GOD IN THE MIDDLE -- PART TWO

 

The Fickle Finger of Fate & Fable 

JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D. 

© January 26, 2019 

Two themes that have earned their small capital in these pages: ABSTRACTION and ANALYSIS.  They have been attached to material facts for obvious reasons but they are habitual as well.

Modern habits are quite apparent but so mundane as to not seem visible.  This happens frequently when we are wont to combine two themes in one event -- popular opinion and common facts. These occasions may carry a flavor of the absurd. One may posit the popular cliche that this is a “machine society," which is it is but the term is absurd because it has no substantive meaning other than to delay thinking of why we feel so handicaped. It puts a middleman – a middle thing – between experience and perception, it yields only a derived and artificial experience. 

Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present (2000) 

The Psychological idea has haughtily replaced the Religious View, in which man is seen as a product of Creation . . . The popularity of the idea is understandable. Never before has a general philosophical system so concerned itself with Self. Never before have we so revered self-indulgence. The idea focuses directly on modern man’s vulnerable psyche and newly acquired emotional rights. The lure is irresistible. Egocentric modern man, the prospect of Self of God seated at the center of a world philosophical system is exquisitely attractive. 

Martin L. Gross, The Psychological Society: A Critical Analysis of the Psychological Revolution (1980) 

People go from fragmentation to wholeness and integration; from sadness to gladness; from powerlessness to pulling their own strings; from being effects to being causes; from staleness and boredom to creativity and joyfulness; from isolation and hostility to closeness and love. Counseling can, we are constantly told, remake us, transform us, change our lives. We can have, be, and do whatever we want. There are no limits to therapy’s power to change us. 

Bernie Zilbergeld, The Shrinking of America: Myths of Psychological Change (1983) 

THE FALLACY OF SEPARATION 

It should come as no surprise that Jacques Barzun’s reasoned analysis of the past 500 years, or Martin L. Gross’s and Bernie Zilbergeld’s more recent testy carping on the ineptness of psychology and psychotherapy, have not lessened our retreat from the captivating myths of Christianity and Islamism but have simply replaced them with the equally riveting myths of psychology and psychotherapy as the newest religion of secular Western society. 

Myths are quite compelling especially when wrapped in the paraphernalia and folderol of scientific methodology clinging to our psyches as if part of our DNA. We obviously cannot avoid being forever intrigued by myths. 

Scholars and societal critics are quick to give myths legitimacy in a paradoxical manner, by positing passionate disclaimers, thus ensuring survival of cherished myths. This has become part of the legacy of the “Age of the Enlightenment” some three centuries ago. That age erroneously thought it could get beyond the shackles of institutional religion by denying its efficacy and the mystique of God, but God simply will not go away as God is wrapped in the mystique of love, and love sustains the world. 

That is why Christianity’s concept of the Virgin Mother has remained so powerful an appeal. She fulfills the universal desire for a mother whose love knows no bounds and never falters. One easily understands why in the Middle Ages most miracles were laid to the credit of the Virgin Mother. Henry Adams, the grandson of President John Quincy Adams, a nonbeliever and a stoic agnostic, gloried in showing how the Virgin Mother not only upset the laws of man, but those of heaven as well (see The Education of Henry Adams, 2000, and The Mind and Art of Henry Adams, 1957). 

[The unfortunate irony of the legacy of the “Enlightenment” is that we have become jaded with an obsession with the "inner self” which has become metaphor for self-love, narcissism and self-indulgence, to be discussed in Part Three of God-in-the-Middle.] 

Suffice to say here that love is "self-forgetfulness," that in essence love represents an investment and free exchange of psychic energy that strengthens and invigorates. Alas, it is in short supply in these cynical times at the personal, social, societal and political level. 

We have moved from the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church and a God centered universe to where God and religion have devolved in status to identity politics with man, now very much alone, the center of the conversation having shifted away from the reality of the imagination and the once mythic dominance of the Church. 

