Category Archives: conservatism

Ram Dass

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I keep running across Ram Dass in my readings.  And I still have not read him and his name still rings slightly dissonant in my heart.  But I recognize that this dissonance speaks volumes about me and my conservatism in the 1970’s (when he first surfaced on the cultural scene) and nothing about him.  Though I have not read any of his books, I have discovered numerous quotes all of which speak to his insight and courage.  For example:

In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.

 Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.

 Religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery.

 Ego is an exquisite instrument. Enjoy it, use it–just don’t get lost in it.

 I recognize why I was so averse to him in my youth and why conservative spirituality still is averse to him and all Eastern religions—he recognized a spiritual reality that is not reduced to the conceptual and which, consequently, cannot be owned and controlled.  That posed a threat for me as it brought into question everything I assumed about spirituality…and I have discoursed here several times re the “tyranny of assumptions.”

One task I have before me is to start reading Ram Dass, probably starting with his book, Be Here Now

Book review re Frank Schaeffer’s “Crazy for God”

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Frank Schaeffer is the son of Francis Schaeffer who was a leading spokesman and intellectual for the Christian Right in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s.  Frank himself was groomed in his childhood as their heir apparent for his father and did indeed step into that role as a young man.  But, safely ensconced in that prominent position, he became disaffected and disillusioned by the bigotry and closed-mindedness that he witnessed and eventually left the fold.  But, if that wasn’t enough, he began to speak and write about what he witnessed during his youth, not just with the Christian Right, but with his family itself.  His book, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All of It Back” is the story of his “conversion” from hyper-fundamentalist Christianity and political conservatism to a pronounced liberal stance in both regards.  If you are an ex-fundamentalist, or if you are a fundamentalist who would deign to look critically at yourself, you really need to read this book.

Politically and familial-ly his book is a story of a standard dysfunctional family, a family trapped inside its own limited world-view and incapable of dealing honestly and openly with the world.  Families of this sort are in service to the myth that they are caught up in and dutifully dedicate themselves to perpetuating that myth even at the expense of its members own soul. Yes, it is sheer lunacy at times.

However, let me note that the “lunacy” presented here cannot compare with the lunacy I noted last week when I discoursed re Muslim culture from the perspective of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  Any closed-mindedness veers toward lunacy and will end up there unless reality sets in.  But, I much prefer our culture’s conservative lunacy over that of the Muslim world.  There are more limits set here, largely by the power of a liberal and critical press.

Review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book, Infidel

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I have started reading again, Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  In this book she describes the intricacies of tribal culture and the various myths that shaped this culture.  One thing is standing out in this reading of the book that I had forgotten—-even though her father was the patriarch of the family he was a bit “liberal” and that definitely had an impact of Ms. Ali.  I’m sure contributed to her rebellion at age 22 and her rejection of her entire culture.  The first “mistake” her father made…in reference to the dictates of the tribal gods (i.e. Allah)…was that he got a Western education at Columbia University, majoring in anthropology.  And her mother also was a bit of a rebel herself, leaving home on her own at age fifteen and moving to the city, Mogadishu I think.  And, Ali’s parents met casually and engaged in courtship and married without an “arrangement” by parents.  Furthermore, political turmoil abounded in Somalia in the seventies, wreaking havoc on the country in all respects, including culturally.  This instability there was the opportunity for “mischief”, meaning an opportunity for some brazen children to begin to “question the gods”, that is to say in this case, Allah.

This is a very important book and is very relevant to any culture, tribal or modern.  Ali eloquently portrays the iron-clad grip that her culture had on her, particularly its Muslim religion, and the excruciating pain that it inflicted on her and other females.  She writes in detail of her own genital mutilation when she was aged five.  It was painful to read.  But equally painful was the total and brutal denial of the rights of women and the extremes that her culture went to to keep it that way.

Culture can be ugly.  Or, to be more accurate, human beings can be ugly.

 

 

Paean to Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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I would like to recommend two books by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel (about her rejection of Islam and flight to Holland to avoid an arranged marriage) and Nomad (about her move to the U.S., under threat of death from the Muslim community).  These two books are biographical as they recount her experience of the oppression of women in her native Muslim culture and the identity crisis she experienced as she moved to the West and began to verbalize and write re the tyranny of Islam, especially with regard to women.

Ali was born in Somaliland in 1969.  Her father was a political dissident and while he was jailed because of his political activism her grandmother seized the opportunity to defy Ali’s father wishes and have Ali “circumcised” when she was age 5.  She portrays this brutal practice as only a reflection of the brutal tyranny of the Muslim faith as a whole, a religion which desperately seeks to cling to traditional, tribal culture even as modernity closes in on them.  (I think she recognizes that Islam in the West is often less tyrannical but she argues that the tyranny is inherent in the faith itself, Western version or Middle-eastern version.)

