Mythic Religion and Containment of the Power Ego

A great post from Integral Options Cafe:

The Benefits of Religion

from Integral Options Cafe by WH

Yesterday morning I was being a slacker and not doing homework, so I watched Top Gun, which was on some cable station or another. I really dislike Tom Cruise so I had never seen this flick, but I had heard that it offered a great object lesson in memetics.

Maverick (Cruise's character) is a hot-shot young pilot, but he is very cocky and takes too many risks to show off his skills. Eventually, through no real fault of his own, his best friend and co-pilot dies on a training mission.

Iceman (Val Kilmer) is the rival pilot, equally as talented, but he flies within the rules of the Navy pilots training program, one of which is to never leave your wingman. Iceman eventually wins the Top Gun competition among the pilots in training. Maverick eventually submits to the military structure and saves Iceman in a real life firefight.

Maverick represents an ego-centered memetic stage of development, while Iceman represents a more authoritarian memetic stage. The film demonstrates through (melodrama and bad acting) that the power-drive of the ego needs some strong containment within authority structures to allow it to reach its potential.

By now, you may be wondering what this has to do with the benefits of religion.

Over the weekend, a video made the rounds online of a pastor up in Tempe (just outside of Phoenix) saying he hates Barack Obama and wished him dead. This same man and some of his congregation had shown up at Obama's speech a little more than a week ago armed with assault rifles and handguns.

Here is the video:

Popout

This video has resulted in a lot of despair about the role of mythic religion in our culture. You can read some of the discussion the video generated at my friend Stuart's Facebook page.

Many people feel that mythic religion has outlived its usefulness, or that it is no longer an appropriate developmental response to a complex world. This is not wrong, but it is only a partial truth. In fact, the mythic worldview is losing its power, and that is partially why those infected with a more malignant version of this developmental meme are reacting with fear-based violence.

However, not all religion is bad, and not all religion is malignant. As is the case with the military structure portrayed in Top Gun, mythic religion offers a structure to contain the power-drive of the raw ego. But mythic religion is only one form of religion (and here we are talking specifically about Christianity, not Islam, Judaism, or other religions). There are many rational, egalitarian, and even some integral stage Christians. It is not Christianity that is the problem.

The problem, rather, is that some of the people who adhere to a fundamentalist religious dogma also adhere to a very rigid and hateful form of ethnocentrism. The result is a profound fear of the other, and the other is anyone who does not share their specific values and beliefs about the world.

In the example of this clown up in Tempe, the other is Obama - because he is liberal, because he holds some postmodern relativist values (a woman's right to choose what happens to her body), and quite possibly because he is black. The Phoenix metro area is already well-known nationally for its fear/hate of all people who are not them, as Sheriff Joe Arpio demonstrates on a regular basis.

When religion in this country isn't infected with this ethnocentric hatred, it performs valuable roles in society. It has been inner city churches that have done the most to help those involved in the tribal and ego-based power drive of gang culture grow out of that. Even Malcolm X, although his faith was Islam, found containment for his power-drives in the authoritarian structure of religion.

In the same way that sports teams or the military provide that rule-bound structure to contain the raging egos of young men, so does mythic religion. When well-meaning but misguided liberals worked to disempower inner city churches in the sixties and seventies, it was the the neighborhoods that suffered for the lack of religious authority.

And none of this even touches the benefits that religion has for its believers. Churches provide community, comfort, and certainty. While we may not share their values or beliefs, most of these believers are good citizens. The few hateful people should cause us to condemn the whole religion.

It's strange that I find myself, an atheist, defending religion so often against other atheists. This is not the first time, and it likely won't be the last that I make these arguments, so I guess it part of what this blog is about - an integral approach.

Health Care with Chinese Characteristics?

This morning waking up from a nightmare a fairly bitter and ironic thought struck me: health care reform would get passed in China.

Of course, the type of sweeping health care reform that we need in America with the type of coverage that we're talking about never could actually get passed over there- most of the populace (900 billion peasants) has never had anything resembling the type of care Americans with decent health care are accustomed to, and the political system is not in the business of giving away gobs of money and or services, and is corrupt beyond anything most Americans could imagine.

