Why then do I continue to have faith for the future? I continue to hope--not because I believe that humanity needs the noble lie of meaning in order to survive but because I realize that I am not alone in condemning the kind of thinking that inspired/inspires those events as immoral, and because not one of these horrors and injustices has gone unchallenged at the time it took place or shortly thereafter. Significant numbers of human beings all over the world are finally waking up to the futility of warfare, the hollowness of greed, the absurdity of the "I win you lose" kids' games, and the gentle power of holistic thinking, humaneness, dialogue, and respect for those who are different. In earlier centuries, prejudice, intolerance, wars, crusades, forcible conversions, pogroms, inquisitions, witch-burnings, slavery, serfdom, injustice, ruthless competition, spiritual and physical rape, and abuse of women and children were generally accepted and frequently celebrated as noble and virtuous. Today, ever increasing numbers among us, from all over the globe, are beginning to recognize those actions and attitudes as symptoms of spiritual immaturity, and even major business concerns are developing humane codes of ethics in order to "do well by doing good."
The shadow of evil accentuates the radiance of the good. It was precisely while he worked as a medic at the front that Teilhard de Chardin became aware of himself as "spiritually one with a wider humanity, a collective entity with riches past and future" (Cuénot 38). In 1917 he wrote in a letter to his close friend and cousin Marguerite Teillard that he saw himself within the "creative milieu of a crucible," pulled by a double force, the force from behind that animates and consecrates, and the force from up ahead that loves and attracts (Briefe 256). That vision would eventually inspire him to offer a powerful alternative to Yeats's dark vision. He sensed, to apply the words of physicist, Ilya Prigogine: the breaking forth of "Order out of Chaos!" The "Great War" also led to President Wilson's dream of "open covenants of peace," the League of Nations, and such thoughtful antiwar appeals as August Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. The Holocaust activated the Righteous among Nations, some 6,000 individuals who risked their own lives to save strangers--too few to stop the slaughter but enough to serve as models for humanity.
World War II precipitated the April 1945 establishment of the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, envisioned to combat "hunger, poverty, despair, and chaos" that fed the former enemies in Europe, the Nuremberg Trials that established a global standard of justice, and the International Declaration of Human Rights. The threat of atomic warfare along with Soviet totalitarianism, and the "Iron Curtain" eventually led to the end of the Cold War, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, and Mikhail Gorbachev's concept of restructuring or perestroika through the openness of glasnost. Hence, on the one hand, I see the continuation of ancient tribal patterns that escalate inter-group conflicts, but on the other hand, I take delight in the exponential growth of methods to encourage cooperation, democratization, and global connectivity rooted in genuine appreciation for diversity.
Minor and major conflicts result when previously isolated groups come into close contact in the course of migration, population growth, territorial expansion, commercial interaction, the conquests of war, missionary activity, through the written word, print, and other assorted media. Conflict tends to be especially pronounced when such contact with the "other" is sudden and massive. Until some ten years ago, the rate of this culture-mingling process, while clearly accelerating, was nevertheless fairly predictable. Since the middle 1980s, however, something occurred that may well be called the twentieth century "cyber-revolution" by future historians.
This "something" is the exponential increase in the number of personal computers, high-speed modems, fax machines, the Internet, and other newly developed tools for almost instant and either free or at least low cost mass communication (such as the World Wide Web). Humanity is suddenly faced with the challenge of the spawning both of literally millions of separate information-and-attitude sharing and disseminating groups that draw their membership from anywhere on earth and, concurrently, as a byproduct, the rapid globalization of the human community. No longer are images and text travelling by themselves. Computer information arrives along with human commentators who, in all ways except skin-to-skin contact, are as accessible as one's next-door neighbors and may come out of a physical community ten thousand miles and several continents removed.
