Individualism

2,300 words

The Christian belief in the bodyless immortal soul has tended to confer ultimate ontological status and value on the solitary human individual; effectively, in all this vast universe of things, only the “spiritual” human individual has a full measure of being.  Everything else is “just matter.” This has had a significant influence on the goals and ultimate values of the nations of Western Europe.  It has produced a worldview called individualism.

Simply put, individualism completely demolishes any metaphysical basis for solidarity among humans and commonality with the wider material universe.  Without the metaphysical grounds for commun­al identity and universal belonging, no amount of moral exhortation can overcome the core principle that only the human individual is fully real.  The bodyless immortal soul, by establishing “spirit” as the highest category of being, and further defining the human male individual as the highest example of “spirit” in the universe, declares that all other forms of cosmic reality ― feminine, infantile, non-human, inanimate ― are seriously deficient in being (spirit) and cannot be allowed a full measure of autonomy in the management structures of universal society.

The corollary to the immortality of the bodyless individual soul is that the world to which the human spirit is destined to live is not this one.  There is another world which is the real world; it is the only real world because it corresponds to human beings who are complete, i.e., who have left their body and gone to reside permanently in that other world as their home.  In other words, they do not really  belong here.  This world is transitional, impermanent; it’s reality and everything in it is an illusion; only the “other” world filled with qualified individuals has a full measure of being, and is lasting, eternal, permanent, complete.

Two-world politics and original sin 

There is a “this-worldly” political dimension implied in all this that I want to make explicit.  The belief in two-worlds discourages commitment to justice in this world and excuses collaboration with exploit­ative economic and political systems.  Please take note: justice is a communitarian virtue. The Platonic two world view based on the doctrine of original sin, is necessarily individu­al­istic.  Individualism is a transcendent feature of Western civilization.  It’s important to see how this works in Augustine’s theological system which dominated Western Christian life in thought and practice from the 5^th century right up to today and continues to function subconsciously  in the culture whether west­erners are Christian or not.

In Augustine’s scheme of things, no one’s destiny is tied to anyone else’s.  You are living for your individual reward in another world, and what happens to others ― even members of your own family ― is secondary; and you have to distance yourself from them if they are damning themselves.  Even when it does not explicitly encourage escapism, the attitude permits those who have no interest in redressing injustice (perhaps because they are profiting from it) to rationalize their inaction or complicity.

I believe it is the two-world system that helps explain how the non-violent resistance of the early Christian martyrs to Rome’s self-idolatry, could have been followed less than a decade after the last ­persecution^[1] by the Christian readiness to cooperate with the Empire.  You have to understand: what the martyrs opposed was idolatry, and they faced death fearlessly because they believed they were going immediately to the other world.  If refusing to throw incense on the fire also included their opposition to the Empire’s dehumanizing exploitation and enslavement of those it conquered, there’s no evidence for it, and if they did, it was secondary; their bar of judgment was personal morality.  The martyrs were “two-world” individuals.  Personal reward after death motivated their courage, they were explicit about that.  Please notice: that exclusively “religious” motivation meant that once Rome declared, under Constantine, that it would worship the “true God,” resistance to the empire evaporated.  Belief in the “other world” permitted if not encouraged support for the Empire without requiring that it cease its exploitive modus operandi: conquests to augment the slave population.  Justice — a communitarian imperative — did not have a sharp focus among Christians because a two-world system intensifies individualism.  Institutionalized slavery was unquestioned.  The result has been the justification, in Christ’s name, of the exploi­ta­tion of defenseless isolated individuals by a class of elite predators throughout European history.

There is a spontaneous human outrage at injustice that parallels the spontaneous empathy that stirs our compassion.  Both these are communitarian “this worldly” instincts that can be vitiated by the refined selfishness encouraged in a two-world belief system.  And a non-violence, like that of the martyrs, driven by unconcern for this world can actually work in the service of this selfishness.

In our time some have erected “Christian non-violence” into a new moral imperative.  But there is no guarantee that just being non-violent in the face of injustice always promotes the com­mon good, and may not itself simply be an excuse for indifference, cowardice or even selfishness.  Don’t get me wrong, there is even less guarantee that violence will secure justice.  The point I am making here is that non-violence is not an end in itself.  It is a tool of action and receives its value from the ends it is used to pursue.  It must be directed against injustice.

western individualism

In a version of “individualism” that we are familiar with today, our culture teaches that happi­ness is an individual achievement and possession, and that society’s role is to protect the indivi­d­ual’s ability and opportunity to achieve happiness, here and hereafter.  In more extreme versions it is considered perfectly acceptable that the competition that allows the “winners” to achieve, entails the actual physical extinction or economic destitution of the “losers.”  Such attitudes assure the continued existence of a menial underclass, marginated and miserable, a phenomenon that has characterized our societies for so long that it has come to be considered “natural.”  An off-hand remark by Jesus, “the poor you will always have with you,” by which he meant to turn his disciples attention to his own impending death, has been taken out of context and used to confirm that view of things.

How did this come about? I believe that such a conviction is the ultimate product of a cluster of ancient beliefs that were centered on the existence of a personal entity “spirit-God,” who judges, rewards and punishes each individual “spirit-person” separately in a “spirit-world” after death.  It is a corollary of a “two-world” view of reality, and it is supported by the doctrine of Original Sin as projected by Augustine.  In such a universe there is no group survival or “salvation.”  Every one is on their own.  An intense concern for oneself has been introjected deep into the western psyche.  It has endured long after the Christian religion which promoted it stopped being the official state-sponsored object of belief.

“Original Sin“ is the foundational Christian doctrine making individual selfishness the very definition of adult behavior. It originated with Plato, but it is significant that this teaching was elaborated in its most toxic form by Augustine (a Roman) less than a century after Constantine’s “conversion.”  But, early as this was in Christian doctrinal history, it was still a full 350 years after the birth of Christianity, and could hardly lay claim to original apostolic authenticity.^[2]

Augustine’s “Doctrine of Original sin” advanced individualism on three levels simultaneously.  (1) It declared that each person was born with “original sin” and thus was punished individually for Adam’s affront to “God.” (Even newborn babies, if they died without baptism, would be damned for all eternity as individuals.)  (2) It claimed human nature had a proclivity to sin, which meant the individual was innately selfish — constitutionally predisposed not to consider anyone but him or herself.  And (3) it meant individual damnation, unless sin were forgiven and remedied — individual by individual — with the ritual ablutions administered exclusively by the Empire’s Church. Augus­tine’s Roman imperial theology proclaimed that “outside the church there is no salvation.”  It gave the empire all the justification it needed for external conquest and internal control.^[3]

In tandem with belief in the individual immortal soul, “Original Sin” was perfect for Roman imperial purposes.  Your fallen humanity guaranteed that your selfish body would always predispose you to sin, and you would always have to go to the authorities of the Empire’s Church for forgiveness.  Terrified of dying and going to hell, you knew that there was no one except them who could help you avoid eternal damnation.  Christian doctrine rendered irrelevant family and village — the primary human survival communities — and put the Empire’s Church, offering individual survival in another world, in its place.  To effect that transition, you had to be convinced that you were a spirit from another world, that you really belonged to that other world not to this one made of matter … and the Church controlled the keys!  Family, clan, village and language group were absorbed into the community of the theocratic State, once declared “dead” by the martyrs by reason of its idolatry and now brought back to life by the kiss of the Imperial-consort: Constinatine’s Church.  And all of it was based on the central dogma of the spiritual individual, the existence of the “other world,” and the corrupt nature of everything in this one made of matter because of “Original Sin.”

“Original Sin” established the premise that unregenerate, non-Christian human nature is inherently corrupt and selfish.  It would follow, then, that any attempt at forming “human community” outside of the salvific community of the Empire’s Church must be the product of some kind of selfish materialist dynamism … if it claimed to be altruism, it must be the work of Satan, for outside the true Church all is corrupt, all is the work of the devil.

Doctrinaire capitalism, as the ultimate violent self-projection of the individual who arrogates to himself as “owner” what belongs to all, is virtually inevitable in such a world.  Since fallen humanity is intrinsically selfish and insatia­bly greedy, it is a condition that cannot be changed.  Thomas Hobbes in 1651 said: “man is a wolf to man …. In the state of nature profit is the measure of right.”  Note: Hobbes was Christian.  By “the state of nature” he meant life in this world without the effects of “grace” mediated exclusively by baptism and the other sacraments of the Church.  To be selfless in Hobbes’ terms is supernatural — that means it is not human.  The best that could be done for unregenerate (unbaptized) humanity is to harness and direct its demonic selfish energy,^[4] hence capitalism.

Besides, those who are convinced that they are utterly despicable before God, develop a need for a compensatory mechanism that will allow them to function psychologically.  The accumula­tion of wealth as a sign of divine forgiveness was a solution that came to be institutionalized by the Calvinist version of Christianity in the 16^th century.  We still speak of the well-off as being “blessed by God.”  This morphed into the popular belief that the wealthy were morally superior — elected by God to teach and to rule.  The plutocracy today that rules the world receives a subconscious approval from there.

It should not be a surprise to observers that the dynamics of the achievement of “salvation” in the next world exactly parallel economic life in this one.  In each case, one accumulates the coin of the realm, money or merit, respectively, through a lifetime of individual transactions, and the earned amount is tallied up in a “final judgment” providing the individual subject life or misery as a result.

The insuperable individualism that we have been brought up to believe is the norm, therefore, is the result of a very long, intense and continent-wide cultural programming in the lands we know as “Western.”  For more than 1500 years, Europeans were subjected to this Imperial Christian indoctrination telling them who they should think they are and what they should think of this world we live in.  The result was to breed a continent of isolated individuals, vulnerable, defenseless, terrified of “God,” mistrustful of themselves, their neighbors and this material world which produced their material bodies.  Their only refuge for forgiveness and moral support was the state’s religion, viciously closing the circle.

The doctrines of the Empire’s Church formed the soul of Europe and its political structures.  Western colonial conquest over the past four centuries, energized by this vision, has exported that mindset and insured its globalization.  European capitalism and its associated pseudo-democratic plutocracy is the product of an ancient imperialist ideology; and in our times they have come to dominate the planet.

[1] The persecution of Diocletian ended in 303.  Constantine endorsed Christianity in 312.

 [2]  The early source cited for “original sin” is the NT Epistle to the Romans.  But what Paul expressed there did not in any way justify where Augustine went with it.  Augustine’s version is thoroughly hellenic, individualistic, a reprise of the Platonic theory of the fall of spirit into flesh, denigrating matter and permanently grounding individual guilt.  Paul’s was hebraic, communitarian, symbolic, using the story of Adam’s sin to evoke the re-creation of a collective humankind ac­com­plished by Christ alone ― establishing a new communitarian relationship to “God” for all people, without law, guilt or sin.  Similar to what he did to the Jewish book of Genesis, Augustine completely reversed the meaning of Paul’s imagery.

 [3] 16^th century Christian colonization of primitive peoples in the Americas entailing their exploitation and enslavement was universally justified as “Christianization.” Imperial Christian doctrine has always motivated and justfied conquest while rendering the conquered submissive ― a lethal combination.

[4] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651

Christian Universalism (VII)

the just society

9.

Human community is a derivative of universal natural faith. The emptiness that conditions life for all human individuals causes them to reach out to one another for interpretation and support. Biological survival is certainly a primary motivating factor, created by a longer childhood dependency than any other animal species; but family and clan interdependence entailed the evolutionary development of brains that can “read” others. A great deal of the operating time of the human mind is spent imagining what others (who are significant to one’s survival in society) think, feel, desire, intend, and can do for them or against them; and most of human conversation is dedicated to sharing it. We may trivialize it by calling it gossip, but it is what we do.

The ability to sense what others are feeling when something happens, or what they “mean” when they say or do something, is called empathy.   Empathy is the ability to feel the similarity between others and myself ― it implies a high degree of self-awareness. Intelligence evolved, apparently, driven by the need to navigate relationships in a complex society. Its unavoidable by-product was self-awareness ― the know­ledge of one’s own emptiness, and the equally unavoidable expectation of endless life, for despite how inexplicable and improbable it all is, here we are, and we love being-here.

Given the biological reality of the drive to survive, the ability to empathize can go in any direction. There is no guarantee that this extraordinary emotional clairvoyance will not be put to selfish purposes. Knowing that I am “needy” and therefore what “neediness” looks and feels like, I have a window that opens onto a vulnerability in others. What may have served as a tool to alleviate another’s anxiety, can always lose its “other”-directedness; when neediness no longer evokes sympathy, it is reduced in my field of perception to something I can exploit.

Similarly the implicit awareness that there is a warm sustaining wind that bears us all aloft can also evoke a selfish reaction. I trust life and those around me; that means I know that others spontaneously trust me and are not initially wary and self-protective, in fact they are predisposed to support and protect me. I can exploit this spontaneous reaching out ― the very need that is creative of human community ― and turn it to my own advantage. That such a turn poisons the wellsprings of life together is disregarded. Our ability to empathize is not ultimate or absolute: it is subordinate to other forces in the human organism ― like the instinct for self-preservation and self-enhancement ― that are easily mis-taken as its contrary. At some point the conatus must consciously be directed to serve empathy or it will distractedly pursue selfish interests.

The spontaneous trust in life with which we come into this world, continues to penetrate and pervade all of our endeavors. An expression of this is the feeling of indestructibility that arises from the unchecked natural expectation of endless life. It is a biological disposition we are all familiar with, especially when young. It is generally held in low regard by adults who call it “adolescent.” It displays a naïve trust in life that can be dangerous. It is associated with having an aversion to the work that society deems necessary for survival. It is also seen as a source of recklessness that can result in fatal or crippling accidents. (That doesn’t prevent society’s managers from exploiting youthful naïveté to build armies of self-doubting teen-age boys “trained” to risk their lives and kill on orders. Young males are redundant for society’s reproductive needs and are treated as expendable.) But we have to recognize that this “frivolous” youthful attitude arises from a natural proclivity of the organic matter of our biological organisms to simply enjoy being-here free of care. Until the work of providing survival has been made so unachiev­able as to require total dedication to nothing else, thus disabusing the individual of dreams of a care-free life, it is the normal condition. We are all naturally care-free; we are spontaneously optimistic because we are made of matter; matter “knows” it belongs here and instinctively expects that all will be well. We must learn that is not the case.

The instinct to be care-free does not necessarily imply irresponsibility. In a random universe the urge to spend our days in play is quickly modified by the realities of survival. I contend that the effort to irresponsibly secure a care-free life for oneself ― selfishly seeking to avoid work at the expense of others ― is the root of social injustice. It is my opinion that the class divisions in society arose in the distant past, when some who had gained control of the survival process, in order to make life secure and care-free for themselves, coerced and extorted the labor of those who could not resist them. They became masters and made the others their slaves. Everyone acquiesced either actively or passively and the pattern became a system. Some claim the original model was the subjugation of women by men.

Master/slave systems provided a concentration of wealth and an organization of labor that was used to build all the great empires on the planet. All of us that are alive today came from one of the civilizations in which those empires flourished, and our current global civilization is in a process of concentration and once control is unified it will be an empire. There are very few human communities, even now, whose work life is not part of the global economy and its class divisions of labor. We have all internalized its principal features and transactional dynamics. We have all been formed by the master/slave system.

Work patterns in a master/slave system share certain distortions. For example, it is to the advantage of masters to eradicate care-free attitudes from their slave-laborers in order to get more work out of them. Instilling fear, and making any kind of satisfactory accumulation extremely difficult, the “masters” hone and sharpen their “slave” tools for their service, robbing them of the joy of life and a sense of security. The aim is to eliminate “frivolity” and make work’s survival achievements the only satisfaction available to the worker. This is done precisely so the masters can avoid having to live under such burdens themselves. They justify this by telling themselves (and their slaves) that there is a difference between them, a difference in their humanity ― that human nature is not universal ― that the masters are superior human beings and the slaves are inferior; that “nature” designed the division of labor.

