Ideas and people are individually separate, and both are complex and both interact complexly. You can have good ideas lived out badly, or by people with bad intent. You can have good people with bad ideas, acted out with good intent. People want to make things simple. They like generalizations and absolutes. They like shortcuts. And they’re not just fundamentally moral, they’re moralistic. People can’t live without some sort of morality. The source doesn’t matter, whatever authority it descends from. Religion, culture, science, psychology, philosophy, anything.
Regardless of the actual content of their beliefs, people are all the same sort of creatures, and will do the same sorts of things with their belief. You’ll find people who will turn it into blind dogma and use it to judge and marginalize and devalue and deny the humanity of others. That’s just what people do. It’s what all people do (or a large proportion, inevitably, especially if they’re not constantly on their guard against it). And their own moral certitude and righteous pride is part of what will lead them into it, the confidence that they’ve got things right and have the right system and content, that it makes them superior, that they’re justified, that the ones they judge deserve to be judged.
The abuses of religion are not a separate category from other human actions, they are universal to all. They are fundamentally human in nature, not merely religious, and are found everywhere regardless of culture or worldview. Pick any belief system, using any basis, in any place or time or culture, and you’ll find people doing lately the same things with them. The specifics might look a bit different, but the attitudes, approaches, and results will share much in common.
All humans feel a deep need for a fundamental moral system that informs and justifies their own actions and value and allows them to judge and assign value to the actions (and identity) of others. It’s a necessary part of human psychology. And whatever that system is, many people will proceed from that morality to moralism, a system that isn’t so much about content as it is about practice and approach and how much care you take, how many shortcuts you make, how much you’re willing to question your own easy judgements, how much pleasure and personal value you take from displaying your own virtue and deriding the failures of others. It’s the moment when your moral system stops being something above you, outside you, available to all, that you submit to and conform to and follow and turn it into something you possess, a special thing that belongs to you and can be wielded by you for your own personal good, a tool for you to venerate yourself and beat others with. It’s the difference between righteousness and self-righteousness.
Recently I was watching and reading some cultural news (Democratic primary stuff), and I was suddenly struck by how familiar everything I was hearing was sounding. It was all modern, liberal, progressive discussion, totally non-religous in nature. Yet it seemed like I had been I exactly that same situation before, hearing the same arguments, and it made me terribly uncomfortable. And I suddenly realized exactly what it all reminded me of. And the answer was: legalistic Christianity.
The content was different, but the process, the attitude, the approach was exactly the same. The “circular firing squad”, as Obama put it. The virtue signaling. The piety, the lip service, the concern with appearance and self-righteousness. The easy condemnation, the fear. The disdain for others judged and found wanting. The need to toe the line and hide your real thoughts. The need to constantly subject everything and everyone to an inquisition, to tear them down for their imperfections. The inability to let people be humans, but to make all their actions, all culture, all stories, all words merely opportunities to run a moral calculus The hopelessly merciless standards for being righteous enough. The race to prove yourself before the world and to yourself as a perfect moral standard and to relegate all others measuring anything less as failures and reprobates.
Powerful or popular ideas always contain some element of truth, even if it’s an unbalanced or limited truth. There will be something there that people are grabbing on to. The more powerful the truth, the more potential danger there is, much as the more potent a medicine is, the more potentially toxic it can become if taken in the wrong dose, or combined with the wrong things. And it’s generally just the nature of humanity to take everything to extremes. If a little bit of vitamins are good for us, then a lot must be even better right? We should go all in and megadose ourselves!
That’s just how people think. They pick a side and go all in with it. Not realizing that without proper perspective, without the knowledge of what a balanced diet is, what health really is, we could actually harm or even poison ourselves. That’s why almost all diets are some sort of extreme. Nothing but this, none of that. And we swing back and forth between extremes, jumping from diet to diet, yanking our body down first one extreme path, then another. And nutritionists are constantly trying to tell us about moderation and balance and health and none of us and actually do it.
That’s how we are with our diets because that’s how we are as humans, with all things. We swing from one unbalanced extreme to another, elevating one truth into an idol and declaring its opposite a devil, not realizing that its being improperly raised from an angel to god that turns angels into devils. And the more powerfully good the angel, the more terrible the demon it will eventually become.
And those inclined to see the other side of things start seeing the heresy being built and redouble their own efforts at defending thier truth (and when you approach a truth or idea in such a way, defensively, or aggressively, as a weapon against an enemy, it will almost always give way to abuse and devolution). Because of the accelerated structure of modern society, we can see both happening at the same time, in the same place.
Eventually, we simply won’t be able to live together or cooperatively and it will come to open blows and hostility. Already you can see it happening on a national scale. The idea of universal rights or values or truths among nations becomes less and less realistic. And while both sides in whatever ideological conflict you happen to pick accuse the other of driving society to the brink of destruction, they both fail to grasp the real truth. That they’re both right, and both are, in their own different ways, from different ends of things, driving us all to the same end. Abuse, conflict, harm.
America in particular is a wild experiment in bringing together people of very different backgrounds and outlooks and trying to unite the peacefully in a common endeavor of nationhood. It’s a bit like the tower of Babel. And I don’t think we can hold it together much longer, or that anything can be done about it. Pretty soon we’ll need to go our separate ways and become different peoples at odds and in competition with one another. We have such wildly differing theories about what to build a society and cultural morality on and who and what is a worthy inclusion to that process.
I don’t think we’ll be able to run all those different experiments within the same playground. We’ll need to find our own individual, competing spaces to live them out and see how it goes and learn from our own mistakes. But we’re all so entangled in one another’s lives through the way modern life is structured (it’s not like we’re all clustered into a relatively independent federation of differing states any more, we’ve all federalized quite a bit), we won’t be able to pull apart without pulling apart the very fabric of our nation, towns, and families.
At this point, I can’t help but feel that it’s too late. Too late for our country, too late for American Christianity (which wasn’t my subject here but is of interest to me), too late for any of the people I know or places I care about. It’s too late to do anything about it or go back or put things back together. We’re on an inevitable trajectory, we can’t pull back. We’ll have to go through the long way and learn from the historical process, basically, from seeing the consequences and suffering them and learning from our mistakes.
Families, churches, people groups, whole cultures and countries may suffer and fall apart, perhaps even cease to exist. We’ll learn the meaning of the maxim, that a house divided against itself cannot stand. In a time like that, only the undivided will survive, and they will conquer and swallow up the weak, those without self doubt, with the blood of unquestioned, basic human drives in them. Survive, protect my tribe, take what we can, eliminate what threatens our well-being, defeat our enemies, grow. The basic, instinctual, non-rational drives of the species.
I used to feel like maybe this could be avoided, maybe even that I should do my bit in speaking out to prevent it. But I just don’t believe it any more. It just seems a bridge too far, too late, the change coming too quickly everywhere I look, in every corner, and there’s no one left worth trying to raise the alarm to. Almost everyone has been conquered into one side or the other, been deputized into the inevitable conflict, been pushed further into one camp or out of the other camp as they descend into the militarized outlook necessary to defend against the other side.
Who knows which side the people we know will end up on, what brother will be set to fight against brother, and sister against sister. And all I feel like doing is pulling out, giving up, and defending my personal patch and my personal good. And that’s pretty depressing for me.
Making Nobody Happy 