The Cynic and the Fool

The Unconscious in Theology & Politics

DeLay

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781532604256
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía de la religión

The questioning of religion is the beginning of a flood, one that cannot be contained and will soon drown every theological, political, economic, and cultural orthodoxy that pledged its allegiance to a sinking cause. We are in just such an era of revolt, and those with eyes to see are learning to interrogate motives. When we are told of an idea that cannot possibly be true, the most immediate question is this: does the speaker so very foolishly believe their own words, or is the person a cynic who knows perfectly well how they manipulate the truth? As individual personalities transform into a collective drive, the aftermath is a brutal mix of motives, fictions, and anxieties.The Cynic & the Fool explores theology and politics through the lens of our unconscious motives, our clever repression, and our deceptive denial. In nine chapters interspersed with nine parables, DeLay unites psychoanalysis, philosophy, and theology together for an accessible yet critical theory of culture. There could not be a more crucial moment to settle these questions. Why do we feel such anxiety over the most abstract orthodoxies, what conflicts of interest are we facing, and why we are commanded to see the world a certain way?

The End

In a moment, there was nothing but utter darkness. In a split second that seems an eternity, you begin to comprehend your life has ended, and you have passed on. The dark hue brightens until you find yourself in a room of pure light, with only yourself and an elderly figure sitting across from you. Waves of emotion keep you from speaking for days, as you had never quite faced the reality that you would eventually die. But finally you gather the your wits to ask where you are. The old man shifts uneasily, considering how to answer such a meaningless question until at last he answers, “Friend, you are where you have always been.”

A lifetime of questions come flooding back to you, wondering about paradise and punishment. You wonder aloud, “Am I here to wait for something?”

Disappointedly, the elder elaborates, “My friend, your existence is not a place, and neither are you coming or going, nor being made to wait for anything.”

An eternity passes, but to every question, you are greeted with only a similarly cryptic response. Your striving eats away at your soul. As eternity passes on, you realize your striving is meaningless, which is where your wonderings have always been. You come to peace with this eventually.

After a good while, the elder, no longer interrupted by your questions, stands with a smile and says to you, “It is finished. I can see you are finished.” He leads you to two doors and, gesturing to the first, says you may enter through it to return to an eternal, dreamless, serene sleep.

The alternate door lies adjacent, with the words inscribed above: Abandon hope all ye who enter.

“And what of the streets of gold and the heavenly mansions our elders spoke of?” you ask. Feelings of indignation rise as you angrily fight the suspicion your end has indeed arrived.

“Yes, I have walked those streets,” the figure replies. “There are those that need an eternity chasing luxuries before they can rest. But if you desire your striving, that is the second door.”

5

Illusion and Delusion, Prophecy and Apocalypse

We are rediscovering today what the prophets told us long ago: what we cannot bear to feel during the day will haunt our dreams by night. What cannot be remembered will be repeated in our behavior. What cannot be spoken aloud will be ingrained in our rituals. We are as creative as we are fearful. Our creativity is a field from which we reap sustenance, but it is also the factory packaging denial of all we fear to be true.

This chapter begins with prophets and ends in apocalypse. As I’ve said from the start, I am interested in the flood beginning when we question our most basic assumptions. I am more interested in how ideas work than where they arrive. I am interested in how a question about ancient Israel—those who called themselves wanderers in the desert—turns so quickly into a question about modern immigration policy. I am interested in how a question about Christ’s atonement challenges the nature of forgiveness, and I am interested in how the erasure of guilt changes our thinking about our student loan debts. I am interested in how Saint Augustine’s abstract doctrine of original sin informs our nation’s concrete original sin of slavery, or how a story of violence in a book written twenty-five hundred years ago becomes justification for a war today. I am interested in how rethinking our closest religious beliefs changes our thinking about everything else. And I am also interested in why so many dare not think.