The reasons adduced in the West for the class divide have been amazingly adaptable through the millennia: first it was claimed that the slaves were more “carnal and unthinking” and the masters more “spiritual and rational” ― slaves were like children who needed the masters to organize life for them; then later it was held that the masters were war lords and paladins who defended the people, and the people worked for them to maintain them in their warrior life-style and insure their protection; then, when new lands were discovered, it was said that the dark-skinned people who were made slaves were not Christian, had never been baptized and therefore were under the dominion of Satan and needed to work for their Christian masters as a discipline of exorcism; and finally in our time that the masters are wealthy owners because they are intelligent and disciplined and the laborers are not. Hence the almost unchallenged agreement is for working people to “go to college” so they can become members of the educated elite and ultimately become owners themselves. The “story,” regardless of how it has changed, remarkably always comes to the same conclusion.

These efforts have resulted in normalizing an unnecessarily hard and sustained work-effort for those who must sell their labor. The business of working to stay alive has been made more onerous than it needs to be precisely because the economic life of society has been organized so the masters can live “care-free” lives, and habituating the slaves against any hope of procuring the same for themselves is an essential part of it. Economic life has been structured along class lines for so long that we cannot imagine anything else. Everyone has internalized these myths. Any hopes the slaves still harbor for living care-free become exclusively focused on the day they themselves can become masters over others. Yes indeed, go to college.

I do not believe in the “supreme value of hard work.” I see that particular “belief” as another dogmatic mystification created by the masters to keep the slaves disinclined to expect that the system will ever allow them to be autonomous and care-free responsible collaborators as workers. Their only hope is to become masters/owners themselves. They are driven to “succeed.”

I contend that in a just society ― one that has made the pursuit of distributive justice its constant priority ― personal insecurity is eliminated or reduced to a minimum and shared by all. Everyone knows that their work will guarantee them survival and a standard of living on a par with everyone else. Resentment at inequality, and the exhausting over-exertion expended by those who are not paid a living wage for a normal day’s work, simply does not exist. Most of us have never lived in such a society, even growing up in our families which often mimic the pressures of larger society in order to “train” their children. I submit that economic life has been so distorted in the societies we are familiar with ― societies that function on wage slavery and the normalization of insecurity that is intrinsic to the master/slave paradigm ― that the unnecessary impoverishment and insecurity of the working classes (and the unnecessary anxiety of the ruling classes) would be totally eliminated if it weren’t for this internalized expectation. Like everything else in human life that exacerbates the insecurity of existential dependency, it is a product of our minds. Our minds create the structures that enslave us. Life is hard; but we have made it harder.

 

*          *          *          *          *

 

Humans have evolved the ability to imagine what’s not there. One of the “things” that’s not there, says the Buddha, is the imagining mind itself. We imagine that our imagination is an entity, separate and independent, that we identify as our “self” in opposition to the body and all other “selves,” when in fact it is actually a function of the body, a tool of the self-conscious organism that survives only in its social network. The imagination gives the organism the ability to anticipate, “under”stand, and empathize (relate). The real self is the full human organism and the mind is its instrument of survival-in-society. The greatest of human tragedies is that we take the image-maker and the images it concocts to reify and aggrandize itself as if it were a separate self, not the complete human being, ― and then re-imagine society to be made up of similar selfish avatars in competition with one another for ascendancy. It’s like a masked melee of the WWE.

The Buddhist project includes using mind-control techniques ― principally, meditation ― to reduce and eventually eliminate the false images that our arrogant minds generate about who we think we are. The widespread suffering that comes from the frustrated attempts to secure ultimate happiness through selfish accumulation and self-aggrandizement at the expense of others is the primary damage that comes through a runaway imagination. “Living in the present moment” is a mantra that proposes to get us out of the fantasy that we are disembodied independent “selves” and that something will fill our emptiness and make us, as separate individuals, secure and care-free. It calls us to let go of selfish delusions and to focus on our reality as biological organisms who have need of one another here-and-now.

Accepting our emptiness, our insuperable vulnerability and complete reliance on the forces of community life-support, leads to a simple acknowledgement: some version of the golden rule must override all other considerations. We must treat others as we want to be treated. It is the foundation stone of a just society. It is natural, intuitive and universal. We don’t need “God” to reveal it to us. It is the totality of our moral obligation and the whole purpose of our political designs. Any nation, political party or religious sect, regardless of its venerable antiquity and claims to sacred origins, that has not discerned the primacy of that moral imperative, is exposed as false and dangerous to the human project. By their fruits WE know them. The gods we need are the ones who remind us that we are all we’ve got.

The just society is our tool of survival. I wonder if we fully appreciate what such a statement implies. Perhaps it’s clearer in the obverse: without it we will not survive.

The just society, unimaginable only to those who have imagined it out of existence, begins with a simple transformation of who we think we are.

 

 

 

Shibboleth

2,800 words

A shibboleth, in its original signification and in a meaning it still bears today, is a word or custom whose variations in pronunciation or style can be used to differentiate members of in-groups from those of out-groups. Within the mindset of the in-group, a connotation or value judgment of correct/incorrect or superior/inferior can be ascribed to the two variants. (Wikipedia)

The word “shibboleth” is Hebrew. It means variously an ear of corn, or a current, a stream. Its actual denotation is irrelevant, however, because in the Biblical Book of Judges chapter 12 it was its pronunciation that was used by the victorious Gileadites to identify their disguised fleeing enemies who could not pronounce the “sh” and said “sibboleth” instead. Those who did not have the correct pronunciation were killed on the spot.

“Shibboleth” as used today is the equivalent of “password.” It has become a symbol of the practices described in the epigraph that, regardless of name, are common everywhere, among all peoples, throughout the history of humankind. If one were tempted to also include in the definition of this phenomenon, the ethnic, national, linguistic, racial and other differences that have divided us into groups justifying the practices, the effort would soon be abandoned with the realization that even where no “tribal” differences exist, people find ways to create them and they use shibboleths to do it. Effectively in these cases, the shibboleth, instead of being a symbol of real differences, itself becomes the only difference, creating groups artificially where there would otherwise be none. The suspicion that there is more here than meets the eye is hard to ignore.

Examples of these shibboleth-generated divisions abound across a wide spectrum ranging from the fans of sports teams who feel disdain and animosity toward fans of rival teams, to alumni of schools whose claims of superiority are imaginary, to the inheritors of different religious traditions where differences in belief do not result in differences in attitude or behavior. In all these cases, however, the shibboleth ― the team, the school, the religion ― used to distinguish insiders from outsiders is the only difference; as a corollary, the commonality both groups share so outweighs the distinctions evoked by the shibboleth that the resulting divisions appear to be artificial and intentionally maintained.

The utterly irrational level of passion and potentially extreme behavior generated by these shibboleth-created groups is the salient feature here. I believe it’s a clue to the etiology. A baseball fan who supposedly loves the game, observing a great “play” by the opposing team, instead of enjoying such an outstanding display of athletic skill, actually becomes furious, and momentarily has feelings of hatred and the desire to do the players ― and their fans ― bodily harm. All claims of “love for the game” disappear in the reality of the overwhelming emotional avalanche generated by the “tribal” identification with the team. Anyone who doubted its irrationality would have it quickly confirmed by the similarly irrational fact that if those same opposing players were to be suddenly signed by the “home” team, hatred would immediately turn to love.

On May 29, 1985, in Brussels, Belgium, hundreds of English soccer fans attacked rival Italian supporters before the kickoff of the European Champions Cup final, sparking a riot that killed at least 36 people and injured some 250 others. The violence here was clearly irrational. No one was threatening anyone. It was only a game! It’s the irrationality that calls attention and demands explanation.

What is going on here?

winning

In the case of sports, it seems clear that, outside of the money generated by the popularity of watching the games, the entire enterprise is arbitrary and meaningless. Nothing is gained and nothing is lost in winning or losing a sports event. The claim that the “contest” stimulates the highest level of effort and that the real goal is to see superlative athletic performance, is quickly refuted by the example described above where excellence is actually held in opprobrium by half of the obser­vers because it was done in the service of “the other team.” In another example, the awarding of gold medals to Olympic athletes who outperformed rival contestants by a hairsbreadth that can barely be measured, does not reflect the fact that the winners and losers are, to all extents and purposes, equal. The awarding of gold medals under such circumstances seems to reveal a prior need to have winners and losers no matter what.

Clearly, then, in these cases the focus is on winning even though winning may have nothing to do with performance. It impels me to ask: What is there about winning that makes us so passionate that we create arbitrary fictional scenarios where reality makes no such demand? Cries of “it’s only a game” meant to escape the feeling of despon­dency that accompanies “losing,” are swallowed up in the irrepressible passions that hold sway at such moments.

vicarious group identity

The next thing is the vicarious nature of the phenomenon. Our personal identity becomes enmeshed inextricably with something or someone other than ourselves, and most intensely with some identifiable group about which we generate a considerable amount of affect. It’s like we can’t help it. Why is that?

For me this is the dominant feature of the shibboleth phenomenon: the identification of the individual person with a group and the feeling that one’s own survival, identity and destiny is tied to that group. I believe this has its roots in evolution. We evolved in pre-historic times with a need to belong to a survival community (family and clan) and genes were “selected” by the more successful survival of those who were inclined to live in community over those who did not; they lived longer and reproduced. Survival was the selector, as always, not the preference of the individuals. It has to be recognized that such a communitarian instinct was originally crucial to the survival of the individual, and so feelings of loyalty for one’s family and clan along with a fear and mistrust of whatever threatens the group ― like a rival group competing for the same resources ― would be understandably part of the selection. Human beings could not afford to be separated from the protective and reproductive community that stood between them and an impersonal and hostile world. Human identity from the beginning was tied to belonging to a local community.

In advanced civilizations, however, like the ones that now populate the earth, family and clan are swallowed up in much wider networks where the survival connections do not resemble a local clan community. It is my contention that the primitive clan instinct is conatus-driven, biologically embedded and particularly intense; it gives rise to the need to identify something in larger society that satisfies the demands of the instinct or, upon failing to do so, impels people to create one.

I believe the “need to belong” to an identifiable group is as primal as any other biological urge directing human behavior. How the modern “rugged individualist” myth arose is a paradox that is explainable as an historical rejection reaction. Along with other factors that substituted belief in a disembodied mind for flesh and blood human beings, individualism was the expression of the modern worldview that replaced the superstitions and class slavery of European Christian culture. Modernism and its bloodless rationality was a rebellion against the emotional religious totalitarianism of the middle ages which built its monolithic structures on the exploitation of the need to belong to a community of survival. To this day, the inheritors of mediaeval Christianity disguise their Churches’ totalitarian proclivities by offering membership in a “survival community” that is global in extent. Freeing oneself from those structures resulted in the creation of unconnected individuals who then became the building blocks of mass society. Was there no alternative?

Deny it as we might the need to belong will not go away. The current emergence of a grotesque and unnatural tribalism onto the political scene not only puts to rest individualist illusions but confirms Darwin’s theory that all biological life including the permutations that gave rise to species are driven by survival. Intelligence itself evolved as a tool of survival. There is no rationality, no goal, no purpose, no intention directing life beyond life itself. Giving purpose and direction to life is a strictly human undertaking; “nature” does not do that for us. Nature gives us a biological inheritance whose energies are conditioned by their evolutionary origins. Belonging to a group that can be perceived and identified with the survival and wellbeing of its members unleashes the most ferocious of human passions ― those associated with the conatus itself ― the instinct for self-preservation. And correlatively, where the group that human instincts are programmed to seek is nowhere to be found, people will create one. Like those who suddenly sense that they are naked, they instinctively grab for something to put on. The analogy is apt; we emerged as biological organisms wrapped in a protective and nurturing matrix ― a human community ― that allows us to survive. We feel homeless without it. It is embedded in our bones. We can control it, but we cannot ignore it or suppress it.

 

But it is imperative that we control it. For human needs have ever been the feeding ground of abusive political power. The exploitation of what people believe they need has functioned infallibly since the rise of warrior kings who offered protections and future greatness that families and clans could no longer provide for themselves. This widened the community beyond perceptibility. The larger the political unit, the more irrelevant the local community, the more disconnected the solitary individual and the greater the alienation and sense of homelessness. “Progress” as represented by civilization, has always meant the progressive elimination of the local community and therefore the necessary rise of disconnected, isolated individuals. Ironically, the displacement of the locus of protection from clan to king, chosen as an instrument of survival, ends up making the individual feel more isolated and defenseless, generating a deeper anxiety over survival.

The central role of survival in driving these developments helps us understand some of the otherwise perplexing features of the shibboleth phenomenon. The need to have winners and losers in sports competitions corresponds to the focus of the conatus on survival. The “team” as the vicarious community of survival must win. Attending a game is most certainly not the refined enjoyment of superior performance. “Winning” is crucial even when it is clear, as in the Olympics, that athletes are equally accomplished.

Similarly, joining or identifying with a group represents the individual’s instinct to find the support community which is part of his/her identity. “Identity” is ultimately a communal phenomenon, and until the individual connects with a community of survival, s/he will sense a lack of identity. These vicarious experiences ― shibboleths ― mirror the instinctive need to belong to a support group local enough for human interaction to be palpably experienced. Once that happens a sense of wellbeing ― belonging ― is immediately generated.

From this perspective the shibboleth phenomenon is seen to be part of a constellation of human feelings, urges, reactions and practices that get their energy from the instinct to nestle oneself in a perceivable communal matrix ― a family or clan ― producing a sense of well-being that arises from our biological organisms. The fact that belonging to a particular group as a matter of objective fact might not really provide the protections that the individual needs does not mitigate either the loyalty or the sense of well-being that comes with membership. The irrationality in evidence here is a clue to its origin in biological instinct. The attempt to create a society of disconnected individual citizens rationally pursuing life, liberty and security for themselves without connection to others, no matter how reasonable and technically efficient it might be, will never fully succeed because human beings are tribal by nature. Tribalism is rooted in the organic intimacy of the family. Because of its irrational dimension, it can be dangerous; it can be manipulated and people are vulnerable. But so can any other biological feature embedded in our organisms, like the need to eat, the urge for sex, the reflex to self-defense. All these things generate a passionate response because they are biologically hard wired. That doesn’t mean they cannot be controlled, but it does mean that the corresponding urges will make insistent demands that the unprepared may feel they cannot disobey.

Strangers, foreigners, those who do not speak one’s language, who eat strange foods, wear unfamiliar clothing, practice a different religion, have a different skin color, are usually just excluded from the in-group until they are perceived to be a threat to its integrity and well-being. Then they become the object of fear and active hostility. These are instinctive reactions that are innate in us and part of the need to identify with a community of survival. We may consider it unfortunate that our biological equipment happened to be forged in the furnaces of the Pleistocene epoch 1.7 million years ago, but those are the conditions under which we have to eke out our survival on this planet. If we want to control it we have to first understand and accept it. This is what we are. The notion, held by many, that tribalism is an aberration of some sort and that a little education will dispel it, is a fallacy touted by the educated that reveals their prejudice against the “others” whom they disparage. It is another example of the shibboleth phenomenon; this time as a myth generated by the privileged ― the beneficiaries ― to justify their own segregationist tribalism i.e., their claims to class superiority.

 

Once the tribe is perceived to be under attack, the individual’s conatus sees its identity threatened and goes into a defensive posture that is focused on the elimination of the threat to the group. The control of tribalism is not to be found in an attempt to dismiss it, much less to eradicate it, which is quite impossible; for even if the “tribe” were destroyed, the members would recreate it in another form. It is rather to make sure that natural groups at the level of family and clan are protected and their well-being ― their ability to provide for the survival and wellbeing of their members ― insured. Individuals should be encouraged to identify with them rather than insist on the failed policy of promoting a mass society where interpersonal human contact is simply not perceivable if not non-existent and considered irrelevant to human happiness. It is the source of the alienation that is generalized in our societies.

