Effing the Ineffable

(With apologies to every other person who's used this clever turn of phrase)


This is the short essay I wrote based on the thoughts that brought the title phrase to mind the other day in the garden. I confess I'm a little hesitant about posting it - the thoughts are more personal than I would normally consider publically revealing, and it takes a pretty hard stance against beliefs to which some of my friends no doubt subscribe. However, the combination of reading Douglas Rushkoff's post about faith and a brief visit to a private school the other day caused these thoughts to surface quite vigorously in a way I could not suppress or ignore.


The title phrase popped into my head yesterday while gardening and I couldn't get it out. The context was a train of thought that started from our reaction to the religiosity of a private school we saw yesterday. Morning "worship" of a non-distinct Christian flavor and my kids instantly veto what is otherwise a pretty appealing educational option. I'm proud of that reaction. And yet we are, I think, more "spiritual" as a family that most - we believe very deeply in the sancitity of the human condition, our unique position of privilege and responsibility in the world. The dual-edge of joy and pain that comes from consciousness and conscience. Deeply moral, sometimes to the point that perception of injustice suffered by others can cloud our own enjoyment. Ethical, pacificistic, humanist. Sounds like a giant subset of the "teachings of Christ" especially when stripped of the dogmatic trimmings that accompany them.


So why the violent reaction against formalized ritual of any stripe? Because organized religion of every flavor falls into one of the most basic traps of the paradoxes of the human condition. Codifying morality into a set of rules attempts to make concrete the wholly abstract, the ineffable. By doing so it perverts its basic goal and creates an opportunity for the true original sin: domination of one person by another. Dogma has been the basic toolbox of tyrants and autocrats and big men and chiefs and dictators as long as we've been human. Thou shalt not sets the stage for the punishment if thou happens to anyway, for the monitoring of thine actions to make sure thou dost not, and for further restrictions on your behavior to ensure thou doesn't even get the opportunity to dost it again, even by accident. In the hands of society's institutions those restrictions seem inevitably to lead to fascism of one flavor or another. Extreme? Maybe. I admit my definition of fascism is broader than Franco, Hitler and Mussolini. But I don't know a better word to describe the rule of a master over his slaves, which is what, literally or figuratively, organized religion produces.


At this point in human history whatever good organized religion can claim to have contributed to the world is overshadowed by the suffering, death and oppression it has produced. Time for a little less religious tolerance, and Douglas Rushkoff has written over on his blog. Time to treat religious faith for what it is: a dangerous desire that can make one a member of a dangerous mob or give one the tools to manipulate that mob to one's own ends. We consider the 'primitive' societies that practised the various forms of human sacrifice barbaric, but we should also consider what brought them to the point of offering human souls to the gods -- taking their own myths as literal truth.


Effing the ineffable, it turns out, completely effs things up. Don't eff with the ineffable. But that desire, to express what is impossible to express, is a basic component of the human condition. It's vital in fact to the pursuit of human knowledge, vital to communal life, to loving and living with another soul. I think the line that needs to be respected and very rarely crossed however, is accepting someone else's codification of the ephemeral on blind faith that it will work for oneself. That the motivation of the originator of the codification was pure and benign. We have reached a moment in the development of the human soul when it is vital for each and every individual to make up her or his own mind about the meaning of life. Make it up for yourself, don't subscribe to someone else's. Effing up your own ineffable minimizes the damage you can do. We lose some cohesion in our society, perhaps, but that's a small price to pay. The modern state of angst and alienation is vastly superior to the comfort that can be had by belonging to a bunch of thugs.