bread of life

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” is not a question we necessarily outgrow. Whether or not we are conscious of it, there is always something we are aiming at in our lives. But what exactly? Maybe it depends which part of us you’re asking. How would our inner muppets, muggles or divas answer, for example?

In Sola Ratio, Sola Scriptura I identified four types of muppet. Type 1 is the rationalist, scientific materialist, militant atheist type; Type 2 is the skeptical, relativist, postmodern hippy/hipster type; Type 3 is the radical, idealistic, extremist, political revolutionary type; Type 4 is the dogmatic, reactionary, literalist, religious fundamentalist type. I suggested that Types 1 and 2 are the unfortunate products of “sola ratio” and Types 3 and 4 are the lamentable products of “sola scriptura”, both “solas” being characterised by excessive left hemisphere dominance.

Well it might also be useful to identify four types of muggle and four types of diva, if only for the sake of comprehensiveness. A Type 1 muggle would be someone who’s aim in life is simply to do what is expected of them by their parents and family. As a consequence they tend to be rather conventional and unadventurous. This is the most traditional and probably the most common type of muggle.

Type 2 muggles are less attached to their family, but are very concerned about the approval of their peers and of the culture the find themselves in. They tend to be very image and fashion conscious. They will look the part, and may go to great lengths in order to fit in with the prevailing winds, perhaps getting tattoed, pierced or having a touch of plastic surgery in the process. They are usually very active on social media and are invariably rabid consumers of popular culture. They are basically highly conformist, even when the image they project is nonconformist.

Type 3 muggles seek approval not so much from their family or peers but through monetary success. Their main purpose in life is to become as rich as possible. This is partly for the sense of security that financial stability affords, but primarily for the status it confers. A large bank balance, a successful business, a nice house and car and an assortment of other impressive material possessions are the heart’s desire for Type 3 muggles.

Type 4 muggles just want to be adored. They put all their effort into activities that lead to general approbation, popularity and perhaps even celebrity status. Whereas Type 3 muggles are naturally attracted to the world of work, especially business and the financial sector, Type 4 muggles gravitate to more visible arenas such as the arts, especially acting and the music industry. They may be creative and talented, but their art is inevitably compromised by an obsession with image and fame.

So what about the divas? Divas are “top dogs”. They are the ones who have made it. There are two muggle top dogs and two muppet top dogs. Since the first two types of muggle are unambitious, they don’t even attempt to climb up the slippery pole to Muggle Heaven. Neither do the first two types of muppet bother trying to get up the muppet pole. They are content to feel superior in their own eyes.

Type 1 divas are basically the rich and the super rich. Type 2 divas are A-list celebrities. These are the two muggle top dogs, the “rich and famous”. Type 3 divas are powerful politicians and leaders and Type 4 divas are influential cultural, spiritual and religious leaders. These are the two muppet top dogs types, the movers and shakers wielding “power and influence”.

Deep down, what do you really want out of life? Do you want to be rich and famous, powerful and influential? If so, this is the Wheel for you. You might even get to be a diva in this lifetime. Chances are you will take a few spins round the addict, victim and demon realms as well, but you may judge that a small price to pay. If you play your cards right, you’ll probably spend most of your time as a muggle or a muppet, and may even be remembered as a diva after you die.

Alternatively, you could settle for ordinary muggleness and muppetry and spend your days quietly and unobtrusively as Type 1 or Type 2 muggles or muppets with the odd unremarkable foray into the lower realms of addiction, victimhood and demonology. Of course you might get lucky, have greatness thrust upon you and end up a diva anyway, without all the sticky sweat and tears. So, what shall it be? Fame, fortune, power, influence or mediocrity? Or is there something else to aim for?

Well there’s always the Cross. Does this model have a specific aim? If we break it down into the three lines (one vertical and two horizontal), we can discern three aims, one for the Mystic Shaman, one for the Warrior Monk and one for the Philosopher King. Together, these constitute the threefold goal for those committed to spiritual rather than worldly ends.

To be holy, virtuous and wise: that’s the ultimate threefold aim of the Orthodox Cross.

The Mystic Shaman is oriented to the cultivation of holiness through the purification of mind and body. Holiness is here closely related to both wholeness and healing. The essential qualities of holiness are Peace and Love.

The Warrior Monk is oriented to the cultivation of the virtues, and the virtues are rooted in Goodness and Beauty.

The Philosopher King is oriented to the cultivation of wisdom, and the key to wisdom is dedication to Truth, Consciousness and Bliss.

So there is the fundamental choice at the heart of life. Don’t choose, and you will just turn endlessly on the Wheel, like a child’s paper windmill in the breeze. Do, and the choice is between two different worlds and two different lives: one dedicated to fame, fortune, power and influence and the other dedicated to holiness, virtue and wisdom.

 

“Sola ratio” means that only reason can give us a reliable and accurate understanding of reality. This was the sincere belief of the Enlightenment philosophes, the champions of the “Age of Reason”. The exclusive nature of “sola ratio” (only reason) leads inevitable to a left hemisphere dominant vision, which ends up distorting or even ignoring reality through excessive attention to rational models, theories and systems.

