Category Archives: human culture

Ta-Nehesi Coates: “Thinking They are White”

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Ta-nehesi Coates’s book on racism was one of the most provocative books I read last year. Mr. Coates grew up an impoverished black child in Baltimore, Maryland, managed to escape with an education, and wrote this very revealing book about what it is like to grow up under the tyranny of racism in ’70’s and 80’s America.  One line that really grabbed me a class of people who learned to “think they are white” and the power that comes with that understanding.  For, being white in America did carry, and still does to a large degree, implicit assumptions of power, i.e. prerogative.  Growing up a poor white boy in Arkansas I clearly remember discovering early the “black-white” distinction in my culture, the blacks being known, of course, as “N…….s” and viewed with great scorn and contempt.  Looking back I now recall distinctly how important this was as a poor white, having a class of people who were lower on the totem pole than we were though we were very low socio-economically.  Learning to “think I was white” was one of the most important early discoveries of my life, very much a formative part of my identity the early stages of which involves drawing distinctions between self and others, including between my group and other groups.

But Mr. Coates’ observation, “thinking they are white” really cut to the quick with me, conveying to me what he had seen about the smug observations we make early in our childhood which become solid bedrock in our cognitive grasp of the world.  And with my grasp of my “whiteness” I knew that though I lacked many things, no one could take away from me my “whiteness” and with that status came the power of eating on the right side of the diner, using the nicer bathrooms, drinking at the white water fountains, and going to the better white schools.  It was nothing I thought about…consciously.  It was a given, a basic assumption, an implicit part of the template through which I viewed the world.  I had a power that many others did not have, regardless of how powerlessness I might feel otherwise in my life.

Though I have long since gone beyond this racist view of the world, I know the template is still there in the depths of my heart thought quite faint.  In the past decade as I’ve aged I have recognized faint racist imagery and thoughts creep into my consciousness, an experience which has not alarmed me because I see them for what they are.  The earliest imprints from our culture, even those “burned in” on our pre-conscious soul, never leave us.   People may vehemently deny being racist but very often their behavior and passing thoughts betray them.  For example, note the Republican Party which is quick to deny racism but has systematically and persistently sought to deny blacks the right to vote in recent years.

Racism is only the surface of a deeper problem, an intrinsic dimension of identity formulation already alluded to.  For an identity to begin to organize and to escape the matrix in which it first existed, that “blooming, buzzing, confusing world of sense experience” spoken of by William James…it must draw distinctions between it and the “other”.  Blacks in my early life, and in most of my generation, was one of the earliest “others” that we found and when we “othered” them it was done with great emotional intensity.

So racism is merely an essential part of American identity and all cultures and tribes have some similar process at the bedrock of their collective psyche.  But I’ve discoursed here only as an introduction to my next blog post, the Christian faith utilized as a contrivance for identity formulation and, devoid of maturation, serving only to “other” masses of people.

Shakespeare and Consciousness

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Hamlet lamented in a famous soliloquy, “Thus conscience (i.e. consciousness) doeth make cowards of us all.” Shakespeare demonstrated in his plays and sonnets a profound grasp of the human condition and beautifully illustrated our foibles in various characters such as Hamlet.  Hamlet, as well as many literary figures, portrays for us a soul tortured by consciousness and Hamlet noted in this same soliloquy that such “awareness” can stymie one into inaction.  In clinical lore of recent decades I have often run across the “Hamlet Syndrome”, the plague of many young men who are so conflicted they have trouble making decisions, thus their many dreams and fancies, “lose the name of action.”  (And this “syndrome” usually captures only males…but not exclusively.)

Another theme of Shakespeare was madness and his understanding of this common human malady was not unrelated to his insights about consciousness.  For, consciousness is a phenomenon one is to be immersed in and to step outside for even a moment and become aware of “consciousness” is not unrelated to madness.  For this leap into meta-cognition for someone who has never doubted his way of looking at the world, i.e. his conscious grasp of the world, will find the sudden dawn of a perspective on his perspective frightening.  As philosopher Paul Ricoeur noted, “To have a perspective on one’s perspective is to somehow escape it.”  The terror of this meta-cognitive leap is so threatening that most people live their entire life comfortably ensconced in the narrow view of the world they were given by their tribe, usually deemed as decreed valid by the gods/God.

