[photo: "Sadness", 11/22/2012, JAVanDevender]
Walker Percy is quoted as saying that in our post-modern Western world, something has gone wrong, and gone wrong in a sense far more radical than, say, the evils of industrial England which engaged Dickens. It did not take a diagnostician to locate the evils of the sweatshops of the nineteenth-century Midlands. But now it seems that whatever has gone wrong strikes to the heart and core of meaning itself, the very ways [in which] people see and understand themselves. [from Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth, preface, vii, 1992]
Percy, with his usual perceptiveness saw the seed which now lies fully germinated.
I think that the Newtown murders have, perhaps finally, forced a fairly massive and long overdue self-examination on the public consciousness of our country. The prevailing question I keep hearing being asked is "How could anyone do such a thing?" or variations on that theme. There is the usual hue and cry for solutions that will fix the "problem" and let us all go back to our mindless existence and trivial pursuits. The assumption, sometimes recognized but most often not, is that there IS a solution. As Smith mentions in the preface to his work, it is only in our Modern Western mentality with its fatal misreading of the potential and capability of modern science (not just technical fields but the entire edifice), that forms a "notable exception... in its very soul" from what he called "the human unanimity." He is speaking of a prevailing unanimity that understands the world in terms of transcendent truth. Especially the issue of evil and how to explain it.
Science seems to say that for every "problem" there is a solution... a "fix" if you will... that will enable man, as scientist and as beneficiary of science, to overcome that problem and make it "go away." Jacque Ellul called this "techne." Here it is presumed that civilization is progress in that it is the triumph of man over his surroundings, environment and, to some extent, himself. Given enough study, practical application, enforced or exhorted cooperation, and man proves that whatever obstacle, moral or technical, he faces can be overcome.
Huston said that it was high time (then) for us to "rejoin the human race." He asserted that such a view is seriously misguided. "Post modern science gives us not another model of the universe, but no model at all." The obvious corollary is that if it does not give us a model of how the world actually is, then it certainly cannot give us ultimate solutions for what the world ought to be. And it is exactly here, in the light of news events flashing into our consciousness, that I must say "amen!"
The problem with viewing the Newtown killings, the cannibalism murders, the recent infant deaths at the hands of their mothers, etc. as "problems" that need to be solved by new legislation (political solutions), armed guards (NRA solution), wider screening/treatment of mental illness (medical/psychological solution), etc. is that it fundamentally ignores what seems blatantly obvious. We are diagnosing these events as anomalies, as aberrations, as deviant behavior. We are assuming that the "mean" of human behavior (most people don't do these things) somehow accurately defines the "essence" of human nature. Since "most" people don't do these things, we assume that people are fundamentally "good" (or, all people are fundamentally "good" and bad behavior is in someway a product of external influences on a person who, absent those influences, would demonstrate that goodness) and that therefore what we must do is discover how to "fix" those "few" who are different from the rest of us.
The actual scenario is summed up in the famous saying of Pogo: "We have met the enemy and he is us!" The true state of things is that it is the "mean" of human behavior that is the result of external influences, not the tragedies of crime. Evil lies at the heart of man because he is not born with a clean slate on which good and evil is inscribed in some relativistic conditioning process. Man is conceived with an inherent drive toward his own self interest that, if not bounded, will manifest itself along a continuum of evil. Man's problem is moral... he needs to be saved from himself.
Even apart from religion, from Shakespeare to Camus, the essential human condition has been glimpsed if not illuminated with floodlamps. Even comedy is based on tragedy. And it is not just the 'Shadow' who knows "what evil lurks in the heart of man."
Man, unique among the creatures, is able to analyze himself... and to deceive himself. Recognizing this, we can see that what all the "solutions" being advanced need more than anything else is that for them to achieve much of anything, which ever is chosen, there must be a general, wide-spread, "repentance" that accompanies them. That's a religious term and I do not apologize for it. It is the most accurate word to use. What is needed is a general change of mind, a turning away from and a turning to something else. We must put away our blinders and adopt the consensus that, in a very real way, we ALL participated in these crimes. We have ALL done our part in producing these "monsters." We have ALL, through neglect, through distraction, through slothfulness, through self-absorption, or through actual promotion of such evils, participated in creating a climate that promotes evil rather than acts to curb ourselves. Please note, I mean that personally. We have to understand ourselves, individually, as needing imposed boundaries that are moral sanctions - not physical, coercive sanctions - that act to inhibit, restrain and otherwise limit our inherent tendencies to evil. On the other hand, we need, as Huston notes, to recognize that apart from positive encouragements, moral exhortations, that are grounded in absolutes (what's right is right - for everyone) the negative curbs will not long prevail.
We need to take off the blinders and see what is really there. We have spent too long in Pinocchio's circus. If we are to survive it will take more than a few placebos to do the trick. We must have a season of mourning... in sack cloth and ashes. Then, in humility, maybe, just maybe, we can have some hope of agreeing on something we can do... together.
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