The Opium of the People

A missionary-minded friend sent me a link to an evangelical Christian book discussing the Marxist dictum: "Religion is the sob of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world ... the opium of the people."  I cracked the book and had some ideas of my own.

 

To me the title of this book--Opium or Truth?--begs an important question.  In what way is opium not truth?  Regarding Marxism, I agree with Karl Popper, who called it a modern humanitarian religion (which the Bolsheviks and their ilk practised the way the Holy Inquisition practised Christianity).  So Marxism is just another kind of opium, subject to the same accidents and afflictions that attend the brands it aims to displace in the marketplace of ideas. 

I think the Daodejing is a better book for understanding the world, from the perspective that Life (or God) has given me, than is the Bible.  That does not mean that I resent people reading the Bible (or similar books), only that I don't personally find in it the deep meaning that they do.  I thought I found that meaning, for many years, but I kept searching the world and experiencing new things--and at some point I realized that the Bible is not the only or even the best guide for my life. 

My religion is not primarily about books or beliefs, in the end.  Books and beliefs for me are just tools, means to enable a kind of existence that is bigger than they are, that includes more things.  I need some connection to people, people who don't live on the other side of the world (or in an office building I can never visit in Salt Lake City).  I need some connection to the non-human environment around me that I can believe in (as I cannot believe in the gods I meet in the Old and New Testaments, the way these are commonly interpreted).  I need friends, nature, and service. 

The Bible does not offer me any of that.  In fact, it seems to take that away, when churches founded around it want to spend all their time talking about the Bible, instead of living what I see as a holy life.  I understand Jesus differently today than I once did.  I think his message was likely a bit different from what many people seem to think.  He did not write anything.  He did not command people to write.  He came to fulfil the Law: so why are we still reading it?  The Old Testament is done, gone, a curio--no different to Christ, in my mind, than the Epic of Gilgamesh.  The New Testament is not really much better: somewhere in the midst of miracle tales, sectarian rants, and pseudo-philosophical speculation (not to mention the straight-up insanity known as the Book of Revelation: that is some strong opium there, maybe LSD), the basic Christian message of universal love and political renunciation ("my kingdom is not of this world") gets buried and lost, so lost that hardly anyone finds it (especially not the people who spend their entire lives bloviating about the secret meaning of the impossible riddles we find in Isaiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, or the Book of Revelation).

I know you love the Bible.  It allows you to build a coherent life, one in which you get some kind of regular access to whatever it is that you need to be a good person (relating well to God, to yourself, and to the rest of us).  That is great.  Not all of us can have that the same way.  I don't want to take your life away and replace it with mine.  I am not sure that reading the Daodejing would improve your life.  I don't know precisely what it is that you need to live well.  I leave the negotiation of that problem to you and God (without any definitive idea myself of what that means: deity is a mystery for me, a mystery that people don't understand--especially not when they think it is clearly visible in some book like the Bible).  I rejoice when you are happy in your religion.  I am sad when you are sad.  I am here to help you in any way I can. But I cannot share your faith anymore than I can share your mind or body.  We are not the same--similar though we might be, much as we might share (in terms of inheritance, of culture, of history and experience). 

If I were to identify myself as a practising Christian, a thing which could happen, I would not make the Bible central to my Christianity.  What appeals to me in Christianity is not the Bible, but the renunciation of attachment--to the world and its ideas, including all the worldly ideas in the Bible (which is a very worldly book, in my experience, one that includes reading many books).  I could see myself becoming some kind of Orthodox (probably not Catholic) hermit, monk, or recluse--retiring from life to pray, sing, and grow a nice garden someplace remote, with a cave or cell I might inhabit peacefully (with or without a Bible: I don't particularly care).  At this point in my life, this option is not really a good one.  I have a family to look after, and the Christian traditions that surround me are not really friendly to contemplative approaches that eschew theology.  Instead, everyone wants to debate the Bible, to establish orthodoxy, to get the sacraments right, to make the kingdom of heaven come down to earth so that we can all see it the same way, in the same things.  I really dislike this vision of religion, of Christianity.  It is not my religion.  It really never was, not even when I was a good Mormon.  I did not want to impose faith on people; I was not interested in convincing or converting folks against their will.  I just wanted to understand myself better, myself and the mystery I know as God.  That is all I have ever wanted.  I am still pursuing my quest; I have just left behind the conviction that it must lead me to active affiliation with religion that is not mine--with life whose integrity I cannot know and embody for myself. 

We don't all react the same way to the same opium.  When the truth sets us free, we don't all use our freedom the same way, to do the same things.  This too is part of the mystery we call God.

Wu Wei (無為)

If all culture is poison, as I have come to believe, then it is also to some degree healthy.  This is true even of the most awful culture anyone can imagine.  Health is a matter of dosage, not substance.  From this it follows that the most dangerous poison in my life is the one that appears to do no harm.

