Cosmic Anthropology: True and False Humanisms

Well, this is good news. I just received a letter from my malpractice insurance carrier, letting me know that I can get a discount if I join a group called Psychologists for Social Responsibility, which is obviously a left wing cult of some kind. Imagine the outcry if they offered a discount, say, to people who complete the RCIA program and become baptized in an actual faith instead of being indoctrinated in a phony one?

In that case, you would actually take a solemn vow to absolutely avoid the sorts of activities that result in malpractice claims, such as bonking your patient. I mean client. No, consumer of mental health services. Wait, co-evolutionary partner.

But it seems to me that the type of gelatinous Joe who would join an outfit such as Psychologists for Social Responsibility has, by definition, a severely broken moral compass, since he systematically externalizes responsibility to the collective, thus robbing the individual of his moral agency, not to mention his human dignity.

That's a little unfair, isn't it? I don't even know anything about them. For all I know -- since they have the word "responsibility" in their name -- they could be a group that promotes personal responsibility, clean living, teenage abstinence, the cultivation of virtue, living by the Ten Commandments, shunning the self-defeating culture of victimhood, not whining, and generally acting like a man for once in your life.

Uh oh. According to the website, PsySR is an organization "that applies psychological knowledge and expertise to promote peace, social justice, human rights, and sustainability. Our members are psychologists, students, and other advocates for social change in the United States and around the world."

"Advocates for change?" What the hell is that supposed to mean? Such gibberish. Now you know why I don't relate to my profession. "Promote peace?" Something tells me that "killing bad guys" or tossing them in the slammer is not on the agenda.

"We share a commitment to the application of psychological knowledge and expertise in addressing today's pressing societal challenges and in building cultures of peace with social justice."

Even if you wanted to, how do you "build" a culture? Much less one "of peace and social justice" -- especially when "social justice" is just a code word for a backward and justice-denying collectivism?

Ah. Under the rubric "Our History," it says that they fought against fascism before and during World War II. Oddly, I am quite sure this didn't involve killing nazis.

And to suggest that these people "fought fascism" prior to World War II is just an outright lie, since they were and are the fascists (the liberal fascists, as demonstrated in Jonah Goldberg's book of the same name).

Proving once again that the left is irony-proof, they brag that "during the height of the Cold War in the 1980’s," they promoted "the use of psychological skills and knowledge to push for nuclear disarmament and to reduce the threat of nuclear war." Thank God they didn't succeed, or the Cold War would still be be with us.

Nevertheless, after they ended the Cold War with psychological magic, "we expanded our mission to include broader issues of peacebuilding and social justice." One evil empire down, one to go: the United States.

Ack. Every click brings new horrors. Anti-Semitic? Naturally. They don't call on genocidal Islamists to end their siege of the Palestinian territories -- or to renounce terror and recognize Israel's right to exist -- but demand that Israel cease defending itself from these monsters. One can hardly be more morally confused than that.

And they are so concerned about abuse within the Catholic church that they cannot call it what it is: predatory homosexual abuse, since the vast majority of victims were adolescent boys. And I don't even have to check to see that there is no concern expressed for teacher abuse in the public schools, where the abuse is more prevalent.

Oh for the love of.... "Climate change" causes mental illness in children. Being that the climate has never not changed, I suppose this explains why humans are so crazy. I know my son suffers a psychotic break every time the weather changes from sunny to cloudy.

Look at how they just make shit up in that letter. There's not a word of truth, much less science. It's all hysteria. These people are the very sickness they presume to treat. I'm sure they don't want to know that the air and water are actually cleaner than they've ever been since we started measuring, or that there is no non-junk science linking the natural disasters they cite to carbon dioxide.

Social responsibility? Let's begin by undermining the unit of society, the traditional family! They are opposed to any legislation that "seeks to deny same-sex couples the right to marry."

But of course, no one is denying anyone the right to marry. Persons of the same sex just can't marry each other, since it is impossible for a man to be married to a man. We want the state to simply recognize "what is," not to impose a new and idiosyncratic definition of reality upon the rest of us, and to redefine an institution that is much older than the state. No state has any right whatsoever to usurp this power.

*****

Enough of what isn't and can never be. Back to what Is.

I don't know if we can appreciate how radical it was in antiquity to announce that God is love; today its meaning has been largely drained, rendering it as biting as a Hallmark greeting card. Therefore, it requires some deprogramming in order to re-appreciate its world-altering consequences.

Consider how love spontaneously emerges in our free society. I would guess that the vast majority of popular songs are about love (I can't really speak for contemporary music, since I don't listen to it). Why should this be? It's quite odd when you think about it. But we don't think about it, because it is so pervasive.

Benedict notes that there is "a certain relationship between love and the divine," in that earthly love evokes our instinct for transcendence, and promises something far beyond the object of love.

Rather, love taps us into "a reality far greater and totally other than our everyday existence." And one of the problems affecting contemporary relationships is that they are asked to bear the weight of this "totally other" in a way that no human being can.

In other words, instead of looking toward that to which love points, or following it to its source, it becomes focussed solely on the (human) beloved, which cannot help but end in frustration and quite literal dis-illusionment.

But in Benedict's view, the very purpose of terrestrial love is to provide a kind of everyday ladder to the divine. A relationship is both a crucible and an escape (or rather, inscape) that can heal the wounds it makes through the unification of mind, body, and spirit, i.e., through the purification and divinization of man.

Man is a complementarity who is always fishing for his complement; he is a "unity in duality," both vertically, i.e., spirit + matter (or body), and horizontally, i.e., man + woman. Love is not only the basis of their unification, but oriented toward the telos which lights the path of ascent:

"It could hardly be otherwise, since [love's] promise looks toward its definitive goal: love looks to the eternal. Love is indeed 'ecstasy,' not in the sense of a moment of intoxication but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus from the closed, inward-looking self toward liberation through self-giving, and thus toward authentic self-discovery and indeed of God" (Benedict).

Benedict also explores one of our orthoparadoxical principles, (↓↑), i.e., eros and agape, or the "ascending and descending love" that "can never be completely separated" (ibid.).

Rather, "the more the two, in their different aspects, find a proper unity in the one reality of love, the more the true nature of love in general is realized" (ibid.).

Only because God is a three-in-one is it possible for man to be a whole in oneness. The union that results "is no mere fusion, a sinking in the nameless ocean of the divine; it is a unity that creates love, a unity in which both God and man remain themselves and yet become fully as one" (ibid.).

This is the True humanism. Anything less is just zoology or economics.