Civilisation And Its Dishwashers

Civilisation And Its Dishwashers

Thursday, 19 January 2006

DishwasherCivDishYou?

“Friggy,” people say to me, “adored your pieces on love, death and iPods. Where to next?”

It was politics or religion, of course.

I flipped a coin, but I was barracking for religion, because politics just makes me angry to the point at which words fail me (yes, it happens) and I have to squeeze my vintage thalidomide drug-rep stress-ball.The problem with writing about religion, of course, is that if it’s going to avoid offending anyone, it’s probably going to avoid saying anything as well. I don’t like to offend people, but I am fond of saying the odd thing, so please refer to the list at the end of this article to see if I think I might have offended you before reading any further. I’m only trying to be reasonable here.

So. I was at a council swimming pool recently. It’s now frequented by inhabitants of the funky flats and townhouses that have popped up nearby, so they can do a few laps between brainstorming video conference calls and decaf skinny chai lattes with the personal trainer. That way there’s something better to look at in the full-length mirror on the way to the ensuite-with-spa after pampering oneself in front of the plasma-screen with the entire second series of American Idol on DVD. Because you’re worth it, right?

I looked up from my dog-paddle to see a group of people, fully dressed, approaching the lap pool. My first thought was: They must be Pool Parents, but where are the little splashy noisy people? Then three of the group got in the pool with their clothes on, and the penny dropped. Ahhh, a baptism.

“What are they doing in my lane?” my gut murmured (you can trust your gut to say uncharitable things like that). “Is nothing sacred anymore?”

“Now there’s a thought, something sacred”, replied my brain, watching the gathering chat amiably amongst itself, young and old, black, brown, pink of skin all smiling whilst the baptism took place. “What a wonderful assortment of people,” my brain went on (as it does). “What else would bring a group of that diversity together? A polling booth? A car crash?”

“Good point,” said my gut, and went back to digesting breakfast.

Is nothing sacred anymore? Dumb question. Better question: If we are post-religious, are we post-community too?

(that’s my Carrie Bradshaw-ism for the piece, had to get it out of the way)

Groups are so last millennium. We’re in the age of the individual, of the cult of the self. Each to his own, horses for courses, whatever works for you, right? The dynamics that promoted group survival in centuries past (provided the individual was accepted by the group, as opposed to being nailed to things by the group) is no longer required. Need stimulus? Phone a friend, Eddie. Need structure? Watch telly. Need moral guidance? Nah, neither do I, as long as we don’t break the law, anything goes. An Evangelist Christian friend once told me that post-modernism is the enemy of Evangelism: Sure, people are free to choose any spiritual pursuit, he seemed to say, as long as it’s Christianity (Henry Ford springs to mind). If not, it’s the evangelist’s job to remind them what’s good for them. Apparently. “Whatever works for you”, said my brain. I won’t say what my gut said.

So we sit in our little boxes surrounded by everything we want, and connect to the world electronically, anonymously, briefly. Religion was the opium of the masses; television is the benzo. Want a whole evening to pass without having to bother existing? Pop a Moggie, or better still, chuck the telly on. Repeat after me – I’m worth it!

*

The local Anglican church has had to merge with the next suburb’s congregation, too few people showing up. Soon it will be sold to developers, who’ll get four ‘unique’ magnificently appointed townhouses out of the shell of the old girl. I went along to a service and warmed to the place, with its little old ladies and their cups of tea, the droning through tired old hymns, the warble of the tired old clergyman. “Peace be with you” said a stranger in the row in front of me, and shook my hand. He smelled like soap.

It made me think about life as a clergyman, getting up on Sundays to carry on about the meaning of life in front of a captive audience, then dashing about the rest of the week in a collar, with tea and empathy. Psychiatry is not so far from that – the most meaningful work we do is supportive, and contemplative.

After the church service I walked past the community hall where hundreds of people sang to a band-backed cacophony. A chalk board outside said ‘JOY’. This was where the baptism people must come from, I concluded. They all looked pretty joyful in there. They were rocking out, too.

Churches, as meeting places, places where reflection and fellowship are sacred, I like. The bunches of old blokes that for centuries have called themselves The Church (regardless of denomination) I have trouble with, however. Brain and gut both.

I doff my lid to the old men who wrote the bit in the Old Testament (just to make sure I slander all Abrahamic religions evenly here) about God creating man in his own image. That’s really clever, making God a He, this bloke on a cloud who Fathers the world. Those old men seem to be suggesting that their idea of God was a bit like them, only bigger, so that if we all did what they said, then we’d be OK, and if not, they’d tell God, and being big, he’d make life very much more difficult for us than a few angry old men with sticks and stones could. Clearly, it worked for them.

