The Big Picture

It is indeed a tribal mentality that locks us into ideologically defined camps that flaunt a “you’re either for us or against us” attitude with respect to the rest of the world. This is not a healthful situation. Religious tribalism, for instance, poses a grave danger in its drive to rule the world from the Taliban of Islam to the evangelical fundamentalists of Christianity. In countries like Turkey where Islam is the predominant religion and a secular state presides an ongoing tension between the two persists as it does in the West between church and state – religious zealots seek a total power grab in the name of their particular God.

In the US the church and state issue was thought to be resolved over two hundred years ago. The American Revolution was in part a rebellion against dogmatic authoritarian rule under such concepts as the divine right of kings assumed at the time by English royalty. Such divine right claiming to represent the will and law of God is now assumed by religious fundamentalists who seek to have their beliefs imposed on everyone else by having them become the law of the land. Their position flies in the face of the First Amendment and the very spirit of American freedom and yet they flaunt themselves as true Americans.

That’s just plain ridiculous and demonstrates how ideological thinking can so severely skew one’s thought processes.

Here is another example; on a program that aired on 6/27/2002 conservative talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, in trying to dismiss the notion that the First Amendment to the US Constitution had anything to do with the separation of church and state, said the following - “There is no such clause in the constitution. All it says is that government should not establish an official religion.”

That is also what religious fundamentalist Gary Bauer claimed when discussing the matter as a candidate for the republican presidential nomination in 2000.

That statement was then, as it is now, a distinction without a difference in reference to the separation of church and state.

To point out that the First Amendment only prevents the state from establishing an official religion in no way argues against the concept of separation of church and state. In fact, it supports it.

Not establishing an official religion requires that church and state remain separate.

How else are we supposed to ensure that the government does not establish an official religion except by keeping the two separated?

Limbaugh mistakenly thinks his distinction makes a difference because he lets his ideological fervor take precedence over his better judgment.

All ideologues, of whatever stripe, make the same mistake. In seeking to have their preferred ideology dominate over all others they don’t think things through. They can’t think things through because that would inexorably lead them to conclusions that they do not want to reach. Conclusions that are true but that do not agree with the way an ideologue desires to see things.

In this day and age where we have religious zealots trying to impose their beliefs onto others through their assumption of some divine right of their own we need to take another look at the concept of church and state as it regards individuals. The concept of the separation of church and state for a society is the concept of the separation of faith and reason for individuals.

Keeping the two clear of one another can be a tricky proposition. The convolution of faith and reason is all-pervasive and has been part of our survival gear, perhaps, for as long as we’ve been on this earth. Where reason fails us faith succeeds. Reason cannot answer questions like – “What happens when we die?” - and so it becomes a matter of faith. Where reason falls short faith can soar. But when faith flies in the face of reason, clip its wings.

At the time when the idea of an afterlife was first developed people probably did not think in terms of faith and reason. All that mattered was that the idea of life after death answered their question in a comforting manner. It was something they wanted to believe and was lodged securely in their minds as was the fact that rocks were hard and snow was cold. Chasms arose between faith and reason as a result of certain beliefs that were contingent upon ignorance of physical reality and were eventually shown to be erroneous. These beliefs; the geocentric solar system, Creation, etc. were eventually demonstrated to be unfounded as science became more and more sophisticated. The Church’s reaction to Galileo’s heliocentric solar system was to try and suppress his findings while today those on the side of keeping their faith exactly as it is awkwardly try to bend reason to their will by creating oxymoronic organizations like, Creation Science, in a desperate attempt to challenge the science of evolution.

Difficult as it is we have to come to accept the lesson of history which teaches us that faith must evolve and adapt to the findings of scientific knowledge and sometimes be amended by reasonable views of the world developed through a more accurate assessment of things than that which had been in place in the past. For instance, it would not be acceptable today to conduct ourselves under the belief that God created a world of infinite resources for humankind to do with what we will, as it was once believed. And, one wonders, if Abe Lincoln were alive today would he say, “God must love all the wretched starving people of the earth because he makes so many of them,” as he once said of poor people? Such perspectives once rooted in faith are no longer tenable and illustrate how one’s faith needs to be supervised and amended by reason. The moral argument against birth control needs to be amended by the need for intelligent control of population growth. If one purpose of morality is to preserve life then the moral point of view should realize that living things sometimes have to check their growth in order to preserve themselves.

Again, with the issue of faith and reason we are presented with a dispute that appears to be irresolvable. Those who proclaim themselves as the keepers of the traditional faith brand those who seek to change it as heretics, instruments of Satan. They see faith as something unchangeable, absolute. If it is subject to change it becomes worthless in their eyes. They contend that sanctions against birth control are the immutable word of God. However, one could, without much stretch of the imagination, envision a world in which such an absolute morality could not exist. In fact, a world in which its exact opposite would become the absolute: Sometime in the future, if we are unable to halt the wholesale deterioration of the earth’s environment, we may find ourselves having to live within totally enclosed spaces housed under artificial life-support systems like the one constructed for the Biosphere II experiment undertaken in Arizona.

As one might imagine, space and resources in such an environment would be severely limited and able to support only a small static population. So, a policy of strict birth control would be an absolute moral imperative. That faith is blind to such a possibility is one reason why such a possibility could become a certainty.

Religious values are believed to be absolute in their inexorable connection with preserving life. Which means they are contingent upon the preservation of life. Therefore, it is our interest in the preservation of life that creates our value systems. It is the instinct for the preservation of life that is the absolute.