The thought was not realistic, just something of an amusement. Chinese leaders are said to be contemptuous of the weaknesses of democracy, and this whole issue is a prime example of why: this health care debate is a whole mess that never would have happened in their country. They don't realize that the strengths of our system lie in these very weaknesses, but that's not for this discussion.

To be sure, our democracy is ideally healthier than their "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" by ten, but that presupposes certain things, some of which have been in the balance for some time, such as a media disengaged from power, and some of which have come up short, such as education. (Shout out to Nate for this.)

Our sort of democracy presupposes an educated electorate, and by educated I mean up to the ability to think critically, rationality. Far from being rational, human thought is predicated on emotions, growing on their root. It is a human capacity, a possibility, but not an inevitability. It is something that people must be educated into, though I don't necessarily mean formally so. One does not teach rational thought like one teaches about the American revolution, one teaches rational thought in how one teaches about everything. It is cultural, not a subject.

Not that there aren't rational arguments in any direction on this debate. There are. But most people are not reacting against a public plan from some disinterested intellectual perch. They are reacting against a fear of change coming from people unlike them whom they don't trust. They reject a public option because they don't like black presidents, they are terrified of socialism, they are fearful of becoming a minority in their own country, and all of this could be summed up by saying they're terrified that they are losing their voice, and so their power. They are not alone; their fear is being drummed up by the greed of people who are benefiting from the current system and likely to benefit from any arrangement without a public option in the future, but the fear is there, and is accessible because of a lack of rational thinking. Democracy is born in rationality, and needs it to flourish. (For the Integral out there we are obviously talking about SDi 5 v SDi4.)

I feel as if these people who are de facto with the insurance companies on this have never actually had to deal with them before, having their coverage dropped for nothing, getting seventy percent of the allotted (already only one third of what's necessary) maximum reimbursement per week because their psychologist isn't in the network (someone I know), or having to sift through claims and do paperwork with most of their energy and all of their out of bed time during chemotherapy.

My family has gone through it as well. When my brother got Hodgkins disease in 2003, we routinely received letters from the insurance companies that his medication wasn't covered. Yes, for cancer. Even with excellent health care provided to employees of New Jersey (my mom), we had to jump through hoops. Thankfully we weren't one of the thousands affected by "rescission," which means cut from the rolls for some technicality just as we needed care, a practice illuminated in this excellent Nicholas Kristof piece. In it, Kristof talks about a health care executive that saw the light as he was preparing response propaganda for the Michael Moore film "Sicko," and testified in Congress about the methods used by insurance companies to purge the sick from their rolls. It's a sort of short tell-all, and it shows the depths of depravity of the system we have, if not necessarily all of the people operating it, and just how desperately we need reform.

But how?

I am praying that, as Howard Dean said, Obama has been rope-a-doping the Republicans, displaying that they're not really interested in sitting down and working out the kind of reform that we need, and therefore should be largely ignored. I'm looking for one of those powerful speeches to come just before the fall legislative session begins, outlining the necessity of reform, pushing the public plan as the only legitimate option, and calling out the opposition, all in a straightforward and rhetorically excellent manner as only Obama can do.

But as I said, I'm at the point of praying, and am not a religious man.

As lofty as my love of the country grew when it elected a black man with "Hussein" in his name, so hard will it crash back into tempered cynical realism if we get change all insurance companies can believe in, as evidence of it not mattering who you vote for, or why. For the economy, for the people, for business, and as a moral imperative, we need reform. I trust Obama knows this, but we're all seeing that he's somewhat uncomfortable leading against hard-nosed opposition. (Enneagram 9 with a 1 wing? Anyone?) It still isn't impossible, but make no mistake: this is the defining event of his presidency, and his life.

It's almost enough to make one wish for a government that could just magically take all the cars off the roads and shut down all the factories in the area for some large international event, contrary opinions be damned. Don't be afraid, America: it's not socialism, it's socialism with Chinese characteristics.