Chapter Three: A Destructive Master Narrative
In the preceding chapter, we discussed Michel Foucault’s description of the historical dispersion of power from concentrated coercive structures into the microtheatres of everyday life. A transformation that curbs our freedom less obviously but more efficiently. We investigated narratives and observed the linguistic materials we use to do our storytelling. We considered Jacques Derrida’s observations about how language works and how it leaves its marks on our stories. We noted the problematic relationship between signs and any phenomena outside the sign system to which they supposedly refer. We observed that our particular sign system is markedly out of touch with the Referent. We acknowledged our dependence on narratives and looked into the workings of narrative fields.
In this chapter, we will examine the master narrative that, more than any other, stands between us and the world we would wish to create. Within the narrative field, “master” narratives tie together multiple discourses of lesser reach. Master narratives serve as organizing principles. They provide lines of logic for whole systems of thought, constitute global understandings and maintain mentalities. A master narrative confers legitimacy on minor narratives that branch from and depend on it. Minor narratives, in turn, elaborate and support the master narrative. We tend to assume the truth of master narratives because their many connections make them seem obvious, fundamental, complete, without alternative. Altering a master narrative has far-reaching effects.
At the core of our nearly overwhelming complexity of problems lies a master narrative about who we are, our identity.
Self as Separate
As humans, we learn to think of ourselves through language and cultural practice. Even in a culture that teaches us to prize individual creativity and autonomy, we receive — rather than invent — much of what we come to see as our identity. The process begins with the moment of birth. The words, “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” greet the new arrival. From that moment on, parents, siblings, caregivers, friends, relatives and the larger society assign, shape and model each individual’s sense of self. Later, usually by the time we reach adolescence, we begin to claim our own identity. As individual subject centers, we braid strands of memory, experience and dream into what we think of as our life. We identify with a central actor we see moving through our past, immersed in our present, engaging a future. We evaluate events, respond to others and create priorities according to how we understand ourselves, as well as how we wish others would think of us. But before we begin to make such choices, we spend years learning what our world tells us we are.
In the dominant culture, the most fundamental tenet of that received identity insists that we are each a separate being — whose self-interest is by definition at odds with the interests of others. As children, many of the games we play teach us that life is an “Every man for himself” proposition. Winning the game almost always requires that someone else lose. You win by taking more, gaining at the other’s expense, getting what you want by controlling the table, the game board, the field. Other players are competitors. And although older children often help younger ones, everyone understands that helping the competitor amounts to a violation of the rules. We have a saying, “It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.” Yet we learn that, in practice, winning is what counts. Our parents may try to teach us other values. But we watch TV, come under the influence of a larger society where winners are celebrated; losers eliminated. Well before we leave childhood, we have mastered the lesson that we are a separate self — our value largely defined by competition.
Language underlies and deeply reinforces this understanding of self. As Derrida observed, language can only represent things to Consciousness as objects. Everything, including our Self. Thus, language has us representing ourselves to ourselves as objects. In addition, language defines objects by their not-being something else. Signs signify by differing from one another. Each thing is identified by virtue of separateness from what it is not. So language renders Self as separate — on the most fundamental level. When we create first person narratives we use personal pronouns that denote boundaries. “I,” “me,” and “mine,” is not “you” and “yours.”
By extension, culture and society covertly infringe on our freedom in the very moments when we see ourselves creating an identity that is autonomous, truly our own. Whatever we tell ourselves about ourselves is affected by pre-existing narratives in the narrative field. Whether we are aware of them or not, these discourses shape and explain our perceptions, direct our imagination, and spur us to elaborate on our distinction from others. We learn to use whatever is available — possessions, skills, accomplishments, appearance — to construct an identity geared to comparison and competition. The process necessarily leaves us unfulfilled, since we can always imagine someone, even ourselves, possessing or achieving more. In the end, the narrative of self as separate brings us more unhappiness than satisfaction — because it is out of touch with the Referent.
