Managing Our Civilizational Burden
This morning I received an email from my friend Cynthia Winton-Henry that got me thinking about what to do when we get bad news. Cynthia’s bad news had come via a conversation in which she had been told about the vile anti-Semitic text that Martin Luther wrote. For a mystic Christian who understands herself to be inclusive, loving and deeply committed to rich planetary futures this was understandably a blow.
The question for us all is what to do about the terror of civilization? This is not an easy answer and I have tried in various ways to answer it for students of history and futures who also get overwhelmed. How can we feel comfortable in our own skins when we come to know that our privilege (white privilege) is premised on a wide range of violences that we find in our pasts, presents and futures? After all, we are nice: aren’t we?
Ultimately, I find some balm for this pain in exploring the ethics of the wound and the debt that we incur when we start to work with our pasts, presents and futures. Any well informed, conscious and honest person today must acknowledge that our ancestors committed many violences in the past to their own people, to others such as Africans, Aboriginals, Jews, Indigenous Americans, Tibetans, Adivasii, Mulsims, Christians, Armenians, (the list is endless). On top of that we have perpetrated innumerable violences on our non-human family too and also on the earth itself. The same is true for the present where our world is a flowing litany of violences. This is true for the future also, as we have colonized the future with our violences.
But is that all we have to say? I think not. If we wish to succumb to this story there is nothing more for us to say or do other than live diminished lives. I prefer to accept the wounds as goads to living better despite the violences, doing more for the world, loving more, dancing more. I also believe there is much we can do in small ways to redress this situation. The three wounds incur three debts. A debt to our pasts, our presents and our futures. We are not simply passive victims of history and our birth!
Each debt calls us to speak up and honestly grapple with the wound. First, we must acknowledge paradox. Martin Luther was certainly a psycho-anti-Semite but he also broke the hold of the repressive Catholic church and wrote glorious melodies and wove rich spiritual meaning into a largely bankrupt Christianity. In addition, he opened up a world for thought and soul searching to negotiate new meanings. Without Luther my hero Sebatian Castellio (I wrote my Honours on him) would never have penned his wonderful book De Arte Dubitandi (On the Art of Doubting) in which he advocates for religious tolerance on the basis that we cannot know, with certainty, the Truth in a person’s heart.
Secondly, we must honestly work to reveal the past in all its darkness and glory for we (paradox again) are collectively capable of the best and worst things. Thirdly, we must understand that the past is political — as is memory. We must tackle this issue head on by being critical friends of the past. In fact, critique is the tool for freeing us from submission to the shackles of dominant knowledge frames.
The same is true for both our presents and our futures. Paradox, dark and light and critique must come into play so that we can hold our own. Two things stand out for me here — one is that love is a powerful critical tool (cf Erich Fromm) and that we can activate a critical spirituality in the service of an integrated vision and celebration of what we are as complex people caught in the vortex of trauma and creative destruction that is all about us today. Take one example. We are at a point in history when more people than ever before are literate and educated. Despite this we so easily fall prey to fear and loathing, and vote in the most stupid, dangerous and mediocre of leaders.
Yet, for all that, we are also brilliantly recasting our lives and our planetary narratives through countless acts of love, resistance and cultural creativity. Luther was a product of his time, as are we. I wouldn’t want to live in any other era than this. There is so much going on and it is terrible! Yet, inspiring in equal measure. The only way out is to call the dark out and work to repay our debts to pasts, presents and futures in our own unique ways.
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I saw within Its depth how It conceives
all things in a single volume bound by Love
of which the universe is the scattered leaves.
Dante’s Divine Comedy
