This post from Pastor John Wright is extremely truthful. It explains in an insightful way just how we arrive, I believe, at such monstrous self-deceptions (monstous in their consequences for “others”, and so ultimately, to ourselves.
The story is drawn from a Harry Potter tale:
Dudley is obviously being malformed because his parent’s “opinion” that there is no finer boy than him anywhere is based on an attachment to their son that does not truthfully reflect Dudley’s character. His behavior becomes seen as “natural”, even admirable, because the parent’s love, in itself commendable, is separated from what is really good and true…
I was struck with something of the “American mythos” tonight, watching National Trerasure (with Nicolas Cage) as I recognized the nationalistic (and ultimately idolatrous) reverence for the “Declaration of Independence” and lines like “The Declaration of Independence is not a bargaining chip”, as if it were the most ultimate of all values. So many have that sensibility that summons goosebumps at the “history” of it, and the canonical like stature with which the “signers of the Declaration” are held (and Nicolas Cage “shivering with awe at the thought of how “the last time this (the Declaration) was in this room, was when it was being signed”.
When the war began, it was meant to seem ‘natural.’ The US populace chuckled, “little tyke” and said, “he just wants to get his money worth, just like us.” The commitment to a fictious entity called “the United States” became separated from what was good and true, just as the Ba’athist commitment to a fictional entity called “Iraq” had also become separated from what was good and true. The mindless cycle of violence that seems so ‘natural’ has based in the webs of deceit on all sides. Attachments had arisen that had been corrupted, malformed. The result, just like Dudley, a malformed people unable to see their own real character continues — and sin marches on by what it is not.
Believe me, the mythos is powerful. Only in recent years has the heroic and almost “kairos” quality of the American “moments” begun to fade into relative insiginificance; paled before the glare of truth, exposed in its hubris, and allegiance to what many other empires have fallen for: the deception that they can control history. This is something I’ve caught from Stanley Hauerwas, and it makes a lot of sense, this “nonsense” of the gospel that is “foolishness” to the Greeks (the Greco-Roman culture; this alliance of knowledge — or the academy– and military might to “assure” the access to the right balance of power). The “wisdom” they manufacture for our consumption and assimilation is the darkness that keeps us from recognizing.
All of our perceptions, judgments, character, knowledge are embedded in our attachments. That is why all our attachments must be ordered continually in repentance in desire for God, in whom all Truth and Goodness converge in Harmony and Peace. With our attachments ordered from God, we then may have our eyes cleared to see truthfully, so that our commitments, our attachments, might lead us to see what is really natural, rather than the sinful lack that surrounds us. That way, maybe we won’t raise new Dudley’s, or war-making regimes within the United States.
Go and read the whole post. Much more in there about the “misbehaving” U.S. that all its subjects think is so adorable, man-tough, and “plain-folksy” and just “common sense” (I can still heart Bush echoing his lines: “A common sense policy”)
