The Near Enemies of Religion
The near enemies are qualities that arise in the mind, and masquerade as genuine spiritual realization, when in fact they are only an imitation, serving to separate us from true feeling rather than connecting us to it.
— Kornfield (1993)
“Near enemies” are emotions that are mistaken for positive virtues — such as loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity — as they so closely resemble them on the surface.
— Joe Hunt paraphrasing Pema Chodron
Near Enemies: According to Brené Brown, emotions have their evil cousins. The term grew out of Buddhism and originally described something that seemed to be a helpful spiritual trait, but in reality got in the way of a person’s spiritual growth.
— Darya Sinusoid summarizing Brené Brown
Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy.
— Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature
There is no finer gift to discernment than a sentence that is very nearly true and few provocations as valuable as a sentence that really pisses you off.
— Eric Hepburn
Ideas are qualities that arise in the mind, they are intuitions translated into symbols, they are interwoven emotions made into a fabric of language for sharing and expression. So I don’t mind stretching the concept of the Near Enemy a bit, to turn it into a tool for the discernment of virtue in ideology by identifying THAT in the words, in the concepts, which is not virtue — but is virtue’s evil-twin or masquerading cousin… an escape hatch out of the work, instead of a portal into it.
If I wanted to remake Pinker’s quote (admittedly taken out of context from a long and well-researched book) into the version of it that I believe/think/feel is true — it might read like this:
Religion is dying from woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of hypocrisy which we had assumed were benign, but were, in fact, malignant.
The perception that it is thriving from these things is like the perception that America — or in particular, white America — is or has benefitted from slavery and racism. America is riddled with the cancer of those unhealed wounds and trauma, her veneer of wealth and power are crumbling, revealing themselves as the shallow and venal striving which led the founders to enslave other people and nature to the service of its own (collective) ego in the first place. America’s culture is so bankrupt it can’t even imagine an honest reckoning — addicted, as it is, to it’s own program of boosterism and self-righteousness. And so it is with the vast majority of organized religion — boosterism and self-righteousness. These are not benign hypocrisies. They are the soul-death of people who have forgotten how to be alive. They are the death rattle of those who have become convinced that religion is a tool for generating certainty. It is the dying gasp of a culture that eagerly awaits an afterlife that MUST be better than this world that they have helped to cocreate. It is the desolation of their ‘childish’ knowledge that there must be more to life than this!
When we use science and culture and religion to generate false certainty, this is what we create — people who are dying inside. We’ve sucked all the mystery and possibility out of life, convinced people that they are powerless — that power is something hoarded by others (others who, if watched closely, admit the same fear of powerlessness — revealed by the fact that they never have enough to truly fill the void of uncertainty that haunts them).
So, what do we need from Religion? Anything? Does it have anything at all to offer?
I think it does — no, that’s not quite right. I know — not just intellectually — but in my heart and my gut and my soul, in whatever parts of me are made of and in contact with the divine God/Life/Universe/Gaia that it is at the heart of the medicine we need to heal ourselves, each other, this world, and beyond.
Grounded, Resonant, & Mystical Allegory
We absolutely don’t need ‘woolly allegory’, we need science and arts and humanities and spiritual writings that celebrate our struggle with the unknown instead of trying to put it all in the box of being ‘settled’ or ‘understood’ or, worse, ‘known’. Look, long ago I was an engineering student. My job was to translate ‘things that we know pretty well’ in to ‘strategies and applications of that knowledge that are stable and reliable and useful’ — to my mind, that’s basically the job description of engineering work. What students of engineering must learn and many others are allowed to remain oblivious to, is that our knowledge of the Universe is limited enough that we must incorporate HUGE safety factors in every design to account for all the things we don’t know and for all the things that ‘will probably work this way, but might go the other way’ — perhaps you all remember old stories of bridges built (even with those huge safety factors) that shook themselves apart during sustained winds at the right speed, because we had no idea that harmonics could be so powerful… Yeah, you say, but we know about harmonics now! Yes, and what we don’t know, can’t know, is how many more hard-lessons like that the universe has in store for us. Turning our curiosity off in favor of ‘settled science’ is absolutely a recipe for disaster. And the same is true in mythology, history, and religion. If you haven’t read A People’s History of the United States, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, A Queer History of the United States, The 1619 Project, These Truths, and many others… you’re missing out on some of the most important people and moments and stories that have created this reality that we coinhabit and cocreate called the United States of America. Our obsession with the Bible and with other works from religious antiquity are a similar problem — why is it that we’re convinced that ‘prophecy’ for example is something that happened in the far past, but not since then? Why are the stories we write today, or last year, or last decade, or those lost to history (or nearly lost) — why are they any less valuable to our struggle to be fully human, to be fully divine? Why have we privileged the distant past? The truth is, we’ve romanticized it in ways that are simply unhelpful, in ways that drain it of its own truth while simultaneously devaluing our own contributions to the unfolding of the stories of life as we know it. We need it, all of it, unified and together, to make this thing we call life work.