By discoursing here on this matter I am giving the impression that I’m in the camp of the “conscious” ones and in some sense I do feel I am.  BUT, consciousness flows from the depths of the heart and to be conscious is to realize that the depths of the heart are endless so that one can never bask in the comfort of thinking he has arrived with a wholly “conscious” grasp of the world.  The best I can personally ever hope of doing is to own my very skewed view of the world and hope that as I continue to age my “skewing” might be increasingly open to other viewpoints, leaving me always without accomplishing “objectivity.”

But damn it, it was so much easier in my youth when I mindlessly and dutifully imbibed of what the Apostle Paul described as “the wisdom of this world.”  Yes, in my case doubt was always there nagging at me but I always returned to my script and just doubled-down on unexamined truth, not yet willing to acknowledge that I was merely demonstrating the “bad faith” noted by Jean Paul Sartre.

Semiotics, Language, Meaning, & Politics

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Words do have meaning.  They have value.  I do not think it is trivial that in the Judaeo-Christian tradition we have been presented with the notion of Jesus being “the Word made flesh” though this notion is much deeper and more meaningful than I understood as a child.  I have been immersed in linguistics, semiotics and philosophy for the past 20 years or so and now understand that language is much more than meets the “eye.”  Language, i.e. “the Word”, is a gut-level dimension of our experience and its value extends deeply into this “gut”, or heart, what some label the unconscious.  Words not only extend into this subterranean dimension of our lives but they arise from those depths and are essentially what makes us human.  (See Sandburg poem at conclusion)

Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst who was one of the earliest figures in my venture into this heart-realm argued that our very identity, on some level, is basically a verbal structure which I think provides further understanding of the admonishment of Jesus, “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.”  Our words reveal who we are, or as someone said, “Our words become us” and as the Bible teaches us, “As a man thinketh, so is he.”

But the value of words is multi-dimensional.  There is the very superficial dimension which allows us to perfunctorily live in our culture and offer a “convincing performance” each day of our life.  Without this level of verbal experience, any culture would collapse because the hidden dimension of language, that of “meaning”, would be too intense for most people.  In the words of T. S. Eliot, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”  Yet in this superficial level of experience, “common sense reality”, language even then must be offered respect.  Words do matter including the context in which they are used.  The example the contextual issue is often put on the table with is the observation that though one might have free speech, he does not have the right to cry “fire” in a crowded theater.  Words do convey “fact” in some respect even though some of us pointy-headed pseudo-intellectuals admittedly like to question things like “fact!”  But the “factual” world must be respected if a social body is to cohere in a meaningful fashion.  If our political leaders start to play fast and easy with facts, i.e. with truth, then the very fabric of society is threatened.

And, you might have guessed, this brings me to Trumpism.  I will offer a link to a story in the Washington Post which addresses this verbal disintegration that threatens us.  Trump has ushered in what is being called a “fact free” world in which people can say anything without anything to back it up and will get by with it.  People will not be held accountable for their words, which was so pointedly demonstrated with Mr. Trump during the campaign when he said the most outrageous things and his followers completely overlooked them.  Even now as he is preparing for inauguration he and his transition team and continuing to demonstrate “fast and easy” use of language and now even trying to justify it.  Words do not matter to them.