“Sola scriptura” is the attempt to base reality on the revealed scripture. Maybe our reasoning faculties are faulty, but the sacredly validated truths of scripture are inerrant. They are the Word of God, so they can’t be wrong. We must defer our fallible human intellects to the unfathomable mind of the Most High. We must not question the sacred texts, but must uncritically see the world through the lenses they provide for us.

When there is only reason, everything is fair game for rational analysis and deconstruction. Everything is dissolved in the universal solvent of objective scientific observation and analysis into its smallest component parts. Everywhere mechanisms are laid bare. Whether or not the cosmic watchmaker is blind, our job is to take the watch apart to see what makes it tick. In rationally constructing diagrams, maps and models of parts of the “watch” we imagine that reality really is just an infinitely complex machine, without realising that our diagrams, maps and models are the creation of our own minds and may in fact have precious little to do with reality at all.

Followers of “sola ratio” are left brain people. In extremis they display autistic symptoms and behaviours. These are the rationalist, scientific materialist, militant atheist, logical positivist, nerd muppets. They are “Type 1 Muppets”. But there are other followers of sola ratio who took a different path. They do not worship reason in the same way Type 1 Muppets do, but take reason to its logical conclusion so that it ends up undermining everything it touches, including itself. These are the postmodern, skeptical, relativistic, nihilist deconstructionists, and their symptoms are more schizophrenic. These are the “Type 2 Muppets”. In both cases, the worlds of art, religion, nature and the body are de-mythologised and de-sacralised.

Followers of sola scriptura are also left brain people, but instead of rejecting all filters on the world and relying solely on pure reason, the scientific method and radical skepticism, they cling tenaciously to one ideology through which they can interpret reality. Their ultimate commitment and loyalty is to seeing the world through the lens of their chosen “scripture”, whether it be a traditional religious scripture or a secular system of thought. They refuse to consider alternative views or try out other “lenses” or multiple “maps of meaning” because that would amount to disloyalty and treason.

“Type 3 Muppets” are ideologically possessed political extremists. “Type 4 Muppets” are ideologically possessed religious fundamentalists. Both types are capable of extraordinary levels of violence in the name of their chosen scripture, whether it’s Das Kapital or The Book of Revelation. They make excellent revolutionaries and terrorists, but terrible lovers.

 

The four key books that launched the aggressive attack on religion known as the “New Atheism” are The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins; Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel Dennett; God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens and The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason  by Sam Harris. Collectively, these four writers have been affectionately dubbed “The Four Horsemen of the Atheist Apocalypse” because they appeared to herald the final and inevitable demise of religious belief. This was the Final Battle and they had won. (Sympathisers wisely omitted Alistair Grayling’s The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism from the list because it is so toe-curlingly bad).

Since the publication of these hugely popular international bestsellers, however, there has been a growing interest in hearing the other side of the argument. How would religious believers respond to these full-frontal assaults? Are the heroic atheists right to be so confident in their supposedly unassailable position as defenders of the right and the true?

The debate rages on, but the celebrity atheists now find themselves on the back foot. The response has been measured, considerate and thoughtful but intellectually devastating. It is very difficult to see how the horsemen could recover their moral and intellectual integrity without willfully burying their heads in the sand or blocking their ears (which doesn’t do much for their integrity either).

Ironically, the meteoric success of the New Atheists may have re-awakened an interest in religion, and the books written in response to theirs, although far less of a publishing phenomenon, still have much greater sales than religious books generally have. The high quality of the writing and argumentation is also in stark contrast to the vituperative and condescending rhetoric of the New Atheists.

Contrary to the popular conception of the inevitable collapse of religion as a feasible option in the modern world, the following books, in my view, put the nail in the coffin of atheism as a tenable belief system. It is true that, as Dawkins quipped, Darwin made atheism intellectually respectable, but for those who take the arguments seriously, I predict that, as a consequence of these and other books on religion and atheism, it will be increasingly difficult to be an intellectually respectable atheist in the twenty-first century.

In no particular order, they are:

The Case for God: What Religion Really Means by Karen Armstrong; The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led me to Faith by Peter Hitchens (Christopher’s younger brother); Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies by David Bentley Hart; The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine by Alister McGrath; The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Inquiry by Rupert Sheldrake; There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind by Antony Flew; The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions by David Berlinski; Why There Almost Certainly is a God by Keith Ward; God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? by John Lennox; The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning by Jonathan Sacks and Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel.

And four books on atheism by two former atheists and two avowed atheists:

God’s Funeral by A.N. Wilson; The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World by Alister McGrath; Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate by Terry Eagleton and Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray.

John Gray is an atheist, but he has no time for the militant atheism of the New Atheists, as he makes clear at the start of the first chapter of his book:

“The new atheists have directed their campaign against a narrow segment of religion while failing to understand event that small part. Seeing religion as a system of beliefs, they have attacked it as if it were no more than an obsolete scientific theory. Hence the ‘God Debate’ – a tedious re-run of a Victorian squabble between science and religion. But the idea that religion consists of a bunch of discredited theories is itself a discredited theory – a relic of the nineteenth-century philosophy of Positivism.”

We need to move on from such left hemisphere dominated narrow mindedness. We need to move on from Positivism and Materialism, both fatally flawed, philosophically defunct ideologies. In my opinion, we need to move on from Atheism tout court.

