Prayer of Opening
Lady Wisdom,
we sit at your feet,
seeking instruction.
We want to be done with war
and all manner of violence.
Teach us your ways.
Our love for you
is our willingness to listen,
our consent in allowing
the stream of thoughts
and images born of fear
to carry us to the Ocean of Reality.
What is being born through us,
Lady Wisdom?
What is the way
to the new creation,
the new human?
Birth us
into this future
and as this future.
Assure us that this venture
through the dark canal of our days
is the beginning of a new adventure,
of a one-Earth community,
alive and blazing
with the heart and mind
of Christ.
Among many postmodernist thinkers the idea that war is actually on the decline and that our world is less violent today than at anytime in history, is a romantic illusion. They will point out that the 21st century was the bloodiest century in the history of humanity, as indeed, I have pointed out myself on previous Remembrance Day Sundays. But Dr. Steven Pinker, eminent evolutionary psychologist, wondered if this assumption was true, and decided to do some research. The result is a one thousand page book, (The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined) which I have taken on.[1] The brilliance of the scientific method is that it looks at actual data and available statistics, and can formulate trend charts relating to different themes. Following these charts is difficult for a non-scientific mind such as mine, but does have the advantage of casting one’s assumptions in the light of the facts. In this regard, Dr. Pinker has done us a great service.
He shows that, contrary to a popular romantic myth about the human species, (that earlier iterations of our species were a kinder, gentler lot, corrupted by modernism), that it’s just the reverse. The further you go back in human history, the more violent we were, and the impact of civilization has been a marked decrease in violence and the warring impulse. There have been far fewer, albeit deadly wars, in the last two centuries, and as a percentage of world population in times of war, the two World Wars of the 20th century were no bloodier than other wars in previous centuries. Furthermore, he points out that a century is one hundred years, not fifty years, and these last fifty have aptly been named the “long peace”. We are in an unprecedented reign of peace between the great powers.
Dr. Pinker makes a compelling case, again contrary to a popular theory of some historians[2] (such as Arnold Toynbee), that wars are not inevitable cyclical events, by which our species releases an innate violence that builds up during periods of peace requiring the catharsis of war. In fact, WW2 was somewhat of an aberration in the trends, broken by the sheer charismatic insanity of a single individual, Adolph Hitler. He agrees with a growing list of military historians who are concluding, no Hitler, no war. It is not possible in the time I have in this sermon to go into his corroborating evidence. I can only tell you that I found it compelling. To be fair, others find his research unconvincing. I have included in the manuscript a link to both a positive and a critical review. It strikes me that whether you believe the author or not is less about the facts—and more about one’s fundamental outlook. It is academically fashionable these days to be critical of anything that smacks of anything suggestive of progress. The reasons for this are complex, but many of them boil down to the unexpected horror of WW1 and WW2, that gave rise to a sweeping critique of a belief in human progress.
By way of disabusing the reading of a romantic view of human history, Pinker takes the reader on a rather gruesome tour, beginning with the recovery of the exhumed bodies of early human beings, such as the “Iceman” or Otzi, whose body was preserved in the ice and discovered in 1991 by two hikers. Poor Otzi, as forensic evidence revealed, was murdered. This has been the case for each of these preserved ancient remains. This might be simply coincidence, or it might say something about what life was like for our early ancestors.
Pinker then takes us through each emergent age of humanity tracking the frequency and pervasiveness of violence of human beings—the gruesome nature of which is often beyond our modern minds to even comprehend.
As an atheist, he seems to take particular delight in showing us the violence of the Old Testament. Matthew White, a self-described atrocitologist, counted up the mass killings enumerated in the Bible and came up with a figure of 1.2 million. Biblical scholar, Raymund Schwager informs us that the Hebrew Bible “contains over six hundred passages that explicitly talk about nations, kings, or individuals attacking, destroying, and killing others…Aside from the approximately one thousand verses in which Yahweh (God) himself appears as the direct executioner of violent punishments, and the many texts in which He delivers the criminal to the punisher’s sword, in over one hundred other passages, Yahweh expressly gives the command to kill people.
It’s not that the Old Testament accurately represents history or that this can be taken literally. Rather, the uncritical manner in which God is presented as inherently violent, and the way in which the Kings and prophets of Yahweh enact violence, reflect the popular assumptions about violence of these days. Reality, including Ultimate Reality (God) was assumed to be inherently violent. The world was unimaginably violent compared to today. The poor old church doesn’t fair too well, either, as he describes in gory detail the various instruments of torture that priests thought up in order to encourage witches and infidels to repent.
In one particular gripping exercise of the imagination, Pinker describes crucifixion as a means of execution[3]. This was Rome’s most effective deterrent to anybody thinking about sedition. Rome itself picked up this technology from the Persians, after conquering their lands, and brought it back with them. I will spare you the details of death by crucifixion. Pinker imagines the worst possible criminal figure of the 21st century. He comes up with Hitler, responsible for 10’s of millions of deaths. The Romans tortured and crucified a man in the 1st century for a trumped up crime, but today not a single one of us could imagine meting out a punishment as cruel as crucifixion upon even such a poor excuse for a human being as Adolph Hitler. It is beyond our imagination.
The point is that something has shifted in our collective consciousness; one might even say that there has been an irreversible transformation of consciousness. It’s not that brutal tribal warlords don’t exist today. They do. It’s that our species has gained the capacity to shudder in the face of this kind of brutality. This evolution of our capacity to shudder is meaningful. Attitudes have shifted. Fifty years ago, for example, can you imagine the international community conducting an inquiry into the manner in which a character like Moammar Gaddafi was executed?
