A New Year We Hope Will Not Be The Last!

This society has been bombarded by much calamities, but nothing compared to what is happening today. This is not gloom and doom prophecy. What we are watching today is the result of decades, truly of centuries, of decay! On thinking minds today, there are many unanswerable questions: 1. Why do we have such an enormous economic crisis? Or is it, as politicians say, only a mild recession? 2. Why is this society declining into the abyss of immorality and promiscuity, even in shows on TV and videos on the internet? How far have we damaged our society by insisting on temporal pleasure? 3. How far have our technological advances really served the human race? It seems that they have served the interests of the elite, big corporations, and the armies. 4. How come we are advocating the value of life for every creature including animals except for the value of the life of pre-born humans - the babies in the wombs of mothers? How far have we gone away from our civilization of the sanctity of the human person? 5. Why are we supporting violence and wars? Why are we trampling the ordinary individuals in war-torn societies and helping the agressors in their battles? 6. Why, rather than educating ourselves and non-Christians about the value of true freedom, are we forcing Muslims in the Arab world to hate us? 7. Have we learned the lessons of decades of atheism that enslaved us? Or on the contrary we have given in to the twisted minds of the likes of Dawkins and Dennett? 8. And last, why is our society shrinking in population? Will there be a next generation to beget children and carry this civilization into the future? Each of these questions deserves attention but my guess is that we are still sleeping after celebrating the new year. All these questions, in fact, may be answered intellectually. Our miserable situation - of greed, self-sufficiency, self-eternalization , excessive sexual appetite, aggression, and destruction - is rooted in Original Sin. What does Original Sin of our first parents tell us? I have been thinking lately of the main faults that could dehumanize any person in the world. I came up with 3 categories. Ironically they are the constitutive elements for self-realization: 1. Too Much Eating and Ultimately Excessive Eating 2. Undeterred Sexual Desire and Ultimately Sexual Intercourse 3. Pride and Ultimately Megalomania Eating by definition is necessary for any child to grow. Sexual intercourse is necessary for self-reproduction. And pride is the one element that leads to greed which allows man to conquer and swallow the weaker creature. Let's go a bit more in the deep, yet keep it as simple as possible. Why did all the great civilizations of the world vanish? What happened to the ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian empires? What was the fate of the Greek empire, or more recently the great Roman empire? Where is the British empire that was called "the Sun will never set on it."? While we are at it, it is worth considering what happened to the Soviet empire a couple of decades ago and, lest we forget, the current dismal fading away of the American empire. Take two contemporary thinkers: Joseph Ratzinger thinks that in the face of death there are two ways in which the ancient human civilizations attempted to perpetuate the existence of the self: 1. Self-reproduction through sexual intercourse. This is why infertile men and women were thought to be cursed by God (or the gods). This is also why polygamy was quite widespread in almost all ancient civilizations. 2. Self-eternalization through statues and temples. If I cannot be self-eternalized through my offspring, then I may be self-eternalized through memory of me. This is evident in what governers, kings, and pharoes built throughout all the ages. Actually we still do it today in different ways. We build sky-scrapers, universities and internet blogs even though the stated intentions may be quite different. René Girard, Stanford professor of civilization, now a member of the Academie Francaise, takes an anthropological view. In his view, every act of violence and aggression is nothing but mimetic rivalry. His theory, now advanced by research institutions in psychology, claims that rivalry potentially exists between young children when they look out for the toys of each other. This rivlary grows and intensifies with rivalry between tribes, cultures, and, eventually, nations. Mimetic rivlary is very clear in early civilizations. In the Bible, Girard says, the story of Solomon’s judgment in the third chapter of 1 Kings is a good example. Two prostitutes bring a baby. They are doubles engaging in a rivalry over what is apparently a surviving child. When Solomon offers to split the child, the one woman says “yes,” because she wishes to triumph over her rival. The other woman then says, “No, she may have the child,” because she seeks only its life. On the basis of this love, the king declares that “she is the mother.” Note that it does not matter who is the biological mother. The one who was willing to sacrifice herself for the child’s life is in fact the mother. The first woman is willing to sacrifice a child to the needs of rivalry. Sacrifice is the solution to mimetic rivalry and the foundation of it. The second woman is willing to sacrifice everything she wants for the sake of the child’s life. This is sacrifice in the sense of the gospel. It is in this sense that Christ is a sacrifice since he gave himself “for the life of the world.” Girard's conclusion is that as much as mimetic rivalry is the cause of our misery, true love actualized by Christ's sacrifice is the only remedy. We can touch on his thought in another lecture. What matters here is how close we are today, in our thinking, to our own misery. We seem to have lost our way from a Christian perspective into self-centredness that what matters is only me. Much prayers are needed, for only the love of God can save us from ourselves... May the good Lord preserve us and all the human race from self-destruction. Happy New Year!