Spiritual, Emotional, and Intellectual Commitments to Wisdom in all of its written and embodied forms
While we must, due to sheer magnitude and multiplicity, cherry pick forms and writings of wisdom and spiritual/emotional/intellectual practice that resonate with us — wherever we are on our journeys. What we can no longer afford is the toxic illusion that there is ONE WAY. When we discover A way — that is a thing of beauty and wonder and awe, something to be celebrated and shared and written/danced/sung about. Something worthy of being passed down from one generation to the next — a legacy, a lineage, a real contribution to life. The corner towards boosterism and self-righteousness is turned when ‘A way’ becomes ‘THE way’. When invidious comparison between your way and ways discovered by others moves from ‘tangential curiosity’ to ‘central preoccupation’. This is the fractious history of religion as we know it — as it accurately has been — for the vast majority of human history. A movement of more and more fragmentation and division, a movement along the continuum of disagreement. It is my spiritual/emotional/intellectual/embodied intuition that this is the inflection point of this moment of history. If we see that fragmentation as an outbreath of dispersal, what is happening at this moment is the inbreath of ingathering… the reunification of life, the reintegration of wisdom practices and texts into our daily and political lives.
A Compassionate Cure for Hypocrisy, Juvenile Egotism, and the other forms of Soul Disease
Hypocrisy is cancer. It is the excuse that complexity overwhelms are ability to choose what is right. Our illusion that we can do it all with our heads (intellectually) without spirit, soul, gut, emotion, and body — that’s what keeps us from picking what is RIGHT in front of us. It is why developing spiritual practices and maturity is requisite for discernment — the skill that obviates hypocrisy.
Egotism (which is juvenile) in both its individual (narcissistic) and collective (boosterish) forms must be treated as the developmentally-stuck phenomena that it is, an illness to be healed — certainly not a virtue to be lauded. For those suffering immediately under its yoke, it is as ‘near enemy’ as you can get — the feeling as though your very life and identity are pinned, are intertwined with the survival of your self-righteousness, the survival of your cultural identity. This false belonging is another near enemy — an attempt to put a too-small-label on the feeling of oneness-with-all-life that lies (awakened or dormant) in the deepest recesses of your being. The oneness that is the core striving of all religious and wisdom teachings and practices.
Our response to these soul diseases must be compassionate healing, without dehumanization or violence. I do mean no longer tolerating hypocrisy or egotism ‘as-if’ they were normal or healthy or virtuous or unavoidable or evolutionarily-appropriate or competitively-demanded… these are all BS rationalizations for immature and unwise behavior. And in order to heal we need to stop mistaking disease for health — as if we couldn’t tell the difference. We can, and our first step in reclaiming our own power — the power that we are — the power that never has and never could leave us — is to regain our trust in ourselves to tell the difference, our trust in ourselves to reconnect to the divinity within us and around us, our trust in ourselves to cocreate a world worth leaving to our children and their children and all the children who will come after.
So maybe it would sound like this — the not-near-enemy, the virtuous version:
Religion itself, is asking to be reborn as Grounded, Resonant, & Mystical Allegory with Spiritual, Emotional, and Intellectual Commitments to Wisdom in all of its written and embodied forms, and A Compassionate Cure for Hypocrisy, Juvenile Egotism, and the other forms of Soul Disease
— Eric Hepburn
