Serching for God # 67

The Romantic movement had already started to rebel against Enlightenment rationalism. The English poet, mystic, and engraver William Blake (1757-1827) believed that human beings had been damaged during the Age of Reason. Even religion had gone over to the side of a science that alienated people from nature and from themselves. Newtonian science had been exploited by the establishment, wo used it to support a social hierarchy that suppressed the ‘lower orders,’ and in Blake’s poetry, Newton, albeit unfairly, became a symbol of the oppression, aggressive capitalism, industrialization and exploitation of the modern state. The true prophet of the industrial age was the poet, not the scientist. He alone could recall human beings to values that had been lost during the scientific age, which had tried to master and control the whole of reality…(Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, p. 228-229)

From the previous post.

And although the point was introduced in the last piece that this moment in time, at the critical confluence of STEM, digital technology, and Remi Girard’s influence on imitation, and the rise of obsessive-compulsive tyrants riding a new wave of social imitation (thanks to Peter Thiel et al) who might be the comparable Newton or Newton’s for use as a symbol of oppression, aggressive capitalism, industrialization and exploitation of the modern state? Names like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer, Larry Ellison, Jensen Huang, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Sergey Brin and, of course, Elon Musk with the sycophantic elephant, Donald Trump as patron.

Who cannot be amazed at the relevance, parallel, radioactivity and timeliness of that phrase from the description of the 18^th century to the first quarter of the twenty-first century’s conundrum?

The tech-entrepreneur is the latest icon/archetype of capitalism, in a world whose rules of trade, institutional traditions norms and regulations, democracy and human rights protections are all atrophying, and being dismantled deliberately by politically and militarily emboldened alpha males. Foreign aid and social justice programs are considered too empathic, too compassionate and wasteful, while military build-up, as well as cyber and national security apparatcheks are deemed essential. We are being confronted hourly by headlines that announce another attack on Gaza, after a thread-bare peace has been allegedly negotiated, attacks on Ukraine and most recently the abduction of an allegedly ‘elected’ leader of Venezuela, Maduro, by the Trump departments of war and the C.I.A. At the same time, the surge of refugees, immigrant, and people living on the edge of starvation and death is, at 250,000,000, the largest number since World War II. As Richard Haas put it, approximately, on GPS with Fareed Zakaria on Sunday January 4, 2025, Trump’s move into Venezuela signals a shift from a world order of the last three-quarters of a century to a tri-polar world of regional circles of influence, one for Putin in Europe, one for Xi Jinping in south-east Asia and the third for Trump in the Western hemisphere, where each will be enabled to do whatever it is they want to do.

Separation from nature, separation from each other, and separation from the circles of power, not mere ‘degrees of separation’ but all-out, full-frontal, and beyond appeal are these isolations, effectively abandonments, all of them together calculated to line the pockets of the oligarchs who pave the way for the wannabe tyrants to first obtain power and then, as payback, are rewarded commercially, financially, and luxuriously. A uroborus snake’s circle of pay-to-play-reap-to-reward-to-continue-to-play…and then face excommunication by varying degrees including imprisonment, poisoning and death, if somehow these sycophants dare to criticize their ‘dear leader’. The snake image also applies to the manner in which the tyrants themselves operate, as snakes, jettisoning all vestiges of truth, all hints of care and concern for the people in their realm, all human rights, all legitimate laws and the governance agents who pass and then enforce them.

The python of political and military and cyber power, it seems, has begun its willful, strategically planned, co-ordinated and lethal design to ‘wrap itself around the neck’ of the democracies, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the United Nations, NATO, The International Refugee Committee, and any and all collaborative, co-operative alliances, in favour of ‘strong-man tyrannies.’ Suffocation by concerted squeezing, by and through headlines that defy human rights, human decency, human sensitivity, compassion, empathy and respect, human ethics, human morality, human aspiration for truth, beauty and love those old chestnut Platonic ideals only begins to describe the malignancy of manipulation into whose vortex we have been plunged.

And it is not without considerable participation, whether conscious or unconscious or both, that the world finds itself on this precipice. The painter listened as the woman intoned, “I think I like the new paint colour,” and then blurted, “If you only like it, I will get a gallon and try it. You need to love it!” The analogy applies to the detachment from full-out-commitment that plagues us all. There is a valid and substantive argument that we are in this mess because through disinterest, detachment, indifference, apathy and lethargy we have allowed those whose desperate need for power is their obsessive undoing to climb their snivelling, snake-squirming, slippery sliding onto the front pages, through whatever form of infamy they chose, seduced a few and then a few more, and then a mountain of mostly men until finally they reached the apex of their respective political ladders. And the grease that made their slipping and sliding feasible is our collective fear of engaging with the snakes.

I rejected a kind and challenging offer of a political nomination back in 1977 for the simple reason that I refused to get into a mud-fight with a political snake who would be the opponent, whose respect for truth, dignity, decency and honour had already dissipated into lust for power. It is true that I might not have won the election; but the risk of having mud all over me and my family was too high.