Atheism, particularly the militant strain of it exemplified by the New Atheists, is inevitably a left brain view of reality. Only the right hemisphere can make room for the transcendent mystery we call “God”. Take away religion and you take away our main route to the right hemisphere, and ultimately to the very foundations of civilisation itself, which depend on holistic, embodied, right hemisphere consciousness. We in the West are presently running on the fumes of Christian civilisation and the cracks are starting to show.

The left hemisphere world of atheistic disbelief is populated by divas, demons, victims, addicts, muppets and muggles. The right hemisphere world of faith is populated by Mystics, Shamans, Warriors, Monks and Nuns, Philosophers and Kings and Queens, or at least by people with a sincere aspiration to embody these ideal types.

Next time you’re out on the town of a Friday or Saturday night, have a good look around you – which world would you say you’re in?

 

If you don’t believe in God or Nirvana, it’s highly unlikely that you will spend much time praying or meditating. There is no reason to retreat from the world in order to commune with nothing. It’s just a waste of time and effort.

If you do believe, you will be much more likely to turn you attention to the transcendent beyond. As C.S. Lewis put it, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” Your longing for this other world will lead you to pray and meditate.

In the last few posts I have been exploring the trinitarian doctrine of Kashmir Shaivism, which consists of “Parashiva”, “Shiva” and “Shakti”. Parashiva is the transcendent God (God the Father in the Christian trinity), Shiva is immanent consciousness (the Logos or the Son) and Shakti is the manifest energy of existence (the Holy Spirit). I described how meditation (and prayer) involves the gradual withdrawal of consciousness from all objects of consciousness, which can be understood as the withdrawal of Shiva from Shakti.

Without this intentional process of separating consciousness and form, there is such a fusion of awareness with the objects of awareness, that Shiva and Shakti cannot be distinguished. So the world and the self are experienced as an undifferentiated field of action. It’s all just stuff: things and thoughts, feelings and events. It’s just “one damn thing after another”.

Whether you are theoretically a monist or a dualist, that is, whether you believe that minds are reducible to physical processes or not, you will experience the world in a similar way, as a collection of stuff and experience. That’s if you live on “Earth”. If you live in “Hell”, everything will be tinged with the implacable malevolence of the Great Machine, but we don’t need to concern ourselves with that right now.

So what happens when you pray to God or meditate on Nirvana? Your individual consciousness withdraws and merges in absolute, universal consciousness. Shiva merges in Parashiva. What happens when you return? You come back “trailing clouds of glory”. You retain something of the experience of pure consciousness and develop a taste for it.

The more often you pray or meditate, the more often you “commune with God”, the stronger this sense of pure individual consciousness becomes, the stronger your Soul becomes. Shiva emerges from Parashiva. This is how God makes Souls.

Eventually your life becomes suffused with Soul. You become simultaneously aware of experiences and aware of your awareness of experiences and develop a capacity for Self Remembering or Mindfulness. Wherever you go, wherever you turn, you see both Shiva and Shakti, consciousness and form. This is what I call Pachananda, the “Bliss of the Earth”. This is the Pure Land, the Kingdom of Heaven.

 

Remember what peace feels like? Give yourself a minute. Take your time. Remember what love feels like? Remember what beauty feels like? Remember what goodness feels like? Remember what truth feels like? Remember what consciousness feels like? Remember what bliss feels like?

I’m sure you’ve experienced these things at least once, if not countless times. Just a little intention and a little imagination and it’s amazing how quickly and easily we can re-connect with the essential qualities of peace or love, beauty or goodness, truth, consciousness or bliss. And the more we do it, the more primed we are to do it again. We become habituated.

Virtue Ethics is all about habituation, about cultivating good habits. You can do this by behaving in accordance with a particular virtue, like acting courageously for example. Then, next time you are confronted with a difficult or dangerous situation, you will be more likely to rise to the challenge. But you can also do it by imagining acting bravely, or by imagining that you are actually a great warrior.

Remember what it feels like to be a warrior? Remember what it feels like to be a monk? Remember what it feels like to be a philosopher? Remember what it feels like to be a king or queen? Or a mystic or a shaman? (Those might take a bit more remembering or a bit more practice.)

Then, who knows, you might forget all those bad habits associated with feeling like a victim, all that wallowing in misery, feeling depressed, anxious, grief-stricken, helpless and weak. You might forget all your addictive behaviours, your cravings after food, drink, sex, entertainment. You might forget all your silly ideas and muddled thinking, your small-mindedness, your vanity and cruelty.

Neuroscience has repeatedly and conclusively shown us the extraordinary plasticity of the brain. On a purely mechanistic level, the fact that “neurons that fire together wire together” means that neural pathways can be re-formed and re-directed. You can train your brain if you just set your mind to it.

In Positive Psychology they don’t talk about virtues and vices because of their religious overtones. Instead they talk about “character strengths” and “character weaknesses”. Whatever the terminology we use, an explicit appreciation of the moral core of psychological well-being and flourishing is well overdue in the therapeutic field as well as in the culture at large.

It is not enough to transform “hysterical misery” into “common unhappiness” as Freud advised. It is not even enough to feel “common happiness” in a purely self-interested sense. True lasting happiness doesn’t come from a shrink. It isn’t about fixing your broken mind or overcoming neurosis. It isn’t ultimately just about you. True happiness comes from a deep sense of purpose and meaning, which is inevitably bound up with morality. And morality, if it is real and alive, is always moving, always developing and growing. True happiness is not a state. It’s a process.

