Beginner's Mind - August 7th, 2007
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03:13 am
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Ahmadinejad's Gift
Ahmadinejad's Gift
The President of Iran has given us a gift. In his May 2006 letter to President Bush he identfied the basic issue of the culture war. He refers to the "contradictions that exist in the international arena" and goes on to say, ". . . the Almighty God sent His prophets with miracles and clear signs to guide the people and show them divine signs and purify them from sins and pollutions. And He sent the Book and the balance so that the people display justice and avoid the rebellious."
This is advocacy of rule by the Book, by the clergy, by authoritarian religion. It stands over against the form of rule used in the West since 1648, which is rule by conscience, by reason, by negotiation and democracy.
There are some people in our society who think like he does. They advocate a return to rule by the book rather than conscience. They have no confidence in conscience; they have no confidence in self. They have what we call "a negative self-image." As a group we refer to them as "fundamentalists", "evangelicals", or "the Christian right". But even though they think like mullahs and act like mullahs, there is one big difference between them and mullahs: they are separated from political power by the establishment clause of our Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion ... .”
The Establishment Clause is one expression of the prevailing (liberal) view in the West that all claims that authority comes "from God" are deluded and inevitably produce tyranny.
In the West, this thinking was put in place in the sixteenth century. The Protestant Reformation gave us the "benefit" of a sudden outbreak of violent competing claims to Divine Authority. These conflicts were not with enemies outside Europe (e.g., the Moslems), but among formerly amicable segments of European society itself. The amount of death and destruction produced by them was so great that purely pragmatic traditional political leaders concluded that all claims to Divine Authority are not very important for maintaining virtue and civil order in society. So, in a series of political decisions, they disenfranchised religious authorities.
This was the transition in our history from "rule by the book" to "rule by conscience". It was a fateful and evolutionary transition that in the course of history only goes one way. It is also the essence of "secularism". Once a people realizes that their conscience is competent to guide personal and social morality, they will never go back to blind obedience to those who claim divine authority.
To summarize the next 400 years of our history we would have to say that the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) did eliminate one false solution to the problem of human anxiety and violence, but it did not eliminate all of them. Our forebears did not realize that the key transition of Westphalia was not from one particular instrument of political authority to another (religion vs. reason), but from one "instrument" of self-exploration to another (self-hypnosis versus staying awake).
As soon as secularism was introduced in the West, the cry arose to rely on the rule of "reason". And while science produced great advancements in knowledge during "the Enlightenment", that period of time also produced the unthinkable violence and injustices of the Colonial Period, and culminated in the most violent episode of human history, the Holocaust and World War II. Clearly, the elimination of religion from politics had not solved the problem of violence.
But in Europe in the twentieth century there was never a widespread call to return to the pre-Westphalia reliance on religion to solve the problems brought to the surface by the killing of 50 million people in a period of twenty years. This was because Westphalia marked a no-turning-back transition in method of self-exploration, not a simple re-arrangement of political institutions. And so, from the end of World War I to the end of World War II, an immense learning took place in the West, and in international arrangements the transition was from "the Carthaginian Peace" of the Treaty of Versailles to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the founding of the United Nations.
So, here we are, at the start of the twenty-first century, clearly not finished with the problems of human anxiety and violence. But the key point of conflict is between the methods to solve them. Ahmadinejad's method and that of cultural conservativism is the self-hypnosis offered by religion. The other method is to continue to explore ourselves.
The Islamic philosopher Sayyid Qutb, for example, looks deep inside himself and only finds "a hideous schizophrenia" between the divine and the worldly. He sees that people are miserable, anxious and skeptical, sinking into idiocy, insanity and crime. They long for an integration of self that once had been found in the old code of Moses, with its laws for diet, dress, marriage, sex and everything else, and had enfolded the divine and the worldly into a single concept, which was the worship of God. And he notes that such integration has been restored to the world in the Sharia of Islam.
The other view of Qutb's "hideous schizophrenia" is that it is the outcome of certain child-rearing practices. The non-integrated self ". . . may be traced back to a considerable discrepancy in the early formative stages of the individual between his bio-psychological needs and the material and psychological care, attention, and affection available during the relevant times." [Balint, 1968] Where you have consistently positive and supportive child-rearing practices, you have an integrated adult self. When you have harsh and contradictory child-rearing practices, you produce a non-integrated self.
And so the solution to the problem of" hideous schizophrenia" is not the all-encompassing sedative of authoritarian religion, but a mix: temporary sedatives for crisis intervention (Prozac is still used, but we do not legislate an official national sedative) and then all the instrumentalities of self-exploration: science, education, rational law, therapy, and meditation.
The difference between these two solutions to human anxiety is the heart of the conflict of the present age.
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