Rob Kall: What is this brokenness?
Andrew
Schmookler: The brokenness came by degrees
and from luck... There's a lot of
brokenness visible, and part of the brokenness is, there's a lack of
integration. They can go to church, and
if you relate to them when they're in that church mode, you would think that
the Sermon on the Mount lives through them.
But then they go out, and the rest of the week they're listening to Rush
Limbaugh who is -- the spirit that he is expressing could not be more opposite
from the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount; and they are living a contradiction
and they don't see it and they don't wrestle with it. and I think that grows out of the harshness
of the culture, which makes it very difficult for a growing human being to
reconcile what's really inside them, and the things they've internalized from a
culture that's very hostile to a lot of what is inside.
That's where the brokenness comes from: the culture to the person. That's where the pattern is: the culture is
then antagonistic, and that's where The Parable of Tribes comes in, that
you were asking me about. The Parable
of Tribes describes how there is something that isn't a function of human
nature, but is a function of how the systems of civilization develop. I won't go into it here, but /
Rob Kall: I want to hear about it, I really want to
hear about The Parable of Tribes.
Andrew
Schmookler: Really? For real?
OK.
Rob Kall: Yeah I thought it was interesting. Flesh it out.
Andrew
Schmookler: OK. In a nutshell, because, you
know, I used to give one hour talks on this (laughs). When human beings stepped
out of the niche in which they evolved biologically, which is, say, about ten
thousand [10,000] years ago, with the domestication of plants and animals, we
did something that had never happened in the history of life, for three and a
half billion years. It's breaking out of
the limits of the biological order!
But, since there are a lot of them butting out all over the place in the
various parts of the world, and there was no order between them, a struggle for
power inevitably emerges in this system, where you basically have anarchy, you
have like what happened in Somalia, you have an inevitable struggle for power. It can take a long time, even thousands of
years to develop, but it will develop; and all over the world, the same process
can be seen at the five places where civilization developed for the first
time. They are all evolving into larger,
more militaristic and cruel regimes, coming up to a conclusion that is the
emergence of the first full-scale cities, and empires, and such.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