If you develop your character, so that your character strengths begin to outweigh your character weaknesses, and if you can see that you are moving in the right direction, that you are making progress, then you will automatically get a sense of purpose in life. You will become increasingly motivated to be the best person you can be, so that you can do the most good in the world.  Funnily enough, the further along this path you travel, the more authentic you feel, the more yourself you feel. It’s almost as though you are slowly remembering who you really are. It’s almost as though you are slowly waking up.

Remember when you were spiritually enlightened? Remember God? Just keep remembering.

 

There are so many pitfalls on the spiritual path it’s any wonder anyone gets anywhere along it at all! The Tibetan Wheel of Life is a reminder of the ways we can fall and the ways we can fail. If we want to make progress on the path, we must resist all the temptations of the six realms: Greed, Hate, Anxiety, Ignorance, Delusion and Pride. We must, at all costs, avoid becoming an addict, demon, victim, muggle, muppet or diva.

But that’s not all. We must also defend ourselves from the addicts, demons, victims, muggles, muppets and divas we will inevitably encounter on the way. They may pull us into the orbit of their world: if we hang out with drug addicts we may well become a drug addict ourselves. If we hang out with model railway enthusiasts, we might end up spending all our time playing with toy trains.

Not only might we fall off the wagon completely, but we might waste time better spent making real spiritual progress. It’s okay to spend time with addicts, demons and victims with a view to nudging them out of their ruts. But there comes a point where the benefits to them outweigh the costs to you. It’s not easy to know where to draw the line, as any psychiatric nurse will attest, but it’s not that hard either.

The line seems harder to draw when dealing with muggles, muppets and divas, because it’s just not so obvious when people are being willfully blind, delusional or narcissistic. However, in my experience, muppets are the most difficult of all. You can waste time with muggles, but at least you know you’re wasting time. They are not interested in spirituality, so you talk about other stuff and do other things. It’s like a mini holiday. Divas are so aloof and superior, that although their arrogant manner can be achingly irritating, they will pretty much leave you alone unless you actively seek them out.

Muppets are different. You can waste a lot of time spinning round the muppet vortex. But then why do you keep jumping in? Because they are interested in interesting things. They are thinkers, questioners, seekers, like you. They may have different views, but that makes for good chats and good debate, right? Wrong.

If they are genuine bona fide muppets, you will almost always end up wasting your time and theirs. As a general rule, if you are serious about spirituality, don’t waste time talking to Militant Atheists, Religious Fundamentalists, New Age Hippies or Political Radicals. You will only end up scratching your head, after having banged it against a brick wall.

 

I know some people who advocate open borders. They seem to think that if there were no restrictions to the flow of goods and people between countries, everything would somehow sort itself out. There would be no illegal immigrants, no detention centres, no long queues at passport control, and the law of supply and demand would smooth out the bottle necks. If one part of the world was especially attractive to people, it would become so intolerable because of the huge influx of people, that it would cease being popular and people would move elsewhere.

I’ve never met anyone who advocated the opposite, which is to say closed borders. But I suppose they must exist. Most people, though, are somewhere on the spectrum between open borders at one end and closed borders at the other. Indeed, this goes for all kinds of borders, not just national ones. Some people seem to be temperamentally more comfortable with clearly defined boundaries, whereas others seem to prefer a more amorphous, flexible existence.

It appears that conservatives are generally more into boundaries than liberals. They seem to like to see everything in its proper place. They will be less inclined to blur the boundaries between the sexes for example. They will be less likely to blur age boundaries and act like a teenager in their forties. They will prefer their art in a frame on the wall rather than on the floor. They will probably eat lunch and dinner at lunch-time and dinner-time.

There is no such thing as open borders or closed borders, open boundaries or closed boundaries. They are always semi-permeable, although the degree of permeability varies. Obviously, the phrase “open boundary” is a contradiction in terms. If it is fully open, it doesn’t classify as a boundary. A “closed boundary” also implies that it can be opened or traversed. If it were completely impenetrable, it wouldn’t make sense to call it a boundary.

There is an Overton window through which we can see the range of reasonable permeability or porosity of any particular boundary, such as a national border. Within this window, it is possible to have a range of views on exactly how open or closed it should be.

Outside this reasonable mid-range, however, are the outliers who would like to see a much more open border on the one hand or a much more closed one on the other. These go far beyond the conservatism of the conservatives or the liberalism of the liberals. I call these outliers muppets.

There are four types of muppet: nerds, fundamentalists, hippies and radicals representing the two opposite poles of the border debate.

Nerds can only function within very clearly demarcated boundaries. They need parameters within which to make sense of the world. They are highly methodical logicians. They tend to be somewhere on the autism spectrum. They may display obsessive or compulsive behaviours. They write in short sentences.

Fundamentalists are similarly highly boundaried. They draw very thick lines between people and things. There is a clear division between the in-group and the out-group. Ideas are literally true or literally false. There is no room for ambiguity or nuance. There is no room for poetry or metaphor. They know the difference between right and wrong and no amount of argumentation will budge the high wall between them.

