Thursday, July 03, 2003
(4:36 AM) | Anonymous:
The Wanting Seed
A while back, when reading John Howard Yoder's For the Nations a thought occured to me.
Mankind as a whole is in love with the ascension towards perfection, yet at the same time we hate perfection itself. This is obvious in the fact that the process of begetting perfection drives men to attempt things well beyond their measure, even to the point of giving their life. Yet, perfection itself brings jealousy, mockery, and apprehension. Man is never content with something that he can't improve upon, even if there is no improvement to be made. Instead he tears the thing to the ground and begins anew in some other direction. It was from this thought that I began to see this applied in man's constant attempts to perfect God before giving up and tearing him down.
Shortly thereafter I read the novel The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess.
This book brilliantly and playfully made clear the way in which mankind is constantly going through the Augustinian-Pelagian cycle. That is, under the Pelagian phase, a government believes man is perfectable, that perfection can be achieved by his own efforts, and that the journey towards perfection is a long straight road, because man at his core wants to be perfect, he wants to be good, thus there is no real need for coercion or sanctions to force them to co-operate. This carries on until Disappointment destroys the dream. When the governors find men are not as good as they thought they were, they are horrified. It becomes necessary to try to force citizens into goodness to save the dream. Laws are reasserted, and a system of enforcement is put in place. Disappointment leads to irrationality, which leads to panic..which leads to brutality, beatings-up, secret police, torture. This is the Interphase.
The Interphase cannot last forever though, as the governors become shocked at their own excesses. They find that they have been thinking in heretical terms - the sinfulness of man rather than his inherent goodness. They relax their restriction, and the result is chaos, but by this time disappointment cannot sink any deeper. The orthodox view becomes that man is a sinful creature from whom no good at all may be expected. But again, it eventually appears that human social behaviour is rather better than any Augustinian pessimist has a right to expect, and so a sort of optimism begins to emerge. And so Pelagianism is reinstated, and we come right full circle back into the Pelphase. (I paraphrased this explanation of the cycle from Burgess.)
Much like with God, man constantly strives to perfect his society, until he reaches a point where the disappointment becomes too much, and thus decides that society must be perfectly evil, until the progression towards perfection reaches it's uttermost hilt and must be torn down yet again, over and over.
Yet, it wasn't until just the past two days when I reread C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet that it hit me that this striving and constant tearing down affects us on more than just our relationship to God, or our relationship as a society on the whole, but in our daily lives.
The "god" of the alien race in the book confronts a man named Weston who has come to take over the planet in the name of mankind near the end of the book. He notes that the man is not motivated by gain for his self, but for the gain of man in general. Yet, notes the alien, to live on other worlds, "man" would have to look quite unlike Weston. Thus, it cannot be the body of man that Weston loves. And it cannot be man's ability to reason, for if so, on encountering these aliens with similar if not superior reasoning abilities, he would also love them. Weston replies that it is his own race that he cares for. And yet, the alien points out, he was perfectly willing to kill a certain man they had captured and brought with them to sacrifice to the aliens..so Weston cannot truly be said to love any one of his race. What Weston truly loves is not the completed creature of "man", but the very seed of mankind..his future and what he will produce. It is this one law, the law of love of kindred, which mankind holds above all rest, which he is willing to break all other laws for.
This same rule applies to man in all of his relationships. Whatever we consider our "kindred"..our country, our gender, our political party, our race, our sexual preferences..whichever of these we associate ourselves closely with, we are willing to break all other laws in the name of that association. Yet, it isn't the perfection of this law that we love..for the majority of Patriotic Americans still hold a hatred for the majority of Americans, and many Republicans would like to punch other republicans in the throat, etc. It is instead this idea of the process of perfection inherent in what we associate ourselves as that we are willing to kill all others for. When one says he loves the "white man" and is willing to break all laws for the advancement of the caucasian race, he doesn't care for the actual white person, but rather the idea of working towards the perfection of an ideal. In the same way love of countryman is not for any individual person of that country, but for the potential ideal of The Perfect Countryman. The examples are endless, and I'm sure you yourselves can better articulate them, but the point remains..man is fearful of any state except working towards perfection, be it accepting a less than perfect condition, or actually achieving perfection.
I think it is this very fear that brings so much hate into the world. We fear the dying out of the chance for perfecting whatever association we hold most dear. All of us can see that it will never happen, that perfection can't be attained, and yet none of us can endure this thought. With this fear comes murder and rebellion, constantly flying from the chronic imperfection and death which will overtake us all in the end. If only mankind could see to give up the striving for perfection, and accept perfection, or non-perfection, there would be peace.
Yet, to anyone embroiled within this constant cycle, this all sounds like defeatist trash. Everyone can see that the fight for perfection is useless, and yet they still would side with the one who would fight and jump and struggle with every breath to live..one who would continue the action, instead of giving up and accepting peace.
I promise to be shorter from now on,
-Robb
