As I was getting started into the intro and first chapter of this week\u2019s reading, I thought to myself \u201cGreat, this will be easy!\u00a0 I\u2019ll just connect the dots between the \u2018agora\u2019 and \u2018ecclesia\u2019 and make this week\u2019s post a \u2018part 2\u2019 of last week\u2019s.\u00a0 I should be able to really drive home my assertion that Jesus\u2019 intent when describing his \u2018church\u2019 was NOT to create a new religious sect but rather, an organism derived from the surrounding community\u2026 etc etc etc.\u201d\u00a0 Bauman\u2019s section on the \u201cAgora\u201d seems to provide more evidence of my position that the \u201cEkklesia\u201d was envisioned by Christ to serve in the best interest of the community rather than itself.\u00a0 Yeah!\u00a0 I had every intention to engage in a healthy dose of proof-texting, then I made it to chapter 9, \u201cA natural history of evil.\u201d\u00a0 Oh my.<\/p>\n
I found myself gripped, unable to skim over this chapter.\u00a0 Initially, I found it difficult to grasp how this topic was connected to the broader themes of the book.\u00a0 It felt sort of like a morbid aside, a macabre side-note, designed to drive the nail in the coffin of any hope remaining that humanity is salvageable.\u00a0 It drew me into a downward spiral of darkness.\u00a0 I was alarmed, disturbed and saddened while confronted with the stark reality of the depravity of humanity and our, not only willingness but apparent eagerness, to inflict the grossest forms of suffering upon other humans.\u00a0 It is almost as if we are waiting for permission to do violence; it\u2019s in our nature I suppose.\u00a0 I found myself puzzled by the reality that we, as humans, are capable of de-humanizing other humans.\u00a0 Then, the more I pondered this, another, even more distressing thought occurred, is it actually \u201cde-humanizing\u201d behavior after all?\u00a0 Maybe we\u2019re not de-humanizing in order to feel better about perpetrating violence.\u00a0 Maybe we\u2019re really just violating each other.\u00a0 That is a chilling possibility.<\/p>\n
Bauman examines historical accounts of remarkably \u201cordinary\u201d people, very casually crossing over into the most horrific of behavior.\u00a0 These are not monsters, they are our neighbors or perhaps, us.\u00a0 In his commentary of Hannah Arendt\u2019s observations about some of the most vile of the soulless, Himmler and Eichmann, he writes the following, bone-chilling conclusion:<\/p>\n
What Arendt meant when she pronounced that verdict was that monstrosities do not need monsters, outrages do not need outrageous characters, and that the trouble with Eichmann lay precisely in the fact that, according to the assessments of supreme luminaries of psychology and psychiatry, he (alongside so many of his companions in crime) was not a monster or a sadist, but outrageously, terribly, frighteningly \u2018normal\u2019.1<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Monstrosities do not need monsters\u2026\u00a0 It would be far easier to accept that an occasional anomaly, a very broken, twisted, desecrated former-human is capable of looking into the eyes of another while subjecting him to gut-wrenching, unspeakable acts but that is unfortunately no the case.<\/p>\n
Christopher R. Brown investigated the twisted yet invariably gory path of men belonging to the German Reserve Police Battalion 101, assigned to the police from among conscripts unfit for frontline duty, and eventually delegated to participate in the mass murder of Jews in Poland. 17 Those people, who had never been known to commit violent, let alone murderous acts up till then, and gave no grounds for suspicion that they were capable of committing them, were ready (not 100 per cent of them, but a considerable majority) to comply with the command to murder: to shoot, point blank, men and women, old people and children, who were unarmed and obviously innocent since they had not been charged with any crime, none of whom nurturing the slightest intention to harm them or their comrades-in-arms.2<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Yes, but that was an example of extreme circumstances, right?\u00a0 The ravages of war had certainly and indelibly imprinted on the collective German psyche, creating the \u201cperfect storm\u201d anomaly, leading to a temporary lapse in humanity, a community sociopathy of a massive scale\u2026\u00a0 Or maybe not.\u00a0 If this be the case, then how do we explain away Abu Ghraib?\u00a0 How do we account for our own president Truman using the occasion of war to exterminate upwards of 200,000 innocent Japanese because, after all, we \u201cjust couldn\u2019t waste two billion dollars,\u201d could we?3 \u00a0Extreme?\u00a0 Hardly.\u00a0 More likely, this is the human condition sans Jesus.\u00a0 I can think of no more compelling reason to press the gospel into our societies.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
1.\u00a0Zygmunt Bauman. Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age<\/i> (Kindle Edition: Loc. 2615-2618 Wiley. 2013-04-18).<\/p>\n
2. Location 2703.<\/p>\n
3.\u00a0The cost to develop the first atomic bomb through to testing and completion.\u00a0 Once the bomb was developed and manufactured, there could be no compelling reason given Truman to NOT use it in real time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I was getting started into the intro and first chapter of this week\u2019s reading, I thought to myself \u201cGreat, this will be easy!\u00a0 I\u2019ll just connect the dots between the \u2018agora\u2019 and \u2018ecclesia\u2019 and make this week\u2019s post a \u2018part 2\u2019 of last week\u2019s.\u00a0 I should be able to really drive home my assertion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[63,2,475],"class_list":["post-3978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bauman","tag-dminlgp","tag-lgp5-2","cohort-lgp5"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3978"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3979,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3978\/revisions\/3979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}