Category Archives: ideology

Rebecca Solnit on Trump’s Maddening Solitude

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This is the best “sermon” I’ve read yet about Trump and his minions.  Rebecca Solnit spares no punches and delivers a prophetic word, not just about Trump, but about our whole culture.  As they say, “Read it and weep.”  And weeping is in order as this is a very sad moment in our history and could get even sadder at any moment.

My use of words like “sermon” and “prophetic” bely my rage at the church culture of my origins.  Yes, “me doeth protest too much.”  I still think that “truth” can be found in spiritual traditions but very often spiritual traditions ossify and become merely “well-worn words and ready phrases that build walls against the wilderness.”  That leaves it to artists, writers, and even comedians to “speak truth to power” and Ms. Solnit here “knocks it out of the park.”

http://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-the-loneliness-of-donald-trump/

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Two other blogs of mine are listed here which I invited you to check out:

https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/

https://literarylew.wordpress.com/

https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/

Epistemic Closure in Poetry

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The political impasse in my country with the hijacking of the Republican Party by hyper-conservative voices has brought to my focus the topic of epistemic closure.  This is the idea of an idea, or group of ideas, that so captivates a group that any disagreement is forbidden as it would threaten their unconscious need for certainty.  Carried to an extreme this phenomenon always produces a figure head, someone extremely immune from feedback from external reality like Donald Trump.

This morning I ran across a beautiful poem in the Times Literary Supplement which illustrates this phenomenon.  It then brought to my mind two other poems, all three of which I will now share:

Sleeping Dogs by Stephen Dobyns

The satisfied are always chewing something;
like eternal daybreak their smiles remain constant.
They think they travelled far to get here. In fact,
it was two or three steps. Their definitions
surround them like a kennel contains a hound.
Let’s say you rattle their gate. Let’s say you became
a flea nibbling the delicate skin of their belief.
One eye rolls up, a raised lip reveals a tooth.

Like a thrown stone imagining it will not fall
their explanations work to keep the world fixed.
And here you’ve come with your trumpet. Did you
think they would like your music? Your accusers
are blameless. They press their paws to their soft ears.
Why share their kennel if you won’t let them sleep?

And here is one of my favorite poems by Emily Dickinson who uses vivid, concrete language to describe the emphatic closing of a mind against any feedback from one’s private frame of reference:

The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —

Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing —
At her low Gate —
Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat —

I’ve known her — from an ample nation —
Choose One —
Then — close the Valves of her attention —
Like Stone —

And finally here is an excerpt from “New Year Letter” by W. H. Auden who poignantly captures the duplicity of the social contract and the courage it takes to explore beneath its facade:

…only “despair

Can shape the hero who will dare

The desperate databases

Into the snarl of the abyss

That always lies just underneath

Our jolly picnic on the heath

Of the agreeable, where we bask,

Agreed on what we will not ask,

Bland, sunny, and adjusted by

The light of the accepted lie?

 

A Mother Teaches Her Daughter About God

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The Washington Post yesterday offered a fascinating report of a young mother’s attempt to introduce her four-year old daughter to the notion of god, even though she herself had given it up.  She knew that the “notion” of god was part of the culture her daughter was being raised in and wanted to help her to understand the idea with a broader based viewpoint than she had experienced during her youth in a mainline Protestant denomination.  (See link at conclusion.)

One dimension of this issue was the use of gender in reference to god.  She explained the use of “he” as a traditional choice but would occasionally use “she” to show her daughter that gender when describing our Source was “neither male nor female.” At one point in the exchange the young girl has gotten the hang of the free-play which is possible with word selection and, instead of concluding a prayer with “amen,” she playfully…being gender sensitive…concluded with “ah…carrot.”

