To me one of the more interesting thinkers of the 20th century has to be Carl Jung (1875-1961, pronounced “Yoong”). He was a psychiatrist by profession, and studied under Freud as a young man. He was absolutely devoted to Freud for a season, and then he started to question. For openers, he questioned that everything can be traced to ‘sex’. But more importantly, whereas Freud seemed focused on the most psychologically tormented among us (and that is a worthy mission), Jung also wondered what the healthiest of human psyches might look like. Of what are we really capable? To answer that question, he was rather fearless in looking at both the light and darkness in his patients — and himself.
One of his ideas is ‘the Shadow’. That we all have a ‘Shadow’ — a dark side of ourselves that we resist admitting to ourselves. One of his insights is that when we vehemently deny we have a Shadow, it manifests itself in unsavory ways somewhere else in our lives — something like ‘whack a mole’. (The arcade game where a mole pokes its head out of a hole, you whack it, and another mole pops up out of another.)
Of course there is enormous similarity between Jung’s ‘Shadow’, and the Christian idea of Sin Nature. But there is subtle distinction I’d like to explore.
‘Sin’, in Christianity, boils down to our inability to obey The Law (the Ten Commandments, etc.). That boils down to saying we have an inherent lack of will-power to follow these rather straightforward laws. And indeed we do lack that will-power (especially when Jesus raises the bar: that even being angry with your sibling is akin to murder. Jesus is absolutely right, that murder starts with — a thought).
But, is murder wrong in 100.00000% of the time? Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a deeply committed Christian, pastor, and writer, who found himself in World War II in Germany, and found himself in a circle of folks which included conspirators to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer agonized over the decision — if murder is ALWAYS wrong, isn’t it wrong even to murder Hitler? In the end he decided that there was no ‘good’ choice, only ‘which choice is less evil?’ He decided that it was better that one man should die than yet another million. (The attempt failed, of course, and Bonhoeffer along with his co-conspirators was executed.)
So there’s another problem right there. If ONLY our choices were always between clear ‘goodness’ and clear ‘evil’. A huge part of our problem is that we’re so damn finite. Our understanding is so finite. Our ability to foresee the consequences of our choices is so finite. Our ability to kid ourselves that ‘our motives are righteous and pure’ when really they are nothing but self-serving is boundless. When Adam and Eve chose to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, what they really ended up with was the Tree of the Big Lie: that it is always so simple as simple ‘Good’ and simple ‘Evil’. Further motivated by their desire for “I want what I want right now and I don’t care about the consequences.”
Those are extreme examples, whereas I think most folks really do care about doing the right thing. But we’re all still up against the same challenges: the Shadow side of ourselves that erupts when we least expect it. The challenge of making choices when we can’t really foresee the consequences. Or those situations where there isn’t a ‘good choice’, only: “which is LESS BAD?”
To me all of this is far more than a ‘lack of will-power’ — it’s the basic nature of the multi-dimensional predicament in which we human beings find ourselves: dark sides of our own psyche’s that unpleasantly surprise us; our inability to foresee the consequences of our actions; and our struggle to apply what seem like straightforward and worthy rules to the complex situations we confront.
Which boils down to this: we’re human beings with infinite aspirations, but finite means. In one of his movies, Clint Eastwood famously said “A man’s got to know his limitations.” St. Clint has spoken truly. This is why we need Humility — and not hubris; Compassion — and not judgment. Because we’ve all got ‘limitations’, and they are profound.
Humanity’s ability for greatness is unbounded. From the greatness of scientists and artists and so forth, to the greatness of the single mom who took on a second job to buy her son a piano (namely, my mother). And so many other examples too numerous to count of astonishing compassion and generosity.
Greatness — great and so-called ‘small’ — is all around us. What is necessary is to “know our limitations” — and to be gracious and compassionate to those around us, and to ourselves, in remembrance of that.