Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

In an age when the fifth type of totalitarianism, Mass Society, has systemically devalued and degraded the human person, I hope it is proper to demand a hearing of any and all authentic reactions in favor of a person’s inalienable solitude and for her effective freedom. The murderous cacophony of materialism cannot be allowed to silence the independent voices who will never cease speaking. It is all very well and good to assert that human beings are ‘social animals’ a fact which is obvious enough. But that is no justification for making her a mere cog in a totalitarian machine – even if such a machine is religious.

In actual fact, society depends, for its existence, on the uncorrupted personal solitude of its members – a solitude that is constituted through the intimate relationship of significant others. To merit its name, “society” must be made up not of numbers or mechanical units, but of persons. To be a person requires a “freedom to” and a “freedom from”, which, in more tangible terms, is a combination of responsibility and liberation. Such a state of personhood cannot be achieved without the constitutive contributions of significant others who facilitate both the required liberation and the situation toward whom such a liberated person can act meaningfully. The two faces of this coin – which Isaiah Berlin called negative (liberation) and positive (responsibility) – rely on the currency of authenticity. Thomas Merton, in Thoughts in Solitude, described this authenticity as a “certain interior solitude”. What we understand to be an authentic person is one who has personal integrity, a sense of one’s own reality, and the ability to give of herself to society – or to refuse that gift.

When persons are merely submerged in a mass of impersonal human beings being pushed around by automatic forces, they lose what is true and valuable about them – their integrity, their ability to love, and their capacity to determine their own lives. When society is made up of persons who know no interior solitude, such a society can no longer be held together by love: and consequently, it is held together by violent and abusive authority. We see this on the face of the surviving Palestinians and in the face of North American Black Friday and Boxing Day shoppers. When persons are either violently deprived of the liberating solitude necessary for authenticity (Palestine) or are technocratically forced into isolation by online shopping and self-serve human resource departments, the society in which they live becomes putrid – it festers with servility, resentment, and hate. 

We can’t look to technological progress to cure the hatred that eats at the vitals of materialistic society because it is infected with a spiritual cancer. The only cure for this cancer is, and must always be, spiritual. There is not much use talking to individuals about God and love if they are not able to listen. The ears these individuals have are suppressed and deeply hidden in their hearts. The only way to access these ears is to constitute within them an authentic solitude and an experience of silence.

In other words, since our own freedom and self-determination require freely receiving gifts of grace, an individual will not commune with a spiritual message as long as both her heart and mind are enslaved to automatism and the logic of technological rationality. She will always be enslaved so long as she is submerged in a mass of other automatons and in systems of technocratic rationality that eradicate anything resembling true individuality, i.e. without their authentic integrity as persons.

What is said in the upcoming blog posts is not merely for hermits. It is for all those who hold on to spirituality with a minimal amount of resistance to technocratic, imperial, authoritarian, genocidal, and apartheid structures that threaten to eradicate the human person altogether.

Please subscribe for updates.