This was beautiful parenting.  This mother, have done her time in religion, including evangelicalism and even fundamentalism, had learned the nuance of language and was gently teaching her child of the beautifully fluid world that she lived in.  But what she was also doing was teaching her child that all words, i.e. labels, are useful but only refer to “things” and are not the “thing-in-itself.”  The beauty of this gracious mothering is that this young lady, just beginning to formulate an identity, would learn that her very identity itself, the core of her being, could not be confined to words and her spirit would not be endungeoned within a conceptual prison.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/03/22/an-atheist-moms-challenge-teaching-my-daughter-that-god-might-be-a-girl/?utm_term=.9e0d6e9fd64a

Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche and the Trans-gender Issue

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, the Nigerian born novelist and feminist, has created a stir with her views on the trans-gender issue that is so much in discussion currently. (See link to The Guardian article at bottom.) The problem occurred when she noted that a trans woman who had been raised a male certainly was not uninfluenced by the power that accompanies “male-ness” even if “he” has become a “she.”  Adiche was roundly criticized by feminists and the Left but refused to apologize, merely noting that her critics had not listened carefully.  She furthermore chided them for clinging to “language orthodoxy” without employing a discriminating ear, i.e. “critical thinking.”  Adiche declared, “…I don’t think it’s helpful to insist that unless you want to use the exact language I want you to use, I will not listen to what you’re saying.”  She pointed out that critical approach to speech and language is necessary and just because something we hear or read does not fit into our “orthodox” view of the world does not mean that it should be immediately dismissed.  This point is often made of the Left about conservatives but Adiche called attention to its presence in liberal thought.  For, this “uncritical ear” is a temptation to any vein of thinking.

Adiche, being a talented writer, understands the nuances of language and the whole of culture as she demonstrated in her excellent novel, “Americanah.”  In this current controversy, Adiche is reflecting the belief in the bumper sticker, “Don’t believe everything you think.”  She encourages us to listen better, open our hearts more than is our first nature, realizing that as we do so we might find something being said has more value than we first thought.

She declared, “If we can’t have conversations, we can’t have progress.”  She understands that a closed mind, one religiously devoted to “orthodoxy,” is a conversation stopper or, better stated, a dialogue stopper.  Conversation in the sense of mindless palaver…chatter…can go on endlessly without accomplishing anything.  But the dialogue that Adiche has in mind is meaningful exchange of ideas the effect of which will lead to an opportunity to broaden one’s world view, or mind-set.  Orthodoxy always brings dialogue to a screeching halt, best illustrated by the congressional impasse of my country.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the newspaper article:

She suggested in an interview last week that the experiences of transgender women, who she said are born with the privileges the world accords to men, are distinct from those of women born female. She was criticized for implying that trans women are not “real women”.

“I didn’t apologize because I don’t think I have anything to apologize for,” she said on Monday. “What’s interesting to me is this is in many ways about language and I think it also illustrates the less pleasant aspects of the American left, that there sometimes is a kind of language orthodoxy that you’re supposed to participate in, and when you don’t there’s a kind of backlash that gets very personal and very hostile and very closed to debate.

“Had I said, ‘a cis woman is a cis woman, and a trans woman is a trans woman’, I don’t think I would get all the crap that I’m getting, but that’s actually really what I was saying.

(https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/21/chimaman da-ngozi-adichie-nothing-to-apologise-for-transgender-women)

 

“The Moon is Made Out of Cheese”

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The following is a facetious reverie I utilize socially on occasion to illustrate the lunacy that we all wallow in occasionally.  Bear with me.  There is a point to it.

Wow, I woke up this morning and I suddenly realized that the moon is made out of cheese!  Furthermore, I knew that this insight was profound and relevant to the entire world so I immediately began to formulate a plan whereby I could spread this very important insight.

I started by canvassing my neighborhood and though many refused to open the door, some laughed at me, there were a handful of people who, knowing how special and gifted I was to begin with, immediately said, “Hey, you have a point there!  I’ve always had thoughts like that myself but didn’t have the courage to speak of them.”

So we began to meet regularly and started each meeting with an assessment of those in the neighborhood who had not “seen the light” and had so rudely refused the good news that we had brought.  We took great comfort in the realization that most people cannot handle the truth, stubbornly keep their minds and hearts in the darkness, and refuse to allow enlightenment to enter.  Often, as these meetings ended, we would be in tears as we lamented the fate of those who had stubbornly refused to acknowledge the truth that we offered.

I must make a long story short and summarize.  This initial group did grow and at some point our initial band of seven faithful souls expanded to twenty-three.  We formally organized and, of course, since I was the source of this inspiration I announced that I was the leader of the group…and also the treasurer…and that I was the final authority on some of the fine points about the moon being made out of cheese.