We ourselves are the Referent, biological beings made up of molecules and atoms. As Referent, we have an inescapable individuality. Like snowflakes, no two human beings are or can ever be exactly alike. At the same time, we depend on the living environment and each other for food, shelter, water, sanitation, health, life. Our DNA, our every breath, our dreams, our emotions and who knows what other invisible threads connect us. Cosmic waves and quantum entanglements are part of us. Cooperation, more than competition, characterizes the activity of our cells, our organs, our bodies. Our unaided perception cannot detect much of this connectedness. And language works against questioning the thought of self as separate. Most of us recognize, however, that what makes us happiest is love.
In addition to sheer programming, we have emotionally charged historical reasons for clinging to the narrative of self as separate. We associate this view of ourselves with something we cherish as much as happiness: our freedom. Respect for individuality is linked historically with the advent of democracy and free societies. Yet this link, forged in bloody revolutions, has been distorted by counter-revolution — and the revolutionaries’ own unconscious engagement with the master narrative. The resulting notion of individuality works against our freedom to create the world we want. A brief historical foray can help us sort these threads.
Before the changes that brought democracy, the culture of pre-modern Europe gave almost no positive value to the individual. The medieval world of kings, feudal lords and the Church portrayed its social hierarchy as ordained by God. This world view — backed-up by violence — blocked individual ambition and discouraged even an individualized sense of moral integrity. You did what you were told. You were born to what your life would be. The ideal was a kind of fixed society, ultimately impossible to sustain.
In the eighteenth century, Enlightenment writers confronted the old order with the authority of reasoned thought and the undeniable appeal of the pursuit of happiness. The Age of Democracy had arrived, but did not go deep enough. It did not eradicate the master narrative that had informed the establishment of the European aristocracy: a concept of self that granted to anyone who could seize power the right to exploit others. Despite such limitations, the new democratic societies permitted people to give individualism added dimensions of personality, creativity and autonomy. Ultimately, the Holocaust and Existentialist thought made it clear that individuals not only have — but cannot escape — their freedom of choice and its attendant moral responsibility.
We have good reason not to want to go back to the pre-modern view of the individual. Now that we know what freedom is, we want more of it, not less. Most of us do not feel free enough, even if we enjoy the privilege of living in modified democracies. We hear much talk about freedom and liberty. Yet, we live daily with social hierarchies that squelch creativity, limit individual opportunity and permit out-and-out tyranny in arenas such as the workplace. A master narrative with roots in our pre-democratic past allows money politics to make a mockery of democracy. The more we understand the master narrative, the more we enable ourselves to change these conditions, exercise the freedom to create the world of our dreams — and fully bloom as individuals.
We also hold to the identity defined by separation and competition because we believe it to be “healthy” and the basis for the best of all possible societies. Sigmund Freud made the “ego” a cornerstone of modern psychology. According to the Freudian narrative, we are all born totally selfish. As infants, we are an “id.” We live only to satisfy our own needs. We assume that the entire world is meant only to serve us. As we learn more about others we develop an ego and a “superego.” The superego represents the demands of society. The ego negotiates between id and superego. A healthy ego therefore helps us to live successfully with others in society and permits a type of self-evaluation. This narrative explains who we are and how we mature while enshrining the idea of a separate self as normal, unquestionable and without alternative.
As Foucault pointed out, however, normative psychological discourses prompt us to limit our own freedom — and provide tools to anyone who wants to control us. Ego psychology informs manipulative economic practice from marketing strategies and advertising to business management. Seeing ourselves as egos in a lifelong unwinnable competition, we readily fall prey to sophisticated marketing techniques. We mistake the desires constructed by advertising for expressions of our spontaneous free will. The ego narrative both facilitates and justifies a constant infringement on our freedom to think for ourselves, shape our lives, make informed and well-considered choices.
When we see ourselves as egos, we evaluate our lives — not in terms of the joy we find in creativity and connection with one another and Nature — but rather in terms of power. The ego identity poisons our relationships. It places others in the role of accessories: rival winners or losers, supporting actors whose importance we measure according to their utility. Defining success in terms of fame and fortune, we imagine that a “big ego” is necessary to achievement. For that reason, we can almost seem to admire egoism.
