Tillich's Echo

 

At work John Wemmick in 𝘎𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵 𝘌𝘹𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 is Mr. Jaggers’ clerk and embodies the cold, rational, and skeptical demeanor of the legal world. In the office, he’s emotionally detached, pragmatic, and focused solely on business. He even advises Pip to separate his personal feelings from professional dealings.

At home, in stark contrast, Wemmick transforms into a warm, whimsical, and affectionate caretaker. He lives in a miniature castle with his elderly father, the "Aged P," and delights in domestic rituals, gardening, and playful inventions. His home life is filled with kindness and eccentric charm, revealing a deeply human side that he keeps hidden from his professional world.

The average American is such a double man. Thanks to his nation’s moral traditions, the American is still taught as a child the Judeo-Christian ethic of yieldingness, generosity, sympathy, altruism, tenderness. Then the morally instructed child grows into a businessman to whom aggression, competitiveness and skepticism are represented as the only ways of being on the ball and going places. During working hours, the businessman plays to the hilt the role of the “smooth operator.” Evenings and weekends, he attempts to revert to the honest, kindly role of principled Christian and loving father.

The result is spiritual and psychological confusion. Aggressiveness cannot be eluded merely by putting on a hat and walking away. When the businessman leaves his office, he takes with him a sinister self that has no place to go. At worst, he becomes savage and cynical; at best, he swells the ranks of those who smoke too much, eat too much, drink too much marry too much, take too many sleeping pills and drive too fast.

I'm interested in the changing order. Politics is the outcome, not the cause, of social change, as the English historian George Macaulay Trevelyan observed. For example, I believe that Richard Nixon's "Checkers" speech was a political watershed. Until then, a politician who was found out was finished. But, with the help of TV, the stunt of a half-baked confession set him on the road to the Vice Presidency ‐ and the later troubles he caused.

What I view as the decline of American morality and changing styles in American humor inspired me to strike out in new directions. E. M. Forster used to say, "Only connect," and I've tried to make connections in my writing. The domino theory that was supposed to happen but never did in Southeast Asia really worked here, with the falling of American political morality under Nixon and his gang.

I attacked my elders' racism by identifying at its core the fear of the sexuality of black people and the abstract systemic demand (that is to say, heartlessly calculating) for a cheap labor supply.

While I don't believe the claim that connects the super-bunker 'neath the ballroom to the money sent to Nazi refuge Argentina, I salute the effort as an exercise in Mark Twainish humor overwhelmed by black humor.

The petty-bourgeois paranoia that drives conspiracy theories is a more connectible dot. From this coign of vantage I was able to examine the structure of American business society, whose values have created the neurotic personality, the American schizophrenia and anxiety, a heritage I am anxious not to pass on.

A good society, to me, is a cooperative society, in which the whole human being may meaningfully operate, to which he can relate himself and in which he can feel at ease. The business society in which we live, I think, looks with favor only upon the cultivation and development of those aspects of the personality which are in line with its prime motive: the acquisition of money. Behavior so cramping, hostile and competitive is in conflict not only with the basic needs of human beings and the Ebionite tenets of the Judeo-Christian ethic upon which Western civilization is ostensibly based, but also with those idealistic principles from which the Government of the United States has sprung.

I am intent on restoring to the forefront of active behavior what I call the "Bankruptcy Ethic" — the gentleness, compassion, consideration and affection which are the properties of family life. The pursuit of money in an attempt to provide the human being with the prestige and security which he might obtain more rationally is a self-defeating mechanism. It would be enough if our moral and emotional climate were such that no one, for instance, could make a nickel out of sex.

Psychiatrists, social thinkers and philosophers have for a long time been pointing out the terrible distortions of modern life, of whose effects we have been giving adequate demonstration almost from day to day. Any thinking person has of course been able to observe these disasters and speculate upon their causes. I have been able to add nothing significantly new to what, for instance, Ashley Montagu and Erich Fromm have more succinctly and more eloquently said. Such truths cannot have too much reiteration, and the more who spring to help humanity the better.

Employing the acerb of my father's businesslike skepticism (and p'tit-boo paranoia) as my chief rhetorical asset to my father's own cherished ritual lies, I dimly viewed our nation as a moral swamp. Senator Robert A. Taft was intellectually dishonest. President Eisenhower was an inert a piece of chewing gum rolling around in the jaws of history. When President Kennedy talked about the United States getting off dead center, he did not really mean it.

Within the culture, there is a continuous and reassuring enchantment – in books, newspapers, magazines, radio-television, conversation between friends – of Ritual Lies. This phrase is less harsh than it sounds, because the Ritual Lie is felt, comfortably, as a ritual and not as a practice of lies. The breadth of this social behavior is demonstrated by its inclusion of the religious sphere. Religious organizations learned the commercial techniques of promotion and public relations.

Observe the details: the ritual lie is charming, multiplying and reassuring, in addition to not showing embarrassment, because it is a ritual. And even if someone doesn't accept it, we all practice rituals; that is, we experience behaviors that symbolize ideologies and teachings. The scope of rituals is precisely because they are used to achieve different purposes, from the satisfaction of emotional needs, strengthening of social bonds, social approval, the simple act of shaking hands with others or even the fulfillment of religious obligations.

Ritual lies can be defined precisely as those erroneous or rigorously false concepts that the establishment commands and enjoys. It erects definitive truths  according to its convenience.

Regarding current religious expressions, the presence of ritual lies is striking. The religious environment has been presenting such deteriorated behavioral patterns, compared to the original biblical proposal, to the point that the New Testament seems almost naïve when it describes eleven apostles and only one Judas. Cheating and lying are not the most dramatic sins in the Bible, but they are two of the most important. The lie is, let's say, available at all times. During the Reformation, as Tawney demonstrates, the prudent virtues of thrift and industriousness were valued and became much more important than they had been in medieval Europe. The concern of saving money, once a sin of usury, became a respectable thing; and the early Christians' notions of mortification of the flesh were abandoned in favor of the new concept that making money was now a virtue. After the influence of Freud and Darwin, respect for the sacred was minimized, because there is no longer the image of the bearded God to punish bad behavior.

Except for the most ardent defenders of the ritual lie Tawney describes. The Baptists fragmented into so many "surnames", using a mixture of rituals, that they would become unrecognizable in the face of the pioneer martyrs. Many Pentecostals (also fragmented) decided to follow the path of party politics as a means of giving power back to the churches. And the post-Pentecostals (or neo-Pentecostals) have quickly embarked on ethical relativity, worshipping the immediate satisfaction of the physical and emotional needs of their followers through a deus ex machina that is activated to solve the problem of the plot of human life on Earth, whether in the purchase of a shoe, a new car, a house, a farm, a boat or an airplane. These are called divine blessings. 

For them the Wrath of God works like an infernal nectar cauterizing their consciences and compassion until they gloat about cuts to SNAP and Medicaid. Just because this didn't happen overnight does not mean that it did not happen.