Conflicting or Amalgamated Myths and Symbolisms and their Involvement in Atrocities

             The interplay of symbolisms in the drive for civilizational control and total power and knowledge can become quite complex. Himmler was using the Hindu Bhagavad Gita to justify murdering Jews, who believed differently than the Christian nationalists of Nazi Germany.  An interesting contrast to Himmler is Hong Xiuquan, the leader of the Taiping movement in China. He is credited with killing 11-20 million people in China. He did so as a Christian, who believed that Jesus was his 'elder brother' and that god had ordered him to save mankind. He combined this Christian form of holy war and redemptive mission with Confucian and Taoist ideologies. The result is a Christianization of traditional Chinese justifications for the totalist state, a kind of amalgamated Christian/Confucian will to power. The "mandate of Heaven" is combined with the racist and ideological supremacy of Christ as the chosen exemplar of the virtuous, who because they are Christian, are superior to others. Hong wrote that in "my hand is the killing power [of] heaven and earth, to behead the evil ones, spare the just and ease the people's sorrow". Again the same pattern of immortalizing murder coupled with benevolent intent. Those who dissent from the new synthesis of beliefs must be killed. Hong saw traditional Chinese as the enemy as much as he saw the British as the enemy.

             The Taiping rebellion is largely the result of missionary and capitalist imperial treatment of the Chinese people.  It represents an attempt to synthesize or amalgamate Western and Chinese ideologies in opposition to both the traditional Chinese state and the British Imperial presence that was then ravaging China. To complicate these conflicts and amalgamations of belief systems even further, Marxism enters Chinese history on top of the British and Taiping bids for power and control of the Chinese cultural mind. The later Maoist overthrow of Chinese nationalism was in many ways the completion of the process that began with the Taiping, which is why the Taiping were seen by Mao as heroes rather than murderers. But in this case, Marxism rather than Christianity, combines with the traditional system of knowledge/power that had been intact in China since the Shang dynasty.

             In all these cases of conflict between rival, combining or migrating systems of knowledge power, the death toll is enormous. The case of Hong, like the case of Himmler shows that the categories of East and West, traditional and modern, are no longer explanatory. Eastern and Western ideas and practices can and have combined in producing atrocities.[1] Traditional ideologies are sometimes agents which bring about modernization. Conflicts between systems of knowledge and power complicate and extend the atrocity producing tendencies of single systems of knowledge/power.

            The complications of interacting systems of knowledge and belief raise the question of whether or not one system of knowledge is truer or more real than another. I think this is the wrong question. There are different kinds of truth and different kinds of realties. Living within a mythic enclosure, a world view, or a belief system is quite different from inside, subjectively considered, than it is from outside, to someone with a different belief system who is observing. Knowledge systems are fluid, not static, despite the attempt to fix them with eternal, infallible, archetypal or scientific status. Science too is a mythic enclosure, however much some of its conclusions may describe aspects of reality. This makes the study of knowledge systems from a scientific perspective highly problematic.  Living within a system of knowledge is real to those within it, just as science seems real to us. What is in fact real in a world view, and what is mythic or projected cannot be precisely determined. Gods are symbols of aspirations, power needs, explanatory, cultural and emotional needs. These are as 'real' as scientific facts. But scientific facts are also culturally determined to some degree: what a scientist chooses to observe is determined by complex cultural biases and choices. This is not to say that there are no facts or no realities, or that factual information is necessarily just a "story" or relative to the bias of the scientist.

            Since the question of what is real and not real cannot be precisely answered,  knowledge systems must be regarded with some skepticism, whatever their claims. What matters is the effect knowledge systems have on the world, on nature and on human beings.  Ideas in themselves do not matter at all. The question is how they are applied, what they do.This can be known to a significant degree: Himmler and Hong killed enormous numbers of people; big business sacrifices people and environments for profits. The question of whether or not Hong's Confucian/Christianity, Himmler's nationalist Christian/Hinduism or the complex beliefs involved in Big Business are 'true' or 'real' is a question that is beside the point. What matters is what they do, not what exalted status of truth and reality they claim to represent. Thus the primary justification for a useful or good knowledge system is its fairness, equality and inclusion of natural and human rights, not whether or not it is 'true' or 'real'. Does it sustain, nurture and help human and natural worlds, or does it undermine, waste or destroy them in useless conflicts.