Everything about modern economic “development:” from industrial manufacturing that displaces cottage industries, local guilds and craft labor with the mindlessness of the assembly-line; industrial scale agriculture that has eliminated the family farm and the local jobs that went with it; big-box stores pushing local mom and pop retailers out of business and paying their workers less than a living wage; urban “renewal” projects that destroy neighborhood ethnic enclaves; rural “development” that replaces farms and villages with suburban sprawl and shopping malls, the massification of leisure activities that replaces local restaurants by national chain franchises and fast-food outlets ― the list goes on and on ― have conspired to destroy the neighborhood and village once created by family and clan and to replace them with urbanized, isolated, disconnected masses of unemployed people looking for “jobs” with big corporations and for a “home” to rent from some stranger. All the many benefits of small scale, neigh­borhood and village life ― work, commerce, housing, service ― have been eliminated and in their place people are offered money to satisfy their consumption needs (if they’re lucky), which, given the options for living still left to them in mass society, amount to little more than the addictive accumulation of the empty symbols of wealth and success ― another shibboleth ― another substitute for the real thing.

It’s hard to imagine recreating the sense of local belonging that once characterized the living conditions of the majority of humankind without reversing the factors of massification that were responsible for destroying it. But, until the real thing comes along, it seems we will continue to try to satisfy our instincts vicariously by identifying with substitutes ― shibboleths ― that symbolize the instinctive needs we are no longer able to satisfy. These shibboleths are an ersatz, vicarious, unnatural, substitute tribalism that springs up like a fungus on the decaying corpse of the local communities that have been plowed under by the massification of modern society.

To love “God,” love yourself as you would a spouse

3,700 words

1.

The Song of Songs

Nuptial imagery has been the gold standard for western mysticism from before the middle ages. Its origins can be traced to Christian antiquity when the Platonic mindset of Origen of Alexandria, who died in 254 c.e., reconceived the Biblical Book known as the “Song of Songs” as applicable to the individual Christian “soul” and its relationship to “God.”

The Song of Songs is a book of ancient Hebrew poetry celebrating the erotic love between a man and his lover incorporated into the Jewish Bible. It was originally used by the priests of the Temple to poetically characterize the relationship between Yahweh and the nation of Israel. It was an intentional theological application in which an individual relationship was taken as poetic metaphor for what was considered a literal collective reality.

The shift back to an individual understanding of those poems seems natural enough, especially for a Christianity that had embraced Platonism as the ultimate truth. The principal Platonic category dominating the Christian worldview was that the human person was a “soul,” ― individual, immaterial and immortal ― a “spirit” that was substantially distinct from the body which it inhabited as a temporary tenant. It had the ultimate effect of extracting the human person from the world of material things and situating it in another world where only “spiritual” entities resided. It eliminated the community as the primary locus of human reality and substituted the spiritual individual. For Platonists, the family, clan or nation were not “essential” ideas and therefore not “humanity.” Humanity resided in the human individual alone. The theory worked well for the Roman Empire and its state religion whose investiture with divine favor was claimed to supersede tribal prerogatives. The one imperial power, a theocracy chosen and protected by God, ruled a whole world of isolated individuals.

The other entities that inhabited Plato’s “real world” of ideas included, first and foremost, “God,” the One, Pure Spirit, uncontaminated with even the slightest hint of matter, and his Nous, Mind, Logos, a divine emanation who took the “One’s” creative ideas that constituted his own reality and “poured” them into amorphous matter as into an “empty receptacle” (Timaeus). Those ideas were spiritual realities which humans could access because they too were immaterial spirit.

“Spirit” for Plato was naturally immortal because it was not composed of parts as matter was. Not being composed meant it could not decompose, i.e., it could not die. But because, in the case of humankind, spirit was “married” to matter, the “soul” suffered the weaknesses and limitations of the body, the principal one of which was its inevitable decomposition. But being spirit, the human individual could transcend its material side, and in anticipation of the final liberation from the body at death, relate with increasing exclusivity to the spiritual world to which it alone among earthly entities belonged; that included not only “ideas” but also the One and its Mind. The “spiritual life” was conceived of as the “soul’s” systematic disengagement from the world of matter including its own body, and engagement with “spiritual” realities and entities, the highest of which was “God.”

But “God” was pure spirit and no shadow of matter existed in “God.” His Mind, Nous, Logos, was believed to play the role of mediator and interface with the world of matter, and that would of course include the human individual wedded to matter. Christian Platonists assimilated Jesus as Jewish messiah to the Nous or Logos, and generated a narrative in which “God” united humankind with “Him”self and His immortality through the incorporation of the human individual into the saving events of Jesus’ (Nous, Logos) death and resurrection in Christian baptism.

Thus, the achievement of immortality was imagined as the by-product of new relationship in which the original ties to the body and its communitarian relations ― the family and tribe ― were replaced by a “marriage” between “God” and the individual human soul, mediated by the Logos. This created a new universal community: the Catholic Church, identical to the Roman Empire when Constantine made it Rome’s state religion.

Hence, the nuptial imagery on display in the Bible’s Song of Songs became an aspirational symbol for Christian mystics. It was used to represent this union between “God” (mediated by Christ) and the human “soul.” Following Origen’s commentary, Greek Fathers like Gregory of Nyssa accepted it as part of the truths received from the Jewish tradition and even used it, to the degree that the poetics allowed, to draw theological conclusions. For Ambrose of Milan it revealed virginity to be more than a personal preference, it became a transcendent goal of Christian perfection. Because the Platonic theory said that both “God” and the “soul” were exactly alike insofar as they were “spirit-persons,” the nuptial imagery was increasingly taken literally. The patristic practice of commenting on the Song of Songs continued on through the Middle Ages. The commentaries and sermons of Bernard of Clairvaux composed about 1136 were probably the most famous and widely read; they were cited by Martin Luther as a principal influence on his own spiritual development, and may explain his insistence on maintaining the doctrine of the real presence in glaring contrast to most of his fellow reformers. As late as 1584, Spanish Carmelite John of the Cross wrote Spiritual Canticle, an exposition applying classic Thomistic theology to an understanding of The Song of Songs.

Despite its revered tradition, it’s my contention that the Christian importance accorded to the literal interpretation of the imagery established by the Song of Songs is intimately connected to the Platonic world­view, and for that reason false and misleading. Even if the LIFE that has extruded and enlivened the material universe could in some philosophical sense be called a “person,” it is not as we are persons, and LIFE does not interact with us as we interact with one another which is what the nuptial imagery projects. Most specifically, the erotic dimension so prominent in the Song is entirely inappropriate. Relationship to LIFE does not demand sexual fidelity which has been the common application since Origen. The celibacy it enjoined reinforced Plato’s denigration of sexuality as hostile to the human “spirit” and justified Augustine’s outrageous claim that sexual desire was a corruption of the human body and that sexual intercourse performed under its influence transmitted Adam’s sin from parent to offspring.

Not only does nuptial imagery falsify relationship to “God” but it reinforces a radical individualism that detaches the human being from family and its extensions in the local community, and through the fiction of a “marriage to God” leaves the individual psychologically isolated and vulnerable to the control of impersonal forces like despotic empires, exploitive masters and bosses, and totalitarian religious hierarchies. This individualism cultivated by Platonic Christianity impels the believer to reject natural solidarity and transfer loyalty to “God” and his Church-State agent. The power of religion to galvanize new artificially created conglomerates has been recognized and exploited by empire builders since before recorded history. Traditional Christianity is not alone in lending itself to these efforts.

Moreover, the dualist Platonism implied in the literal take on the traditional imagery is a primary obstacle preventing understanding between spiritual aspirants of Eastern and Western mystical traditions. But I emphasize literal. As with all religious imagery, the nuptial analogy is metaphor, and simply acknowledging that fact will go a long way in opening closed doors and beginning the journey to the universalism that I believe is the final result of sincere and authentic religious dialog.

 

2.

Spiritual growth: growing up

The similarity of the imagery in the Song of Songs to an erotic fantasy is obvious. The appeal it could have for isolated, sexually frustrated individuals creates the suspicion that the claims of mystics like John of the Cross might be pathological projection. Along with the paternal imagery about “God” cited by Freud, it seems to be an added example of how religion can be used to maintain the childhood dependencies that result from (and contribute to) the failure to achieve adulthood. That such consequences correlate with the political effects of individualism makes the traditional imagery even more questionable.

This anomaly of traditional mysticism needs to be rectified. I would like to approach the issue by first bracketing all religious belief about the nature of “God” and the “soul,” and look at things strictly from the point of view of human experience. I want to start with what I think is the true state of affairs, i.e., that the first step in spiritual growth is growing up. Maturation is the response to what we call “the human condition,” something that is true for all people everywhere and does not depend on religious belief of any kind. By “human condition” I mean the endemic, universal, inescapable “problem” of human dissatisfaction with the parameters of life available to human organisms on the planet. It is an immaturity identified with childhood; in is grossest form it displays itself as selfishness ― a refusal to accept the responsibilities of the collective struggle for survival.

Humankind seems to be the only species on earth that is capable of not being happy with itself. We are restive and feel trapped by the limited capabilities of our organisms, the unavoidable material and social/psychological demands of survival (i.e., work and family), and the nature of the human life-cycle which is vulnerable to trauma and disease, and necessarily includes old-age and death. This general dissatisfaction with being human defines us as different from all other forms of organic life, plant and animal, who seem to embrace their evolutionary inheritances ― which have virtually the same limitations as ours ― without question, and live out their organic destinies which include the struggle for collective survival with unmitigated enthusiasm.

I contend that the overarching pursuit for human beings is the thorough understanding and appreciation of exactly what we are and the decision to accept it. This is admittedly an intellectual quest, but it is undertaken as the necessary precondition for emotional self-acceptance. It is unavoidable. For it is the uniquely human feature of being reflexively self-conscious­ that lies at the root of the very possibility of imagining ourselves to be other than what and where we are, and therefore dissatisfied. Unlike all other animals who, as far as we can see, cannot imagine themselves differently from what they experience at any given moment, we humans must consciously choose to embrace what we are, and what we are doing, and the necessary prerequisite for that choice is understanding.

Laying out this premise in this way identifies the contours of the “human problem.” There is no solution that does not entail an accurate understanding of the boundaries and the possibilities of our situation ― what doors are closed and what doors are open ― and denying neither. No transcendent experience, no interpersonal relationship, no guarantee of survival or security here or hereafter, no accumulation of resources or of pleasurable, satisfying events, no accolade or recognition by others can substitute for knowing what we are as human organisms, acknowledging our limitations and responding to the demand of our potentials. The solution to the “human dilemma” is self-embrace; and it follows that unless we understand thoroughly, accurately, and without self-deception what we really are, what we can and can’t do, the possibility of choosing to-be something else, or wanting to be somewhere else ― some imaginary concoction ― is always there and bodes a continuance of the frustration. It is to fall right back into the problem, for that is exactly the nature of it. The human problem is that we are trying to be something that we are not and cannot be, in order to please and aggrandize ourselves at the expense of reality. Adulthood is the realistic acceptance of what we are ― and that includes both positive and negative ― bowing to what we cannot be or do, and obeying what our humanity demands of us.

The mystical quest

Being an adult is a basic condition of survival. But the total “end of sorrow” (words of the Bhagavad Gita) is the goal of the mystical quest and goes much further. It is not, as some believe, some kind of “end run” into an imaginary never-never land, an escape-fantasy chosen to avoid responsibility and struggle. The mystic begins with having achieved full responsible adulthood but goes far beyond simply tolerating our condition and reluctantly coping with the frustrations of life. The aim of mysticism is joy. There is no greater human achievement than to understand the full burden of our humanity and embrace it enthusiastically without disappointment, reserve, fear, reluctance or hesitation. All religious belief, all spiritual programs can be seen as attempts to reach such a state based on some set of beliefs thought to make it possible, and even mandatory.

In our case the beliefs begin with the discoveries of science. Science reverses ancient Platonic metaphysics which identified humanity with the individual relationship to “God” and “God’s” political agent, the state. Science identifies us as belonging to a universal community. Being human is a biological fact. Self-embrace, therefore, involves first of all, acknowledging that to be fully human is to have a human body, the result of the reproductive activity of male and female human beings. This applies to everyone. No one has to worry about becoming human through proper behavior, or “joining” the human family by some choice or another, like baptism. The human organism at birth is fully integrated into the evolving human community as it currently interacts with the material conditions of biological life on earth. Human Identity is biological in origin: clear, unambiguous and unchallengeable. This affects all of humankind. There are no distinctions, racial, ethnic, national, class, that make some more human and others less.

The second step, of course, is the details; it is the full elaboration of what being in a human community with this organism, evolved to this point of development from these people with this formation and on this earth, means. Unearthing the details is the work of meditation and mindfulness because it is a comprehensive self-conscious picture that must reflect reality. We are talking about understanding. If the end of sorrow is self-embrace ― accepting ourselves with the unmitigated enthusiasm that we see in all other forms of organic life ― it begins and ends with right thinking. We have to understand fully, without illusion, regret or rejection, exactly what we are where we belong and who belongs to us. The human community is universal. The responsibilities of mutually assisted survival bear on all of humankind. Those who do not see the egalitarian and universalist implications of this need to do some more meditating.

An integral part of this second step is the honest perception of the deformative influences on our “thinking who we are” made by parents, siblings, family and the local social environment; these are all time and place dependent and their self-aggrandizing inclinations must be acknowledged and corrected. We are born into the current of human history and we bear the marks (scars?) of our location in that flow. It determines, among other things, exactly how much knowledge about our evolutionary biological origins is available to us, and how aware we are of the universality of humankind. If knowing what we are is crucial to an effective self-embrace, when and where we were born and what deformities our local community has passed on to us enters decisively into the possibilities of accurate understanding. The discoveries of modern science are particularly relevant to this question, for the narrative that paints the picture of what we are has radically changed under its tutelage. We now know we are a universal family.

This leads into the third step in the process of growth ― if indeed it can be called a “step” because it is the point of it all ― the unreserved acquiescence to what we have come to understand ourselves to be in both our limitations and our potentials, talents and responsibilities. This step acknowledges that merely understanding what we are is no guarantee of success. There is always the possibility of resisting, rejecting, ignoring, avoiding, disdaining and even destroying ourselves. The social dimension, the global extent of our community of mutual support, is always the most vulnerable to selfishness ― individual or group. There is always the possibility of a regression back into childhood or pre-scientific myth; it is a prime example of the suppression of reality. Even after painting an accurate picture of what it means to belong to the global human community, the ultimate challenge remains: to embrace it lovingly, without disappointment, doubt, ambiguity or reserve. There are many who feel this is simply not possible. We are, they say, irremediably unreconciled to what we are; we would simply rather not be human the way humanness currently exists. Besides national, ethnic and religious conditioning accomplished so early in life that the individual cannot avoid being misshapen, they adduce the fact of universal death as proof of their claim. It’s difficult to undo childhood formation, and no one can accept death. An examination of this claim and the consequences of abandoning the quest for self-embrace because of it will be discussed in a later reflection.

I am using the word “embrace” in an effort to incorporate as much affectivity as possible into this final step. This is the defining mark of the mystical quest which is not satisfied with merely accepting life; it wants to love it. I am aware that the word can be taken in less than the sense of intense self-abandon and enthusiasm that I mean it to include. I want the word “embrace” to bear the emotional weight of the word “love” plus the sense of active personal engagement that makes love more than a passive self-pleasing experience and converts it into passionate commitment. Self-embrace is really intended to mean “falling in love with your life.”