This development was truly unprecedented and could not be fully anticipated until it was actually occurring, even though as early as 1949, the Jesuit paleontologist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin not only linked terms such as "ultra-hominisation" (Man's Place 109) with the natural sciences but anticipated an essential role for "those astonishing electronic machines (the starting point and hope of the young science of cybernetics) by which our mental capacity to calculate and combine is reinforced and multiplied ... [leading to] an auto-cerebralisation becoming the most highly concentrated expression of the reflective rebound of evolution" (111). Forty years after his death Teilhard would, one suspects, be gratified to see the World Wide Web weaving itself around the globe, spinning the beginnings of his noosphere, allowing ever new and more complex links, nodes, synapses, and networks to emerge and take on a life of their own--turning into the global super-brain, and more importantly, the global mind.
In fact, I tend to see Yeats's dirge as intuitive acknowledgment of the painful emergence of a New Global Consciousness from the breaking chrysalis of the past, largely engendered of what Karl Jaspers calls the Axial Period (Ursprung und Ziel 19-43) in the centuries that bracket the 6th century B.C.E. During this epoch ritualistic tribalism transformed itself into self-reflective, analytic, critical, individualistic consciousness and engendered the major world religions. The present age, Ewert Cousins argues, represents another such radical quantum leap of consciousness--the Second Axial Period, which will transform individual consciousness, into global consciousness--a global consciousness, envisioned not as a simple, homogenized or empty uniformity that obliterates individuality but as fruition of the person in and through mutuality. Cousins echoes Paul Ricoeur' second naiveté but goes beyond it.
Cousins's main inspiration is Teilhard's vision of the convergence of previously diverging cultures precipitated by the spherical shape of the earth combined with exponential growth of populations and communication. According to Teilhard, global consciousness will precipitate creative unions and syntheses which will intensify and focus both individuality and diversity.
The combination of multinational corporations, supersonic travel, film, television, and especially the phenomenal proliferation of internet communication, has resulted in radically novel modes and vastly increased frequency of people-to-people contact across vast distances, both by disseminating ideas almost instantaneously across the globe and by making it possible for individuals to move to faraway localities temporarily or permanently. This contact and mingling of often widely diverse worldviews, especially combined with the instability of population, presents us with an unprecedented two-pronged challenge: both as opportunity for increased inter-human understanding and as risk of heightened xenophobia and withdrawal into private ideological fortresses. We can choose to permit this challenge to help us grow by focusing on our common humanity coupled with appreciation of individuality, or we can allow it to shatter us into antagonistic shards by emphasizing differences, viewing variegation as an evil to be eliminated, and remaining blind to commonalities. It is up to us to take the next evolutionary step toward a global civilization in which humans from every part of the world are bound, if not by friendship, so at least by mutual respect.
The process of collaborating with others from all over the world can, and I hope will, take on some of the characteristics of a religious act, an invitation to look at things a certain way, to celebrate differences while rejoicing in convergence (NOT conformity), to allow ourselves to be transformed the way a butterfly emerges from the cocoon. Thus, while interreligious, interideological dialogue does not propagate certain specific, already existing faiths or ideologies, the process of engaging in these kinds of activities has itself the potential of becoming the catalyst of a genuine change in the way human persons understand themselves, one another, the world, and ultimate reality by any name or none.
The present is frequently criticized as an age of moral and religious confusion. The boundary lines between right and wrong, we are told, are no longer painted bright yellow for everyone to see and obey. In this perspective --critics insist--churches and schools have failed to keep up the highways of moral life. Lanes are no longer clearly marked, few if any speed limits are posted, stop signs are down, traffic lights are out of order, and cops look the other way. If this is so, it may well be a blessing, and a challenge to mature spiritually. Precisely this uncertainty presents an opportunity. "May you live in interesting times," may be a Chinese curse, but I see it as a blessing.