I would like to share a few excerpts from Nomad:   “All my life I have been a nomad.  I have wandered, rootless.  Every place I have settle in, I have been forced to flee; every certainty I have been taught, I have cast aside….Every change of country threw me unprepared into whole new languages and sharply different habits of mind.  Each time, I made a child’s fornlorn, often vain attempts to adapt.”  She described her dilemma when she was in the West as “teetering between the clear ideals of the Enlightenmend…and my submission to the equally clear dictates of Allah that I feared to disobey.”  She described the temption to cave-in, to surrender to her cultural introjections, noting, “I suffered many moments of weakness when I too entertained the idea of giving up my needs and sacrificing my personal happiness for the peace of mind of my parents, siblings, and clan.”  And she summarized the problems of Islam as deriving from the belief that, “Muhammed is considered infallible…and all (the Koran’s) commands must be obeyed without question.  This makes Muslim’s vulnerable to indoctrination in a way that followers of other faiths are not.”

I deeply admire the courage Ali has had to step forth, at the risk of her own life. to pursue self-expression and self-dignity.  It takes nerves of steel to observe personally how deadly indoctrination is and dare to question the basic assumptions of one’s culture.  We can attempt a journey of this sort much more easily than she can as we usually…though not always…can do so without the threat of harm.  Our only risk is a lot of anxiety, perhaps a tad of depression, and guilt from no longer subscribing to the tribal god/s.

A couple of footnotes here:  a)  She rejected the arranged marriage by fleeing to Holland and there she began to get a Western education.  She even became a member of the Dutch Parliament for a few years before death threats forced her to resign and flee the country.  2)  Though Ali is a flaming liberal with regard to her native country, when she moved to the U.S. she quickly obtained employment at the American Enterprise Institute, a very conservative think-tank.  She noted in Nomad…I think…that she had some ambivalence about this decision but decided to take what was the best offer that she had.

 

 

Knee-deep in relativism

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I am knee-deep in relativism, a term that was roundly denounced from the pulpit in my youth, and a term that is still roundly denounced from conservative-Christian pulpits.  And I still fill a tinge of guilt for having departed so far from the fold.  But only a tinge!

I also feel very strongly that relativism, like any notion, carried to its extreme becomes absurd.   Aristotle is credited with saying, “Moderation in all things.”  I am really an extreme relativist but somehow, by the Grace of God, I realize this perspective is not for all and that it can be problematic for anyone, including myself.  I believe that the beliefs that we hold say less about what is “real” and more about how our mind operates.

Let me give an example of this aforementioned Grace at work in my heart and life.  When I pray I step away from the ether in which I dwell intellectually/spiritually and simply pray along the vein of, “My father, which art in heaven….”  In prayer there is no need to be complex and to engage in sophistry.  I simply pray to God.

Let me apply this to moral codes, say the Ten Commandments.  Though I think moral codes a relative, I don’t believe we should ever espouse to dispense with them.  Without moral codes…and the much-related guilt…we can’t function as a social body.  I do think there needs to come a time in one’s spiritual/emotional life where he/she goes beyond the “letter of the law” and recognizes as did Paul, that “all things are lawful.”  But that does not mean one should let his/her impulses run amok.

Let’s take one fundamental human impulse and fundamental component of any moral code, summarized in the Ten Commandments as, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”  I really think that at some point in adulthood one needs to exercise good judgment, or as we say, “make good decisions” in sexuality and do so not merely be clinging tenaciously to a biblical prohibition.  If, at that time, this biblical prohibition is the only thing keeping our sexuality under control, then there is a personal issue that needs to be addressed.

And I think moral codes have value for the modern world, even in a liberal society such as ours where sexual mores are in flux.  For example, I think the simple prohibition, “Thou shalt not commit adultery” should give anyone, even in our culture, pause from time to time and make him/her wonder, “Now why did they come up with this notion back then?  Why was it important then to put limits on the sexual impulse?  Does this have any relevance to me and the modern world?”  (And I realize there are some valid anthropological/sociological answers to this question.)  And many will answer their query with, “Well, no it has nothing to do with me in this modern world.”  But I still think it was, and is valid, to ask the question.  It reflects self-awareness and I fear our culture often lacks this quality.

There must be limits.  There must be “moderation in all things.”

 

Cognitive arrogance

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I discourse frequently about cognition and its limitations.  This is no accident as it is very relevant to me personally.  So much of my life has been limited by various cognitive grasps of reality which only later do I discover to have been very confining and….ahem….very narcissistic.  The key is, not to attempt to discard cognition….as if that were possible in the first place…but to recognize that there is a world out there beyond our cognitive grasp of the world and that in embracing that “world out there” we become a little bit more humble and tolerant of those who look at things differently.

