The Need for Centeredness

My recent posts have revolved around society and sexuality:

Where Does the Urge to Rape Come From?
Lessons from "The Sex Lady"
Uncommitted Sex? Just Say No!
Our Baser Selves
The Procreative Norm

I think our society is way off balance — when it comes to sex, and when it comes to a lot of other things.

Another way to put it is that we are way off-center, and we need to be a lot more centered.

We need more self-respect and more respect for others. If we are off-center in our lives, it's a struggle to be respectful of others' needs, because we don't even understand our own needs.

Urges are not the same thing as needs. Urges can pull us off-center. True needs will not.

We are off-center as individuals, and we are off-center as a society and a culture. If the culture were more on-center, there wouldn't be as many rapes. There wouldn't be as many unwanted pregnancies and abortions. Not as many relationships that end in breakups and divorces. Not as many instances of domestic violence. Not as much child sexual abuse.


And, taking this out of the realm of sex, there wouldn't be as many tragic shootings by crazed individuals with guns.

Nor would there be as much crime in general. Most crime comes from individuals who think they have a right to something that only breaking the law can get them. That kind of self-centeredness is the exact opposite of the centeredness I'm talking about.

Most of us keep our baser behavior patterns in check, most of the time. Most of the time, we are kind to and respectful of others. Most of the time, we don't do wild things that may make us feel good in the short run, but then inevitably wind up making us feel sorry in the long run. Most of the time, we don't disrespect or bully people who "aren't like us."

But then sometimes we do stuff that we wouldn't do, most of the time. Stuff we "shouldn't" do, but we do anyway — some of the time.

Why do we act so schizoid? Why do there seem to be two different people inside our skins?

It's a sign of being off-center.

And how often do we seem to get pulled off-center by such things as pressure from our peers, as well as by the stuff we and they see every day online, or on TV, or at the movies. The whole culture seems to be conspiring to pull everybody off-center, over into our baser selves ...

... where the urge arises to fight, to snarl, to be snarky, to exhibit hostility ...

... and to behave sexually in less than a "chaste" way ...

... to act as if the world is out to hold us down, to keep us from the pursuit of what we imagine to be our happiness ...

... and so we get cynical about so-called "good" behavior. People who are good and generous and kind are simply pretending "the dark side" isn't there. They'll surely end up losers.


Whatever name you prefer to call "the dark side" of human nature and human behavior, it recedes into the background when individuals and the society as a whole are on-center.

A certain number of people today seem to have bought into the idea that the dark side might even conceivably "save the planet."

How ironic! When the phrase "the dark side" entered the language back in 1977, from the first Star Wars movie, no such idea was meant or implied. It's a sign that we have become ever more off-center that this notion of a heroic "dark side" has taken hold today.

We live in an age of irony. In every aspect of life, we feel like we serve two masters, the "Force" that Luke Skywalker learned to "feel" as a budding Jedi knight, and the "dark side" that the evil Darth Vader epitomized. We mostly triangulate between the two, which is manifestly the cause for our overarching sense of irony today.

Most of us surf those roiled waters just fine, thank you very much ... most of the time. We may not be centered in any spiritual sense, but we do manage to keep our balance.

But "balanced" and "centered" aren't the same thing.

Balanced and cynically ironic about it, are we: it's a sure sign that we need centering.

As individuals, being balanced between our inner Luke Skywalker and our inner Darth Vader clearly "works" for us ... most of the time.

I see the problem as the effect on the culture of too much balancing and too little centering. We often feel we are balancing precariously, with one foot hanging over the edge of chaos. Some of us occasionally go over the edge. Others of us go permanently over the edge.

These are the rapists and sex offenders, the serial killers and crazies with hair-trigger fingers and loaded semiautomatic weapons, the people whose terminal self-centeredness makes them stony-faced criminals and cheats. There are way too many of them because of too much balancing and too little centering in the broader culture.

What centers us? It used to be our spirituality that did it. Spirituality, that is, that was anchored in religion. Religion tethered us to an ethos, a shared sense of right and wrong. As we shared it with one another, our centering came from God. We were a God-centered people.

Now, not so much.

Now we often find we need to take extraordinary measures just to keep our balance. This is where the free-floating anger just under the surface of our lives comes from. For some of us, it's right on the surface a good deal of the time. We get righteously angry, and it makes us feel so much better for a while.

If that doesn't work, we can always try bullying someone.

Or stalking someone.

Or tearing someone to shreds in a "flame war" online.

How often that word, "war," crops up today! We hear of a "war on drugs," a "war on poverty," a "war on terror," a "war on women." Conflict and mortal combat are constant metaphors in movies, in television, in sports contests, in the video games we play.

It was not always thus. War/conflict/combat themes didn't used to be omnipresent. Throw a dart at the monthly program guide of the Turner Classic Movies channel and the chances of hitting a old movie where somebody gets killed are at most fifty-fifty.

There were the World War Two movies, of course. They were more about people sacrificing, people standing together, people serving with honor, than they were about superheroes — imaginary stand-ins for each of us personally — saving the world from Armageddon.