Toddlers must leave their cribs and learn to sleep in regular beds without rolling off the sides. Five-year olds must learn to walk to kindergarten on their own. Sixteen-year olds must learn to drive safely, even if there are no road signs. Growing up involves a gradual shift from blind obedience to the letter of the law to responsible action according to the internalized spirit of the law. Maturing comes at a price: we can't always play it safe. We must be willing to take risks, make mistakes, stumble, fall. We must be willing to change precisely in order to become the best we can be. As the German poet Goethe put it in his Faust, God won't abandon those who earnestly and honestly try.
Blind obedience to a neat set of simple, unambiguous regulations is no longer possible or even desirable. Contemporary conditions are too complex to permit rigid rules for every possible situation. People must take the responsibility for their decisions and chart a middle course between two kinds of destructive irresponsibility: lazy refusal to think for themselves and arrogant, selfish independence which exceeds their capabilities. They must understand themselves well enough to know both their potential and their limits. They must follow the counsel of their individual conscience as the arbiter of their choices. They must have faith in themselves--without arrogance. Almost all mentally competent people know the difference between positive and negative motives, between altruism and selfishness, caring and indifference or cruelty. People know when they are motivated by greed, envy, revenge, hatred, and other destructive emotions. They may choose to reject life according to the law of love, but this does not mean that this possibility never existed for them. And so I dream of a time when we will truly fulfill our human potential, become who we are meant to be: no longer caterpillars but butterflies and beyond--not worms but men and women who respect themselves and each other as siblings--sisters and brothers, humans-in-process, children of the Infinite.
When we read about the supposed breakdown of the contemporary family and the horrors of child neglect and abuse we tend to forget that those ideal families of the past we are asked to emulate are to quite an extent illusory, and even if they existed, they did so only for a few fairly recent generations of select middle and upper class people in the Western World. We tend to forget that against the backdrop of history, our very concern with the welfare of individuals and especially the attention we pay to the disenfranchised, is a new phenomenon, a sign of increased sensitivity to human suffering and concern for human persons and their life-satisfaction. Until the present century, marriages were primarily economic contracts designed to regulate procreation and to pass on property to a man's legitimate progeny. The very idea of sexual intercourse, for example, as mutual LOVE-making would only have occurred to those who were fortunate enough to be able to transcend the norms and prejudices of their cultures.
For most of human history, spouses were only rarely friends or tenderly passionate lovers, and what we would now call wife and child neglect or abuse has for millennia been entirely ordinary, socially approved, and often religiously institutionalized behavior all over the globe. Bride-burning is still common in India. Footbinding has only recently been abolished in China. Currently, the political asylum case of the young African woman, Fausiya Kasinga, is being argued in York County, Pennsylvania. Ms. Kasinga had fled her native Togo in order to escape forced clitoridectomy (female genital mutilation--FGM), an ancient operation, performed without anesthesia, that has become incorporated into Islamic ritual to safeguards virginity and suppress women's sexual desire by making intercourse at least unenjoyable and frequently excruciatingly painful. According to Equality Now, an international human rights organization, approximately 100 million females around the globe have undergone the procedure and at least 2 million girls per year are in danger of having the procedure done. The practice is finally being challenged and will presumably go the way of Chinese foot binding and slavery in the U.S. and Europe. Lest we are too proud of our own enlightened standards, let us remember that in the 19th century clitoridectomies were routinely performed in this country to "treat" women who were suffering from "hysteria," and that Native Americans and assorted "undesireables" from habitual pick pockets to prostitutes and the "feeble-minded" were sterilized without their knowledge and consent well into the 20th century. Fifteen years ago one of my students told me that her priest insisted that she had to allow her husband to beat and rape her because marriage is a sacrament and her husband's attacks were "her cross to bear" in this life.
In the social organization, in the ancient and medieval worlds, despite Jaspers's Axial Period of intellectually increased individuality, the desires of individuals continued to be subordinated to the needs of the group. In this perspective even the much-maligned position of the Church in favor of sexual abstinence makes a perverse sort of sense. In a social context that routinely condoned brutality towards women, curtailing the demand for wifely "duties" might have been as welcome as the Christian vision of the radically new possibility of genuine non-erotic friendship between men and women. The emotional callousness of medieval European parents and children would have stunned the philosopher and politician Cicero who in Roman times had argued that tender love for our children is our strongest natural instinct.