Hippies are the opposite. They believe that “all is one” and train themselves not to even see the divisions between things. They float around without caring about right and wrong or up and down or left and right. They believe that they have entered a New Age, where everything melts into everything else. All religions are the same. Everything is permitted and everything is cool.

Radicals are less laid-back. They are also on the open borders of the spectrum, but only because they see so much division in the world. Instead of just ignoring borders and boundaries like the hippies do, they spend their time and energy tearing them down. Any social distinction between different classes of people is seen as inherently divisive and oppressive. They are therefore extremely sensitive to class, race, culture, gender, sexuality, socio-economic status, and any other dimension along which people can be distinguished. Any distinction between people is ultimately seen as a form of segregation imposed by a power-hungry elite.

This is how the muppets fall: nerds and fundamentalists on the extreme of the closed borders end of the spectrum and hippies and radicals on the extreme of the open borders end. Everyone else is somewhere in the middle. Of course we all need borders and boundaries, whether physical or psychological, but it’s best if they’re not too many or too high. We need limits, but within limits. We should take everything in moderation, including moderation.

 

I would like to explore the somewhat counter-intuitive claim that humanism is inherently fascist. But first I will need to define my terms: what do I mean by “humanism” and what do I mean by “fascist”?

By “humanism” I mean secular humanism. I’m not talking about Renaissance humanism or Christian humanism. And I am using “fascist” in the popular sense of the violent imposition of a particular ideology, not the specific ideas of Benito Mussolini or any other self-avowed political fascist.

So in what way is humanism fascist? Well, the first thing we might say about “secular humanism” is that it is a contradiction in terms. Humanism, if it is about anything, is about human beings and being human. Implicit in the very idea of humanity is the assumption that there are universal human characteristics. In other words, there is such a thing as “human nature”.

We can quibble over the contours of the “nature – nurture” debate, but no-one with even the flimsiest grasp of human history and prehistory can deny that religiosity is part of human nature, that it is a natural expression of what it means to be human. Which is why some anthropologists refer to humanity as “homo religiosus”.

So secular humanism is a misnomer. But it has a useful function for evangelical atheists. It smuggles in the a dubious assumption that atheism is our natural state, and that religion is a purely cultural accretion. But this is clearly untrue. Atheism is a learnt doctrine, derivative of and purely reactive to, theism.

The atheist narrative tries to invert this fact and persuade us that religiosity is merely an epi-phenomenon, an archaic, superstitious, unnatural con-job imposed on unsuspecting dupes by the church and other nefarious entities. In the name of secular humanism atheists are therefore committed to destroying the natural religious impulse in people for their own good.

This is a form of fascism. The Reign of Terror which flowed ineluctably from the atheistic ideals of the French Revolution shows us the true face of fascistic atheism. But there is a deeper reason why humanism is inherently fascist, which the French debacle perfectly illustrates.

The Jacobins were both political and religious revolutionaries. Their targets were both the monarchy (and aristocracy) and the church. In the place of the deposed monarchy they installed democracy (or tried to anyway) and in the place of God and the church they installed Reason and the philosophes. At the height of their rationalist hubris, the revolutionaries even renamed Notre Dame “The Temple of Reason”.

So at the heart of the French Enlightenment and the Enlightenment more generally was the re-invention of humanity as a purely rational animal. This was the real revolution of “The Age of Reason”. The essential nature or characteristic of humanity itself was transformed, heralding the beginning of the end of “homo religiosus” and the dawn of “homo rationalis”.

Instead of the ontological claim that human beings are related to a transcendent reality, and that we are in fact made in the image of this transcendent reality, the Enlightenment thinkers, following Descartes, argued that all we really know is what we can think and reason our way to knowing. We are not made in the image of God, we are made in the image of Reason.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, faith in Reason came to replace faith in God as the primary defining characteristic of what it means to be human. Soon Reason itself (with its proud capital ‘R’) was treated as a god, or rather, as the Hebrew prophets would instantly recognize, as an idol. The philosophes appeared to have forgotten the First Commandment brought down from Mount Sinai, “You shall put no god before your God”.

My contention is that idolatry is in fact the root cause of all forms of fascism. If you make an idol out of any particular human characteristic, you instantly create a hierarchy of value with your idol at the top. If Reason is at the top of your hierarchy, what happens to emotion? What happens to intuition? And what happens to reason itself? Reason is not God, but treated as such, it first becomes tyrannical, lording it over all other human capacities, and eventually collapses under its own weight. It deconstructs itself. Which is exactly what happened in the twentieth century.

If you make an idol of your racial identity and put that at the top of your value hierarchy, what happens to all the other races? And ultimately, what happens to your own race? Just when you thought you were the Master Race, you find that morally, you have actually become the Nazi scum of the Earth. If you make an idol out of the workers, what happens to everyone else? What happens to the ruling class and the middle class? And what, ultimately, happens to the workers themselves? The Communist experiments of the twentieth century witnessed the greatest massacre of ordinary working people ever seen in all recorded history.

According to Yuval Noah Harari, the two world wars of the last century were similar to the wars of religion a few centuries earlier in that they were ideologically motivated, except that these were not religious wars but humanist wars. He identifies three competing humanisms fighting for supremacy: “liberal humanism”, “socialist humanism” and “evolutionary humanism”.

