Читать книгу Liberating the Will of Australia - Geoffrey Burn - Страница 13

We are used to thinking of society as a collection of individuals who have the free will to choose how they will act. When looking at a wrong action, moral reasoning traces back from the action to the thing that caused it. Moral judgment requires the relationship between the act and the individual to be personal, a person acting freely, and we escape responsibility if the act can be shown to be compelled, determined, or otherwise unavoidable. In this system, we cannot be morally praised or blamed for that which we have not freely chosen or could not avoid. Even if wrongdoing is done by freely willing agent, the person may still not be accounted guilty, because, for example, the wrong action may have been an unforeseen consequence of an action (or inaction).20

The theological concept of bound willing asserts that we are never truly free; we can only be free from. Human beings are shaped by what happens to them and how they respond to what has happened. This includes being shaped by our culture; we are parts of communities which have been shaped by their histories.21 There is a tension between the passive and the active, between sin as a fundamental distortion received with one’s humanity and the way that one actively enacts and personally joins oneself to it.

Bound willing further posits that there has been a total and universal moral collapse which makes avoidance of wrong actions problematic, and that we are accountable for this situation and for our individual acts of sin which this situation preconditions us to commit.22 Moreover, people are guilty not of their own acts but they also inherit the guilt of others’ actions; human beings do not enjoy the sort of freedom which enables personal action and moral accountability. Rather, they are bound to sin, not to freedom.

Now, I am aware that this could seem very negative, but it is only negative if we are thinking that there is a negative judgment associated with this, even that we might be punished for our wrongdoing. Rather, this is a liberating way of viewing the world, because we can acknowledge and understand the complexities of the situations in which we find ourselves, that we are part of something that is much bigger than individuals, and that we are at a loss to see how to put things right. It is the other half of the story of bound willing which reveals that we can be set free from our bound willing, for God is at work in the world to bring good. In turning to God, we see that our bound wills have blocked the overflowing love of God from bringing good, and in turning towards God we position ourselves so that good is able to come as our wills are freed from their bondage to sin. The concrete practices which can take hold of this liberation will be explored in the Second Movement.

In order to help understand the dynamics of these theological concepts, we turn to the work of Alistair McFadyen. Unlike McFadyen’s rigor, we will be proceeding by example rather than by doctrinal development.

McFadyen has two major case studies in his book: the experience of children who have been sexually abused; and the Nazi holocaust of Jewish and Gypsy peoples, as well as other groups of people. He also spends considerable time considering the plight of women, who are often oppressed in our society. He has a deep concern that both popular and academic ways of talking about these issues do not have sufficient explanatory power to comprehend the full depths of these pathologies, nor are they able to offer any real way of resolving the problems. His presentation is subtle and full of compassion. Inevitably, any summary of this work is not going to be able to capture the full nuances of his argument and it risks being taken up with what seem like technical philosophical and theological issues, whilst appearing to abandon any compassion for the real damage and pain that is caused by the pathologies that he discusses. This is especially the case here, where the main purpose is to lay out his theological framework in order to cast light on a different situation, namely, understanding the plight of the First Peoples in Australia and the possibilities for life-giving transformation for all the peoples in The Land. There seems to be no way around this, and so I apologize in advance for those who have experienced the traumas that will be so quickly covered here, drawing out the theological insights rather than a full description of the pain that has been experienced. Please accept my apology for this and please take time to seek help concerning any personal issues that are opened up by these examples.

The first case study is of the sexual abuse of children, which he defines thus: “children are sexually abused when they are involved in sexual activity, are exposed to sexual stimuli or are used as sexual stimuli by anybody significantly older than they are.”23 The study is focused on the experience of those who are abused. It demonstrates that abuse can only happen through isolation and the construction of a false normality, a world where what is good and right and true has been radically distorted and redefined. It can lead to the internalization of the dynamics of the abuse, so that a person’s direction in life is reoriented, disorienting a person’s desire and will.

