LAST TIME I pointed out how modern culture as a whole teaches us to think of ourselves as fundamentally untrustworthy.
From childhood we get the message that there is something wrong with us, that we must be constantly reined in lest we run amok.
After all, what would happen if everyone just did whatever felt good?
Wouldn't it be chaos?
Don't we need a set of moral rules to follow slavishly, if we are going to be safe from ourselves?
This way of thinking is not only extremely authoritarian, but it forces a kind of inner authoritarianism on each of us.
That evangelical organization I mentioned earlier passed out a pamphlet which contained the "spiritual law" that all humans were sinful by nature.
At the end of the pamphlet were two diagrams, two circles with a drawing of a throne at the center of each, and various smaller circles in the space around the throne:
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One throne had the letter "S" sitting on it, which the diagram explained was a life with "self" on the throne.
The smaller circles in that diagram were all jumbled and out of order, representing the chaos we would make of our lives if we were ourselves in control. -
The second throne had a Christian cross on it, which the diagram explained was a life with Christ on the throne.
The smaller circles in that diagram were perfectly ordered, representing the perfectly ordered life of all Christians.
As I wrote that last sentence I could hear the laughter of my honest Christian friends.
But my point isn't about the absurdities of evangelists, or about who should or should not be on the throne.
My point is that neither the writer of that pamphlet, nor the people who passed it out, nor most of those who received it ever questioned the underlying assumption that a picture of an interior life must have someone on the throne.
The assumption was that our inner, spiritual, experience was authoritarian.
This is how far the paradigm of kings and priests has contaminated our culture—it has even infected our perception of our internal world.
Think about it: when you disapprove of yourself—call yourself undisciplined, or lazy, or selfish—who is "being bad," and who is "disapproving"?
The fundamental idea that we could disapprove of our self implies that we have become, at root, divided against ourselves
That division has taken the form of an internal hierarchy, with part of us giving the orders and trying to whip the rest of us into shape, while the rest of us, as often as not, is busy rebelling.
Doesn't that sound a lot like the world of politics?
You don't need a doctrine of original sin to get this effect.
What you do need is a society which assumes that humans are by nature problematic, and that the only way to keep them from running amok is by teaching them to follow a set of rules, instead of their own instincts.
That assumption has the entire dilemma built into it, because if we need some sort of exterior morality, a set of rules, enforced upon us to keep us from being "bad" then we must be bad, and everything I've written above follows, as a matter of course:
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The way we treat children
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The way we form an internal authoritarian hierarchy
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The way we come to believe that there is something inherently wrong with us
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The way we generalize that idea to everyone else and become suspicious and dangerous to each other
So, in the end, our distrust of ourselves—our lack of faith in ourselves—poisons not only our interior life but society as a whole.
Some more caveats:
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I'm not implying there should be no laws.
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I'm not implying there should be no morals.
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This is not a matter of liberals vs. conservatives or religious vs. non-religious.
Many a liberal disapproves of his or her inner conservative.
Some religions are hierarchical, some have a low view of humans, and some do neither.
In fact, even the hierarchical religions can offer a way out: a point I'll explain later.
The danger does not come from religion per se, and it does not come from politics.
It's fundamentally a spiritual problem, which is something much more fundamental than a religious or political problem.
It comes about whenever any society or group or individual takes a fundamentally anti-human stance.
To the degree that we believe humans to be bad we are anti-human.
To the degree that we are anti-human, we are against ourselves.
And a species, or an individual, divided against itself cannot stand.
More to come...