In Europe, at least ten percent of medieval and early modern births ended in the mother's death. Remarriage was common. Hence the kind of family portrayed in the grim Grimm Brothers tale, Hansel and Gretel, may have been far more typical than we want to admit, particularly, the part about the mean step mother and the children losing their way in the forest. Widows with children were considerably less likely to remarry than widowers.
Contrary to general opinion, most peasants in traditional Europe spent their days in simple nuclear families of parents and their few surviving children. Despite the small size of families and the early age when children left home, privacy was practically non-existent. As recently as 1839, the farmer's teenage son and daughter in a German rural household might share a straw mattress with the hired hand, maid, and an occasional overnight guest. In the 1880s urban families generally lived in one-room households. In eighteenth century France the farmer would call the veterinarian to treat a sick cow but spare the expense of a physician if his elderly parents or wife fell ill. If the parents should succumb he wouldn't have to feed them any more, and if the woman should die, he would speedily replace her with a newer model complete with dowry. A medieval Brittany proverb puts is succinctly: "Rich is the man whose wife is dead and horses alive." As one historian comments, "that men should whack their wives about and eat at separate tables was normal" in eighteenth-century Germany. Chaucer's gap-toothed oft-wed Wife of Bath offers an alternate perspective on late medieval "marital bliss." While there were surely happy marriages, the institution of marriage was not considered a means of finding personal happiness.
Partly in response to Church pressures, infanticide, routinely used in ancient times to deal with unwanted babies, decreased in the Middle Ages. On the other hand, records show that what appears a disproportionately large number of children drowned, fell to their deaths from carts, stumbled into fires, suffocated when their parents rolled on them in bed, were eaten by hogs, or--like Hansel and Gretel minus the happy ending--got permanently lost in the woods. For many mothers individual children were so insignificant that they didn't recall their ages, and often couldn't even remember how many children they had borne. One historian cites records that parents left their dying babies "lying in the gutters and rotting in the dung heaps of London" and rarely attended the funeral of a child younger than five. As late as the 18th century, the father of the future historian Edward Gibbon called all his sons Edward, hoping that one would survive to carry on the name. One (and only one) did.
Even parental wealth did not guarantee good child care. Aristocratic women farmed their newborn infants out to wet nurses--mothers who had just had babies--generally for at least two years. Unfortunately, there were many uncaring and inept nurses who didn't bother to change bedding from one infant to another and kept babies from howling by drugging them with alcohol or opium. Despite objections by some physicians, by the eighteenth century wet nursing had become the rule for middle class city women as well. In his bestselling novel Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded (published in 1740), Samuel Richardson argues for the unusual practice of actually having an upper-class woman nurse her own baby.
Harsh interpretations of Christian principles contributed to the misery of children. The Puritans considered no child too young to go to hell, and elders did their best to save progeny from damnation by beating obstinacy out of their black little souls. The alphabet was often taught--to those fortunate enough to get an education--with garishly illustrated primers that focused on death and the punishment for sins. The world of Charles Dickens was entirely realistic. Disciplining young ones by cracking their skulls and breaking their bones was common in the early industrial age. Every community had its orphanage and foundling home, and most orphans and foundlings perished. In the late 18th century, one third of all the infants born in Paris were abandoned to such institutions. The industrial revolution added incentives for other ways of exploiting the surviving children. In English mines, young girls worked for a pittance naked on all fours as hurriers, pulling heavy wagons of coal with straps attached to their foreheads. Teenage boys and young men would tease and grope the girls. Whenever I consider contemporary child labor laws and sexual harassment legislation I realize how far we come along, at least in terms of protection under the law.