In more detail, the sexual abuse of children will include many of the following features.24 Sexual abuse can only happen if a child is isolated, from the effective care, interference and concern of other adults, and from the codes, values and interpretive frameworks belonging to normal social relationships. Abuse can only happen to those who are already isolated or can be made to be so. There is a need to stop others knowing about it, usually by disenabling the child from telling others, so abuse can even happen in public spaces; physical seclusion is not necessarily needed. Abuse creates a false normality, making the wrong seem normal, such as it occurring during bathing. It can be unwittingly reinforced by others who misinterpret the child’s complaint, for example, by thinking that the child is complaining about being bathed by her father, rather than what the father is doing during the bath. An abuser may create illusions of consent. If this has been done, then the child may internalize feelings of guilt, blame and responsibility, and she can become inextricably bound into the realities of the abusive relationship. In this situation, she is less likely to seek outside help. Often abusers make sure that they are the most significant emotional relationship for child, so that the child cannot get out because he does not want to lose that relationship, even if he senses that some of what happens is bad. The person being abused is bound in silence; no one is allowed to be told about the relationship. Various forms of threat may be used to force compliance. Common threats are: firstly, that the abuser is more powerful than any others who might try to help (now and at any time in the future); secondly, if the abused person tells someone and is believed, then she would be stigmatized, and so she will not be worthy of the care that others are allowed; and thirdly, being blamed for the consequences (e.g., the father goes to jail and family is broken up). Secrecy is essential. Secrecy encloses. It not only stops bringing information to public expression, but it also inhibits communication, and the processes of understanding, judging and evaluating the information represented by the abuse. Abuse is almost always confusing, sometimes traumatically so. Secrecy is itself confusing: if this is all right, how come I can’t tell anyone? The child may internalize the abuse, coming to believe that it is something he has caused to be done. He has then taken the abuse as the unalterable baseline against which his identity must be worked out. Sex with a child is not only socially inappropriate, but developmentally premature, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually and physiologically; it traumatizes sexual relationships. Premature sexualization will become a central feature of their sexual development, and sex may become obsessional or something to be feared; it may have unrealistic emotional significance, or else it may become disconnected from the emotions. Sexual abuse may lead to fear and anxiety and to becoming a powerless victim in relationships, or becoming like the abuser in relationships.

McFadyen summarizes the findings of his study in the following way:

•The sexual abuse of children is fundamentally an abuse of trust and of power which exploits the age-related differentials between child and abuser, as well as enlisting, abusing, distorting and disorienting the child’s needs for intimacy, affirmation, security, trust and guidance.

•Abuse is not adequately construed in terms of acts which might then have certain consequences; it is better thought of in terms of an expansive dynamic of disoriented relationality which may affect all of the child’s relationships (including that to herself) and invade the relational ecology of other sets of relationships. (It is thus impossible clearly and cleanly to separate act from consequence.)

•Its core dynamic is that of entrapment and isolation, through which social and psychological transcendence may be blocked.

•That dynamic effects a form of traumatic confusion concerning the nature of reality in all its dimensions (social, moral, personal, material).25

•A particular source of confusion is the incorporation of the child’s active agency in psychologically “accommodating” to the abuse and keeping it secret.

•As a consequence, abuse easily leads to a radical distortion of the very core of self-identity,

•which becomes the means of transmission of the consequences of the abuse into an entire ecology of relating and is capable of passing on the effects of abuse trans-generationally.26

