“Longing for Belonging”
Noel K. Anderson
First Presbyterian Church of Upland
Text: Revelation 21: 1-4
1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
“See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his people,
and God himself will be with them;
4 he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.Ӡ
[Video: The Empathic Civilization by Jeremy Rifkin]
An Earth-shattering Find
We were wrong about power
Christmas week—the most sacred secularized holiday of the year—wherein we extend our empathy and kindness to include more people than we usually would, say in October of an election year. We’ve been talking about home—its importance to the human heart and how central it is to our repentance. Today, we’re going to look at empathy, the longing for belonging, and its importance to us and to world civilization.
Experiments on macaque monkeys reveal that primates are soft-wired for empathy—feeling what others feel—initiating new research which has concluded something terribly significant: human beings are soft-wired not so much for aggression, violence, and self-preservation, but sociability, attachment, affection, and companionship. Our first drive is to belong. This is utterly earth-shattering.
For roughly 150 years, the Modern World (driven by the West) has operated entirely under another assumption; namely, that human beings are soft-wired for power above all else. Modernism says, “Power is everything.”
I’m going to offer four names, each of which represents a full tree of thinking that you and I have inherited. It makes up what we have called knowledge in the West for the past 150 years or so, and it stands at the heart of academia, business institutions, and government. It has shaped the modern worldview and is at the heart of most of our popular assumptions. What is more, it is all wrong. Certainly, it is incomplete.
The POWER World
Charles Darwin and Friedrich Nietzche
The idea that the basic human drive is for power is overwhelmingly evident in the present political landscape. The anger, aggression, self-interest, and violence all fill the daily news cycle. The core assumption is that humankind is all about power—self-empowerment—and doing whatever is possible to hold and keep that power for oneself, one’s family, and one’s tribe, whatever that may be.
This is the assumption behind both racism and anti-racism, sexism and feminism, sexual and gender politics, border politics, and every war ever fought. All politics is the politics of power.
It goes back to the first name in the Modern Rogues Gallery: Charles Darwin. Darwin saw all species, including human beings—as highly-complicated biological organisms designed to serve their own survival. Don’t you love being called “a complicated biological organism”? Can you imagine that in a love letter? “My dear, you are a complicated biological organism inducing within this complicated biological organism the compelling desire to reproduce our DNA.” ’Tis like Shakespeare!
From Darwin, we have the hard idea that this world is one big jungle. It is dog-eat-dog survivalism, and only the strong and fit survive; therefore, we exist in fundamental enmity—struggle and competition—for our survival. Or, simply put, it’s all about power, and the complicated, biological organisms known as human beings are primarily motivated to secure power for themselves so that they can survive and reproduce their DNA at the expense of others.
But Darwin is just one. Add the philosopher Friedrich Nietzche, who, building on Darwin, said that there are no absolutes, no truth, and no purpose—there is only what you and your tribe agree upon. There is nothing of any real value, but only what you and your tribe agree to be valuable. There is no truth, just acceptable currency—the legal tender of ideas, assumptions, and values.
It’s exactly like the art world. You may have heard the story of Julian Schnabel. Schnabel, a would-be artist, was waiting tables in a New York restaurant. His boss let him take home broken plates, and he incorporated these into his paintings, by which I mean he stuck broken plate pieces into the paint of his canvasses. His boss let him put up his broken plate “paintings” on the restaurant’s blank walls.
One evening, a couple came in—they were the owners of perhaps the most prestigious art studio in New York. They ordered dinner. Julian Schnabel was their waiter. They asked him about the paintings, “Who did these?” He answered, “The greatest, undiscovered artist in the world—me!” The couple was charmed and bought up all the paintings for thousands of dollars. Immediately, every wannabe gallery owner in the city had to have a Schnabel, and the value of his paintings increased a thousand-fold overnight.
What’s the actual value of a Schnabel painting? Who is to say? The canvas, paint, and broken plates may add up to perhaps 100 dollars’ worth of material, but the selling price was quickly over $30,000 per canvas.
Nietzche tells us that all truth and value work precisely the same way. There is no real value, just the value that the community projects onto it. And the ones who hold power get to say what is true and what is not—what has value and what does not. We’ve been living with the outgrowth of this ever since—a philosophy that says it’s all about power, and truth is just a word people use to hold power over others.
Those who have the power control the narrative; history is written by the victors. The drive for power battles for information, twisting it—even propagandizing it—to keep and hold power. Again, if you assume there is no absolute truth, there is only a power struggle to control the tribal narrative. Who defines reality? Whoever leads, and them that’s got the gold makes the rules.
History is POWER
Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud
Enter Karl Marx, who reduced humankind to competing classes. For Marx, history is just an ongoing power clash between the haves and the have nots—the oppressors and the oppressed. His contribution to the modern era remains powerfully evident wherever you see people gang up and blame the wealthy or the well-empowered. The Church has carried this torch because we tend to side with the poor, the oppressed, and the outcast. We are also quick to acknowledge the evils of mammon—money and earthly power.
Marxism seeks to invert power and create little revolutions by which the poor become rich, the oppressed become new oppressors, and the outcasts become the new elite club that excludes others. His solution is a classless society with no personal property of any kind. Both Russia and China are still attempting to implement communism, but neither has succeeded, rather defaulting to a kind of state tyranny.
The Church, in contrast, seeks to give the poor what they need, suffer with the oppressed and welcome the outcasts. For the Church, it’s love, not politics.
Fourthly, batting clean-up is Sigmund Freud, the Father of modern psychology. A brilliant man, Freud, like Nietzche, said the human being is primarily soft-wired for gratification. This amounts to power because power enables gratification. If you have power, you can afford all manner of self-gratification.
