I’m undertaking research work at the moment for a book, a book about eight people who were writing and publishing in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, people who deeply influenced my spiritual formation. Some of them are not widely recognised or read today (and in some Christian circles, some of them were and probably still are taboo), They include William James, Mircea Eliade, Peter L. Berger, Bede Griffiths, Theodore Roszak, Fritjof Capra and Eckhart Tolle.
At the moment I’m re-reading Theodore Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends (1972, revised 1989). In Chapter 5: A Dead Man’s Eyes, he writes in complex prose about the human loss of faith and self-awareness he witnesses. Projection of emotions, ideas and actions onto others is, he says, “a familiar human vice. We project the sins that reside in our hearts, locating them far off, in others, in adversaries whom we then assail and persecute for our own guilt.”
“The capacity of people to depersonalise their conduct – and to do so in good conscience, even with pride, is the distinctive psychic disease of our age. This devouring sense of alienation from nature and from one’s fellow human beings – and from one’s own essential self – becomes the endemic anguish of advanced industrial societies. Only those who have broken off their silent inner dialogue with humans and nature, only those who experience the world as dead, stupid, or alien and therefore without a claim to reverence, could ever turn upon their environment and their brothers and sisters with the cool and meticulously calculated rapacity of industrial society.
“The great truth of Bacon and his disciples of the New Philosophy is: break faith with the environment, establish between yourself and it an alienative dichotomy and you will surely gain power. Then no sense of fellowship or personal intimacy or strong belonging will inhibit your ability to manipulate and exploit. This is the same power we gain over people when we refuse to honour their claim to respect, to compassion, to love. They become mere things on which we exercise power. Between ourselves and them there is no commerce of feelings, no exchange of sentiment or empathy.”
Tip Toe, Trump, Putin, Netanyahu
On Tuesday evening I watched the final episode of Russell T Davies’ drama Tip Toe on Channel 4. An intensifying dispute between single gay bar proprietor Leo and married father and electrician Clive has unfolded over one fateful week, shown over five episodes. At the end of the last episode, Clive, in a brutal, vicious bid to reassert his masculinity, together with the rowdy gang of football-obsessed ‘lads’, increasingly deranged by images and videos posted to the TV, set upon Leo and kill him, stringing him up from a lamppost outside his house. The end had been well signposted but the rapid descent into intense emotional and physical chaos was more deeply disturbing. Tip Toe is Russell T Davies’ way of warning us about where the trajectory of prejudice against LGBTQIA+ people in particular, and also in general, is headed.
I switched off the TV and switched on the radio to listen to the R4 ten o’clock news. Headlines reported the violence in Belfast following the vicious attack by an asylum seeker from Sudan. Nigel Farage, Reform, Restore Britain and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon were fomenting anger and violence. Buses were on fire, houses attacked, bins and cars set alight, mask-wearing gangs roaming the streets. Trump also was on the warpath, “some level of reaction required” to Iran’s latest shooting down of an Apache helicopter. “It may spin further out of control”. The dynamics in Tip Toe the TV drama and the immediately present drama in Belfast, the Middle East and Ukraine were the same, showing deranged people in action.
The effect on me
I’m hyperconscious at the moment of the insane quantity of projection that is taking place in the wars between Putin and Ukraine, between Trump and Iran, between Israel and Iran, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, Lebanon, Syria, Trump and Netanyahu and in the violence taking place in the UK against refugees, boat people, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, black people, the police, politicians, LGBTQIA+ people (and others that you, reading this, will be conscious of).
All knowing is personal
Roszak refers to the work of Michael Polanyi (1891 – 1976), a Hungarian-British polymath. Polanyi gave the Gifford Lectures in 1951–52 at Aberdeen, later published as Personal Knowledge (1958). He claimed that all knowledge claims (including those that derive from rules) rely on personal judgments. A knower does not stand apart from the universe but participates personally within it. Our intellectual skills are driven by passionate commitments that motivate discovery and validation. Our tacit awareness connects us, albeit fallibly, with reality.
As I read the paper, listen to the radio news and watch the TV news I know the reality of the wars being fought, the result of an absence of “personal knowing”. People being killed and injured, lies being told (over and over and over again by Trump), economies disrupted, human relationships corrupted, communities distressed. Existential alienation is affecting human life, relationships and well-being everywhere.
Part of my thesis In my book is that faith communities and congregations, Churches, Synagogues, Mosques, Gurdwaras, should be gatherings of people learning the dynamics of human relationship according to the life, teaching and practice of wisdom people - Jesus Christ for Christians – showing us how to live life in all its fulness as open, self-aware individuals, deepening through spiritual practice and commitment, our self-awareness as members of self-aware communities.
Christian awareness
Tragically, dogma and doctrine, tradition and literalism of Bible teaching are more important, far, far more important, to large proportions of the Christian world than a focus on deepening our self-awareness and developing our relational, open, self-giving life as members of the Body of Christ. Within the confines of your own congregation and local Christian community, the impression may be that this is what your community is already like. Having visited a significant number of churches and congregations over the past nine months, I can tell you yours would be an unusual congregation. We have accommodated ourselves to projections and prejudices to maintain our idealised view of Christianity and local Christian communities as open and welcoming.
Agents of change and transformation
We have work to do, global, country-wide, denomination-wide work to do. We could be agents and communities of change, influencing, however unlikely it is, political leaders and the driving forces behind AI.
Religious, spiritual bodies and networks have to do the ground work if the leaders at the summit of power in the USA, Russia and Israel (and many other countries, are to become more aware of the vitriol, poison and hatred they spread and the damage they do to vulnerable human lives and souls. If I were still allowed to preach, this is a sermon I would offer – in conversation with the congregation, because it’s a tough message both to deliver and to receive – a sermon inspired by Theodore Roszak, hoping to heal the familiar human vice of projecting emotions, ideas and actions onto others, the sins that reside in our hearts, locating them in adversaries whom we then assail and persecute for our own guilt.
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Changing Attitude and Unadulterated Love
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