The More Things Change…

The more things change, the more they remain the same. This is espe­cially true when it comes to human nature. After many years of study­ing human behav­ior, I have come to appre­ci­ate the ever­last­ing rel­e­vance of the first few sto­ries in Gen­e­sis. Fun­da­men­tally, we humans vio­late nec­es­sary bound­aries, then we lose our self-esteem and resort to blam­ing and sham­ing. Worse yet, we attempt to hide from God. On top of that, we per­ceive God as puni­tive rather than restora­tive. The cycle esca­lates. The rest of the story is about lying, mur­der, greed, war, and a con­stant ratio­nal­iz­ing of our own mal­ad­justed behaviors.

We humans have not come very far from the very first cou­ple. In fact, many may be revert­ing to a more prim­i­tive state (act­ing worse than ani­mals). Mes­mer­ized by our own tech­no­logic suc­cesses, we turn a blind eye toward the social ills that threaten our very exis­tence. When we go down to the dust, our machines will remain as sym­bols of what might have been a utopia, if we had paid atten­tion to our most basic reli­gious sto­ries. We cre­ated a tech­nol­ogy beyond the wildest dreams of our fore­bears, but ignored the pit­falls of our own nature.

Maybe we need to go back to the essen­tials of the early Bible sto­ries: admit that we vio­late basic trusts; own our behav­iors; stop blam­ing and sham­ing; stop pro­ject­ing our imag­i­nary “bad guy” images on God; real­ize our lim­i­ta­tions; stop pre­tend­ing that God does not know; stop play­ing “spin” games with infor­ma­tion; accept God’s efforts at re-establishing a rela­tion­ship with us; give up the myths that we can cure our own spir­i­tual ills with­out an eye toward the Eternal.

There is noth­ing more rad­i­cal than the basics. The lessons we learned as chil­dren (if we were so for­tu­nate as to have a basic Bible School expe­ri­ence) are more rel­e­vant the longer we live. Take a look at the pri­mary infor­ma­tion flow of the cur­rent world. How much blam­ing and sham­ing do you see? How about the vic­tim­iza­tion of gen­der dif­fer­ences? How about the vio­lence lev­els in every­thing from atti­tudes to words to world wars? Has human­ity “evolved” or have we merely changed the look of our cul­tural and tech­no­logic cloth­ing? Things are really chang­ing these days, but they’re really not.