Important, emotional stories on BooMan during the last few weeks and a diary about, in part, how we treat one another during our silicon based conversations, all led to this rather long diary. Also in the mix leading to this meditation were several diaries and comment threads that touched on the existence of evil in the world. I hope you read these thoughts. Get some coffee first. A lot more after the fold.
The philosopher Eric Voegelin, psychiatrist R.D. Laing and sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman have all had an impact on my thinking about these matters. Even though I’ve mentioned these guys I don’t want this to be a boring scholarly droning, but more conversational. Let’s hope I’m good enough at it. Maybe get more coffee, or a beer, ….???
Consider this: Are all religions some form of idolatry through which the worshippers worship themselves because the God they believe in is so awesome, all-knowing and omnipotent? It always seems to me when Christians, for example, sing “our God is an awesome God,” they are actually engaging in a mass masturbatory celebration about themselves. Perhaps it’s because, to my more noetic rather than pneumatic mind, God is more transcendent than that. Would the Creator of the Universe really give all that much of a shit, if the people He fashioned out of wet dirt thought he was awesome? Don’t think so.
This doesn’t mean that I’m an atheist, far from it. But we can only say some very precise things about God because once we go beyond that, we’re making shit up and worshipping the shit and thinking it’s Shinola. (You have to be real old to get that one).
The reason we can only say so much about God is because we can only authentically say so much about our selves. And what we say has to be grounded in experience to be truthful.
What can we say with absolute certitude about us? We live in a world that was here before we were and looks like it will be here long after we’re not. We live in a society that was here before we were and looks like it will be here long after we’re not, in spite of Dubya’s attempts to destroy it. How do we comprehend such a world?
If we say we comprehend our world by studying the astronomical subfield of cosmology or by reading Genesis to learn about the beginning of our universe, or by reading history books to learn about the origins of our society, what we are saying is that the beginning of the world we live in is beyond our experience and we can only learn about it from someone else. However, no one alive has an experience of the beginning of the universe. We only know that it is, because we’re in it. It’s got to be something rather than nothing. If it was nothing, we wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t even be.
Where does that leave us? It leaves us with us: and with our experience of us as belonging to something with a beginning and a beyond. But anything we say about that Beginning and that Beyond is pure, unadulterated speculation no matter how fervently we may believe it. What does that experience lead us to? It leads us to something Dom Crossan, who writes about the historical Jesus, wrote in one of his books. Stories about the son of god were rampant in the first century BCE. Octavius claimed to be divi filii, the offspring of a divine father and human mother (virgin? nah, Roman) and claimed the title Augustus. His godhood stood at the top of an empire that conquered its neighbors through pre-emptive war, drove its subjects into the dust with tribute, and commercialized the ancient world for the sole betterment of the Roman investor classes. His god was the god of the empire, of conquest, of fertility human and vegetative. Those who made Jesus son of Joseph into the expected Anointed One (Christos in Greek) claimed that he too was the son of god, but this god was a god of justice and righteousness, a god for the poor, the widowed, and the orphaned. Both son of god titles are speculations; but both are not equal. Choose. This choice is the human condition. To do or to suffer injustice, which god will you follow.
However, not everything we can say about ourselves is guesswork. Eric Voegelin put it this way. Our participation in being is and is not a “datum of experience.” It is not a datum of experience in the sense of being an object of the external world that can be measured. It is a datum of experience only from the “perspective of participation in it.” In other worlds, we cannot get outside ourselves or our society or our world to “objectively” look at it and then pronounce the truth about it. Those who claim this kind of knowledge are either deluded or lying. The passage below was written in the early fifties and contains, to our contemporary ear, a jolting, outdated use of “man” for human being. Don’t let the conventions of the past get in the way of the spiritual insight.
“The perspective of participation must be understood in the fullness of its disturbing quality. It does not mean that man, more or less comfortably located in the landscape of being, can look around and take stock of what he sees as far as he can see it. Such a metaphor, or comparable variations on the theme of the limitations of human knowledge, would destroy the paradoxical character of the situation. It would suggest a self-contained spectator, in possession of and knowledge of his faculties, at the center of a horizon of being, even though the horizon were restricted. But man is not a self-contained spectator. He is an actor, playing a part in the drama of being and, through the brute fact of his existence, committed to play it without knowing what it is. It is disconcerting even when accidentally a man finds himself in the situation of feeling not quite sure what the game is and how he should conduct himself in order not to spoil it;”
“Participation in being, however, is not a partial involvement of man; he is engaged with the whole of his existence, for participation is existence itself. There is no vantage point outside of existence from which meaning can be viewed and a course of action charted according to a plan, nor is there a blessed island to which man can withdraw in order to recapture his self. The role of existence must be played in uncertainty of its meaning, as an adventure of decision on the edge of freedom and necessity.”
