"The Most Plausible Perjury."

In spite of the fact that everyone who testifies in court is required to place their hand on a Bible (What is that about anyway?  Why do they use our book?) and swear to tell "the truth," the general consensus among lawyers I consulted was that nobody tells the truth in court.  One attorney candidly confessed that what judges and juries have to come up with when assessing testimony is "the most plausible perjury."

In other words, they assume that everyone is lying and that the best outcome is basically whatever story makes the most sense to whomever is making the decision.  If the decision-makers are not particularly self-aware -- and, believe me, judges are at least as impaired by self-serving delusions as people who have no power at all -- then their decisions are fatally infected by self-interest.  That is, they will go with whatever appeals to their desire, fear, and anger, whatever story buttresses their thinking about the world, serves their personal and professional goals, and places them in the best light.  The decision that gets made ends up being the one that makes them feel best.

This is the way we are increasingly making all our decisions.  When Ronald Reagan asked voters whether they were "better off," he stated what became the basic criterion for everything.  He inadvertently echoed the 60's mantra, "If it feels good, do it!"  It's all about feelings.  If it feels true it must be true.  This is how we determine what is plausible: what feels right to us.   

If truth is reduced to feelings, facts don't matter.  Facts have in fact been shown to be susceptible to spinning and interpretation.  The data and statistics we are willing to accept are dependent on how we feel about them.  Experts know how to present "facts" in such a way as to incite particular feelings.  And feelings are often based on perceived consequences of our actions and decisions.      

If I am not happy with the state of the world, I can look for someone to blame.  I can immerse myself in grievances and resentments.  As if all facts are equal and I get to choose the ones I want to use to cobble together a story that makes sense to me, that is, that makes me feel good: vindicated, comforted, righteous, pious, responsible.

Some States are passing laws that don't allow schools to teach history that makes some white people feel bad.  The facts don't matter.  Feelings matter... and only the feelings of white people.  Stories that make Black people feel bad are fine, apparently, which makes this a deeply political matter, with the loudest and most obnoxious group getting to have their story maintained, and their feelings catered to, at everyone else's expense.  

Feelings are therefore the result of a calculus of consequences, like the Pharisees trying to answer Jesus' question about whether John the Baptizer was from God or not.  "If we say this then that will happen, and if we say that then this will happen," so, unable to choose between two uncomfortable outcomes, they decided to say they didn't know.  

Is truth based on the anticipated consequences and how we feel about them?  This attitude leads us to deny facts that don't suit us, like the global climate crisis.  This is what chairman Mao was thinking when he caused a famine by trying to set agricultural policy according to his political ideology.  This is what Donald Trump is doing with his persistent lies about the 2020 election.  As if things can't be true if they do not gratify our self-image.  

We read the Bible this way as well.  Too often the Bible is just like the Mirror of Erised in the Harry Potter books, reflecting our own desires, showing us what we want to be.  This is how people at opposite extremes on socio-economic-political spectrums can manage to wield the Bible supposedly in their own favor.  We assume that Scripture and the Church exist to make us feel good (and someone else feel bad, usually people we don't like).  This is true of liberals as well as conservatives.  We expect the text to just reflect back to us what we want, and if it doesn't do this to our satisfaction, we ignore, change, or marginalize the parts that don't serve us.

We're not going to get to the truth unless we care more about the truth than we do about self-gratification.  That is already a difficult ask.  It demands a complete change of our way of thinking.  Scripture refers to this as repentance: metanoia, attaining a new mind.  

Our egocentricity is so profound in us that it taints and colors everything we perceive and every decision we make.  Spiritual maturity is learning to recognize this and let go of it, which is a very painful process.  Jesus calls it giving up your life and self and taking up your cross.  But every faith tradition in the world has something like it.  It is the beginning insight of the Enneagram, for instance, that we are distorted by personality.  

If we continue to muddle and crash through our existence, unconsciously following what we self-servingly determine to be the most plausible facts, adhering to false narratives and the strategies based on them, we will continue to wreak damage in all our relationships and therefore on the whole world.  Perjury is still a lie even if we imagine it to be plausible.

I'm not saying that the truth is always something uncomfortable, inconvenient, and difficult that we don't want to hear about.  But frankly a large part of the time it is.  And it's not like everything uncomfortable, inconvenient, and difficult is true.  But we do have to put some effort and attention into discernment, and realize that the truth is very likely to challenge our self-image.  It is likely not to be something we want to hear.

But the truth is, in the end, good news because following gratifying falsehoods eventually leads to death and disaster.  Like diving out a 7th story window because you feel like you should be able to fly.  Or going barefoot in February because you feel like it should always be summer.  The thing about truth is that it always wins. 