On another level, however, we don’t love egoism. Few of us like to be called an egoist, egotistical, or egocentric. Everyone knows the uncomplimentary meaning of saying someone is on an “ego trip.” When someone is called an “egomaniac,” it suggests that they’re pathologically oblivious to the needs and feelings of others. In the extreme, the ego idea points to complete social havoc. Short of that, this basic concept of self as separate lies at the root of a whole world of problems.
Modalities of the Master Narrative
The ego self interprets perceived differences as signs of separation. Not-self means objectification: seeing the other as object. We ascribe free will and feelings to subject centers, but not to objects. Objects are fixed. They do not initiate action. They either serve us or represent obstacles. Since we prefer things helping us toward our goals rather than frustrating those ends, we make every effort to control objects.
When we see other people — other subject centers — as objects, we try to exercise power over them. The initial mental process of objectifying others translates into acts of inhumanity. The ego licenses the use of others. It denies personhood. It dismisses concerns about other peoples’ feelings. Although the ego is nothing more than an idea, the harm it causes is concrete and real.
While pitting us against one another on the individual level, the underlying notion of self as separate turns group similarities/differences into bases for larger scale antagonism and competition. Wherever a “we” appears, the ego narrative produces a “they” to power over. The ego identity suggests criteria by which individuals can associate and together imagine themselves superior to those who do not belong. These narratives of group identity — ranging from social cliques, to nations, to larger groupings such as gender — constitute modalities of the ego narrative.
History has led many of us to recognize that it is not only unintelligent but morally unacceptable to harbor pre-judgments of superiority/inferiority about whole groups of individuals. Few of us would embrace group hatreds consciously. Unconsciously, however, a powerful master narrative still imprisons us in group identities and hostilities. If we can come to understand what lies at the core of these problems — mental constructs made of words — we can deal with them more effectively and create a world that better matches our aspirations.
GenderOf the several modalities of the ego narrative, none is more fundamental than gender. Our first lessons in identity based on separation have to do with whether we happen to be male or female. The reproductive organs of the newborn carry great significance for parents, siblings, caregivers, friends and relatives. Gender evokes a set of pre-figured — although partly unconscious — responses. Studies have shown that, regardless of our views on gender, we treat boys and girls differently even as infants. We more often hold girl babies face-to-face and turn boy babies face-outward, toward the world. Pink blankets and blue blankets give way to gender oriented toys. We give dolls, make-up kits and pretend jewelry to girls; while boys get toy cars, trucks, guns, tools and footballs. We speak differently to and about girls and boys.
Children quickly grasp that they are supposed to aspire to their society’s notions of masculinity and femininity. Even parents who don’t believe in emphasizing gender find themselves responding to the child’s enthusiastic embrace of gender identity — and perhaps wondering if gender isn’t more biological than they thought.
Many parents today don’t want their child’s horizons arbitrarily limited by society’s ideas about gender roles. This significant change shows the rarely acknowledged influence of the 1970s feminist movement. Maligned in popular culture, feminists nonetheless managed to put the strict gender definitions of the 1950s among the cultural codes jettisoned in the wake of the 1960s.
Women are now admitted to professions and careers previously closed to them. Girls can dream of becoming doctors, dentists, lawyers, scientists, mathematicians, CEOs, Senators and Secretaries of State. Access to sports programs allows women to continue making breakthroughs in athletic achievement. School administrators, business managers and the courts are aware of sexual harassment. Police departments enforce stricter laws and have better understandings about criminal behavior such as wife-beating and date rape.
Yet we take for granted that streets, alleys, parking ramps, even homes, can be unsafe — especially at night — for women. In the United States, a woman is raped every two minutes. One out of every three American women will be sexually assaulted during her lifetime. Eighty-five percent of women will experience sexual harassment in the workplace or in educational institutions. Thirty-eight percent of girls under the age of twelve are sexually molested. And these are only the most blatant forms of gender-based mistreatment that still plague even societies that have seen many barriers fall.