Hence, the nuptial imagery of western mysticism. As a poetic metaphor for the loving self-embrace of the mystics, it is quite appropriate. Betrothal and marriage evoke the affective dimension that is the proper component of authentic self-embrace. But notice, it is metaphorical. I am not talking about being “married to God” but rather loving myself and the humankind into which I was born and through which I survive. But I not only love myself as I am programmed to do by the conatus of my organism, for if I am to achieve anything like the enthusiastic self-accep­tance that I see in the in the myriads of organisms ― plant, animal, insect, fish ― that surround me on this planet, who all live in a state of total joy, I have to do more than just passively “accept” myself or tolerate my life. I must fall in love with myself as I have been made and, as is so poignantly expressed in the marriage vow, “abandon all other” imaginary ways of being. I have to fall madly in love with being human as I am with all the moral and social burden that comes with it. This is the goal of mysticism: not a mental escape but a total joy that puts me in sync with all the other forms of living organism evolved by matter’s energy.

This “fidelity” which requires “forsaking” anything other than what I really am, means “letting go” of any and all imaginary constructs ― selfish fantasies of escape ― that do not correspond to what is possible to and demanded by my humanity. My body bears forward in me the direction and intensity of the extroverted existential energy released at the birth of our universe. Matter’s energy comes to me in a highly evolved form. Material energy that comprises my organism is not a tabula rasa. It is already spoken for. It is an unquenchable energy focused on being-here that, in the pursuit of ever greater expansion has molted first into living and then into reflexive self-con­scious form. That is not a revealed truth but an undeniable fact drawn from 14 billion years of observed behavior and demonstrated direction. Material energy is committed to universal availability ― the work of limitless abundance. My body is composed of this existentially committed energy.

This introduces another perspective that reinforces the validity of the nuptial imagery. This existential commitment to an ever-expanding abundance on the part of matter gives me a sense of the “otherness” of the living energy that resides in the components of my organism. My self-embrace is ultimately grounded in the prior presence of this energy that is undeniably independent of me and present in everything else in the material universe. It suggests that I am not only myself; LIFE transcends me. The LIFE that I enjoy and that energizes my every thought and desire is 14 billion years old and was not my creation either in design or production. This “outside” source of my “inside” energy puts me in the presence of a mysterious wellspring that I call LIFE. It suggests a unique immanent relationship between myself and that source that I did not initially suspect was there, and it reboots my relationship to all other things constituted of this selfsame living material energy: it makes all other things made of this universal matter, in some sense, “me.” This train has been running for 14 billion years and shows no sign of changing course or slowing down. We’re already on board when we awaken to its reality. Once we understand that WE ARE THAT, everything falls into place. We are at home in the universe.

I and my source are one and the same thing. My ancient pre-scientific tradition may not have completely anticipated that my unity with my source and creator had such a concrete ground and was so total, but it seems to have at least suspected that it was more than met the eye because since ancient times it characterized the relationship as “nuptial.” The implication was that the two were one flesh.

Being “married to God” is a poetic symbol that can be used to evoke our relationship to that in which we live and move and have our being. Like all poetry it becomes grotesque and meaningless if it is taken literally. Alongside of other poetic symbols that come down to us from our pre-scientific ancestors, it can remind us who we are, and what we are doing here. These are things, for some reason, we all find easy to forget.

 

 

The Face of “God” is Your Face

You are not only constructed of “God-stuff” ― the living material energy that created the universe and determined the direction of its evolutionary process ― but with only the potential and resources supplied by that energy you actively appropriate and pursue matter’s principal objective, being-here.

Matter’s intrinsic and exclusive relationship to being-here recapitulates the traditional definition of “God” as esse in se subsistens, self-subsistent being. Being-here is esse in process. You yourself are the closest thing to “God” that you will ever see, and the generation of any other image will only falsify the significance of your existence, and leave you very far from understanding “God.”

You are-here, not as an independent “self” with a unique and personal destiny, as your misguided individualist culture has been telling you, but as a conatus of universal matter; you are a concrescence ― a knot ― of the universe’s material energy in pursuit of being-here. The fact that you are autonomous, self-aware, purposeful, has been misinterpreted to mean independent. Those features don’t come from another world, they are rather functions of the same universal matter, and were evolved as tools in the pursuit of matter’s one goal: being-here in time. The human species and you in it are a tiny part of an immense material totality whose energy and constitutive structures account for everything you are, everything you have and everything you can do, without remainder. There is nothing else there but the universal matter of your body driven to be-here endlessly. You are necessarily and inescapably an expression of the totality’s goal, even when you attempt to distort or destroy it.

Of all the worldviews generated to explain your reality, it’s hard to find one that evokes its moral and mystical implications so directly. It says, quite simply, you are made of your source; you are made of what made you; you and “God,” in other words, are one and the same thing. It is the image that most closely corresponds to Paul’s evocation of “God” in Acts 17, as that “in which you live and move and have your being.” How is this way of picturing “God” different from the older obsolete ones: Ahura Mazda, Aten, Zeus, Thor, Yahweh?

 

First of all, there is nothing “infinite” here. “God” is not all powerful even though it may turn out that there is no limit on what can emerge from its creative evolutionary process.  This “God” is not eternal, even though its explorations in the pursuit of being-here in time may prove to be endless. You are faced with learning to love a very simple, powerless creator that recycles its own substance into a myriad of forms because of its obsessive, compulsive hunger for being-here in time. You are one of those forms. “God” can’t help it, just as you can’t help it. You know exactly what that’s like. Being-here is what you want and what you do all the time. You only reach full maturity when you become capable of reproducing another human organism pre-programmed, like you, for only one thing: being-here.

You have to accept “God” for what “God” really is, and does … and forgive “God” for what “God” is not, and cannot do. And since you are part of this “God,” you also have to accept and forgive yourself for what you are, and for what you are programmed to do, not what you have been taught to think you are and force yourself to do. Just like “God,” you are-here for the sole purpose of being-here. Nothing else.

A moment’s reflection will reveal how liberating that is.  A career or a relationship or an accumulation will not change that destiny.  Don’t let them put you on a treadmill. You already are everything you could ever hope to be.  You already have more than you could ever hope to acquire.

As a corollary to this immanent “God,” there are no miracles.  If this “God” were omnipotent, rational, personal and providential, as your benighted culture tells you, there would be miracles.  But there are none. Living matter evolves marvels, but does not perform miracles. “God” is what “God” is, not what you want “God” to be.  You have to grow up and let go of your infantile fantasies of an omnipotent, omniscient parent that made you feel loved, secure and carefree.  Life for all material organisms in this universe is hard and precarious.  Secure and carefree evaporate with childhood.  Growing up means learning that hard and precarious are the conditions for being-here. “God” is universal matter in existential struggle; that’s how new forms are created, and that’s how you live out your life from the cradle to the grave.  It’s what makes you flesh and bone with “God.”

 

Therefore, be like the “God” whose face you bear and join the struggle for our collective survival.  You are the expression of a totality.  It is the totality that survives, not you alone.  Everyone is scared.  It’s the human condition.  Join the totality and make everyone as loved, secure and carefree as you can.  Be like a father and mother, brother and sister, to others … to all others.

You are the face of “God,” so listen to yourself and act like “God.” You know how happy it makes you to have something ― someone ― to serve; it allows you to forget yourself.  Listen to what your body ― your material energy ― is telling you.  That’s what “God” is like.

You are-here because you have a body, you are matter’s energy.  That amazing feat has already been accomplished.  You do not have to do that again, and the idea that some puny project of yours ― a career, a relationship, an achievement, a possession, a purchase ― is anything like the achievement of being-here as you are with that body, a part of universal matter, is the classic delusion, the tragic flaw that enervates the human condition.  Your selfish cravings for ego-enhancement are an effort to substitute a fabricated isolated “self” in place of the real self that is-here securely as a part of the totality.  Matter’s energy is neither created nor destroyed; being-here is guaranteed for every part of the totality.  You are part of the whole.  Stop trying to tell yourself you’re not.  Stop trying to create yourself, save yourself, deify yourself.  Listen to your body made of universal matter.

Listen to your body.  Forget yourself.  You know how happy that makes you.  Put others first.  You know how happy it makes them.  What more do you need to know?

Care for the earth? Care for others? These are not the revealed commands of a far off “God,” they are the spontaneous inclinations of your body of flesh, to love and protect your earth-home and the family of living organisms where you emerged.  Listen to your body, earth’s body.  Once you know who you are, where you came from, where you belong and what you will be forever, the entire spectrum of creative human behavior rises clearly into view and beckons.  These are not conclusions of syllogisms wrenched reluctantly from abstract premises by rigid logic, as our culture has falsely taught you, they are the natural movements of your human body towards those most intimately related to you.  What was missing was knowing who you are, and where you belong.  You are the offspring of universal matter.  This earth teeming with living things is your mother and your family.

Your culture was wrong.  It made a guess, but it was wrong.  It told you you were a solitary spirit, unique, isolated, self-directed, self-involved, and fundamentally and unalterably selfish.  It said you were hard-wired for “gain” in another world, your real home, as reward for making believe you were selflessly serving others in this one where you don’t belong.  Look how that contradiction glares.  Don’t let yourself be sold a bill of goods.  Once you taste what it’s like to belong, to serve others, you will never want to go back to living for yourself, not even in “heaven.” Listen to your body.  Stifle yourself!  You are made to serve others for they are you, flesh of your flesh and bone of your bone; that’s what makes your body happy and your heart awaken.  Listen to your body.  What you hear is the whispered voice of universal matter in which you live and move and have your being.

 

Third, you say you want to love “God”? Then love yourself with your whole heart, your whole soul, your whole mind and all the strength you can muster.  You are yourself, mind and body, composed of the living creator of all things.  When you see your face it is primordial reality that you are looking at, 14 billion years old and counting; and even before it extruded you, it was already focused obsessively on what it wants.  It’s not yours to decide, as if it were something dead and drifting that needed you to infuse it with life and direction.  It’s goals were already settled, its destiny already determined; you sit quietly at its feet to hear what they are, and once you hear you don’t have to be told twice what to do.  You know what to do; for YOU ARE THAT!

Matter’s living energy had evolved into countless forms before you came along, so of course you revere it as you would a transcendent parent.  But regardless of your awareness of its transcendence and primordiality . . . regardless of how clearly you perceive that it was-here before you, is greater than you in time and form, and will continue on creating new forms long after your time and planet home have disappeared, you can never forget that YOU ARE THAT!  When you look at your face, there is only one thing there: YOU, constructed of the very “stuff” that made you ― “God.” You can never, never allow yourself to imagine that “God” is something else ― something other than you ― “out there.” Nuptial imagery was a misplaced metaphor.  If you want to embrace “God,” embrace yourself.  You want to see “God,” look at yourself.  You don’t like what you see?  Transform yourself.  Be the “God” you are.

You and your creator, the two are one thing. Please don’t complain that you do not have the “categories” to grasp, explain and articulate this. It doesn’t excuse you that your myopic culture in its know-it-all arrogance never even made an effort to develop a word to describe what was staring it in the face. For, with or without a traditional category you are looking at an objective fact: you and your creator are one and the same thing.  You can never succumb to the primitive imagery you inherited from an archaic, self-idolizing, tribal fairy-tale about a big policeman in the sky, ready to punish you if you’re bad and love you if you’re good  . . .  who displays his will for humankind by creating empires: making one tribe rich and powerful with permission to enslave others.  GET OVER IT!  These are fairy tales, myths from the past before history.  Yahweh, the Warrior or the Bridegroom, is no more accurate an image of “God” than Thor the Thunderer or the mighty Aphrodite.  These were the “categories” your brilliant culture came up with, and it’s time to put them in the museums where they belong.  They do not correspond to reality.

You don’t have the words? Find new ones. You don’t have the categories? You are saddled with ancient rituals and symbols that reproduce false and misleading narratives? Dump them. Change them. Sublimate them. Ask yourself: is it really “God” you’re after as you claim, or are you really only trying to create yourself out of nothing by erecting your tribe, or something else like it, into a “god”? Have you so lost touch with yourself that you no longer believe your body is-here? Do you need to fabricate a false self to put yourself here? Is it your tribe and its narratives, or some other “achievement” that gives you reality? Please be advised: this is all idolatry.

“God” put you here.

There is only one “God.” And when you look in the mirror that’s who should be looking back at you. It’s time to acknowledge the one whose face you bear, in whom you live and move and have your being.

“. . . the most to be pitied.” (II)

^“If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we of all people are the most to be pitied.”       

1 Corinthians 15:19

That statement of Paul’s was uncharacteristic of a Jew. In Paul’s time, Jews did not believe in an after-life.  Besides, the remark had an arrogant and demanding tone that was more typical of Greek attitudes dominated by the belief that human beings were immaterial spirits unnaturally imprisoned in their bodies of matter.  The Greeks were focused on an “other world” of divine spirit where our “souls” supposedly originated and to which they returned at death after escaping from their dungeons of flesh. They were quite passionate about it. If a world­view did not relate to the existence of the immortal human spirit, it was not worth considering. We are not animals.

The mystery religions that flourished in the ancient Mediterranean world reflected this Greek obsession with spirit and the afterlife. And it was to the mystery religions that Paul turned for an interpretation of the Christ event. Paul taught that the Christian was ritually immersed in the death and resurrection of Christ the way the mystēs was immersed in the death and resurrection of Demeter and Orpheus, Isis and Mithra. For Paul, the resurrection was more than a sign of divine approval for Jesus’ authenticity as a messenger, it became the message itself, the mysterion (Latin: sacramentum), the ritual-vehicle that would transport us to the other world. In a thoroughly Hellenized culture where religious practice was constituted by the pursuit of life after death, one can understand the appeal of Paul’s proclamation. Christianity, because of this emphasis of Paul, stopped being a heterodox Jewish sect and became a Greco-Roman religious cult.

The paradox that lies under the surface of early Christianity is that Jesus himself was a Jew and expressed none of the focus on life after death that was central to Paul’s message. Jesus’ preaching as reported in the gospels, was most definitely “for this life only.” This is more than a mere matter of emphasis. Jesus did not offer life after death as the motivation for the humble, generous, just and loving behavior he encouraged. In the tradition of Job and the Jewish prophets he conspicuously avoided any motivation based on reward or punishment either in this life or after death. The motivation, like the behavior he called for, was love. He told his fellow Jews to imitate their loving Father who was just, compassionate, generous and forgiving. “Be like your heavenly Father who makes the sun shine equally on the just and the unjust.” . . .   His model prayer, the “Our Father” said “forgive us as we forgive others.”

Paul and Jesus

I believe what we are dealing with are two very different religious visions: (1) Jesus’ renewal of Judaism grounded in an emphatic re-characterization of Yahweh as “loving Father” and the rejection of earlier imagery that painted him as warrior king and punitive lawgiver, and (2) Paul’s focus on the Hellenistic pursuit of life-after-death, proven by the real resurrection of Jesus to be more than wishful thinking, confirming Greek hopes.

The arrogance of Paul’s statement is a first clue that his message was different from Jesus’. Paul sits in judgment on reality itself and finds it wanting. If living morally is the only way to be authentically human, and we are not able to live moral lives without radically altering the natural course of human life which ends in death, then, indeed, it is not possible to be human, because there is no way to avoid death. I believe it was Paul’s merger of the two sources of his formation that accounts for this bizarre metaphysical judgmentalism. The Greeks had decided that their theory about the immortal immaterial soul was scientific truth, and those that did not accept it had to believe that we were only animals. The Jews, for their part, were convinced that they were God’s chosen tribe destined to political supremacy over all the other tribes in the world. If Jesus was the messiah, for Paul it meant that God was bringing the whole world into submission to Jewish salvation history. Put these two delusions together as Paul did in his own head and you’ve got an ideology with an attitude. It laid the foundations for Christianity’s subsequent tendency to demand the submission of all other traditions to its own.

