Sadly, my nearly year-long saga in Spain is coming to an end. Today is my last full day here. Since last September, my wife, Peggy, and I have shared a sabbatical with my daughter and son-in-law and their family of five children (ages 4 to 15). Right now we’re in Mallorca.
The whole experience has been life changing – almost as important as my study of liberation theology in Brazil (1984), my frequent visits to revolutionary and post-revolutionary Nicaragua (beginning in 1985), all those times I’ve visited Cuba (starting in 1997), and my years of study and teaching in Costa Rica (1992-2013).
In Spain I’ve learned more and changed more than I could ever have anticipated.
Unexpectedly, I’ve entered an unusual community here – of street musicians, cave dwellers, hippies, and grassroots philosophers. I love them all, and as I said, it’s changed my life.
One of them, Simon (from Chile) introduced me to the great Chilean film director, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and to Ana Rodriguez Sotomayor and her milestone book, The Precursors of Printing.
My troglodyte friend, Simon
Those sources and my desire to improve my Spanish comprehension sent me back (via YouTube) to my early teachers from Chile, Costa Rica, Argentina, and Puerto Rico: Franz Hinkelammert (who died last week), Enrique Dussel, and (more recently) Ramon Grosfoguel. Together their drive to decolonize world history has rendered irrelevant my previous understandings (and teaching!) of Eurocentric universal history.
Simon and I also studied together the Mayan sacred book, The Popol Vuh. He introduced me to Tarot, marijuana, and mushrooms. At least once a week, we talked for hours.
Another dear friend, Francesco from Italy, showed me how to read tarot cards. Cesco’s a Bob Dylan scholar. My friend’s two long essays (in Italian) helped me appreciate Dylan more deeply and enthusiastically than ever.
That made my attendance at Dylan’s Granada concert (with my 15-year-old granddaughter, Eva Maria) richer than I could ever have imagined. Eva and I had an artistic experience that night (in the Alhambra) that neither of us will forget. It was magical.
Eva Maria & I pose before entering the Alhambra’s General Life
So, I found it somehow fitting that just a few days ago, with my time in Spain running out, it was Eva who suggested that I read Dan Brown’s novel, Origin. Her suggestion was inspired by connections she saw between my recently published essay on artificial intelligence (AI) on the one hand, and our frequent conversations about faith and religion, along with our shared experience of Spain itself on the other.
Origin is a 2017 “who dunnit” that involves the biblical Book of Genesis, science and evolution, Christian fundamentalism, and artificial intelligence. All of it is set in Spain and many of the places my family and I have visited over the last year.
I’m talking especially about Bilbao and its Guggenheim Museum and Barcelona’s iconic Sagrada Familia cathedral created by Antoni Gaudi. Involved too is what I’ve learned here about Spanish politics, the enduring power of the Spanish Catholic Church, the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939-1975), the monarchy in Spain, and resistance to that apparently outmoded institution.
Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona
In short, Origin has Dan Brown’s perennial hero, Robert Langdon attempting to solve the murder of the brilliant futurist scholar, Edmund Kirsch. Kirsch claimed to have discovered definitive atheistic answers to religion’s two most persistent questions: (1) Where did we come from, and (2) where are we going?
Scholars from Christianity, Judaism, and Islam found Kirsch’s discoveries so threatening that the only solution to the problem he represented was to silence him permanently.
With the dastardly deed done, Langdon must locate the responsible forces.
Not surprisingly, doing so involves a stunningly beautiful heroine, several additional murders, frantic chases, and Brown’s usual long (sometimes pedantic) discourses on symbols, codes, architecture, history, mythology, science, and technology.
Also involved are long conversations with “Winston,” a computerized embodiment of the very artificial intelligence that my earlier-referenced essay had speculated might represent the next step in human evolution.
The whole thing was quite fascinating and even exciting from its opening interfaith exchanges to its cliffhanger conclusion.
Still however, the book’s central problem seemed somehow outdated. I found it difficult to imagine that in 2017 the “entire world” [actually, 250 million (of 8 billion) people with access to computers and iPhones] would still be interested in, much less threatened by long-resolved (or dismissed as irrelevant) questions of creationism vs. evolution explained in those pedantic screeds.
Except for a quickly shrinking cadre of Christian fundamentalists, that controversy was solved cinematically years ago by Spencer Tracy in “Inherit the Wind” (1960). Granted, the Scopes Monkey Trial (1925) did garner fevered national attention at least in America. But that was almost a century ago.
Since then, we’ve had the death of God movement, John XIII‘s Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church’s pedophilia crisis, and the resulting general discrediting of organized religion that has all but emptied (Catholic) churches across the world. (Just go to Mass here in Spain on any given Sunday, and you’ll struggle to find anyone under 60 among the worshippers.)
Today (at least among Christians) only religious crazies (like bombers of abortion clinics) are willing to commit murder over differences about the Bible (in which btw, there’s no denunciation of abortion).