We continue to face such problems in large part because this modality of the master narrative generates many supporting discourses telling us that gender is biological. Certainly male and female are biologically distinct. Yet culture constructs much of gender identity and gender-related behaviors. We know that masculinity and femininity are sets of ideas, in part because cultures differ in their gender definitions and roles. Moreover, most cultures put a great deal of energy into gender socialization, far more than would be necessary if gender were simply “natural.” At the very least, all of this effort makes it difficult to sort out biological dimensions untouched by cultural notions. While individuals receive somewhat different versions of their culture’s gender formation — and respond differently — social pressure urges all to aspire to the norm.
In our culture, masculinity epitomizes the master narrative of the competitive ego. Males are socialized to assume the role of dominance over women, Nature, their own bodies — and other men. From the start, adults tolerate, even encourage, aggressiveness in boys. “Boys will be boys” permits only a certain range of behaviors, however. Punitive curbing of conduct such as crying or otherwise being a “sissy” produces anxiety about gender identity. Insufficient attention from adult males can also leave boys clinging to a theoretical masculinity. Asserting power and control proves manliness. Boys establish hierarchies in playground fistfights. Adult males emulate the alpha-male ideal by aggressively battling for position and possession. Masculinity grounds the popularity of sports such as football and spurs consumption of violent movies, computer/video games, military histories and sensationalized press coverage of war.
This version of masculinity fails men in a profoundly important way. Since we human beings are social animals, males need companionship and love as much as females. The masculine mythology of the great individual, the warrior, the lone hero obstructs relationships. Fears of being effeminate check feelings of tenderness, dependence, vulnerability, compassion and belonging. Men have difficulty establishing and maintaining close bonds with anyone, especially other men. The expression “male bonding” has no female counterpart, since it goes without saying that the feminine will bond.
Women, like men, are shaped by a larger culture laced with the ego narrative. Yet, in the abstract, the feminine ideal embodies the opposite of egoism — in order to complement the male ego. Beneath a surface of personal beauty, delight in pleasure and appreciation of pretty things, femininity is about service, cooperation and communication. As little girls learn to speak, we accustom them to accepting interruptions and teach them a special, cheerful intonation. We encourage them as they play dress-up and practice mothering skills with their dolls. Movies, books, cartoons and toys teach girls that the goal of their lives is romance, living “happily ever after” with a “prince charming” husband. Modeled all around them, from magazine covers at supermarket checkout lines to animated fairytales, girls see the purported means to that end. A woman, they learn, must make herself the object of desire, the thing to be looked at, on display. From mothers, sisters and friends, girls learn how to put on make-up and select clothing designed to titillate. By the time women are ready to marry, they’re supposed to have mastered the skills of psychological, domestic and sexual service that men expect.
However, girls also learn that the larger culture sees self as separate and winning as all that counts. Women are less likely to resort to violence than men, since direct forms of aggression overstep the bounds of femininity. But women can be fierce competitors. In the feminine sphere, titles of success include most desirable sex object, most successful mother and variations on the money theme from most fashionable clothes to most lavish dwelling. Women compete with men, too, in any realm permitted: academic/professional achievement, for example, or the workplace where employees vie for the boss’s favor. “Playing the game” easily overrides non-egoistic feminine values.
Our culture’s sex roles are deeply embedded historical traditions that favor males, but do harm to both sexes. Masculinity’s obsession with control produced the Victorian morality that still distorts our sexuality today. This code of sexual behavior links sex, Nature and women — uncontrollables — with evil, the forbidden, the dirty. In the twentieth century, we came to recognize that repressed sexuality is unhealthy for both the individual and society at large. Yet unconsciously, we still regard sexual pleasure as somehow “bad.” Many people still find it difficult to accept same sex love — and not only because of programming to heterosexuality. Men loving men or women loving women so blatantly violates the gender codes that the whole edifice appears threatened. We cannot fully liberate ourselves from unreasonably restrictive sexual morality, as long as we cling to gender traditions that empower one sex over the other.