This is relevant to an earlier point that words emerge from the depths of our heart.  In Trump’s heart there is grave “porosity of boundaries” so that he speaks and lives with disdain for common sensibilities and decorum, paralleling his life-style.  He was right when he declared months ago in the campaign the campaign that “I could shoot someone in the streets of Manhattan” and not suffer at the polls.  He was exactly right.  He early in life discovered that no one would set limits for him and could steam-roll over any obstacle before him.  The American electorate has been steam-rolled and he is still being propped up by his supporters, many of whom continue to claim that God “has raised him up” to Make America Great Again.  And I can’t help but wonder if Trump is the mouth-piece for some heavily repressed dimension of his supporter’s heart

For perspective on this emerging fact-free zone, read the following (https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-post-truth-world-of-the-trump-administration-is-scarier-than-you-think/2016/12/02/ebda952a-b897-11e6-b994-f45a208f7a73_story.html?utm_term=.cffac584016f)

A great poem by Carl Sandburg about our words rising out of our hidden depths.  (http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/jabberers/ http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/jabberers/)

Words No Longer Matter

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But I cling, nevertheless, to my childish fantasy that words do matter, in spite of what Trumpism is unleashing in our world.  Donald Trump demonstrated repeatedly that he could say anything, including with his behavior, and people would dutifully overlook it.  The best example was when he declared brazenly, “I could shoot someone in the street in Manhattan and not suffer at the polls.”  He was right.  He once told a crowd in Iowa after falling behind in the polls, “How stupid can you get?”  He carried Iowa easily in the election.

But I must admit that I play loose and easy with words.  I do not believe they are the “thing in itself” so that when you passionately affirm your faith in “God”, for example, that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with God.  But, we live in a less esoteric world where the meaning of words in popular usage carries weight.  Therefore, if I cry “fire” in a crowded theater, I have crossed a line.  If I tell a hot young woman, “You have a fine rack,” then I have crossed a line.  Usage of language requires a sensitivity to decorum and sensitivity so that when I run for President of the United States in four years, I promise I will not be insulting or denigrating of my opponents on the debate stage.  I will not defend the size of my “male member”, though let me assure you, “there is no problem there!”  I will not refer to women’s private parts at all and if I had to do so I would not use the “c” word.  Use of words has a contextual dimension and involves a sensitivity to that context.  Someone with the neurological disorder Tourette’s Syndrome illustrates what kind of problems happen if someone lacks that filter.  He creates awkwardness in the social body and this “awkwardness” now being legitimized by Trump if not stymied can lead to chaos.

Yes, words have a hidden meaning, they “burgeon forth into a region beyond themselves” (Gabriel Marcel) but they also have value on the superficial, contextual level.  What we are witnessing now in my country is the breakdown of verbal propriety, of decorum, and people with a reptilian brain in over-drive are feeling empowered by Donald Trump.  They can say, and do, whatever they wish because “words do not matter.”  Words do not carry consequences.  Donald Trump has demonstrated that my country lives in a meaningless universe of its own making in which words, and deeds, do not matter.  This is “meaninglessness” and, per William Butler Yeats, “mere anarchy is unleashed upon the world.

 

The American Civil War Still is With Us

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Yesterday I addressed the issue of systemic trauma that often occurs from economic disparity.  This issue is personal to me as I grew up in the American South, the state of Arkansas, and my family was impoverished for the first 10 years of my life or so.  As I aged I began to become aware of the social atmosphere of where I lived and as I entered college years and became engrossed with the social sciences I began to scrutinize the socio-cultural context which had shaped my life and realized that this context was, in turn, shaped by historical processes that long preceded my arrival on the stage of life.

Study of history taught me of the social disruption of the Civil War in the American South and the profound sense of loss and alienation that swept the former Confederate states as they began to grapple with this “tragedy” that had befallen them.  One conceptualization of this despair is known to historians as “the myth of the lost cause” and my studies quickly showed me how this despair had created the sectarian Baptist denomination that was the bedrock of my spiritual life.  The multi-generational despair gave rise to a religion of hopelessness disguised as “belief in Jesus.”  (I will attach a recording of an old hymn that vividly illustrates this issue.)

Another relevant term to this cultural atmosphere is dispossession.  Civil War Era Southerners felt they had been dispossessed of what was rightfully theirs, that “big government” had intruded and taken away their god-given way of life part of which was slavery.  Their sense of entitlement had been gravely imperiled. And this fear of “government intrusion” is still very much present as evidenced in our recent election.  Related to the experience of dispossession is the existential terror of alienation, of not belonging, and the hope that a “strong man” would appear on the scene at some point to right these wrongs and, “Make American Great Again.”  And, if that did not happen, comfort was found in the firm knowledge that God would make things right in the after life, punishing those who had brought this injustice on a “god-given” way of looking at the world.

