So, who or what is the “true object” of the anger welling up from the American body politic in the late summer of 2010? What “untouchable” figure or force is responsible for our dire predicament? My answer would be similar to that offered by G.K. Chesterton when the Times of London sponsored an essay contest on the question, “What is wrong with the world?” Chesterton’s brief, two-word essay read simply, “I am.”
We are.
The United States is now a zombie nation not because of something that Muslims, Mexicans, African-Americans, or the poor have done, but because it is filled with 310 million zombies, spiritual corpses who give the appearance of life, but are filled with “dead men’s bones and every kind of impurity.”
This is the most disconcerting answer of them all, and the real reason why the “true object of [our] anger is untouchable.” In our pride and sinfulness we spurn the truth about ourselves and our country. As a result, the one thing we refuse to do at all costs is examine ourselves, each of us, and question our contributions to the disintegration we see around us. That was true in the bellum omnium contra omnes – the war of all against all – in primitive societies, and it is true today. And yet we – all of us – are the source of our present discontent and the collapse that may be upon us. . . .
No, the solution to our problems can be found in one word: conversion.
Mark Gordon (h/t Mike McG)
A different, more expanded understanding of spiritual zombie-ism as I have talked about it here, but apt. Our zombie-ness is indeed our normal condition, and it's precisely from it that we all need to be saved.
For we are zombies to the degree that the ordinary world seems ok, and we are saved to the degree that we feel this tension between the ordinary world and this incipient thing the Gospels identify as the kingdom within. The beginning of salvation is to feel the tension between being a citizen of the zombie state of the natural man and a citizen of the kingdom born within. I don't think you have to be a professed Christian to feel that tension, but a genuinely Christian mindframe helps you to understand what's going on. And at some level you have to have this experience of conversion, after which you can never feel to comfortable in the "normal" world with its zombie mindframe.
Gordon's whole post is worth a read. It is interesting for the way it leans on the work of French
Christian thinker, Rene Girard. (If you're not familiar with his work Wikipedia give a very good overview.) He has such a Christian mindframe, and
his work on scapegoating and the dynamics of mimesis and crowd
psychology are a useful lens through which to view and understand what's
going on in this country right now. Girard's key insight is that the Christian story is precisely about the subversion of the scapegoating, mimetic society and that the beginning of salvation lies in awakening from the bad dream that accepting such a society as normal truly is.
One of the fundamental themes of this blog has been that Christianity is at its deepest level always subversive of normal social reality, and Christianity is almost always a species of false consciousness when it is a tool of social establishments to keep people in line and well behaved. Societies that think of themselves as "Christian" are for that reason anything but. For lawful human behavior, in Christian terms, can never be imposed from without. It must follow from the awakened conscience–and while that awakening (conversion) can be effected from without–by the people we meet, the things we read–it is essentially an interior, subjective experience, but it's a use-it-or-lose-it kind of thing. That's the point of the parable of the sower. For the conscience, when understood in this sense, is the cognitive faculty, the eyes and heart and mind, of that part of us which is the citizen of the kingdom born within, and without its exercise we forfeit that citizenship and we revert to live once again the zombie life which is walking death.
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