A moral value system can advertise that it promotes the preservation of humanity. In this way it extends one’s instinct for self-preservation to the preservation of all human life. But this is nothing special to human beings. Even in other species self-preservation is projected out to the preservation of one’s progeny, which in turn fosters the preservation of one’s entire species. And one’s own self-preservation can be overridden in favor of the preservation of one’s progeny and even one’s species. The “martyrdom” of lemmings, for instance.

It has, of course, been traditional lore to think of lemmings as committing suicide in mass numbers as a means of managing the threat of overpopulation. This myth, of course, has not been borne out by research. However, instances have been documented which explain its genesis. In a book by Dennis Chitty, Do Lemmings Commit Suicide?, the author cites examples of lemmings being found dead on sea ice in the Canadian arctic and he writes, “Lemmings that move on to sea ice will almost certainly die from lack of food and shelter, and in a sense are committing suicide. So, it’s easy to see how the myth arose. But it’s harder to believe that suicide is what’s on a lemming’s mind. For one thing suicidal lemmings would leave fewer descendants than those that stayed home, and natural selection would put an end to so simple a solution to overpopulation.”

That certain behaviors result in lack of descendants, however, does not mean those behaviors would necessarily disappear – homosexuality, for example.

Exactly why lemmings behave in this manner is not totally clear but, whatever the cause, their actions do serve as a means of population control, thus serving the higher purpose of group survival at their own expense. They are in a sense martyred by circumstances they find themselves in because of who and what they are.

On the human scale, Thomas More, for instance, did not intend to become a martyr. He became a martyr due to circumstances he found himself in because of who and what he was. This is not to downgrade his or anyone else’s martyrdom. Nor is the comparison meant to upgrade the behavior of lemmings. It merely points out broad similarities, especially in the fact that one does not need to have a conscious intent to become a martyr in order to become one.

Of course, one might say here, Thomas More made a conscious decision to die rather than deny his faith and that is not at all comparable to the behavior of any lowly lemming. However, one could also say, given who and what Thomas More was he really didn’t have a choice in the matter. A religion may teach us to put the interest of others, or the interest of holy principles, before self-interest. But it takes a certain type of person to carry that teaching to the extremes of a Thomas More. If we say there must be certain physiological attributes that give one the necessary character to be a Thomas More that would be no objection to celebrating such people. And as much as we’d like to separate our “lofty” actions from basic instinct the martyrdom of a Thomas More is, of course, supposed to ensure one a palatial suite of rooms in one of heaven’s finest hotels for eternity. Now, might one have a smidgen of self-interest in that prospect? To preserve one’s life for eternity? So, we’re back to the instinct for self-preservation.

It’s something one cannot get away from no matter what metaphysical labyrinths one constructs in order to distance oneself from such fundamental instincts. In denying self-interest in this life we see that one can actually increase self-interest infinitely in the next. It is the instinct for self-preservation that is the most powerful element engineering our whole outlook on the world and it is that which must be addressed realistically.

In perpetuity it is the condition of the gene pool that the instinct for self-preservation is subject to. When the gene pool becomes contaminated then self-preservation can become compromised. This, it seems, is what happened to the chimps of Gombe with respect to the internecine conflict that wiped them out. It was as if the chimps were programmed to survive or perish as a community. They were surviving together until suddenly something snapped. A signal switched on and ordered each and every individual chimp to declare war on one another. Like an individual biological cell that has been compromised in some way. A signal can be switched on that instructs the cell to self-destruct as it poses a threat to the self-preservation of the organism it is responsible for. Passion’s aberrant behavior along with other burdensome afflictions evident in the Gombe community, an outbreak of polio, a young chimp refusing to mature, were perhaps responsible for flipping the switch to self-destruct and thereby destroying their contaminated gene pool.

Might such a signal be switched on with respect to the human community and trigger a nuclear holocaust? There are those of us who are moved to indulge in wildly unrestrained violence for no other reason than to indulge in wildly unrestrained violence. Skin heads, the random self-destructive violence that has taken place in Mogadishu, in the Semitic community Arabs and Jews cannot help killing one another nor can Shiite and Sunni. And there is “ethnic cleansing” in various parts of the world - school and workplace rampages. Are we perceiving one another as mutant species that need to be killed off? Is that not how the chimps of Gombe came to perceive themselves? In the human sphere, as with chimps, those of other tribes were always considered to be completely exploitable and candidates for whatever aggression one tribe chose to dispense upon another for whatever reason.

When a threatened planet becomes more and more unable to support the billions of people that inhabit it along with it being manned by increasingly touchy and aggressive world leaders with their trigger fingers on nuclear weapons things could easily spin out of control in our ever shrinking global village.

The only possible solution is for social organisms all over the world to redesign themselves from the bottom up, with the microcosm firmly in control of the macrocosm. The world cannot be managed on a global basis, but global management can be achieved by communities managing themselves within a global context. That is, thinking globally, acting locally and keeping in mind the responsibility for the survival of life on this planet. That is the one value that unites every single human being on earth, indeed every living thing and honors the moral compact with life to come in the unforeseen future. And as we have come to measure our conduct here on earth according to how we believe we must behave in order to ensure ourselves continued life in the hereafter, we must now come to realize how we must conduct ourselves to ensure the continuation of life here on earth. The instinct for self-preservation is a powerful force and must be powerfully conditioned to serve the preservation of life rather than merely disguising it in self-serving moral finery in preparation for one’s death.