Searching for God # 45

 Here is a tentative, speculative, and modest proposal of a theory…..

It may take a few minutes to set up the background, how it emerged, and why it might make some sense.

In the West, especially, where Christianity has established a firm foothold in the culture, the binary divide between good and evil, in both personal, private terms as well as on a macro, perhaps even global stage has taken hold. We have built a system of both rewards and punishments for those seeking ‘integration’ and acceptance and affiliation within the social and political structures of the society. Primarily, we encourage, foster, reward and sustain those who have chosen to ‘fight’ for the good, or fight against an enemy.

At the centre of our mindset is ‘conflict’ with the aim and goal of either championing a victory or slaying an enemy. And while, for example, the model of conflict and combat is more deeply embedded in the United States than it is in Canada, and perhaps also in some Scandinavian countries, competition and combat lie at the heart of both our economic and political/national security/global security thinking. We train warriors as athletes, as soldiers as scholars, as political leaders, as corporate executives and even as clergy.

Hillman’s “love of war” applies as much to the corporate and political boardroom as to the scientific research lab, as well to the medical/legal/finance/science/technology schools applications for admission. There is a fascinating, captivating and even seductive aspect to this mental and social archetype of ‘winning’ some various kinds of conflicts. Some fight against disease, some fight against social injustice, some fight against political or ideological opponents, some fight against cultural enemies, some fight against crime, some fight against lies, some fight against racism, sexism ageism.

Historically roots for these respective ‘fights’ or battles, it seems can be found in the heroic history of the battles of the Greek heroes, the Roman heroes, and the various intellectual thought pioneers, many of whose perceptions and observations have evolved into the foundations of western thought, attitude, perception and even to some degree belief.

On the fight for compassion, empathy, care and social sensibility, there is an archetypal model in the Good Samaritan parable in which the hated Samaritan finds and rescues the Jew taken for dead in the ditch, and raises him up, and finds him a room and support. The Good Samaritan can be considered the character foil for the military officer who is fighting for national pride, national security, national supremacy, national protection….the list of these goals and purposes continues.

The Jew in the ditch is an obvious ‘victim’ of some form of abuse and his immediate rescue and recovery beg immediate action. A disease, plague, or fatal accident or a natural disaster all demand immediate, urgent and emergent responses. And a kind of military discipline attends to the efficiency and effectiveness of all formal responses to these crises. Many of us come from families that wretched from crisis to crisis, in a pattern of crisis management that demanded immediate and urgent attention to some specific perceived crisis. There is a broad extant, informally trained brigade of ‘crisis management’ survivors even before they/we consider ‘what to do’ with our lives/careers/ finding purpose or meaning. Indeed, history is among other things, a testament to the urgent, heroic, emergent, decisive and creative responses to various forms of threat, many of them potentially lethal.

There is a kind of urgent perspective that is integral to the training of professional response practitioners whereby time as in very quick decisions require an insightful perception and apperception of the situation in order to determine a diagnosis as well as the ‘plan’ to address the situation. There is a required ‘hierarchy’ of both seniority and skill-set that almost ‘involuntarily’ falls into place, depending on the shared perception of the moment. Clichés such as ‘saving lives is our first priority’ are often chanted as both directives and ethical principles.

Empirical evidence is both critical and dominant in the assessment of such crisis situations. There is little if any time for reflection, until later when things like motives and backgrounds, character and relationships can begin to be the focus of investigators. These conditions are integral also to military engagements, although considerable planning based on ‘precedents’ can be and is conducted in combat training institutions. A similar model for both training and execution can be found in law schools, medical schools and in some religious/ministry development programs.

Attacking, disabling, destabilizing, ameliorating, or even eradicating some form of enemy, or evil, lies at the base of all of these social, political, academic and professional models of training and execution. And, too often, because of our conditioning as crisis managers, we either prefer or defer to some degree of procrastination before taking action in any incipient yet not full blown, crisis. It is a well-known cliché that doctors have been trained in the perception that at least 65-75% of all physical complaints that greet them in their general practitioner offices have a psycho-somatic basis. Naturally, such a piece of data could and does have an impact on the degree of urgency with which the doctor views the illness, as compared with the perceive urgency of the patient.

Front line professionals, in all fields, including fire, police, criminal investigation, military firsts to encounter the enemy all have a status as brace, courageous, essential and highly familiar and tolerant of profound risk. These are the ‘marines’ archetype of military service, or the ‘special ops’ and there are ‘special ops’ in almost all areas of human activity.

Even ‘warriors for God’ have been inculcated into the fold of society’s war class, only they are allegedly fighting to convert those considered ‘unsaved’ or ‘unbelievers’ prior to the intervention of the evangelist. Crisis management here often includes a hot drink, perhaps a blanket for those living on the street, and basic medical attention, and perhaps a hospital or clinic referral. Follow-up could often include additional counselling, perhaps finding shelter, job training, and preparation for re-entry into the mainstream of the society.

Just as there is no time for reflection in a case like an urban shooting patient admitted to the Emergency Department, and immediate attention and diagnosis and treatment are required, so too, such timing and appropriate interventions are required and expected on the street.