At the turn of the century, it seemed that liberal humanism was unassailable. But then came the First World War and the Russian Revolution and liberalism was suddenly in serious trouble. Two rival ideologies, the socialist humanism of Lenin and the fascist humanism and racialist humanism of Mussolini and Hitler seemed poised to take humanity into the future.

The Nazi experiment ended with their military defeat in 1945. The Communist experiment ended with the fall of the Soviet empire in 1989. Liberal humanism emerged triumphant once more. Some saw this victory as so decisive as to herald not just the End of the War of Rival Humanisms, but as the End of History.

But history is clearly far from over. Harari predicts that the logical outcome of secularism and liberal humanism is “homo deus”: basically, in the absence of God (his death is taken for granted) we will attempt to make ourselves into gods. We will strive for omnipotence, omniscience and immortality, primarily through the application of ever more sophisticated technology.

I disagree. The liberal humanist experiment is not over yet. But it does show signs of going the same way as its sister humanisms, into the great dustbin of history, unless it can pull itself back from the brink. Strange as it sounds, liberalism can be as extremist as any other -ism.

Both the socialist and evolutionary humanist pipe-dreams ended in disaster. Between them they destroyed the lives of hundreds of millions of innocent people, and plumbed the very depths of inhumanity. Paradoxically, though avowedly humanist, the actual value of a human life was as nothing to them. Both ideologies were fascistic to the core.

The Nazis were “evolutionary” fascists, honestly believing that they represented the evolutionary tip of humanity, the “ubermenschen” or “supermen” of the world. The Communists were “socialist” fascists, and sincerely believed that forcing their egalitarian vision on everyone would usher in a beautiful utopia of brotherly love, prosperity and peace.

They both went the way of fascistic violence and ended up destroying themselves. Let’s hope the same thing doesn’t happen to liberal humanism.

Perhaps liberal humanism is immune to the fascist virus? Sadly not. And the evidence is mounting. Jonah Goldberg’s excellent book Liberal Fascism shows how easy it is for liberalism to adopt fascist strategies. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what you put at the top of your humanist hierarchy. If you make an idol out of liberalism, or even of completely worthy causes such as anti-racism or anti-fascism, it will always end up biting you in the ass.

Who can seriously deny that Antifa are actually a fascistic organisation, reminiscent of the brown shirts? Who can fail to notice how illiberal and intolerant public discourse has become? Political correctness has imposed a liberal mono-culture in humanities departments and other public institutions. Freedom of speech is under threat, more now than it has been for decades, and on liberal grounds.

Brave New World and 1984 are the two classic dystopian visions of fascist humanism. Who can fail to see them both mirrored in our contemporary society? All our idols twist and warp society, including the ever-present idolatry of money, the worship of Mammon.

No idol, however well-meaning, can ever take the place of God. Why? Because God is beyond all human hierarchies. He is not one element in the system trying to dominate the system. He transcends the system, and therefore includes it all. Fascism results from one part of the whole taking over everything else. It results from the self-defeating attempt to raise a human value to the status of a god, a temptation which can only be effectively resisted through a prior commitment to the true transcendent God above and beyond all human commitments.

The only sane human societies are ones established on the rock of the true transcendent God. This is the essence of what it means to be human, the essence of what it is to be “homo religiosus”, and the essence of the Law followed by Moses and the Prophets and Jesus: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength, and love your neighbour as yourself”.

If we are to restore sanity to the Western World, we need to restore the more benign meaning of “secular humanism”, where “secular” refers to a space of religious freedom and tolerance. We need to keep Church and State separate and respect the rights of individuals to follow their own faith or none. We learnt that lesson in the wars of religion.

But if we make atheism the State Religion by default, then we open the door to all the dangers of idolatry we saw play out in the twentieth century. Were Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung and friends not idols for the godless? Did they not believe that they were accountable to no-one above them because there was no-one above them?

Liberal humanism is different, of course. It doesn’t look likely that there will be a liberal totalitarian state, although some people fear that this is happening surreptitiously through the back door. Liberal humanism is actually the best we’ve got, tempered of course by its natural spouse, conservatism. This is the marriage that should keep us on the straight and narrow.

A liberal humanism, rooted in the humanism of the sixteenth century, rather than the militant atheist humanism of the nineteenth, will surely survive the future, with a little help from its friends.

 

Why is politics so emotionally fraught? Why this seemingly endless, pointless war of attrition between Left and Right? Why do we hate each other so much? Jonathan Haidt has developed a very elegant and persuasive theory addressing this perennial question in his excellent book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, where he makes the case that people’s political orientations are primarily the expression of deep-seated moral values.

Haidt identifies six moral foundations: “Care”, “Fairness”, “Loyalty”, “Authority”, “Sanctity” and “Liberty”, which  he derives in a bottom-up approach from quite plausible speculations about the survival strategies of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. I won’t go into the details here, but will just give you the main finding of the book (spoiler alert!) which is that left-wing liberals are currently almost exclusively interested in the “Care” dimension (with a dash of “Fairness”) , whereas social conservatives have more evenly spread moral commitments across all six foundations.

This is an excellent model for thinking about morality and politics. However, I would like here to propose another, even simpler analysis of the relationship between morality and politics, with reference to the infinitely versatile “Wheel of Samsara” (Tibetan Wheel of Life) model. From this vantage point,  politics is not only an expression of what we value, but also of what we reject; it’s not so much about what we recognize as moral as what we recognize as immoral. Because it manifests in a disgust response, it is closely associated with Haidt’s “Sanctity” moral foundation.

