The individual most certainly can, and more often than not does, 'swallow his moral obligations by putting them inside the actions of society'. Case in point:
you. Or your neighbour. Or those of your church. I don't exclude myself necessarily should it seem that I am coming out with an attack. (There is really no way to attack 'the other' in my view since we are only really and always speaking, essentially, to our own self. Keep that in mind for all that follows). It seems to me that if one really wants to examine ethics and morality, one really has to be willing to get down to some of the horrible basics. If that is true then Savitri Devi is really someone to be admired: She took her ethics and morals to the farthest point. Not the area I intend to take my own and yet what her intensity illustrates, again, is that any formal ethics functions like a sword, a cutting tool. Perhaps that is why we wish to do away with hard, cutting edges?
'Moral obligation' is more often than not some oatmealy, sometimes even trite, imperatives that more often than not revolve around the
wrong morals. I spent a good deal of time when in Colorado for a few summers listening to Christian talk radio. It is all very tricky and difficult to sort through but in the end the typical American Evangelical focus is incredibly limited to issues of sexual morality and such and cannot---and does not---participate in a full, dynamic, ethical and moral conversation about the reality that we live in. It can't because it doesn't know how. It fails to understand itself---that is the Christian history in Europe and the Medieval underpinning---and thus has little means to analyse itself, or history, or the present.
This seems mean-spirited yet it is not, not really: It perfectly illustrates how it is that typical Christianity totally misses the point of spirituality and the real concerns of ethics and morality. The terrible joke that must be played on the 'typical Christian' to demonstrate the perverse misconstrual of values, is necessary, but after the guffaws the hard questions still remain:
What the fuck are we really talking about? What is really valuable? What is really to be preserved? What really
IS the strength of our civilisation, its achievement? What is the
real area to focus in and what area should be dismissed? And this question leads invariably, if I am right, to the essential fact that a defined ethics and morality that is this-worldly must have a sharp edge. And the minute that a
sharp edge is defined, one is essentially in that borderland of the fascistic. Yoga is self-fascism. Strict Catholicism the same. All
disciplines have some part of this ethic. Discipline is in a sense and by definition 'fascistic'.
I have been reading Samuel Francis and his 'Essential Writings on Race'. (This all stems from interest in the American Civil War). In one of his essays he critiques a book by James Russell called 'The Germanisation of Early Medieval Christianity: A Socio-historical Approach to Religious Transformation'. (Oxford, 1994) In brief, what he desires to bring to the fore is the question of whether a religious modality will be 'world-accepting' or 'world-rejecting'. Obviously, early Christianity was pathologically world-rejecting and was also founded in a totally destructive hallucination, or death-wish, of neurotic fantasy that imagined the whole wide world would come to a cataclysmic end which really seemed only to cover over a psychological will to see a fantasy of resentment and submerged hostility play out on a cosmic level. In short to see one's enemies tortured in the hands of their loving God. The whole vision is so rife with contradictions that it becomes nearly impossible to consider it in rational terms. The only way to go through it is, perhaps, as a Jungian, and this is to restate that it is therefor 'all psychological'.
(From a review of James Russell's book):
- "Russell situates this "reinterpreting" of Christian belief and ritual not in active attempts by Germanic peoples to resist or reformulate the message disseminated to them but rather in the sociohistorical circumstances attendant on the conversion itself. The book is divided into two parts of roughly equal length, the first of which Russell uses to construct what he terms a "sociohistorical model" of religious change. Social or ideological structures particular to a given society may, he argues, incline that society to a specific form of religious expression; similarly, psychological factors (e.g. anomie or alienation arising from increasing urbanization or perceived "status dissonance") may also affect the types of cult to which individuals and communities are drawn. Societies marked by alienation or despair, or in which the bonds of community or family are weak, are predisposed by these sociopsychological characteristics towards what Russell calls "world-rejecting" religions—cults which are, in other words, soteriological and/or eschatological in nature and "universal" in their message and intended audience. (Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity are all offered as examples of such religions.) Conversely, societies which are relatively stable, enjoy a high degree of familial and communal cohesion, and deemphasize individual priorities in favor of group identification and interests, incline towards "world-accepting" "folk religiosities"—cults in which the locus of the sacral is the folk community itself. (Confucian ancestor worship, Shintoism, Arabian tribal cults, and Celto-Germanic paganism are the main examples here.) Such "folk-religious" societies, Russell argues, have no interest in soteriological promises of redemption in another world. If adherents of "world-rejecting" religions like Christianity are therefore ever to succeed in converting persons living in such cultures, they will have to modify their essential message in order to "accomodate the predominantly world-accepting ethos and world-view" of those societies (p. 103)."