Then there were the emotional shifts. Up until the 19th century children were raised on fear, and it was not until the 1860s that we have evidence that lower class women began routinely to form emotional attachments to their children. By the beginning of the twentieth century the prevalent indifference toward infant life or death had given way to maternal concern, and infants were left free first to exercise their arms, next their feet, and finally, their minds.
Historical linkages are complex. Thus, the same cult of individual freedom and fulfillment bred and fed by capitalism spawned both the terrible outrages of the industrial revolution and romantic love among the lower classes who had no property to preserve and hence were free to marry on the basis of love. There was a fundamental change in attitude, an new paradigm, away from enforcing conformity to treasuring individuality, empathy, and sentiment. A little over a century ago, Pope Leo XIII's encyclical De Rerum Novarum opposes excessive child labor while emphasizing the right of every adult to be able to support a family in reasonable if frugal comfort. Organizations, such as the British Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, introduced the first laws protecting children in their homes in 1889. The collective way of life was giving way to the individual way of life.
Instead of deploring the loss of a past paradise that never was, we should admit that as a society we have made considerable progress in the areas of human relationships, that many of us at least part of the time are becoming kinder, gentler, more sensitive, and more open to and accepting of others. In addition, there is social and legal pressure to protect the weak. Thus, instead of killing healthy unwanted babies, and letting infants with birth defects die along with adults suffering from incurable diseases or terminal old age, we harness powerful medical resources to give them a chance at life. The very idea of universal human rights--while surely anticipated by such ancient cosmopolitarian thinkers as Marcus Aurelius--is fundamentally a discovery of European Enlightenment thinkers, such as Voltaire (who was in turn affected by the Judeo-Christian emphasis on the Golden Rule), with his strong sense of human dignity, social justice, concern for the weak, and loathing of all forms of intolerance.
When we find fault with the Enlightenment as elitist, imperialistic, and excessively rationalistic, we tend to forget that at its best the Age of Reason ushered in an amazing period of ideological tolerance as well as respect for the abilities of educated and brilliant women who were frequently the catalysts for dialogue in their elegant salons. We are still battling Voltaire's targets of the noxious troika of intolerance, superstition, and religious fanaticism, and have yet to live up to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's conviction of the equal worthiness of the three religions of Abraham. We tend to forget that the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment moderation put women firmly back into "their places," tending to the three K's, Kinder, Küche, and Kirche (children, kitchen, and church), as delicate, passive, sentimental, walking wombs to complement the strong, active, male intellectual and spiritual principle.
Romanticism, especially in its popular form, also encouraged extreme emotional attachment to nation and religion, and planted the seeds for 20th century Western fascism, fanaticism, and fundamentalism. It is in this petrified Romantic form that we tend to imagine and idealize the perfect family-now-forever-lost without realizing that the proper reaction, instead of mourning, might be a sigh of relief and a comment of "good riddance." It seems to me that the perceived perfection of families past encouraged static, patriarchal, and excessively hierarchical patterns of inequality rather than dynamic patterns of mutuality, egalitarianism, generosity, crossfertilization, and shared growth. In fact, I believe that in the present era, for the first time in human history we have the chance to view men and women as equal partners (regardless of race, nationality, or religion) and hence are ready for a new paradigm of marriage and family that is truly egalitarian and life-affirming for all the members of the human community. It may even come to include constituents from previously excluded groups, such as lesbigays who as persons have a right to public recognition and validation of committed pair-bonding with the legal advantages of having established a recognized family.
