The "Bridge to Being" Blog

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The religious – secular divide in the West is just one social fracture among many that need to be healed as we all face the challenge of the Islamist jihad against liberal civilization. 

Sectarian differences between the religious sub-communities of the West (think of the “culture wars” between so called “fundamentalists” and “liberals”) are every bit as debilitating as the divide between the rigidly religious and militant secular. These social/political fractures have sometimes been conflated to a ridiculous extent.  For example, I have heard secular and religious liberals accuse “fundamentalists” of being the “American Taliban”.  In almost every case, this is a case of rhetorical excess clouding perception of reality.  We don’t read a lot about the Pentecostal beheadings of Episcopalians lately.   

The looming existential challenge posed by the jihad will continue to damage us directly and indirectly.  It will grow in intensity and danger until we choose to crush it. A threat of this scope and substance demands much more active and heartfelt cooperation than the bickering classes appear to be ready to give. 

Yet, our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, those who disapprove of them, the New Age spiritual hedonists, and those who disapprove of them, the leftists, classic liberals, our fervently fundamentalist Christians and our most secular neocons, paleoliberals, and conservatives, and the moderate Muslim refugees among us … really, all of us are in jeopardy. 

It seems that our shared interest in survival isn’t yet deep and wide enough to fuel a robust, long-term countermovement to save and protect Western civilization. The situation sometimes to me is like one of those prison break movies, where the escaping convicts briefly unify for that fleeting moment when the walls are brought down, but their momentary cooperation almost immediately breaks down into that every prisoner for Number One ethos.

Alliances of convenience tend to fracture under extreme duress or when that doesn’t happen right away, they erode over time.  Especially when we are faced by a long term threat like the jihad, our civilization needs more than a utilitarian, any-port-in-a-storm defense. If we humans are to accomplish the things necessary to avert the next Dark Age, we’ll need to close ranks and fight for the light. Alliances of convenience need to be replaced by patterns of cooperation founded in deeply shared values

Clearly, we need a robust, deeply held common ethos that supports the maintenance and fierce defense of liberal democracy.  I believe that this project is both necessary and realistically possible, provided we are able to elevate the status of the values and moral precepts that we share, and to sharply diminish the status of the issues over which we differ.  This will require many of us to think about the “accommodation” issues differently, many of us much to think about them more clearly, and others to simply stop bickering.

I am now persuaded that the necessary bridge between the secular and religious ethics of civilized life can be located in a common understanding of evil. 

Without an understanding and acceptance of the reality and significance of evil, and without a definition of evil sufficiently narrow for us to hone in on the real threats, our species is going to be in for a very hard time indeed. We need a unifying conception so deep and clear that we can reach substantial agreement on the core good and set aside the rest as minor differences.  And we need it yesterday.

Even without the jihad, we were facing unprecedented technological challenges calling us to preserve our essential humanity or face human “obsolescence”.  In that limited sense, the jihad’s challenge to our values may prove to be a good thing, provided we can rise to the challenge.

But this discourse isn’t about evil as such; it is about finding and repairing the common foundations of the good.   I believe that any confrontation with large scale evil is capable of initiating moral insight though a process of catastrophic clarification.  And I am persuaded that we are able to arrive at a common vision of the good by "reverse engineering" from a common understanding of evil.

Just a few months after eleven searing and transformative days in Manhattan near Ground Zero on and after 9-11-01, I was asked to participate in a panel discussion about evil.  The panel included a Superior Court Judge, a Buddhist monk and a prominent Christian theologian.  

It was an opportunity for me to reexamine two world views – that secular humanism and religion -- and to reflect on the larger lessons pf 9-11.  It quickly became apparent to me that the project of finding a bridge between the secular and religious world views will prove vitally important for the future of our species.

Here are some excerpts from my part of that discussion.

In the current issue of Scientific American, Richard Dawkins makes this observation: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” 

 

Perfectly stated, professor D.  An attitude of value neutrality – Dawkins writ large - still prevails in the academy, permeated by various forms of moral relativism.  The fact that nihilism is afoot in the larger culture is not unrelated.  To battle nihilism from a platform teetering on a foundation of moral relativism is awkward at best.  It’s like trying to swat flies while balanced on the back of a chair. 