Into this unstructured void, science has assumed the role of high priest and architect of all that it surveys. Meanwhile, dignity, identity, happiness, love and good will are seemingly beyond the pale of man’s reach, although everything he once thought he desired is now there for the pickings. Is man a happy camper? Hardly, for in a “cut & control” manufactured world, where these attributes have been largely replaced by “toys of the mind,” man appears to have lost his moral compass and his way. 

We are in the world of postmodernity where man is constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown (To be discussed in a future missive), as two-thirds of society is obsessively anxious and either engaged in some form of psychotherapy or psychological counseling. 

Israeli scholar Yuval Noah Harari steps into the void to trace man’s arrival at this juncture after several millennia in “Sapiens” (2015) and then hypothesizes as to man's future in “Homo Deus” (2017), books rising to bestsellers for an audience hungry for a measure of reassurance in a world that no longer makes sense. 

Even so, there is surprisingly little new in these impressive volumes other than wild speculations as to the future of man as Homo sapiens. We need not fault the author for stepping into the breach to assert his views as he like the rest of us is stumbling for clarity in the madness of the times. Why so? 

The 17th and 18th century's “Age of the Enlightenment” provided the philosophical underpinning to move from a God centered to a man centered universe beyond the countervailing control of the Roman Catholic Church to bask in a post-Christian morality, liberating the individual from the confines of what was considered a broadly repressive society. Alas, man is free only to walk into “Nowhere Land” as “Nowhere Man,” while constantly denying such confinement (see book of this same title: www.amazon.com). 

While hardly new, we are in the midst of the strong ruling the weak more viciously than ever before, but absurdly expecting happy egalitarian outcomes. It is the gospel of every man following his “inner star” (his inner self), denying the clinging shadows of the past and therefore failing to provide understanding or separation from this drifting momentum. 

That is why readers who join in the conversation should be applauded as experts will not pull us out of the funk that denial and neglect has created. Credentials today, whatever the discipline, are the products of our imagination of reality locked in the hubris and sentiments of the past. In other words, the educational institution has become anachronistic and the pedagogic role atavistic, or obstacles to meaningful dialogue. 

A READER WRITES 

In the past myths existed to explain aspects of reality we did not understand, but today the belief in myths is to escape reality. 

The believers do not want to accept that we are this tiny little planet in a vast universe. The believers want to believe they are special. In order to believe they are special, they believe in a dictatorial god who according to biblical stories and the Koran does terrible things to humans which these people accept as normal since their belief puts them in a special group who will not be punished. 

This god is an arrogant narcissist essentially like all dictators. You have to look no further than the past crop: Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler and Mao. The current crop reveals the same characteristics: Maduro and Putin, the heir to the throne in Saudi Arabia, and multiple others. There are people who believe in these guys because it makes their reality better, but all it does is help them escape the true reality that they are being ruled by terrible people. 

What I find fascinating about people who are Christians and Muslims as well as other people is that the Greek and Roman gods and their stories are called myths, but Christians and Muslims believe all their stories are true events and not myths when in fact they too exist for the same reason that the Greek and Roman gods were created to explain things that are not understood. 

I once read the whole bible, and I vaguely remember that in the early parts of the Old Testament the Jewish god was one of many gods that other people of that time worshiped. 

When you assume that the Christian myth is true or the Muslim myth is true you have fallen into the quicksand of group think in that you believe something is so because another believer says it is so. It is like believing fairy tales are true. 

No one knows how all this came about. Some people try to figure it out and others prefer to listen to fairy tales. Some people believe in these tales because of fear or from a desire to live in heaven. But as I have said before the god of the Old and New Testament is worse than any dictator in all of human history. 

The Catholic Church with all its power structure would not be something that the person called Jesus would have thought wonderful. If you want to be your own best friend you need to understand yourself and not assume that stories that someone made up are true and live your life according to them. Throughout human history the major concern for a minority is the control of the majority. This has never changed and continues today. 

Finally, the events today are like the events of the past. The technology and all the other innovations have changed society which is another phenomenon that occurs continually. No society ever stays the same and changes always happen, and we have little or no control over that. Most societies do not encourage individualism, and many in the past and in the present have punished people who attempted to think for themselves and talk about it. The Catholic Church, Communism, and Nazism all wanted total control which is the same today in many parts of the world including in this country. Most people have always wanted to be part of a group. 