The truth has the structure of a fiction, but I have no interest in simply pulling a rug of certainty out from under our fleeting feet. My goal is much worse, for every view we hold is everywhere and always a misdirection, a placeholder, a false consciousness seeking to avoid. We believe things because reality construction is human. We choose not to reconsider our beliefs if we desire to blend into our tribes. Those with eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts to ache for the oppressed will not fit the tribe of certainty. The tribe would rather change things just enough so that everything can stay the same.

So it went that Ezekiel found himself bound like a fool on his side, staring at the model of Jerusalem before it was sacked and cooking his food atop a burning pile of his own excrement. His rage burned against the sins of Sodom, which he told us was an overfed culture of arrogance with no concern for the poor.32 We prefer to think the sins of Sodom were something else, because if the sins of Sodom were, in fact, being overfed and unconcerned, we would have to face our own recklessness. So it was that Isaiah walked the halls of power to whisper of its approaching collapse. He bit the hand that fed him, and he spoke to people whose ears and eyes were closed and blinded. He spoke to a nation on the verge of implosion, and the prideful cannot afford to listen to warnings. So it went as well when the Christ began his teaching in a quiet synagogue with an unwelcome message: who really desires redistribution for the poor, sight for the blind, and freedom from oppression when present conditions are the very foundation of the status quo?

As we’ve seen, the dogmatic religious types never seem to notice what their supposed savior thought of dogmatic religious types. It’s far easier to concoct a version of the Christ who loved certainty, so long as it is the correct certainty (always filled with godlike arrogance and unconcern). And just as the message of the prophets was lost on ancient ears—for things do not change so much from epoch to epoch—we close our eyes and ears because we’d rather not know about ourselves. The message we evade sinks deep into our unconscious and keeps the social machine running. The message becomes grafted into our rituals and behavior, into our issues and causes, into our anger and hope. What cannot be accepted and remembered will return in an inverted form.

We gather together to break bread and drink wine, but we forget the original act of the Eucharist was an invitation for communion, a feast without regard for social class, and fundamentally an act redistributing the grace that naturally goes along with sharing a meal. We took a holy act and turned it into a litmus test for an in-group, and in so doing we re-crucify the body broken for us. The conversion of Eucharist from gift to litmus test happened quickly, for it is no mystery that an in-group quickly jumps to police its boundaries. What cannot be properly remembered (grace, redistribution, and emancipation) becomes repressed in a vain ritual, a ritual organized around anxiety in an inverted form of the ritual’s original meaning.

Diogenes the Cynic was once asked why people give alms to the poor but not to philosophers. He guessed they give to the poor and the blind because they think they may become poor and blind, but nobody expects to suddenly start thinking. Indeed, if you have ever gone down the path of rethinking something fundamental to your tribe, you understand what I mean when I claim daring to think is one of the most antisocial acts imaginable. We become the rubbish that must be repressed so our tribe may continue to sleep. The saints know this well, for as we have seen, a saint is always an empty signifier. Saints cannot be remembered without offense, so they are converted into misrecognized dreams and misremembered parodies.

Misremembering Origins

When I teach my students the history of Christian and Jewish thought, we look at the dual creation stories of Genesis chapters one and two, and we compare them with the ancient Babylonian story called Enuma Elish (“When On High”). In the Babylonian myth, the parents of the gods become angry at their children for being too loud and decide to slay them. Enraged at this plot, the wise god Ea and the warrior god Marduk battle against their parent gods, and after the war is over Marduk creates the heavens and the earth (in roughly the same order copied in Genesis chapter one). He pours out the blood of an enemy god and creates humankind out of the divine blood. We know this version is from a tablet in Babylon, because Babylon worshiped Marduk. In ancient Mesopotamia, each city’s version of the creation myth presents its own god as the protagonist. It is a story Judah encountered during its exile in Babylon, a period in the sixth century BCE when Jewish scribes were organizing the Hebrew Bible, and they made the story their own. But in the Jewish version, God was deeply good and fashioned humankind from the dust of the earth rather than the blood of a demon. And then my class asks: do we still have creation myths today?