It is particularly tragic that the distorted willing of the perpetrators affects the willing of their victims. In the case of the survivors27 of childhood sexual abuse, where there are age-related disparities of power, status and knowledge, the child’s willing cannot be an operative cause of the abuse, but the fact that survivor’s basic patterns of intentionality (including willing) are distorted strongly suggests that the distortion of willing may be traceable back to the situation of the abuse itself. In abuse, the abuser confuses the victim’s willing, for example, because the relationship with the abuser outweighs the abuse, or the use of rewards, inducements or other benefits, or because the initiation of abuse is seductively incremental. In the first two cases, the willing for the inducements may be confused with willing the abuse, especially so when desire for benefits leads to initiation of abuse, so eliminating the distinction between means and ends. “Childhood sexual abuse abuses the child’s active willing and intentionality, and this is why it can have such long-term traumatic consequences.”28 For incremental abuse, the gradient is so shallow that it obfuscates not only when the relationship became abusive, but also the point at which willing became operative. What seems abusive does not seem to be so different from the step before so, looking back, the victim can be easily convinced that the abuse was willingly accepted from the beginning. Secrecy encloses the abuse as a total context for all the child’s willing, and so no willing in relation to abuse can be free from it.29

Those who have survived sexual abuse as children or who have worked with people who have been sexually abused as children will recognize how the distortion of the will in survivors carries on into later life and affects the ways that people form relationships. This full description is needed in order to be able to see how to best restore the damage that has been done in such an abusive relationship, something that will be returned to below, after considering the second case study.

The first case study has shown the basic dynamics of bound willing. The second case study is the Nazi holocaust of Jewish, Gypsy and other peoples, and so explores the binding of the will of a whole nation. The focus is on the perpetrators rather than the victims. Alistair McFadyen draws heavily on the work of Zygmunt Bauman, who argues that modernity was the essential framework for enabling the holocausts to happen.30 The genocide was not driven by ideas, but by pragmatic issues due to the failure of other attempted solutions to the “Jewish problem,” and it was intricately tied up with the country being in a war, where the goal of the country was to fulfill what it saw as its historic destiny. This destiny was related to racist ideas and it built on previous historical developments, such as “the historical relationship between the churches and the Jews; the defeat of Germany in World War I and the conditions of the armistice; the perceived threat of Bolshevism; social Darwinism; the science of eugenics; [and] the rise of rationality and its fantasies of perfection.”31 That is, the Second World War and its eventual holocaust did not come out of a vacuum, but was a continuation and development of the distorted willing of the German nation that was already in place.

This holocaust can be seen as taking one of the ideas of modernity to its extreme end: the triumph of rationality in planning and action, which is threatened whenever irrationality intrudes into and interrupts efficient organization. German society was trying to create the perfect society without problems of emotions and irrationality.32 Science and technology were dominant in all areas of life in order to do this. Anything that got in their way was a problem to be eliminated. Nazi policy towards Jewish and Gypsy peoples and others was designed to eliminate pathogens that they believed threatened a perfectly rational social order based on the purity of race.33

In the Nazi worldview, the Jewish and Gypsy peoples were a nation without a state, so they could not participate in the Darwinian struggle between the races by the normal means of diplomacy and war. Instead they were dispersed amongst the nations, and so they could be presented as peoples involved in international conspiratorial action to undermine and overtake the nations of the world. It was believed that intermarriage with these peoples would dilute the Arian bloodline. Jewishness could not be cultivated out of Jewish people, so it had to be removed by their exclusion. This turned Germans into participants or bystanders in a bureaucratic, administrative process which dealt with the commonly perceived “Jewish question” in a rational, and therefore apparently civilized and, above all, legal manner.34

Initially, the plan was to remove Jewish and Gypsy peoples and others from the German state. The invasion of other countries in the war introduced two further problems: greater numbers of such people were living in the areas controlled by Germany, and they needed to be taken further away. This situation gradually morphed into a further instance of the one of the most shameful things in history, where one group of people seeks to totally remove another group of people from the face of the earth.