RESPONSE 

Aside from the fact that we frequently talk past each other, there is credence to what you say, but none of this is a matter of either/or, but either and or. 

We are at the end of a 500 year journey, started by Martin Luther evolving to the dominance of the inner self in Western society. Progressive liberalism and the freedom to exchange ideas has enabled us to have this conversation with impunity. It is an expression of human dignity and central to our well-being (noting your reference to The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend, 1996), while at the same time finding us often at war over such matters as personal identity and political/social and psychological identity. 

Perhaps it has always been so. Obviously, circumstances moved the German scholarly cleric to express his indignity at the selling of indulgences by the corrupt Catholic Church, leading to the posting of his 95 theses of protest on the Wittenberg Church door in 1517, changing Western Civilization forever. 

Martin Luther launched more than a new Christian denomination, freeing churchgoers from the dominance of Roman Catholicism. He released Pandora’s Box, not only of the evils and miseries that afflicted the world, but the individual’s mythical anchor that once was that of the Church. Christians ever since have been in a frenetic quest to become once again whole; to have an authentic identity, and an authentic inner self. 

[If this sounds hypothetical, read “Devlin: A Psychological Novel” (2018).] 

Individualism and identity sparked the American Revolution and the French Revolution, down to the Rose and Orange Revolution in Georgia; Green Revolution in the Ukraine; the Tunisian Revolt; the Tahrir Square Uprising in Egypt; the Arab Spring; the Tiananmen Square Protest; and Black Lives Matter, among others. 

People want to be respected, treated with dignity, recognized and appreciated as persons. 

George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) foresaw the collapse of dignity and identity, giving us “Big Brother” who controls through the television screen, while Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1939) saw the state using biotechnology to erase individualism and stratify and control society. These dystopian novels foresaw the world becoming unhinged leading to the homeless mind of modernity. 

Francis Fukuyama highlights these developments in a brief volume, Identity: The Demands for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (2018), while Jacques Barzun devotes his magna opus to broader declensions with From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present – 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (2000). 

The “monsters” to whom you allude did not rise out of a vacuum. On the contrary, Napoleon filled the vacuum left in the wake of the dysfunctional French Revolution (1799); Hitler came to power through a legitimate election of the German people (1933); Stalin replaced Lenin who died as the Russian Revolution of 1917 seized power from the Russian Czar; and Mao came to power after the miraculous 6,000 mile historic Long March (1934 – 1935) of the Chinese Communist emerging as the undisputed leader of China. 

This story continues with the changing roles of Christians and Muslims as part of our social evolution while being influenced by historic and cultural events. We gain no understanding by painting either the West or the East with a broad brush of contempt. Both are in a state of radical change with the inner self and the outer self on display with identity, respect, trust and dignity on a cultural collision course throughout the world. God simply will not go away. 

THE GENESIS OF “GOD-IN-THE-MIDDLE 

The West after winning WWI managed to divide the Middle East landscape with little regard to thousands of years of cultural and ethnic history. Fukuyama devotes attention to this in “Identity” (also in The End of History and the Last Man, 1992) where neither Christians nor Muslims are ogres with the faithful of both religions however trapped in current events. 

Closer to home, we have the gridlock of the outer self in political identity from the left (liberal) and the right (conservative) spectrum as defined by economics. 

The left wants more equality. The right demands more freedom from government constraints. 

The left focuses on workers, trade unions, and social protection and welfare for foot draggers. The right is interested in reducing the size of government and promoting the private sector’s hard chargers. 

The left is fixated less in the 21st century on broad economic equality and more on promoting the special interests of people they believe to have been marginalized: such as blacks, immigrants, women, Hispanics, and the LGBT community. The right has reduced itself to patriotic issues (Make America Great Again!) protecting the tradition of national identity of race, religion and ethnicity. Small wonder we have a traffic jams in Congress. 

