Tag: evil

Consumerism and entitlement

Like many of my fellow earthlings, I am asphyxiated by the perillously thin air that passes today for social intercourse. I am sick of a society which flaunts its technological prowess and has not even the beginnings of a notion of what constitutes a good life. And I am sick of attitudes which are antithetical to the most basic human values, to the innate sense of what it is to be human. The society I live in is on a crash course towards self-destruction.

I do not conceive of myself in society as a one-man business, providing material and spiritual benefits in return for eking out an emotional existence. I am not a beggar. I am abundant.

Unlike many people I encounter on the “spiritual” path, I do not object per se to the existence of an economic system with property rights, labor relations and currency. These are all very strange concepts, totally alien to our human nature, but they make a world possible in which there is reasonable physical security and material well-being. I am willing, in short, to play the game, and even to defend the game. A society organized on tribal principles isn’t going to be sufficient given the level of global interdependency and complexity required to sustain ten billion human beings on this planet.

However, this doesn’t change who I am or what I aspire to; it doesn’t change that the economic system should be at the service of humanity, not at the service of itself. In fact, it does not change the fact that the entire edifice which we call the “economic system” would not work for five minutes if it really had to function in the way it is imagined to work by materialist utilitarians. Our human nature is not an inconvenient maladaptation to economic reality: it is its basis as well as its raison d’etre.

The rampant power of the creed of self-interest is intensely depressing. It has turned us all into social zombies, unable to think about any situation in life, even the most intimate, in terms other than “what’s in it for me?” It has cut us off from all other strategies than manipulation to get what we need, from the very ability to perceive other human beings as incarnate entities preceding their casual and casuistic attributes. This cancerous religion of self-interest is the true, most fundamental incarnation of evil in our midst. Around me, all I see is entitlement, cynicism, an attitude in which people are disposable, in which everyone is training for their black belt in manipulating everyone else and no-one has the sense to call time on the insanity. Where I am required to frame my every gesture as the first move in a commercial transaction in which I will be, experience shows, invariably outsmarted by a more talented bargainer.

Human life, human relationships, are sacred. But we are so degenerate, such sleepwalking machines, that none of us has any idea any more of what this means.

Calvaire

Returning from my trip to Burgundy, I have been struck by the omnipresence, at the summit of perfectly pleasant hills, of crosses, incorporating or otherwise the crucified representation of the first century Jewish reformer whose cult went on, by a series of disparate embellishments, to become the major religion of the Western world. Indeed, these depictions are so ubiquitous that I was unsure whether “le calvaire” had not become, in French, whether by semantic extension or more innocent semantic regression, simply a term for the unwooded top of a hill (apparently that is not so).

When I was a kid, taken to Catholic services, I always – probably like any other kid – experienced a vivid distaste for this representation. I guess I could buy into the notion of self-sacrifice, the cruelty of the fate imposed to a good man, and even, admittedly in my wildest imagination, the ancient Near Eastern cosmic mythology of the dying and rising god, but it was never evident to me (though it is now) why this lifeless figure impaled on a cross needed to be paraded eternally before my nose.

Certain theological acrobatics endeavor to portray this scene as a moment of victory. Indeed, the success of this exegesis invited its later, equally successful emulation by Napoleon III, in search of a secular messiah in the person of the defeated and ultimately executed Gaulish chieftain Vercingetorix, who conveniently (but, it later transpired, inaccurately) declared, according to the account in Caesar’s Gallic Wars, that “La Gaule unie, formant une seule nation, animée d’un même esprit, peut défier l’Univers.”

Statue of Vercingetorix in Alise-Sainte-Reine
Statue of Vercingetorix in Alise-Sainte-Reine

Whilst Vercingetorix at least, in Viollet-Le-Duc’s representation, appears proud and almost as a victor, Jesus, on the other hand, appears broken and lifeless, anything but an inspirational figure. This aspect of its postulated deity has presumably been a major weakness in uniting Christendom against the much better organized Muslim conquerors, and indeed one wonders whether Caesar would have triumphed over Vercingetorix if he had been laden down with such a handicap.

The emphasis on suffering and redemption so characteristic of Christianity both historically and culturally appears as surprisingly singular, though Shiism seems to have preserved some similar ideas from its related Zoroastrian substrate, and Judaism has applied the notion to the people in both the Deuteronomic and Zionist traditions, but not to its deity.

That suffering has a redemptive character appears almost axiomatic to many Westerners, even those who would portray themselves as emancipated from the intellectual heritage of Christianity. But we worship our suffering because we have been taught, by the most unnatural of ruses, to do so. To bear suffering without protest, convinced one is thereby serving some higher goal, is, obviously, a desirable attribute, but from one standpoint only: that of those who benefit from our quiescence.

That there is plenty of suffering in the world I do not doubt, but many cultures endure it without losing, and certainly not forever, an underlying gaiety and celebration of life. Christianity is presented to us as a solution to the problem of the existence of suffering (and even more metaphysically of evil) in the world. Yet this “problem” is entirely of its own making. That suffering is a fact does not make it a problem – unless you have devised an abstraction of God as both creator and redeemer in the first place. Our natural instinct is to flee suffering where possible and to heal it through mourning and empathy where not. To dwell on it deliberately, to find it where it does not exist, to elevate it to ubiquitous supremacy, seems a biological aberration.

And yet it is to this counterintuitive quest that the calvaires incite us: to be in the midst of the vibrant, teeming beauty of life and yet not only to find unsuspected morosity in its midst, but to prefer this morosity to celebration. Even the best in Catholic spirituality is rarely more than a lyrical accommodation to this underlying tragic conception of the world. Never does it burst free.

During all of human history and most of its present extent, the natural rhythm of life has been and is satisfactorily mirrored in rituals and cultures which have not needed any such artifice. To crown innocent hilltops with such disfigurations is, I would argue, not to honor any spirit of sacrifice: it is to stand in Pilate’s shoes, not those of his victim, institutionalizing and thereby perpetuating the cycle of persecution.