Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

It has taken me some time to learn the lessons of the individual journey of authenticity – of becoming myself – and I am still learning it. I have had to deal with the suffering of being excluded from places I thought I desired to be in, and from personal, social and political relationships where I thought I belonged. Often, I felt I was scapegoated – that my exclusion was traumatic to my identity. I have also been in situations where someone else was scapegoated, and I was part of the group that scapegoated them. I tended to view all these conflicts through the lens of praise and blame. The journey of authenticity needs to continually adopt and perfect the ability to live with compassionate awareness towards oneself and others. Being authentic requires a humble honesty in admitting our own blameworthy behaviour, instead of resorting to the essentially conformist behaviour of scapegoating.

I have taken too long to learn this lesson.

It is not only our hatred and distrust of others that is dangerous; but also, and above all, our hatred and distrust of ourselves: particularly that hatred and distrust of ourselves which is too deep and too power­ful to be consciously faced. For it is this failure to authentically admit our own evil and capacity for it which makes us notice and often project our own evil in others and unable to see it in ourselves. 

When we see crime in others, we try to correct it by destroying them or at least putting them out of sight. It is easy to identify the sin with the sinner when he is someone other than our own self. In ourselves, it is the other way round; we see the sin, but we have great difficulty in accepting responsibility for it. We find it very hard to identify our sin with our own will and our own malice. On the contrary, we naturally tend to interpret our immoral act as an involuntary (not of us – and thus not part of who we really are) mistake, or as the malice of a spirit in us that is other than ourselves. In other words, our own evil is not really our fault. Yet at the same time we are fully aware that others do not make this convenient distinction for us. The acts that have been done by us are, in their eyes, “our” acts and they hold us fully responsible.

This I have experienced rather viscerally. And more than once.

Like any profit-oriented business, we attempt to offload the cost to reduce our overhead; we tend unconsciously to ease ourselves of the burden of guilt that is in us by passing it on to somebody else. When I have done wrong and have excused myself by attributing the wrong to “an­ other” who resides with impunity “in me,” my conscience is not yet satisfied. There is still too much left to be explained. The “other in myself” is too close to home. We often account for our own faults by seeing an equivalent amount of evil in someone else. One does this, consciously or otherwise, to minimize one’s own sins and compensate for doing so by exaggerating the faults of others. 

As if this were not enough, we make the situation much worse by artificially intensifying our sense of evil, and by increasing our propensity to feel guilt even for things which are not, in themselves, wrong. In all these ways we build up such an obsession with evil, both in ourselves and in others, that we waste all our mental energy trying to account for this evil, to punish it, or to get rid of it in any way we can. We go crazy in our preoccupation with evil that, in the end, there is no outlet left but violence. We are compelled to destroy something or someone. By that time, we have created for ourselves a suitable enemy, a scapegoat in whom we have invested all the evil in the world. He is the cause of every wrong. He is the reason of all conflict. If he can only be destroyed, conflict will cease; evil will be done with; there will be no more war. 

This tempting kind of delusion is especially dangerous when it is supported by a whole elaborate pseudo­-scientific structure of myths, like those who exercise cancel culture in the name of social justice, and those that distrust all information in the name of being cautious of the neo-liberal deep state. Yet more than exuding a kind of “anti-political polarization,” I see it as particularly pernicious and dangerous when it operates in the confused and groundless secular opportunism which is a substitute for religion, for philosophy and even for mature thought.

However, good intentions are not enough for peace. At times when the whole world is in moral confusion, when no one knows any longer what, or even how, to think, people have consistently run away from the responsibility of thinking. This happens when one embraces absurdity by exiling himself entirely from realities into the realm of fictions; one expends all one’s efforts in constructing more fictions with which to ac­count for one’s own ethical failures. At these moments it becomes clear that the world cannot be saved from global war and global destruction by the mere efforts and good intentions of peacemakers. We are becoming more and more aware of the widening gulf between good purposes and bad results, between efforts to make peace and the growing likelihood of war – and in smaller scales, of scapegoating. It seems that, no matter how elaborate and careful the planning, all at­tempts at dialogue end in failure. In the end, no one has any more faith in those who even attempt the dialogue. On the contrary, the negotiators, with all their pathetic good will, become the objects of contempt and of hatred. It is the ones with “good will,’” the ones who have made their feeble efforts to do something about peace, who will in the end be the most mercilessly reviled, crushed, and destroyed as victims of the universal human self-hate which they have unfortunately only increased by the failure of their good intentions. 

We still have a superstitious tendency to equate failure with dishonesty and guilt – failure being interpreted as “punishment.” Even if one starts out with good intentions, failing somehow indicates fault. If the one who failed was not guilty, he was at least “wrong.” And “being wrong” is something we have not yet learned to face with compassion. Like the polar opposites of praise and blame, we either condemn it with god-like disdain or forgive it with god-like condescension. We do not manage to accept it with human compassion, humility and identification. Thus, we never see the one truth that would help us begin to solve our ethical and political problems: that we are all wrong, that we are all at fault, all limited and obstructed by our mixed motives, our self-deception, our greed, our self-righteous­ness and our tendency to aggression and hypocrisy. 

