Long ago there was a bastard. In the technical sense. Son of a king but also son of a prostitute. Because of this when he came of age the royal family drove him away saying, “You will never have any of our inheritance, since you are the son of another woman and not our mother.” So he left in disgrace. In a far off country he got by in life by becoming a scoundrel and before long a gang had formed around him. He became something of a raider, a pirate. Much like the modern day lost souls in Somalia or Congo, he made his living stealing from nearby towns and villages at spearpoint. He gained a brutal reputation. He was a man of blood and flesh. He was not plastic.
Time passed. Another kingdom made war against his father’s land and the kingdom was sore pressed on every side by the invaders. In desperation, they sent messengers to the bastard. “You are more brutal than we,” they told him. “And your strength is needed in this time to repel the enemies of your father’s house.”
“Did you not chase me away?” The bastard asked them. “Why come to me now? And why would you expect me to help you?”
“True.” They answered. “We did chase you away. Nonetheless, if you come, and you help us gain the victory over our enemies, we will make you king in place of your brothers who are not strong enough to save us.”
This seemed agreeable.
Like so many of his kind the bastard was a religious man. Something of a paradox that faith is held so dearly by all the most violent. Even today you will find more icons and prayer beads in the camp of a Mexican drug cartel than you will any home in suburbia. Religious symbols adorn the tattooed bodies of almost all prison inmates. Street gangs frequently wear the cross. The aforementioned pirates of Somalia are likewise the same, their candor endlessly refreshing. “Yes,” they acknowledge without hesitation. “We are Muslim and piracy is haram but, look… man’s gotta eat.” The bastard was no different. He was not a plastic person. He believed in God with an intensity and extremism that would be alien to the plastic populace of today’s world. Before leading his new army into battle he prayed. He got down on his knees and struck a deal with The Almighty. “Listen,” he prayed. “Give me the victory and when I return home, whatever comes first out of the house of my door to greet me I will sacrifice to you as an offering.”
God listened.
The bastard was victorious. It was a brutal battle but he returned home to the city amid shouts of triumph. Dancing, horns, tambourines. All the fattest animals had been slaughtered and were spinning on skewers. Wine poured into every cup. Jesters juggled and musicians played. But, when he approached his home, who should come out first to meet him but his own daughter. An only child.
When the bastard saw her he tore his clothes and fell on his knees. “My daughter! You have brought me down and I am devastated! I have made a vow to God I cannot break!”
The girl, young, a teenager and not yet married, was not as horrified as you might expect. Like the Hindu women who would willingly jump into the funeral pyres to burn with their deceased husbands or the Nordic pagans whose wives would kill themselves with their husbands swords if their viking was slain in battle… she understood.
“Father,” she said. “You have given your word to God. Do to me as you have promised since God has given you the victory. Only give me two months to go into the wilderness and weep with my friends that I shall never marry nor have children.”
He agreed.
In two months time she returned from the hills and the bastard took his daughter, bound her hands and feet, placed her on a giant pile of wood, and set torch to the whole thing.
Say what you will… nobody in this story could be accused of not being real.
That’s a story from the Old Testament by the way. Judges 11. The bastard’s name was Jephthah and your pronunciation of that is probably as good as mine. We don’t know his daughter’s name. May as well call her Ash.
People used to be different. I’m not saying good different or bad different, but, definitely different. Modernity has flattened people out. Interesting is it not that the word “extremist” has become a pejorative? After all, it’s not obvious that it should be so. Tiger Woods is an extremist golfer. Tom Brady is an extremist quarterback. On the face of it the word “extremist” itself simply means a man or woman who takes things to their limits. Who gives their all to something. But that’s the trouble isn’t it? The idea that somebody might be fully committed to something. To anything. That there might be a man or a woman out there so dedicated to something that nothing, not even death, would deter them. How would you control that? How on earth could such a mindset ever be integrated into a democratic system?
Well.
It can’t be.
That’s why we’ve pathologized it.
Every single person in the old testament would, by today’s standards, be considered bipolar. Sitting in ashes and tearing their clothes one day. Having overwhelming blood lust the next. Feasting and partying in celebration for nine months straight. Ripping someone’s head off. Cutting their own bodies with shards of pottery and running naked outside the city gates. Cooking food on their own feces. Falling down in bouts of divine ecstasy. So forth. So on.
Again, I’m not saying that behavior was good. Nor am I saying it was bad. I’m just noting that it was different and that a people who try to stamp such behavior out of themselves can’t possibly understand the religion of the ancients who didn’t. Heck, today if a kid is simply too bouncy in class we try to give them meth to settle them down. We are emotionphobic. Being too sad is seen as a mental illness, depression we call it. Being too happy is the same. That’s mania see. Swapping between happy and sad too frequently is also bad. That’s bipolar disorder. Caring too much? That’s extremism. The only acceptable mode of existence is one of even keel emotional stability. Stability. That’s the modern religion. The modern sins? “Unsustainable.” “Unstable.” “Lacking Balance.” “Extreme.”
Everything is permissible in the modern culture so long as you don’t care too much. You can have your opinions or your beliefs about this or that, fine. But for heaven’s sake you’d better not care enough about them to act on them in anyway that might be seen as “antisocial”. Going along to get along is the goal. Everyone tolerate everything, except for that which cares enough to be intolerant.
To it’s credit this ideology does produce a stable society. One with minimal violence and consistent ability to put food on the shelves in grocery stores. Maybe that’s what we want. Maybe that’s worth it.
The problem is it also produces stable people. People that cannot feel and people who cannot, by definition, believe. The moment anyone starts to believe too strongly about anything the culture begins to push them away. “Uh oh…. this guy cares. He might become a terrorist, or an anarchist, or, or….”
See, it produces people made of plastic.
This is why I’m against psychiatry. Against psychology. Against “therapy” culture. Don’t get me wrong, it has its uses. I’ve read Jung and Freud and Piaget and Skinner. There’s a time and a place for therapy and addressing mental health. But at the same time it has become a crutch. It’s become a tool to prevent ourselves from being fully human because we are terrified of what that might mean. We need to talk ourselves out of believing too hard, or out of caring too much. We need to “reframe” how we think about things so they don’t seem so bad or so important. If talking fails, we need to drug ourselves. Brave New World style. Blue pill. Open wide and swallow the soma. Eat the lotuses. Do whatever is necessary to strangle that little voice inside your head telling you there might be more to life than “consume product, get ready for next product.” Kill that voice. Against that and that only are you allowed to be extreme. If you don’t you might become a real boy. Real boys are scary. They bleed.
Jesus was a real boy.
Jesus was most certainly an extremist.
Jesus most certainly bled.
You don’t even have to look that far back in our own history to see the same mindset that we find in the old testament. The frontier men. The colonists. The puritans willing to burn witches. Did you know that for a spate in the history of New England people used to dig up the corpses of their deceased relatives, burn the remains of their hearts, and then drink the ashes? 1892. Mercy Brown. Rhode Island. Look it up if you want to.
Imagine the mindset of a man so committed to keeping his word that he was willing to burn his own daughter alive. Who thought it was that important to keep a vow. Who believed God was that important. Abraham thought the same. Was willing to knife his own son. For that he became the patriarch of patriarchs. Started this whole bleeding mess we call “religion.” Can you imagine that mindset? Can you?
I can’t.
I’m not sure I ever want to.
But people used to be different.
Thank you for your thoughts and writings!