Confucius claimed we could have harmony in society if we named things accurately. Peace begins with the rectification of terms. Somehow we missed the obvious meaning of the myth of Genesis. When God linked human dignity to the task of naming the animals, the point was not that human beings were supposed to lord it over everybody. We were intented to be poets, not conquistadors. The human essence, the soul, the self, is revealed not in the schizophrenic psyche of the warrior, but in the healing naming and chanting of the poet. We lose our essence when we fall into propaganda — false naming. We exile ourselves from the garden of the spirit when we pervert language and give a false sanctity to acts of destruction. Changing vices into virtues, we become inhumane.
We may begin healing our diseased species by a small but radical reclaiming of language, by ceasing to sanctify blind obedience to authority with the honorific "duty" , or call the willingness to kill an unknown enemy or die in the attempt "courage" or baptize the spirit of revenge with the name of "honor".
The word hero needs to be reserved for the man or woman who is willing to take the solitary journey into the depths of the self, to reown the shadow, to exorcise the ancient warrior psyche, to discover the power and authority of wholeness. And the word courage should be reserved to characterize the man or woman who leaves the infantile sanctuary of the mass mind, to live in the creative anxiety of meditative and reflective consciousness. And duty can be nothing less than the refusal to allow a national consensus of communal narcissism to displace the "transmoral conscience" that is the true human instinct for universal compassion.
Sam Keen
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