Living in Atlantis

The old story of a city beneath the sea, somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, fascinates everyone, me included. I’m very at home in the U.S. (Green Card in hand, the possibility next year of becoming a citizen) but of course I have strong memories of Europe, so I suppose my soul is somewhere between, like Atlantis. Not only that. I find that ancient fable to be a parable of our own time: a civilization alive but drowning. In the Greek version Atlantis was a military empire and was swallowed by a massive inundation in a night and a day. In the Hebrew Bible the sea is cosmic code for violence (think the Books of Jonah, Daniel). Putting those cultural clues together, Atlantis drowned in a tide of its own violence.

Humans are no more violent today than our ancestors. But we have accumulated the tools and images of killing to an unprecedented degree. We have devised a visual feast of violence in news, movies, computer generated images, video games. It’s something literally the world has never seen before. Violence is a 24/7 human percept. And that has a double effect. It makes our minds more accustomed to scenes of violence (what people sometimes call becoming desensitized) but also much more conscious of it as a theme in its own right. I just read a book, Hunger Games. It was tenth grade summer reading at my son's high school. It tells the story of a kind of reality TV in a post-apocalyptic era. What is striking is the brutal matter-of-fact way in which teenagers kill each other because they are ordered to and everybody expects it. There is hardly any compunction or moral conflict. And that’s clearly a reflection of the way people (especially young people) are used to seeing killing through the lens of TV, movies etc. It is not a moral question, but a perceptual one. It’s how we frame and feel our reality. Today we do it with enormous doses of imaged violence. On the other hand, because of this we are more and more aware of violence. People who read the book cannot help but think about it. It’s become something that is bigger than us, happening to us as a reality in its own right.

We live inside a giant permanent Coliseum games. But it’s obviously not just a game (no less than the original Coliseum was just games). Almost every week, and sometimes more than once a week, with sickening regularity, there is news of a group of people, a family, or simply random individuals, blown away by a man with a gun and a grudge. The plasma of violence—this thing in its own right—will grip an individual with uncontrollable power and he will pick up one of the guns lying around in our country like kitchenware and act out his fury. At the same time the U.S. exports a huge amount of violence to the rest of the world. I was recently hit by this statistic: two thirds of the arms sold in the world in 2008 were from the U.S., earning $37.8 billion. Again all this is not basically a moral question. It’s a human question, about how we structure our human life and in a way that comes round to destroying it, to wiping it out. If we were to imagine some final Atlantis style melt-down for our civilization it would make Plato’s strange folk memory/myth look like a cute fairy tale.

But that’s not the point of what I’m saying. This is not a scare piece. In fact it’s the opposite. The point of living in Atlantis is to learn to live underwater. All the stuff I just described is already happening so in so many ways we’re already right there. We’re swimming in the ocean of violence. For a Christian who understands this the reaction is not to seek even more violence—this time from an angry God who will come to punish all this evil. That is simply to see God in terms of the percept of violence which dominates the human eye. For a Christian it is rather a call to build the survivability of Atlantis within its moment of disaster. Because it’s only when the crisis builds to this level—when there is no middle way between the two alternatives—that a new humanity based in forgiveness as a way of life, as the true way of being human—not just an occasional “heroic” gesture—becomes apparent. It is in fact the moment of choice, the moment when the challenge of Christ begins to come home in an unavoidable way: either an entirely a new way of being human or the endless self-fueled crisis, either the pure eye of peace or the beam-in-the-eye of violence, either forgiveness or limitless recycling fire. Living in Atlantis therefore is enormously exciting and hopeful, the time when the Christian message can really come into its own.

As Jesus said, “the only sign that will be given you is the sign of Jonah,” a human being who could live under water.