Is there a truly “natural” human being?

Ryan Bell wrote another blog post today. I’m enjoying his blog even though what I’m about to say is a sort of complaint. Maybe it’s my sick sense of enjoyment.

He uses “stepping into the void” and other language that seem to imagine that traveling from Christianity to atheism is like taking off a set of clothes, or stepping out of a room with smoke, or taking the cherry topping off of your cheesecake in order to finally discover the “you” under the “you” you used to know. It is again in a sense a search for the natural elephant borrowing from Jonathan Haidt’s imagery that the elephant is the unconscious self which is most of the “me” I am, while recognizing that the conscious self is just a small player (this too is not an unbiased idea but I think certainly has a lot of validity).

Bell talks about taking off “the god glasses”, again as if somehow his natural eyes can see straighter without the stuff that Christianity or religion put upon him. In all fairness he is undoing a Calvinist metaphor of using the Bible as corrective lenses, so he comes by this imagery honestly.

It strikes me, however, that this isn’t similar from the way white people talk about other people’s cultures, as if white people don’t have their own culture.

I read Rod Dreher’s little piece about culture and perpetual poverty where one person makes the observation that middle class life has a whole host of implicit, unwritten practices and expectations that actually act as an invisible barrier for upward economic mobility and inclusion in “the club” of the economic majority. This is, duh, what a culture is and how it works.

There is no such thing as a “natural” person, someone who is devoid of biases, culture, beliefs, and dare I say “religion”.

I imagine the journey Ryan Bell is on is from one room to another, from one set of clothes into another, from one type of air into another. White people have culture, and secular people have beliefs.

The Authentic Self

I can appreciate the idea of “the authentic self” but it tends to lean again towards the unadorned self or the self free from outside contamination. All that we have and are come from someone-where else. I received my genetic code from my parents. I absorbed culture from my context. The “authentic-self” is not a naked self. In some ways the word “authentic” is as abused as the word “literally“.

It is a bit amazing that in a context where we are perpetually reminded of the constructed nature of our existence that we imagine de-construction isn’t constructed.