My
weekend reflection led me to Psalms 115. Here is a full extract from verse 2 to
8:-
“Why let the nations say,
“Where is their God?”
Our God is in the heavens,
and he does as he wishes.
Their idols are merely things of silver
and gold,
shaped by human hands.
They have mouths but cannot speak,
and eyes but cannot see.
They have ears but cannot hear,
and noses but cannot smell.
They have hands but cannot feel,
and feet but cannot walk,
and throats but cannot make a sound.
And those who make idols are just like
them,
as are all who trust in them.”
Have we placed our trust on the wrong gods? Are we now being
punished for fashioning gods in our own image? Have we effectively atomized our
society to serve the individual and to put his/her needs above the society?
What have become of us in this age of technology, market-driven economy, wealth
creation and post-modern values?
I
scarce to think that our "self" has never really been crucified at the altar and it
is now making an insidious comeback under the covers of self-help,
self-actualization and freedom of self-expression. It seems that the modern
message is about helping the self rather than dying to it. The psalmist wrote
most prophetically when he said that our idols have been silver and gold and the
idols themselves differs little from the idolaters – from us. For we are
blind and deaf to the dangers of materialism, having no sense of direction, unfeeling
and helplessly seduced, wholly subservient and imprisoned to the gluttonous zeitgeist of the time.
There
is no doubt that the post-war era has been most lavished and indulgent to the development of the human desires. Runaway economic growth has definitely catapulted prosperity and
wealth to the economic stratosphere and way beyond our wildest imagination. From
millionaires to billionaires, from humble inventors to captains of industries,
and from travelling evangelists to prosperity preachers, our modern society has
rewarded men for their inventiveness and re-inventiveness, and in return, they
are heartily reaping what they had sown. Yet, something is still missing. There
is a hole in our heart that cannot be filled. The irony here is captured in
this observation by the economist Richard Layard, “There are many clear cases where people became objectively better off
but felt subjectively worse.” We have returned to become an island in ourselves, languishing and lost, in a human archipelago of self-isolation.
Nothing
can hide this anxiety that most of us are feeling and reeling from. All that
glitters is indeed not gold. We have replaced the Source of life with the
accessories of life and this has only added to our anxiety, depression and
emptiness. This is how a theologian Walter Brueggemann sees it, “It is only God…who can deal with the anxiety
among us…The causes for anxiety among us are wrongly discerned…Our mistake is
to pursue autonomous freedom. Freedom which does not discern the boundaries of
human life leaves us anxious. The attempts to resolve anxiety in our culture
are largely psychological, economic, cosmetic. They are bound to fail because
they do not approach the causes. The public life is largely premised on an
exploitation of our common anxiety. The advertising of consumerism and the
drives of acquisitive society, like the serpent, seduce people into believing
there are securities apart from the reality of God.”
Earlier
I wrote that the self has made a triumphant comeback and it is not without
assistance from the prevailing culture of our time. It is actually a vicious
cycle of self-gratification that is fast changing how we process our values and
beliefs. Technology itself is a mixed blessing for us. It has opened up a whole
vista of efficiency, convenience and even hope for humanity. But this hope also
comes with a cost. In the book Virtually
You authored by psychiatrist Elias Aboujaoude, he writes that we are
developing an online personality where nothing is really off limits. In other words, it is
boundless and that’s the problem. Where we fail in the real world, we have
become gods in the virtual worlds. In other words, we are taking self-worship
into a whole new level with games like Second
life, and have become less inhibited with our thoughts and actions.
Dr
Aboujaoude explains, “More specifically,
against this background of disinhibited, disassociated personhood, five
psychological forces will vie to assert themselves: grandiosity, or the feeling
that the sky is the limit when it comes to what we can accomplish online;
narcissism, or how we tend to think of ourselves as the center of gravity of
the World Wide Web; darkness, or how the Internet nurtures our morbid side; regression,
or the remarkable immaturity we seem capable of once we log on; and impulsivity, or the
urge-driven lifestyle many fall into online.”
Examples
abound in this area. The cult of fame (or infamy) has produced a litany of 7-minute
starlets who parade themselves online doing the silliest and most mundane thing
conceivable. We have oversized men in semi-nude parodying various art forms,
young surgically-transformed girls promoting food and product lines, mindless
display of superstar wannabes singing and dancing to cover-hits, desperate teens
offering to “rent” their girlfriends for dates in order to buy the latest
electronic gadgets, companies inviting married men to commit no-strings-attached
adultery, and people selling illegally harvested kidneys and livers at competitive prices. And
I have yet to include sex-depraved and morbid sites where online customers are
invited to a pay-per-view to watch live executions, child rapes and other
sadistic acts in what is commonly labeled as “polymorphous perversity”. In such a private, self-gratifying and
boundless online environment, where everything is accessible to the young
suggestible minds, depravity with deluded impunity is the order of the day.
Indeed,
we have become idols-making factory. And in running helter-skelter to escape from the Truth that is immutable and transforming,
we pursue, mimicry and embrace transient concepts of fame, power, superficial
beauty and materialism. One author challenges us with this question, “Who are
we without buying, owning or experiencing?” Alas, we may just discover that we
are running empty. We have lost our
core identity for we have traded it for the idols of this world; a world that
caters only to the worship of self.
Let
me end with the sagely thoughts of John Kavanaugh: “Having patterned ourselves after the image of our commodities, we
become disenfranchised of our very humanness. Reduced to commodities, we lose
the intimacy of personal touch. We cannot truly see or listen as vibrant men
and women…We do not walk in freedom, since we are paralyzed by what is. Such is
the result of idolatry. Those who make idols and put their trust in them become
like them.”
For the Creator’s image
has become the images-creator and is now a slave to them. Cheerz.
