Quest of the Spirit: From Suffering to Acceptance

5. Battling Victimization and Oppression: Eliade, Sinclair, Goldman, Buber

 1.  Ethics also plays a critical role in theologian Martin Buber's perception of man's loss and alienation. Buber attributes man's spiritual separation from God as the principal cause of his victimization. In this respect, man suffers because of his spiritual estrangement from God; thus, only secular remnants of his earlier religious affinity exist in the form of what Mircea Eliade describes his "tragic existence." Eliade suggests that "Man is haunted by realities that he has denied, and [that] his earlier religious behavior is still present emotionally in his deepest being 'ready to be re-actualized.'"Like Jung's archetypes, the remains of his ceremonial rituals exist in the form of "superstitions and taboos" creating camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals such as "New Year festivities, house-warming ceremonies, marriage rites and parties at the birth of a child or a social advancement." In essence, man's religious inheritance surfaces in numerous practices, although suppressed and perverted from its original form, much like Freud's theory of sublimation form positive or negative behavior resulting from repressed sexual energy. Eliade contends that the "myths of modern man" subconsciously emerge in "the plays he enjoys, the books he reads, the cinema ('that dream factory'), and television; with fights between heroes and monsters, paradisal landscapes and descents into hell" (Oliver 22). Man's victimization proves inescapable, almost to the extent that it is paradoxical. As Martin Buber observes, "Modern man is nourished by the myths of the unconscious, but he does not thereby achieve a truly religious experience or vision of the world. This nonreligion is equivalent to a new 'fall of man'; he does not understand the role of religion and hence cannot live it consciously" (23). In Images of God, Buber describes what he calls the tragic irony of the creation account, from which Adam and Eve acquire the "knowledge of good and evil" through an act of disobedience which separates them from their Creator and costs them immortal status with their God (28). As Buber suggests in Two Types of Faith, "Man sins as Adam sinned and not because Adam sinned" (30). Tragically, and ironically, man's desire to be divine by his own means rather than God's condemns him to a life of eternal separation (30) which forms the basis for the twentieth-century archetypal wanderer" whose inescapable name is Adam" (33). It is said that the descendants of Cain, other subsequently known as Kennites, because of God's mercy upon their ancestor were among the most righteous of the tribes during the period of the Exile, and for that reason were spared the persecution, captivity, and death of their Jewish counterparts. Ironically, Cain's prayer to spare him from the judgment of men concerning the murder of his brother Abel and the mark which protected him left an indelible impression upon his children and their children. Thus, from the crime of fratricide and its subsequent consequences, God created a miracle  which worked for His own glory.  Fortunately, the paradoxical nature of sin and faith transcends human understanding and creates avenues for spiritual growth beyond the mind of man.

  2.      As a result of Adam's "loss of dialogue with God," man resorts to "the main trends of modern political and sociological thought" for fulfillment. Buber describes twentieth-century man as a lost member of "the fatal division of the race of Cain" who thus lapses into a form of "fratricidal violence," which leads him and portions of society as a whole to "no longer understand each other," becoming, as it were, a disillusioned generation following "the false cohesion of the self-sufficient, sky-aspiring men of Babel." This "disruption of dialogue," he contends, manifests itself in "the actual conduct of large human societies," as evidenced in World War I, in the leaders' increasing inability to communicate from diverse points of view (52). Consequently, a form of mistrust develops in the place of honesty and integrity, a mistrust which Buber attributes to "a scientific rationalization in the teaching of Marx and Freud" (54). Thus, in its most tragic sense, determinism, or the misperception of it, indirectly governs the behavior of nations, and its impact upon the lives of whole societies proves devastating. Like Einstein and Born, Buber calls for a means of remedying the dilemma by establishing "a vital peace which will deprive the political principle of its supremacy over the social principle." Serving the "resolute will of all peoples" on the planet, together, must play the foremost role, not any of the "devices of political organization" (55). As Buber suggests, "The hope for this hour depends upon the renewal of dialogical immediacy between men . . . Then, we shall recognize that immediacy is injured not only between man and man, but also between the being called man and the source of his existence" (54). In this way, the man-to-man and man-to-God relationship can hopefully be reconciled (Oliver 54). In reality the theories of Freud, Marx,  Darwin, and Spencer have done much to denigrate the value of humanity. Today, capitalism, like communism,  does much the same by exploiting the poor  and empowering the rich. Speaking out against the evils of capitalism in her autobiography Living My Life (1931), Emma Goldman said in one of her speeches for the unemployed, "Men and women, do you not realize that the State is the worst enemy you have? It is a machine that crushes you in order to sustain the ruling class, your masters. Like naive children you put your trust in your political leaders. You make it possible for them to creep into your confidence, only to have them betray you to the first bidder. But even where thee is no direct betrayal, the labor politicians make common cause with your enemies to keep you in leash, to prevent your direct action. The State is the pillar of capitalism, and it is ridiculous to expect any redress from it" (Goldman 122).  Upton Sinclair  continually stresses  in One Clear Call  that Marx'himself affirmed that socialism can come about through  peaceful parlamentary means as well as revolution (Sinclair 380). Marx said this in the Hague Convention in 1872.  Although Goldman's and Sinclair's words expressed a strong sentiment almost a century ago, today it could also be argued that the same form of power and influence exists in our government today. Surely, capitalism has its benefits, but its evils  sadly go unchecked.

                                                                                      Works Cited

Buber, Martin. Images of God:Studies in the Relationship Between Religion and                                                Philosophy.Princeton University Press, 2015.

Goldman, Emma. Living My Life. In Two Volumes. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1970.

Sinclair, Upton. One Clear Call. New York: The Viking Press, 1948.