Still another important dimension of this atmosphere is a deep-rooted suspicion and fear which often found expression in paranoid fantasies.  I subscribed, and promulgated my fair share of these fantasies and recall well how reassuring they were to me, allowing me to focus on an external enemy rather than address the deep-seated insecurity and fear that I now know terrorized my heart.  Fear is part of life and even a necessary part for survival.  But when fear is a guiding force in a culture, it shapes the lives of the children so that they have no reality other than one that is fear-based and their coping mechanisms are usually not healthy.  Mine were not.  Obama was right eight years ago when he was overheard describing some people as “clinging to their guns and religion.”  He had no problem with “guns” or “religion.”  He knew that “clinging” was the issue, that it reflected an existential loss that is only temporarily and superficially assuaged with weaponry or a moribund, sterile, “letter of the law” version of Jesus.

Here is a recording of the hymn that I mentioned above.  And, as I listened to it just now, the tangential demons of hopelessness, fear, and despair were resurrected in my 65 year old heart.  Listen to it and you’ll see what I mean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zD1IPUlMdlU

 

 

 

Spirituality in Cultural Captivity

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When working on a Master’s thesis in history at the University of Arkansas in the 1980’s, I focused on American religion, specifically the fundamentalist Christian response to the influence of modernity in the late 19th century.  One book I stumbled across me was entitled, “Churches in Cultural Captivity” by John Eighmy which described how the Southern Baptists had unwittingly been “captured” by their culture, disobeying one of their basic maxims, “To be in the world, but not of the world.”

Any spiritual tradition faces the peril of enculturation as any spiritual truth has to be conveyed through human contrivances like ritual, art, and language.  The essence of spirituality is a dimension of the human experience which is ineffable and therefore not accessible through these or any other cultural contrivances.  These contrivances are but pointers to the spiritual dimension of life but immediately they are likely to fall prey to people who will take them literally, who will not allow these symbols to make any ingress into the depths of the heart where they can be meaningful.  Language, for example, will never get beyond conceptual formulations, words and phrases (i.e. jargon) which rattle around in the cavern of the mind and have all the value of what the Apostle Paul called a “sounding brass and a tinkling symbol.”  Or, to borrow from comedian Jerry Seinfield, they will amount to, “Yada, yada, yada.”

Often these sterile thoughts and ideas rattling around “up there” might contain great value.  But if they are only ideas, devoid of any engagement with a heart that is connected to a body, they will only be dogma and usually will serve the purpose of satisfying some cultural dictate.  One simple cultural dictate is simply to fit into the comfortable confines of the tribe which in my case meant “getting saved” and becoming a Christian.  Furthermore, these sterile ideas will likely gain power to the point that they make the individual extremely amenable to the prevailing sentiments, values, and more ways of the prevailing cultural milieu.  Thus, early in my spiritual life, it was definite that women should be submissive to their husbands and stay in the home, that blacks were inferior to whites and should be kept “separate but equal” with not so much emphasis on that “equal” part, that everyone who did not subscribe to our biblically correct view of the world was likely to spend eternity in hell.  For, when spiritual truth is only conceptual, i.e. “the letter of the law”, there will be no internal discernment and one is likely to be innocently imbibing what the Apostle Paul called “the wisdom of this world.”  This does not make these people “bad people” it just means they have been captivated by their culture and have not allowed the spiritual wisdom of their tradition to sink down from the head into the heart.