Yes, that’s true about questions of creationism vs. evolution, and believers who understand the Bible as:
- A single divinely authored book with 73 chapters
- Whose most important chapter is Genesis
- Whose data conflicts with modern science
- And whose meaning is confined to the personal sphere,
- While supporting American patriotism
- And “spiritual” questions
- Of feeling good about oneself
- And about life after death,
- Punishment and reward
- And an apocalyptic, God-willed
- World destruction
- As punishment for sin
To repeat: very few among Christians are willing to kill or die for such arcane beliefs.
But that’s not nearly so about the Bible and questions of social justice. Instead, as Noam Chomsky (a Jewish atheist) has shown, the U.S. government has shown itself quite willing to kill hundreds of thousands (including a whole team of liberation theologians in El Salvador in 1989) precisely over biblical interpretation that differs from that of the Christians whose irrelevant fundamentalism U.S. leadership approvingly identifies with Christianity.
On the other hand, the assassination-worthy theological enemies of the United States include those who ALONG WITH VIRTUALLY ALL OF MODERN BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP:
- See the Bible as a library of books written by various authors in various historical periods for various reasons and from various theological (often conflicting) perspectives.
- Within this canon, the Book of Genesis and its creation myths are peripheral,
- While the Book of Exodus and Israel’s nation-founding story of the liberation of slaves from Egypt represents the Bible’s central focus
- Reflecting ancient and modern conflicts between the world’s poor and its rich and powerful classes
- Whose oppression of marginalized people stand in sharp contrast to the biblical God’s “preferential option for the poor,”
- [And to “America’s” (and empires’ in general) preferential option for the rich],
- While identifying the Book of Revelation’s “Apocalypse” as predicting not the end of the world, but the annihilation of the Roman Empire and (by extension) of empires in general.
With all of that in mind, it’s no wonder that Dan Brown chose a safer and less politically controversial approach to religious controversy than that pinpointed by Chomsky, biblical scholarship, and contemporary politics.
Instead, Brown chose to stick with worn out cliches and simplifications.
Regrettably, he steered far away from Chomsky’s advice: “Keep away from clichés, this world is much more complicated.”
So is faith and Sacred Scripture.
About Things That Matter 
Hi Mike,
Thanks for once again pointing out the Western-centric and plutocratic bias in the background stories we in the western world are immersed and through which we misunderstand those different from us.
Meeting people who grew up with and live in a different perspective, even the small encounters, does indeed show us the spot on which we normally stand.
On September 23, 2001, I found myself in a large business hotel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. My host/customer put me up there on a business trip I had planned and booked well before that earlier fateful day. Like most business that are not for the wealthy in KL, the hotel was in a “block” — a building the size of a city block with multiple floors that has businesses on all the different floors. My host pointed out to me that I could find a grocery and variety of different fast food places on the various floors of “the mall” that was in the same building.
I wanted dinner so I walked around and found a Kentucky Fried Chicken (figuring that I would progress toward eating native Thai food once I was over jet lag).
After a bit of walking (all the better to get over jet lag) I found the KFC. There, I waited in line and gave my order to a young woman appearing to be of high school age (at that time all high school students were taught English during the high school years). She was in KFC uniform and, being Muslim (about 45% of KL were Muslim back then) she also wore a hijab, as did other workers there, apparently part of their uniform.
After she took my order she asked “are you from the U.S.?” I said yes. She replied, in a tender and heart-felt voice, “I am so sorry.” She spoke to me as a person, not as a representative of my country. I thanked her. I held back my tears (of gratitude), not wanting to discomfort her.
It was that moment which informed my reaction to the horrible acts that followed, in which over and over again a Western-centric view of the world, not open to the experience of the common people unlike ourselves, destroyed millions of lives. We had done the same in Vietnam.
When we will learn? All we have to do is listen and learn the lives of the ordinary people.
Hank
PS: I found out only in the last 2 years that the CIA analysts back in the Vietnam war era knew the life experience of the common people and warned against the war strategy that was employed and which did so much useless harm. Politics trumps knowledge. The same was known in the so-called war against terrorism. When scoring political points outweighs knowledge a lot of people hurt and/or die.
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Dear Hank, Thank you so much for such a thought-full reply. Like you I’ve found that ordinary people outside the United States often know so much more than “educated” people in our culture. They know about colonialism and even the meaning and effects of terms like “structural adjustment.” Frequently, I’ve found, they know more about U.S. history than most “Americans.” I’m grateful to you.
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Hi Mike,
What matters to me isn’t what a person knows — it’s their willingness to connect, regardless of our external differences.
People who connect with each other despite differences in what they know or believe have shrunk the distance between them. From that position of together, what is known and believed becomes less important than before they connected.
Those who make a habit of connection become less willing to support those actions which will harm others and more willing to help those who on the surface are different from them. Connection begets empathy and empathy enacted becomes “love your neighbor’ or any of the other variants that exist in some form in all the world’s religions.
Hank
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Thanks, Hank, for your words of wisdom. At my age I’m more and more realizing how much I DON’T know.
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