When I was boy, I went to a “revival” with my grandmother. The preacher made a point I still hear now-and-then. In short, he said it wasn’t the Romans who killed Jesus and it wasn’t the Jewish people who killed Jesus – it was us – all of us – each of us – it was YOU who killed him with YOUR sin and disobedience. HE died for YOUR sins. Without YOUR sins, HE wouldn’t have had to DIE. Therefore, with YOUR sins, YOU killed HIM. YOU should be ASHAMED. YOU need to REPENT – the sooner, the better!
I felt so bad about killing Jesus that I accepted Christ as my savior. The trouble is, a few years later, I came to resent the emotional manipulation, not to mention the hypocrisy I frequently saw in the church. I spent most of my youth as an agnostic at best, and if it were not for a group of guys I met in college, I probably would be an atheist today, rather than an extremely flawed Christian. Making someone “feel bad” is a dishonest way to get them to do what you want. In psychological terms, this is how a narcissist gets his way. It also seems to me such tactics might end up motivating a person to do the opposite.
However, there is a difference between being deliberately manipulated by an appeal to our emotions, a technique often employed by politicians and other sociopaths, and having an emotional reaction to certain information, such as learning how human beings were treated as property on plantations or how entire families were exterminated in concentration camps. If one is not upset when learning about such cruelty, I question their credentials as a human being. Then there are those who blame God for “allowing” people to suffer. Perhaps we should instead question why so many humans have made excuses for human suffering.
All learning has an emotional element. There is joy in an “ah-ha” moment. There is pain in trying again and again to get there. We can take pride in our predecessors’ achievements. We can also feel regret or shame when we learn about their failures. Just as being manipulated by a preacher decades ago became part of my learning process, feeling an emotional reaction to new knowledge, or even taking offense at an ignorant or tasteless comment can be part of what it takes to learn and grow. Not all learning will “feel good.” I’ve argued that if everything we see or hear makes us feel good, we probably aren’t learning very much. David Baker, the great jazz teacher, once said, “If you always sound good when you’re practicing, you’re not really practicing.”
If we want to keep moving forward, we must have the courage to confront the past. Yet, there is a difference between being shamed by mistakes and learning from them. I’ve done some things I’m proud of and, sadly, some not so much. My parents taught me to accept responsibility for my actions, to try to do better next time, and to avoid getting stuck in self-punishment. The past can be admirable or deplorable. People can be noble, to be sure, but also despicable. We all need to learn the difference. I’m concerned that when certain topics are banned, history can become whatever the powerful say it is.
We can’t fix what we don’t know about. We can’t understand what we are afraid to acknowledge. We can’t even evaluate what we are doing today without a good understanding of yesterday. If we believe we shouldn’t discuss our mistakes, we won’t be able to do better. Simply put, if we choose to ignore the past, we can’t learn from it. It seems to me we are not supposed to be “comfortable” with learning. The price of knowledge is often discomfort – that’s why it’s called cognitive dissonance. If knowledge is power, sometimes we should be uncomfortable with what we learn. Otherwise, all we might learn is how to use our uninformed beliefs to take power over others.
MurrayWorks 