We are a culture, with avowed Christian roots, that spends an inordinate amount of time, money, personnel and public policy and research in ‘crisis management’….while at the same time, allotting considerable resources to the longer-term research, reflection and strategic planning, ‘for the next crisis’ whatever and wherever it may erupt. And while nature is one of the more ‘engaged’ characters in our having to attend to crises, especially given our ignoring and denying and defying the evidence of global warming and climate change for decades, we are still, as a culture, not fully engaged in the depth and meaning of this crisis.

Denial of death, at the core of our many denials, plays its own role in our procrastination, as well as in our perception that death itself is the most tragic of all of the threats we face. This, too, has a religious and Christian basis for which the church, having adopted the ‘sacred gift of life’ approach to human existence, has exaggerated the concept of death beyond the natural, whereas it is as natural an aspect of nature as is birth. Again, the crisis archetype frames the public and religious debate over abortion and ‘warriors’ have evolved and been formally and informally trained to fight for each ‘side’.

Enter Leo Tolstoy, again in this space, with his exhortation from the Sermon on the Mount to ‘non-violently resist evil with force,’ a critique which he claims is deeply inherent in each of us. Let’s look at this exhortation from the perspective of the crisis-management’ heroic and urgent, immediate, dramatic and high-risk intervention perspective with which we seem to approach many of what we consider our enemies, or evil.

Discernment of evil, unlike the ‘rush to judgement’ that prevails in tabloids as well as in high-profile criminal cases, and unlike the urgent and immediate assessment of a crisis, demands considerable reflection; it is not as quickly or as clearly determined as an ‘instant-gratification’ culture demands. A child is being abused, physically and/or emotionally, and needs to be rescued. Social policy requires an assessment, and as rapid a removal of that child from the abusive situation as is feasible or removal of the offending adult. It is a reported crisis, and the conventional wisdom is almost predictably and invariably compassionate identification with the abused child. Discernment of all options, including the potential transformation of the abusing parent is very low, if it exists at all, in the list of options on the template of the visiting social worker. We have made a ‘crisis’ of our ‘failure to protect the child’ as the behaviour driving the policy and practice of those intervening. Diagnosis, the parent is a criminal for having administered the abuse. Few if any cases represent a variant on this model.

Our investigations, because there are so many and so few trained professional social workers, are constricted in their options, again because we have labelled, framed and complicitly agreed that the situation cannot fall outside our statistical template. Immediate, urgent, emergent intervention by those trained in such ‘models of intervention’ is once again the model for the professionals. Relying on the empirical, literal, legal/medical model of crisis intervention, we have relegated much human behaviour to more crisis-management.

Hillman refers to this approach in his disdain of clinical psychology’s approach to abnormal psychology. Not only is the model dependent on pharmaceuticals, and diagnosis and the enhancement of the clinical psychological professional, based on the medical model, but it also excludes his proposed deployment of the imagination, in search of the archetypal gods and goddesses that might be impelling the individuals in any situation. One example that comes to mind is the ‘crucifixion’ as an archetypal model for the ‘instant, urgent, immediate and highly conflicted intervention of a congregation with what they all agree is a non-compliant clergy. Given that politics of power and money rules the church, the hierarchy, as in Morley Callaghan’s ‘Such is my Beloved’ dismiss a priest who has befriended two street prostitutes, without ever engaging in sexual activity with either of them.

Infamy, shame, scorn and excommunication are the chosen and the preferred ‘diagnostic and treatment plans for the Callaghan clergy who may be naïve and somewhat irreverent, especially of the mores of the congregation, and of course those ingredients are the essence of social fear and embarrassment. They provoke especially the established members of the cheque-writing elite whose cash is essential to keep the church doors open and the heating bills paid.

What is the evil is that situation, the priest’s naivety and physical friendship with the call-girls or the church’s hierarchical and establishment’s shame and reputation of hubris? Perhaps if the church, and each of the clergy and laity within its borders were to take to heart the exhortation of Tolstoy to non-violently resist evil, with force, a more creative, thoughtful, pensive and even patient approach, as an integral component of the theology of those engaged in the ecclesial and faith community could and would emerge.

What would/could be the impact of such a shift in perception, definition of evil and the plethora of options that would accompany an imaginative, non-judgemental, and non-interventionist urgency which seems to define many of our shared threats.

As the inverse of this proposition, it would also be helpful if we could remove the blinders and the defiers and the ‘hoax’ advocates on global warming and climate change, in order to being about the needed shared, collaborative, collegial and effective interventionist set of suites of programs to detain this existential crisis.

We have the potential to discern with a far more nuanced set of eyes, ears and imaginations, just where ‘evil’ lies and what part we each play in both its existence and its potential non-violent resistance, with force. Failing to deploy our imaginations, whether on the battle field, or on the atmosphere, or on the daily conflicts and tensions and threats that erupt daily if not hourly, seems like a self-sabotaging approach to public policy and practice as well as a negation or perhaps even a defiance of our Christian theology as people like Hillman, Moltmann and Tolstoy are urging. I include Moltmann’s concept of hope that never recedes even when there is no empirical evidence to support it. It is that degree of hope that undergirds this and all other pieces in this space.