Catechism II: Isms
(I know that I am thoroughly and vocally opinionated and fond of being right so I put myself at risk of some hypocrisy here. Please bear with me.)
Being finite and human, which most of us are, it is easy to insulate and forget that we play a role in many cause-effect relationships, and we are fond of assuming that our version of the world is the only one. This universal human tendency gets worse when one is a member of an elite class of any flavor, because of course your position gives you a sufficiently privileged perspective from which to call the shots. If you don’t know something, it must not be important. You have the luxury of avoiding knowledge of certain things in order to prevent them from becoming important to you. You are entitled to not being made uncomfortable. You have a natural right to evaluate, influence, and control other people but they have no business reciprocating. (Who do they think they are, anyway?)
This is true not just of politicians and business magnates, but academics and church leaders as well. Quandaries of interpretation, abstract theological musings, responses and (over)reactions to contextual circumstances, or interpersonal and factional grudge matches tend to land somewhere in the untidy realm of reality, playing out powerfully in human lives whether or not those in the ivory tower pay attention to the fallout. Paradigms trickle down haphazardly piecemeal to the masses, losing any sense of nuance, process, and ambiguity in their origins. Or, worse, an erroneous or oversimplified approach to an issue gets deliberately packaged and delivered as The Truth.
Inherited ideologies are dangerous. If one does not know where one’s ideas come from, chances are one believes that it ‘just is so,’ and one is not capable of defending what one believes except by shutting out evidence and arguments for all other options. To open things up for discussion would be to betray The Truth, and changing positions, budging even a little would require shaking the very foundations of reality. (Forget embracing new paradigms or, heaven forbid, repenting.)
We are conditioned from the cradle to perceive the world in certain ways, and all education is to some degree re-education. No one comes to a situation un-formed, and many of the formative influences bombarding us in are daily lives are fallen, causing our perceptions of ourselves and our surroundings to be de-formed. We can learn to identify these to forces in order to counteract them—discernment and re-formation. But we will never be able to do this completely even for ourselves, let alone when we are teaching or learning from people whose stories we do not know. So we need to pay attention and ask ourselves why anyone believes or acts the way they do.
What ‘isms’ “colonize your imagination?” (Phrase coined by Stanley Hauerwas or Sam Wells, I think). Who paid for the version of reality you are being fed? Who profits from ideological enforcement of the status quo? What would you stand to lose by letting new ideas change you? Ignorance may be bliss, but is it innocence? At what point are we morally responsible for what we choose or pretend not to know?
Being finite and human, which most of us are, it is easy to insulate and forget that we play a role in many cause-effect relationships, and we are fond of assuming that our version of the world is the only one. This universal human tendency gets worse when one is a member of an elite class of any flavor, because of course your position gives you a sufficiently privileged perspective from which to call the shots. If you don’t know something, it must not be important. You have the luxury of avoiding knowledge of certain things in order to prevent them from becoming important to you. You are entitled to not being made uncomfortable. You have a natural right to evaluate, influence, and control other people but they have no business reciprocating. (Who do they think they are, anyway?)
This is true not just of politicians and business magnates, but academics and church leaders as well. Quandaries of interpretation, abstract theological musings, responses and (over)reactions to contextual circumstances, or interpersonal and factional grudge matches tend to land somewhere in the untidy realm of reality, playing out powerfully in human lives whether or not those in the ivory tower pay attention to the fallout. Paradigms trickle down haphazardly piecemeal to the masses, losing any sense of nuance, process, and ambiguity in their origins. Or, worse, an erroneous or oversimplified approach to an issue gets deliberately packaged and delivered as The Truth.
Inherited ideologies are dangerous. If one does not know where one’s ideas come from, chances are one believes that it ‘just is so,’ and one is not capable of defending what one believes except by shutting out evidence and arguments for all other options. To open things up for discussion would be to betray The Truth, and changing positions, budging even a little would require shaking the very foundations of reality. (Forget embracing new paradigms or, heaven forbid, repenting.)
We are conditioned from the cradle to perceive the world in certain ways, and all education is to some degree re-education. No one comes to a situation un-formed, and many of the formative influences bombarding us in are daily lives are fallen, causing our perceptions of ourselves and our surroundings to be de-formed. We can learn to identify these to forces in order to counteract them—discernment and re-formation. But we will never be able to do this completely even for ourselves, let alone when we are teaching or learning from people whose stories we do not know. So we need to pay attention and ask ourselves why anyone believes or acts the way they do.
What ‘isms’ “colonize your imagination?” (Phrase coined by Stanley Hauerwas or Sam Wells, I think). Who paid for the version of reality you are being fed? Who profits from ideological enforcement of the status quo? What would you stand to lose by letting new ideas change you? Ignorance may be bliss, but is it innocence? At what point are we morally responsible for what we choose or pretend not to know?
posted by Ingrid at 12:32 PM
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