One of the main themes of my writing has been a tripartite understanding of the human being, individual and communal, as mind and heart and hands. We think and we feel and we do.
The triad of mind and heart and hands is like the Real Presence in being somehow a way of speaking of a fundamental truth, a way of speaking which must be retained and kept in mind even as we learn more and speculate upon the deepest mysteries of Creation and the Creator. Speaking of specific ways of understanding “thinking and feeling and doing” (in Aristotelian terms or in modern neuroscientific terms) brings us a greater abstract understanding but does so by taking us a necessary distance from the more raw truth, perhaps the raw experience of created being in its relationship to its Creator. Speaking of some metaphysical understanding of the Real Presence such as the obscurity of Transubstantiation or the much more clear concept of the primacy of relationships over stuff is also to bring us to a necessary distance from the more raw truth. (A Christian may well believe that, when we share God’s life on the other side of the grave, it will be possible to experience being in its most concrete manifestation while simultaneously understanding that being in an abstract, detached way.)
If any part of the human being gains dominance over the others, there is likely to be trouble. To be sure, there are many individuals who are at least somewhat dominated by mind or heart or hands. That often isn’t a problem, though it would always be a serious problem when a major community is dominated by one of these at the expense of balanced human being. There are signs in this year of 2015 that the major Christian communities and many other human communities, especially in the West,are becoming as gigantic, bleeding hearts—perhaps united to hands but not to minds.
It’s the mind which anticipates, much more than thinking on the fly when the action happens. When a human being, individual or communal, is shaped properly by way of direction of a properly formed mind, heart and hands will do what is right or at least what is most clearly seen to be right. This right feeling and right doing shouldn’t be simply a knee-jerk reflex to, for example, allow unrestricted migration at the expense of future generations and at the expense of a civilization. In addition, unintelligent charity might well put would-be beneficiaries in a worse position, such as the EU admission of refugees through Turkey—those people are living in tents in northern Europe, without adequate food or clothing, with northern European winter approaching.
And so I diverge to discuss a bicameral mind of sorts. In both the individual and the community, stability will often, and properly, lead to a dominance of a relatively rigid mind, one of rules. This mind will see the future as being essentially the same as today. Perhaps the village is growing and perhaps the kingdom is dealing with other realms which are hostile; yet, things are pretty much moving along a straight path. Until they aren’t; until the wise men of the village grow lazy or morally irresponsible or until the village or kingdom moves straight while the path is curving or until the path disappears and a new one must be cleared through a wilderness. Then a more flexible mind is needed, one which looks outside of what is known and responds, well or poorly, to new conditions or even new understandings of old conditions.
During transitional periods of any sort, creative sorts of minds should be encouraged to come to the forefront. We should understand before we act or even before we unleash our bloody hearts upon innocent victims, and certainly before we try to restructure human communities in blind obedience to some sort of rules, even those of charity. Understanding during periods of great change might mean a re-understanding down to the very foundations of human understandings of created being and of its relationship to its Creator.
For example, most traditional moral thinkers, philosophers and theologians and the better sort of political thinkers and so on, think of morality in terms of pre-existing virtues and vices though the positive (at least partly `mathematical’) sciences have shown human beings are born with traits arising from physical structures or flows of chemicals in the body. The love generally considered purest, maternal love, is largely mediated by physical interaction between the body of mother and embryo and then strengthened further by, for example, the flows of hormones as the baby is first put to the breast of the mother. Both the lust of the sexual predator and the love of devoted husband and wife are driven by sexual passions arising from hormonal flows and the complex and as-yet poorly understood actions of various brain regions.
None of this corresponds well to abstract schemes of virtues or vices, though something like a scale of virtues could be used as a way of training the young in moral behavior; yet, we must realize that even a simple scale will vary according to a lot of factors including the different levels of raw passions and inclinations of different peoples who have evolved in response to different problems and opportunities.
It would be desirable to apply creative mental energies to our situation, to a re-understanding of human being and its relationship to Creation and Creator. It might even be said to be necessary. In such a complex world, one where even moderate collapses can lead to great damage and a huge number of deaths as well as a loss of good standards of living for generations, we shouldn’t just go off half-cocked on various military adventures or on the opening of the borders of complex human communities to people with drastically different behavioral and other traits. But we Americans have done such, thinking to protect ourselves by irrational attacks on some community defined as enemies by well-meaning leaders or by the all-too common scoundrel-leaders or by both in alliance. We have done such by opening the borders to those who seek a better life in highly developed countries rather than developing their countries as well as those suffering from unwise growth when their food supplies were dependent upon weather cycles and—this is a tough one—as well as those who are fleeing the chaos caused by utterly stupid and morally despicable behavior by war-profiteering parties in the West.
We in the West should feel ashamed of ourselves, even those who tried to stop some of this criminal behavior, for what we’ve done to various parts of the world—in a much more intense way since profiteering scoundrels and nutcases started directing American foreign policy following World War II. It’s not that we Americans were morally pure before that, but even the crimes against the Amerindians were understandable in the abstract when set in the context of the sometimes peaceful and sometimes violent struggles initiated by the beginning of agricultural and the resulting complex communities and inter-community relationships from the time of the “first farmers” (northern Syria and bordering regions of Turkey about 12,000 years ago). Nearly all Amerindians in North America were nomadic or semi-nomadic, that is, in the same situation as the hunter-foragers of Europe who were gradually pushed into oblivion or forced to adopt the new ways as small numbers of those “first farmers” came out of northern Syria and adjoining regions of Turkey, bringing domesticated crops and animals and ways of life which allowed great reproductive success—the creation of dense populations which came to dominance in acre after acre all the way to the North Sea and to the Atlantic. In putting our own country of the United States in historical and moral context, we could also consider conscious, immoral use of the advantages of more advanced development, such as the banana wars when the Wall Street financiers used the US Marines as a labor negotiation team; look up Smedley Butler, the Marine Corps general who wrote War is a Racket, available for free download at various Internet locations. On the whole, the United States was acting the part of an immature country which had too much wealth and power for such an early stage of development, a juvenile delinquent of a country and still one nearly a century later.
As many Christian do-gooders follow the spurts of blood from their enlarged hearts, so did many Americans and most of the powerful and wealthy reach out with their hands for the goods of this world—including the goods belonging to other peoples in Nicaragua and Mexico and the Philippines and then Iran and so forth. Even such intelligent men as Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and John Kennedy, as well as Pope Francis and other current do-gooders, would have been far better leaders if they had learned the importance of good knowledge, of calm and orderly thought, of the appreciation of tomorrow. Much that is good has been destroyed over the past couple of centuries by a pursuit of what is allegedly perfect or would be more perfectly used by those with superior greed or higher self-esteem.
[Those who have followed my blog or have downloaded and read any of my books will know that I have been working to produce a Christian re-understanding at a fundamental level of human being and of all of created being. See Catalog of Major Writings by Loyd Fueston for a list of those books as well as links for freely downloading most of them.]