If we are actors in a play we don’t know the play, the role or the author. But this does not mean that we are blind because our existence is illuminated by consciousness, and we experience ourselves as existing. But what is this We that experiences. There is no such thing as a “human being” who chooses to participate in being as if we had a choice. We exist. We’re stuck with it. There is a “something”, a part of being that experiences itself as such and is capable of using language to call itself human being. The simple act of naming ourselves as human being, as a separate part of existence is what Voegelin called a “fundamental act of evocation.” We constitute a part of being separate from world, society and god. But simply calling ourselves a name doesn’t constitute knowledge. “The Socratic irony of ignorance has become the paradigmatic instance of awareness for this blind spot at the center of all human knowledge about man. At the center of his existence man is unknown to himself and must remain so, for the part of being that calls itself man could be known fully only if the community of being and its drama in time were known as a whole. Man’s partnership in being is the essence of his existence, and this essence depends on the whole, of which existence is a part. Knowledge of the whole, however, is precluded by the identity of the knower with the partner, and ignorance of the whole precludes essential knowledge of the part. This situation of ignorance with regard to the decisive core of existence is more than disconcerting; it is profoundly disturbing, for from the depth of this ultimate ignorance wells up the anxiety of existence.”
All fundamentalisms which claim to know the whole and therefore all of the parts are lies based in existential terror. But we are not completely blind in our ignorance. We exist in the “In Between” and we illuminate our existence with the language of the “tension between life and death, immortality and mortality, perfection and imperfection, time and timelessness, between order and disorder, truth and untruth, sense and senselessness of existence; between amor Dei and amor sui, l’ame ouverte and l’ame close; between the virtues of openness toward the ground of being such as faith, love and hope, and the vices of infolding closure such as hubris and revolt; between the moods of joy and despair; and alienation in its double meaning of alienation from the world and alienation from God.”
Abject, existential terror at this notion of our fundamental ignorance about the center of our existence (Why are we here? What does all this mean? What happens when I die? Do they play golf in heaven?) forms the core of the right wing politics and religious fundamentalism which provide absolute but specious answers to these questions. (Billy Graham says they do play golf in heaven. Some of my friends say that’s a non sequitur.)
When ignorance is paraded as wisdom evil thrives. I present the Bush Administration as my first witness. (And all excellent Steven D. diaries as corroboration of said Bush ignorance). We would all agree that when we act we act with the purpose of bringing about some good result. We would also all agree that sometimes when people act really awful things happen. Why? Did those who bring about catastrophe intend evil results? No. They were trying to bring about what they thought was a good end. The evil consequences were a result of their ignorance with respect to the consequences of their action. This ignorance occurs because human beings are too often unwilling to accept that what is good for them will not be good for others. We too often equate what is good for us with Good in itself (and with the shorter version, God). Because human beings are not willing to transcend their own particularities of gender, class, race, etc. and make decisions and take actions based upon more inclusive criteria, evil runs riot in the world.
So where does all this rambling leave us? If we understand who we are as human beings we have a better chance to live together as we want human beings to do. If we understand that as actors in a play where role and author are unknown (no matter how many people claim to speak for that author), and that we are in this mess together, we have made great strides toward making it through.
The two greatest spirits in western civilization are Socrates and Jesus. Both have been appropriated in the service of various evils throughout history but this fact doesn’t diminish their importance to us in the 21st century trying to find a way to live together in some kind of harmony. Socrates stated that there will be no end to the evils that beset people in society and the world until those that rule become philosophers. He did not mean a philosopher-king as he has been misinterpreted for centuries. Any rulers– kings, oligarchs, or democrats–must become philosophers in order to find order and harmony and avoid chaos and injustice. Philosophers aren’t the nit pickers of academia but are people who transcend themselves in how they choose to act and then execute that choice. Jesus talked about the kingdom of god as being present. His kingdom of god was the alternative to the Roman Empire. The kingdom of god is a place of transcendence and justice; the Roman Empire a place of domination and collaboration. Live in the kingdom of god not the empire of Bush.