(I think it has to be mentioned that Ancient Greek culture, in it early manifestations, tended to be 'life-affirming' and 'world-affirming' in the very best senses possible. Everything of tangible value and fundamental to our civilisation has come out of this focus. And much that is destructive has come from what is 'world-negating'.)
Part of saying such wicked things about Christianity is, in my view, to force us (one, someone, them, me) to reconsider what is really the mainly valuable thing about Christianity: What was done in a thousand year period when Christian (Eastern) doctrines ran up against, and were also transformed by, European paganism. In my view it is not that Christianity needs to extricate itself from this unholy blending of body fluids and return to some 'essence' or 'purity' that is said to be or understood as 'original':
there is no 'original', it is
all revisionist, and much of it is a strange game that is played within novelised visions of a world that never actually existed, nor will ever exist: and right there is another hurdle-of-absurdity to overcome if one want to approach a 'core of value' in the Christian traditions.
I say: Trash the lovey-dovey horse-shit, the false-universalism and the horrid false-piety, and undertake the harder work of defining a vibrant and demanding ethics and morality in a realistic, a life-affirming, and a non-sentimental post-Christianity. There is
no other 'Christianity'. It is all 'post'! Christianity needs to ensconce itself within paganism---that is to say within real people in real time---and needs to jettison a vast amount of fluff and putridity that has grown up around it like weeds. Further: Christ would do very well to be revisualsed not as a weak, faggy fluff-bunny who never raises his voice and never wakes up with an erection, but very much the opposite: first a man, and second a vital man with living and real concern for ...
Well, the beginning of a definition---the act of defining, the act of deciding, the act of separating, the act of recombining---is precisely the area where one will always find oneself in the thick of all the most serious, and the hardest, ethical and moral problems. Perhaps you are right then and it should all be left up to the management team at Walmart USA or ... as it happens ... Walmart Earth. A manufacturing and distribution system that not only attends to the physical structure upon which everything rests, but will eventually assume responsibility for ideas, for ways-of-seeing, and which will mediate the very lens through which 'reality' is viewed. Is this not
metaphysical in the most important sense?
But anyway the fucking bullshit and typically picayune Christian conversation, and its bullshitty universalist area of concern, has to be blown out of human consciousness ... somehow ... I don't know how.
Samuel Francis wrote (in the essay noted above): 'Organised Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it'.
Whoa, Sam, what's gotten into you man?
The cool thing about direct and contentious statements (any sort of statement really that takes a stand in something) is that they force a person to define a position
in relation to it. I do not fully understand what he means. But I will say that our present culture is very certainly a Christian culture even if it seems to be rejecting the forms of Christianity or even its tenets. I just watched a Swedish film, 2005, called '
As It Is In Heaven'. (I advise you to locate a bucket nearby before you open this link). If I am forced to explain the plot, with all its sentimental inversions of Christian tropes, I will end up violently vomiting again so please excuse me as I will refrain.
But in a telling sense, at least in my view, this is what Christianity is, and what its vision is, and in a sense too where it leads: sentimental tripe. If this is the focus one will, inevitably, lose the trail to constructing an ethics and a morality that can actually effect something in the world. In every single manifestation of Evangelical Christianity---
every one!---that I have experienced so far ... this is where it leads. It gets feminized and sentimentalised and perversely idealised.