Francis Berger
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Human Dignity Alone Does Not Save a Human Being From Becoming a Thing

1/26/2022

5 Comments

 
In a recent post titled Satan’s Scheme, Dr. Charlton noted the following:
 
Maybe the goal is to convince all people that they are things.
 
(Once that's done, the work of damnation has been achieved - and the rest is just Satan having fun.)
 
To do this by making the world on that treats all-of-reality as things - only things are really-real.

 
I believe that effectively and succinctly captures the essence of what could be referred to as the satanic agenda. Furthermore, I believe “convince” is the key word in Dr. Charlton’s observation. People are not really things, but if they can be convinced that they are in reality nothing more than things, then they will act like things and allow themselves to be treated as things. 

 
On the surface, the satanic goal of convincing people that they are things appears to be an abysmal failure. If asked, I sense nearly all contemporary people would vehemently reject the idea that they are merely things and would instead insist on the reality that they are human beings. In other words, very few moderns appear open to the idea that they are just things.
 
Yet these same moderns also insist upon the un-reality of God, transcendence and the supernatural – which is all discarded as delusional supernaturalism – and choose instead to believe in life as nothing but the random, unguided, accidental, and self-existing evolutionary material “reality” of the natural world, of which they are an integral – but essentially inexplicable and fundamentally meaningless – component.
 
The problem with this humanistic life stance of being immersed solely in the unguided “flow” of the material, natural world is simple – it does diminish human beings to the level of things. Which immediately raises a question – How do modern people reconcile their rejection of being classified as “merely things” with their humanist, reductionist, positivist, leftist assumptions about their place in a reality that is nothing more than the flow and interaction of unguided things?
 
Well, primarily by clasping onto a progressive nontheistic worldview that keeps humanity firmly confined within the limits of the natural world yet somehow magically elevates humanity above the laws and forces of the natural world via “humanity”; more specifically, human reason, which strives “to be good without God” through the implementation and pursuit of ethical values informed by scientific knowledge. These scientifically informed values then give birth to the desire to defend civil liberties, establish secular governance based on justice, compassion, and equality as well as the motivation to affirm the dignity of every human being by ensuring their real needs, here and now.
 
It is the inherent belief in the dignity of every human being that appears to block people from thinking of themselves or other people as things, but this immediately reveals a contradiction. On the one hand, modern people have willingly accepted the belief that they are simply a part of a reality that fundamentally amounts to nothing more than the random unfolding of the natural world. On the other hand, modern people continue to assert that they possess some sort of dignified status within this unguided natural process.
 
I posit that the inherent dignity of every human being that modern people continue to insist upon is rooted in the divine world – the very world their opposing metaphysical assumptions conspire to deny. With this in mind, it is worth noting that the devil’s greatest tricks are the ones he manages to slip past people undetected. By convincing people that the dignity of human beings originates solely in the natural world rather than the “non-existent” divine world, Satan has shrewdly convinced to humanity to sidestep the spiritual issue of overcoming duality.
 
In reality, a human being is a bridge between two worlds – the natural world and the divine world, which together form the cosmos. These two worlds are not actually divided because everything in the material, natural world belongs to the world of the divine, but human nature falls into the trap of perceiving the two worlds as distinct from each other as a dualism of existence. A big part of human spiritual development entails uniting the two worlds within man, which can only be achieved through spiritual freedom and creativity. Uniting the two worlds allows for the possibility of a cosmic perspective – a true religious consciousness that experiences the two apparent worlds in their full extent as unified cosmos. But for this cosmic perspective to be born, the natural world must first be overcome.
 
Overcoming the natural world is not a rejection of it. On the contrary, overcoming the natural world entails redeeming it as part of the cosmos, which requires the recognition of human beings as both essential parts of the cosmos as well as little cosmos in and of themselves.
 
Overcoming the natural world, overcoming the apparent dualism of existence, and attaining a cosmic perspective are acts of spiritual integration through which the fear, suffering, violence, oppression, objectification, alienation, entropy, and evil of the natural world are transcended.
 
It is from this spiritual potential and responsibility that human beings derive their dignity. It is here that a human being knows himself to be more than a mere thing. However, a true understanding of this dignity requires a firm belief in God and Creation.  
 
Satan’s scheme offers a faux solution to the dualism of existence. Instead of striving to unite two worlds within themselves as cosmos, people become convinced that cosmos cannot exist and that there is only one world – the monism of the natural, material world in which everything is just a thing. After this conviction settles into place, Satan diverts the call of the divine – which continues to appear in “natural” man as the need for “dignity” – by convincing people of the nobility of natural human-all-too-human-only-human humanity, which is somehow above the natural “thingness” of everything else.
 
This shift in consciousness locks human beings in the external, material, object world. Stripped of its spiritual aspects, the natural world quickly becomes the “given” world of pure externalities, which is a non-cosmic condition of atomization, alienation, and enmity. Stripped of their spiritual aspects, human beings begin to disintegrate rather than integrate. Instead of overcoming the natural world, man is consumed by it and, in short time, enslaved by it.
 
Having no foundation in cosmic transcendental values, humanity’s human-only-human values of dignity quickly deteriorate. They are subverted, perverted, and inverted and steadily degrade until they become anti-human values. When the spiritual reality of humanity is openly rejected, it is only a matter of time before the “natural” dignity of humanity is ceremoniously debased, devalued, and dehumanized until it becomes “just a thing” and, eventually, “no-thing”.