McFadyen argues that this was only possible because of a triumph of reason over all other considerations, where all decisions and actions were subjected to the question of whether they were the best way of implementing the goal; the goal itself could not be discussed: “In the Nazi’s Final Solution, we not only encounter the politics of a totalitarian ideology; we also find the totalitarian tendencies of technical-instrumental reason, of rational expertise in establishing and implementing means toward the end set by the political agenda.”35 Implementation therefore becomes “objective”: once the goals are set, only the means of implementing them can be discussed, not the ends. Whether one liked or approved of what was being done was only allowing nonrational, personal and subjective things to intrude. There was thus a shift for evaluation from the moral and political to the instrumental, and the instrumental discourse became totalitarian, redefining ends without the competition of other rationalities; goodness was redefined as meeting the requirements of the efficient functioning of the system.36 The bureaucracy needed to implement this reduced people from subjects to objects and so people disappear. Appeals could only be made as procedural questions concerning the proper application of the rules (e.g., to prove Aryan descent), but the rules could not be questioned.37

There is a question as to how people could be caught up in such a program. McFadyen argues that the logic of the situation was that the distastefulness of the task was seen as a sign not of its being evil but of its necessity in pursuit of the greater good: people would not be asked to do such things unless it was absolutely necessary. Individual wills had to be subjected to the great task. Sensitivity to what was being done was decreased by repeated action. Group loyalty and solidarity was key to the continuing action.38

The “Final Solution” was the act of a society, people continuing to do the tasks that they had done prior to their incorporation into genocide, such as making railway time tables, maintaining tracks and so on. It was hard for individuals to take responsibility because the task was broken down into separate actions which did not allow the workforce to piece it all together. This functional specialization separates the work of one group from other parts of the process and the end product. The meaning of one’s actions is hidden because the meaning is in the interaction and total product of the actions; a single task has no intrinsic meaning, so moral evaluation and responsibility are somehow externalized. Even those directly killing could or would have experienced it in nonpersonal and nonmoral categories: they were just fulfilling orders, which were legally and procedurally correct. The principal moral virtues become loyalty, discipline, obedience, particularly in the face of conflict with one’s own wishes or views: “Bureaucracy’s double feat is the moralization of technology, coupled with the denial of the moral significance of non-technical issues.”39

Perhaps the most insidious part of the whole process is the incorporation of the Jewish people themselves in the project of genocide. The Jewish people were included in the process, such as managing ghettos and selecting people for “transport,” perhaps thinking they could help to alleviate the problem. Within ghettos, the authority of the Jewish council was total, but only within the parameters set by the state. Cooperation was rational. When it became clear that the policy was to kill all Jewish people, then resistance came, even in face of almost certain lethal and total retribution. The Nazis were always careful to give choice in order to give the illusion of some freedom, but whichever choice was taken would lead towards their desired ends. In camps, they went even further and aimed at destroying people’s personhood, encouraging competition for survival.40

Does the concept of bound willing give us any further insight into the dynamics underlying the Nazi-led holocaust? Clearly, the holocaust could not have happened without the will and desire of the Nazi leaders. This, however, was not free willing, but it was shaped by the historical foundations of the German nation. As stated earlier, these included the historic relationship between the church and Jewish people, the nature of the ending of the First World War, social Darwinism, eugenics, and perceived threats from other powers at the time. Further, the willing was shaped by the changing circumstances of the war, leading to genocide being seen as the only feasible solution to what they perceived was a problem. Each successive measure further conditioned the will in an incremental way so that it became unclear at which point certain actions became willed; the final outcome was far from the initial intended action. People in Germany were compelled to submission of their wills to an objective reality which required the holocaust. Willing was not disabled, but displaced towards “objective” and “rational” ends which were beyond dispute. “Everything except open rebellion led to practical participation in constructing a racial order, which had the further effect of normalizing and radicalizing both the practices and the construction of reality required and engendered through racially ordering dynamics.” 41 Many did rebel and suffered the consequences of doing so, as they were crushed by the dominating will of the nation. Participation, or the failure of resistance, resulted in further hardening of people’s wills. Willing had become bound to choosing ways to implement an end rather than having a free choice between competing ends. For participants in the genocide, it may have felt that they were not personally accountable for their actions, that it was a passive acceptance of reality. This is not a true understanding, however, for participation was aligning one’s energies with the dominant will of the nation and becoming part of what was happening. That willing was not able to discuss the meaning of things but only whether that which was required was being done in the most efficient way. McFadyen writes:

