The Righteous Mind and From Under the Rubble, plus a podcast

In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt helpfully summarizes his points neatly as he goes, and he compresses a convincing hypothesis supported by a myriad of wide-ranging studies into a few concrete images: the elephant of emotive intuition and the rider of post-hoc rationalization, or again the individual as 90% chimp and 10% bee. In the light of the later image, apropos of our "hivishness," the Dionysian counterpart, if you like, to our individual construction of meaning, I was struck by the aptness of the following quotes:

In The Direction of Change, in Solzhenitsyn's anthology From Under the Rubble, the anonymous A. B. writes: "But as we already know, the fallacy of all revolutions is that they are strong and concrete on the negative and destructive side, and limp and abstract on the positive and creative side. This is how Dostoevsky defined the underlying cause: 'The bee knows the formula of its hive and the ant the formula of its anthills, but man does not know his formula.' The reason why man does not know his formula is that, unlike the bee and the ant, which are not free, man is free. Freedom is man's formula, bu he will never find it so long as he seeks it in parties and ideologies, however good they may be in themselves."

And he goes on: "This freedom is not man's 'natural' inheritance, but rather the aim of his life and a 'supernatural' gift. 'Servitude to sin' is how Christianity defines the normal condition of man's soul and it summons man to free himself from this servitude." (147)

In the following piece by Evgeny Barabanov, Schism Between the Church and the World, another echo of that Raskolnikovian phrase, "to speak a new word": "The Church closes up on itself, hoping to wait out the siege, then suddenly revolts and hurls anathemas, but ends up by trying to speak in that alien language imposed form outside. But how, in those circumstances, is it possible to speak about things that have been expressed only in the unchangeable language of Christian Hellenism or medieval scholasticism?...But then it is a long time since the Church seemed once and for all to renounce any desire to create cultural values or a new language for religious culture itself. It seemed to have overstrained itself in the period of its medieval supremacy." (190)

I thought about that a bit, how if we speak of the Church as a body, it is certainly one with its own elephant and a rider perched atop. How if we speak of it as a paradox of freedom and servitude, answering to our own lived experience, it at least makes it more difficult to dismiss as a simply superstitious/oppressive reliquary. And if it is a kind of personality, made in our image, then it, too, need only strive to turn the other cheek, to write in the dust, in response to those most subtle critiques of, say, Pullman.

More on that another time, no doubt. Here's the next installment in the podcast conversation with Alex Schmid: episode 021.