When people convince themselves that they are things, the spiritual beings they fundamentally are cannot have a genuine "human" experience in this mortal life. They lose the freedom needed to do what they have been incarnated to do. Instead of unifying the natural world and the divine world into the reality of the cosmos that is God and Creation, our divine selves are dragged down into a dehumanized experience of "thingness", which is at once a major obstacle to spiritual learning as well as a certain path to damnation.

Note added: I have drawn some of the ideas I have expressed here from Dr. Charlton's thoughts on cosmic perspective and Nikolai Berdyaev's ideas of creativity. 
5 Comments
Todd
1/26/2022 15:37:35

Wow. This was a good essay. Thank you, Francis.
It really nicely explains how to overcome dualism, which is such a bugbear to so many. Dualism in a way is just a misperception of reality, which is an integrate whole. And the evil side wants us to lose sight of the most important part, the spiritual.
It also explains why human dignity is never enough to prevent constant atrocities in this world. I mean, you have to break some atoms, I mean eggs, to make an omelet, am I right?

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Francis Berger
1/26/2022 17:17:55

@ Todd - Thanks, but in retrospect I probably shouldn't have used the term dualism because I did not mean to refer purely to the mind-matter distinction, but rather specifically to the spiritual-material (I know the two are somewhat synonymous/interchangeable, but still).

I am also unsure if unity or unifying is the proper term here. I have heard William Wildblood refer to it as harmonizing the material and the spiritual, and I think that is probably a better way of putting it.

As for human dignity, any sense of it is diminished greatly if the spiritual aspects of human beings -- that which makes a human whole -- are denied.

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Todd
1/26/2022 19:04:56

Fair enough. But your essay still caused connections and ideas to happen.
I think harmonizing is a better way to look at it.
Regarding dignity - yeah, how does it help human dignity to deny that human beings have a spiritual aspect to their existence or beingness?
Regardless, thank you for writing these essays and daring to express new thoughts and ideas.

bruce charlton
1/26/2022 16:21:46

I found the argument a bit hard to follow in the second half - I shall need to read it again.

The way I think this business works by Satan establishing the negation of persons in the public world - which is essentially bureaucracy in its widest sense.

Within the world of bureaucratic discourse, there are no persons - there are just units, components of quantitative summaries or statistics. And there are symbols - like women, minorities, QERTY people.

People can be allowed to say what they like about individual dignity, persons etc - because there is just no place for this in any of the procedures and systems by which the modern world functions. To consider an actual individual is so much hot air - so far as the system is concerned.

My impression is that most people with education, power, influence, money - have absolutely absorbed the idea that life has no objective purpose or meaning. This negative conviction means that when the chips are down, there is no way of resisting the system - no effective language for resisting it.

And the masses have also that there is no 'free will' - that people attitudes and behaviours are completely explained as responses to causes (such as 'society', genes, environment, incentives, pathologies etc).

Ultimately nobody is to blame, nobody is an agent, everything is explained by previous causes; there is no new origin because everything is a thing, and things are passive.

The fact that these are incoherent does not matter, because it is the negations that are absorbed. People are sure that there is no real God, life after death, souls, no spiritual world etc.

They have a kind a plague-pathology of Doubt, whereby any positive conviction of positive good is recoded as 'wishful thinking', polyanna daydreaming, self-deception, immaturity or ignorance, or conditioning, or having been manipulated.

There is a one-sided cynicism, because this doubt only applies to the positive and Good - the default of negation and opposition is firmly established in all social institutions. i.e. Negation/ opposition does not need to be proved - it is true by default.

This works fine for Leftist ideology because it is entirely negative - being 'against' sexism, racism, etc. With all of public discourse thus corrupted, to argue against the opposition of these supposed evils, is seen as a flat denial that they exist, when their definition (if any) is flexible and involves inferences concerning covert motivations.

It is in practice impossible to disprove a negation; and it is all too easy to argue that those who try are by this 'part of the problem'. Catch 22 is the normal and official mode of operation in modernity.

Reply
Francis Berger
1/26/2022 18:03:50

@ Bruce - Yes, what you have outlined is spot on in terms of how leftism/System mechanisms quantify and commodify people. I was exploring how a common person manages this sort of quantification/commodification by clinging to notions of human dignity, which he or she believes comes purely from the natural world (and/or the given world of the System/society).

In the second half I was attempting to wrap my head around the source of human dignity to which so many atheist/materialists appear to subscribe. I was examining this primarily from the perspective of inner despiritualization (how a despiritualized person thinks about human dignity).

My sense is that real human dignity cannot be rooted purely in materialism -- that it must emanate from the spiritual -- but since atheist/materialists deny the spiritual, they assume it originates in the purely material, natural world. This appears to solve the problem of "thingness", but it actually exacerbates it because it fortifies the atheist/material position against the divine.

The spiritual/natural dual nature of human beings is reduced to the natural. Man no longer works to unite or harmonize the (apparent) two aspects of creation within himself, but identifies exclusively with just one - the natural (I refer to this rather clumsily as dualism -- see my comment to Todd above).

However, since man regards the natural world as un-spiritual, he doesn't really experience the natural world at all -- instead he experiences what I have referred to as the given world (the System, society, the science, etc), pure externals, objectification, thing-ness.

He becomes a thing among things rather than striving to be a subject among subjects (a being among beings -- the harmonization of his spiritual and natural). He becomes incapable of attaining a cosmic perspective, even for brief periods of time. Freedom and creativity are diminished and man gets stuck in the "necessity" of the natural world where he sinks ever deeper into "thing-ness".

In retrospect, I should have probably saved the second part of this post for another occasion. The human dignity exploration was more or less wrapped up in the first half.

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