Polarization is a symptom of spiritual failure. It might be said to be a failure
of biblical proportions if the biblical ideal here is to love one’s enemies. For most this has always seemed an idiotically unrealistic ideal reserved for saints and flakes who don’t know how the real world works. But I think of it as eminently practical, if a requirement of practicality involves possessing an ability to see things as they really are. To the degree that we don’t see things as they are, we are deluded. Fear and hatred are agents of delusion.
People who are in a polarized state of mind hate those whom they see as their
enemies and see them as deluded or mentally ill. And they’re right if their enemies are also in a polarized state of mind. That’s what we’re seeing in the Middle East right now, where every one is not in his right mind, and the results are a predictable bloody horror.
The problem lies in the lowest common denominator syndrome. We’ve all experienced it on those occasions at home or at work when you are in a perfectly good mood, and someone who isn’t comes along and says something hurtful or hateful, and next thing you know we’re firing back in kind. To argue that we are morally justified to do so because we didn’t start it, is to argue like a kindergartner. You obviously have a right to protect yourself, but hating those who hate you puts you in the same state of mental illness. And if we are in a state of mental illness or delusion, it is very hard for us to see clearly and therefore to know the right thing to do.
That’s why politics is often a public form of mental illness that results in policies that are so destructive. We define "normal" in reference to what is accepted as normal by the social world around us. But what if the social world is structured in such a way that it promotes a fundamental alienation from reality? This clearly happened in Germany under the Nazis and in the Soviet Union under the Communists. It happens when fear takes hold of a group, as in financial panics. And it happens when a group fears an enemy who seeks to destroy its way of life, as Americans feared the Communists during the Cold War, and as they fear terrorists now.What people have come to accept as normal and the conventional wisdom that accompanies it, is often completely nuts. And we can usually measure the degree of its nuttiness by the degree to which fear plays a role in shaping the defintion of "normal".
There is an obvious correlation then between fear and hatred. We hate those whom we fear. We hate those who pose a threat to us physically, but certainly also those who would abuse us emotionally and spiritually. It’s easy to hate those whom we fear–it’s an instinctual reaction, and
instinct is what comes naturally. But virtue is the mastery of our
instinctual life–not it’s repression, but the refusal to let it rule
us. And virtue is something we don’t talk much about these days,
except in the rigid idiom of the religious right, which gives virtue
a bad name. So therefore, if it is counted a virtue for us to master our fears by the development of a greater capacity for courage, it is also a virtue for us to master our hatreds by the development of a greater capacity for love.
Love is a virtue, not an emotional state. It transcends our likes and dislikes.
It’s the and capacity we must develop to be related to the world as it is, not as we wish it to be or fear it to be. It is in a very deep sense the fiercest of all the virtues, and the one that demands the most of us. But the measure of one’s capacity for love is in a very real way correlated with his or her cognitive capacity to see the world accurately. Love is in this sense not some pie-in-the-sky ideal, but a prerequisite for seeing clearly and acting effectively. He who is weak in love is strong in delusion.
It is relatively more easy to develop courage in the service of hatred than it is to develop courage in the service of love. But courage in the service of hatred is always courage in the service of a delusion. It is not possible to see the world accurately through the lens of fear and hatred.
Courage is not an emotional state; it is the refusal of the will to let our fears dictate our course of action. Neither then is love, as I speak of it here, an emotional state; it is the refusal of the will to let our hatreds master us. And as with anything, the more you practice it, the more habitual it becomes, and the more any state of soul becomes habitual, then along with it comes feeling states that reinforce the inclination of the will toward virtue, and with that comes a clarity of the mind that makes it difficult not to see more clearly what is really there.
Are we delusional to fear threats posed by terrorists and rogue nation-states?
Of course not. But the challenge does not lie in blinding ourselves to the forces that pose threats to the well-being of our society. They do, and they are lethally dangerous. The challenge is to cultivate the state of soul that is most competent to respond to those threats effectively.
My indictment of the Bush administration lies in what I see as its failure in moral leadership. It has not promoted a courageous response to the terrorist threat, but rather a hysterical one. It has manipulated the public by stimulating its fears rather than helping it to find a sane, measured, effective response. It has been blind to the facts in the situation as they really are in Iraq, and either willfully or because it is so deluded in believing its own propaganda, it persists in promoting a storyline about Iraq that has very little basis in reality.
It used to be true among GOP partisans that anyone who criticized Bush could only be motivated by Bush hate. I hope it’s clear now that it’s possible to see the man for what he is and not hate him. The evidence has been out there for all to see, so the real question is why it took so many others so long to recognize what should be so obvious.
This administration needs some tough love, and the best way to provide
it is by taking the majority away from the GOP this November. God
knows the Democrats are not the answer, but the Republicans are the
worst thing that can happen to the world for the next several years if
they continue in power. They are the party of delusional, morally righteous bloody
messes.
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