There was a sea change for most Americans on September 11^th last year.  The sudden appearance of massive, purposeful evil on one’s doorstep pierces denial and moral ambiguity; it cuts through the fog of cultural and moral relativism like a flare on a night battlefield. The events in Manhattan of 9-11 revealed an important truth.  Evil’s appearance illuminates and calls forth the good in us because our ability to recognize and identify evil illuminates and informs our ability to recognize and identify the good.

 

… [A] common human vision of what is truly evil, a vision of the universal evil, if you will, at the same time, can expose a common vision of the good.… When purposeful human malevolence looms, we are threatened on the immediate physical level, but we are also attacked on the level of our deepest values. The confrontation with true evil calls us back to our core values. 

 

I share the conviction of those humanists and religionists alike who believe that there is a universal good that transcends our sectarian perspectives. For me it begins with life affirmation, leads to affirmation of conscious being, and proceeds to reverence for all creation. Conscious being presents at least three powerful, life enhancing capabilities: compassionate empathy, creative innovation, and foresight. This suggests the moral purpose of conscious being as well as its provenance.

 

In this way, consciousness and life affirmation necessarily lead to creation affirmation, though the deep understanding of the universality of the processes of creation, of the roots of life and consciousness in those processes, and of the incarnation of ongoing creation in the human mind.  Life affirmation, respect for conscious being and reverence for creation are the innate affirmations of the enlightened being. 

 

For the theistic religions, these three affirmations combine to form the heart of the human -- deity relationship.  For humanists, they make up the foundation stones of the core human agenda.

 

Our universal values are protected within almost any civilized enclave more than in a brutal state of nature, [and] not all social conditions and regimes support these values equally. We require the robust infrastructure of a civilization dedicated to protect life, consciousness, and creation.

 

The classic evil mindset is characterized by an active opposition to life affirmation, opposition to the affirmation of then integrity of conscious being (i.e., individual human dignity) and indifference to any reverence of creation, especially in human creative expression.  Evil action rises to a major threat in any serious, purposeful challenge to civilization and the core values that civilization is designed to protect.  [At its best, civilization promotes life, human dignity and the creative enterprise; it is no coincidence that the current atavistic jihad is aimed at just these “Western” values.]

 

It is my hope and prediction that the spiritual significance of creation by human agency in all its forms, the innate holiness of the human creative enterprise as it serves and enhances life and conscious being, will be at center stage in the spiritual practice and ethics of the 21^st century. For now, human creation seems to be the forgotten stepchild of many traditional religious communities.

 

The takeaway points can be summarized this way:

Where moral relativism is common, real evil is frequently missed in the social cacophony. It tends to be denied by the relativists, yet over-identified by fundamentalists. Evil represents a purposeful, realistic threat to the core goodness of the human enterprise, as broadly defined. The elements goodness at the most general level are captured in the affirmation and integration of three universal values: life affirmation (especially human life), respect for conscious intelligence (especially ours and its ethical, esthetic and creative capabilities), and reverence for creation (including those human activities, avocations and creative accomplishments that affirm life and conscious intelligence).  So the opposite of good is not evil.  The opposite of good is the bad. The opposite of evil is the holy in the most inclusive sense of that term.  I have come to believe that our species’ life-and-intelligence-affirming creative acts are inherently holy.  This is why the creative ones are among the first to flee an evil regime. Their flight is diagnostic.  And I believe that the term holy can be understood a special sense (as that which is worthy of the highest human reverence), a sense that transcends secular and religious world views. 

I know that making sweeping generalizations about religious and secular cultures are problematic.

It can’t be helped. 

Secular ethics tend to assign a high value of creativity and creative achievement as an inherent good, yet religions tend not to do so as much, except perhaps within the confines of the needs of religious institutions (cathedral art and liturgical music, for example).  This is a key area in which religions can and should be enriched by the secular-spiritual dialogue.  

Religions tend to be suspicious of heroic self assertion, often opting to reject the heroic altogether (particularly in the modern and post modern eras) except in the limited context of heroic moral sacrifice. But the secular traditions, especially the older ones, are much more comfortable rejoicing in the heroic accomplishments of the entrepreneur, the inventor or explorer, and yes, even the successful warrior.  Again, both cultural perspectives will gain from a fruitful dialogue.

In its most dogmatic forms, religion tends to disparage science while, in its most dogmatic forms secularist thinking tends to disparage transcendence in all its forms.