How the cultural Other became God

KPA writes from Canada:

This thought came to me as I was reading through Jim Kalb’s wonderful site Turnabout, where he mentioned God as the supreme Other. I cannot find this quote (it was very brief), but very illuminating to me for the following reasons:

As a Christian, I don’t doubt that God is the supreme Other, mysterious yet knowable, and who guides and leads me in every way.

I don’t know where “the other” as an anthropological term evolved, in terms of the non-Western cultures anthropologists were so fond of studying.

But, in today’s secular, liberal world, hasn’t the Godly Other been replaced by the “foreign” other? One who can do no wrong, who is mysterious, but who with dedication and faith can be knowable? And above all, this is the part that took me by surprise, one who leads and guides the way of the forsaken follower?

I wonder if that divine projection of God into “other” human beings is at the core of this very powerful system which so many—conservatives and liberals—seem to have fallen into? Why Muslims can do no wrong, and in fact can teach us, lowly Christians/atheists/Enlightened peoples so many things?

If so, this whole situation is much more serious than we think. And Christian leaders have a huge and urgent task in their hands.

Just some thoughts since I was wondering why this situation is so entrenched, especially in light of the LGF’s bizarre free fall, and of course all the other conservative thinkers’ (e.g. at FrontPageMag) inability to see evil (dare I use that term) so clearly in front of them.

LA replies:

Personally I don’t relate to describing God as the Other, as that term for me has its primary meaning in the more familiar usage as the cultural Other etc. Also, I simply don’t think of God as “the Other.” Jesus did not speak of God as the Other. He spoke of God, and to God, as his father in heaven. And the Old Testament speaks of God not as the Other but as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who addresses his people intimately, as a father his children, wanting the best for them.

But leaving aside the question of terminology, I entirely agree with your main point:

“[I]n today’s secular, liberal world, hasn’t the Godly Other been replaced by the “foreign” other? One who can do no wrong, who is mysterious, but who with dedication and faith can be knowable?”

Here’s one way I would explain this. The belief in equality as the highest truth means there is nothing above us. The highest thing is the human self, with all human selves being equal. And since man still needs the God he has displaced, the tendency is to make the human self into God. Thus the “religion of man.” But our own self is not “transcendent” to us, and cannot fully serve the purpose of being our substitute God. What therefore is “transcendent” to us is the human self of other human selves—the more “other” they are (and thus the more alien or even threatening), the more transcendent they become. And so we arrive, by a somewhat different route, at the moral inversion of reality described by my First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society, where the worse something is, the more we praise it.

Another way of explaining the transformation of the cultural Other into God is as follows. “Love your neighbor as yourself” in its original context assumes the existence of God and one’s relationship with God. You see yourself in the light of existence under God, and so you see other people in the same light. One’s own self has its full value because of God, and other people are given the same value. Human brotherhood is a function of—and is also guided and constrained by—God’s fatherhood.

But what happens if we take God out of the picture but we still say, “Love your neighbor as yourself”? In that case, self-love is not guided or constrained by any higher truth. We love ourselves completely, without truth. This is the condition of man in modern liberal society. But it doesn’t stop with the unlimited self-love of modern man, because we’re supposed to love our neighbor as ourselves. Therefore, since we love ourselves with a love that is not limited or guided by truth, we owe the same unlimited love to our neighbor, who is now defined as every human in the world, especially those from strange cultures. Thus the rejection of the transcendent God leads to suicidal liberalism.

- end of initial entry -

Sage McLaughlin writes:

Your correspondent KPA writes: “As a Christian, I don’t doubt that God is the supreme Other…” I respectfully submit that the notion of God as the supreme Other is distinctly un-Christian. The entire point of Christianity is the Incarnation. The point of Christianity is NOT that God is some darkly knowable transcendent mystery that guides us. The point of Christianity is Christ, that is, God made Man. If God wanted to remain a distant Other, eternally estranged in essence from Man, then he would not subsist in the Trinity. The notion of God as pure transcendence, as the ultimate Other, was central to the Gnostic heresy, and was rejected by the early Church Fathers.