But consider how presumptuous this is. Paul claims to know exactly what God’s intentions are for humankind and therefore how “God” structured the world and directed human history. In Paul’s attitude there is nothing of Job’s blinding insight that, while he could not explain Yahweh’s behavior, he realized he knew so little that his only valid reaction had to be an awed silence.

Job’s was the proper reaction. If God is as utterly unknowable and his designs as unfathomable as theists have always claimed, then the door must be left open for possibilities that we cannot imagine. Who are we to decide that death, which, is the destiny of absolutely every single living thing on earth, is “unnatural” in the case of humankind . . . a claim our Platonist Christianity has sustained for two millennia despite the indisputable evidence that every single last human being that has ever lived has died and no “immortal soul” has ever been encountered.

Besides, by arrogantly deciding that if resurrection is not part of the picture “we are the most to be pitied,” Paul is implying that alternatives are not authentic and cannot be considered reliable guides to life. He ignores the fact that Jesus himself encouraged people to live moral lives without ever invoking resurrection following the entire Jewish tradition for a thousand years before him. Were Jesus’ listeners being misled? Were all those people to be pitied?

Don’t misunderstand. I am not trying to disprove the resurrection. That’s not my point. I would personally be overjoyed if we were all to come back to life as ourselves to be united once again with the people we love. I am not hoping there is no resurrection, I’m simply saying, against Paul, that even if there is no resurrection, nothing changes. Our sense of the sacred and our trust in LIFE remain the same. No one is to be pitied. Faith in the resurrection might make it easier for some to live a moral life, but that doesn’t invalidate other views. All are obliged by their humanity to be moral, even those who find resurrection incredible.

Resurrection is either real or it’s not. If Christian beliefs are true, my denying them won’t make them disappear, any more than believing them will create them.   Whatever the case may be, we have absolutely no control over what happens to us after death. All we know is that we die and we cannot bring ourselves back to life. That means that if we are to come back to life someone or something else that we cannot see or control has to do it. It is not in our hands. Everyone is equally powerless. Christians have no more control than anyone else. They, too, have to trust that “God” will bring them back to life after death.

TRUST IN LIFE

This finally brings us to the core of the issue: trust. Belief in the resurrection does not change reality, it changes my attitude toward reality. It offers no more guarantees than human life itself in whose processes we have to trust implicitly.

For consider: Our dependency on the forces of LIFE is so universal, so deep and so insuperable that no matter how willfully selfish and anti-social we decide we are going to be, we still have to trust in the biological processes that must continue to function efficiently if we are to carry out our nefarious plans. We have to trust that the multiple organic operations of our bodies, alimentation, respiration, elimination, circulation, the proper release of neurotransmitters guaranteeing perception, insight, thought, memory, many of which we do not fully understand, will work without error or interruption. And then there are the events that create our very identities and roles in society: conception, gestation that brought us from conception to birth fully equipped for life as independent biological organisms, the ontogeny that impeccably brought us to adulthood along with the generative sexuality that allows us to reproduce. None of us has personal authorship or control over any of these things. Everything about us and our life with others has been handed to us, developed over immeasurable eons of deep time by an evolutionary process that has adapted our organisms perfectly to our environment. We have implicit trust in all this. We have no choice. Trust in LIFE is the sea we swim in. It is the inescapable attitude, conscious or not, that characterizes the relationship that we have to being-here. Our organisms are programmed ― they are hard-wired ― to trust in LIFE.

Trust in death

Given that trust is the very condition that defines us, it should come as no great surprise that even as our lives wind down and we approach death, we are spontaneously inclined to continue to trust. The fear of death is a learned response; it should not be confused with the flight from danger which is a biological instinct, a reaction to a living perception that evaporates as soon as the threat has passed. Death is different. The organism has no notion of death because no one living has ever experienced it. Death is a mental construct, pure product of the imagination. Trust, I contend is instinctive. It is the simple seamless continuation of the way we live our lives from moment to moment. Given that life is a very long unbroken series of trusting moments no one is spontaneously inclined to suddenly decide that some next moment cannot be trusted. Something has to intervene to break that chain.

It is very difficult to be afraid of the moment of death without conceptual intervention and a considerable amount of projection. We imagine what death must be because we see what it has done to all the people that have passed through it. Using this gathered data, our minds create an abstract concept which, in fact, is at odds with our spontaneous trusting expectations. Our instinctive inclination is to embrace with joy each now moment as part of the process of living.

Now resurrection, life-after-death, is itself a projection of the imagination that is obviously generated to neutralize the death-concept. No one living has ever experienced resurrection, even those that claim to believe in it. But it is even more remote than death, for while we have evidence that people have died, no one living has ever seen anyone who has come back from the dead. All “data” in this regard come from the records of ancient people who themselves are dead, and never came back to life. That the belief in resurrection can overcome such a huge credibility gap tells you how powerful the urge is to trust LIFE.

Now my point in all this is to identify “human bedrock,” by which I mean the ground beneath which there is no ground. It is the sine qua non for living a human life. Resurrection is not bedrock, as Paul’s arrogant statement seems to claim, a psychological human need so deep that without it, it is impossible to live humanly. For resurrection as a psychological operator functions as magnet for a trust in LIFE. It restores the trust that our organisms are programmed for.

I contend that trust in LIFE is human psychological bedrock. And that means that without trust in LIFE we cannot lead human lives, we cannot be sane, we cannot be moral, we cannot love ourselves or others, we cannot build a human world. And the trust we have in LIFE, while it gives us absolutely no information whatsoever about what happens to us as conscious identifiable selves after death, has the potential to override the absence of evidence about life after death.

But in order for it to do that, trust in LIFE has to neutralize the exaggerated import­ance of the self which, to my mind, is at the root of Paul’s arrogance. Resurrection as we have imagined it correlates to the human individual self. Our trust in life has been detoured into an expectation that the individual “self” will live forever. The bitterness and disillusionment characteristic of modern times in the lands of the West, in my opinion, is directly due to having been sold a bill of goods about our selves that was sheer fantasy. Having taken Paul seriously, when it became clear to many that there was no resurrection, their love of life itself was destroyed by the conviction that “we are the most to be pitied.”

The “Self”

I believe that the transcendent importance that we have accorded ourselves as identifiable self-conscious individuals, (requiring resurrection if we are to trust LIFE) is a cultural phenomenon, not metaphysical. It is characteristic of Western Christianity and the cultures that it has shaped. It is the result of the artificial expansion and intensification of a psychological focus on oneself that was always open to being situated anywhere along a fairly wide spectrum of importance. In other words, it is our culture that has made the “individual” the super-important thing that we project it to be. Our culture under the tutelage of our dualistic religion has cultivated the appreciation of the individual person well out of proportion to what it might have received from other cultures. We are not unaware of this. For many it is a source of great pride and admiration. It has given rise to what we call western values which includes the dubious legacy of belief in our superiority and the right to impose our way of life on the rest of the world.

That importance is culturally inflated but not created out of nothing. Self-awareness and self-prioritization is a universal biological experience. All animal organisms display it. But, falsely defining the human person as a “divine” eternal “spirit” destined to live forever without the body precisely because the “self” is not the material biological organism it appears to be, is the cultural bellows that forced air artificially into the “self” expanding it in size and visibility. The individualism of the West is an exaggerated, overblown, cultural artifact grounded in the unfounded belief in the separable human spirit as a metaphysical “thing” of divine provenance, different from every other thing in the material universe. The cultural context of belief in the human “soul” as immaterial immortal spirit skews the perception of what the human individual is, well beyond the conclusions that would be drawn by experience if left alone. The evidence that we are material biological organisms is undeniable; but there is no evidence that there is an immaterial thing called a “soul” that continues to exist after the death of the body, none whatsoever.

Once the exaggerated importance accorded to the human person has been reduced to the proportions that the evidence will support, we are left with a biological organism that is able to perform extraordinary functions that go beyond what organic matter in other biological configurations is capable of, but at no point do they propel it out of the orbit of the organic and biological. Even the human mind, which we identify as the “self,” is a material phenomenon whose human functions can deteriorate beyond recognition well before they cease entirely at death.

Trust in LIFE, then, is trust in the material processes, micro and macro, physical, chemical, biological, from which human beings have been elaborated and in which they remain immersed and borne along. Trust is a direct corollary of the recognition that we ourselves are an emergent form of the matter-in-process that constitutes this entire cosmos of things. We trust the process because we are the emanations of the process. We are evolving LIFE in its most forward manifestation. It has produced us and elaborated in the most exquisite detail all the organic tools we would need to interact successfully with the environment. Both that and what we are we owe to the process. Death is an integral part of it.

The key is to not be distracted by the fears and apprehensions generated by the mind, for we have no idea what death brings. And like Job, our ignorance calls us to silence. Whatever death brings is what LIFE has devised as a necessary component of our being-here. We have to trust it. We know no more about it than our coming-to-be-here itself. If we have trusted LIFE implicitly up until now what could possibly cause us to stop trusting it into the future, except unrealistic expectations based on who we have been told to think we are. Our unnatural demand that we live forever as our “selves” is born of the delusion that we are not part of nature and that what applies to the rest of biological life constructed of organic matter does not apply to us. It’s time we disabused ourselves of that fantasy, which indeed makes us, of all of living things in this vast and awesome universe, the most to be pitied.

 

Reflections on the “Our Father”

3,000 words

 Our

It would be inappropriate to address our LIFE as “my.” We are all members of families, clans and lineages that merge in a cloud of ancestors that become totally indistinct as they disappear into the distant past. Way back there our DNA tends to become one single human thing. Go back further, and we mesh with more primitive life forms from which we are descended. Made of the same quarks and leptons, we are all ultimately members of one cosmic organism: the offspring of LIFE, matter’s energy.

Here I am sitting surrounded by things made of wood, clay, fiber, grown or dug from the earth and metals forged in stars. We are all LIFE’s energy to be-here. How can I fail to include their clamor? How can I omit the living cells of my body crammed with molecules and atoms taken in just hours ago from my sibling life-forms, plants and animals, made incandescent by the oxygen in the air all around me that I breathe in uninterruptedly? How can I say “my” when this “self” that prays is a web of living connections ex­ten­ding outward beyond even the earth to the farthest reaches of the cosmos?

Father

“Father” is figurative, of course. But still, LIFE is more like a father than a god. Material LIFE evolved the genetic codes that weave together particu­late matter, chemical valences and electromagnetic force fields that make up our material organisms which reside, draw living energy and find atomic and molecular replacements in this material world. Matter’s LIFE is what spawned us, and matter’s LIFE is the precious spark we bear as our own in our most intimate center, the place where our being-here in each sequential “now” of the flow of time surfaces simultaneously for all of us. We are alive together because we are all born again in every successive instant of this LIFE we bear. We are bound together by LIFE’s material energy that pours out the universe like a river of existence.

We are LIFE’s offspring. But we are not its “children.” LIFE does not micro-manage our lives like a hovering parent; nor like a god does it demand obedience and punish us if we fail to comply or perform miracles in response to our incantations.

LIFE evolves apace with the natural order and that includes our self-determi­na­tion. LIFE lives in our autonomy and full human maturity. It cannot function for us outside of it, so it is meaningless to ask it to do so. We are on our own, and we are responsible for what we think, and what we do.

“Prevenient grace,” in the traditional Christian sense of an infallible influence on our thoughts and choices by a guiding “God,” is a derivative of the naïve concept of “providence” and is equally naïve. It can only be a metaphor. Our life is in seamless confluence with LIFE itself. We are LIFE in human form; LIFE can only do what we do. We cannot ask it for miracles, and it cannot override our decisions. LIFE is not a god.

Who art in heaven

“Heaven” is also a trope. LIFE transcends us all. LIFE is whatever it is and I have no idea what that might be. LIFE’s abundant generosity prompts us to address LIFE as “You.” Is LIFE a “person” at some level imperceptible to us? “Heaven” is a symbolic clue. It means the answer is beyond us. Does LIFE love us? It doesn’t matter. We love LIFE. It gave us itself to be our selves. What more do we need to know? We are its offspring.

I am alive with LIFE’s material energy but I am not all of LIFE. This LIFE I live as my very own, came to me one night in a dreamless sleep and “I” awoke. I did not give it to myself. I know that when it leaves, there is nothing I can do to stop it from going, and once it’s gone there is nothing I can do to bring it back.

Where does it live when it is not living in me? Everywhere, in everything. So I call it “heaven.” It’s my way of reminding myself that I do not know what LIFE is and that it belongs to us all. I do not own LIFE even as I live it as my own and have the capacity to pass it on. LIFE belongs to me as it belongs to all things. LIFE is beyond us all and it is whatever it is …!

Hallowed be thy name

“Hallowed” means “holy.” It is another word for “sacred.” What can it mean to say “LIFE is sacred”? Our gratitude just for being-here would be enough to make LIFE the object of our loving worship.

Does “holy” refer to the traditional difference between the sacred and the profane, i.e., that what is sacred is special, it is kept apart in a special place, taken out only at special times, treated with special care and not mixed with ordinary things which are “profane”? Profane connotes something ordinary, of no value, common, mundane, routine, something to be used and thrown away.

But then, how can we call LIFE “holy,” for LIFE is our common Source. Of all things common and ordinary, LIFE is the com­mon­est and most ordinary of all. LIFE lets itself be used and thrown away. It is the energy of the material universe in which we float suspended like sponges in the sea.

So in this prayer, “holy” must mean something else. It must mean what makes LIFE different. This is a great paradox, for what’s unique about LIFE is precisely that it belongs to us all, from insignificant microbes to the majestic galactic formations seen in the Hubble telescope. We are all driven, set in motion, sustained in existence and drawn into the struggle for survival by LIFE whose evolved Self we are. What makes LIFE special is that it is not special. What makes it uncommon is that it is the most common presence of all: it has made its own reality available to become others, giving itself so completely, so unreservedly, and so unconditionally that it is empty of itself.

What makes LIFE different from everything else is that it is not its own “thing” like the rest of us. It sustains all things intimately with its own self. It is the being-here of all things that are-here, it is the LIFE of all things that live. It is the inner reality of everything.

LIFE has No-Self. It lives in the selves that have evolved from its inner dynamism. That is its holiness: its emptiness, its self-abandon, its utter donation of everything it is, to the point of having nothing that is its own. That is what holiness means in our material universe, and that’s what we seek to emulate: a generosity that leaves us with No-Self to serve: like LIFE whose offspring we are.

Thy kingdom come

LIFE’s “kingdom” is the family of things gathered by LIFE.   But “kingdom” is also a figure of speech. For LIFE is not a king. It says nothing, wants nothing, commands nothing. It brings us together without force or coercion. It is we who imagine LIFE as if it wanted something.

When we look closely we can see that LIFE is pure generosity, total absence of self; it is only others. Jesus, our Jewish Teacher, whose message is captured in this prayer, said “be like your Father who makes the sun shine on the just and the unjust, and the rain to fall on the evil and the good.” … LIFE gives the same gifts to all, no matter who they are, and we should be like that. To be “ruled” by LIFE, then, is not to live by coercion or need, physical or emotional, legal or moral, political or religious, but by an energy with an attitude: give your “self” away!

Thy will be done

If we were to imagine that LIFE wanted anything at all we’d have to say, from the way it acts, that there be more LIFE.   We want to transform ourselves so that we will want what LIFE wants and do what LIFE is doing. We want to become imitators and agents of LIFE. This is more than possible, for we are its offspring; we are genetically programmed to generate LIFE … as our bodies constantly remind us.

On earth as it is in heaven

So we, the evolving material forms of LIFE, are active here on our planet the way LIFE is active everywhere in the universe: generous to the point of aban­don­ing its “self” and compassionate toward the conatus-driven material entities with which we share this earth. We all know we are vanishing. We understand why all things tremble. Even the stones will perish.

