SEE THE HARM WE ARE DOING TO OURSELVES

ON VENERATING THE INFANTILE

Valson Thampu

Have you regarded a spoilt child? What do you make of him or her?

In simple words the state of being spoilt as a human being, child or adult, has two main features. (a) The person concerned knows, or accepts, no limits to his or her desires and whims. (b) He or she alone matters; others, if they exist, are there to serve his/her interests.

Do I have to say that some people never grow up? They swell in their body but stay infantile in their person. Their tribe is increasing.

Our age, if you don’t mind my saying so, is the age par excellence of infantilism. Long ago, Jesus talked about the ‘blind leading the blind’. No, no! That’s not our plight. It is, instead, ‘the puerile leading the infantile’. We are, for all practical purposes, a mass incarnating infantilism.

Spirituality is a call to maturity. Hence the teaching, ‘love your neighbour as yourself’. ‘Do to others what you would that they should do to you’. Why? The neighbour, ‘the other’, is a necessary limit that each one of us needs. Nothing can be, without limits. I exist not because I have no limits, but precisely because there are limits that I cannot wish away. Life is impossible without limits. Yet, who doesn’t want to live without limits.

If you examine spiritual practices, you will note one common denominator to all of them: they are voluntary erections of limits to oneself. Think of fasting, or alms-giving. Hardly anyone knows these days that the purpose of prayer is to strengthen oneself to accept limits and to excel, not because there are no limits, but precisely because there are limits.

Now think of our religious and political leaders. Would they accept limits of any kind? No, their entitlement is to impose limits (in their favour and to their profit) on others. They are also experts in convincing us that everything belongs to them, as Satan did to Jesus in the third of the Temptations. We are there as a shadowy presence by their sufferance.

Show me a single political or religious leader who will tolerate limits to himself. In this respect, all differences of ideology and religion disappear. They all become one: an elite club of swollen infants, an infantile mass of the self-important. We call them VVIPs. It means, very, very infantile persons; if word and reality are to meet somewhere.

Sadly, most of us lack the understanding to realize that much of what is asserted and imposed on us in the name of AUTHORITY are the entitlements of INFANTILISM.

In the interest of clarity, consider an example. We are inured to the assumption that the AUTHORITY of a bishop or Archbishop should be obeyed and never questioned. Never mind the sense or stupidity of what he says or does. Never question him! Obey, always!

Is that not how parents spoil their children? Never say ‘No’ to them? Don’t they assume that that’s how they are to love their children?

Wise parents, the few as they are these days, know that it is healthy for the child to be made to realize that THERE ARE LIMITS to one’s will, whims, and fancies. That is basic to growth towards maturity.

If the realization of limits –in ethical terms, duties and proprieties, or maryada (in Sanskrit)- is good for the growth of children towards maturity, why are limits bad for our leaders? By the way, maryada means limits. Who is a well-behaved person? Is he not someone who recognizes and respects limits to oneself? Is it not by accepting limits to ourselves that we respect the right of others to have their own space? [Married women, including my wife, will readily agree that a great deal of infantilism lurks in the ex-officio authority that husbands claim over wives.)

To recognize no limits is to be insolent, insensitive and boorish. That is a simple truth. But we dare not apply this to our leaders. Instead, we assume that it is bad for a bishop to have any maryada, or limits. He should not be accountable, or norms of rationality and fair play should not be required of him. His stupid presumptions should not be questioned. He must be indulged in respect of his whims and fancies. If not, he will throw tantrums at us like a petulant, spoilt child! The very thought of it scares us.

The same is true of our political leaders too. Show me a single leader today who accepts the dictum, ‘Do to others what you would that they should do to you’. The operating code of conduct for leaders –religious and political- is: Do to others what you don’t want them to do you. And we are ever so grateful.

A dictator is not an accident. He is a collective achievement. An individual is conceived in the womb of a woman. A dictator is conceived in the collective womb of infantilism. Religion or politics, makes no difference.

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