Our culture is complex and fast moving. We have a sharp eye for authoritarianism and control in their direct and obvious forms. We are, in ironic contrast, almost completely blind to the huge control and subtle authoritarianism of consumerist image culture. On the one hand, we are warriors for the freedom view and on the other, simultaneously, are absolute disciples of the God of Quantity. Our crisp cynicism and compliant greed have meant that we have unwittingly severed huge regions of the invisible tissue which holds community and civility together. Our society is addicted to and incessantly nourishes and inflates the spectacular. The invisible tissue which sustains real belonging is never spectacular; it is quiet and unostentatious. In order to survive as a planet and as a society, we need to reawaken and retrieve these lost and forgotten capacities of ours. Such virtues may heal our absence from our true nature.
One of these quiet virtues is honour. Contemporary psychology and spirituality speak of “honouring your gifts,” etc.; the focus is inevitably subjective and sometimes narcissistic. Honour is a broader and deeper presence. The Irish word “úaisleacht” is lovely. Úaisleacht means “nobility”; it also carries echoes of honour, dignity, and poise. A person can be wild, creative, and completely passionate, and yet maintain úaisleacht. This is in no way an argument for some kind of code of honour; such codes inevitably become external and arrogant. It is more a plea for the retrieval of a sense of honour. This reawakening would gradually ensure the lessening of our tabloid convention and obsession. The sense of honour would also begin to reveal the vast fissures in and the hollowness of the huge kingdom of image and PR. Television might cease to be a soap kingdom. At evening, the empty screen might indeed become some kind of genuine mirror for our real concerns. Some of the huge questions which now confront us might actually begin to come alive in our homes, to replace the pursuit of fake questions which further nothing but gossip and passivity. Imagine a programme called “The Awkward Question,” which would genuinely pursue many of the fundamental questions that the media avoid. A sense of honour in the way we relate to each other would invite the return of respect; the recognition that every person is worthy of respect. No one should have to earn respect. It could also mean a reawakening of our sense of courtesy. There is something very fine about a courteous person. Our times are often vulgar.
Compassion is another such quiet virtue. There is a huge crisis of compassion in contemporary society. This crisis has nothing to do with our inability to feel sympathy for others. It has more to do with the numbing of our compassion because of our image exposure to so many of the horrors that are happening around the world. We feel overwhelmed and then hopeless. It is important to remember that a proportion of our numbness is convenient. We avoid the harrowing images or allow ourselves to be immediately overwhelmed. Most of us continue our privileged lives within our complacent cocoons. Outside of the normal pain and difficulties of our lives and those of our friends, we rarely come into contact with the hungry, the destitute, and the oppressed. Their convenient absence from our lives means that we can never follow through and make the connection between the way we live and the awful lives to which our more helpless and vulnerable sisters and brothers are condemned. Not far from any of us are the poor, the homeless, the prisoners, the old people’s homes, and the addicts. Because we are privileged, we have great power. We have a duty to speak out for those who have no voice or are not being listened to. The practice of compassion would show us that no sister or brother deserves to be excluded and pushed onto the bleak margins where life is sheer pain and endurance. We should at least begin to have some conversations with these members of our human family. It would open our eyes. When our compassion awakens, our responsibility becomes active and creative. When we succumb to indifference, we blaspheme against the gifts that we could never earn, that have been so generously given to us. The duty of privilege is absolute integrity.
Hope is another quiet virtue. We live in a culture where information is relentlessly meted out to us in abstract particles. So much of our information is a series of facts about how disastrous everything is. When we listen to the voices of doom, we become helpless and complicit in bringing the doom nearer. It is always astounding to see how willing humans are to give away their power and become disciples of helplessness. This accounts for the chromatic cynicism which reigns in our times. Cynicism is very interesting. Behind the searing certainty of the cynic, there is always, hidden somewhere, disappointed longing. It takes quite a good deal of energy to be a committed cynic. Time and again, life offers opportunities and possibilities. Time cannot help being a door into eternity. Within even the most cynical heart, eternity is a light sleeper. It takes considerable energy continually to quell the awakening invitation. Argument with a cynic merely serves this sliced certainty. A more subtle approach that addresses, not the argument, but the residue of disappointed longing can bring change. Our world is too beautiful and our human eternity too magnificent that we should succumb to hopelessness and cynicism. The human heart is a theatre of longings. Under every hardened and chromatic surface, be it system, syndrome, or corporation, there is a region of longing that dreams as surely of awakening to a new life of freedom and love as winter does of the springtime.
There are many other quiet virtues like care, sympathy, patience, confidence, loyalty. A new sense of community could gradually surface if we called upon some of these virtues to awaken. The great religious traditions advocate these as ideals. Increasingly, the custodianship and representation of these traditions have fallen into the hands of frightened functionaries who can only operate through edict and prescription. Few of them have the sensibility and imagination to address our longings in a way that respects our complexity and wildness of soul. They are unable to invite our sense of freedom and creativity to awaken and begin the new journey towards belonging. We need to take back our own power and exercise our right to inhabit in a creative and critical way the traditions to which we belong. We have allowed the functionaries to persuade us that they have the truth and that they own our traditions. A great tradition is a spacious and wonderful home for our nobility of soul and desperation of longing. We need to exercise our belonging in a new and critical way.