Here are a couple of quotes I’ve ran across recently on the subject:

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. — William James

I happen to feel that the degree of a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting attitudes she can bring to bear on the same topic. — Lisa Alther

It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape — not from our own time, for we are bound by that — but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our own time. — T. S. Eliot, Unknown 

And this last one I came across 30+ years ago but just cannot remember the author.  He said, “Our thinking is the belated rationalization of conclusions to which we have already been led by our desires.”  To summarize, he was saying, “We think just what we want to think.”

Economic ecumenism

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According to a recent CNN story, the Vatican is calling for increased global cooperation in economic issues, specifically for a new “global public authority” to help alleviate the economic woes that all of us are now facing.  The Vatican is concerned that the market economy is not working any longer and that a central economic authority needs to be in place to regulate this market’s inequities and vulnerabilities.  This authority would also be able to impose penalties on individual market economies  that were not behaving “efficiently.”

Personally, I like this idea.  Our world has outgrown the 20th century (and earlier) ideologies, including economic theories, and we need to realize that all the nations of the world are economically intertwined.  I admit, it would be a perilous adventure to have such a global authority but I fear it is even more perilous if we continue present course.

Now I’m realistic.  This is not going to happen anytime in the near future.  I can hear the right-wing crowd scream with an age-old mantra, “One world government, one world government!  Its of the devil and a sign of the end times.”

 

 

 

 

 

(CNN) – Against the backdrop of the European debt crisis and the birth of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Vatican on Monday called for a new “global public authority” to help reform the world’s finance and economic systems.

New ideologies are “reducing the common good to economic, financial and technical questions, (placing) the future of democratic institutions themselves at risk,” said Roman Catholic Bishop Mario Toso at a Monday press conference.

The document, called “Towards reforming the international financial and monetary systems in the context of a global public authority” quotes former Pope John Paul II in bemoaning the “idolatry of the market.”

The document calls for a new global economic authority that could impose penalties on member states as “way of ensuring that they possess efficient markets,” Toso said.

Some progressives embraced the Vatican’s call, arguing that it sounded many of the same themes as the Occupy Wall Street movement.

 

Einstein and spirituality

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I deeply admire the spirituality of Einstein though I think he called it his “religious sentiment.”  He shows that it is possible to appreciate science, to believe deeply in the scientific exploration of our world, and still maintain faith.  In the quote below he describes the “delusional systems” that we are all susceptible to and the prison that they constitute.  He encourages us to broaden our world, to realize that we are all in this game together, even those that are vastly different from us:

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

conflict habituated relationships

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Mobi Ho, in his introduction to  book, Thich Nhat Hanh’s, The Miracle of Mindfulness, describes how the disciples of Hanh attempted to facilitate reconciliation in Viet Nam after the war ended in 1973.  He noted that these disciples “persistently refused to support either armed party and believed that both sides were but the reflection of one reality, (my emphasis) and that the true enemies were not people, but ideology, hatred, and ignorance. (my emphasis)

How can opposing sides of any issue be merely “the reflection of one reality”?  Even more so, how can this be the case when both sides are armed to the teeth?  Ho believed that the answer is because both sides of the conflict were slaves to “ideology, hatred, and ignorance.”  T. S. Eliot described these peoples as “united by the strife which divided them.”

This is also relevant to the field of mental health.  In my trade, we have a term for couples who are joined at the hip in intense conflict and would never leave each other for any amount of money:  conflict habituated relationships.  I once knew a couple who spent the last 35 years of their life, living at opposite ends of the same house.  They hated each other intently and ravaged the lives of their children.  But they could not do without each other.

I believe that Ho was very astute in his observation that the real issue in conflicts like these is “ideology, hatred, and ignorance.”   It is as if the people are “the toy of some great pain”.  (I think that quote comes from Ranier Rilke).

And, to conclude, I can’t help but apply this phenomena to our current Congress.  I fear that the real issue is that many of them are mere ideologues, filled with “hatred and ignorance” and are willing to “ravage the lives of their children”, i.e. the American citizenry.

And one further point.  Ideology is ideology.  Be it conservative or be it liberal, ideology is ideology.  The point is to have ideas, of course, but not be so blind as to bludgeon other people with those ideas.

“Getting saved” in terms of culture

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I was born and raised in a religious world where “getting saved” was a mandate.  And, I might add that I still see it as a valid cultural initiation to spirituality but I fear it is often misused.  Too many times the concept is introduced and promulgated in a culture of manipulation and fear…terror even…and young children are “saved” before they have any idea of what they are doing.  And when they are introduced to religion in that atmosphere and if they continue to live there, they often to do not allow their spirituality to deepen and mature.

We must not fail to recognize the socio-cultural dimension of spirituality/religion.  That is one fundamental dimension that is often overlooked.  When spirituality/religion is not allowed to mature, when it continues to be only a socio-cultural phenomena, the deeper meaning is not allowed to develop.