Spirituality of this fashion will always be very formulaic, legalistic, and judgmental.  This is a cognitive faith, one that is emphasizes thinking over the affective dimension of life, the phenomenon described by the Apostle Paul as “the letter of the law.”  These are the people who Jesus encountered in the person of the Pharisees and he immediately saw right into the “foul and ragged bone shop of their heart” and called them hypocrites.  That quotation was from the poet W. B Yeats who also noted, “Oh God, guard me from those thoughts men think in the mind alone.  They who sing a lasting song must think in the marrow bone.”  Yeats saw the dilemma of the “disembodied word” and those in whom their words have not become “enfleshed” are apt to practice great evil though always in the name of what is “good” or “godly.”  This is a matter of experiencing an integration between heart and mind so that we don’t merely talk a good game, but our behavior “speaks” a good game.  Or, as I heard Richard Rohr say one time, “Speak the gospel everywhere you go; and, if necessary use words.”

These “gospeleteers”, whose daily functioning draws from a mélange of rhetoric in their heads, can’t act for any purpose beyond themselves for they cannot see one.  They “have eyes to see, but see not; ears to hear, but hear not.”  These are not necessarily bad people.  They are merely people who have been enculturated too well and/or have never stumbled across a church or spiritual teacher who challenged their spiritual preconceptions, forcing an encounter with subterranean regions of their heart.  This makes me think of a fear that Ralph Waldo Emerson voiced in the 19th century, the fear of coming to the end of his life and realizing that he had not really lived his life at all.  Or, to put it in the words of Jesus, “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and lose his own soul.”  Jesus was telling us that if we spend out whole life only skimming along on the surface of things, especially in the realm of spiritual things, we will have lived without every tapping into an authentic dimension of our own life.  He was saying, for example, that if we spend our whole life “christianized”, we will miss the point and experience of being a Christian.

Jesus was not and is not about fire insurance.  Jesus was about getting God “down from heaven” onto the earth, expressing his graciousness, kindness, and love as his Presence is woven into the very fabric of our being.  That will not leave us as some damn Christian geek running around bible-thumping and trying to make you see the world like he does.  Even more so it refers to the “working” out of an imminent deity that Jesus taught is within us already, as in when he reminded us, “the Kingdom is within.”

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A VERY NECESSARY CAVEAT:  I am using terminology from one particular spiritual tradition.  Remember, “the word is not the thing.”

 

S

Drawing Boundaries in Religious Experience

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After another long hiatus, I’m resuming my blog with the intent of pursuing a theme for periods of time.  Beginning today I am introducing the notion of human beings as “distinction-drawers,” a notion that I broached casually months ago.  And this is a very personal issue as “distinction-drawing” is very close to the core of my ego identity though now I am apparently in “recovery” from this death trap.

We are born into a world that was “always already underway.”  Even before we started to venture toward consciousness, this pre-existent world was beckoning, a gentle beckoning which would become more demanding as our journey through infancy continued and we approached the threshold of consciousness.  Becoming human depended on acceding to the demands of this “exterior” world and formulating a template through which we would view the world, a template which must be shaped so that it is consistent with the world view of the tribe into which we were born.  This template is a narrow prism through which we view the world and we will never completely leave it behind…even when in the “recovery” mentioned earlier.

One primary feature of this “template” is thinking itself which is a carving up of the world into discrete categories, providing escape from that matrix into which we are born and in which we spend the earliest months of our life.  This matrix (i.e. mother) is a womb, the mythological Uroborus in which there is no distinction drawn between me and the outside world.  It is the Garden of Eden from which we must be banished.  And if we fail to escape that matrix (i.e. “mother”) we will not be able to “join” the human race.

I will admit that there is some sense in which I have never made this escape as I’m still deeply rooted in that primeval world where distinctions are not as clear as they are to most people. I have spent most of my life “pretending” to have escaped by imprisoning myself in a conceptual world which has allowed me to function well in the “real” world.  This “real” world is a world of reason, a highly structured world which we call culture.  Without this fabricated world we would still live in that Ouroborous which means we would not really have a world at all, living in an undifferentiated state of unity with all things.  Having an “object world” is necessary for the creation of culture and our own infantile development of an “object relationship” with the world is necessary if we are to participate in the world into which we are born.

Joining our “object world,” our tribe, always means subscribing to reason and the “rational world” of the tribe is a “necessary evil” that we will need to gain some freedom from when we mature.  And that certainly does not mean we will need to become “un” reasonable only that we learn to see that the distinctions that we have learned to draw in our early tribal life are not as pronounced as they were seen, and felt, to be.  Early cognitive development turns us into a “distinction-drawer” and that is a developmental imperative.