Freud says the human being is a hungry, empty hole looking to be filled—a ravenous animal with a thin veneer of good manners at the surface. The human brain is soft-wired to seek power for one’s own gratification.
Not only individuals, but civilization itself is an outgrowth of swarms of humanity seeking self-gratification. This has given us 140 years of seeing our life together as an otherwise pointless competition—a futile game of king-of-the-hill—a glorified rat race. Self-interest alone drives humankind, and if anyone does good, it is only because they have sufficiently cared for themselves first and may have a little leftover to help others.
It’s a bit bleak, but it’s modernism with a capital M.
Worldview of God-haters
The one ring to bind them all
Can I mention one other thing about the Rogue’s Gallery? Aside from Darwin (he’s debatable), Nietzche, Marx, and Freud all hated God. It’s too kind—too gentle—to say they didn’t believe in God. No, they hated Him, and they despised Christ and Christianity. Together, they are the prime architects of the Modern World, the Modern Mind, and the contemporary worldview. Probe the mindset of any atheist, and you’re guaranteed to find their footing on one or more of these bases.
But our little video about monkeys and the legitimate scientific research it represents tells us a different story. It says Darwin, Nietzche, Marx, and Freud were all wrong about humankind. We were not, as they supposed, soft-wired primarily for power, but rather we are soft-wired for belonging. We long to belong before we long for power, aggression, and survival.
We all need to belong—our brains are designed for empathy, not aggression. It is today a proven fact; all the subsequent research confirms it.
Christian people, we know that we are here for love—love of everyone, even our enemies. God has wired us for love and all the talk of power and empowerment, this group and that group, haves or have nots, my needs versus your needs—has us in perpetual, political deadlock—a century of stalemate, non-solutions. We’re either demanding too much or refusing to settle—either way, we are not at peace as long as power is at the center of our discussions and worldview.
Correcting Modernism
An Empathic Civilization
So imagine with me what the world may become as a result of these findings—of the knowledge that humankind is not power-based but belonging-based. What will things look like once the truth sinks in and takes effect, perhaps decades from today?
For 150 years, we’ve told people that they are all about power, so what else would they seek? If you tell people that they are all about self-gratification, they’ll make self-gratification their spiritual quest. But if we tell people, rightly, that they are about empathy—that the complex biological organisms that are human beings—are made to care for others, how differently would they grow to look?
What would America be like were we to replace the politics of power with a new politics of belonging? Start there: everyone needs to belong somewhere. If we were to think of our families, tribes, and nation regarding the need for belonging, how different would our political landscape look? Because that is where it is going as soon as we outgrow the old modernist assumptions and worldview.
Think of how the longing to belong works: we all need a family to belong to—even if it isn’t a biological family. Why else do young men join street gangs? Fraternities, sororities, alumni associations, country clubs, churches, political parties, fan clubs, hobby groups, Facebook pages—all are ways of belonging and vehicles for extending our empathy.
Empathy overcomes division—overcomes differences in race, sex, and political orientation. America’s patriotism is a kind of belonging. Every American belongs to America, and we belong to each other. We all have friends on the opposite side of political ideas, opposite sex, opposite attitudes, and we should. But our empathy doesn’t stop at our borders—we find room to care and feel for people around the globe from every nation.
When empathy takes center stage, we outgrow self-gratification and come to feel for any and all in need, whatever their background, whatever their reason. When all belong, there are no outcasts, no exclusive insiders, because we are all needed, and every one is precious to God.
We don’t need to divide into competing classes, races, or sexes because we see ourselves as the diverse brothers and sisters of a complex family.
The basic competitions—man against man, man against nature—give way to cooperation in maturity. We will no longer conquer others or conquer nature because we will be figuring out how to get along instead. We will leave the dog-eat-dog jungle for a new home and new ways of dealing with other human beings.
Be clear: it’s not Utopia. We still need defense, police, and governments to regulate society. Aggression and greed will not be gone, but they will no longer be the central driver of civilization. We will always need to evaluate risks and will always differ over possible solutions to every issue, but if power and aggression are not central to our self-understanding, our daily conversations will be very different.
I’m saying we are heading that way, though it may take another 150 years to catch up with the science. But the news is out there—Darwin, Nietzche, Freud, and Marx were mostly wrong because they built their castles on sand which will in time erode. Our great, great-grandchildren will look back at the 20th century the way we look back at those who thought the earth was flat and that the sun, moon, and stars passed through the sky.
The Promise of Scripture
Revelation 21: 1-4
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
“See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his people,
and God himself will be with them;
4 he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.”
The promise of Scripture—what we call prophecy—is the revelation of our final state. It is God’s promise of where we are headed. The calling of the Church is to demonstrate that destiny and seek that kingdom, ever helping our world to align with its final state.
We know where it’s all headed and we know that Christ is there, with us, reassuring us that we belong because we were made to belong.
We belong to Him and to each other. Let that be the center of all of our thinking and self-understanding because Christmas is coming!. †
Questions
- What are some predictable outcomes from people and people groups who see the world in terms of power?
- Where do we get the idea “the world is a jungle”? What attitudes are spawned by that assumption?
- If God is not real, then who plays God?
- What are the end results of 19th-century “Progress”?
- Who are among the chief architects of the Modern Worldview?
- What single factor do the Founders of Modernism hold in common?
- What would be different about a world wherein empathy is more important than power?
- What role can Christians play in transforming American Culture?
- How does God’s promise of a “new heaven and earth” shape our Christian worldview?