February 21, 2006

From It to Thou - Part 2

Beyond the First Person Singular
Forgive the awkward grammatical image: What has hurt us and has created us is the drive to assert “my” right to live over and against “your” right. Buber would have called this an “I/It” relationship. The other is a means to an end, an obstacle to overcome. Think about the epithets of warfare. The enemy is never thought of as human. The enemy is a “gook,” “heretic,” “nigger,” “fag,” and so on. The uglier the epithet, the greater the fear. Really, what have to fear in each other? Why do we need to be the greatest at the expense of the other? I would suggest it is our fear of extinction that drives the engine of hatred.

So Why Are We So Afraid?
I am amazed at the cost of warfare; finances aside – money has no value except that which we have assigned to it – the real cost of warfare is in lives lost. There is precious little that is worth anything: We have time and our life, nothing more. We use resources and leave a legacy of consumption in our wake. We cling to life with terrible tenacity, but will as quickly dispose of life. What has struck such fear in our hearts? Why are we so afraid?

I think that it is part of our evolutionary imprinting that has made us into creatures defined by competition. We are accustomed to the struggle. We long for the bitterness of victory and defeat. Life devolves into a win/lose dichotomy. Competition, from my limited perspective, bespeaks fear. We compete because we are afraid of loss. I do not accept the notion that competition drives progress. That makes for good capitalism, as it implies a profit and loss equation: somebody wins; somebody else loses. The cycle is not ascending: it is circular. Times and names have changed. The periphery has been altered, but the essential equation of hunter and hunted remains. We remain in fear of a perceived enemy that shares more in common with us than we dare to imagine. In a real sense, we are afraid of ourselves. The mirror frightens us.

Is Conflict the Only Impetus to Evolution?

Conflict has, without a doubt, created intelligence. Consider the predator: predatory animals must be intelligent. They have to rely not only on the weapons at their disposal, but an innate intelligence that allows them to hunt, capture, and consume their prey. The idea of a food-chain has driven evolution, especially human evolution. We developed from a simple ape that began to develop tools, later developing a brain that allowed the creation of theology, art, philosophy. But is this the only impetus?

I posit that the next evolutionary development is one that moves beyond confrontation with our fear. The ultimate fear is of our own finitude. We face the immensity of a universe that is both infinite and infinitesimal and find that we occupy a very small bit of space and time. We are momentary expressions of life that possess self-awareness. To overcome our fear of finitude is to accept the reality of our own extinction. This is not an issue of God. It is an issue of acceptance of a godless universe that is beyond our comprehension.

God, Religion, and the Spirit

It is almost an excurses that is necessitated: it is not that I do not believe in God, I do not believe in the God that is the necessary parent for lost and fearful children. There are moments when even the most courageous of us requires a moment of spiritual comfort. This having been said, I do not believe that a world come of age – to borrow a phrase from Dietrich Bonhoeffer – requires a God that is there to hold humanity’s hand as it crosses the street. What God, then, do we worship in a godless universe? I believe in God as the ultimate source of all life and as the connection that holds us in a community that exists in space/time. I find great beauty in the myth of the incarnation: a God that transcends the eternal glory to experience the finitude of the creation (using that term advisedly). This is the God that seeks to lead by experience of the most deeply seeded human fears. This embrace of our fear allows God to be the God that both is and exists. A humanity that has come of age requires a myth that allows us to face the darkness as adults.

God becomes human. The eternal become finite. Our minds allow us to imagine an infinity and beyond (apologies to Georg Cantor) and in so doing suggests that we, at least in the realm of imagination – intuition? – move beyond what is merely sensed and can only be spoken of as metaphor. The human mind embraces the infinite and infinitesimal. In so doing it embraces that which can drive the next great cycle of evolution: an awareness of a common destiny with the whole of the cosmos, God and creation meeting in the arena of the mind.