Читать книгу The Myth of the Shiksa and Other Essays - Edwin H. Friedman - Страница 12

How do you pervert the third basic concept of salvation?

By introducing political rhetoric.

I have no idea what you mean.

Unlike omnipotence and omniscience, human beings can achieve immortality. Not as individuals, of course, but collectively, as a species. The Holy One knew that way back in the garden.

I suppose that is why he banished us.

But it was part of the process. The co-creator stuff. There are no natural limits to the growth of the soul, to maturing processes. And to the extent each generation functions in a responsible manner, the communities formed in the next generation will be that much richer for it. The process is limitless.

And by maturity, you mean what you said earlier, the capacity — or the willingness — to take responsibility for one’s own emotional being and destiny.

Correct, but that means not blaming. It means understanding that the toxicity of most hostile environments is proportional to the response of the organism, not to the toxic factors within it. It also means understanding that the conditions for trauma reside within the emotional processes of the family or the community rather than within the event. It means accepting the fact that forgiving or at least not being reactive to situations is more freeing than vindication. It means understanding that cutoffs between people do more fundamental damage than the initiating hurts.

And those are all internal factors, as you said before.

Internal and eternal. They have to do with the soul, which is the proper concern of both religion and therapy.

So?

So I seduce humanity into focusing outside instead. I have three favorite displacement issues. Abuse, which I mentioned; carcinogens is the second; and the environment is the third.

Those are honest matters of concern.

I didn’t say they weren’t. I called them “displacement” issues, not false issues. I use them to keep people from focusing on their own salvation. I used to use the communists, but carcinogens and cholesterol work just as well. And as far as the environment goes, it is absolutely the ultimate in arrogance for humankind to think that they can destroy or save the planet. The earth will survive, even if it has to do in the human species in order to, and then it will simply start over again. If you don’t believe me, pay a visit to Mount Saint Helens. The evolution of the human species does not depend on the survival of the planet; it can take care of itself. Immortality for the human species depends on overcoming its tendency to adapt to its own immaturity.

But isn’t helping one’s fellow, unfortunate creatures a form of maturity?

Absolutely. And there are hundreds of public and private agencies designed to accomplish that. There are no other institutions, however, aside from religion and therapy, that are designed for promoting the evolution of the soul. By introducing political rhetoric into salvation, I succeed in destroying their distinctiveness, and thus thwart their potential for promoting immortality. In addition, political rhetoric makes everyone get too serious, and they lose their capacity for playfulness and, therefore, perspective. Remember what I did to Marxist art? “Social realism,” ughhh. Political rhetoric makes everyone more intense, it increases the efforts to will one another to change, and it enlarges the possibilities for alienation and polarization.

We’re back to black and white alternatives.

Right. And most delightful for me, introducing political rhetoric into religion and therapy allows me to hoard all the devilishness for myself.

Well, I don’t know what would happen to religion if it tried to get more playful. Salvation is pretty serious.

Let me correct you. What seriouses up salvation is trying to save others. Saving oneself is not nearly as grim. But I haven’t finished. By introducing political rhetoric into religion and therapy, I swing the power to the dependent, to the victims, to the recalcitrant. The adaptation of the community goes towards weakness, not strength. And comfort triumphs over challenge, thus weakening the immunological response.

Why does that follow?

Because political rhetoric encourages everyone to lower their threshold for pain. It supports a quick-fix attitude. Haven’t you ever noticed that in any counseling session or at any community meeting the persons most apt to mention “trust,” “sensitivity,” “confidentiality,” “togetherness,” and “consensus” are always the ones who want others to adapt to them?

These concepts have great communal potential.

They used to, but through the word “empathy” I have succeeded in turning them into abuses of power.

You’re taking credit for empathy?

It’s probably the most regressive concept I have ever employed.

Regressive? It’s the foundation of many modern approaches to relationships.

But it makes feelings more important than boundaries. It’s a very late concept, you know. The word is not even in the original edition of the Oxford English Dictionary published in 1931.

I believe it was originally intended as a translation of a German word in the field of aesthetics.

Came over into English about 1922, actually. At first I didn’t pay too much attention to it, but then I began to realize that by getting everyone to substitute empathy for compassion — feeling in supposedly being better than feeling with — I saw that I could generally frustrate the Creator’s plan for an evolving response to challenge because everyone would stay focused on one another instead of themselves. It wasn’t until after World War II, however, that I really succeeded in getting empathy into common parlance.

But how does the matter of feelings connect up with immortality ?

Through the concept of immunology. As some of your more recent biologists have come to realize, immunology is not basically about outside toxic agents; it’s basically about the inner condition of integrity. As I said earlier, everything that is true about immunology is true about self. In fact, the immunological system has been defined as the capacity to distinguish self from nonself. It does not come equipped at birth like a woman’s ovaries; it learns from its experience with adversity. Moreover, organisms that lack an immunological system cannot experience love.