We used to have something that kept us on-center without our having to imaginatively enact our own personal mortal combat situations over and over and over.

That something used to be religion. What are we going to replace it with?

Ethos Optional?

In a recent article called "The End of the Anglican Communion," Catholic conservative George Weigel writes of the stresses that today threaten to tear apart the Anglican Communion: the worldwide group of churches that historically look to the Church of England as their center of gravity. The Episcopal Church in America is the branch of Anglicanism we hallow here. Since the national Episcopal church has recently ordained a gay bishop, for that and other related reasons many local Episcopal congregations are considering affiliating with an evangelizing African bishop, outside the Episcopal Church USA, rather than sticking with a homegrown hierarchy who seem to them to have abandoned all vestiges of traditional Christian morality.

Mr. Weigel writes of

... an Anglican [i.e., Episcopal] church, St. Luke’s, a few blocks up Old Georgetown Road from my parish in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. [that] recently posted a large sign on the church lawn: “No matter who you are, no matter what you believe, you are welcome at our table.”

Mr. Weigel takes this ecclesiastical open-door policy as a token of something he rues: "the Episcopal Church USA's determination to bless same-sex unions and ordain practicing homosexuals to priestly and episcopal ministry." I further assume that, to the extent that the no-matter-who-you-are proclamation at St. Luke's includes women who have had or are contemplating an abortion, Mr. Weigel objects to that as well.

I assume he objects, that is, not to the love-the-sinner aspects of such a policy — you can't seriously call yourself a Christian if you don't profess Christian love toward all people without regard to sin — but to what could be an implicit tolerate-the-sin attitude that may seem to go along with it.

Or, is there an effort being made in the Episcopal Church USA simply to redefine the sin out of existence?


Actually, there is a third possibility: to take cognizance of the fact that our society has become one which lacks a guiding ethos all of us can share.

I don't know whether I am using the word "ethos" the way social scientists do, but to me an ethos is a set of rules of moral conduct, written or unwritten, official or unofficial, stated or unstated. All members of the society simply know what these rules are — whether they are written, overtly stated, and officially promulgated, or they are unwritten, unofficial, and never stated as such, right out loud — and agree that they are the rules.

Furthermore, most members of an ethos-based society tend to follow the rules, and expect others to do the same.


It doesn't work that way here any more. While it is true that many in our society continue to observe the old moral and ethical rules, few now expect others to do the same. So, while many of us still think homosexuality is wrong, far fewer people consider that moral opinion binding on anyone besides themselves. Ditto, the old rule against having an abortion ... or, for that matter, against getting pregnant out of wedlock, or having extramarital sex, etc., etc., etc.

So let me suggest that our ethos is no longer an ethos at all, if there is no longer any reasonable assumption on the part of each person that everyone else in the society needs to, or will, adhere to the stated or unstated rules. An ethos-optional society is no different from a society that doesn't have, or never had, an ethos at all.


Christian churches, Catholic, Anglican, Protestant, or otherwise, have a well-deserved reputation for being, or intending to be, ethos preservers. George Weigel is an ethos preserver. And so, as a Catholic, am I ... except that I worry that we ethos preservers and supporters are spitting into a gale-force wind.

More, I worry that perhaps the number one reason why church pews are empty today is that so many are put off by an institution, the Christian church, that promulgates an ethos they no longer feel any general obligation toward upholding. They may still personally believe in God, they themselves may live lives as chaste and pure as any professing Christian achieves, but they may feel it downright hypocritical to join a church that asks yet more: belief in a communally shared, universal system of absolute right and wrong.


By "absolute" morality I do not mean to imply that there are no contexts in moral choice. In most contexts, for example, the dictum "thou shall not kill" applies, but there is such a thing as self-defense, or just war. Still, the commandment against killing other persons is, or so I believe, absolute and universal ... that is, once the given situational context has been factored in in a way that itself stands up to objective ethical scrutiny.

Today, however, one gets the feeling that not committing murders is something we, most of us in this society, opt to abide by; we are, in doing so, not binding ourselves to any old-fashioned set of general, absolute moral codes or rules. We accordingly exercise our "radical freedom" in deciding to, yes, live by certain ancient but no-longer-absolute rules. If someone else takes the opposite tack and is in fact a murderer, we today oppose that (to the extent we can) solely out of a pragmatic understanding that murderers, if not stopped, may eventually threaten us and those we love.


But gone is the belief that something is right or wrong simply because it is. For each of the old rules, today there is a hyper-pragmatic attitude which says, in effect, I don't care what you do with your life with respect to that particular rule unless and until it impacts on my life and that of (say) my children, so if you want to look at porn on the Internet, fine ... as long as I have some way of making sure my kids don't see it.

What happened, then, to our erstwhile belief in absolute (albeit situational) rules of morality? Inasmuch as it's hard to imagine traditional Christian religion without them — an I'm-OK-you're-OK God, I ask you? A no-fault deity with a "whatever" attitude? — it's no wonder George Weigel thinks the no-matter-who-you-are welcome posted at St. Luke's Episcopal is tossing religion's baby out with the bathwater.