Baaa

I’m with most people on this: I resent my behaviour being analyzed as if I were a dog, or a lion, or a sheep. As in, for instance, “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way . . .” (Isaiah 53:6, NIV). Most galling is the implication that I’m guided by a “herd mentality,” the accusation that I’m not choosing my path logically and intelligently, but am just going along with whatever “herd” I happen to have chosen. 

Political parties are “herds,” religious denominations are “herds,” Fox News watchers are a “herd,” CNN watchers are a different “herd.” It’s not hard—they say—to tell which herd you or I are loyal to; we spout a common line even if we don’t understand it, exhibit similar behaviours, denigrate people who don’t belong in our “herd.”

As hard as we've worked at it, the conviction that a race is a herd has been almost impossible to eradicate. Baaa. 

Like bison or caribou, though, to opt “out of your herd” can be dangerous. Or medicine, for instance. Although not 100% reliable, vaccines when applied to an entire population result in “herd immunity,” a situation where acting as a herd has, for instance, wiped out diphtheria. If enough people break from the herd and refuse to vaccinate, the virus will eventually find a soft spot in the herd where it can again propagate, threatening the whole herd once again.

We don’t take defection from the herd lightly; we set the guidelines for “who’s in and who’s out” pretty strictly. What is homophobia, after all, except an attempt to preserve the homogeneity of certain herds? What is racism except herd mentality where the borders are defined by skin colour? What is denominational-ism except a set of criteria that delineate the borders of a herd? We defend our positions on any number of issues on a “right vs. wrong” basis when what we’re actually doing is trying in whatever way we can to preserve the integrity of our herd. Our safety, we believe, depends on it.

It’s been said over and over that ours is an age of individualism, that community is breaking down and the bonds among people no longer hold. This is, of course, herd-speak, something so many people have said so often that it’s become conventional wisdom. But it’s poppycock. Humans are a herding species of animal; the fact that we abandon one herd in favour of another that exists, possibly, primarily behind our television screen, in hockey arenas, in our Facebook world, in some cult-like separation from our earlier herd doesn’t mean we’re “individualistic,” it just means there are realignments of herd allegiances going on as never before. From that standpoint alone, it’s evident that we’re living in dangerous—and interesting—times.

(So here’s a discouraging irony: Klavier Onk considers himself a free-thinker, a reader and observer in great detail of the world around him. Definitely not one of all those sheep who’ve gone astray. He organizes a free-thinkers book club, subscribes to New Yorker, drinks his coffee at Starbucks with his laptop open to some erudite website on cosmology, or liberal theology, or philosophy and . . . and suddenly realizes that he’s now part of the holier-than-thou, smarter-than-thou academic elite: another, different herd.)

The gospel of Christ can be read through the consciousness of a divided, competing-herds world and a lone voice urging us to see that there is but one herd (Kingdom of God, heaven, it has various names) that can answer a need and a longing for peace and prosperity for all people for all time. Unfortunately, his followers seem never to have understood it fully; they set out to found a new, competing herd called “the church.” They should have been out there softening the borders as their mentor tried so hard to do; but instead they ended up simply moving them around, most of them being rewarded for their efforts by dying for daring to challenge the boundaries of the prevailing “herd.”

Maybe it’s a dream that nudges us toward something more “heaven-like,” if unreachable. Possibly, the brighter future can only begin if and when we accept that we’re sheep who don’t necessarily go astray, but who can actually make nice with a herd of wolves. Somewhere there’s a story (or is it just a hope) that reads, “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.” Oh, yah. That was Isaiah again, 11:6 to be exact. If that’s not a metaphor pointing toward the softening of hard, herd borders, I can’t imagine what would be!

Neither can I imagine a disciple of Christ ever saying something as ludicrous as, “We’re gonna build us a wall.” Can you?