At least in the Western world and in those regions touched by Western values, ideal families are seen as considerably more than economic and offspring-producing-and-raising units. Families are also viewed as "base communities" that offer safety, acceptance, mutuality, friendship, loving, sexual pleasure, satisfaction, and happiness. A 1989-1990 two-part Love and Marriage national probability sample study of 657 couples conducted by Gallup via telephone interviews for Psychology Today resulted in surprising findings: eighty percent of respondents would marry the same person; seventy-five percent consider their spouses their best friend; sixty-six percent say they are very happy (Faithful Attraction 19-20, 27). Even if half of the respondents were lying because their partners were listening to the interview, the figures would still be impressive. If historians are even remotely right about the dismal state of family life in the past, the present may indeed be an era of exceptional marital satisfaction, at least for middle and upper class individuals (telephone owners) in the United States. Divorce statistics may actually bolster this claim, since most those involved speedily remarry, presumably in search of the expected happiness and companionship they felt had eluded them before.
I have a dream: That one day all of us we will be sufficiently sure of ourselves that we won't secretly doubt that we are worthy of being loved, and hence will not be afraid to love.
I have a dream: That one day we will know that love is not a pie which grows smaller as it is shared, that loving is not an either-or proposition: either we love others or we love ourselves. Quite to the contrary. When we are told to love our neighbors as we love ourselves we are simultaneously told that it is perfectly natural and good to love ourselves.
Self-love is the model for love of others. Loving others as we love ourselves, treating others as we want to be treated, shows that the boundaries between self and other are permeable. In the mutual movement of reaching out to others, connecting with them, feeling empathy for their reaching out to us we expand ourselves as they expand themselves and our circles overlap and interconnect. We are no longer solitary individuals but part of an living inter-dependent community in which all benefit from the individual's well-being. We exist in the relationship. But we are not dissolved in that relationship. BOTH individuality AND community are enriched in the kind of organic Gemeinschaft, the trans-temporal Platonic community of minds and hearts that can grow out of and across the Cyber-Sea.
Here, too, Teilhard de Chardin was ahead of his age. Instead of mourning the loss of Eden's perfection, he invites us to be drawn toward the future. This is not a return to the irretrievable glory of the One, of the Golden Age lost through the Fall, but instead an invitation to be drawn into Omega convergence by "Christifying" matter through love--which can be done even if we are not Christians. This is not homogenizing pantheism but a brilliant fusion of the One and the Many which maintains both in oscillating tension. We are called upon to be co-creators, thinking cells or molecules.
In practical terms this means that nationalism must give way to a sense of global community and universal cooperation that is not imposed from above (as demonstrated by the Marxist failure to force the former Soviet Union into ethnic tolerance) but gradually and naturally evolved from below and within. "In other words," writes Leonard Swidler, "we must try to cast our religious and ideological insights in language 'from below,' from our humanity, rather than 'from above,' from the perspective of the transcendent or the divine" (After the Absolute 56). Swidler calls our era the "Age of Dialogue" and insists that the future of humanity hinges on our ability to engage in interreligious, interideological, intercultural dialogue--the kind of global dialogue made infinitely more accessible through the technological magic of cyberspace, a path toward peace, albeit, ironically a path originally developed by the military for use in war. "Building the Earth" in terms of Teilhard's vision can become both model and method for such a transformation which is, in the words of David Tracy, "the kairos of this our day--the communal and historical struggle for the emergence of a humanity both finally global and ultimately humane" (Imagination 453).
Once again the falcon can hear the falconer. We are not rootless and ruthless atoms out to get "them" before "they" get us but independent, responsible cells of the we-they continuum. We realize that whenever we injure "them" we are actually severing the web of the whole and sawing away at the limb that supports us. What harms us harms them and what harms them harms us. What benefits us benefits them and what benefits them benefits us. Ultimately we no longer think in terms of them and us but solely in terms of "we" as we draw all of humanity, all of creation, into the healing circle of our unselfishly selfish "love of self-and/in-other." Then we will truly belong, as David Steindl-Rast put it, to the universe. We will have come home to discover, with T.S. Eliot, that we have been there all alone. Point Alpha will have returned to itself in Point Omega.
References
Last revised 1 February 1997 by Ingrid Shafer
Copyright © Ingrid H. Shafer 1997