When a person is overly-protected, he or she cannot grow. Deprived of the possibilities—the opportunities—of risk and responsibility, one’s chances of maturing are slim.
I cannot discover who I am as long as who you are has me bubble-wrapped and boxed-up with strapping tape. How can I discover my own personhood in your attic? Or on the wall of your museum?
Truth brings with it the reality of risk and responsibility. If a person hides from the truth as one would flee a home-invader, his chances of growing in faith decrease as the darkness of his mind and heart increases.
Take away the tension associated with risk—the tension between rest and exertion, success and failure, solidarity and individualism, good and evil—and I cannot live. How would my heart beat? How could I breathe? How can I think? How can I freely love?
The uncivilized and obscene excess of over-protection is a tyranny which justifies its existence on the grounds that power determines personhood. Violent and degraded men put on government like a sock puppet.
The sock puppet speaks and moves as if it is a person. Men and women of good will—who really are persons but are told they are not—are made to idolize the sock puppet that covers the iron fist of decadent leaders.
Equally uncivilized and obscene is one’s denial of another’s self-determination. Rather than tolerate a community’s right to possess received Truth and to freely experience the risk and responsibility that such truth imposes, violent and spiritless men wage war.
They kill on the pretense of saving lives. They destroy communities and nations in the name of healing. The sock puppet’s trigger finger fires a missile launcher. It pushes the buttons inside a black box.
What fails to grow and mature in human beings who are deprived of the meaningful experience of risk and responsibility in the light of Truth is precisely their humaneness.
Persons who do not grow and mature morph into the frightening—and frankly disgusting—phenomenon of children living inside grown-up bodies. By being overly-protected, these people are conditioned to shun risk and responsibility.
They fear the Truth. To escape these realities, they resort to uproar and violent provocation or by fleeing the tension and taking refuge in self-distraction. Their inhumaneness emerges as hyper-individualism. They are lazy. They rationalize failure. They perceive the good as lighter shades of evil.
And the worst evil manifests itself in persons who are ruled by an abnormal and ungoverned compulsion to keep moving, make noise and hoard things while, at the same time, feeling a toxic revulsion for other human beings.
This profound disruption of the fragile and complex human ecology of personhood and relationships is the precondition for wide-spread and pathological sickness—the profound dis-ease human societies have come to know as tyranny and war.
It is a poverty that human beings are taught to perceive each other as dispensable aggregates of human tissue and data while, at the same time, falling over themselves to award animals the status of personhood—the very thing which men and women (mostly men) seem to understand least of all.
Your blog writer suggests that the stampede to brand animals as persons ought to be deferred for a few years until human beings prove their mutual good will by eradicating tyranny and war among their own species.
After all, what animal today wants to find himself on the front lines fighting a guerilla war in Afghanistan or in Somalia? (More to the point, what happiness could any animal possibly enjoy were it truly aware that Pol Pot had embraced it, calling it friend and brother?)
Very young children often are shocked by the realization that human beings other than themselves are persons in their own right whose needs at a particular moment are equally if not more pressing than those of the precocious child.
Herein lies humanity’s hope—that the socio-scientific disciplines may come to acknowledge that faith, hope, and love are foundational to the larger periodic table of spiritual elements absolutely essential for a balanced ecology of human relationships.
Somewhere along the line, human families, neighborhoods, cities and nations must reacquaint themselves with received Truth, moving beyond mere research--which formulates so many questions it can never answer--to accepting the risk and responsibility of faith and belief.
Should the day arrive when we human beings are less enamored of doing things to, for and against each other and more disposed toward doing things through, with and in each other, then we just might discover something new.
Our respect for human personhood and our reverence of humaneness may point us precisely to that which represents the greatest of all risk, responsibility and reward—the compelling existence and personhood of the One whom God has revealed to us as his very own self.
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