At this point, trouble started.  One gentleman brought up the question, “Well, what kind of cheese is it?”  I was a bit taken aback as I knew without a doubt that it was American cheese but another dared to suggest, “No, it is cheddar.”  Still another affirmed that it was American cheese but argued that it was Velveeta.  It took a lot of argument, and at times intense anger, but I managed to convince the second gentleman that the Velveeta notion was heresy and he agreed with me.  But the cheddar proponent was adamant about his viewpoint, and convinced three others he was right, and they separated from our group and focused on developing a belief system around the moon being made out of cheddar cheese.

My point here with this lunacy is, once again, “Don’t believe everything you think.”  Those who do, lacking the capacity to think critically, are subject to easily being influenced by a seductive and/or intimidating person.  Whatever our “pet” thoughts are, it does not hurt in the least to subject them to a bit of critical thinking.  I like T.S. Eliot’s observation on this note, encouraging us to, “live in the breakage, in the collapse of what was believed in as most certain and therefore the fittest for renunciation.”  “Pet” thoughts that have value can withstand this type of scrutiny and even flourish as a result.  This makes me think of something I read decades ago about how to make a poem, “Grab a word and pull on it.”  Grabbing a word or a thought and “pulling on it” with critical thinking can help ferret out the value…if any…if the thinking.  The less value in the vein of thought that grips one’s soul, the less likelihood that any critical thinking will be brought to bear upon it.

Each of us have passing thoughts.  That is good.  But we can be selective about which one’s we give any energy to and if it is something that tends to promote isolation, we might take pause.  We might ask, “Do I really believe this?”

I am a Writer

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I’m a writer.  It has taken me 65 years to make this bold assertion though this blogging experience of the past five years has been a very tentative, left-handed way of making this announcement.  And “endeavor” was a deliberately chosen term as it has been and always will be a struggle as writing of any substance must come from the heart; and anything that flows from that bastion of “beastly little treasures” will be a struggle.  The heart is the innermost recess of our being, so “inner most” that, if you will let me slip into Zen for a moment, it is a “No Thing” and can best be described as emptiness.  Therefore, if you “know” what your heart is…that is if you cognitively grasp your heart, or think that you do…I would beg to differ with you.  For the “heart” always lies beyond our conscious grasp.  And this “emptiness” is very much related to the Christian teaching of “losing your self to find your self” and finding our “self” in the sense that Jesus had in mind is much more than a cognitive, rational, linear-thinking enterprise.  You could even say it is a “work of the cross” but not in an intellectual way but in the constellation of archetypal energies which will often feel like a crucifixion.

Acknowledgement that anything is beyond the grasp of our conscious mind is frightening to most people, especially those of us in the West.  Since the Descartes dictum, “I think, therefore I am” the West has been worshipping thinking or reason and we have slowly come to be convinced that the whole of life can be reduced to linear thinking, i.e. reason.  And this has made us technologically and scientifically great but left us with a spiritual emptiness that will soon leave my country, the United States, with a man who is egregiously mentally ill as its President.  “They call it Reason, using Light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.” (Goethe)

But writing and all artistic enterprises can only spring from a heart that novelist Toni Morrison described as “petal open.”  That is where spirituality flows from, other than the “letter of the law” variety which is only what the Apostle Paul called a “work of the flesh.”  My favorite description of this vulnerable heart was written by Shakespeare whose character Hamlet, with great intensity lamented to his mother that he could never unburden his heart to her because it was, “bronzed o’er with the damned cast of thought so that it” is a barrier against “sense” (or feeling) and thus not “made of penetrable stuff.”  Shakespeare knew that an open heart can be “penetrated” while a closed heart, one shrouded by an enculturated verbal patina will be reduced to mindless palaver, “the well worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.” (Conrad Aiken)

But words do have the capacity to furrow into the depths of our heart and there we can use them to “unpack our heart.”(see footnote below).  But the unopen heart will only reflect from its patina a slough of jargon and packaged, formulaic speech in accordance with what the speaker perceives will gain him the greatest approbation.  Here is the opening stanza of a poem by Irish poet W. R. Rodgers who in 1942 recognized the “post-truth” dimension of language that is currently plaguing our world.

WORDS (an excerpt)

By W. R. Rodgers

Once words were unthinking things, signaling

Artlessly the heart’s secret screech or roar,

Its foremost ardour or its farthest wish,

Its actual ache or naked rancour.