Can we not accept the partially good intentions of others and work with them (of course prudently and with resignation to the inevitable imperfection of the result)? By not doing so, we are unconsciously proclaiming our own malice, our own intolerance, our own lack of realism, our own ethical and political bullshit. 

Perhaps the first step toward peace would be a realistic acceptance of the fact that our ideals are may be illusiory and fictional, and to which we cling out of motives that are not always perfectly honest, i.e. they are inauthentic. We thus prevent ourselves from seeing any good or any practi­cability in the ideals of our enemies – which may, of course, be in many ways even more illusory and dishonest than our own. We will never get anywhere unless we can accept the fact that politics is an inex­tricable tangle of good and evil motives in which, per­haps, the evil predominate but where one must continue to dig doggedly in what little good can still be found. 

But a Western-educated someone out of a Platonic or Aristotelian tradition will say: “If we once recognize that we are all equally wrong, all political action will instantly be paralyzed. We can only act when we assume that we are in the right.” On the contrary, I believe the basis for valid political action can only be the recognition that the true solution to our problems is not accessible to just one isolated party or nation but that all must arrive at it by working together. This is what Hannah Arendt imagined to be the realm of action which, for her, was the political realm. 

At this point we must caution against the encouraging of the guilt-ridden thinking that is always too glad to be “wrong’ in everything. I have known Catholics and Mennonites who tend to think this way. This too is an evasion of responsibility, because every form of oversimplification tends to make decisions ultimately meaningless. We must try to accept our authentic selves, whether individually or collectively, not only as perfectly good or perfectly bad, but in our mysterious, unaccountable mixture of good and evil. We must stand by the modicum of good that is in us without exaggerating it. We must defend our real rights, because unless we respect our own rights, we will certainly not respect the rights of others. But, at the same time, we must recog­nize that we have trespassed on the rights of others, willfully or otherwise. We must be able to admit this not only as the result of self-examination, but when it is pointed out unexpectedly, and perhaps not too gently, by some­body else. 

These principles of authenticity which govern personal con­duct, which make harmony possible in small social units like the family, also apply in the wider area of the state and in the whole community of nations. It is, however, quite absurd, in our present situation or in any other, to expect these principles to be universally accepted as the result of moral exhortations. It is ridiculous to source political thought on the faint hope of a purely contingent and subjective moral illumination in the hearts of the world’s leaders. But outside of political thought and action, in the privacy of our own hearts and homes, it is not only permissible to hope for such a mysterious consummation, but it is necessary to pray for it. Such prayer for authenticity may not likely “convert” the ones who are mostly responsible for the world’s peace, but at least that they may, despite their obstinacy and their prejudices, be guarded against catastrophe.

It would be naive to expect people to trust one another when they obviously cannot be trusted. But at least, in their authenticity, they can learn to trust God. They can bring them­selves to see that the mysterious power of God can, quite independently of human malice and error, protect a person’s unaccountably against themselves, and that God can al­ways turn evil into good, though perhaps not always in a sense that would be understood by the preachers of sunshine and uplift. If they can trust and love God, who is infinitely wise and who rules the lives of human beings, permitting them to use their freedom even to the point of almost incredible abuse, they can love people who are evil. They can learn to love them even in their sin, as God has loved them. If we can love those we cannot trust (without trusting them foolishly) and if we can to some extent share the burden of their sin by identify­ing ourselves with them, then perhaps peace on earth is possible, based not on the wisdom and the manipulations of men but on the incredible and incomprehensible mercy and grace of God. 

For only love – which requires authentic humility – can cleanse the fear which is at the root of all violence. 

This should not be taken to mean that prayer excludes our best applied wisdom. It may make sense for a sick person to pray for health and then take medicine, but I fail to see any sense at all in praying for health and then drinking poison. 

I am fully aware how archaic this sounds in a computerized and scientific age. But I would like to submit that pseudo-scientific thinking in politics and sociology have so far had much less than this to offer. One thing I would like to add in all fairness is that the atomic and surveillance scientists themselves are quite often the ones most concerned about the ethics of the situation, and that they are among the few who dare to open their mouths from time to time and say something about it. 

But who on earth listens? 

If we really wanted peace, we would sincerely ask God for it, and He would give it to us. But why should He give the world a peace which it does not really desire? The peace the world pretends to desire is really no peace at all. 

To some men peace merely means the liberty to exploit other people without fear of retaliation or interference. To others peace means the freedom to rob others without interruption. To still others it means the leisure to de­vour the goods of the earth without being compelled to interrupt their pleasures to feed those whom their greed is starving. And to practically everybody, peace simply means the absence of any physical violence that might cast a shadow over lives devoted to the satisfaction of their mimetic desires for comfort and pleasure. 

Many people like these, including myself, have asked God for what they thought was “peace”, and wondered why their prayer was not answered. They could not understand that it actually was answered. God left them with what they desired, for their idea of peace was poisoned with violence. 

So instead of loving what you think is peace, love other people and love God above all. And instead of hating the people you think are warmakers, hate the disordered mimetic appetites in your own soul, which are the causes of war. In other words, hate these things in yourself, not in others.