Blogger of Jared

A few years ago, I read two books worth of Boondocks as part of a research project with my humanities professor. For the uninitiated, Boondocks is a comic strip about two African American boys from the hood who are forced to live with their Grandfather in a predominantly Caucasian (and generally WASPy) suburb. Aaron McGruder, the comic strip’s author, uses the strip to explore everything from American race relations to the competency of the current occupant of the white house. McGruder is unabashedly liberal; the strip’s main character, for instance, aspires to belong to the Black Panthers, nevermind that he’s only about 12 years old.

After a few months of a Boondocks-heavy diet, I found my politcal views changing in spite of myself. I was living at the time with five highly-educated friends and, in our intellectual bachelorhood, we often came to discuss politics and the world at large. These discussions were often challenging and insightful as all of my roommates were quite intelligent. More than anything, however, the discussions probably lacked variety–we all held fairly similar (moderate to slightly right-leaning) views and so there was seldom very vigorous debate. After I had been reading these comics for a while, however, and with no other appreciable change in my intellectual diet, I found myself increasingly critical of the Bush administration. Indeed, I was soon able to whip out witty one-liners and razor-sharp zingers which almost all served to skewer Mr. W. The funny thing was that these words often came out without any thought on my part, almost as if I were reciting lines from a script. After a time, I realized my thoughts and words were beginning to change and it kind of scared me–is my opinion, my paradigm, the way I view politics and the world really so malleable? I wondered. Soon thereafter, the research project ended, I stopped reading Boondocks, and my thoughts and feelings gradually drifted back to approximately (though not exactly) where they had been before the experiment began.

Still, I sometimes think back on those few months and find myself sobered at the power we grant to others to determine what we think and feel. Pondering this experience in particular, as well as my life in general, has led me to guard with something approximating zealotry the media (be it books, music, articles, or shows) to which I expose myself.

On the one hand, of course, this is a principle expounded in every general conference–at least every one I can remember. Most obviously, every conference brings at least one (and probably more like five) talks warning of the dangers of pornography. Lewd pictures are inherently bad, I believe, because they degrade women, corrupt sex, and destroy marriages. Beyond this, however, church and secular leaders of many stripes have clearly explained their belief that pornography’s most dangerous consequence is the way it loosens the reins on our sexual behavior–that is, a man can only view so many voluptuous nude women before he craves the chance to touch one who looks like what he’s been seeing in pictures. The visual message plants within the man the seeds of future actions–thought, feeling, word, and action are merely points along the same continuum, the former leading inexorably toward the latter. Thus, pornogaphy has its hand in increasing infidelity, divorce, molestation, and rape–or so the theory goes.

This same line of reasoning, however, holds in many arenas outside of pornography. Consider, for instance, political beliefs. For simplicity’s sake, let’s examine my opinion of George W. Bush. The Boondocks example is extreme, but some subtle and insidious version of that more noticable indoctrination seeps into me everyday. If, for instance, I read and believe everything printed in BYU’s daily newspaper, I will be inclined to think much more of Mr. Bush than if the NY Times is my only source of news.

Of course, most of us do not obtain news from only one source, and most of us do not believe everything we read; nonetheless, our beliefs are inescapably shaped by the things we read and hear–if nothing else, we can only base valid opinion on what we know and, since few of us travel regularly to Washington DC , nearly everything we think and believe concerning national politics derives from what friends tell us, what the newspaper says, or what we hear on the evening news.

Even more fundamentally, however, outside influences press in on us incessantly, attempting to shape not only our views of politics, but our very selves. Some might argue, in fact, that our personalities merely reflect outside influences. That is, I am not who I decide I am; instead, I am who the advertising executives, religious leaders, editorialists, authors, musicans, and politcal pundits say I will be. Of course, this theory soon becomes confusing since, ultimately, the pundits shaping me were shaped by someone else–eventually we will have to question the ultimate source of opinion and thought.

That difficult question, however, does not bother me particularly because I don’t believe outside influences mold me without my knowledge or consent. They affect me–about that there is no question–but I am the gatekeeper. Most basically, of course, I decide what to watch (fox news or CNN), who to read (Leonard Pitts or Cal Thomas) and to what I will listen (Dixie Chicks or Sean Hannity). Beyond that, however, and, in the long run, more importantly, I decide what to do with the information I receive.