Give us this day our daily bread

We are matter, and we are vanishing. We need more matter every day to stay alive: food, air, water, clothing, shelter, other people. Being matter creates this struggle for us: we must take in matter from our surroundings or we will not survive. LIFE cannot help us with that. It has already evolved everything we need to procure our own survival together. This “petition” is clearly a fiction: for we are talking to ourselves. We know exactly what we’re up against. We have to provide our own bread as a community. We have no illusions about it; we have to struggle together to survive.

But it makes us anxious as individuals. We have compassion on everything living for we know all individuals are driven by the same need. Everything is under the lash.

Living organisms of every species achieve maturity when they can take care of themselves. We humans provide ourselves with our daily “bread” through intelligent and cooperative labor. To beg LIFE for our daily bread is to embrace our individual maturity in collaboration with other adults without clinging to the sterile individualism of a dependent childhood or puerile adolescence.

We are all born with a conatus whose job it is to keep us alive. But the conatus’ instincts are the same in all individuals: to avoid enemies, to find food and to reproduce. It is a struggle to stay alive, and sometimes we lose. There is bound to be fear, conflict, overreaching, hoarding and violence.

We are all fair game for one another. We are all constructed of the same homogeneous matter and at any moment it can be ingested by other life forms, from microbes to carnivorous predators, to sustain their lives. It is the basis of our own survival. We eat other life forms, God forgive us, and they eat us.

This is the contradiction at the heart of the human condition, the source of potential tragedy: we resonate with LIFE’s generosity but we are driven to stay alive by appropriating the matter of other entities. To survive and reproduce is a command of our flesh that is every bit as imperious as our instinct to share. To live we must take … but to be LIFE we must learn to give and receive what is freely given. This is hard. And we often fail to find the balance.

Forgive us our trespasses

As individuals we get scared. We think we are being diminished and we take too much … and in order to protect ourselves we deny others what they need. God forgive us.

We suspect that others are like us, and are taking more than they need … or they will, and they will even take what we need — what belongs to us. They can’t be trusted. In the end, no matter what we do, we will die … LIFE itself, it seems, can’t be trusted! We can’t help these fears, it’s the way we are.

But we will not allow ourselves that excuse. So we need to forgive ourselves until we get it right. Death or no death, evolution put us in charge. Our intelligent bodies awoke from our ancestral sleep and suddenly everything changed. We see clearly what we are capable of: we choose to follow our potential which mirrors the self-emptying generosity of LIFE itself and subordinate the blind instincts of the conatus to it. Such a choice requires that we forgive ourselves as a first step. How else can we carry out such a momentous project? We want to transform the very conditions of our existence. Asking LIFE to forgive us allows us to forgive ourselves. And it’s not a fiction: the LIFE in which we live and move and have our being has been betrayed by our selfishness — our failure to surrender to the LIFE that we are. May LIFE forgive us … we have betrayed ourselves.

So we ask for forgiveness for letting our selfish conatus mindlessly run the show. We are in charge, we forgot that. We failed ourselves, for we are the living offspring and powerful agents of LIFE. We can’t start again unless we forgive ourselves.

As we forgive those who trespass against us

LIFE put that selfish conatus at the center of our organisms. LIFE evolved this paradox. There’s a design flaw in the human organism, if we’re honest. Who can blame us if we follow our selfish instincts. Blame LIFE!

But we are in charge, and we have made our choice. LIFE did what it had to do, given the material conditions that impacted our evolving bodies and I forgive it! Before even forgiving those frightened people who have cheated, robbed, insulted and injured me in body and mind, deceived by the anxieties coming from the spontaneous instincts of the mindless conatus, I forgive LIFE itself for the way it evolved! It had no choice.

I forgive LIFE for leaving us at the mercy of a need to survive that has driven a wedge between us … separating us one from another and making it hard to trust. I forgive LIFE for the design flaw that requires my death and the death of all living things as the condition for being-here. I forgive LIFE for our crippling diseases and for the brutal onslaughts and indignities of old age. I forgive LIFE for evolving a biota based on a food chain of predators and prey. I forgive LIFE for not insuring that both partners of a loving relationship die together … for allowing one to live on desolate and amputated. I forgive LIFE for never answering us when we cry for help.

I forgive LIFE, for LIFE can’t help it. It is constrained by matter’s limitations. The prayer of St Francis is entirely applicable in regard to LIFE itself: “… to love rather than to be loved, to give rather than to receive.”

I can relate to LIFE but not as to a god, or parent. I relate to LIFE as it really is … in its “suchness” as the energy of matter “that makes the sun shine on the just and unjust, and the rain fall on the evil and the good.”

And once we have forgiven ourselves and forgiven LIFE, with deep compassion we can forgive others what they have done to us. We know what they are up against. Life is hard. They are doing the best they can.

The point is: LIFE gave us intelligence and now we are in charge. We do what we choose to do. We choose to forgive LIFE its design flaws and we choose to forgive our family. We choose to further the project of creating more LIFE more abundantly. We are in charge now. We know we could go on glutting ourselves until we choke … and we could kill whatever gets in the way of our narcissism (including ourselves).  But we choose to live, to transform our selfish “self,” to find ways to overcome our isolation born of fear of one another, form a mature community of collaboration and justice that will cast out fear and promote LIFE for all who have been spawned by the earth.

We justify this choice because we are in touch with LIFE intimately, at the silent center of our organism. We are LIFE, and we know connaturally what LIFE is, what it wants and what it can do. It’s a power we wield, a divine power, the same power that LIFE itself deploys for all its creative projects.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Because we know it is LIFE itself whose power we activate as our own, we call on ourselves as collaborators with LIFE to consider our own weakness under the relentless demands of the conatus and not put ourselves in situations that require more than we can handle. We should help one another in this regard. This too is our responsibility.

The ancient adage that “God” will “never let us be tested beyond our strength” is a benign fiction. It is a way of encouraging ourselves to deal with whatever comes our way and accept responsibility. For LIFE does not control what happens to us, and cannot be blamed for our failures. We can’t expect that “evils” beyond our capacity won’t overwhelm us, which, if we are honest, happens to people every day. We only have one another; we are all we’ve got. We have to have compassion … on ourselves as well as others.

Don’t be fooled. If LIFE could prevent these things, then LIFE could also be condemned for permitting them. Shall we sit in judgment on LIFE? This is nonsense. It’s time we grew up. We are LIFE. We have to help one another in our weakness. That’s the story. Being activated by LIFE is the miracle; there are no others.

If we call on LIFE to protect us, we have to acknowledge that we are momentarily generating a fantasy; we are intentionally regressing into childhood and conjuring an imaginary parent. It is a survival mechanism invented to avoid an emotional implosion at a time of overwhelming fear and anxiety. Sometimes it’s all we can do.

Dealing with difficulties is our responsibility. Mindfulness is the way. Know what you are doing, do only what you really want to do, and anticipate the consequences that your action will entail because you will have to embrace them.

For the rest, I wish us all “good luck,” for we all know quite well that anything can happen. There are no miracles.

Wage Slavery

3,500 words

One of the objectives of this blog is to highlight the value-shift that occurs when we finally accept the fact that we live in a material universe. Fundamentally, that means eliminating the toxic residue of the Platonic paradigm that remains embedded in our social structures and value judgments.

This post is the third in a series on work. It ventures into the realm occupied by economic systems, and by implication the political structures necessary to support them. If it seems radical, it’s only because of the great distance we have drifted from an acceptance of our nature as material organisms. It lays out principles of practice derived from the premises established in two posts of July of this year: “Work,” posted July 1^st and “Work in a Material Universe,” posted July 14^th. I hope you can read them as a whole.

I want to start by making series of propositions.

(1) The economic systems of all modern complex western societies are based on what is aptly called wage slavery.   Wage slavery is a version of the master slave relationship. Wage slavery is not a metaphor. It is slavery. People may no longer be owned as persons, but as workers they are not free. Their work is owned by someone else.

(2) All remunerated labor tends to be servile. Money paid for labor is most often equated to the purchase of non-human objects or products. Such use considers what is bought to be then owned by the buyer. The buyer in effect becomes “God” with the right to annihilate or abuse the object purchased as he sees fit. He artificially individualizes the worker by treating his labor as an object owned, extracting him from the natural survival community and its instinctive cooperative collaboration.

But human work cannot be owned by another. Labor cannot be alienated from its author and his community because it is the expression of the conatus — the resident energy that imposes the obligation to continue to exist on the individual material organism in its social matrix. Work is and always remains the output of the worker’s personal survival drive in collaboration with his natural community.

Analogous to the deferential way professionals are treated in western society, an individual’s labor can only be compensated for. Payment (in money or kind) can only be the attempt to counterbalance the temporary (and voluntary) deflection of the worker’s own life energy to the survival interests of someone outside of his natural community. To claim that labor can be bought and owned by the employer is fiction; it is metaphysically impossible. To force it is enslavement; it will fatally distort the humanity and relationships of the people involved in the attempted transaction.

Notice that professionals are treated differently. They are also remunerated, but because of the high value placed on mental as opposed to physical activity in the Platonic worldview, no one considers that in paying a professional, like a doctor, that he becomes your employee and must obey your orders. You compensate him for his creative initiative on your behalf. That should be the paradigm for all labor output from all human beings.

(3) Wage slavery is culturally conditioned by two things: the mythic significance of money and the perennial existence of officially approved master-slave relationships in our western “Christian” societies.

Slavery

The fundamental division of labor is between masters and slaves. Slavery in western society originated in pre-Christian Mediterranean culture, which in turn inherited it from the earlier civilizations of the fertile crescent, Mesopotamia and Egypt. Modern wage slavery is grounded in the ownership of labor. It is the recapitulation in commercial, contractual terms of the slavery characteristic of the ancient world and its Christianized continuation in mediaeval serfdom, indentured servitude, penal and other forms of impressed service.

The oldest form of slavery was ethnic; it was maintained by the conquest and control of people identified as “alien” and, since one’s own tribe, culture and language was assumed to be the only fully human version of humanity, conquered aliens were necessarily considered less than human and therefore similar to the animals that humans used for work, sport or pleasure.

Ancient slavery shed its ethnic roots and was given a universal and specifically spiritual justification by Platonism as the care and guidance of the less-than-human. From the time of the ascendancy of Christianity in the Mediterranean world beginning in the third century, all cultural entities, including the institution of slavery, so essential to the ancient economies, came to be evaluated and universally justified under the aegis of Platonic categories which Christianity embraced, “baptized” and carried forward. It is important to realize that, like imperial autocratic power itself to which slavery is the categorical counterpart, slavery was never repudiated by Christianity in the ancient world.

The principal Platonic tenet that was used to justify slavery was also embraced by Christianity and placed at the center of its world-view, despite the fact that Jesus never endorsed it. It was the concept of the “spiritual soul,” defined as a rational mind, separable from the body, believed to be the person itself, naturally immortal, destined to be judged at death. The soul was an immaterial substance opposed to matter and the material body’s fundamental nature as “animal,” or “carnal” and mortal.

Body and soul, constructed of diametrically opposed “substances,” matter and spirit, were mutually inimical. The spiritual soul, and by extension “spiritual people” (whose lives were relatively free of bodily domination), were considered fully human. Professors, teachers, landowners, administrators, magistrates, senators, merchants and bankers, religious elite, military commanders, etc., people who lived by the work of others and confined their activity to labor of the mind, were in this class. Slaves who lived by the work of their hands and body were deemed less than fully human — their souls were crippled by bodies which were physically controlled by others when not dehumanized by their own animal urges and survival needs. Slaves required having a master to control them, guide their daily activities and determine what they should accomplish with their lives. Slaves, women and children were the first constituents of the primary division of labor: between master and slave. Platonism gave it philosophical form: it said the division was between the fully human and the sub-human — those that worked with their mind, and those that worked with their hands.

Platonism attributed a spiritual dimension to the male body and an excess of material density to the female which supposedly accounted for what men called “women’s erratic behavior.” Thus the domination of the husband over his wife — already well-established as a function of paternal ownership — was re-presented under Platonic Christianity as a replay of the need for the mind to control the body … for spirit to dominate the flesh.

The father/owner/slave master, far from being identified as oppressor in this view, was re-conceived as protector, and it was as protectors that Christianity imposed moral obligations on the slaveholders: they were not to mistreat their slaves. But at no point did Christianity condemn slavery as an institution, or insist on the parity of the partners in marriage, or defend the full humanity of slaves, or require that masters refrain from disciplining them in any way they saw fit. These norms and standards were also applied to the father’s control of his family.

This same thinking was used to justify mediaeval serfdom and the 16^th century conquest and enslavement of primitive peoples in Africa, Asia and the Americas.   The supporters of slavery quoted Aristotle directly. It was all done under the aegis of a slavery-tolerant Christianity.  Christians have universally tolerated or justified slavery in one form or another in every epoch and in every place they gained ascendancy. There is evidence that even the monasteries used slave labor.

The paternal family in the west is an integral part of this picture and is both the source and the result of the Platonic-justified master-slave relationship. That an adult gives commands, and children obey, is a necessary and unavoidable practicality because adults are more knowledgeable than children. But that the right and obligation to command whether the authority has superior knowledge or not, and the moral duty to obey even though the subject knows more than the authority, claimed as justification for coercing obedience to the proprietary male from women, children and servants, deemed carnal, inferior and needing control, is an arbitrary cultural value choice, imposed for the internalization of the master-slave system. Fathers were owners of their wives and children, every bit as much as of their slaves. That convention has been justified by Platonic Christianity as a spiritual function since its birth in the ancient Mediterranean world.

Based on the value placed on mental as opposed to bodily energies in the Platonic system, the educational patterns in western society imitate and in turn reinforce the master-slave relationship by preparing students to accept the primacy of rational thought over any other human activity. Educational practices and goals are dominated by the values prioritized under the Platonic paradigm: respect for and obedience to the spiritual superior. Rationality, exemplified as mental operations ruled by logic and mathematics, was the standard of highest value set for the student. Feelings — internally experienced forces that have been traditionally ascribed to the body — were excluded as less-than-human; manual work, it goes without saying, was demeaned as subhuman; they were all to be eliminated, or at least suppressed and controlled. Historic movements of awakening — 12^th century humanism, 15^th century renaissance, 19^th century romanticism, 20^th century post-modernism — were all attempts to reassert the rights of the integral human organism against the tyranny of the Platonic exaltation of the mind over the body

Professionals in our culture are those who live by mental activity, not physical. Students are taught that professionals are a “higher” version of human being. Education prepares the educated to accept the “natural right” of mental over physical labor and therefore the control of the commanding manager who thinks, over the toiling worker who supposedly does not. In reality, it is a fiction that disguises the fundamental myths: the myths of the disembodied mind and its ownership of all things material, including “material” people..

In Plato’s world, the body does not think, only the soul thinks. The Platonic prejudice is so powerful that despite the fact that the ideal of pure rational cerebration is almost never realized, giving clear indication of the delusional nature of the belief, it has not mitigated in the least the supreme value placed on it in our dualist culture. It has justified the existence of a master class as superior thinking human beings. It encourages its devotees to denigrate and dismiss contributions to human discourse and decision-making that fall short of that ideal. It means that the uneducated, i.e., those who by definition have never been thoroughly indoctrinated in the cerebral illusion by certified “masters” during an extended period of mental submission, are pre-emptively excluded from the gatherings where directions are chosen and the means of achieving goals determined. It means the worker has no input. It divides society along educational-intellectual lines and consigns the uneducated to lives of obedient physical reflex, either entirely devoid of a rational dimension or where the rational element, which has already been determined by the educated elite, is to be applied without revision or deviation.

From this short description it should be clear that most “jobs” — what people mistakenly call work — fall into this category. Jobs, for the most part, are slave labor based on the Platonic scheme of values. From society’s perspective wage slavery is not only arbitrary and unnecessary but it is inefficient and wasteful of the creativity of those who are employed. Moreover, it risks generating sociopathic blowback for, from the worker’s perspective, it is dehumanizing.