Largely a construct of language, gender inequality leaves us unsatisfied because it is out of touch with the Referent. Biological reproductive functions in themselves are non-hierarchical. Female and male together create the miracle of bringing a new human being into the world. Narratives of dominance/subordination ill serve intimacy and eroticism — the celebration of the joy, wonder and beauty of our bodies. The ego identity frustrates the need for love inherent in our physical being.
The importance of gender reaches beyond the production of antagonistic relationships between men and women, however. Gender attunes us from infancy to the notion underlying all the modalities of the ego narrative: that of defining self in terms of who or what we are not. Each modality of the master narrative of self as separate sets us over and against the Other.
ClassServing as a kind of template, the most generalized modality of the master narrative naturalizes the idea that the strong take from the weak. This formula defines “survival of the fittest” in popular culture. Biologists, however, increasingly see cooperation as key to fitness for survival. Indeed, life would never have developed on this planet if complex proteins hadn’t begun sharing molecules. Yet we humans have come to believe that success in Nature consists almost exclusively of grabbing as much as you can. The underlying notion that we are separate selves has consigned altruism — giving more than taking, doing for another’s sake, working for the common good — to the sidelines as idealistic, unrealistic, foolish, or at least extraordinary.
Only in a world scripted by the ego narrative is it imaginable that money could determine whether people live or die, whether they go homeless and hungry, whether they receive adequate health care, whether they have quality education and meaningful employment opportunities, whether they can travel, enjoy entertainment and so forth. The ego culture creates a moral climate that does not require the privileged to concern themselves with those living in deplorable conditions. An economic system based on the ego idea demands that everyone look out for themselves — because no one else will.
The term “economics” derives from the Greek root words, “ekos” and “nomos.” Together they mean, “the rules of the house.” The “house rules” govern how we exchange and produce the things we need to survive, how we each contribute to the well being of the whole of society, how we compensate one another for the work we do, and how we take care of each other. We ourselves create these rules and the systems that enact them.
We can change our “house rules.” Yet without changing the underlying the master narrative, the effort will end in failure, as it has in the past. Communism, for example, had high ideals — that each should give according to their ability and receive according to their need. When individuals attempted to impose these principles through violent revolution, they aroused resistance and felt forced to suspend basic civil liberties. And since these leaders did not interrogate and alter their own relationship to the ego narrative, they reproduced a hierarchy characterized by corruption and, ironically, unequal distribution of wealth. Ultimately, the people threw off this oppression. But that does not mean that the “house rules” we call “free enterprise” are the best we can do.
The “free” economic system that dominates our world relies on the belief that we are lazy and selfish. It operates on the principle that greed is good. Its less-touted motivating force is fear. Lower- and middle-class workers fear for their livelihood and the welfare of their families; the middle and upper classes for the maintenance of their position. The ego identity presses everyone to acquire more in order to see themselves as successful in the competition. Yet something of who we really are shows through even here. We seek consumer goods for the admiration and esteem they elicit as much as for the comfort and pleasure they afford. As biological beings, we need the love, reciprocity and community that egoism denies us.
In our democratic political culture, popular sayings and hallowed texts reiterate the theme that no one is better than anyone else. “We hold these truths to be self-evident...” On a most fundamental level, we believe that everyone should count equally. In theory, we don’t recognize birthright. Yet that's not what goes on in our government and in our workplaces.
At work, the owners, their surrogates and favorites take up positions of power over others. Workplace culture scoffs at democratic decision making. Bosses can expect deference. Those lower down usually have only two options: acquiesce or quit. We endure the situation because, no matter how skilled, sincere or willing to work you are, this economic system does not guarantee you a job — unless you were born to a social position that gives you “connections.”
In politics, the ego narrative undermines all principles and rules except those that serve private gain. Classism justifies unfairly influencing legislation, manipulating the outcome of elections, appointing partisan judges, doing whatever one can to protect and further self interest — including overt forms of corruption such as bribery. A profiteering economic system does not serve the interests of government “of the people, by the people and for the people.” The ego narrative argues against working for the common good or helping the less fortunate.