Kristor writes:

People need to worship, and they’ll find something or other to worship, something or other to which they find it meaningful to devote their lives, something they can treat as larger than themselves, and worthier. The reason we are built that way is not far to seek. If there is nothing larger than our lives, which they are in the final analysis about, then our lives are at bottom pointless, and therefore stupid. Their only value then lies in the net sensual and emotional rewards they can generate. But a human life considered as an isolated project standing or falling on the basis only of its own merits and demerits, must result in depression—because, being finite erroneous entropic sinners, our demerits always in the end outweigh our demerits (this being one of the reasons we dwindle and die, and our dwindling and death being themselves both major demerits of life). Depressed people are less motivated to meet the challenges of life, and are more likely therefore to surrender and die. Their courage failing them, they are likely to fail. So the progeny of the survivors, who were not so depressed because they were encouraged by the thought of transcendent things—us—are wired to seek a larger purpose. [LA replies: Interesting: a religious explanation of natural selection. But if evolution leads to people who believe in God, why do Dawkins, Harris, et al. demonize religion and seek to destroy it?]

If God is out of bounds as an object of worship, as has for more and more educated people been the case since the Enlightenment, then people will find something else that seems worthy of worship, and work, and sacrifice: equality, freedom, the People, something or other. The exact term for such worship is “idolatry.” Wherever it is practiced, it devolves more and more over time, until it reaches its apotheosis in something like the holocaust of children practiced by the followers of Moloch.

Which only makes sense. Unless there is some transcendent Truth, everything is more or less a lie. If there is such a Truth, then wisdom, righteousness and faithfulness are really possible, but so is error. So either liberalism is correct that there is no Truth, in which case all dogmas, including liberalism, are lies; or liberalism is incorrect, there is a Truth, and liberalism is an error. It is merely logical that running one’s life on the basis of what is necessarily either a massive lie or a massive error should eventuate in an suicidal culture. For if a culture is wrong (as liberal culture ineluctably understands itself to be, for the reasons just explained), it is ipso facto wicked, worthy not of preservation in the contest with its cultural competitors, but of extinction. Thus the liberal valorization of the cultural Other, and hatred of the West of which it is itself a feature.

KPA writes:

Thank you for your response.

In response to Sage McLaughlin’s comment, what I was trying to say is that God is not us, and we are not God. There is still a separation necessary, otherwise we cannot humbly follow and obey his commands.

What I was trying to compare is the merging that God and man seem to be making. Man climbs to the level of God, and brings God down to his level. Tries to become God, in short. But, since man still needs God (or his god), he turns his transcendent needs onto another object—in idolatry—to the “other,” who again is not him, and cannot be him. This refusal of God, like some Freudian slip, manifests itself in strange and dangerous ways.

That being said, the beautiful homily recently posted at VFR where Pope Benedict says “A faith which is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ is adult and mature.” This, surely, is the example of how to build our real relationship, unlike the dark picture that Mr. McLaughlin brought to my attention,

Chris B. writes:

May I add to this discussion my own idea:

The starting point is that one is interested in the Universe, one observes that one is finite and has a limited amount of time to achieve anything. One then observes that others are sometimes more, sometimes less finite then you. This is intolerable, as the experience of finitude puts a gulf of jealousy between those who possess higher abilities then you, and nostalgic regret for those poorer then you.

This leads to a sweaty, anxious, state of estrangement from the infinite and from others. It is called sin in certain religious traditions.

Liberal society as it exists today is a fantasy world for keeping peoples minds off reality. The chimera of equality is instructive in this regard. The Other is adored for precisely the reasons a normal man finds repellant: tribalism, dreadful poverty, elaborate and irrational cultural conventions. These are all good things to the egalitarian liberal, as they help maintain the feeling of unity without reference to reality—thus diminishing the above described state of sin. It is a substitute for God.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 06, 2007 06:15 PM | Send