The
first insider response to someone who denies his religion
or ethnicity – where the best of reasons explain but
do not exculpate -- is to label the person a coward. The indignant
accuser, for whom the poltroon represents the lowest form
of humanity, with a thumping nod to Kant's categorical imperative
that pronounces one’s action or position correct if
it lends itself to universal law, finds the denier guilty
of abetting the enemy at the gate, and makes the denial the
principle upon which a people’s vanishing point gains
traction.
Of course
not everyone has the luxury of denying his identity. If the
hater's goal is to eliminate, for example, all members of
a black ethnic group, short of undergoing costly group depigmentation
therapy, changing identity is not an option. But when it comes
to ideas and the many isms we are all familiar with (communism,
fascism, corporatism, all religions), since our allegiances
are an accident of birth, as we mature and become familiar
with foreign ideologies and belief systems we can choose to
opt out of our inherited circumstance in favour of another.
This is not to be confused with denying one's origins. If
I have been raised as a Catholic, Muslim or Jew and convert
to Buddhism, I will always, psychically, be as I have been
raised, especially if I have been persecuted or prejudiced
against. However, if the conversion takes place early in one's
formative years, one's acquired identity and psychic identity
will be one and the same.
What
is important to note is that all the world isms are arbitrary
cultural constructs; that is they are the issue (not of the
gods) of man, and most of them have been around for less than
three millennia, a mere blink of the eye in the spectrum of
time. Human nature, on the other hand, is not arbitrary. Despite
the remarkable heterogeneity of world culture, all human beings
share the same nature which they cannot opt out of. At best,
they can attempt to refuse it when it is in their best interest
to do so.
If among
my core values, I deem non-negotiable the one that says my
life is worth more than any arbitrary belief system, as a
duty owed to that value, circumstance might oblige me to deny
my identity in order to avoid persecution and/or preserve
my one and only life. And while I will be held in scorn and
opprobrium by the group from which I have disaffected, whose
members are prepared to sacrifice their lives in its defense,
I will be favoured by nature whose first command is to survive.
In nature, species, in the manner of the chameleon, that can
change their colours in order to avoid becoming a predator
species's’ next meal are the ones that survive and propagate.
So on
the one hand, from our earliest years we are inculcated into
believing that our community's culture and beliefs are sacrosanct,
and (implicitly) that the integrity of the group's cherished
way of life prevails over the individual, nature holds that
being alive (survival) is the highest value, which leaves
man, a product of both nature and culture, caught in the crosshairs
of a conflict where taking sides or no side at all generates
consequences.
Not all identity disaffection is a result of being the target
of hatred (internalized as self-hatred) or persecution. I
can rationally opt out of my political or religious affiliation
if I no longer subscribe to its core values. If during the
course of my life I come to believe in equal opportunity for
women which my birth culture frowns upon, I can decide to
renounce my present membership in favour of another whose
values are more commensurate with my own, taking into account
that disaffecting will result in a radical reconfiguration
of both friends and foes.
If in order to save its life, an entire people can decide
to defect from religion X such that it disappears from the
face of the earth; what will not disappear are those very
same beliefs now living under a different flag or appellation.
If X believes in a Christian God and converts to Islam in
order to save the life of his family, his private beliefs
will remain intact even though his original Christian dentity
will have disappeared. When the Greeks conquered Persia,
the latter disappeared in name but the culture did not.
Apostasy,
relieved if its pejorative significations, is a first response
to imminent threat or demise. Throughout history it
has been a very useful and oft used stratagem of persons persecuted
for their political and religious beliefs but who understood
that staying alive was the best guarantor of core beliefs
that for reasons of expediency required a change in outer
appearance.
Who
are we to judge the homosexual whose group as a whole is reviled,
who denies his identity (convinces his persecutors that he
is heterosexual) in order to find peace of mind and/or save
his life. If one is born into community that, however irrationally,
is loathed, is it not an instinct to modify one's behaviour
to be relieved of the hatred, attempt to join a more favourably
viewed group?
How
should we judge Woody Allen's titular film character Zelig,
who in the course of his daily life is constantly modifying
his personality and world view in order to optimize the continuously
changing circumstance of his life? Zelig enters relationships
only in so far as they bear on his happiness and well-being,
a position that requires no defence in the court of natural
law whose position on authenticity just happens to be diametrically
opposed to the philosophical one. Then again, what kind
of relationship can one have with someone who has no true
centre, who selves are inseparable from the many masks he
wears, whose loyalties are determined by advantage? Every
politician, in the manner of Zelig, owes his success to the
many selves he is able to project in order to appeal to the
long list of special interest groups upon which his election
depends.
Given
the unprecedented global phenomenon of the mixing of unlike
cultures, and our species-specific intolerance towards those
who do not share our beliefs, and the general arbitrariness
of all isms, one would think that before signing up to sacrifice
one's life (or taking another's in the name of ), the idea
or belief itself should be held to the highest scrutiny.
Throughout
history, group pressure has coerced millions into believing
that it is their sacred duty to defend their religion or political
affiliation to the death. Seduced by the noble cause and heroic
gesture, as soon someone decides to put his life on the line
for his God or government, the cause is granted an aura of
authority and legitimacy that conveniently removes it from
cross-examination; and when others en masse get swept
up in the righteous fervour, a tsunami is unleashed, crushing
everything opposed to the noble idea that when stripped of
its hype and cant often turns out to be the predictable means
to the end of someone's raw craving for power.
Communism,
the cause for which millions sacrificed their lives, petered
out after a mere century. It was an ism that in a very short
historical period proved to be incompatible with human nature.
It collapsed under the dead weight of its unfounded, illusory
pre-suppositions.
If it
should come to pass that there is no God, or One that doesn’t
correspond in any manner to man's conception of Him, what
will we say, how will we judge the multitudes who sacrificed
their lives for a fiction, for an arbitrary mental construct
that wilted before the hard facts of its insufficiency. In
The End of Faith, Sam Harris writes: "Religious
faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of
our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity
– a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse
proves impossible . . . Religious faith allows the unknown,
the implausible, and the patently false to achieve primacy
over the facts."
In the
Milky Way galaxy, one of billions of galaxies, there are 250
billion stars. The distance from one end of the galaxy to
the other is one hundred thousand light years. It takes our
galaxy 230 million years to execute one complete orbit. Before
this incomprehensible immensity that should silence us all,
are we to believe, without a byte's worth of data, that the
Maker of all this expects us to attend mass on Friday night,
not to open the light switch on the Sabbath, to pray to Allah
five times a day, and will chastise us if we don't?
And yet that is precisely what most people believe, compelled
by an unexamined urge to be vitally connected to an idea.
The much storied story of man is the eternal recurrence of
the impotence of reason to expose the transient nature of
ideas whose dominion is directly related to being able to
decommission man's faculties of judgment upon contact.
Not
until we, in our accusation, learn to make the blood on our
hands the catalyst that bids us to acquaint ourselves with
the tragic history of ideas that have come and gone like may
flies, will we begin to suspect as the height of folly the
humungous human sacrifice flawed ideas have engendered.
If,
in the end, history is simply a compilation of winners and
losers, we should note that among the winners are those, who,
in the face of scorn and opprobrium, dared to deny their religious
and/or political affiliation. Positing life as the highest
value, they -- cowards by the majority's reckoning -- lived
to see another day and their kind multiply.
Whether
or not there is something instructive to be said for that,
which is the task of this small essay, is left to the reader
to decide.
