You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Politics’ tag.
“He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god.”
That is what Mircea Eliade said about “modern nonreligious man.” He had explained that our religious ancestors imitated the ways of their gods to realize their human potential, but that modern nonreligious people, which is what we are really, no matter how religious we may imagine we are, believe we realize our potential by demystifying the world – by killing God.
Eliade’s association of killing God with freedom lingers in my thoughts. It lingers with my memory of Alfred Kazin making this association in God and the American Writer, with my memory of Nietzsche’s Parable of the Madman and Thomas Hardy’s poem God’s Funeral. It lingers with something Satan said in Paradise Lost about how he would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven. It lingers with Patrick Henry’s battle cry, “Give me liberty or give me death.”
It is true. The price of freedom is the death of God.
Darwin was a theist, although one with more doubts than faith. Suffering, especially innocent suffering, fed his doubts. A particularly cruel wasp was theologically significant to him – a wasp that paralyzes grasshoppers and caterpillars and takes them away to its nest alive but immobilized for their larvae to eat.
It is hard for the human mind to imagine anything more cruel than a predator that paralyzes its victim and then lets its children eat the victim alive. Darwin considered it inconceivable that God would design such a creature. It is easier to accept such cruelty if it is senseless rather than planned.
It is easier to believe the cosmos is senseless than to believe it is designed. It is easier to believe the cosmos is indifferent than to believe it cares.
Most people, I believe, would rather not live in a senseless universe, but in modernity that is the way many of us see the universe. It is like we are living in a place where we just don’t belong, in a place we have been brought against our will.
I do hear some people saying that the senselessness of the universe does not matter because we can make this place better, we can make our own meaning, and we can care about suffering even if the cosmos does not. But I think another voice is more convincing – the one that says, “Why bother? Just live as well as you can while life lasts.”
Maybe there is mercy in being paralyzed by the predator. Maybe the mind is paralyzed too – so that suffering is easier. Maybe hard work, watching television, playing video games, shopping and immersion in a cause like politics or religion are a kind of paralysis – they keep us from fighting back. We don’t know how to fight the cosmos anyway.
I hate the wasp that brought me here. I hate the larvae gnawing me away.
Lost Borders 
Recent Comments