Wage slavery tends to reduce “owned” labor to a mechanical reflex, and thus has encouraged the adoption of the “assembly-line” factory system, operational world-wide at this point in time, premised on the mind-numbing repetition of some minor procedure, as the ideal (most efficient) form of labor. But workers also think and can plan the desired outcome of community endeavors; such is their predisposition as living organisms. Their exclusion from that process is a profound injustice endorsed by the Platonic delusion. Money cannot compensate for the loss of participatory autonomy. Work is a survival function of the human organism; we are innately determined by it.

The key valence and infallible indicator of the presence of the master-slave relationship is absolute obedience on the part of the isolated individual worker whose instinct to collaborate creatively with companions in the work effort is totally frustrated. The worker is under orders to make no input of his own into the task at hand. For the successful completion of a project he is to relate to the employer alone, not to his work companions.

The ancient monks saw very clearly the power of obedience to stifle the self — in their case what they believed was a false self — and replace it with what they believed to be their “true self.” The slaveholder is equally intent on suppressing any self in the worker that would compete with his own goals. Hence he requires absolute obedience from individuals isolated from their natural community because he has bought and thinks he owns their labor. The monk used obedience as a tool to achieve his own chosen goals, one of which was the formation of a brotherhood. The isolated jobholder, however, knows very well that the only goals of his own or of his community that he will ever achieve through his job will be those he wrests from his employer by force.

Money

Money prevents workers from exercising control on two counts. The first is the myth that a private person can actually own (with the right of annihilation) the means of production of goods and services that are used and needed by the whole community. This is patently impossible.  At most the community may consign management to a private entity, but it cannot allow its survival to be held hostage to private concerns. It is a logical tautology because the “private” person survives only in and through the survival of the community.

The second myth is that employers can buy and therefore own the labor of their individual workers. Both myths are based on the more fundamental belief that money gives ownership with divine rights over what is owned.

The Latin language, which has been the source of so many helpful distinctions in our thinking, in this case does not distinguish between owner and master: the same word, dominus, is used for both. Similarly, ownership and political power have only one word: dominium.

Historians surmise that trade began with barter: the use of equivalent values for items that each trader needed. Then it seems likely that some highly desirable object became the standard of calculation. Precious metals lent themselves to being such a standard because of their association with the gods and immortality. In Egypt, gold, which was associated with the sun god, Ra, because of its yellow brilliance, was calculated at 12 times the value of silver which was thought to capture the pale light of the moon. To participate in such divine power was everyone’s desire.[1]

Money is believed to give ownership to the buyer. Even the customer momentarily becomes “master” over the corporate giant that sells the product in question because money has exchanged hands. The “customer is always right” is the acknowledgement of the supreme power that money is given in our culture.

Survival in a complex society requires money. When money is the exclusive form of compensation for every kind of labor, even the most meaningless (or dehumanizing) task can earn one his living. “Jobs” that are paid for with money pretend to own the energy immanent in the artificially individualized worker. Employment pretends to redirect that energy toward ends that may have nothing whatsoever to do with the survival needs of the worker and his community and claim that the deflection is fully justified by money.

There are no differences in the recognition provided by money except through quantity. Hence the volume of money alone becomes an index of value. This equation is so ironclad that even those who are aware of its falsifying potential are unable to extricate themselves from its illusions: everyone defers to those who have a lot of money. Many silently harbor beliefs that the rich are superior: smarter, more disciplined, more moral and “blessed” by God. The myth is reinforced by traditional religion that ascribes to divine providence the actual state of affairs in human society. If someone is wealthy, it’s because “God” willed it. The fact that this is obviously preposterous should be enough to put an end to these illusions. There is no such providence.

This blurring is especially damaging to the economic programming that these reflections are suggesting: that we can re-structure the division of labor and remuneration in such a way as to guarantee that each individual is included in the collaborative effort to survive and through that participation achieves survival and a place in society.

The first element in any analysis of how work and reward should be distributed is clarifying the distinction between survival work and other human endeavors that are directed toward the quest for life that transcends the moment, many of which are of dubious value. The second is to insure that the worker’s efforts are respected for their double significance: work achieves organismic survival in a community that acknowledges the human instinct to transcendence through social membership. The collaborative participation of the worker expresses the communitarian character that matter’s energy has used as a survival tool over and over again during the course of 14 billion years of evolutionary development. The natural human instinct is to work with known companions as part of a collaborative endeavor.

Worker Justice

From all that has been said it should clear that the exclusive focus on “bread and butter” issues (salaries, benefits and working conditions) when addressing the question of justice for working people, omits the most important: collaboration and worker control. It assumes that the worker is an isolated individual whose labor can be redirected by the master who owns it. In a material universe that is committed to eliminating the toxic residue of the Platonic paradigm, the primary injustice is identified as the isolation of the individual worker and his alienation from his work — the claim to own the labor of another human being. The fundamental injury is the institutionalized frustration of the need of the human organism, embedded in its community of survival, to express its intrinsic and constitutive existential bearing in its work. It is the refusal to permit the collaborative, intelligent, autonomous participation of socialized human organisms in the communal decisions and collective labor that determine not only what work will be done but also all the associated conditions that impact the project and the workers.

Wages and benefits are not the be all and end all for working people that many labor organizations claim. In their haste to be part of the prevailing economic system and to avoid alternatives prejudicially labeled “socialist,” labor unions end up collaborating with management in the maintenance of the mindlessness and isolation of wage slavery. Worker collaboration, input and control is never part of any contract package, and it is not even part of labor unions’ declared mission statement. Workers who become union members do not join a brotherhood; each isolated individual worker performs only one collective action: he votes with other isolated individuals to hire a corporate lawyer who will defend his rights as an individual worker.

Justice for working people will never be secured until the issue of collaborative human participation is acknowledged as an essential part of any and all human endeavors, including the jobs protected by labor unions.   Human work must be the act of fully engaged human organisms, body and soul, mind and spirit. None of this can be “owned” by another.

Transition

The enormous gap between these principles of practice and the actual state of affairs in our economic system is so great that many will dismiss this vision as quixotic. But don’t be fooled. These proposals are not some new utopian innovation. They address a massive historical deformity that we have inherited from our dualist tradition: the human organism has been trapped in an ongoing cultural fiction that has destroyed its integrity in the service of exploitation by the master class. We have been living with wage slavery for more than two centuries. The consequences for working people have been catastrophic. It’s time we put an end to this mockery of the human being.

We fail to implement the reform of this system at our peril as humans. That doesn’t mean that society faces imminent collapse or that armed insurrection is inevitable. Things may very well go on just the way they are. But the human destruction to working class individuals and to community at the level of family and neighborhood will continue unabated and even intensified. It will continue the propagation of individual and social pathologies of genocidal proportions, an effect that we have been living with among the working class in our cities since the early 19^th century. To change the situation a transition from the patterns that now dominate wage slavery will require a complete overhaul of the way work is planned from the very beginning.

Such a change would be a “revolution.”

[1] Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death, Wesleyan U. Press, 1959, p. 234 ff.

The Sacred and the Profane

1.

For people like myself, trained since childhood for the Catholic priesthood, the “sacred” was neatly divided from the “profane” and easily identified because it was thoroughly exhausted in the doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church.

What was sacred was what was declared sacred by the teachings of the ecclesiastical authorities and accepted as sacred by those who submitted to their teaching. “Sacred” was a word, therefore, that labeled a social bond: the Roman Catholic Church, docens et discens, both teaching and listening … and when that bond was broken — when I stopped listening — the word and category became meaningless; the sacred no longer existed. Suddenly, for people like me, nothing was sacred.

The division of reality into sacred and profane has been called a “principle,” following the categorical analysis of social philosophers, like Emile Durkheim. Along with the prestige of his name, saying the distinction between sacred and profane is a “principle” implies that it is grounded in reality, i.e., that there is something intrinsic and necessary about dividing the world into sacred and profane. But in fact it is merely the generalized description of a series of human societies that have, since time immemorial, divided reality into the “sacred and the profane.” So it is not a principle, it is rather a sociological “law” in the sense of a valid description of a repeated pattern of behavior for “larger” societies (not all sub-groups are covered) that, until modern times, seems to have had no exceptions. But it cannot be used as a universal premise from which to deduce incontrovertible conclusions … even when its predictions appear to be confirmed. It’s the nature of a scientific law. The most it can validly claim is that it is an accurate description of observed facts and its predictions have a high degree of probability. It cannot be adduced, for example, to disprove either of its two contraries: that some people may believe everything is sacred, or that some may believe nothing is sacred. Indeed, if the attitude that I once had represents the “truth,” as I believed it did, then the law would be invalidated because for me, temporarily, there was nothing sacred.  On the other hand, perhaps many people will finally come to the same conclusion that I have:   everything is sacred.

The Catholic Church of my formative experience was a perfect example of Durkheim’s sociological law, because it had, at least since the third century of the common era, declared itself to be the only authentic source and repository of the sacred in the universe. “Outside the Church there is no salvation,” was coined by Cyprian of Carthage around 250 ce. It was the same as saying the Church alone is sacred and outside the Church everything is profane. The Church, still to this day in its official documents, claims that anything besides itself that has any sacredness to it at all, has received that sacredness through contact with the Christian message or its ritual … or with Christians whose thoughts and actions had been sacralized by those words and rituals. Until that contact is made and those transformations occur, all of reality remains profane, and being profane according to ancient Christian ideology connotes a measure of corruption; non-Chris­tian reality is un-redeemed, “unregenerate,” under the control of Satan. That means it is not only not-sacred, but it is anti-sacred — actively hostile to the sacred. To one degree or another, non-Christian … and then, after the Reformation, non-Catholic … meant “actively evil.” Thus was the “sacred” made distinct from the “profane” in Western Catholic eyes, a condition that called for a “mission” to transform the profane into the sacred (make everyone Catholic), or if that proved impossible, to preside over their damnation, for the profane had no right to exist. By thus demonizing the existence of non-Catholic, non-Christian, and non-human reality, the core beliefs of the Catholic Church have maintained the perennial justifications for the separation, exploitation and even the extermination of “the profane” which includes all of nature.

A binary system

But notice in the traditional scheme of things: the sacred and the profane are intrinsically bound together in a binary system. You can’t have one without the other; if there were no “sacred,” there would be no “profane” and vice-versa. Once the sacred disappears, the profane disappears with it. We should take note of the transcendent importance of this fact. It means that by doing away with Durkheim’s categories, we immediately do away with the age-old justifications for the traditional hostilities that characterize the human family and condone disregard for species other than man and the earth that spawned us all. It is an absolutely necessary first step on the road to a new way of being-human. So when I thought that nothing is sacred because I realized that the claims of the Catholic Church were false, I also implicitly acknowledged, whether I was aware of it or not, that nothing is profane. Annihilating the sacred/profane dichotomy set me on a promontory with a view of universal reality rarely achieved by religion-bound humans in this vale of tears. By discovering that nothing is sacred I came within reach of its correlate implication which is much more important: nothing is profane.

Once you make that step, and realize there is nothing profane, you have opened a door to a respect and esteem for things (and people) that you may have been taught by your religious tradition to hold in disdain. Words like “respect” and “esteem,” like “cherish” and “love,” come awfully close to what people have in mind when they use the word “sacred.” Opening our eyes to the transcendent significance of that step is the beginning of wisdom: the understanding of what “sacred” really means — that everything is sacred.

2.

So we have stumbled onto a series of paradoxes: the path to understanding that everything is sacred begins by realizing that, in the traditional sense, nothing is sacred. And since the traditional sacred has always been identified with traditional religion, saying nothing is sacred necessarily involves the abandonment of religion in its traditional form. The ultimate paradox is that the universalism that first-century Christians claimed to bring to the religious life of humankind has been vitiated by the sectarian beliefs that have come to define the Christian institution at least since the third century. Clearly we are dealing with two different notions of what “sacred” means, and the traditional, sectarian meaning we are familiar with — which requires a complementary “profane” — is not only at odds with the earlier version but it has clearly displaced it. My rejection of the accepted dichotomy as meaningless represents a first step toward the other. I am on the way toward a new way of being human.

It’s important to keep in mind that both I and Durkheim before me were working off that “traditional” definition of “sacred.” The word “sacred” had been given a sectarian significance by a class-dominated Christianity that was almost two millennia old by modern times and formed the horizon of our lives. We knew nothing else. I contend that the “sacred/profane” dichotomy became a categorical paradigm in Durkheim’s mind because Christianity in its sectarian form dominated the religious environment in which he was formed. From there it was not difficult for him to see that Christianity’s precursors, like Judaism and later Islam, concurred; Christian sectarianism had, in fact, emerged historically from and recapitulated their fundamental assumptions. The “religions of the Book” all divide the world between the sacred and the profane. Asian religions like Jainism, early Buddhism, Taoism are different. They do not fit so easily into that schema.

If we look at the question as a function of logic, my conviction that being “sacred” can only mean being opposed to what is “profane” is really the result of a circular reasoning. The very category is established only by ecclesiastical fiat — an historically conditioned sectarian Christianity taken as a paradigm — and when made to function like a universal “principle” proves only itself. As a premise it is false and misleading. When the term is finally factored out, the equation yields the beginnings of an understanding of the universality of the sacred. A “sacred” that needs a “profane” to make itself intelligible is logically untenable — it floats groundlessly in mid-air — and its effects on the human project, predictably, distorting.

Existence is sacred

If our “classical” sociological definition of “sacred” is indefensible, what then is the true one? The true definition of “sacred” stands on its own.   It has no need for opposition to an imagined “profane.” The sense of the sacred is the primordial human reaction to being-here — existence, LIFE. It is the direct corollary of the irrepressible joy-of-life that accompanies the conatus, the instinct for self-preservation and the inescapable ecstatic embrace of self-identity. It is inescapable because it is embedded in the organic matter of which we are made. It is innate. As such the sacred is revealed as absolutely universal, for all things share that élan, and it is necessarily self-grounded, self-evident, and undeniable. There is nothing profane, as I discovered from my insight that nothing is “sacred,” and therefore no transformation from profane to sacred is required. The spontaneous focus of the conatus’ self-embrace is for the organism to continue to be what it is. To continue in existence as I am is survival. Survival is not optional. It is the “law of nature” that establishes the foundational priority of the sacred. We are in the realm of metaphysical transcendentals here: the sacred is an intrinsic and inalienable property of existence that emanates from the drive to survive. Transcendence — the characteristic of properties that qualify absolutely everything that exists — arises from the very inner depths of mundane reality itself and is intimately identified with it. I am organically predisposed to cherish life.

3.

If the “sacred” is the psychological reflection of the very energy of existence itself, its universality is primordial. How did such a transcendent foundation get trivialized into the sacred / profane dichotomy so characteristic of our religions? Our particular Western Christian way of structuring the sacred-profane divide is rooted in our history. Specifically, it comes from two beliefs inherited from ancient times, each coming from one of the two source cultures which melded in Christianity: (1) the Greek belief that (sacred) spirit “fell” into (profane) matter — the body — a substance distinct from spirit and the cause of all human weakness, corruption and mortality, and (2) the Jewish myth-turned-belief that the events in the garden of Eden literally introduced evil, suffering and death (the profane) into human life, a subsequent corruption of pristine (sacred) reality that reached even to the human spirit. Both were erroneous, but Christians believed them; together they guaranteed that the natural universe including humankind would be considered corrupt and evil without the saving action of the Christian Church.   The Church was sacred, everything else — absolutely everything — was profane. The Greek and Jewish traditions had concurred in this: nature as we know it was the result of an unnatural “fall.” Both agree: the universe is not what it was supposed to be; it had to be “saved” from what it had become and transformed back into what it should have been. “Nature” was corrupt, it needed to be made whole and healthy by something more powerful than nature — something “supernatural.”

