Today’s Post
Last week we saw how recognition of what we have been calling. ‘The Divine Spark’ is not only key to our personal evolution, but even more so to the evolution of the state towards a democracy. As we saw, Thomas Jefferson’s embrace of “the people themselves” as the “safe depository …of the ultimate powers of the society” has become the cornerstone of what has become, so far, the most successful form of government by nearly every measure possible. We saw how the metrics assembled by Johan Norberg not only delineate a distinct increase in human welfare over the last two hundred fifty years, but how societies based on his fundamental assumption, the recognition of an ineffable quality of the human person, are essential to this burst of progress.
Denial of the Divine Spark
We also saw last week, in opposition to such progress-oriented vision, a movement which would return societies to governments led by Nietzsche’s ubermensch, one step away from rule by ‘royals’. We how his mistrust of the ‘Divine Spark’, the common human denominator recognized by Jefferson, played out in his writing, but here’s another, from his book, “Twilight Of The Idols”
“The doctrine of equality! There exists no more poisonous poison: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, while it is the end of justice.”
One would think that Nietzsche’s bitter and negative philosophy, especially in contrast to the success of one based on Jefferson’s recognition of the divine spark, would have fallen out of vogue in the intervening hundred years marked by the success of democratic forms of government. As seen in the rise (and fall) of such regimes as Nazism and Communism, embracing his illiberal tenets , there is plenty of evidence that Nietzsche continues to be read today. Some of his negativism can be seen in the recent resurgence of nationalism in many parts of the globe.
From where does such a negative and contrary-to-data outlook arise? Undoubtedly, some blame falls on the failure of Western religion to focus on the divine spark first identified by Jesus in the gospels and promoted by Jefferson. This failure eventually led to hundreds of years of ‘Christian on Christian’ fratricide. To the fathers of ‘The Enlightenment’, the rise of empirical science as a building block of society must have seen like a safe shore after the storm tossed years of religious wars.
But as we have previously noted in this blog the human brain is not a simple organ, but exists as three tiers ‘stacked’ one on the other, and all contributing stimuli to our consciousness. The reptilian layer contributes ‘survival’ stimuli to insure that we fly or flight, for example; the limbic layer contributes emotional stimuli to insure that we, unlike the reptiles, nourish our more complex young; and the neo cortex layer, unique to humans, enables us, when we are so disposed, to base our responses to the ‘lower brain’ stimuli on what we understand to be ‘true’ of a certain circumstance. As humans, we can choose our actions based on what we have learned about our environment, and choosing the ‘correct’ actions is an essential skill in insuring both our personal and societal continued evolution.
Or, as Teilhard would put it, as humans we have the capacity to ‘articulate the noosphere’ in such a way that we can learn how to cooperate with it and thus insure our continued evolution.
Unfortunately, however, we can allow these lower-brain stimuli to distort our neo-cortex conclusions which might arise from such articulations. Fear, as almost every belief system recognizes, cannot only be much more powerful than hope, it can be a much more successful motivator to action.
Thus our negative experience with religion combined with the need to properly balance our neurological stimuli with our ability to ‘know that we know’ offers many paths to a decidedly negative comprehension of what it means to be a ‘person’.
Dualisms
In the two hundred fifty years delineated by Norberg, we saw a sharp rise in human welfare, which we interpreted as quantification of evolution in the human species. During this same time frame, we also saw the appearance of philosophical paradigms antithetical to the principles identified by Norberg, – for example, in the writings of Nietzsche – and the resultant rise of systems like Nazism and Communism which were based on his illiberal principles.
In this blog we have addressed many ‘dualities’- antithetical beliefs historically held in tension- such as science-religion, body-soul, grace-sin, damnation-redemption, human-divine, this life-the next, salvation-damnation, and many others. We have shown in each case how the evolutive hermeneutic of Teilhard operates as a perspective by which these dualities can be seen not as opposites, but perceptions of facets of a single thing. When we come to such a duality as ‘Jefferson- Nietzsche’, or more basically ‘human personal equality-inequality’, however, no such integrated understanding is possible. Either the divine spark exists or it doesn’t, and whichever side one comes down on makes all the difference.
And this is the ultimate conundrum before which mankind is currently ‘marking time’: Shall we continue to trust in Jefferson’s assertion of the basic ability of “the people themselves” as the “safe depository …of the ultimate powers of the society”, or do we to move to Nietzsche’s dark opinion of these “people themselves”?
Note that this irreconcilable duality of the human person has risen in Western religion alongside that articulated so positively by Jefferson. It is one assessment shared by the father of Christian Protestantism (and exists in threads of teaching found therin) and is shared by those expressions of psychology which hold Freud’s negative assessment of the human to be authoritative.
On the one hand, we have the positive assessment by Jesus, which proved valuable in constructing Western society beginning with Rome, but was diluted by the rigid Church hierarchy and demands for adherence to dogma influenced by Greek thinking. On the other hand we have the insidious creep of what Richard Rohr identifies as the ‘penal substitutionary atonement theory’ in which the death of Jesus was necessary to appease a God angry at the imperfections of his creation. We have addressed in several places in this blog how this theory festered into Martin Luther’s assessment of the human person as “piles of excrement covered by Christ”, and by Freud as ‘basically dangerous’. It is not surprising that such elements in Nietzsche’s Teutonic culture would have influenced his disdain for the person.
Even though, as we have pointed out throughout this blog, Western religion contains nuggets of a positive humanism which underpin such progress as chronicled by Norbeg, the history of Christianity in the West shows facets which can, and have in the past, inhibit such progress.
The Next Post
This week we looked a little deeper into the aspects of a ‘nationalism’ which can be seen in the West which threatens the continuation of improvements of human welfare documented in such detail by Norberg. We showed how a ‘dualism’ between the tenets of thinkers like Nietzsche and those of Jefferson are not simply ‘two sides of a coin’, they are true opposites which cannot be ‘held in suspension’ and understood in in an integrated context such as the many others we have addressed in this blog.
Next week we will move on to looking a little more closely at what we have been calling “The Divine Spark’ to understanding its persistence in universal evolution. Such a perspective is necessary to understand how its presence in the human person is deeply rooted in the billions of years in which the universe has grown a ‘personal’ face.