I woke up yesterday wondering if perhaps white Christian culture, particularly Protestant culture, did not take over the world in large measure out of a superabundance of shame.
We think of, say, Japan, or China, as “shame based cultures”, where family reputation, and “saving face” is everything.
But at the root of our own culture is the idea that we are all born “shamed”, flawed, rejected by God, reviled strangers in the only universe we know, and only redeemable by submission to power structures which, in the case of the Catholic Church, hold the power over our very souls, which can “excommunicate” us and condemn us to hell for eternity.
And even for Protestants, your only path to avoiding hell is conforming to the dictates of your Church, to professing piety, to doing what you are told, to never straying too far outside of narrow lines.
That is a sort of ANTI-Humanism, isn’t it? I don’t really know who Adam Weishaupt really was, or what he really believed, or if his ideas still matter today, as some claim, but if you put yourself in the middle of that world, and make those ideas unavoidable, universal, relentless in their pursuit of your individual conscience, could you not see some strong impetus to refute them, perhaps even by inverting them?
And I will wonder aloud if the world would not have been a better place if Jesus had not lived, or if his ideas had died shortly after he did; or for that matter, if HIS ideas did live, and were not perverted and substituted by others seeking to use his name for their own infernal purposes.
Jesus spoke of Love, which is to the good, but he didn’t invent the idea. He did not need to invent the word, or the idea. And practically, what matters most to people is not the positive message, but the negative one, which is eternal damnation if you get caught out of synch with the people around you. Gays were going to hell. The apostate. Maybe even the divorced. Those who were not baptized. The Liminal, broadly speaking, who were his original audience, and who he spent most of his time with. He wasn’t crucified by the outcasts, but by the power elite of his time. Even the Romans were very prepared to tolerate him and his ideas. It was the people who held all the local power and influence who most objected to the idea that society should not be stratified, and that an individuals capacity for Love was vastly more important than his learning, or his place and station. Those are truly interesting, and certainly subversive ideas.
You know, in this world, in this confusing place, where we are born crying and often leave alone, there are a wide variety of logics which make sense, and which need to be understood and transcended, rather than rejected outright.
And it was not insane to believe that if the Church, as it existed in 1776 was the embodiment of “Love”, then sanity lay elsewhere. And if you look at all the evils perpetrated by that Church, it would not be unreasonable to seek out evils of your own in response, in rebellion, in reaction, in an individualistic affirmation of I AM to prevent being steamrollered into the oblivion of complete and abject submission to inferior people and ideas. In my view, there would be something healthy in this, even if it were taken too far in the other direction.
So many ideas are out there which have something to recommend them, which are still pernicious on balance and over time.
And as I have said, shame and trauma remove your face, your individuality, your unique perspective and capacity for perception. They remove your capacity for nuance, for subtlety, for accepting this but not that, for taking from the table what is good, and leaving what is bad.
Racism is really shame based stupidity. So is anti-racism. Both miss important points.
And it is hard for me not to see in the Left cultural habits which arose in the Church being perpetrated in spirit without Christian backing, but nonetheless religious and even cultish in their iteration and practice. ALWAYS and NEVER seem to occur often. You always–this is an exception!!!–have to have a SOMETIMES, and a partially, and a yes but also no. You need a middle which moves, which bends, which flows in the water, which is rooted but not inflexible.
But thought is somatically rooted. If you live in a constant state of mild to severe fight/flight/shame, you will have a hard time with sometimes. You will NEED TO KNOW what is “right” and what “wrong”. This is particularly true if your “cultural field” (nods to both Jung and Rupert Sheldrake) has been teaching you for 1,700 years (let’s date it to the Council of Nicea) that your eternal destiny can only be assured by getting the details perfectly right.
And obviously, practically, much of the Left seems to view its job as inverting whatever the “right” says–or they think “it” says–and dogmatically adopting the opposite as its creed.
Donald Trump has many flaws, which are obvious to his supporters and haters alike. But he is not evil, as far as I can tell, and I’m usually pretty accurate in my judgements. He is not trying to end democracy in the United States. He is guilty perhaps of bad judgment sometimes in terms of what he says and how he says it, but I have no doubt he does his best to speak the truth as he sees it, and by and large I think most of what he says makes sense. He was wrong on the vaccines, in my view, but it is ironic that HIS POLICY is now the dominant demand of the Left today. They don’t remember that because they have not been told to. That fact has disappeared.
And making him the embodiment of all evil blinds people to other more important evils. We have a President now who cannot even read a Teleprompter intelligently. He has read “End of Comments” numerous times now. I’m surprised they still put it on there.
I perhaps cheapen some of what I say by inserting specific political commentary, but everything good in this world depends on the preservation of freedom, of speech, of conscience, of non-violent behavior, and all of those are blatantly under sustained attack by most of the organs of our government.
All of us need time and space to build something better. We need liberty.