I came across this quote from Fritz Fanon today that has been circulating lately on Facebook. It prompted me to think about the course I am teaching on Christianity this semester and the gale of resistance it has generated from some of my students.
In many ways, Fanon understood implicitly what Jesus spoke of in his rhetoric about the Kingdom of G_d. Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth was devoted to the peoples of an occupied Northern Africa struggling to develop a sense of their own dignity and ultimately to be free of their European occupiers. Jesus lived in a similar context, a Roman occupied Galilee where his assertion “Blessed are the poor” stood in stark contradiction to the Roman system of extraction which enriched the 1% of their day while impoverishing the 99% who produced that luxury.
Trying to get students to actually look at the Jesus of 1st CE Roman Palestine is difficult on a good day. They either don’t want to hear about Jesus – or any other aspect of religion - at all or they come with inherited and thus largely unexamined religious constructs already firmly in place. Rudimentary, undeveloped understandings of the Christ of faith routinely provide little room for a Jesus whom our textbook readily recognizes as a rebel, a subverter of the status quo and ultimately an enemy of the state.
The imperatives of existential security cannot be underestimated. If one’s religious construct is a means of reassuring oneself of an ongoing life after death marked by comfort and ease, however contrived that might ultimately be, shining too much light on said constructs can easily make one a lightning rod. Jesus certainly knew that. Indeed, his unwillingness to back away from that endeavor ultimately cost him his life.
Still,
it is the role of a true teacher to prompt his students to think, even when it’s
painful to do so. Perhaps especially when it’s painful to do so. I sent out
Fanon’s quote with the following announcement to my class yesterday. My guess
is that a good number of the students won’t read it. Even so, if even one or
two brave souls and open minds consider it, perhaps it will be worth the
trouble.
March
16, 2014
Announcements
I found this quote from North African philosopher Fritz Fanon today. It strikes me that a number of you might resonate with the phenomenon this describes. As Lent builds toward Holy Week and the remembrance of the execution of Jesus on Good Friday, consider how his message and his actions may well have prompted cognitive dissonance in his hearers, a painful state that people will seek to avoid if possible and end as soon as possible if encountered.
A common way to end cognitive dissonance is to shoot the messenger. Hebrew culture called it stoning the prophet. I sometimes refer to it as putting them out of our misery.
Now consider Jesus' entry into Jerusalem that causes a major uproar at the beginning of the Passover feast. Hebrew legend has it that if the Messiah is going to return, he'll come during Passover. Christians commemorate this event as Palm Sunday: "Hosanna to the King!"
Jesus then proceeds to go to the Second Temple in the heart of Jerusalem, the nerve center for religion, business and Roman rule. He disrupts business. The Sadducee temple cult is out of business for the day, unable to make their sacrifices because the money cannot be changed (profane Roman coinage is not permitted in the Temple to pay for the animals for sacrifice). The herders and traders are out of business as well. And the Romans, ever vigilant for any sign of disturbance, realize they've got a major problem on their hands.
Little wonder that within days Jesus will be taken by the Romans after being made aware of his whereabouts by their Temple cult collaborators and publicly executed.
The Teachable Moment
However, cognitive dissonance, while painful, is not necessarily bad. Cognitive dissonance signals that a person has encountered a divergence between their understanding of reality and the reality they encounter. That gap provides space to grow, to learn, to develop. Educators call it the teachable moment. Many of Jesus' disciples understood this implicitly. In response to the cognitive dissonance Jesus prompted with his teachings that reversed the world order they knew (Blessed are the poor?), they had chosen to grow, to become, to develop. As a result their lives changed dramatically. Greeks called this process metanoia.
Cognitive dissonance is unavoidable for the true student in an actual learning situation. A good teacher will always present students with ideas and understandings that do not simply affirm the foregone conclusions of their students. Good teachers always challenge the understandings that students brought with them often provoking painful cognitive dissonance. As former California governor, movie star and weight lifting champion Arnold Schwarzenegger puts it, "No pain, no gain."
That presents the student with a choice. They can rationalize, ignore or deny the new ideas and understandings. They can even choose to shoot the messenger - sometimes quite literally - to put the messenger out of their misery. Or, they can choose to bear with the pain of cognitive dissonance, to expand the envelop of their understanding, to grow, develop and to become a slightly larger person than before.
Original Sin?
M. Scott Peck in his masterful book The Road Less Traveled observes that human beings always have the potential to grow, to become and to develop their highest potentials as individuals and members of communities. So why don't we?
He observes that there are three reasons: human beings tend to avoid pain (e.g., cognitive dissonance), we find ourselves incapable of delaying gratification and we tend to avoid any kind of exertion requiring effort and energy on our part. Clearly, we are well trained consumers, addicted to convenience and presuming ourselves entitled to constant comfort. But Peck has a different description of this avoidance of the road less traveled to growth and development. He calls it original sin.
Perhaps
some food for thought this second week of Lent.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott
Coverston, M.Div. J.D., Ph.D.
Member,
Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest,
Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor:
Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University
of Central Florida, Orlando
If the unexamined life is not worth
living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is
not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to
production in sound bytes.
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