Jim Taylor’s Weblog

Sunday August 1, 2010

Pessimism and optimism

By Jim Taylor

Under suspicion
        I fear for my grandchildren. The world they inherit will not be the world I’ve known most of my life, where boundless optimism shaped our technologies and social systems.
        We saw industrial development as the cure for poverty.
        We saw mass communication as the antidote to ignorance and bigotry.
        We saw prosperity as a human right, “Freedom 55” as a universal goal.
        We saw big government providing a lifelong womb of medical care, education, social services, and personal safety.
        All of these have now become causes for suspicion, not celebration. Lofty goals have been betrayed internally by greed and corruption, proven false by external factors like the Baby Boomer generation surging towards retirement, and rendered irrelevant by technologies that mutate too fast for society to keep up.
        Even institutions that have done nothing to earn distrust come under suspicion, simply for being institutions.
        So I am pessimistic about humanity as a whole.

Face to face
        At the same time, I am profoundly optimistic about individuals. In my lifetime, over 70 years now, I have met very few individuals who refused to respond to another’s need, face to face.
        I read somewhere that only 15 per cent of soldiers ever actually shoot an enemy. Deep within even those trained to kill on command, there remains a reservoir of compassion, a reluctance to inflict unnecessary suffering on another living being.
        I know no one who would leave a swimmer to drown, would let a child bleed to death, would callously slash a lifeline. I’m sure there are such people, even if I don’t know them personally. But they can only commit these acts by distancing themselves from their victims, by convincing themselves that the other person is somehow less human than themselves.
        It is this distancing – in weaponry, in boardrooms, in mental attitudes – that converts human beings into ideological robots.
        Individuals can change. Individuals can learn. That’s the foundation for my optimism. (I’m less optimistic when individuals submerge into a collective mentality.)
        As individuals, we respond to the example of other individuals. We see a Martin Luther King Jr., a Mother Teresa, a Mahatma Gandhi, a Nelson Mandala, and we recognize that we need not be constrained by the limitations of any particular society or civilization.
        The best of our ethical insights have all come from individuals – Jesus of Nazareth, guru Nanak Dev, Baha’u'llah, Mohammed, the Buddha….
        But the power of individual example is not restricted to religion. Scientists and thinkers often acknowledge that they were inspired by some individual predecessor – mathematicians by Einstein or Newton, astronomers by Galileo, biologists by Darwin, physicists by Planck or Keppler….

Generating a critical mass
        But there’s an inherent paradox here.
        An individual has impact only when he – or she, like Mary Baker Eddy or Susan B. Anthony – generates a critical mass of followers. Only a mass movement can abolish slavery or win voting rights for half of humanity. But mass movements also led the Crusades and invented the caste system.
        The danger, it seems to me, comes when individuals following the footsteps of an examplar reject their own individuality. They surrender their uniqueness; they entomb themselves in a tradition or cause. They elevate their icon onto a pedestal, placing her above contradiction, making him the answer to all circumstances, all situations.
        They forget that their model became a model by diverging from the conventional wisdom of that time.
        The primary imperative of following those exemplary individuals, then, is NOT to get sucked into a one-size-fits-all mentality. Rather, it is to accept personal responsibility. To always respond as generously, as compassionately, as one would face to face.
        We can do it as individuals. We seem less able to do it collectively.
        That’s why I am optimistic about individuals, but pessimistic about humans as a whole.
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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NEW PARAPHRASE AVAILABLE

I write paraphrases so that I can understand the Bible. And one of the most bewildering books, for me, has been Revelation.
        Then one day my minister suggested that I was reading it wrong. I was concentrating on the prophecies, the interpretations of the visions, the explanations of the symbols. I should be reading it as a verbal painting.
        Without most of the speeches and proclamations, Revelation turns into a massive visual tapestry, an epic narrative. In most of my paraphrases, I have tried to replace archaic metaphors and images with more modern ones, and to replace desert based illustrations with some that we who live in more northern climes might find more familiar. I have not done that this time. I have simply excised the blather that gets in the way of John’s magnificent panorama of rebellion and victory.
        I’m offering this paraphrase of Revelation on the honour system, the same way as my other paraphrases (except for Psalms, which you have to order through the publisher). If you want to examine my paraphrase of Revelation, just write me. I will send it to you as a Microsoft Word file. If you decide you want to keep the paraphrase, you send me a cheque for $5 Canadian; if you decide it’s not worth that much, just delete the file and send nothing.

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