Obedience (Season 2, Episode 12)

Obedience bears with it the perils of our human condition. The agency of our free will is persistently limited by the weakness of our bodies and the ignorance of our intellects. To the former, we in times past sought remedy through the labor of beasts and our fellow humans either through compulsion or mutual benefit. At present we are engaged with the servitude of increasingly complex machines. Still the ignorance of the human intellect has only been grappled toward perfection directly by a few and indirectly by the masses, that is, only a few intrepid thinkers have sought through discipline and virtuosity to perfect the use of the intellect in the direct acquisition, recollection, and synthesis of knowledge. The recourse of the masses, the grand majority of human beings, seek instead to subcontract their knowing, thinking, and conclusions to others and ultimately to the great digital catalogues and processors of our era.

The long pageant of human history appears thus as a great procession of progress. On the side of labor, the movement from beasts of burden and human slavery to paid labor, steam and electric powered machinery followed by autonomous worker drones seemingly completes for us the Baconian conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate. On the side of the intellect, the movement from cave drawings to moveable text, i.e. books, to moveable type, digital data, and now queries that return responses gathered from the purported collected wisdom of the ages available presently in pockets and purses around the world, this movement seems like an accelerating drumbeat of advance against ignorance itself.

And yet, have we surpassed the state of affairs in Genesis 2, in which the material needs of life were supplied to our first parents by a garden they did not plant and in which all that was necessary for them to know was revealed to them through their intimacy with God in that very garden? Although transferred to a decreasing number of farmers in the world, do we not still eat by the sweat of our brow as commanded in Genesis 3? More to the point of our topic, obedience, does not our growing dependence on (or from) computed information leave us in the same position of the woman conversing with the serpent and weighing two counter claims to her obedience, one revealed and transmitted to us, the other based on radical distrust of authority and thus rooted in purported self-reliance?

Obedience is the intersection of agency and passivity. As a word, a verbal construct to convey this reality, it is fascinating. In Greek, the active verb, πείθω, meaning, “to convince, persuade” assumes the meaning, “to obey, yield” in its middle and passive form, πείθομαι. Obedience so construed occurs in the context of the persuasive other, which is not surprising as the English “obedience” features the Latin prefix “ob.” This prefix and later preposition “ob” bears the spatial meaning “toward” or “against.” It is as if the entire force of human frustration from obstacles, obstructions, and obligations is encapsulated in these two round letters. This resistance to our agency signified by “ob” is what makes the meaning of obedience from “ob + audire” all the more puzzling. We understand obstructed sight as either the disabling of the eyes or an obscuring of the line of sight to an object. Hearing, as expressed by “audire,” can likewise be obstructed through a disabling of the ears, and yet line of sight is not absolutely necessary for hearing. One can hear and provide an auditory response to loud neighbors in the apartment above without sight of them. Similarly, an inopportune sneeze from a hunter’s blind fails the day’s harvest. Furthermore, the openness of hearing like the openness of the ear cannot be easily turned off by the brain as with the eyes and their rapid lids. Accordingly, humans have been known to torture one another with unobstructed concussive sound which the victim must endure, but this is not obedience.

Obedience is an act of the hearer in response to what has been heard. The act is therefore both passive and active, and yet we rarely refer to obedience as doing things to which the agent is readily disposed. Only the rare Cathar or Albigensian is said to obediently enjoy ice cream or idle through a park on a spring day. Obedience in common parlance bears the sense of doing what one does not desire or is not disposed to do for the sake of the command or law given and received, that is, heard. In a licentious and libidinous age, this is not unwise counsel, and yet the other extreme still threatens. The triumph of obedience regardless of truth and goodness, the doing of what is contrary to our desires for the sake of dominating our desires is a pyrrhic victory when contrary to right reason and the truth of faith.

To grapple with right reason flowing from nature or the truth of faith through revelation is to keep the “ob” in obedience. Adaptation, adequation, and assimilation occurs in us in conformity to nature and nature’s God. This is the active movement of change and conversion. The reverse only appears to occur in instances of grave ignorance, that is, a misunderstanding of nature or faith in which we still remain passive, that is, obedient to the Creator and created order.

Benaki Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Thus, “to thine own self be true” (Hamlet, I, 3, l. 84) is a pearl of damned nonsense in that such obedience remains enclosed within the system of self. Self-obedience taken to this extreme avoids the excesses of the libertine and yet still becomes radically disobedient to the claims of the natural order and God. For this reason, perhaps, Shakespeare places this dictum in the mouth of a conniving fool Polonius. As it happens now, we live in a time of fools, conniving or otherwise, who have adopted this admonition as sage wisdom, taking solace and sanctimony in the Nietzschean constancy of the will regardless of ends good or evil, that is, praiseworthy or blameworthy. Ours is a time of superb disobedience rightly ascribed by the vitium masquerading as vita (See, Two Iotas of a Difference), pride.