The Tibetan Wheel of Life can be understood as a depiction of the sins of fallen humanity, a graphic Buddhist alternative to the traditional Aristotelian or Judeo-Christian lists, such as the Seven Deadly Sins. In Repentance and Faith, I lay out the characteristic sins associated with each of the six positions on the Wheel, as I understand them.

My version, which I call the “Wheel of Samsara”, describes six sins (or vices) associated with six ego states – three intellectual and three emotional. The three intellectual states are represented by the muggle, diva and muppet archetypes, associated with the sins of Ignorance, Pride and Delusion respectively. The three emotional states are represented by the addict, demon and victim archetypes, with their corresponding sins, Greed, Hate and Fearfulness.

So how does this model shed light on our moral responses to the political landscape?

Well, let’s start with the supposed immorality of the president of the United States, Donald Trump. He is variously portrayed as a sexist, a racist, a crook, a philanderer, a narcissist, a fool, a dunce, a fascist, a bully, an evil mastermind and, of course, a greedy capitalist pig. One or several of these accusations may very well be true for all I know – I remain agnostic on the content of his character (as opposed to the colour of his hair).

What I am really interested in is the moral psychology behind the image. Who is this monster so vilified by TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) enthusiasts?  It seems to have elements of the addict (greedy, lascivious, hedonistic) but also of the muggle (ignorant, simple-minded, materialistic). But it also has lashings of the  demon and the diva: not only is he Greedy and Ignorant, he is also Evil and Full of Himself.

The same image seems to stick to our very own “British Trump”, Boris Johnson. It’s not just the hair and the eccentricity he holds in common with Trump (let alone the politics), it’s the monster image: Boris is also portrayed as a monster by his political enemies (or, as I heard a nice well-spoken middle class mother assure her twelve year old daughter on Hampstead Heath the day after his election as Prime Minister, “a prick”).

People on the left side of the political aisle look down on muggles. They call them “hicks”, “red-necks”, “deplorables”, “trailer trash” and “racists” in the US. In Britain they are called “twats”. But worse than mere muggle simpletons, who are just plain Ignorant, are muggle-addicts, who are both Ignorant and Greedy (and probably sexual predators to boot). And worse than muggle-addicts are muggle-addict-demons who are secretly driven by malevolence and evil. Worst of all are the muggle-addict-demon-divas who are not only Ignorant, Greedy and full of Hatred and Evil, but Proud and Arrogant and all too often unconscionably Rich and Famous.

There is a kind of puritanism underlying all this moral outrage. We’ve been here before. Remember Cromwell? Remember Danton and Robespierre? Remember Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler? Remember the Der Stürmer anti-semitic propaganda cartoons? The Nazis held up the moral depravity of decadent money-grabbing monsters for all to see. And hate.

Clearly, it’s much easier to kill monsters than people. Which is why painting people as monsters should ring some warning bells. A muggle-addict-demon-diva is a monstrous creation which can be destroyed without compunction. But so is its political rival, the muppet-victim-diva-demon. This is the monster held up for ridicule and attack by Right-wingers. In the US they call them “liberals”, “radicals”, “commies”, “hippies” or “social justice warriors”. In the UK they’re called “twats”.

Worse than mere muppets, who can be pitied and patronised (they’re usually too young to know any better) are the muppet-victims, who play into the whole “victimology” narrative of Identity Politics and Intersectionality. Not only are they Deluded, they are also Paranoid and Pathetic. Right-wing pundits refer to this kind of social activism as the “Oppression Olympics”, where those regarded as the most socially marginalised and victimised enjoy the greatest standing in the muppet social economy.

This is not traditional left-wing politics of course. It is “neo-progressivism” or “progressive liberationism”, a kind of “applied post-modernism”. The basic premise is that everything of value in life is socially constructed, so everything can be deconstructed. With enough political will (ie. force) humanity can re-create itself as a blank slate (everyone equalised and neutralised).

The Right experience this kind of thing with intense moral disgust. The most prominent and vocal exponents of muppet ideology then come to be seen not only as muppet-victims but as muppet-victim-demons, whose activism is fueled by intense self-loathing and hatred, with their sole aim the destruction of the family and Western civilisation. Worst of all are the self-congratulatory, virtue-signalling Proud and Arrogant leaders, the muppet-victim-demon divas, on whom the Right can vent all their spleen and outrage.

Just as the Left project all the sins of the muggle and addict (Ignorance and Greed) onto the Right, and then pump the monster up with extra diva-demonic steroids, so the Right projects all the sins of the muppet and victim (Delusion and Fearfulness) onto the Left and pump their monster up with the same diva-demonic cocktail of hubristic evil.

The Left find Donald Trump and Boris Johnson disgusting because they epitomize the heinous sins of “Capitalism” and the Right find Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jeremy Corbyn disgusting because they epitomize the mortal sin of “Socialism”. But it’s got nothing to do with politics really: it’s all about moral disgust for contrasting negative human archetypes. Trump is the archetypal muggle-addict-demon-diva in the eyes of the Left and AOC as the classic muppet-victim-demon-diva in the eyes of the Right.