He refers to a period of the 19th century that scholars call “romantic militarism: the doctrine that war itself was a salubrious activity…it brought forth spiritual qualities of heroism, self-sacrifice and manliness, and was needed as a cleansing and invigorating therapy for the effeminacy and materialism of bourgeois society.” This is precisely the attitude that this church’s founder war trying to counter when he built this sanctuary as a memorial to peace. Whether he was entirely successful is an interesting conversation. As we discovered during a symposium on our beautiful windows a decade ago now, this sanctuary itself was part of an intentional post-WW1 government initiative to cement the myth of Canadian identity that was forged in the trenches of that war. The Rev. Colonel George Fallis had a lot of trouble convincing naysayers that this sanctuary was not a glorification of war. Here are a few examples of the romantic militarism that was alive and well not so long ago.
“War almost always enlarges the mind of a people and raises their character” —Alexis de Tocqueville
“War is life itself…We must eat and be eaten so that the world might live. It is only warlike nations that have prospered: a nation dies as soon as it disarms.
—Emile Zola
“The grandeur of war lies in the utter annihilation of puny man in the great conception of the State, and it bring out the full magnificence of the sacrifice of fellow-countrymen for one another, the love, the friendliness, and the strength of that sentiment”
—Henrich von Treitscheke
“Wars are terrible, but necessary, for they save the State from social petrifaction and stagnation. It is mere illusion and pretty sentiment to expect much (or anything at all) from mankind if it forgets how to make war”.
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Many scholars are now wondering whether we’ve seen the end of war between the great nations. As soon as one speaks with such hope about the end of war, one is reminded of the one about the turkey, who, on the eve of Thanksgiving, remarked on the extraordinary 364-day era of peace between farmers and turkeys he is lucky enough to be living in.
We hate being caught out as being foolish and naïve. Pessimism saves face. But Pinker is not saying that the human capacity for violence has been permanently transcended. It hasn’t. Yet our very capacity to shutter in the 21st century at cruelty against animals, let alone, people, is in marked contrast to the public form of amusement, only two hundred years ago, of watching a cat being slowly lowered down into a fire. Vigilance is required, certainly, but just as the empathic impulse has exponentially accelerated in the past fifty years[4], so in that same time period has there been a corresponding attitude shift about war and violence. War is making less and less sense and is less tolerable.
It is inevitable, when somebody like Steve Pinker makes his case, and I try to summarize it in a few pages, that all of the exceptions, from violence against women, to ethnic cleansing, to the military-industrial complex that is a trillion dollar industry in the U.S. come to mind. I just ask that you read the book with an open mind.
You won’t be surprised to hear that I think that we are, in fact, evolving as a species, and that in fact, there has been an acceleration evolution in our collective consciousness in the past fifty years. This is not to say that continuing evolution is inevitable. It isn’t. Vigilance is required. There are subtle dimensions of violence toward self, Earth, and others that we are a long way from addressing, and which Dr. Pinker was not tracking. These subtler dimensions belong to the realm of spirit. It is here that we need to keep our wicks trimmed and our oil in good supply, if we are to be conscious agents of the evolution of our species.
The bridegroom in the parable is, of course, Christ (Matthew 25:1-13). In the early church Christ’s immanent return was expected, and the writer of the gospel was imploring the early church to stay alert to his arrival. But we can understand the parable today as an injunction to tend to the light of conscious awareness, because this is the secret of evolutionary acceleration of the emergence of a new humanity. We can think of the coming of the bridegroom Christ as the collective emergence of a transformed human being—what Barbara Marx Hubbard has been calling homo universalis for decades now. The coming of Christ is the advent, the birth, of this new human being on a collective scale so that the new human becomes an incarnation of the heart and mind of Christ consciousness.
The way we can best honour the fallen of our nation, indeed all those who have been victims of violence in all its forms, as bearers of the lamp of Christ consciousness, is to turn our alertness inward on those dark corners of our own psyches where the impulse to violence lives in the darkness. By shining the lamp of consciousness inward we bring the many, subtle faces of violence within ourselves into the light, where we can take responsibility for it. The parable dramatically tries to make the point that nobody can do this for us. We can’t borrow anybody else’s light. We need to keep a supply of our own oil on hand. We can’t read a book or hear a sermon about the ways in which violence subtly is expressed in our lives, and expect that this will be sufficient. This is work that each one of us must engage in.
The new human that bears the heart and mind of Christ will have fixed her mind so completely on the desire for sacred Wisdom or Sophia, that a new and deep intelligence that transcends violence will characterize her. Wisdom is the milieu of Christ consciousness, the divine mind and heart, within which consciousness, and the whole evolutionary process is occurring. In the reading from the Wisdom of Solomon, wisdom is personified. She is a felt presence and those who seek her will find her, because she wants to be found (Wisdom of Solomon 6:12-14). She awaits those who truly seek her for instruction.
Wisdom is found by the purification of desire—a single-minded intention to live by her ways. She is the divine intelligence that is available to all who truly love her (vs17). It is important that Wisdom is a feminine personification, because for at least the past 10,000 years Earth has been dominated by a masculine orientation. I find this to be true of my own orientation in life. But we are entering a new age, when alignment with Reality, and not so much mastery over it, is what is required. It is time to enter into an intuitive relationship with our own bodies, which are vessels and manifestations of a nature’s deep intelligence—for this is where Wisdom is found close to home. To align with our subtle body energies is to align with Earth herself. This is primarily a practice of listening for heart-intelligence. As we follow our heart desires we become Wisdom’s children—as Jesus called himself. He is the Prince of Peace, the first fruits of a new humanity, who shall neither hurt nor destroy. In his blessed spirit, desiring Wisdom, we dedicate ourselves to the future of our planet.
Links:
http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html
For a positive review: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/sep/22/better-angels-steven-pinker-review
For a critical review: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-why-violence-has-declined-by-steven-pinker/article2201455/
