I was recently in Oxford, UK and while there I interviewed a couple of writers. One of them suggested a book. It turns out that the book in question, The Matter With Things, by Iain McGilchrist, is written in three volumes, totalling 1500 pages. The premise of the book (I’ve read 88 pages thus far) is that we need to “clear away assumptions that cloud our vision” in order to adopt a more complete and helpful view of reality. The author says that his working title was “There Are No Things” because he argues that the relationship between things has more to do with reality than things themselves. Our western mindset has majored on things and celebrated people who are good at manipulating things while neglecting relationships. Relationships turn out to be much more important in terms of all life on earth than things are.
I’m not sure how much of the book I will get read, but it has already reminded me of a tendency that many of us have. We tend to think that we are right. I suppose that conservatives think that they are mostly right. I suppose that liberals think they are mostly right. As someone who spent a great deal of time in the evangelical church I can assure you that most evangelicals think that they are mostly right.
This is, of course, a problem.
More that just thinking we are right, we also think that we are nice. I happen to be very close to some very nice people. If you are close to people like that then you are freed from the idea that you are the nicest person. Right near you, quite a lot of the time, it turns out that there is someone nicer than you. However, it is still possible to think that you are nicer than most people.
A 2017 British study found that 98% of people think that they are in the top 50% when it comes to niceness. In other words, 98% of us think that we are nicer than most others. Isn’t it interesting how many people delude themselves? We think that we are nicer than most people and we think that we are mostly right in terms of politics and worldview.
If you add religion to that mix you get to even more precarious places. We are nicer, more correct in our views, AND we have an inside track on what God thinks and what God wants. This should be hilarious to even consider. It is arrogant, but not before it is funny.
Here is what the author of that super long book says (on page 45): “The way we start out looking at the world soon hardens up; and after a while, any model comes to look like a surprisingly good fit, largely because everything that doesn’t fit the model becomes helpfully invisible.”
In the evangelical culture with which I am familiar, I saw a tendency to consider questioning belief (or even at times assumed niceness) as a threat. Think about how you may have been taught the concept of being “salt and light” in the world. The assumption was that the world is dark and decayed and needs people like us to show it a better way. This is a pretty narrow reading of the text and a terrible reading of the world, but it is what many religious people were taught. In such religious circles, a kind of panic can arise if teaching is questioned. People who question the teaching and/or virtue of the religious community become identified as “backsliders” or as dangerous.
Accepting or being open to the idea that we might not be right and we might not be nicer than most people, actually turns out to open us to growth rather than closing us off from growth. I remember reading somewhere that the biggest threat to any system of religion are the truest of believers because such intense belief winds up closing the door to any other way of thinking. The door to the stranger is closed because the stranger is seen as a threat. Eventually, this leads to a death of the religion because all worldviews (scientific included), religions, and faith need to be consistently renewed in order to survive.
Maybe you are not as nice as you think you are. Maybe you are not as right as you think you are. Well, that leaves room for growth.
I’m not nice at all. If I were to share every thought in my head...