This may seem far afield to “God-in-the-Middle,” but it all emanates from the subtext of our preoccupation with the inner self versus the outer self. Instead of being complements to each other, they are constantly at war. 

Much of what you say has merit although to imply that belief in God or that the Christian and Muslim God is reprehensible or without virtue; or that organize religion is the problem, plays into the hands of the radical elements that exist within these two faiths. This would be as senseless as to suggest that atheists and agnostics cannot be good citizens because of their beliefs, which of course is absurd. Most people, whatever the belief system, keep it largely to themselves while cherishing its comforts. 

Nor is it true that Greeks and Romans believed less in their gods as myths than Christians and Muslims believe in their God as real. Greeks and Romans, as have Christians and Muslims, gone to war believing they were being protected by their gods or God. 

Our whole existence is based on shaky premises. Scary, isn't it? 

Harari shows the faulty logic to the idea of humans as separate and superior to the animal kingdom because of a conscious intellect that can reason. The Israeli scholar suggests that instinct and intuition, common to all animals including humans, is a survival mechanism designed to maintain the balance of nature. 

Unfortunately, Homo sapiens as man has destroyed much of nature in his quest to prove dominance over nature. As a result, half of all the species that once walked the earth, including five of man's own species, have disappeared. 

We are a crisis management society, creating crises that did not before exist, then solving these crises and congratulating ourselves for our cognitive wisdom. 

THE CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE OF GOD-IN-THE-MIDDLE & REALITY 

Emmanuel Kant was an important voice of the “Enlightenment,” although he never ventured more than forty miles from his home in his entire life. He improved upon the Golden Rule with his “categorical imperative,” which advised people to act as they would want all other people to act towards each other, wishing this to become a Universal Law. He believed all rational people could then exist without any props other than their reasoning minds. God as a concept and belief system has suffered ever since. 

On a personal note, serious minded people have shared their views on this and other subjects with me, people who believe or reject Christianity, or Jesus as the Son of God with reason but without animus. They may be Protestant, Mormon or Catholic, atheist or agnostic. While I am a renegade Catholic, I still believe in God and hope that others, whatever their belief system, find comfort and fulfillment as have I in mine. 

From sharing such disclosures over the years, I have come to understand my Irish Roman Catholicism and myself better. Indeed, I have come to realize that Irish Roman Catholicism differs somewhat with German, Italian, French, Spanish, South American and African Catholicism in terms of such dogma as Original Sin, the Immaculate Conception, the Sacraments, Confession and Communion, the celibacy of the clergy, the primacy of the papacy and such issues as abortion and capital punishment. 

In attending Catholic services in several foreign countries, I have come to realize Catholicism differs as much in practice and ceremony as various Protestant denominations. I was rather a devout Catholic until the age of 30 when the reality of experience collided with my imagination of reality, a subject that I’ve addressed elsewhere in my books. Through it all, I have never lost my faith in God as He has been there for me throughout my many adventures, misadventures and careers. 

During my impressionistic years, I went by the book on Catholicism with no deviance from its dogmatic norms, norms with which I was then comfortable. In 1962, The Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican was opened by Pope John XXIII, my favorite pope, who could see the handwriting on the wall, which was that Roman Catholicism was becoming irrelevant in a changing world and needed to modernize or fade from significance. 

For me, an ordinary parishioner, the sophisticated reasons for the changes were not apparent, as I was comfortable with matters as they were. Vatican II knocked me out of my comfort zone as the priest would no longer conduct the Mass in Latin, but now in the vernacular (English); would no longer dress in ornate clerical regalia; would change Eucharistic prayers; would abbreviate the Mass to less than an hour, edit the liturgical calendar; dispense with classical organ church music for contemporary guitar accompaniment; and no longer have the priest face the altar but now the congregation. In other words, practices more compatible with Protestantism. 

At the time, I was a young chemical engineering sales managers for Nalco Chemical Company traveling across the United States and to several other countries, making a good living, the father of four prepubescent children, feeling one of my anchors had been jolted, only to be assigned to South Africa where my spiritual underpinning collapsed while working there in the era of South Africa apartheid. The world proved not to be the idealistic place in which I thought I had been blessed to live. 

