Interesting post by David Atkins at Hullabaloo on what I can only call the culture of suffering in America:
That's just the beginning -- he hits the war on the poor, police terrorism, torture as a legitimate tool of war, and ends up with this:
I have an easy, one-word answer: Our so-called Judaeo-Christian culture. (Well, OK, it's not exactly one word. Say "Christianity" then.) We tend not to realize the way the basic thought patterns of that religious tradition have infused our entire world view. We see things in terms of absolute dichotomies: good/evil, either/or, black/white. The universe doesn't work that way.
And it's a tradition built on the idea of suffering as a moral good. Christianity itself is centered on the Passion: the pain and suffering of the Christ.* The goal of the good Christian is to be as much like Christ as possible. And not incidentally, there is a strand of Christian thought that holds that the purpose of life on earth is to endure suffering in the hope of eternal reward. (Lest you think Judaism is exempt from this idea, think of Job.) Both Judaism and Christianity rest on the idea of punishment: we are all born sinners, and therefore deserve to be punished. (Needless to say, that's not an idea that appeals to me -- my own take is that new lives are born pure, and I'm not too keen on the idea of being punished for something that a theoretical ancestor did way back when, especially when it was more breaking the rules than being absolutely evil.)
Of course, people being what they are, all this pain and suffering are even more enjoyable when they're happening to other people. That ties into the whole tribal nature of the Judaic base of Christianity: it's Us against Them, and they deserve whatever we can dish out. (Interestingly enough, Christianity dropped the exclusivity of Judaism early on, and wound up being fairly syncretistic in many respects -- the timing and trappings of Christmas and Easter, the appropriation of Pagan holy sites, the tendency to co-opt the gods of other religions by canonizing them -- St. Brigid comes to mind, not to mention St. Nicholas. But some sects, at least, seem to have backtracked to that insular mentality.)
It seems fairly obvious to me that the "punishment and suffering" culture that Atkins decries can be considered a feature, not a bug. It's just part of our cultural foundation out in the open.
* I take Christ as an avatar of the Sacrificed God, who shows up in just about every religious tradition I can think of. The difference is that Christianity denies the existence of any of the other gods, and it's their stories that tend to bring the whole thing back into some sort of perspective.
Why do so many Americans feel so strongly that pain is morally good?
Assisted suicide is in the news again after Stephen Hawking came out in support of it. For some reason it remains a controversial question whether people wracked with terminal illnesses should be able to bring an end to their own suffering. Apparently many Americans feel it's the the greater moral good for dying people to spend an extra few months excruciatingly experiencing every organ failure until a painful, convulsing release finally sets them free. Why is that?
That's just the beginning -- he hits the war on the poor, police terrorism, torture as a legitimate tool of war, and ends up with this:
What is it in the American psyche that seems to be in love with the idea of forced pain as an instrument of terrestrial and divine justice?
I have an easy, one-word answer: Our so-called Judaeo-Christian culture. (Well, OK, it's not exactly one word. Say "Christianity" then.) We tend not to realize the way the basic thought patterns of that religious tradition have infused our entire world view. We see things in terms of absolute dichotomies: good/evil, either/or, black/white. The universe doesn't work that way.
And it's a tradition built on the idea of suffering as a moral good. Christianity itself is centered on the Passion: the pain and suffering of the Christ.* The goal of the good Christian is to be as much like Christ as possible. And not incidentally, there is a strand of Christian thought that holds that the purpose of life on earth is to endure suffering in the hope of eternal reward. (Lest you think Judaism is exempt from this idea, think of Job.) Both Judaism and Christianity rest on the idea of punishment: we are all born sinners, and therefore deserve to be punished. (Needless to say, that's not an idea that appeals to me -- my own take is that new lives are born pure, and I'm not too keen on the idea of being punished for something that a theoretical ancestor did way back when, especially when it was more breaking the rules than being absolutely evil.)
Of course, people being what they are, all this pain and suffering are even more enjoyable when they're happening to other people. That ties into the whole tribal nature of the Judaic base of Christianity: it's Us against Them, and they deserve whatever we can dish out. (Interestingly enough, Christianity dropped the exclusivity of Judaism early on, and wound up being fairly syncretistic in many respects -- the timing and trappings of Christmas and Easter, the appropriation of Pagan holy sites, the tendency to co-opt the gods of other religions by canonizing them -- St. Brigid comes to mind, not to mention St. Nicholas. But some sects, at least, seem to have backtracked to that insular mentality.)
It seems fairly obvious to me that the "punishment and suffering" culture that Atkins decries can be considered a feature, not a bug. It's just part of our cultural foundation out in the open.
* I take Christ as an avatar of the Sacrificed God, who shows up in just about every religious tradition I can think of. The difference is that Christianity denies the existence of any of the other gods, and it's their stories that tend to bring the whole thing back into some sort of perspective.
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