When I first experienced my faith crisis, there were many contributing factors.  One of them was the terrible shame I felt as a result of contemporary Mormon teachings about sexuality.  As a young man experiencing puberty in the LDS church, I felt that my existence as a sexual being made me inherently evil.  Every time something occurred to remind me of sex, I felt evil, and there was nothing I could do to escape the horror of my own judgement (a judgement that I found confirmed by Mormon leaders, rightly or wrongly, on purpose or not: it doesn't matter).  I was wounded a great deal by my experience with puberty, and the church did thrust some daggers in those wounds, causing them to fester.  This is my story.

Moving out into the world, I meet people with stories like mine, people broken by some toxic encounter with culture.  Occasionally, we victims like to imagine a world in which our personal monsters don't really exist--a world in which no young man is ever ashamed of his sexuality (in my case), a world in which authority is never abused, a world in which perfect justice is something impossibly good rather than awfully evil.  The older I get, the less I believe in the utility of such imagination.

The reality of life is that something will always hurt you.  Something will break you.  Something will kill you.  And no matter who tells you otherwise, there is no silver bullet.  There is no Fountain of Youth, no panacea for human suffering that will make it all vanish or reduce it all to something universally benign (let alone pleasant).  Life is hell.  The trick is not to deny this reality, not to escape it, but to meet it head-on in the best manner possible.  If heaven is a place where nobody gets hurt and nothing goes wrong and it does not matter what you do, then heaven does not exist.  To the extent that I am serious about engaging with the world as it actually exists, I must give it up.  I must make hell minimally painful rather than try to replace it with something else impossibly pleasant.

The problem with people who are hurt (people like me), is that we see only what hurt us.  We don't see how what hurt us helps someone else.  We don't see how banning the drug we OD'ed on will not improve universal human health.  We see life narrowly, generalizing from our own experience naively into the experience of others (who are not like us, not even when they appear to be so).

I cannot tell you how to live.  I cannot tell you how to meet the unique and personal hell that you will face in your existence.  I can support you.  I can be a resource for you.  I can offer sympathy and respect.  But more than that would be immoral--harmful to both of us.

Back to sex.  What saved me in the end from the crippling weight of my own judgement was not a sudden lift in universal human sexual taboos.  People continue to have sex today the same ways they have for eons: my story was never about them.  What saved me was meeting people who supported me, people to whom I was not ashamed to bare my soul.  As long as there are people like this somewhere, people like me will be fine: we just need to find the healers.  We don't need to make everyone practice the same kind of medicine.  We don't need to ban sexual shame, no matter what harm it has done us. How could we?  My shame was interior and autonomous.  The LDS church did not put it there.  Its mistake was to treat me with a generic soul-medicine against which I experienced a severe allergic reaction.  Some people need the kind of medicine that the church practices.  Some people need external shame (lacking the kind of massive internal inhibition that I have, not because I am better than anyone else, but because I am me).  Shutting down the social therapists that dispense external shame will not fix the world; a few guys like me might feel a bit better (for a while), but other guys out there will be suffering for lack of the shame they can no longer find.  My life is not worth more than theirs.  My suffering is not worth more.  They have the same claim to health that I have, and we cannot live by the same lights: our health is not the same.

The ultimate lesson I take away from my experience is that I cannot speak for other people.  I cannot tell them how to be happy.  I cannot pretend to design a single regimen for human life that will "maximize utility" (to borrow the convenient expression) for all and sundry with more benefits than deficits.  I don't believe that this "single regimen" exists (anywhere).  There is not one good way of life.  There cannot be.  All attempts to build and enforce such uniformity end up being more evil than good, hurting more than they help.

This means that people have to be wary.  We have to mistrust others and ourselves.  We have to diversify.  Never trust one institution or regimen with all your soul.  Don't worship one god.  Don't attend one support-group.  Don't bet on one stock, one company, one government.  Don't depend on a single career.  Within whatever career you have at the moment, don't depend on a single path to get the results you want.  Be redundant.  Be inefficient.  Doubt everything.  Don't be quick to identify yourself positively with any group or group ideology, even if you like it.  Be yourself.  Have multiple friends, but not too many, and never burden any of them with more trust than they can bear.  Own yourself (including the reality that you have no concrete self, no permanent essence that persists through all the various permutations other people call "you").  Know your limits, and don't let yourself think you can transcend them.  Don't make others dependent on you.  If you must be a leader for some reason, ditch that role as soon as you can (especially if you are successful at it: success attracts people to court ruin, their own and that of others).  Don't hate the things that hurt you (even when they hurt you really badly, even when you have to defend yourself by attacking them head-on).

Be hard like water: hard enough to break rocks, but not so hard that they break you.