Because?

Because without one it is impossible to touch another member of your own species and still retain your identity. The way the Creator set it up, when organisms of the same species that lack immunological systems even reach a certain point of proximity, one will dis-^uintegrate,” in other words, lose its integrity, because of the presence of the other.

“Whenever you find two peas in a pod, one will begin to shrivel.”

That puts it very well. But there is also an opposite form of dis-integration, the autoimmune response, which occurs when loss of self allows anxiety to flood the organism.

Hawks and doves. Pentagons can’t be allowed to make the final decisions. But I still don’t see where empathy comes in.

Look at it this way. What all pathogenic elements in life have in common is they lack self-regulation. This is equally true about viruses, malignant cells, substance abusers, chronically troubling members of families and institutions, and totalitarian nations. Now this characteristic is always the ground of two further attributes. One, organisms that lack self-regulation will be invasive of the space of others. Not because they want to be; it’s just their nature, a byproduct of what they are missing. Two, organisms that lack self-regulation can’t learn from their experience.

That fits with what you were saying earlier about trying to will insight into the unmotivated.

It’s much deeper than that. Despite their essential lack of self-regulation, pathogens are really not capable of producing pathology on their own. There must also be a lack of self-regulation in the host. Remember what Churchill said about how World War II got started?

Because “the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous.”

Exactly. You see, pathogens seem to have a stamina that is hard to muster up in the virtuous. But what I realized is that it’s not really stamina; what keeps them going without let-up is lack of self-control. And the only power that can force a mutation in the invasive organism is the exercise of self-regulation in the invaded organism. The major nutrient of terrorism, after all, whether we are talking about families or the family of nations, is an unreasonable faith in reasonableness. What empathy has given me is a way to deceive people into avoiding responsibility for themselves, while I seem to side with the angels.

This is insidious. You’re almost suggesting that the focus on empathy nourishes evil.

What do you mean “suggesting”? Look how I’ve gotten most Christians to interpret Jesus. His challenging statements far outnumber his comforting ones. Yet, if you go into any church in America beleaguered by pathogenic members and tell the leaders to force the irresponsible members of the community to change or leave, they respond, “empathically” it’s not the Christian thing to do.

But all belief systems are open to interpretation.

It has nothing to do with Christianity. Synagogues also tolerate pathogenic elements because it’s not the “Christian” thing to do. Why, I have got it to the point where people are absolutely tyrannized by the sensitivities of others. As long as I can keep everyone (especially parents) thinking about how they should feel for others rather than how they should prevent others from invading their “host,” no one will take the kind of stands that force the unmotivated to mature.

And I suppose you would also say that such a beneficent stance is ultimately harmful to the organism one is feeling for since it deprives it of the challenging experience of transformation.

It is totally impossible for either leaders or healers to be a transforming presence in an atmosphere that values empathy over responsibility.

Then political correctness also was your idea.

Not exactly, but I immediately saw its potential for inducing a general failure of nerve. Evolution, after all, requires leaders who can stand apart from the general anxiety of the day. In fact, leaders (and parents) function as the immunological systems of their institutions. When they are well-defined, the pathogens are nowhere as quick to multiply, or, in many cases, even to form. But when leaders fail to be present, or function as an anxious presence (which is the parallel to an autoimmune response) the system cannot maintain its integrity.

You know, I think you have been talking out of both sides of your mouth. Which side are you on, anyway?

Are you accusing me of using a forked tongue?

That is a definite possibility.

Fine, don’t take my word for it. But how are you going to explain all the perversity?

You want me to see people as possessed, rather than conflicted.

It’s more scientific. Complexes, syndromes, disorders, they are just models. They have no substantive reality.

You mean compared to demons?

Just because an idea is learned doesn’t prevent it from functioning as a superstition.

Can’t you be serious for a moment?

Okay. Recently the Holy One has changed tactics and I am not sure how to handle it. For one thing, he’s begun to improve the economy by having catastrophes. That’s my game. I mean hurricanes, floods, tornados, massive destruction, and suddenly manna from heaven because the need for reconstruction makes job opportunities pop up everywhere. But that’s not the most perverse thing he’s doing. That’s not what gets me most. There is something else going on, and I can’t figure out how to deal with it, no how.

What’s that?

Well, he’s been using some damn rabbi to try to make Christians more Christian.

Wow, that is really devilish.

Devilish? It’s downright satanic.

Wait till I tell people you said that!

Just remember, though, there’s a theory out there that Jesus was crucified because he spoke in parables, and challenging people can make them very angry. They love answers.

All I can say is, it’s an old rabbinic tradition. I’ll take my chances.