            Enclosure in systems of knowledge and action is a process that is not very well understood. In the religions for instance, in most cases, indoctrination begins in early youth. But it is possible to shift world views later in life. I have gone through periods where my upbringing in a scientific society has charmed and gladdened me, and other times where I deplored and rejected it. The world of biology is full of beauty and no one can deny the wonders of the stars. But I've also spent most of my life in fear of atomic weapons and witnessed environmental abuses. In either case, I had good reason to love or hate science. The deeper question is to understand how a system of knowledge like science becomes destructive, whatever its positive aspects may be.

             I have entered into and practiced a number of religions, Buddhist, Christian, Islamic and Native American. I do not deny there is beauty in religion. But currently my interest in religion is restricted to questioning its role in the activity of systems of knowledge and power. What creates enclosure in a religious system is the activity of prayer, devotional sequences, meditation on stories, association of the body with postures and thoughts, as in yoga, and the association of emotions and experiences with symbols. Religions and sciences are born out of our existence interacting with the world. They picture the human and natural situation in symbols. These symbols are generated like dreams out of the substance of human life itself, without intellectual elaboration. The dogmas, laws, codes, institutions and formulae come later and are socially motivated.  The intellectual elaborations then serve to justify interpretations that legitimize the motives and views of dominant groups.  One must ask why a given society advocates one interpretation of facts and symbols rather than another? To understand the original motives for a given religious or scientific formulation requires seeking back into the context in which it arose. Christianity, for instance, originally grew out of the despair and hopes of small Jewish groups during the Roman occupation of Jerusalem. The despair and hope were real, and the Gospels and other early symbolizations express these needs and hopes in poetic or artistic forms.  It all depends on how these images and poetry are read, literally,  psycho-historically, "esoterically", or as expressions of despairs and hopes of a endangered community. In my view, the human reality of the suffering undergone by early Christians is real enough.[2] But the symbolic reality they created, and which become transposed onto a Roman view of hierarchical domination is both false and unfortunate. Once the "church' developed around the symbols and stories that had been generated out of the despair and hope, an institution with dogmas, hierarchies and punishments evolved. Likewise with the growth of science: wishing to know why plants flower or how to grow food better, or how to alleviate the suffering of the sick are all honest motives. But once science became institutionalized and reflected the interests of corporate or nationalist powers, it turned itself to the service of making guns, money and bombs. [3] The principle question is to try to understand how a system of knowledge orchestrates benefits and destructive results, because understanding this will eventually bring about the possibility of limiting the destructive results.

            When a system of knowledge ceases to reflect the original human realities that motivated it, it becomes dangerous: it begins to serve benefits for a few and deprivations for the many.  Systems of symbols and knowledge arise from human needs and reactions; the need of love, food, security, certainty, the fear of death; the need to explain the world one lives in, needs of family, the nature of animals and plants and above all, the meaning of suffering.  What is 'true' in religion and science is their basis in these needs and realities. What is false in religion and science is that these needs and realities are elaborated by institutions, as well as by  men with power as their goal, into symbols which borrow the authority of what they symbolize. A man named Jesus may have suffered, but to make a god of him is a kind of 'divine lie' that leads to all sorts of abuses. Everyone suffers, and the need to explain or understand suffering is universal. But to exploit this need and create a self- serving bureaucratic institution on the basis of the suffering of others is wrong. Once the lie of Christ's divinity becomes entrenched and questioning the lie becomes heretical, and people are killed who question it, then a cult has developed, holy war begins and the lie that hides the truth is defended to the death. But the truth has long ago been betrayed, the war is senseless, and knowledge comes to represent anything but the truth. Knowledge and the powers it serves become the lie that hides and suppresses the truth.

             Everyone commits actions that are 'wrong' or 'sinful' from the point of view of religions or elite powers, but to exploit this fact and build institutions that benefit a few and punish many bypasses the real causes and magnifies the possibilities of corruption and abuse. Crime cannot be solved by Congressional fiat, the threat of hell or the fiction of Karma, but only by addressing the causes in poverty, despair and inequality.  "Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge", Walter Benjamin wrote. [4] Which is to say that life is more than truth, human and natural realities are more than knowledge. Resistance to systems of knowledge/power begins by trying to escape from the enclosure of ourselves within them.  This is not always easy. Leaving a religion, a set of beliefs, or an ideology can be as painful as losing a wife, a husband or a country. But sometimes, when the sense of one's own existence, or one's life is threatened by a system of knowledge and control, one's only option is to abandon the system and preserve ones rights and perhaps, one's life. One grieves for the loss, but one is still alive.

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