And once they were the gangways for anger,

Overriding the minds qualms and quagmires.

Wires that through weary miles of slow surmise

Carried the feverish message of fact

In their effortless core.  Once they were these,

But now they are the life-like skins and screens

Stretched skillfully on frames and formulae,

To terrify or tame, cynical shows

Meant only to deter or draw men on,

The tricks and tags of every demagogue,

Mere scarecrow proverbs, rhetorical decoys,

Face-savers, salves, facades, the shields and shells

Of shored decay behind which cave minds sleep

And sprawl like gangsters behind bodyguards.

(FOOTNOTE:  For you Shakespearean scholars, I am misapplying this line of “unpacking my heart with words” to describe something useful, when in the play “Hamlet” it described prostitutes deliberately plying their trade knowing that they could then go and perfunctorily confess their sins.  Hmm!)

Post-modernism 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 the Prince of Denmark.  Hamlet, as well as many Shakespearean characters, portray 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…usually not women…who are so conflicted they have trouble making decisions, thus their many dreams and fancies, “lose the name of action.”

Another theme of Shakespeare was madness and his understanding of this common human malady was not unrelated to his insights about consciousness.  For, there is a “common-sense” consciousness that one is given by his community and one’s lot is to be immersed in it fully; and to step outside of this comfort zone for even a moment and become aware of “consciousness” is not unrelated to madness. Asking one to take this meta-cognitive leap is like asking a fish to see water. 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” and this escape, or even its temptation is terrifying.  The terror of this 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.

But, awareness of this issue does not relieve one from the onslaught of unconscious influences. 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 one hope of doing is to own a very skewed view of the world and hope that as he continues to age his “skewing” might be more amenable to other viewpoints, leaving one free of the hubris of “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. But this post-modern view of the world is, and will continue to be, totally incomprehensible to those who are still comfortably ensconced in a linear view of the world.  I grew up in that linear world and remember viewing askance what was then labeled as “relativism”, often affirming brazenly, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

But most of the people who still live in that mind-set are not bad people nor is their view of the world.  I’m sure an equal number of “bad people” see the world as I do.  “Badness” is not a function of our world view but of how much we are under its tyranny.  The more rigidly certain that our way is the “right way” the more liberty will we feel that to impose our will upon other people, even under the name of God!

Danger of “Thinking Outside of the Box”

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As one who “thinks outside of the box,” I must admit that it is not necessarily a virtue.  I’ve had that aptitude since early youth and since my late teens I’ve been exploring its riches.  So, in a way, it is my “comfy zone” and at times I demonstrate my obnoxiousness and arrogance, those very qualities which I see residing in “box dwellers.”  As one dares to venture “outside of the box,” it is always very tempting to ensconce oneself in still another “box’ and there demonstrate the same arrogance that one is deriding with great contempt from his/her “comfy zone” outside of the box.

For, “the box” that I’m referring to is not merely a conceptual formulation but it is the gut-level orientation to take one’s view of the world as primary to the exclusion of others.  And those of us with “enlightened” and “noble” ideas are often the ones who pose the greatest challenges for civilization, witness The Crusades and Isis.  In each of these instances, they are whole-heartedly intoxicated with their world view and are willing to bring to those who disagree with them great displeasure, even death.  That is because those who are “intoxicated” with this delectable nectar of the gods (even though they are dark gods) cannot see beyond their limited perspective.  They have taken an “idea” and run it into the ground even to the point where they are willing to kill for it and to die for it themselves.  When you have reached this point, you are approaching the dark, demonic depths of being an “ideologue” regardless of how noble your idea might appear to be.

And ideologue always seeks to escape his own emptiness by glomming onto some “idea” which he naively thinks is “the answer.”  Been there, done that.  Now I realize that this obsession, even with an idea as noble as Jesus Christ, was just an escape from reality and an escape from my own spiritual depths just to hang on desperately to my illusion of reality and my illusion of myself.  As Jesus, and many other spiritually enlightened men and women have tried to teach us, there is a “spiritual” dimension to life which lies beyond the grasp of our finite, conscious mind.  But that “finite, conscious mind,” being an ego contrivance, resists this awareness and insists that we hang onto the world of appearance, the shadow world of Plato’s famous cave analogy.  And Jesus provided us a vivid example of just how gut-wrenchingly painful it is to give up this world of illusions and “climb the rugged cross of the moment and let our illusions die.” (Leonard Cohen)

Halloween Thought: Consciousness is Scary!!!

