On Regression, and the Politics of Fear

I just read this. The link is included in the article above. Please read it, and come back to this discussion.

I find Reza Aslan’s optimisim seductive, for I am an optimist at heart. But I see clearly that our own democracy is hag-ridden by religion, and religious fundamentalists. I wonder how we are ever going to win free of our lizard-brain yearnings for a patriarchal,
protective God who will reward us, smite our enemies into oblivion, and usher us iinto a Promised Land.

And I am under religious orders, and see true inherent value in religion and religious structures capable of adapting to serve the needs of an evolving populace. I can only imagine how secular progessives must at times despair.

I think the key to hope lies in a quote from Aslan’s book, which was excerpted in the companion article to this interview:

From the Islamic perspective, however, the attacks on New York and Washington were part of an ongoing clash between those Muslims who strive to reconcile their religious values with the realities of the modern world, and those who react to modernism and reform by reverting — sometimes fanatically — to the “fundamentals” of their faith.

The fundamentals of their faith.

It seems to be in our nature to “revert” when the going gets tough. Under enough pressure, we all yearn to retreat back to some delusional utopian state in the past that didn’t seem to have the horrors we face today. After the 9/11 attacks, everyone I know (me included) who cared enough to watch those horrors regressed to some earlier stage of development that would allow them, they thought, access to better coping skills to deal with what had happened. Those of us who were integrating green memetics, or even yellow into our personal growth
patterns found it difficult not to revert to blue — or even red (if you haven’t clicked on that last link yet, please do — it’s a very quick intro to the Spiral Dyanmics theory of personal and cultural evolution) in the aftermath.

If Azlan is correct (and I think he is) then our collective reversion into nationalism, or rampant traditionalism, energized a similar reversion in the Middle East. Rather than struggling forward into a new level of massunderstanding, we (all of us) fled backwards into the arms of a God that is no longer equipped to save us from our own folly.

If I could manage to hate Osama bin Laden for anything, it would be that. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your viewpoint, I don’t really have the luxury of hate any longer. The difference between me and most of the rest of the world is, I know it.

The politics of fear rule us now, and we re-elected a man who plays our fears with as much virtuosity as Louis Armstrong ever riffed his horn. In order to defeat him, we first have to put aside the fears within each of us upon which he preys. Without his own trumpet to sound, B43 is muted. He would have to learn, in a hurry, how to play upon our highest aspirations.

Though I would like to think the best of B43 in that situation, even my optimism has limits.

Quote of the Day: As long as you move from a place of fear and desire, you are self-excluded from immortality. –Joseph Campbell

Metaphors For Life’s website