Now that the snakes have overtaken the global zoo, the rest of us untrained in the ways of animal husbandry, as well as taming the snakes, are left wondering, ‘What are we to do?’ No longer do arguments about political ideology, or economic rules and regulations of free trade, or ententes to contain the use and spread of nuclear weapons, or covenants to curtail emissions of carbon dioxide and methane and other lethal gases into the atmosphere have any relevance, space in the daily press or time on the various television networks. The culture is obsessively-compulsively consumed with the minutiae of the last text, speech, social media post or even photo-op of the loudest voices in the global room. We no longer simply look down the telescope the wrong way, we have thrown away the telescope and replaced it with an electron microscope through which each syllable of text, or turn of an eye-brow is as significant as a new microbe in the eye of the research scientist looking for a cure for cancer.

We have lost our perspective, our long-sought and pursued, reinforced and sustained measure of engagement and participation in those aspects of the shared global public square over which we have some limited measure of influence. We have almost literally stopped writing and reading letters to the editor; we have watched the demise of the local press in virtually every small and medium-sized town and city in North American and with that the rise of behemoth media organizations whose interest is ultimately and exclusively, profit, in order to insure and to assure the dividends of their investors.

We are measured by our financial assets, our investment portfolios, our social and political status, along with those in elected office whose ambition is primarily, if not exclusively, self-interest, certainly ahead of the public interest.

Indeed, the public interest has, like the innumerable extinctions of various species of animals, birds, oceanic and wild-life, ceased to breath, and like the millions of divorces, suffers from no formal funeral. As T.S. Eliot wrote in the last lines of J. Alfred Profrock,

This is the way the world ends,

This is the way the world ends,

This is the way the world ends,

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Humbly and reverently and respectfully, I join in the words of Thomas Merton, speaking to monastics on the last day of his life: From       dailymeditationswithmatthewfox.org, in piece entitled, Merton and the Via Transformativa, by Gianluigi Gugliermetto, May 30, 2025, Prophetic Action, Thomas Merton, Via Transformativa:

Are the monks and hippies and poets relevant? No we are deliberately irrelevant. We live with an ingrained irrelevance which is proper to every human being. The marginal man accepts the basic irrelevance of the human condition, an irrelevance which is manifested above all by the fact of death. The marginal person, the monk, the displaced person, the prisoner, all these people live in the presence of death which calls into question the meaning of life.

If the description of the current North American cultural ethos, the anima mundi, in  this space sounds apocalyptic or existentially threatening, it is intended to sound like that. I recognize and respect that environmentalists in the late 1970’s and 1980’s painted a bleak and apocalyptic picture of environmental disaster, and found that the image was so frightening and off-putting as to be dismissed. And, given the history of the Second Coming that has been among us for two-thousand years plus, without it actually occurring, these two words, apocalyptic and existential threat have lost some of their pregnancy.

Nevertheless, there is no less truthful and impelling a way to depict what we are all facing than to link it by comparison to the period of the Romantic poets and their deferral to unified man-with-nature as well as their championing of the ephemeral, the abstract, the occult, and the unconscious, although they did not have the benefit of either Freud Jung or Hillman and others.

Not only do we, and can we, unshackle the culture from the snake constrictions but we can also refresh our former relationship with the Romantics, and the scholars and theorists of the unconscious.

Let’s begin that process by looking at the word pistis.

The word translated as ‘faith’ in the New Testament is the Greek pistis (verbal form: pisteuo) which means ‘trust; loyalty; engagement; commitment. Jesus was not asking people to ‘believe’ in his divinity, because he was making no such claim. He was asking for commitment. He wanted disciples who would engage with his mission, give all they had to the poor, feed the hungry, refuse to be hampered by family ties, abandon their pride, lay aside their self-importance and sense of entitlement, live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. And trust in the God who was their father.

When the New Testament was translated from Greek into Latin by Saint Jerome (C.342-420) pistis became fides (‘loyalty’). Fides had no verbal form so for pisteuo Jerome used the Latin very credo, a word that derived from cor do,’ I give my heart.’ He did not think of using opinor (‘I hold an opinion’). When the Bible was translated into English, credo, and pisteuo became ‘I believe’, in the King James version (1611). But the word ‘belief’ has since changed its meaning. In Middle English, beleven meant ‘to prize; to value; to hold dear.’ It was related to the German belieben (‘to love’), liebe (‘beloved’), and the Latin libido. So belief originally meant loyalty to a person to whom one is bound in promise or duty. When Chaucer’s knight begged his patron to ‘’accept my bileve,’ he meant ‘accept my fealty, my loyalty.’ In Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, which was probably written around 1603, shortly before the publication of the King James Bible, the young nobleman Bertram is urger to ‘believe not thy disdain’: he must not entertain his contempt for lowborn Helena and allow it to take deep root in his heart. During the late seventeenth century, however, as our concept of knowledge became more theoretical, the word ‘belief’ started to be used to describe an intellectual assent to a hypothetical—and often dubious—proposition. Scientists and philosophers were the first to use it in this sense, but in religious contexts the Latin credere and the English ‘belief’ both retained their original connotations well into the nineteenth century. (Karen Amstrong, The Case for God, p. 87-88)

Language morphs, changes, and translations also part a significant role in what today has become a literal almost legal connotation of the word ‘believe’….and for some fundamentalists, it is reinforced by social sanctions often of considerable insult and pain. To attempt to release some of the linguistic and cultural constrictions and meanings that have been grafted onto the words we use, however, is a process demanding more time and research than this space and time permit.

To be continued……