Problems come, however, when neurophysiology creates too great of a reliance on this “distinction-drawer” and we never learn to see the world in terms other than black and white, us vs. them, good and bad, Republicans and Democrats, right and wrong, etc., etc.  And another dimension of this infantile imprisonment is that sometimes the social “norms” are so rigid that the developing child is basically tyrannized into his/her “distinction drawer” which helps the tribe to perpetuate its collective “distinction drawer.”

In my next post, I intend to explain how my Christian faith contributed mightily to the development of my “distinction drawer.”  And this is not the fault of Jesus Christ but merely an illustration of how human nature tends to use everything at hand to formulate a “distinction-drawer” early in life.

Confessions of a “Scaredy-Cat”

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As a child we would taunt each other with, “You’re a scaredy-cat, you’re a scaredy-cat” in an effort to goad a friend…or someone we didn’t like…into doing something risky.  And of course, that would produce the expected exchange, “No I’m not, you are!” on and on for a few minutes until laughter broke out or someone had submitted and done something stupid.

Well, I was a scaredy-cat, being a little too timid…and I still am in the depths of my heart.  That fear base which terrorized me in my youth is still there, murmuring to me quite often, though now maturity has given me some balance so that these taunts from my reptilian-brain fear base do not have the power they used to.  For example, this morning I read a news story about an antibiotic-proof strain of virus that is now in our country and first thought, “Oh no, here comes the hysteria!  Here comes the fear-mongerers crawling out from underneath their rocks to announce national and even global catastrophe!”  And, true enough, this is a serious event and, true enough, things could get out of hand.  And the “scaredy-cat” did stir for a moment in my heart and I felt that fear-base taunting me on multiple issues.  But on this occasion I employed a newly found maturity to be able to “name the demon”…so to speak…to put words to the subjective experience that was having and not allow fears to predominate.  The fear was there but I was able to employ “the pauser reason” and not imbibe of the hysteria that media is always trying to create.

Life is inherently tenuous.  At the moment when we are born, and certainly at the moment when we come “on line” as a conscious being, our little ego is fragile and desperately needs that “fig leaf” that God so graciously gives us to hide us from our nakedness.  T. S. Eliot described that moment of vulnerability as “That tender point from which life arose, that sweet force born of inner throes.” The “fig leaf” of ego structure is a necessary part of life and allows us to “join the human race” by acquiring a persona and taking our place in the tribe.  But ideally when we reach middle age…and certainly old age…we will achieve maturity enough to open up a bit, broaden our view and experience of the world, which always means encountering that subterranean fear-base to some degree.  Most of us get this piece-meal and only have to deal with some degree of internal duress—maybe anxiety or depression.  Some are not so fortunate and are overwhelmed and crash and burn, the filter provided by their ego structure proving to be incapable of handling the turmoil of unconscious energy.  Many simply go through a mid-life crisis, then “gird up their loins” and get back into the trenches and resume their life.  Others have to endure the “Dark Night of the Soul” that St. John of the Cross wrote about.  And then many others have an ego that resists fear feverishly, and they cling desperately to their persona.  And these “darkened” and “unlightened” souls have a very important place in the unfolding of our world also and rarely do any of them merit the description of “darkened” or “unenlightened.” (But oh how delightful it is to be able to make that judgment!!!  The ego just loves the power of drawing distinctions and casting someone into “outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”)

Actually, what I’m now trying to say is, wording it facetiously, “I fear that I have found courage.” And I have found that courage does not mean the absence of fear but having the wherewithal to persevere even in the midst of fear, of doubt and insecurity.  I credit this to something which happened about two and a half years ago as a result of having read Stephen Levine’s book, “Healing into Life and Death.”  Levine taught that “healing” occurred when one embraced his fears, “stepped into” them, rather than running away from them.  In his book he was talking about helping people who were facing terminal illness and reported that the “healing” often meant coming to acceptance of death and being able to die peacefully. But he also reported that with many others when they embraced their terminal illness and accepted the finality of death, they were healed of their illness.  Two and a half years ago I stopped running from fears and insecurities, began to embrace them, and am discovering the wisdom in the mantra, “This too shall pass.” But when we run from “stuff” it we only perpetuate it and allow it to continue thwarting the unfolding of our life. The culture of my youth taught me to run from “stuff” rather than deal with it.  Even my Christian faith imbibed of this avoidance principal, using the teachings of Jesus to avoid reality rather than to embrace it.