The moral of the story? “Neither a muggle nor a muppet be”. If you spend your time shouting down muggles, you’re probably a bit of a muppet and if you get off on shouting down muppets, you’re probably something of a muggle. Of course it’s important that we call out the errors and excesses of both sides, but please, please, please, not out of hatred and disgust. Mild distaste is fine. Because if we carry on like this, we shouldn’t be surprised if it’s us that turn out to be the monsters.

 

You should have a pretty clear idea by now of what I mean by muggles, muppets, divas, addicts, victims and demons. They are really just updated terms for the denizens of the six realms in the ancient Tibetan Wheel of Life: humans, titans, devas, hungry ghosts, animals and demons.

I am using these archetypes as personifications of ego states, not as literal entities. The Wheel of Life can be understood as a psychological map as well as a cosmological one, and that’s what I am interested in here: how and when we are possessed by these ego states, and what their psychological effects are (bearing in mind that by “psychological effects” I mean physical, emotional, mental, spiritual and social effects).

The chief features of muggles and muppets are Ignorance and Delusion respectively. The ignorance of muggles comes as a result of ignoring the “signs and wonders” of the world as revealed to us in a state of openness and innocence. They ignore anything that doesn’t fit into their pre-defined model of the universe and only see what they already know.

The delusion of muppets comes as a result of valuing a particular model of reality above reality itself. Prior commitment to a certain belief system leads them to overlook or discount the evidence of their own senses and the dictates of reason. The belief system is almost always shared by a community of believers who collectively confirm each other’s beliefs, thus creating an “in-group” and an “out-group”. Of course there is nothing wrong with belief systems and communities of believers as such; it is only when they deviate from observed reality and common sense that they produce muppets.

The chief feature of divas is Pride. Divas are basically “Top Dogs”, more precisely “Top Muggles” or “Top Muppets”. They have achieved a significant measure of success in their own eyes and in the eyes of their community, whether in the wider muggle population or in a specific muppet population. Their success confirms for them the validity of their values and belief, thus consolidating their Ignorance and Delusion.

These three (muggles, muppets and divas) are the more visible of the six ego states, since they are the most socially acceptable. They are the three faces or personas that we show to the world. The other three, on the lower half of the Wheel (in the “underworld”), are usually hidden from view (in functional people) and can only be indirectly inferred or occasionally glimpsed in moments of stress or weakness.

The chief feature of addicts is Greed. The chief feature of victims is Fear. The chief feature of demons is Hate. These negative emotions (or vices) are managed in different ways and usually colour the three higher personality structures rather than dominating them. However, if they become too pronounced, they will take over the personality, which will become visibly that of an addict, a victim or a demon.

The following diagram summarises the archetypes and their chief features:

DIVA

Pride

MUGGLE                                     MUPPET

Ignorance                                   Delusion

ADDICT                                      VICTIM

Greed                                        Fear

DEMON

Hate

This is obviously a generalised, low resolution description, which has the value of comprehensiveness at the expense of concreteness and specificity. So let me flesh it out a little bit more (“drugs” refers to all substances, including food and drink and “rock and roll” to all kinds of music or entertainment designed to excite the sympathetic nervous system).

DIVA

Power

Fame

Fortune

MUGGLE                                                        MUPPET

Comfort                                                             Zealotry

Acceptance                                                   Dogmatism

Security                                           Self-Righteousness

ADDICT                                                         VICTIM

Sex                                                                Worry

Drugs                                                           Anxiety

Rock and Roll                                       Depression

DEMON

Anger

Hatred

Violence

The essence of Christianity, and arguably of all true religion, is beautifully simple. It boils down to two movements: “metanoia” and “pistis”, Repentance and Faith. If you can turn away from Pride, Ignorance, Delusion, Greed, Hate and Fear, and resist the lure of Power, Fame, Fortune, Comfort, (Social) Acceptance, Security, Zealotry, Dogmatism, Self-Righteousness, (Excessive) Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll, Worry, Anxiety, Depression, Anger, Hatred and Violence, “yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it” (to quote a famous Victorian sage). “And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!”

Which is to say, “you’ll be a Mystic Shaman Warrior Monk Philosopher King (or Mystic Shaman Warrior Nun Philosopher Queen), my son! (or daughter!)”

These are the six positive archetypes opposed to the six negative ones in the Wheel of Samsara, which epitomise the contrary qualities: The humility of the mystic counteracts the pride of the diva; the wisdom of the philosopher dispels the delusion of the muppet; the Self-realisation of the king expels the ignorance of the muggle; the courage of the warrior overcomes the fear of the victim; the self-restraint of the monk defuses the greed of the addict and the vital energy of the shaman dissolves the hatred in the heart of the demon.

Repent of the negative and believe in the positive. If you are a Christian, repent of your sins and believe in Christ (the archetypal embodiment of the perfect “God-Man”, the perfect “Mystic Shaman Warrior Monk Philosopher King”). Participation in the death and resurrection of Christ points to this basic underlying movement of “metanoia” and “pistis”, Repentance and Faith.

Christianity provides us with a powerful central image in the person of the risen Christ, but the move from darkness to light, from bondage to freedom can be found at the core of all the major world religions.

“Repent and Believe”: herein lies the whole of religion.