This view appears in many missives on my blog (PeripateticPhilosopher.blogspot.com). Vatican II proved a shock to my belief system with my shallow dependence on Catholic pomp and circumstance. South Africa and its policy of apartheid compounded this devastation as did the country's relaxed morality finding me leaving this assignment as something of a broken man. 

I had pinned my beliefs on the paper tiger of rites and rituals; on the mesmerizing escape of compelling theatre; and not on a scrupulous probity of my belief system. Small wonder my ethical support system imploded when faced with South Africa apartheid. 

When life no longer makes sense to you, sense no longer guides your life. 

We think economics drive us, but it is ideas that do. We think we are our own person when it is the approval and respect of others that we need to feel so. 

The life of the mind can be a happy playground if we accept ourselves as we are along with our foibles, missteps, failures and crudities, our changing beliefs and priorities for then we have the capacity to flow with the merry dance of life not owning other people’s problems while discovering ways to accept others as they are found. 

Conversely, being hypercritical of others is a disease of the mind that denies such defects in oneself while seeing them intolerably flourishing in others, failing to realize that self-correction is not possible until we first deal with self-deception. 

The great challenge of Western culture is to breathe self-acceptance into the soul of postmodern man. 

If we don’t have the capacity to like ourselves, how can we be expected to like (accept) other people? Love of self is the precursor to the love of others. Love of self, however, is not the same as self-love, which is narcissistic and self-indulgent and spreads like metastasis to kill the soul. 

This segues to the matter of God. 

God has always been in the middle since the dawn of man. Nietzsche is credited with announcing, “God is dead!” The German philosopher saw Western society changing its focus from a spiritual to a material center; from the dominance of Christianity and the Church to the political and economic dominance of capitalism, commerce and industry. 

Intellectuals of the time thought they were replacing fables with facts, superstition with reason, but Nietzsche saw the new dominance of science as substituting one self-negating myth for another. If anything, he was intimating that the scientific myth, if anything, was worse. 

With the erosion of faith in God, confidence has inflated science to the ubiquitous hubris of man as master of all challenges. At least with God in the Middle, there was the sense of creative limits. Now with the dominance of scientific algorithms and replaceable data, society can create and seek the comfort and solace of robotics. While robotics do all the work, man can retreat into his cave of electronic splendor to live vacuously on automatic pilot, which now is considered a choice of lifestyle. 

As the reader points out, we are living on one small planet in a universe of billions of planets with the possibility that there are others planets like our own, which somehow hasn’t been either reassuring or consoling. 

Nietzsche posits the proposition that the myth of science implies that our existence is accidental and that we are simply organisms on an obscure planet on the periphery of mostly dead matter. This vision builds on and reinforces the sense of worthlessness that grew from our abandonment of the mystical powers of a God to the waning sense of exceptionalism of Homo sapiens. 

Worse yet, in the absence of the religious reassurance that the “goal of life” is a blissful afterlife, the lack of a “beyond” has had a significant if negative impact on the idea of “a life worth living.” How else can we explain the prominence of suicide, homicide and genocide in the midst of our daily lives? 

The German philosopher hoped for a rebirth of spirituality, but instead saw science leading to nihilism or a world lacking in human values. He urged his contemporaries to attack “the shadow of God,” our unrealistic religious expectations frustrated by scientific materialism and to promote humanism with human rather than supernatural or divine intervention. 

One century and two decades later, we have this: 

The shift from a homo-centric to a data-centric world view won’t be merely a philosophical revolution. It will be a practical revolution . . . The humanist idea that humans invented God was significant because it had far reaching practical implications. Similarly, the Datatist idea that ‘organisms are algorithms’ is significant due to its day to day practical consequences. Ideas change the world only when they change our behavior (Homo Deus, 2017. P. 395). 

NEXT: 

GOD-IN-THE-MIDDLE – PART THREE – “The Inner Self as Legacy to the Enlightenment.”