(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mutant-superbug-us_us_57474a21e4b055bb11719d35)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Freedom and Determinism

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“Freedom and determinism” was one of the first “big thoughts” that I encountered in college and I have wrestled with the notion ever since.  One image that helped me along the way came from psychologist Rollo May, I think, when he likened freedom without limits to being like a river without banks; for, a river without banks would be useless and also possibly destructive.  One of the best ways of summing up my clinical practice was that I frequently assisting clients who had too much freedom in their hearts and were “acting out.”  The clinical term was, “impulse control disorders.”

I want to share some of the thoughts of May, gleaned from his book, “Psychology and the Human Dilemma”:

The inseparable relation of self and world also implies responsibility.  The term means “responding,” “response to.”  I cannot, in other words, become a self except as I am engaged continuously in responding to the world of which I am a part.

What is interesting here is that the patient moves toward freedom and responsibility in his living as he becomes more conscious of the deterministic experiences in his life. That is, as explores how he was rejected or over protected or how he was hated as a child, how his repressed bodily needs drive him, how his personal history as a member of a minority group, let us say, conditions his development, and even as he becomes conscious of his of being a member of Western culture at a particular traumatic moment in the historical evolution of that society, he finds his margin of freedom likewise enlarged.  As he becomes more conscious of the infinite deterministic forces in his life, he becomes more free.

Freedom is, thus, not the opposite to determinism.  Freedom is the capacity to know that he is the determined one, to pause between stimulus and response and thus to throw his weight, however slight it might be on the side of one particular response among several other possible ones.

We are prone to see ourselves as “above” history and to fail to see that our psychology, and even modern science itself, are historical products like any other aspect of culture.

May’s book brings to my mind the word contingency, making me aware of just our contingent our very existence is.  We cannot truthfully declare, as did one poet, “I am the captain of my fate, the master of my soul.” But we do have that power presented above as “awareness” of our contingent, finite, and mysterious world…and of the “contingent, finite, and mysterious” nature of our very own personal existence.

Why Donald Trump Appeals to Me

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Well, at least on some level!.  When I listen to him speak, on some level I too want to say, “Atta boy! You tell’em.”  Many times when I watch him speak I find that deep-seated resonance with his arrogant certainty as he resurrects a ghost from my past when certainty was available and comforted my young soul which was beginning to come to grips with the capricious world I found myself ensconced in.  Trump promises to take us back to yesteryear when “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” was assured to all of us who would simply affirm our faith in “the way things are” and not dare to question the specious nature of that status quo.

My country, and humankind, are now wrestling with a new world that is burgeoning all around us but is very scary as it deprives some of us of the certainties that we have imbibed of for all of our life. It is much simpler to “hunker down” and passionately repeat the bromides that we grew up with, disregarding their lunacy, and taking comfort with like-minded souls who happen to be just like ourselves.  There is no room for “difference” and in fact there is fear of “difference,” thus the frequent demand of extremist groups for “purity” not realizing that “purity” and “danger” go hand in hand.  See anthropologist Mary Douglas’ book, “Purity and Danger.”

Hyper-conservatives always emphasis purity because they believe Truth is an objective fact, readily available to human reason.  They fail to consider that those who disagree with them also employ “reason,” dismissing “their” use of reason as faulty.  They cannot dare to consider that their reason too is “faulty” as it is human nature to reason in such a way that his/her prejudices and biases are confirmed.  It would be too scary to consider this possibility…and might even require humility and faith, two qualities that are difficult or even impossible for ideological extremists.