When it comes to global relations, economic egoism excludes others from the well-being industrialized nations have attained. In what we call “Third World” nations, governments have been forced to borrow money and pay it back with interest — making it impossible to provide services and ease the poverty of their own people. Even as debt is been lifted, trade policies and exploitative business practices continue to prevent hard working people from feeding their families. Multi-national corporations treat the developing world as a source of raw materials, cheap labor, even a dumping ground for toxic waste. The drive for ever greater profit overlooks nightmare scenarios of sweatshop production, child labor, twelve hour workdays, shantytowns and environmental catastrophe. A child dies of hunger every seven seconds under the “house rules” of this world. Someone dies of the effects of poverty every three seconds.
RaceWe more easily perpetrate, accept and ignore mistreatment of one group by another when additional narratives make the exploited doubly Other. This is the case in the Third World where racism melds with our ego-based “house rules.” Multiple modalities of the master narrative can overlap and mutually reinforce each other, as evidenced historically in the effect of slavery on narratives of race.
Most historians would agree that the trade in black African slaves added new components and increased force to existent racist narratives. Before maritime technology made intercontinental slavery possible, Europeans had a history of enslaving other Europeans; and Africans other Africans. But by the time trade in African slaves began, an evolved European culture required efforts to justify slavery — by discourses that denied the humanity of the captive. Furthermore, the Atlantic slave trade lasted well into a time when European/American culture found enslavement of one human being by another almost impossible to reconcile. Under the influence of the Enlightenment, defenders of slavery garbed their excuses in scientific-sounding language about supposed genetic differences. This kind of discourse outlasted slavery. It not only continues to poison black/white relations, but also provided a deeply cut path for other group hatreds as well.
Race itself is a construct of the ego narrative and, as such, removes us from the Referent. Biologically, approximately 99.9% of any one individual’s DNA is the same as any other individual’s DNA. Over millions of years, human groups living in widely separate geographical locations developed variations, some affecting appearance. The master narrative of self as separate turns such perceived differences into otherness. On the most basic level, language has us objectifying one another. Exacerbating this problem, the narrative field tends to retain even discredited discourses and their vocabulary. Altogether, these dynamics translate certain physical and cultural aspects of human diversity into “race.”
Although this modality of egoism encompasses various intergroup relationships, the word “race” in United States connects immediately to a distinction based on skin colors loosely called “black” and “white.” Brought across the Atlantic in chains, the people identified as black spent more than two centuries under the brutal institution of slavery. After the Civil War, bullwhips and the auction block gave way to share-cropping, segregation and lynching in the South. Elsewhere, African Americans encountered both blatant and hidden forms of racial hatred. Racism restricted black people to impoverished neighborhoods as well as the lowest paying and least desirable jobs. The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s overturned segregation laws, affirmed everyone’s right to vote and made overt job and housing discrimination illegal. Yet, racism persists. Many African American children still grow up in ghettos, surrounded by poverty, hopelessness and violence. We still have enormous disparities in education/employment opportunities between the predominantly black inner cities and white wealthy suburbs. Middle-class African Americans also experience the pain of both conscious and unconscious negative attitudes kept active by narratives of race. Police abuse and racial profiling affect not just the lower classes, but professionals, even celebrities. Employers still find reasons not to hire; bankers not to give loans; realtors not to show homes.
The modality of “race” harms other groups of people, too. It justifies building walls to keep Hispanics out, paying immigrants minimum wage or less and subjecting all Hispanic Americans to discrimination and racist rhetoric. Variations on this pattern hurt Asian Americans, Arab Americans and so on ad infinitum. There is no limit to the criteria that the ego narrative will utilize to divide us into a “we” and “they.” It adds new “others” to the list as we come into increasing contact with people who don’t speak our language, share our customs or look like us. The ego narrative teaches us not to appreciate each other’s beauty, or cultural and religious traditions.
