Day 7: The idolatry of ideology

The only response to the deification…
Idolatry of ideology…
You don’t really give a flying f — k
—Bruce Cockburn, “Call It Democracy”

“God hates ideas,” wrote the fifth-century mystic known as Pseudo-Dionysius. That particular idea has been largely ignored since he wrote it. The Reformation, modernism, even the murkiness of postmodernism have not shaken loose the idolatry of ideology. Ideas are easy, whether we’re hiding out in the security of dogma or swimming in nihilistic detachment. Experience is hard. Relationships are hard. Engagement with life is hard.

It’s not that I object to ideas. No, my friends know that I can be over-analytical and downright pedantic. This is not an anti-intellectual protest; it’s a question of the proper place for ideas. When ideas become idols, people are objectified and the noble purposes behind the ideas are lost. We do this all the time with all manner of ideas—religious, philosophical, scientific, political. At one extreme, we kill each other over them. At the other, we write each other off. And this can happen for even trivial ideas. One of my most impassioned rants a few years ago was spurred by a now good friend’s comment that Jakob Dylan was superior to Bob Dylan because of sales figures. I actually let lack of Bob-respect interfere with a friendship.

The challenge is to rediscover “the living person amid the compartmentalization and dehumanization of modern culture,” as Rollo May has put it. This is not an easy task. We’re entrenched in our camps. We find safety in PLU—people like us, and we fear dissolving into nothingness should we give up our ideological idols. The first step is to step out from the crowd. As Kierkegaard wrote, “By forming a party, by melting into some group, we avoid not only conscience, but martyrdom…. No one dares to be a genuine self; everyone is hiding in some kind of ‘togetherness.’ … We are content to be a specimen or a copy…. The ‘many,’ the mass of people, put out the inner fire.”

You leave the crowd to engage life personally, to confront not just the ideologies but all the vagaries of existence, to head May’s existentialist call “back from the delusion that reality can be comprehended in an abstracted, detached way.”

silence and dumb tongues
it’s a different kind of ghetto
—Over the Rhine, “Little Blue River”

To stop there, however, is to merely replace the ideology of the crowd for an individual one and continue the idolatry. That was Kierkegaard’s mistake at the end of his life, and that has certainly been mine. On a dime, I went from political activism to apathy, from religious community to rejection and withdrawal, from flawed involvement with life to total disengagement. In my smugness, I thought I was above the fray, above the compartmentalization, but I had merely created a different kind of ghetto.

What is required is to rejoin the crowd, but this time as an individual. When it comes down to it, what I’m really getting at is engagement with life, which necessitates true engagement with humanity. To leave behind the defensiveness of both rugged individualism and groupthink. To become part of the community without disappearing into the crowd. True community demands this type of individual. As Kierkegaard explained, “The single individual is decisive in forming community…. The cohesiveness of community comes from each one’s being a single individual before the eternal.” True engagement also involves risk; life demands risk. Kierkegaard wrote, “To venture the truth is what gives human life and the human situation pith and meaning. To venture is the fountainhead of inspiration. Calculating is the sworn enemy of enthusiasm, the mirage whereby the earthly person drags out time and keeps the eternal away, whereby one cheats God, himself and his generation.”

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott advises writers:

You must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work…. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it’s a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.

Community is even more subversive. To venture engagement, to offer not just our versions of the truth but our very selves, is revolutionary. Worry about being unavailable. Worry about being absent. Indeed.

Writer James Wall has stated eloquently, “It is in each of these days that we are given the gift of being present to others. Rarely do we stop to think of the present moment as the intersections of biographies. If we thought about it too much we might be overwhelmed by the responsibility and by the sense that we have failed to say what we ought to have said or have said the wrong thing.”

I’ve heard their stories, heard them all
but love’s the only engine of survival
—Leonard Cohen, “The Future”

While Joseph Campbell may have been overly reductionistic, the hero’s journey calls to all of us. Whether viewed in psychological terms as with Campbell or in the religious framework undergirding my primary vantage point, I see everywhere evidence of a fundamental human drama written into our natures, woven into our Jungian collective unconscious, manifested in the myths, stories and arts of the diverse cultures across human history. Part of the journey is a lonely one, requiring us to leave the safety of the crowd to find that call. But then you rejoin the crowd, not as a dependent lemming, hiding, but as a fellow hero, living in healthy relationships, giving freely out of abundance—not merely currying favor out of fear. As my favorite group of modern-day philosophers at Mutant Enemy wrote (in the most succinct summation of my brand of communal existentialism), “Understand we’ll go hand in hand, but we’ll walk alone in fear.” Fear, comfort, suffering, salve, isolation, community—love, life itself, wraps all of these in one confusing bundle that we’re cursed to bear but blessed to share.

Ultimately, it’s about finding oneself and becoming fully human by surrendering—to God, to life, to others, and giving our very lives to find them. As the TV character Angel explained to his saturnine son Connor:

Nothing in the world is the way it ought to be. It’s harsh, and cruel. But that’s why there’s us. … It doesn’t matter where we come from, what we’ve done or suffered, or even if we make a difference. We live as though the world was what it should be, to show it what it can be.

Engage.