As sentient, thoughtful beings, we must scrutinize–to do otherwise is to abdicate some part of our autonomy. Thought demands effort and I fear we are slipping increasingly into a morass of intellectual laziness. The internet has brought an onslaught or information, but a frightening paucity of critical thinking and meaningful analysis–after all, if 300,000,000 opinions are already available via google, what use is there is me taking the time to weigh the evidence and make my own decision?

We travel that road, of course, at our peril. Doing so suggests an almost nihilistic giving-up, a sort of shoulder-shrugging which broadcasts my gullibility to the world–it’s rather like posting my inner-most core, the part of me which has existed forever and over which I will be forever sovereign, on EBAY: my volition goes to the highest bidder.

There is, however, a better way. Part of walking the higher road is merely a question of intellectual fortitude–the moment we cease accepting the most popular opinion (or, as some couter-culturals have done, the least-popular one) unquestioningly, merely because of its popularity, we take the first steps down the road to independence.

This alone, however, is not enough. Once we have rejected the facile acceptance of the popular (or pretty, or convenient, or conservative, or liberal), we are faced with a new question: if I can’t rely on outward sources to make my decisions for me, how do I make decisions? To what source could I possibly look that would be more reliable than the Times (or CNN, or fox news, or my brother-in-law, or who- or whatever?). I often find myself so lost in the din of voices I forget that, no matter how flagrantly I ignore it, a compass needle always floats within, pointing to the North Star, to the Good, to the Promised Land.

Learning to strip away the onion-like layers of outside opinion is, of course, difficult, wearying, and time-consuming, not unlike stripping away old coats of wallpaper and paint. Still, it is necessary. Only with the din quieted can I learn to hear the voice speaking uniquely inside me. It is no accident that, in the Church, we speak of listening to the still small voice. Importantly, though, in such a loud and ubiquitously distracting world, listening to, let alone understanding, the still small voice is no easy task–it is not a loud sound we can hear casually but a whisper to which we must ever attune our ears, working almost harder to shut out other noises then to focus our hearing on that subtle celestial sound.

Of course, listening to and obeying the still small voice introduces a new paradox: if we subject our will to God’s, are we not still slaves? In a sense, I suppose, the answer is yes. John Dunne wrote:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new….

Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

So, yes, in one sense subjecting my will to God constitutes slavery. more importantly, however, subjection to God is, I believe, qualitatively different from subjection to any other entity, including myself. The facile point, of course, is that God is perfect and subjecting myself to a perfect being is better than subjecting myself to anything else. I do not, however, believe that the difference is merely quantitative as such reasoning implies. It is not a question of percentages, as in: well, if I subject myself to the republican party I’ll make 5% of the right choices, to the NY Times and I’ll make 30% of the right choices, to my local minister and I’ll make 55%, and to God alone and I’ll make 100%.

Rather, a choice is not liberating or constraining solely because of the forces which influence me to make it (in the end, after all, some force–even if it is only my own fancy–compels me to make every choice) but also based on whether it makes me, prospectively, more or less free. Thus, regardless of my reason for doing so, drugs are enslaving because they rob me of the ability to choose. Some entities–drugs, alcohol, peer pressure, popularity, wealth, pornography–are inherently addictive and thus rob us straightway of freedom. Others–this newspaper or that journal–are neutral. God, however, actually makes us more free. That is, when I choose to follow Him, I am more free to make my next decision.

How this works, exactly, I do not know. Jesus taught this very paradox, however, saying: “he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” Similarly, Elder Maxwell said:

So many of us are kept from eventual consecration because we mistakenly think that, somehow, by letting our will be swallowed up in the will of God, we lose our individuality (see Mosiah 15:7). What we are really worried about, of course, is not giving up self, but selfish things—like our roles, our time, our preeminence, and our possessions. No wonder we are instructed by the Savior to lose ourselves (see Luke 9:24). He is only asking us to lose the old self in order to find the new self. It is not a question of one’s losing identity but of finding his true identity! Ironically, so many people already lose themselves anyway in their consuming hobbies and preoccupations but with far, far lesser things.

Because we are God’s children, it should not surprise us that the quest to find true identity must end at His feet. Ultimately, we do not yet understand independence as God does. We are, by a million and one competing influences, constrained within this mortal sphere. The jettisoning of these sources is necessary if we are to be truly free and such shedding of mortal shackles can only be accomplished with God’s grace. Thus, a complete understanding of myself requires a deeper understanding of God and my independence requires greater dependence on God. Paradox often forms the bedrock of truth; perhaps we ought not wonder that such apparently contradictory notions constitute both the genesis and promised land of the quest for identiy and independence.