Cautionary note, Traditional Christian Morality, Racism and National Character

CAUTIONARY NOTE:   

TRADITIONAL CHRISTIAN MORALITY, RACISM AND NATIONAL CHARACTER

           According to the Bible, every human is Adams’s descendant.  All of us thus have the same ancestor and the same, fall-corrupted, evil nature.  Early modern English theologians described this foundation of their psychology often and emphatically.  (See Ch 5. of The Psychology of Traditional Christian Sins and Virtues.)  This basic assumption made traditional Christianity incommensurable with racism.

           As a result of Adam’s transgression, all humans are born with a sin-corrupted, evil nature.  Yet, the innate, fallen nature could be -- indeed, absolutely had to be -- totally changed.  This assumption/requirement placed traditional Christianity to the extreme cultural determinism end in the nature-vs.nurture debate, a location that further emphasized Christianity’s incompatibility with racism.

           Christian cultural determinism did, however, come with an important caveat:  changing the innate nature of fallen humans required exceptional methods.  These methods -- the conversion process and meditation (there may have been others) -- do not exist in all cultures.  In societies that do not use these or other effective methods, innate urges should remain the determining force in people’s behavior.  Those cultures should thus be on the nature end of the nature-vs-nurture scale.

           Conversion and meditation exerted their influence at a very deep psychological level.  These “psychological tools” changed will, “rational” thinking, self-evident assumptions and the strength and attachments of fast, reflexive emotional reactions.  These parts of personality feel so natural and operate so fast, that they seem innate.  This impression does in fact come very close to being correct, because many of traditional Christianity’s virtues overcame genetically coded behaviors.

           The requirement to subdue innate, gene-coded urges creates a problem for efforts to describe traditional Christian morality, because genes have far-reaching influence on the mind, and they used that influence to defend themselves.  In “rational” thinking, gene-coded urges bring up with lightning speed all possible excuses/defenses that can protect them and justify pursuing their goals.  In emotions, gene-coded urges make pointing out our unconscious, evil motivations feel instinctively unpleasant, shameful and infuriating.   Flesh/gene’s psychological defenses culminated in the instinctive rage at criticism produced by pride/drive to dominate.  (See Ch. 7 of The Psychology of Traditional Christian Sins and Virtues.)  This emotional reaction was one of the most dangerous innate traits of fallen human nature because it prevented humans from using their brain’s reasoning capability to improve by learning from their errors.

         Describing traditional Christian morality means describing the dangerous influences of genes.  Discussing this subject almost inevitably triggers genes’ psychological defenses -- having one’s pride, envy, anger, lechery etc. pointed out feels unpleasant/infuriating.  To protect themselves, flesh/genes cause “rational thinking” to grab at whatever arguments it can find, and today the most powerful (i.e, most strongly emotionally loaded) “weapons” available are the verbal labels “hate speech”, “racism” and “sexism”.  The intense revulsion associated with these terms makes them very effective “counterattacks.”   Once genes mange to label an effort to criticize them as one of these taboos, the case is in effect closed.  There is no longer any need for evidence-based discussion of the criticism’s factual accuracy.
 
           The concept of “ hate-speech” has been introduced as a well-intentioned effort to help people by protecting them from comments they feel unpleasant.  One wonders, however, whether this is the real motivation or just a rationalization?  From the perspective of traditional Christian psychology of sins, hate-speech laws look very much like the state beginning to enforce pride’s instinctive rage at criticism.  This possibility looks particularly likely, when we recall that conversion and its associated mortification of pride changed people’s instinctive emotional reactions.  Humble people experienced the same pleasure at criticism that the proud experienced at praise and admiration.  For a truly humble Christian, the concept of hate-speech thus made no sense.

           A long-term historical perspective raises a very troubling possibility.   The growing demand for laws criminalizing criticism may reflect a large and potentially extremely dangerous change in mentalities.  The sin of pride and its associated inability to improve via feedback are becoming more common in America’s population.
According to traditional Christian psychology of flesh/genes/sins, the effort to protect people from speech they feel unpleasant is catastrophically counterproductive.  The causality is simple and logical:  everything in human nature can be changed -- including gene-coded behaviors.  However, being able to talk about those harmful personality traits is absolutely necessary for overcoming them.  Prohibiting unpleasant talk makes it impossible to correct the flaws, i.e., to help the people the inventors of hate-speech rules want to help.  (See Ch. 12 for preachers’ oft-repeated observation, that they absolutely had to talk about precisely those aspects of their parishioners’ personalities that people least wanted to talk about.)

      One wonders whether the old expression “national character” could be used to solve this problem?   National character consists of attitudes, emotional reactions and behaviors that are so deeply ingrained as to seem instinctive and thus innate.  These characteristics are shared to varying degrees by the majority of a country’s population.  Yet, there are always exceptions.  One can always find individuals with totally different personalities.  Most importantly, national character is learned and it can be unlearned.  Criticizing parts of our national character feels unpleasant because it hurts our pride, but this criticism is in reality helpful feedback, not a hate-motivated condemnation of something people cannot do anything about.  (The observations about national character are based on the author’s personal experience after having lived for long periods in five different countries.  For examples of what national character means in practice, see the suggestion for intercultural studies on envy’s Shcadenfreude in Ch. 19)