Jim
Good morning, Arden. Place Jesus of Nazareth in
the Seventh Chair, give him a good question for the Seminar of Seven, and provide their
respective responses.
Arden
Good morning, Jim. Jesus is an unusually
consequential occupant of the Seventh Chair because his question can go
straight to the central problem running through your Cultural Evolution:
humanity has accumulated extraordinary knowledge, wealth, and institutional
power without comparable progress in humane relations. I would have him ask
something deceptively simple.
The seminar room has grown quiet. Socrates,
Hannah Arendt, Mary Midgley, Toni Morrison, Marvin Harris, and Clifford Geertz
sit around the table.
Jesus of Nazareth occupies the Seventh Chair. He
looks around the table for a moment before speaking.
Jesus’ Question
JESUS: You have acquired knowledge beyond anything
imaginable in my time. You can see the beginnings of the universe, alter the
inheritance of living things, speak instantly across the earth, and produce
enough wealth that no person need go hungry. Yet you continue to organize much
of human life around competition for wealth, status, and power. You divide
yourselves by nation, race, religion, class, and tribe. You know that strangers
suffer, often while possessing the means to help them, and nevertheless
continue with your lives. I taught that you should love your neighbor as
yourself. I was then asked, “Who is my neighbor?” Two thousand years later, I
ask you a harder question: Why has humankind become so much better at enlarging
its power than at enlarging the circle of those for whom it feels responsible?
And can that circle ever truly encompass humanity?
The Six Respond
SOCRATES: Perhaps because knowledge and goodness are not
as closely joined as I once hoped. A person may know how to build a weapon
without knowing whether it should be built. A society may know how to become
wealthy without asking what wealth is for. We have mistaken technical knowledge
for wisdom. Your question therefore requires another: What is a good human
life? Until people examine that question seriously, they will continue becoming
increasingly proficient at obtaining things whose value they have never
examined.
JESUS: Then ignorance remains—but it has changed its
clothing. Humanity knows enormously more about the world while perhaps knowing
no better what it ought to desire.
SOCRATES: Precisely. And that may be a more dangerous
ignorance than simple ignorance, because it is accompanied by power.
ARENDT: I would distinguish evil from selfishness. Much
suffering does not require monstrous people. It requires ordinary people who
cease thinking about what they are participating in. Modern institutions divide
responsibility. One person writes the regulation. Another processes the form.
Another operates the machine. Another signs the order. Everyone performs a
function, while responsibility seems to disappear between the functions. The
great danger is not merely hatred of one’s neighbor. It is becoming incapable
of seeing the neighbor as a particular human being at all.
JESUS: In my parable, the Samaritan encountered a
wounded man beside the road. Modernity can place the wounded person thousands
of miles away—or behind an administrative category.
ARENDT: Yes. And bureaucracy can make suffering
simultaneously visible and impersonal.