What we observe here, then, is not the exclusion of either morality or willing, but their sequestration, colonisation and co-option, their total orientation towards fulfilling the allotted task, and do so well—beyond what is merely demanded. So willing, virtue and the moral are not functioning here as portents and agents of transcendence. They are entirely bent towards and thereby “redouble” the dynamics into which they are—even unwittingly—incorporated.42

The study of two concrete pathologies, the sexual abuse of children and the Nazi holocaust, has shown that complex situations cannot be simply described as resulting from the choices of the free wills of individuals. It should be clear that the range of possible choices that can be seen in any situation is radically circumscribed by the history of those involved. Willing is not just a personal dynamic but it is shaped by incorporation into pathological dynamics which are both within and also outside the person. In some cases, like that of being sexually abused or being caught up in the Nazi holocaust, the ability of the individual’s will to make choices may be overcome by a superior force. “Here willing is not so much disempowered as ‘bent’ by a superior attractive force, pulled into the vortex of a pathological dynamic and oriented towards its service. The effect which this may have in restricting the number of possible objects of immediate choice is far less significant than its capacity to appropriate the means and criteria by and direction in which choices are made (by defining ‘reality’, ‘normality’, ‘the good’ or ‘rationality’) as all immediate objects of possible choosing are incorporated into the dynamic of this pathological orientation.”43

The sexual abuse of children and the Nazi holocaust have been called pathologies, but that means that there must be some notion of good against which deviations from the good can be measured. It is critical to have a deep enough understanding of what the good is, otherwise we will not be able to comprehend the full depth of the pathology, nor will we be able to see the full possibilities for recovery. The discussion of bound willing reminds us that our idea of good is distorted and so there needs to be an external reference to help us comprehend and reach towards that which is good. Moreover, the pathologies have been shown to be dynamic and relational and so any definition of good must also be dynamic and relational.

Christians understand God as Trinity. This means that relationship is at the heart of the nature of God, and not just any relationship, but a dynamic of being for each other, of seeking the welfare of each other, of a continual process of filling and the overflowing of life. This love cannot be contained in itself, but overflows in creative plenitude. The whole of creation is invited to be caught up in this joyful dynamic movement towards fulfillment. Joy and faith in worship are the answering dynamic of the creation, as it is caught up in God’s own being in and towards the whole of creation. McFadyen writes:

This carries at least four immediate implications. First, the integral order of the world is dynamic and relational. Second, this relationality is an immediate consequence of the movement of God in and through the world as well as towards the world; which is to say, third, that the integrity of the world does not separate it from God. Rather, the world’s very integrity as a dynamic system and order includes and is indeed founded on relation to and the presence of the dynamics of God. Finally, the relational and dynamic order of the world is directed and called towards its own perfection through this relationship with God.44

This is a dynamic image, so fullness is not a static condition to be attained, but a continual process of filling to overflowing as a result of the dynamic abundance of God. Sin, then, “is that which counters the dynamics of God in creation and salvation.”45 But sin is only known in the context of God’s active countering of it: it is only in the perspective of this salvific orientation of God’s movement towards us that we are aware of the depths and nature of sin. “We know sin only in the context of God’s resistance to our resistance to God.”46

A change in life comes when a person responds to God’s overwhelming life and turns to God in faith, to receive change in her deepest being, gradually being released from the bondage of the will that blocks communion with God. Faith is the work of the Spirit of God in a person. In the words of McFadyen, faith

excites willing into a new orientation upon God . . . In faith, one internalises the dynamics of a God who is radically and genuinely for us. The spirit of faith is the excited and redirected energy (desire) through which a person answers by orienting herself in an excess of joy, which repeats and redoubles as it internalises God’s excessive movement towards her. In faith, one commits personal energy in consensual response to the dynamic in which God is for us, and finds oneself simultaneously filled with joy in God and oneself and others. Through the commitment of such personal energy, that dynamic is internalised and redoubled. In the dynamic joy of faith, letting “God be God” enables one to stretch towards being genuinely and fully oneself.47