The underlying notion of self as separate impedes our efforts to deal with the terrible legacy of race. Egoism tell us we have no responsibility for the misfortune of others. It ignores the role of colonialism and economic imperialism in producing the enmities that still plague our world. It recognizes no debt owed African Americans for the millions killed in the Middle Passage, the 250 years of unpaid labor and subsequent discrimination. It denies any obligation to Native Americans for the loss of entire nations, the usurpation of their lands and efforts to eradicate their cultures. It permitted the systematic murder of six million Jews. We see the force of the master narrative in that those who committed or went along with these unthinkable abominations didn’t see themselves as choosing evil.
The Object Universe
The master narrative turns the Universe into a place, a location. Reinforced by the operations of language, objectifying discourses reduce the Cosmos to a thing among things, a mere effect of some cause. We can discern two main variations on this cause/effect theme — two basic explanations of how the Universe, we and Nature came to exist.
The first version argues that the existence of the Universe requires an uncaused first Cause — outside of time and space, in Eternity. In the abstract, this narrative defines God as separate from and absolute subject to the absolute object-world created. This idea appeals to us for many reasons. Intellectually, it avoids endlessly asking “and before that?” Emotionally, we can find solace in times of great personal difficulty in the belief that there is an all-knowing, all-powerful Someone out there who cares about us and to whom we can turn for help. Or, at least, to whom it all makes sense. Although this cosmology places the ego self among other objects in creation, notions of the individual soul can modify the feeling of objecthood. Prayer and other spiritual exercises enhance that effect by placing the self in dialogue with the Absolute Subject. We take comfort in metaphysical concepts such as immortality, reincarnation, heaven and hell. These bespeak our deep longing for the continuation of life after death and for the true home we only wish we could find in this world. Most importantly, the paradigm of engagement with a Subjectivity greater than ourselves resonates with a dimension of the Referent that is left out of the master narrative’s other explanatory model.
That alternative model, the secular account of the Universe, emerged historically from widespread reaction against unquestioned supernatural explanations. By the seventeenth century, the religious worldview had spawned a profusion of beliefs based on other beliefs — without any link to verifiable phenomena. In an effort to rid human knowledge of superstition and metaphysical speculation, advocates of science and reason developed new criteria for truth. Scientific method would require proof in the form of concrete experiments that could be reproduced by others. Evidence would have to meet strict standards; reasoning proceed according to rules of logic. The resulting cosmology posits a different kind of object Universe — the object of human inquiry — in which all that happens is governed by discoverable laws. Viewing Nature as a kind of vast machine, this scientific schema assumes the possibility of formulating a theory that could explain everything. It promises the ability to predict — and ultimately control — what will happen. On the way to that goal, science delights in the undiscovered and therefore has no trouble with questions such as what preceded the “Big Bang.” The scientific approach has clearly demonstrated a more workable relationship with the Referent than the worldview it replaced. The technology it made possible has carried humanity distances previously unimaginable in communication, healthcare, transportation, entertainment and so forth.
Yet both of these cosmologies — as commonly understood — can limit our moral/ethical thinking about the larger problems of our world. To be sure, individual believers in either the religious or secular model do take responsibility, even dedicate their lives to doing what they can about evils such as war and hunger. In Chapter Four and Five we will explore how religion and science provide elements of a counter-narrative. At the same time, we wouldn’t be on the edge of chaos if either approach had fulfilled its promise. The scientific perspective has given us weapons of mass destruction, but little or no help toward resolving our conflicts without violence. Nor have our religious traditions brought us much closer to establishing world peace, feeding everyone and caring for the environment. Individual scientists and theologians who do address these issues are more likely to be criticized than joined.
