In the book, Shaw elegantly contrasts the ethos of attainment with the ethos of consolation. We try to achieve as much as we can on our own, and surrender to something outside ourselves with the things we can't change. But over history that line keeps shifting.
Consolation or surrendering may seem like giving up, but “the ethic of consolation is an affirmation of life and not a negation... [and] the life which is affirmed is after all one that includes limit situations.” We can't do it all, even if we think there's an app for that.
Still, technology has certainly helped. Where once we didn't know what the weather may bring (or how weather worked for that matter), we surrendered to the gods with a good old sacrifice. If we can please them gods, then maybe they will bring some rain to our farms but not so much that it floods us out.
But as we became more sophisticated, our religions became more rational too. Now instead of sacrifices, we just prayed for good health. At least until better doctors came along with a pill for that.
Shaw says, “So we have a picture of religion's function, which is to make possible a positive response to otherwise disorienting and anxiety producing non-manipulative threats to human interest, at first, through metatechnology and then through metapsychology.” We outsource as much as we can to God, at least until we've hired better contractors. God forbid we have to keep depending on God.
And while our control activities of metatechology continues to manipulate the world, there are some places it can't quite get at: like our anxiety-prone narcissism, or the lack of meaning in our lives, or even the fear of death (despite kicking the can down the road a few more years here and there).
It's not like people don't keep trying to manipulate these harder to reach spaces in our head. You'll see it through attention addictions, mind-parasitical projections on others, and the use of magical thinking to manifest indulgences that go against reality. Most of these attempts at controlling our nature fail miserably.
But as they say, grace perfects nature and grace can only be a gift from God. And we can't control or manipulate a gift no matter how hard we try. All we can do is be receptive to gifts (whether or not we think they're good for us — and the divine ones usually are).
God entered the life journey just to show us He can't control things in human form either. He accepted us, so we could accept Him. And it's only when we accept Him that we can accept ourselves. And this makes all the difference: real inner change, and not manipulative change of the strident self.
Shaw notes, “When we have experienced divine forgiveness, we are freed from sin, the essence of which is self-concern and self-reliance, and thus we are able to move toward concern for others.” This takes care of most of our narcissism, offers us meaning, and in essence even transcends our demise as finite beings.
Divine acceptance leads to self acceptance which leads to real non-manipulative change.
So manipulation will only get so far, especially if we are able to redefine the goal...
