The new book by David Kuo, an Evangelical Christian who was second in command of the Bush administration’s office for Faith Based Initiatives, has a new book out entitled Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction. Reports about the book indicate that Kuo is a principled Christian conservative who was appalled at the political cynicism that characterized the Bush Administration’s attitude toward its Christian conservative base. It’s too early to say yet whether this book will have much of an impact on the true believers on the Christian right whose identity seems to have merged with the Republican political agenda, but It put me in mind of a post I wrote in June 2005 which I reproduce here:
Con artists understand that most people
operate in a symbolically patterned world, and that reality, whatever
is really there, is hidden behind the symbols. We tend to accept the
world as it appears at face value. We can’t live without a certain
minimum level of trust that things are in fact as they appear. Con
artists know that because people are uncritically inclined to accept
that the symbol represents truthfully what lies behind it that they can
use the symbol as a kind of disguise. A sheep symbolizes passive
docility; the wolf cunning and rapacious greed. The wolf knows that if
he appears as its symbolic self, no one will trust him, so he hides his
real nature and presents himself symbolically as a sheep. His
effectiveness in the con depends on his effectiveness in appearing
non-threatening and innocuous, someone who raises no alarms in those
whom he seeks to prey upon.The con artist knows that people don’t see what’s there; they see
what they are habitually disposed to see. Did you ever wonder as a kid
how Little Red Riding Hood could ever have mistaken the wolf for her
grandmother? I think the story speaks to this kind of patterned
perception. We are inclined to see (or hear) what we have been
habitually conditioned see, what we are comfortable seeing. When
running into someone on the street have you ever hear a "Good" to a
"How are you?" that you didn’t ask? The person wasn’t listening to the
actual verbal content or your greeting. He was simply enacting a
symbolic or formal ritual where the content doesn’t matter.Con artists understand how to blend themselves into the patterns and
symbolic rituals of our everyday life–one might be a wolf, but so long
as he is tucked in bed like grandma and is wearing her nightgown and
little night cap with the red ribbon, chances are that’s all Little Red
Riding Hood will notice. She sees big teeth but is not alarmed about
them because she has been lulled into a mood of trust by the larger
pattern of familiarity. In such a state of mind she minimizes the
importance of what doesn’t fit into the familiar pattern. She trusts
that her world on that fateful day is the same as the world as it was
the day before and the day before that. Big teeth, long snout? Minor
aberrations. It’s a story about how we are all more inclined to believe
the symbolic version of reality rather than any evidence to the
contrary.Leonardo DiCaprio shows how it works in his role as Frank Abagnale
in "Catch Me if You Can." He wasn’t a wolf really; there was something
rather innocent about his conning–he just wanted to be more than he
was. But the key to his success was his uncanny ability to embody
symbolic roles–airline pilot, lawyer, etc.–to become a symbol without
having any of the substance to which the symbol points. Con artists
play on that trust, and they have a talent for insinuating themselves
into our symbolic landscape to appear the way we expect them to appear,
to be what we want them to be. We tend to disregard whatever evidence
doesn’t fit into the familiar pattern.It might be worth considering in a post at another time to what
degree we live in a literal vs. a symbolic world. That’s a big
question, and there is no simple answer for it. My answer would pick up
from what I was developing in the earlier post in which I talk about
the hypertrophied eye
and how it has led us to limit our consideration of what is real only
to what we can see. For any of us who are religiously or spiritually
inclined, what is real is not what we see. Rather the ground that
provides the supporting matrix for what we see is far more real, even
if it is something that enters our field of awareness mostly in subtle
ways.In a fallen world, except for the rare epiphany, because we are cut
off from what is most real, we most intensely experience the husks of
things–and symbols are the husks. And so what appears in our
experience is real to the degree that is
saturated with the living reality that grounds it and which gave it its
shape, and it is unreal and dead to the degree that is has lost its
connection to it.Some symbols in our cultural life live (paternal/maternal love is
one that comes to mind) and some are dead but live with a kind of zombie
life. Especially during a decadent or transititonal cultural era like
the one we’re suffering through now, we live in a cultural world of
dead or undead symbols. A con man can very easily inhabit a dead
symbol because we don’t really have that strong a sense of what the
real thing is–we’ve forgotten or never known it. As a result, we’re
easily confused and easily fooled. It happens to the best of us.The transcendent reality behind the appearances in a symbol that
truly lives is unfathomably deep and multidimensional, and anybody who
has had a glimpse knows the real from the false. And so if we as human
beings are grounded only in what we see, if we believe only in what is
given to us on the surface, then we can be easily manipulated by anyone
who has the ability to appear as something other than what he is. The
devil is quite capable of quoting scripture to persuade us that his
perverse purposes are legitimate. It happens all the time.Our practical day-to-day life requires that we learn to navigate
effectively in a world of appearances and dead symbols, but the more
important meta-task is to discern what lies behind them and to
re-connect with what is true and life-giving and to reject what is
false and undead. And very often what is acclaimed by the official
reality as true is false and what is denounced as false is true. Our
only protection is to develop a nose for what is rotting inside the
whited sepulcher on the one hand, and on the other a nose that knows
the sweet fragrance of that which lives. This is a cognitive skill best
developed by the thinking heart.Some years ago, when I was reading to my son before bed, we were
working through a fantasy series based on Welsh myths. The stories had
an interesting recurring feature in which an evil spirit was able to
disguise itself as something beautiful–a bird, person, flower–and it
was so beautiful that the unwary would be irresistibly drawn to it, and
when the victim would get close enough, the evil spirit would appear in
its true ugly form and bite its victim and cause him to become deathly
ill. But as beautiful as the shapeshifter was in its disguise, it
always had a minor flaw that distinguished it from the real thing–it
had an extra toe or finger, the wrong colored eyes, a leaf pattern that
wasn’t quite right. If one was alert and discerning, he could recognize
the con for what it was.That’s the thinking part, but in such encounters the heart also
knows better, whether or not the head notices the extra toe. The heart
has to be strong if it’s not to be overwhelmed by unworthy desire which
is also very strong in all of us and always will be. Unworthy desire or
impulse cannot be extinguished; it can only be refused, and it’s easier
to refuse if another choice is presented as an alternative. The
stronger our hearts, the clearer the alternative. So the task is on the
one hand to be vigilant and alert, but on the other to develop a solar
powered heart whose impulses are stronger than the instincts from below
that otherwise drive our actions.We are all of us wandering in a world of shapeshifters, a world
where the shapes may or may not point to something true that lies
behind them. Luckily, not all of what surrounds us intends us harm. And
along these lines the official reality, as I spoke about it yesterday,
is often innocuous enough. But there are times when the official
reality is hiding horrors which, like Little Red Riding Hood, we are
simply not conditioned to see because it doesn’t fit into our pattern
of expectations. Fear makes us stupid, but so does wide-eyed trust.
Nobody likes learning that they’ve been conned. But the sooner the face up to the fact the the quicker will they be able to limit the damage.
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