Christians then, taking the “fall” as the primary fact of life and the source of all human suffering and mortality, claimed that it was the death of Christ that “saved” us and reversed the effects of the fall. They then said that the Church was the “body of Christ,” the repository and exclusive agent of the “saving power” of Christ’s death through time. This dynamic, in place by the third century, set the clear lines that divided the sacred from the profane for western Christendom for millennia … for me and for everyone else.

4.

But it was not always so. Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians claim is their inspiration, was conspicuous in flouting the customary sacred/profane taboos of the time. In fact, if the gospel accounts can be trusted, it was precisely Jesus’ penchant for disregarding the prohibitions against contact with the profane that was the main cause of contention in his relationship with the Jewish religious authorities: he consorted with “tax collectors and prostitutes,” he performed works of healing and condoned his disciples’ gathering grain on the Sabbath, he healed lepers, the possessed, the blind and crippled, a hemorrhaging woman … all of whom were considered unclean, “sinners,” and were to be avoided. Some of the most moving stories about Jesus recounted his characteristic way of treating the “profane” as if they were “sacred:” the story of the prodigal son, the woman taken in adultery, his friendliness with the Samaritan woman at the well, the gentile woman in Sidon who asked him to heal her daughter.

It seems Jesus knew that nothing was profane without having to get there by the “back door” — by way of thinking that nothing was sacred. Everything in his demeanor and what he said indicates that he had a profound understanding of the primordiality and the universality of the sacred. For Jesus, everyone and everything was sacred, nothing was profane.

Some people attribute this to a “special knowledge” he had because he was “God.” But there is nothing in the narratives to indicate that he was telling people something they had never heard of or did not immediately recognize as human and completely familiar. This was not an esoteric “gnosis,” it was the fundamental message that Jesus had gleaned from his formation, life and experience as a Jew who knew the story of his people and the poetry of the prophets who interpreted that story. Jesus had no knowledge that was not available and familiar to all. If there was any source of his simple wisdom outside of his personal experience and family formation, it was the Jewish religion as practiced in Palestine of the first century ce. His vision was entirely human, profoundly human.

The only thing “divine” about him was the depth of his humanity. He was one of us, no more no less. The claim that Jesus was “God” is just another alienating tactic designed to excuse refusal to embrace the natural humanity that we all have. The kind of humanity Jesus was talking about is familiar to us all; and we have all met many people of other traditions and no tradition, who live it with an ease and simple joy that owes nothing to the “sacred” beliefs, rituals and practices hawked by the Catholic Church. Jesus, like any good Jew is a mensch — a human being. That’s all he’s talking about: be a mensch, be what you are. Be a human being. Being a human being means recognizing that being human the way Jesus was human is completely natural; it means living with the understanding that everything is sacred.

 

Thinking About Edith Stein (II)

This is the second in a series of posts on Edith Stein and builds on what was said in the first.  Stein was a serious philosopher who tried to apply the phenomenological methodology of Edmund Husserl to the philosophy that underlay the theology of Thomas Aquinas.  It was a project she took on after her conversion to Catholicism.  Neither Finite and Eternal Being, the book she wrote in the late ‘30’s to complete that project, nor its forerunner, Potency and Act, written in the ‘20’s, were published in her lifetime, the former because she was a “Jew” and the latter because she was a woman.    

Stein was a Thomist.  This essay is not a critique of Stein but of her Thomism.  As such it may be considered as an addendum to the “page” in the sidebar to the right called “Critique of neo-Thomism” which is focused on the work of Bernard Lonergan and Karl Rahner. 

It should go without saying that it is also an implied critique of the Tridentine Catholic dogmatic constellation which her efforts were designed to protect and promote.  Stein was a formidable proponent of that point of view not only because of her unique resources — she was well versed in both Thomism and phenomenology — but because of the power of her personal witness.  People called her a “saint” long before the Wojtyla Vatican decided to “canonize” her for reasons that had more to do with her “orthodox” ideology than her sanctity.  It’s significant that many cite Stein’s brand of “feminism” as a source of Wojtyla’s “Theology of the body.”  His respect for the “uniquely feminine,” however, while it encouraged participation in politics by women even at the highest levels, did not include membership in the Catholic hierarchy even at the lowest levels.  I wonder how Stein would react to the way her thought has been applied.

Clearly she was an extraordinary human being.  The luster of her fidelity in following her lights, however, should not blind us to the flaws in the worldview that, in ways we are only now coming to recognize, was not only the cause of her death but victimized untold numbers of believers in a myriad of ways.  We will have more to say on this issue in subsequent posts.

 1

It is significant that Stein calls her metaphysical opus Finite and Eternal Being and not “Finite and Infinite Being.”  The reason is that “time” is the fulcrum of her analysis .  Very early in the book she makes a revealing reference to a 1927 article entitled “Time” by fellow Husserlian Hedwig Conrad-Martius.  Stein applauds the article’s “profound analysis” of the ego’s phenomenological experience of the temporal structure of existence and incorporates it into her own work-in-progress.  The phenomenon of “being,” according to Martius, immediately contains within itself the notion of “non-being,” for in the very instant of its “showing itself” as a phenomenon now, it is already in declivity toward an as-yet non-existent future that will put the current existing moment into a non-existent past.  But notice what the phenomenologist is doing with this “knowledge:” she uses it to arrive at what she calls the “essence” of the idea (the phenomenon) of being.  For Stein the idea of being reveals itself to be simultaneously a “now” that is eternally “existent,” riding the crest of a continuous wave-form that is constitutively temporal because it continually passes from non-being into being and back into non-being again.  It is precisely this way of looking at temporality that provides the justification for dividing being into finite and eternal.

For Stein, following Husserl, being is an idea — an idea whose inner structure as an idea is explored and “purified” phenomenologically — but an idea nonetheless.  From there, following Husserl’s belief that the idea as constituted in consciousness is “being” and if properly clarified through phenomenological analysis accurately reflects reality, she makes immediate declarations about the real world.

I believe this is to repeat Plato’s fatal mistake.  She believes her “purified” idea reveals reality-as-it-is.  She declares the “now” part of the three part sequence of past-present-future (abstracting selectively from the phenomenon as an unbroken continuum) is eternal and without any admixture of non-being.  Thus she derives the notion of “eternal being” from the very first phenomenological analysis.  “Being” has an eternal side, for there is always a “now,” and it has a temporal side, because it slides back into non-being.  She calls the latter “finite.”  But I believe the flaw in this analysis is the introduction of an arbitrary division in an experience of an otherwise seamless process.

Others who analyze the same “phenomenon,” like Martin Heidegger, do not reify such ideational divisions.  Heidegger, also a student of Husserl, who wrote a book at the same time (1927) and with virtually the same title as Conrad-Martius’ article (“Being and Time”), uses the temporality of the experience to explain the subjective need of Dasein (the human being) to forge its existence ever-new in each instant, the micro-building block of a lifetime of self-creation, the simultaneous source of human freedom, creativity and a profound anomie. 

But no such immediate “practical” determinations interest Stein.  She is focused on “ideas” — like “being” — which presumably, in the final mix with other “ideas” similarly purified and validated by phenomenological analysis, will provide an overall vision that will eventually open onto the practical paths implied.  But initially the reason for the analysis — true to the thought of Husserl — is the purified “idea” that it produces.  It’s what Husserl called the “essence” of the phenomenon.  He “brackets” the actual existence of whatever is constituted in consciousness (a procedure he calls epoché) and by doing so postpones the examination of its practical applications and prevents them from entering into the definition of the “essence” of the experience.  But please notice: this procedure prevents “matter” from entering into the definition of “being” which is forever dominated by its origins as an “idea.”

Husserl always insisted that his analysis did not abandon the anchor of real existence and that his methodology was a way of knowing the real world — that it was an epistemology not a metaphysics.  But by treating “existence” as an “accident” that an “essence” (a purified idea) may or may not have and therefore is irrelevant to the “being” revealed by the essence in question, despite his “realist” intentions, it is reasonable to ask, as many have, if he has not structurally confined himself to ideas.

The primacy of the “idea” characterizes Stein’s thinking as well, even though her position, following Aristotle’s critique of Plato (she is, after all, a Thomist), gives less independent reality to ideas than Husserl does.  But even while admitting that “essence” (form) only exists embedded in a concrete existing “thing,” by sustaining the scholastic principle that “being comes through the form,” her philosophy does not transcend an “essentialism” that runs counter to the discoveries of science about the real world.  For we have learned from evolution that “essence” (form, what things are), in fact, does not come first; “existence” (survival) comes first, and things evolve the form that works for survival.  This radically impacts Stein’s scholastic assumptions about the separate existence and primacy of “spirit” and of a rational creator-God who inserted “essences” (form) into “matter.”

In her 1929 essay comparing Husserl and Aquinas she herself also suggests Husserl’s thought is “idealist.”  One may assume her allusions there to students who were not convinced by his disclaimers include herself.[1]  In her own work Stein clearly tried to subordinate her phenomenology to Thomism’s “moderate realism,” but as with Husserl himself it is fair to ask whether the very tools she employs, like Husserl’s epoché added to Thomas’ essentialist dualism, do not lock her into a world of ideas, her best efforts notwithstanding.

 2

In the cosmo-ontology that I espouse (see The Mystery of Matter, p. 93ff) the temporality experienced by the human organism is immediately seen to be the very condition of material existence itself; it is correlated with the body of knowledge amassed by science.  It is not just an “idea” or a human experience.  The “phenomenon” of temporality corresponds to what all other “things” in our cosmos are going through simultaneously with us.  We are all subject to the same sequence of past-present-future at the same pace, with the same consequences for survival.  Matter exists as an unbroken continuum and “time” is the mental construct we have created to represent that continuity.  Non-being is a fiction.  There is no such thing as “non-being.”

Temporality is a mental derivative of matter’s energy itself.  Everything made of matter — organic or inorganic, atomic or molecular, sub-atomic particles or pre-particle energy — continues in existence as itself moment after moment in a way that creates what human biological organisms experience as “time.”  “Being” and “time” and “non-being” are mental constructs; they are our ideas for what we are experiencing as the conditions for continuity (survival).  Living organisms must learn how temporal sequence affects their vital needs, their food sources and their predators, or they will not survive.  Time is a function of material identity — organic continuity.  By the organism insisting on continuing in existence (surviving), the existential energy (matter) that is the structural “stuff” of the living material dynamism creates “time.”  That “insistence on existence” in the human organism is experienced as the conatus.  And the result of this insis­tent continuity, “staying the same” (surviving), we experience as “being-here in time.” 

Beyond Platonic Christianity: an immanent “God,”

Stein’s idealism is not unique.  We have to take a broader historical view and recognize that Platonic idealism was itself the “hard science” of its day, believed to rationally supersede the naïve naturalist worldview represented by the ancient cosmic theogonies and the immanentist monotheism that they gave rise to.  Platonic ideas were thought to be “fact” of the most superior kind, groun­ding the transcendence of “spirit” over “matter” that gave humankind (as the only “spirit” in a material world) full, absolute and unaccountable dominion over material “nature.” But the price we had to pay was exorbitant.  In exchange for our lordship over creation we were forced to disown the matter of our bodies and maintain the illusion that we were disembodied spirits exiled from another world.  Mind over matter and life after death became the leitmotiv of the culture nourished by Christianity.  The failure of the mediaeval philosophical “science” that was conjured to justify these illusions was the direct cause of the development of modern empirical science.  Thomas’ holistic insistence, for example, that body and soul in man are only one thing, was immediately contradicted by the simultaneous claim that the “soul” lived on after death.  If Thomas’ Aristotelian subtleties were disregarded by the people, we should not be surprised:   people are not stupid.  A soul that lives after death has got to be a “thing” in its own right, and because it goes to heaven or hell, it is the only “thing” that matters.

Modern science evolved from the work of religion’s most ardent defenders, men like Aquinas, partly in reaction to them and partly by employing the analytical principles and standards of probity they had refined from the inheritance of ancient times.  In promoting Aquinas and his scholastic worldview, Stein’s “return to roots” only reached those closest to the surface.  To find roots with enough depth and pre-scientific authenticity to support new growth one would have to go back before Platonic Christianity.

This is not the only way to rethink Christianity in the post-modern idiom but it is a fruitful avenue, and one that offers an ultimate continuity for the Christian.  It attempts to understand the worldview and mindset of Jesus and his immediate followers, and discovers an entirely new set of heuristic principles that turn the so-called “traditional” Christian value assumptions on their head.  A pre-platonic immanent “God,” for example — generally rejected as “pantheist” by the mediaeval Church — a “God” who is near to every one of us, clearly and unapologetically evoked by Paul in Acts 17 and Colossians 1, and John throughout his writings, stands in glaring contrast with Plato’s “Pure Spirit” who is inaccessible to all things material, including human beings, and requires a divine mediator (and his Imperial Church) to bridge the gap between humankind and “God.”  Plato’s remote and distant “Spirit” provides the context for understanding Nicaean Athanasius’ obsessive need to dogmatize Jesus’ “divinity” and set it in metaphysical stone.  If “God” were naturally near us (which is what Jesus believed), there would be no need to insist that Jesus was “God.”  And quiet as it’s kept, Jesus himself insisted he was not “God.”  Theosis would be open to all and human moral goodness and a selfless attitude would be its manifestation and confirmation.  The mechanisms of a Church which were claimed necessary to overcome a metaphysical incompatibility between “God” and humankind would revert back to what they originally were and should have always remained: rituals that evoke and poetically enhance human moral commitments based on attitudes that imitate Jesus’.

In this light, the entire dogmatic edifice of traditional western (Constantinian-Augustinian) Christianity is revealed as the institutionalized displacement of Jesus’ message from the moral to the metaphysical  plane, from the arena of moral action and attitude to that of conferred status, office and ownership.  The “sacraments,” similarly, were displaced from being the symbols of personal transformation and commitment, to being quasi hydraulic mechanical devices — magic ATM machines — delivering a “currency” (grace as “coin-of-the-realm”) needed to secure a “place” in the “other world.”

It was Platonism that created “the other world” and the only evidence for it was the human mind and the ideas that swim in it.  A Christianity wedded to Platonism — made insuperable by the insistence on the immortality of the disembodied “soul” — results in the alienation of the individual’s sense of the sacred and renders humankind defenseless against the maneuvers of self-appointed “holy rulers” who control a mystified population convinced their destiny is in that other world, and that the priests alone hold the keys to it.  Entrance to the “other world,” dependent on “good behavior” and the means of accumulating “grace,” put enormous power in the hands of the hierarchy.  It turned out to be the most efficient mechanism of social control ever devised.  The fact that it came to be correlated to money was a clue to its true function.  It ran Europe unchallenged for 1700 years, and is even today, far from extinct.

Clearly this was not Stein’s intention, nor, I feel assured, was it Thomas’.  But it is my contention that once you define “being” as an idea and “bracket” the real material conditions under which its energy is activated, you have skewed the picture so radically that whatever later you derive from those premises is bound to go in the wrong direction.  In this case we were off by 180⁰.   We are not “spirits” that belong in another world; we are biological organisms spawned by and at home on this planet earth.  It confirms what many post-modern Christians say: that we have labored under a distorted vision of ourselves — as disembodied spirits — and from there we have projected an equally distorted image of “God.”  Our Christian tradition took both “God” and ourselves out of the real world, the world of matter … and left the material universe and our human bodies a godless wasteland.

The crux of that error lies in the denigration of matter: the divinization of ideas and the substantial “spirit” they supposedly represent.  It is the creation of a false and unwarranted division in reality that results in the human alienation from its own material organism.  It is responsible for the pathology of Western Man that fulfills the definition of what Thomas Szasz has called “autogenic disease”: a disease in which the organism identifies its own body as the enemy and tries to destroy it.[2]

[1] Stein, op.cit, Knowledge and Faith, pp 32-33

[2] Cf. Thomas Szasz, M.D., “On Autogenic Diseases,” The Freeman, Ideas On Liberty, May 2004.