Religious discourse can downplay earthly problems by emphasizing an afterlife. One can evade responsibility for this world on the grounds that Heaven is not supposed to be here, but somewhere else. In some religious traditions, admission to eternal bliss is a private affair between the individual and an all-forgiving God. Faith may be viewed as all that’s required. Individuals can believe it possible to attain paradise — without doing everything they can to end evils such as oppression, war and starvation. Wealth and power may be interpreted as signs of God’s favor. Moreover, many religious doctrines assume the eternality of evil, whether or not embodied in mythological beings such as the Devil. Long ago, theologians formulated ideas of fallen angels and hell in order to account for the existence of evil in a world created by an all-powerful and all-good God. These explanations entered the sacred canon of texts — and popular culture. We now attribute to mental illness behavior formerly seen as demonic possession. Yet, we are still hampered morally by belief in Satan and/or the eternality of evil. When we can blame some unalterable outside force, the master narrative goes uncorrected.
In secular discourse, morality derives from the “Golden Rule” or what Emmanuel Kant called the “Categorical Imperative.” ‘Do whatever you would, as long as you would permit your behavior to be made into a universal law for everyone to do.’ In theory, this ethical principle implies equality and, if adhered to, would constrain egoism to a degree by condemning deception, corruption, fraud and so forth. Yet, the Categorical Imperative has been used to enshrine established inequalities of wealth and power — on the grounds that everyone is equally permitted, at least in theory, to take as much as they can. Basic scientific narratives can also be interpreted as excusing us of responsibility for world problems. In a schema that defines Nature as Being without Mind and all that happens as determined by laws, human beings can be seen as having no freedom to make moral choices. Whatever we do — war or love — can be written off as automatic reflex.
In describing these two visions of the Universe and their moral implications, we have necessarily simplified a complex and dynamic picture. Complications arise, for example, from our quirky ways of interacting with the narrative field. It would be extremely difficult for any individual to take up only those narratives consistent with a single worldview and avoid interiorizing any associated with another. The more so in a pluralistic, mass-media society with communications technology amplifying the production, promotion and contestation of narratives. Thus, we find post-modern secularists believing that evil has an inevitable, quasi-independent existence; and believers in pre-modern religious cosmology embracing modern narratives about democracy and human rights.
However entangled, both religious and secular cosmologies express the operations of language and the master narrative of separation. Both leave us perilously out of touch with the Referent. Only by cocooning ourselves in strands of words could we imagine our individual self-interest as separate from that of our Mother Planet. For thirty years, most scientists have agreed that global warming represents a threat. But the “house rules” and retrograde ideologies have prevented politicians from taking effective action. Nor have we the people gone out into the streets en masse to insist that such problems be addressed. Rather than seeing ourselves as Earthlings, we identify with nations — defined by the ever changing geo-political lines that we ourselves draw upon the globe. On the basis of these borders, we stand ready to make an enemy of any other nation. And readiness means we stockpile weapons that could obliterate all of life. Given warning, none of us would drive a vehicle off a cliff — even if some passengers were saying it might not really be one. Yet the ego narrative so dissociates us from the complex dynamic of Life that we continue to risk planetary disaster.
Conclusion
A destructive master narrative, not “human nature” or individual malice, lies at the core of our complicated tangle of world problems. Yet a narrative, even a master narrative, is only made of words. This understanding permits us to grasp and address our situation. It offers both a more effective solution and one without endless recrimination.
The ego identity is a cultural phenomenon. It is a way of thinking of ourselves. The ego, in itself, does not exist. Half a century ago, Jean-Paul Sartre demonstrated that the ego depends on Consciousness for its existence, not vice-versa. Foucault and Derrida contributed to our understanding of what the ego is, where it comes from and how it works. It is time for us to recognize the illusion and break the spell.
The ego narrative may be an aberrant pathway. It may be a stage of development — although we have reason to doubt that egoism ever really helped the human species. In any case, the ego identity now threatens our very existence. We need to shed this view of ourselves in order to survive. Unleashed from it, we will live more happily and realize a greater freedom.
We have more resources in this endeavor than we may at first recognize. The narrative field has always retained other ideas of who we are, although the master narrative dominates. Human beings have formed many kinds of communities, large and small, and developed a variety of cultures — some of them less ego-identified. We need to resurrect and investigate such alternative concepts of self. Many narratives that the ego culture has relegated to the sidelines may offer help in opening the gate to the loving world all of us wish.