I teach the viral spread of myths with this example. In ten thousand years, an archaeologist from New Earth descends in a rocket to land in the old deserts of Iraq. She finds a document containing a story about a great and generous leader, who desired peace so much he gave up all his weapons, who was so honest he had to tell his father when he chopped down a cherry tree, who tried in vain to defend his people against a foreign emperor, and whose name was Hussein. The archaeologist knows of a war between the West and the Middle East in this period, so it would be no great leap to assume who Hussein and the foreign emperor were. And from where would the story of the chopped cherry tree come?

Ancient myths almost always transfer from a more powerful culture to a less powerful culture, and when they transfer they are modified to the liking of the adopting city. In a previous version of the Enuma Elish, perhaps the older Sumerian god Ea was the protagonist. But even though Sumerians invented writing in 3200 BCE, the version we have is Babylonian, and it misremembers the story. Just as we saw in my story of Washington’s features being misremembered, the story a culture tells itself about its great leaders is always a misremembering. America’s creation myth involves intellectuals who were also brutal slaveholders. This is not new information; it is something we have agreed to forget. Creation myths are all around us, from our religions to our nations to the stories we trade about our friends and family. Every tribe has its creation myths, and they are always illusions guarding against knowing too much.

Lest we drive into the ravine of skepticism, let us hit the brakes to consider what we do know. Yes, all truth has the structure of a fiction, for we believe with immense certainty so many things that are not true, but what help is it to recognize this? All this philosophizing is still a waste of time if we cannot come out of this with a few things we do know. Let us propose we think of our beliefs in three broad ways: (1) wish versus indifference, (2) anxiety versus security, and (3) factual versus delusional.

First, we must recognize a spectrum of from our wishes to our indifference.33 We have very little difficulty letting go of doctrines—no matter how crucial they once appeared to be—if we haven’t any wish for them to be true. We tenaciously and aggressively hold on to the thing we desire.

Second, we need to acknowledge a spectrum of destabilized anxiety to absolute security. Religion is filled with desire, and it is simply better suited to providing security than to inciting the quest for truth.34 We feel the anxiety of not knowing, and we search for the one who will say he (and is it not usually a he rather than a she?) knows the absolute Truth. But rather than saying we simply seek certainty, I want to argue we actually do desire the anxiety and ambiguity justifying a lack of determined choice. For example, when I drive away from home but obsess over whether or not I turned off the oven’s gas, it is almost as if I trick myself into believing my house could not explode until I make up my mind whether or not to return. We like to think the universe will forgive us while we are still in the process of deciding, thus the small comfort we feel in a moment of anxiety, of ambiguity, and even of mystery tells us what we’d prefer not to know. Not knowing is an inverted form of knowing. For example, when someone tells you “I believe X, but I don’t want to think it all the way through—I’d rather keep my simple faith,” she is admitting her security in not knowing. In other words, not knowing is itself a type of certainty, but it is toxic and won’t ultimately work.

Third, only then may we arrive at the typical question of whether a religious belief is factual or delusional. The great many who dismiss religion altogether as outdated mythmaking normally start here, but their arguments fall on deaf ears precisely because they have not accounted for the reasons we still believe in the face of all evidence to the contrary. We can ask why we believe foolish things all day long while ignoring deeper questions of why.

Spectrums: Our Wishes and Our Indifference

To consider how beliefs are shaped by wishes or desires, let’s use an example from our history books. When Columbus set sail across the oceans, it was a gamble. Nobody knew whether it would pay off, least of all the men aboard the boats. Learned men and women had in fact known for thousands of years that the earth was round, but this knowledge hadn’t reached the sailors as they embarked on their journey. It is not unheard of for a great wealth of knowledge to go missing. After all, knowledge is a powerful technology, and sometimes it is withheld by t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Diogenes and Plato
• The Prisoner
• You Know, but Does the Big Other Know?
• Noah and His God
• The End
• Diogenes the Great
• Moses and Ra
• Diogenes and Alexander
• The Dark Ages
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography