Born with a Gift of Laughter, and a Sense that the World Was Mad

Friend Cyrus opines that morality is derived from the practical needs of society. More generally, “cultural relativism” has become a common position: morality is what your society says it is.

This goes against one of the most vital of all insights: that the world is mad.

So says Christianity: God came to the world, and the world crucified him.

Not just the civil authorities, either. The religious authorities were very much in on the act. And not just the authorities, either. They judgment is ultimately confirmed by the mob, by democratic vote.

Seems pretty definitive: whatever society as a whole is pushing, it is not reliable. You can’t derive morality from social authority.

This is also a possible understanding of Jesus’s warning “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

A pessimistic reading is that very few get to heaven. A more optimistic reading is that we only get to heaven one by one, never by following the crowd.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus says of his disciples—that is, of Christians—“I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world…. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it.”

Christians are to be in the world, but not of it.

What about the Church? Isn’t it a social authority?

Yes, it is—and have we not seen ourselves, even in very recent days, that as a social authority it is not reliable? What is reliable is the “deposit of faith,” the scriptures and time-tested traditions it preserves, and must exist to preserve. But not the USCCB or CCCB, meeting as a group—and not the Vatican.

The common phrase “whenever two or more of you are gathered in my name, I am with you,” often used to describe the Church, is a misquotation. Jesus actually said, “whenever two or three of you.” This suggests an upper limit as well as a lower one for his true presence.

There must have been a reason why, of his many disciples, he chose only twelve to be apostles, to whom he delegated authority. Only twelve to join him in the Upper Room. The apostles themselves understood this number as significant, for when Judas apostasized, they chose one successor.

Twelve seems a reasonable upper limit at which all members of the group will know one another and interact with one another as individuals. It is the upper limit of human sanity.

Noah

The same insight, that the world is mad, or is no moral guide, is found in Judaism, only a little less centrally. It is the story of Noah, of Lot—only the individual, only one man, is righteous. It is the story of the prophets, almost invariably, as Jesus notes, persecuted by their society. It is the story of the Jews as a whole, in the diaspora.

It is also clear enough in Buddhism—Sakyamuni literally rejects “the world”—he was fated to be a world ruler. He abandons his city and his palaces, then even his few companions in the forest, to achieve his enlightenment in solitude.

To me, the most worrisome thing about Islam is the absence from its mainstream of this awareness that the world is mad.

The Sufis understand it.

Beyond our great religious traditions, the insanity of the social plane is also the core insight of much of our greatest literature. In the Odyssey, Odysseus is always struggling with an irresponsible crew. In the Iliad: nobody listens to Cassandra or to Laocoon. And Troy falls not by force of massed arms, but through the cleverness of an individual, Odysseus. In the entire Medieval “knight errant” tradition; like the cowboy tradition that followed it. In Don Quixote—superficially Quixote is mad, and those around him are sane. Yet we sympathize with him, and see them all as dullards by comparison. Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Gulliver’s Travels. Kafka’s entire corpus; Lord of the Flies; Catch-22; To Kill a Mockingbird; One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Hans Christian Andersen’s "The Emperor’s New Clothes.” “High Noon.” Orwell’s 1984.

It is a convenient error to understand 1984 as solely a prediction of the future. “1984” is “1948” transposed, the date the book was written, for a reason. Orwell meant that, if looked at carefully, the situation in England in 1948 was already that described.

Is there any similar literary or philosophical argument for communitarianism?

There is. It is called fascism.

Individualism vs. Community

Nuremberg shows its community spirit.

I think my leftist friend Xerxes has hit upon something in his latest column: the essential difference between the modern North American left and right. He speaks of joining his church choir as a transcendent experience:

“We have stopped being a collection of individuals, and have become a collective organism. A single mind. And in a sense, a single body – we even have to breathe as one, line by line.

We transcend our individuality. And it feels wonderful.”

And he concludes:

“Worship also attempts to connect with the most transcendent reality of all – merging with the divine.

Granted, not everyone in a choir will reason that singing derives from a universal desire for transcendence. But they all know intuitively they’re part of a community.”

And that's probably the key to it all. To a leftist, this sense of losing the individual in community is a self-evident good. After all, it transcends “selfishness.” So it partakes of the divine. The group is divine.

But any rightist reads that first sentence with horror, and thinks of the tight coordination of the Nazi Nuremberg rallies or the North Korean mass choreographed displays in sports stadia. The solidarity bred by a choir? Like Jack's choir boys in Lord of the Flies? Community is the danger; individualism is what partakes of the divine. 

Pyongyang shows its community spirit.

And I am here to explain why the left is wrong and the right is right.

Individualism is no more “selfish” than community. Every community, by definition, excludes as well as includes. Not all sentient beings are members, or we would not refer to a community. If, then, the members of that community seek their own mutual interests, they are corporately acting as selfishly as any individual would be who did the same acting alone. So selfishness is unrelated to individualism. Either a group or an individual can act either selfishly or unselfishly.

At the same time, individualism means taking responsibility. If you surrender that moral responsibility to a community, and defer to their judgement, you are waiving any ability to act morally. You are, on the other hand, perfectly able to act immorally: if you do something immoral as a member of a group, you are still individually responsible. You cannot say you were “only following orders.” But if, conversely, you help the poor only because you see others doing it, or because it improves your social position, it is no longer a moral act. 

Jonestown shows its community spirit.

This is why “Community,” losing your individuality in the group, is in fact traditionally considered one of the great temptations to sin. “The world, the flesh, and the devil.” Following the social consensus, the community, is “the world.” First named.

Community was the whole idea behind Fascism. That's what the symbol of the fasces was meant to represent. And, of course, community was also the whole idea behind Communism, as the name declares. It was the community of the day who put Jesus to death. A sense of community is, in turn, the underlying essence of all racism, all discrimination, all prejudice. It is the reaction to one "not in our group."  Communitarianism has produced the worst human evils in history.

Community is indeed a human need, or at least a natural human want. Just like food and sex. Accordingly, we legitimately seek community. There is nothing wrong with that. But we do not idolize it, any more than we should food or sex. Bad things then quickly happen.

The important thing is that, when we seek community, we seek it on the basis of morality; we seek to belong only to groups engaged in moral behaviour. And retain our individual judgement.

Selma shows its community spirit.