We don't have much time at this point.  We are wrecking things at too fast a pace.  We need to follow the truth asap.  This means following Jesus, who is the Truth, and his Way of non-violence, compassion, humility, inclusion, forgiveness, service, healing, justice, and love. 

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The Long Defeat.

 

Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect “history” to be anything but a “long defeat”— though it contains (and in legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory. 

—J. R. R. Tolkien, (Letters 255).

The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.

—Tertullian

First they ignore you.  Then they laugh at you.  Then they fight you.  They they kill you.  Then you win.

—Attributed to Gandhi, paraphrasing labor activist Nicholas Klein

How can we look at history, especially the last century or so, and think otherwise than that Tolkien is right: human history is a long defeat?  Indeed, how can we hear about some events even of just the last couple of weeks, and not deeply mistrust the idea that things just keep getting better?  Ignorance and lies triumph in our politics.  Greed and exploitation characterize our economy.  (Even in sports, the winning team features a racist hand gesture.)  Martin Luther King said that the arch of history is long but it bends towards justice; sometimes it is quite exhausting and depressing to live in that bending.  

The opposite of the long defeat is Modernity’s ideology of progress.  And I admit that part of me would occasionally still harbor some hope that people would wise up, that through education, democracy, technology, and spiritual development we could build a better world for all.  But this is the lie we in the Western world are fed from birth.  For a time in our history, at the peak of European power at the end of the 19th century, it must have looked true, from the perspective of the comfortable victors.  History surely seemed like one triumphant advance after another.  

Now I am sure that this was just our white privilege showing.  It is easier to believe that things will always improve if the world is skewed to our benefit through the ruthless application of colonialism, capitalism, and militarism.  We can maintain the illusion of progress if billions of humans are forced to work to keep it seeming real for us.  Adam Smith can be amazed at the magical Invisible Hand creating prosperity, only because he was blind to the very Visible Fist that pounded wealth from the forced labor of millions in factories and colonies.  We have this smug and complacent expectation that the system will continue to keep us in the comfort to which we have become accustomed.  The truth is that Modern progress was all a product of exploitation and violence.  

The alternative to seeing things in terms of progress is to see apocalyptically.  This is the framework of the Bible.  It is where Tolkien’s view of the “long defeat” comes from.  Tolkien also mentions there are those “samples or glimpses of final victory” that do occur.   The Book of Revelation tells us that empires do a lot of damage in the course of inevitably and spectacularly disintegrating, but God’s truth emerges in the end.  That victory is the point.  And that is really important: the long defeat resolves in the ultimate triumph of truth and goodness.  

The only sense in which progress is real is as the way we live into this final victory, trusting in the “samples or glimpses” of it that we experience now.  In that trust we learn to follow Jesus.  And we may make progress, improve, and evolve, over time.   We can advance, as Paul says, from milk to solid food.  This is the progress of discipleship.  We grow into Christ; Christ emerges in us.  “Perfection consists in our never stopping in our growth in good,” said St. Gregory of Nyssa.

So amid this long defeat, we remain faithful to Jesus' life and justice.  We obey his commandments, which are all about love.  We witness to the truth revealed in him, in his ministry, his crucifixion and resurrection.  The world doesn’t necessarily get any better… but we do.  We grow into the mind of Christ.  We let go of our old selves, renouncing in Baptism “the ways of sin that separate us from the love of God.”  That is all we are responsible for, but it “demands my soul, my life, my all,” to quote a classic hymn.

Discipleship may or may not improve the world beyond our little corner of it.  (But it does improve our corner!)  That doesn’t matter.  We cherish no expectations in that regard.  The world as God made it is already a better place than we know; we just don’t see it… until we start living in the gentle and fragile light of those “samples” and “glimpses” of the victory.  So only discipleship matters.  It is what we have to do during the long defeat.

Jesus healed people.  He freed them from bondage.  He fed the hungry.  He welcomed and accepted the marginalized and outcast.  He commanded his followers to forgive without limit.  He said many things that mortally offended the religious, political, and economic establishment.  That’s why discipleship has to include what we call “political” work; it has to be expressed in the way we live together in communities, from the household to the world.  Feeding the hungry also means seeking to change or replace the sinful systems that cause inequalities and injustices in the first place. 

The final victory, as experienced in those “samples” and “glimpses,” is in a sense already here, among and within us.  Jesus proclaimed it at the beginning of his ministry (Mark 1:15).  The final victory is embedded and encoded in creation itself by the Creator, and in each and all of us.  It is always Present.  In the Church we seek to live together in conformity with the ultimate triumph of God.