Human beings are made for worship; all human beings give their lives in worship. To worship is to orient and order one’s life around a reality as primary to and constitutive of what one considers to be of worth and to be true; it is what one gives personal energy to as the ground and criterion of active life-intentionality. Worship of God is the active and attentive response to the dynamic order of God, directing and stretching our energies towards God; worship intensifies being as communion. Bound willing, therefore, directs our worship towards things which are not God and which take our life away. Turning towards the overflowing love of God sets us free from the things which have bound our wills and the love of God enhances and energizes that choice.

Critically, the gift of God is not restoring what was lost, but bringing something new out the present reality. This is seen fundamentally in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The resurrection narratives show that the resurrection was awkward and confusing precisely because it did not deny or disregard what had happened. Moreover, something entirely new was present in the resurrected Jesus, whose bodily life was now different and who could no longer die. The implication is that nothing which has been done need be the final word, that God can bring good out of that which was damaging, but not by returning to some, possibly imagined, pristine past, but by working with what is there to bring something that cannot be imagined.48

It can be seen now how both child sexual abuse and the Nazi holocaust are truly pathologies: both block the dynamic flourishing that arises from being turned towards God by directing energy towards something that closes down the possibilities of life. In child sexual abuse, the abuser blocks the dynamic ecology of being in communion, focusing all energy on relating to the abuser; the child is inhibited from being able to relate to others, particularly God, who is the only one whose relationship is entirely free from damaging consequences. More than that, such abuse is sedimented in the structures of a person’s identity and so limits his capacity for orientation towards the abundance of life that comes from being able to respond to God in worship. Abuse has blocked the possibility of transcendence. In the Nazi holocaust, the peculiarities of the Germanic peoples were absolutized by Nazi ideology. Whilst there is a right place for joy at the particularities of one’s people, it is dangerous when these become absolutized, especially when the way of achieving this perceived purity is the extermination of the other. Raising particular characteristics to being the goal towards which a nation works—that is, directs its energy; that is, what it worships—is to set up something that is static and other than God as the object of worship, which results in the restriction of the life of any who are different in some way. The deliberate destruction of the Jewish people is bad enough in itself, but it has a deeper significance, for Israel’s vocation was to worship God and so to draw all other peoples into the abundance of life that comes from this worship. Walter Wink writes that “Israel’s vocation is to be a light to the nations: to teach them to worship Yahweh as the absolute, and not to worship the absolutized faculties of their own nations.”49 This is not to say that the practice of Jewishness at any point in history completely fulfilled this purpose, but it does say that the worship of national identity can only be pursued through the dismantling and destruction of everything that God intended the nation of Israel to be.

This section began with the desire to have a way of describing pathological situations which is powerful enough to give a deep description of the pathology, one which both explains the dynamics of the situation and is also hopeful because it shows us a way of working with it that gets beyond punishment following the determination of guilt. The theological concept of bound willing was introduced as a way of giving a thick description of situations and McFadyen demonstrated the usefulness of this concept with his case studies. This is a work of hope because we can understand the deeper dynamic of bound willing as being ways in which we are blocked from responding to the generative love of God. If “binding” is the word to describe what happens to the will in being born into and being shaped by sin, then “loosing” describes the process of being freed from this captivity by the overflowing love of God. Both of these are processes, or movements, hence the titles of the major sections of the book. The Second Movement will consider how to take hold of this liberating movement of God. Before we get to that, the next section will show how the concept of bound willing can help us to read the biblical book Ezekiel in a different and illuminating way, giving us more insight into how bound willing works in whole nations over a period of many generations. Then the final section will begin to look at how bound willing describes what has been happening in Australia. The Intermezzo is an extended study which shows how the dynamics of bound willing inherently limited the possible outcomes of the fight over land within the Australian legal system.