Interacting with the Machine

Next, in my description of the operation of the Machine:

The beast employs both body and available materials as a machine.  We interact with the world that surrounds us, and the world interacts with us.  The “we” can be ourselves identified with our bodies, or the “we” can be our consciousness apprehending our bodies.  Moreover, we can define the “us” in the preceding sentence as the “us” of the individual sense, or the “us” of collective humanity or its parts.  This interaction is immensely complex, but in the analysis of religion there is usually the opportunity to distill such matters into There Are Things to Be Done and There Are Things Not to Be Done.

Admittedly, There Are Things to Be Done and There Are Things Not to Be Done straddles the divide (good luck in elucidating it) between the practical and social norms of sentient beings and the ostensibly more refined conceptualizations of proper behavior that we associate with human or humanly-understandable morality.  What is most important in this discussion of the Machine is the difficult-to-elucidate-though-inescapable reality that neither human thought nor divine decree can be truly understood to confer absolute ratification or condemnation of any of the aspects of our world.

Of course, I will bolster this contention with the approach used by Jesus.  Jesus expects us to view matters of morality with a discerning eye—a task that is incompatible with blanket assertions that this or that moral actor or observable phenomenon is intrinsically good or intrinsically evil.  To describe humanity or the world as utterly wicked is merely to forfeit the role of moral contemplation.  There is work to be done in the service of morality, and the work is not to be done by sanctimoniously declaring ourselves to be utterly depraved without divine intervention.  As I said in the previous post, “Like all scenarios contrived by God, the larger context of our temptations—fueled most formidably by our urges—is to an extent understandable, and to an extent manageable.”

Management of moral scenarios is a living process that is connected to the Machine of the universe.  We can do some things more-or-less independently of the larger Machine, and in other scenarios we would be lying to ourselves to pretend we had such latitude.  Jesus was asked why in certain settings his disciples did not fast as expected, and Jesus’ answer merely described the essential impossibility of people acting consistently in any manner contrary to their natural inclinations.  When the bridegroom is present, the wedding celebration commences.  This is about human tendencies—it is as simple as that.

At another point Jesus describes as hypocritical some of the Jewish leaders who condemn certain infractions of the Law.  Jesus asks who will not lift a domestic animal out of a pit on the Sabbath.  His scenario encompasses even the possibility that the “lifter” might be responding reflexively or—better yet for our analysis—that “reflexively” and “deliberately” in any context might be melded fluidly and imperceptibly.  That is how moral scenarios really work.

And, as I have described above, moral scenarios occur in the contest of the Machine of existence—so described by me to avoid the unfortunate tendency to concoct an “existence” of our neatly-defined finitude imagined as it might exist in a lattice of (imagined) infinities.  Simultaneously, we must refrain from attributing infinite or effectively-infinite qualities to the elements of moral scenarios.  This is one of the problems with attributing essential depravity to humans in the course of our analyses (as distinct from the ultimately-unknowable status of any moral actor before God.)  If we call ourselves depraved in how we interact with the world, we unavoidably confer an undeserved moral quality to the world.  As we struggle to do the things we must—or think we must—we do so against onslaughts from the world that are incompatible with any notion that we are constantly victimizing everything around us, and we are not giving ourselves credit for what we do in the face of such onslaughts.

Jesus beseeches us to understand the tender parental care of God toward us.  He asks us to understand this in reflection upon on our care for our own children.  Jesus’ teaching in this regard would be meaningless if our interactions with our children were devoid of moral content.  Even Jesus’ condemnations of certain people’s behavior is often understandable only as a matter of relative proportion.  It is no credit to the believer to do no more than the “heathen” do, yet those self-same tendencies of the “heathen” toward family and social order are the template against which Jesus expects us to understand the care extended by our Heavenly Father.

It is not merely in the abstract that we must act upon the fact that, as I said above, “If we call ourselves depraved in how we interact with the world, we unavoidably confer an undeserved moral quality to the world.”  We are confronted daily by a version of ostensible morality that has preyed upon precisely that phenomenon, to the detriment of America and the world.  I am referring to the anti-government animus that infuses the current pseudo-populist right-wing movement here and abroad.

In America, this phenomenon is traceable in large part to the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and it is particularly regrettable in that the Reagan-worldview contentions of today do not faithfully mirror the beliefs of their founder.  Reagan believed in an essentially good and wholesome America.  His modern-day “followers” believe that anything essentially good and wholesome about America has become the secluded province of a contingent of “real Americans” who must “take the country back.”

The genesis of this tragic scenario—at least as far as Reagan is concerned—is found in the type of unbalanced moral scenario that fixates on one or a few essential infinities (in this case, essential “absolutes”) that can neither be ultimately defended nor—most importantly—prevented from infecting one’s appreciation of the other parts of the Machine.  Reagan’s simplistic worldview is unfortunate not merely in his contention that “government is the problem” (when he had lived through and participated in the United States’ government’s twentieth-century accomplishments that inspired much of the globe), but also in that he considered that the essential goodness of American society—a result in large measure of the people’s long history of fruitful participation in and interaction with their government—was an essential goodness that maintained some ethereal foundation of its own.

The horrid irony is in the fact that the most revered (though paradoxically effectively unchurched) president in the eyes of right-wing Christianity had a worldview that was essentially pagan (in the sense of worshipping elements of the world.)  This is an outgrowth of what I have described.  Reagan concluded that humanity’s interactions with government were essentially depraved (leading to his followers’ demonization of governmental agencies and employees, and a religiose fixation on their abolishment) and he therefore—in what operations of his mind we can only guess—was led to imbue American society with an essential goodness that might only be found in convenient imaginings.

Reagan’s world—to give just one example—was a world in which police officers might be trusted to do their duty responsibly without bureaucratic oversight (and in fact could do their duty better) because bureaucratic oversight is a phenomenon of government (which inevitably corrupts its participants.)  The government official responsible for overseeing some activity of the police (though that official might live in a modest house with some kids and a dog) is a functionary of the evil, devouring state, while the police officer striding through the community with a deadly weapon at his or her side and the presumption of legitimacy is perceived as some sort of social rather than governmental fixture.  After all, he or she has a modest house with some kids and a dog.

In Reagan’s view, the notion of the depravity of humanity applied with awesome force in the context of describing governmental overreach, and the contingent necessity of describing how society could continue to function while government was dismembered was found in Reagan’s romanticization of American society (particularly private-sector society.)  In short—as we would anticipate about any scenario we might assess dispassionately—depravity assigned conceptually to some realm has to be balanced by virtue assigned to another.  That is one of the outgrowths of the notion of the essential depravity of persons—it leads inevitably to the assignment of undeserved moral elevation to the accursed world.