Societal Dysfunction, the Alt-Right, Spirituality, and Following Your Bliss

A headline at today's online New York Times: "‘Hero’ Bystander Shot at Texas Killer; 26 Dead at Church." The reference is to the shooting at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., which claimed the lives of 26 innocent people and ended with the death of the shooter himself. The hero in question was an unidentified bystander, a man who pursued the shooter and exchanged fire with him with his, the armed bystander's, own rifle.

Candlelight vigil following the
First Baptist Church shooting

The shooting was yet another sign of the burgeoning dysfunctionality within our society. Such awful things are happening more and more these days.

Looking for a solution to the gun violence problem, we've talked about passing tighter firearms laws. I support such measures, but I know they are politically impossible at this point. Besides, all this gun violence is but a symptom of things that are wrong with our society at a deeper level — at a spiritual level, I'd say.

By "spiritual" I mean something that taps into the universal human capacity that goes beyond the teachings of any particular organized religion. I mean what Rabbi Michael Lerner talked about in such books as his 2000 "Spirit Matters." A quote from Lerner:

Reality is much more complex than any judgment of right and wrong encourages you to believe. When you really understand the ethical, spiritual, social, economic, and psychological forces that shape individuals, you will see that people's choices are not based on a desire to hurt. Instead, they are in accord with what they know and what world views are available to them. Most are doing the best they can, given what information they've received and what problems they are facing.

We're encountering a potpourri of different world views in America today, which is one of the principal factors that blocks us off from attaining greater unity and harmony. One of the world views that is coming to the fore right now is that of the so-called "alt-right." In the Sunday Washington Post yesterday, I found a Carlos Lozada review of three new books about this phenomenon. "Where the alt-right wants to take America — with or without Trump" has it that the participants in the alt-right movement occupy "an alternative dimension, a mental space beyond fact or logic, where the rules of evidence are replaced by paranoia."

The alt-rightists are deemed, at least by their opponents (of whom I am one), to be white supremacists/nationalists. I'd accordingly say each of them must feel as if he (I use the pronoun because most are white males) is someone from whom something has been taken. They each feel as if their once-dominant culture has come under attack from the cultural left, with its insistence on the so-called "identity politics" that empowers nonwhites, immigrants, women, gays, and so on.

In other words, they feel as if society has herded them into some sort of cultural jailhouse. And it's true: the cultural left has pretty well established a new set of strictures on thought and behavior. The strictures are what's called "political correctness." The alt-rightists hate political correctness.

But that means there is a tendency for alt-rightists to be haters in general. Their vituperative online behavior — so-called "trolling" — bears witness to that. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary online offers this definition of "troll":

to antagonize (others) online by deliberately posting inflammatory, irrelevant, or offensive comments or other disruptive content

Hate is not a spiritual value. Rather, just as is the burgeoning gun violence in America today, it is symptomatic of a spiritual deficiency.

In 1949, Joseph Campbell wrote in his premiere book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there is something lacking in the normal experience available or permitted to the members of society. The person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir.

To Campbell, the "hero adventure" that is at the heart of much of the world's trove of mythological wisdom is a spiritual journey towards personal compassion, not hate. Vituperation and hate offer the hero no life-giving elixir, no vitalizing boon that the journeying hero can bring back to his troubled society to heal its wounds. Rather, said the late scholar of myth, the true path to spiritual elevation is for each potential hero among us to "follow your bliss."

"Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be," Campbell said. The things that initially may seem to be soul-strangling strictures imposed upon the individual by society are ultimately illusory. The hero's adventure takes him or her beyond the current politics or current sociology of his society to reveal a life-giving elixir that is compounded of courage and compassion. The pathway of vituperation and hate does not lead to such an elixir; that's one of the lessons taught by Jesus.

So, please, let's all look elsewhere than the alt-right for paths to America's spiritual healing. Let's all learn to go on a hero's journey and (what amounts to the same thing) to follow our bliss.