Of course, if there really is anything like a wilful external power beyond that of humans, the chances are we wouldn’t have the first clue about it, because we only notice what our five senses have been trained to notice, and can only begin to conceive of what we have the constructs in place to describe. So there might well be a God, beyond the universe, beyond time, beyond anything we have the first clue about. How on earth, however, that God-Beyond would give two hoots about the ins and outs of the Billings Method is beyond my ability to conceive. So to speak.

For the record, I’m a bit of a fan of Jesus, the historical figure. You know, the inspired and inspiring bloke who shows up the ancient Jewish theocracy for the corrupt hypocrites they are, and gets murdered by the Romans for it. So inspired are his bereft followers that they spread the zany idea of Being Nice To People all over the Mediterranean, and it goes quite well for a while, until the Romans decide to stop slaughtering Christians and, well, be them. One and a half millennia down the track, lo and behold the Catholic Church is full of corruption and hypocrisy. If Jesus is in fact sitting on high watching this, he must be, like, “Oh, man. Not again, people! Oy!” It takes another five hundred years and the invention of Birkenstocks to calm him down.

Being a psychiatry trainee, I’ve met God quite a few times: patients who know they’re God, consultants who just have a hunch. Combine the two, (that is, delusion with learnedness and charisma), and, it could be argued, you have yourself a Prophet. There we go, scientific explanation for God and religion, instant offence to squillions of people worldwide.

Freud thought God was a defence. A neuroscientist can point to God on a PET scan, as a bit of brain that lights up when you pray. Angry atheists think God is an excuse to kill people, hurt people, oppress people. All of these people seem to say that He is of Us. We created him in our image, not the other way around. I think the ‘God is a human construct’ line can be incredibly patronising, even if my scientific training insists it’s the most likely thing (besides the notion of God-Beyond, something neither science nor any other human construct can begin to describe). Sure, that might work for the scientists, but not for the majority of our fellow humans. Can scientists claim to know better? I think that would be most unwise.

So do I believe in God? (I’m working on the fighting chance that you care what I believe. Of course, we’re Post-Everything here, so it only matters what you believe. Right?)

True to shrinky form, I’ll respond to the question with a question.

With the decline of mainstream Christian religion in Western society, as more and more people tick the ‘whatever’ box on the census, what are the alternatives for the soul? Unless you convert to a non-Christian religion, you’re left with the charismatic Christian churches, some of whose ideologies can be fairly stringent (to wit: Members of Family First and the Let’s Burn A Lesbian Hoo Hah). Even if they do rock out.

Yet, when people hit upon the tough stuff, like on cancer wards (where I recently worked providing the psychiatry service), they look for something to make that bit of their brain light up. Try telling them that God’s a defence against existential anxiety and you’d likely cop a biff in the chops. Which would work for them, I suppose.

I believe that religion is part bathwater, part baby. The bathwater is the sexism, the misuse of power, the corruption, the hypocrisy, the war. Out it goes, hurrah. The baby, sadly, is the community that churches serve as a base for. Out that goes, too.

I remember a discussion with my school chaplain, in which he said that the cross is taller than it is wide because Man’s relationship with God is more important than with his fellow people. My considered response to this was to avoid religion in all forms for many years. I thought it was far more important to believe in people, and I still do. That’s enough of a struggle isn’t it?

People talk about finding God, and about finding themselves. If we find each other, will that do?

Maybe Nothing is sacred. To look at the night sky and consider everything I have been taught about the universe is to be in the company of space such as I cannot begin to understand. The gaps between the innumerable stars contain yet more stars whose light is yet to reach us. In the countryside, where you go to see a sky that hints at those unlit stars, you hear the silence. You lie still, and realise you will never experience true stillness or silence, as you will always know the thrum of your pulse, the ceaseless indecision of air in your throat.

Lying down under the milky way, or sitting hunched over in a building of worship in the silence between hymn and prayer, these are two of the places where I come close to Nothing. I mean the Nothing that is our Matrix, over which we dump layer after layer of what we like to call civilisation. In contemplation of the vast spaces both without and within us, our space junk – dishwashers, shares, insurance, suits, cars, iPods, tax, laptops, legislation, newspapers, mobile phones, personal trainers, television - begins to recede. It never quite goes – so that pure Nothing is unattainable while we live, only hinted at. Sacred.

How does the song go? “Nothing’s gonna stop us now”. Not quite. Nothing will stop us in the end, or at least, when we stop, when we end, Nothing will be there. For now, we must make do with a glimpse of it, a creation of some space in our cluttered lives.

So it wasn’t such a dumb question, I guess.

People I may have offended:

If you are not on this list and I have offended you, please let me know, so that the list can be amended for the version of this article that will appear in “Get Pseud! The very most of Dr Frigmund Pseud” (Harper Collins, 2008)

If you have not been offended by this article in any way, please read it again. Maybe you weren’t paying attention.