In the movie, The Candidate, a political operator tries to convince Robert Redford, a community organizer, to run for the U. S. Senate.  He is reticent to do it until the consultant writes on the back of a matchbook the secret of a successful campaign:  “You lose.”  It is the renunciation of any expectation of winning that gives him the freedom to get his message out.  (And of course in the end he wins.)  

It is like this for the Lord Jesus.  He knew that what he was headed for in Jerusalem was an ignominious defeat, before rising on the third day.  And it is like this for the community of his disciples.  We are engaged in a long defeat.  We are going to lose battle after battle.  We are after all not fighting against flesh and blood but principalities and powers of darkness that have a grip on people, feeding their fear, shame, and anger, inciting violence and bigotry, ignorance and lies, spawning injustice, war, and ecological catastrophe.   

Our word for this defeat is martyrdom, which literally means “witness.”  We are called to witness, amid the long disintegration, to the truth of God’s love for the whole world, by expressing that love for others after Jesus' example.  In the final victory of his resurrection, we stand firm in or conviction that love always wins, in the end.

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Killing Barney.

When my son was about 5 or 6 I took him to a minor league baseball game in Somerville, NJ.  During the game, between two half-innings, someone dressed as a purple dinosaur danced out onto the field while the Barney Song (“I love you, you love me…”) played over the PA.  My son was getting a little old for Barney, but he had watched a lot of these shows only a year or two earlier.  So he lit up and pointed the figure out to me, smiling.

I don’t know if he is still on TV, but Barney was a character in children’s television.  His show was for little kids and it was about being nice and caring for each other.  He was surrounded by a diverse set of children who danced, sang, and played with him.  It was good.  

Then, at the stadium, as the dinosaur cavorted near second base, there was the recorded report of a rifle shot, and Barney went down in a heap.  The people laughed and cheered.

My son wasn’t traumatized.  But he was shocked and surprised.  He knew it was fake.  But he turned to me with this quizzical and sad look on his face.  “Why did they kill Barney, dad?  And why does everyone think it’s funny?”  

What was I supposed to answer?  “I don’t know, Dan.”  I said.  “People are nasty sometimes.”  

That was pretty lame, I know.  How do you break it to a 5-year-old that he is  entering into a society that thinks of innocence, goodness, and joy as things to be exterminated with glee.  I mean, it could easily have been Mr. Rogers they had assassinated.  (“Owning the libs” is the term for this kind of thing these days.)

(My son “advanced” to Power Rangers around this time.  Nobody messed with them.)

I find it difficult not to be cynical about America right now, and about the human race generally.  Much of our politics continues to be perverted by a buffoon who thrived on ignorance, cruelty, and lies, and who seems to be enthusiastically adored by at least a third of our people.

The latest novel by Richard Powers is Bewilderment.  It describes the journey of a widower and his 10-year-old son through contemporary America.  The boy is very concerned about extinction and other aspects of our ecological crisis.  He keeps getting met with ignorance, cruelty, and lies.  When he asks his dad about this, the protagonist occasionally just has to throw up his hands, shake his head, and say, “Humans.”

I get it.  

In Glasgow right now our leaders are gathered again to address the catastrophic heating of the planetary atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels.  They are making dire speeches, which is at least better than denying the crisis altogether.  But I suspect the results will be the same.  Too little, too late, if anything.  Our political and economic structures are not designed to deal with this kind of rolling catastrophe.  They are designed for ignorance, cruelty, and lies, mainly.  They are designed to make rich people richer.  They can’t be used for anything else any more than my car can turn into an oak tree.

Humans.

What can we do?  Complain to the authorities: there was no reason to kill Barney?  Like that’ll work?  Someone in an office somewhere was paid to come up with that idea.  He no doubt thought it would be hilarious.  For many he was right.  

I still believe, that is, I trust in God, which means that I know that beneath it all, at the very foundation of reality, is love.  And that what we are seeing now is merely the messy disintegration of our ignorance, cruelty, and lies.  They collapse on themselves with great fanfare and cost.  It’s very painful and violent.  It’s analogous to overcoming an addiction, except as a whole civilization.

I sense that God will not allow the creation to go down.  Our civilization?  That’s another story.

Yet love remains, within everything.  In the Voice of the Creator who called it all into being.  

Maybe we would see that, if we saw through the eyes of a child who was not yet jaded and corrupted by ignorance, cruelty, and lies.  Who was still open to something real.  Still open to the truth.  Maybe that’s what Jesus meant when he said we get into the Kingdom of God only as children.  As people who have yet to be indoctrinated into the regime of ignorance, cruelty, and lies.

“This is my beloved Son.  Listen to him.”

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