A Thousand Shards of Glass

Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute . . .

Man is the Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion – several of them.

Mark Twain, ‘The Lowest Animal’ (1897)

In 1999 the anthropologist Kris L. Hardin wrote, ‘Increasingly in the United States a large percentage of the American people are adopting an attitude that says, I shall see it when I believe it. This is not only tragic, it is dangerous.’

At first glance this statement seems merely a clever play on words but upon reflection it becomes apparent that Dr. Hardin was concerned as to how a society should proceed and evolve when an increasing percentage of the population disregards facts and evidence that do not coincide with their beliefs and superstitions. This is dangerous indeed, for a society can absorb a small percentage of such ignorance, but cannot endure if a majority of people hold to such views.

The question becomes self-evident. How do we communicate with each other if facts and evidence are no longer a serious part of the discourse, and are replaced instead with uninformed opinions which are used not to convince but, rather, to trick and coerce? In such an environment how does one reach an informed position or build consensus or even know which questions to ask?

We have seen and heard of such things throughout history. Institutional ignorance once demanded that Galileo recant that which he had discovered to be true. However, despite Galileo’s enforced retraction and the Inquisition’s banning of his writings, the fact still remained that the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around. This is the fundamental problem with ‘extreme’ believers throughout human history. They are almost always obstructive in the evolution of thought and when proven wrong they become more self-righteous, demanding ever more obedience, not for the sake of knowledge but for their own power.

America in 2012 is awash in extreme beliefs and believers. There are some who believe that vitamins can cure everything and those who believe that Evolution is a lie. Some believe, without a doubt, and in spite of evidence to the contrary, that Fox News is really news, or that global warming is a hoax. We see people who steer their lives based on the belief that the world will end on a specific day and others who believe that Newt Gingrich has something to teach us about morality. There are those who believe that no matter how ill someone becomes they should just wait, pray and God will cure. Wouldn’t it be nice to think so? I wish them luck. Some believers think that President Obama is not an American, while others think Donald Trump matters. Many still believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks of September 11 or that the United States went to Iraq to ‘free’ the Iraqi people.

And then there are the varied ‘devout’ among us who are not content with their faith alone, but also feel compelled to inform others of ‘God’s Truth’ as they see it, in order to save the rest of us. We have Scientologists who believe in L. Ron Hubbard (enough said) and Mormons who believe in some very curious things that may, at first, seem humorous, until of course one of them is running for the presidency of the United States. The trouble we have in America is not intolerance but the tolerance of the intolerant and intolerable by the enlightened.

We have so many believers now that it is hard to get away from them. They have injected themselves into business and public policy. They attempt to take books deemed inappropriate from library shelves and then try to place creationist doctrine (Intelligent Design) in the classroom to give a ‘balanced’ counterpoint to Evolution, never accepting that one is predicated on evidence while the other is simply belief sold as truth. And then there are the pharmacists and doctors who believe that they can deny a woman certain drugs or treatment because of their own beliefs. For those kinds of persons I wish a number of things. Luck isn’t one of them.

The believers come to your home uninvited so as to convince you of their faith (or product) and to remind you, with a touch of fire and brimstone, that even though there are many beliefs, theirs alone is the ‘true path’. All extreme believers possess this irony, whether they realize it or not.

Even though some religious doctrine instructs that we should not judge lest we be judged, the extreme American believers are rabid judges who are judging others all of the time. Even worse, many are selective moralists of the type that argue for the rights of a fetus on the one hand and for capital punishment on the other. This is the kind of moral jujitsu that is practiced not by critical thinkers, but by zealots.

You can always tell an American extremist for they all use the word ‘but’ in their initially rational discussions, which go something like this:

‘Did you hear about Dr. so-and-so, who was shot in the back of his head in his church yesterday?’ (This happened by the way.)

‘Oh yes, it’s a terrible thing and just think of his poor children and wife, it’s just terrible,’ (get ready now) ‘but you know he was an abortion doctor. He was in a dangerous job. He was involved in the killing of a lot of children.’ (Yes, someone did say this to me.)

‘What he was doing was legal and they were not children according to the law and you aren’t justifying murder, are you?’

‘Oh no, I would never condone murder, but’ (yes, again) ‘I’m just saying.’

It seems that the believing extremists in America and elsewhere have similar doctrines that demand the relinquishing of moderation and reason. What all of the extremist Christians, Jews, Muslims and others have in common is their fear and hatred of reason itself. They have, whether they know it or not, adopted a portion of Martin Luther’s ‘Sermon on the Gospel of Saint John’ where that old extremist himself preached, ‘Whoever wants to be a Christian must be intent on silencing the voice of reason.’

And here we arrive at the crux of some kinds of power. It is hard to hold power when people think for themselves and engage in that sin of sins, questioning. And yet, it is odd to think that the great god in the sky would give to human beings the ability to reason but condemn them when they choose to employ it. It’s confusing, isn’t it? But then it would seem that only the ‘enlightened’ are confused by such contradictions and hypocrisy. Extreme believers are never confused and that’s what makes them so dangerous to a civilized or developing society.

In America these believers are increasingly involved in politics, overtly and covertly altering public policy, imposing their beliefs in a way that affects people’s lives, for the ‘true’ American believers, like their brethren elsewhere, want you to believe as well, with the proviso that what you believe is what they believe.

The believers I speak of gut a society from within and always follow a tried and tested pattern. To get more attention and to solidify loyalty, there must be enemies of their faith and of the state, who they can point to and blame for the perceived societal ills of the moment. It’s the Jews one century and homosexuals the next, or immigrants, or people who do not look the same or talk or pray the same. Society becomes fractionalized to the point that the people eventually look upon each other with suspicion and fear or as mere commodities to be exploited. It is fatiguing, I know, but there is a cure. It is doubt.

There are the searchers among us, the enlightened, and they are from every walk of life. They question their beliefs and retain an open mind. Their morality is predicated not by a list of institutional rules followed without question, but upon a sense of social justice, knowledge and inquiry. These questioners take seriously the Socratic dictum that ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’ or the aphorism ‘Know thyself ’. They realize, profoundly so, that to possess doubt is to be open to the world and to have blind faith is, well, to be blind.

The enlightened are attempting to find grace, not in the hereafter, but in the here and now, in the lives and struggles of the people in this life, and from that knowledge they hone their beliefs with an informed perception of the world as it is while also working for a better world that might be. They epitomize Gandhi’s suggestion to ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world’.

These enlightened searchers come from every background and philosophy. They are the best of us. They are priests and nuns, Atheists and Muslims, Buddhists, Jews and Hindus. They are shopkeepers and presidents, street sweepers and bakers and maybe even the old woman you passed on the street today. They are large in numbers and comprise the most inclusive of fraternities. The price of admission is a modicum of doubt and a mind poised to change based upon the evidence. To do otherwise is to submit to the tragic self-limitation that George Orwell alluded to in 1984 when he wrote, ‘Orthodoxy is not thinking, not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’

This is a remarkable world in spite of the difficulties we all face and the United States can be a remarkable country, but not by power and belief alone. To embrace doubt is to be freed from suffocating ideologies that promote fear and do little more than hold back people’s potential and, dare I say, joy.

I prefer to be conscious, to question and to be with people who think, search and discover. All these things are important, but really it is also so much more fun to let go of the arrogant view that we know all, and thus knowing all, need not go further. For me, I wish to see what is around the next corner. I love surprises.