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As Hamlet is drawing his famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy to a close, he declares. “Thus conscience (i.e. consciousness) doeth make cowards of us all and the native hue of resolution is sicklie’d o’er with the pale cast of thought…”

Shakespeare knew that most people opt to never become conscious because it is just too painful.  He knew that regardless of out lot in life, be it immense pain or the mute pain of tedium, we would prefer to keep it that way, to “cling to these ills that we have than fly to others that we know not of.”  Each of us prefers seeing the world through a narrow little prism, a citadel of unquestioned premises.  We obstinately cling to our narrow world view, opting to not challenge the comfy set of premises in which we are ensconced.  The price tag for this comfort is that we never become conscious, never escape the herd mentality into which each of us is born;  for, as T.S. Eliot has put it, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”

Hamlet recognized that the “native hue of resolution”, or innate desire to exercise mature will in the world, is “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”  Shakespeare presented this tragic character as stymied by thought, given to “thinking too much” which gave him wisdom, “which, if quartered would be one part wisdom and three parts cowardice.”  Hamlet recognized that hiding beneath that “pale cast of thought”,  that myriad of sterile ideas, was merely cowardice.  He knew that all ideologues are merely cowards, not willing to challenge their basic assumptions and tippy-toe into “reality.”

But W. H. Auden has the most vivid poetic description of our innate preference for this escapism:

Heroic charity is rare;
Without it, what except despair
Can shape the hero who will dare
The desperate catabasis
Into the snarl of the abyss
That always lies just underneath
Our jolly picnic on the heath
Of the agreeable, where we bask,
Agreed on what we will not ask,
Bland, sunny, and adjusted by
The light of the accepted lie.

 

 

 

 

The Pleasure of Being a Victim

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In my country there currently a rise of “victimhood,” best illustrated by the current standoff in Burns, Oregon by right-wing armed extremists.  These men have succumbed to the siren call of politicians on the far right who routinely appeal to a profound sense of alienation and despair in the hearts of the disenfranchised often who happen to be “low-information voters.”  One of the most popular pieces of red-meat these politicians toss out there is, “President Obama is coming to take your guns.”  And related to this fear is the fear of “government/Presidential over reach” which is the suspicion that the government is intruding too far into individual freedoms.

I grew up in this madness, though the version I lived through never led to anything like we are witnessing today.  My father was the patriarch in my early life and he often brought home right-wing fears that evoked fears that were already in my youthful heart as I was discovering that life was capricious all too often.  But dad never would have participated in an armed insurrection.  And another factor in my life was hyper-conservative fundamentalist Christianity which presented me with a “loving” God who was always ready to pinch the heads off of any miscreant and that the world was a really bad place, merely a temporary abode we must endure before we go to heaven and pluck on harps and fawn over Jesus for quatrillions of years.  In my study of religious history, this style of religion is termed “the religion of the dispossessed.”  And my family roots, as well as denominational roots, stemmed from the post-Civil War era when Southerners were first dealing with the alienation that comes from having one’s life wrenched from them by some invading force.

But fear is just a fundamental dimension of human experience.  Human culture is a contrivance that has evolved to help us deal with this fear…usually by completely avoiding it…but also by providing adaptations that allow us to invest in the common good and realize that in spite of the fact that life is transitory and capricious it is a worthwhile and important endeavor.  And I think that religion, and other expressions of faith, can provide a helpful accommodation, but only if we can avoid the challenge of using our accommodation only to escape of the vulnerability that is intrinsic to the human experience.

I have fear, often a lot of it, usually in the form of anxiety.  But for some reason, I can now cope with it more effectively than when I was a child and so without the need for stockpiles of guns and ammunition, belief in an absent Despotic Deity, or even bowing before my country’s true God—consumerism.  So, what does this get me?  Well, if I take it down to MacDonald’s in the morning and lie about my age, and given them a dollar, they will give me a senior cup of coffee.  I don’t think there is anything to “get” other than the simple pleasure of life, the beauty of this world and being here to experience it and be able to handle my frustration that it will not last long enough to satisfy the demands of my ego.

But, this approach denies me the great delight and satisfaction of victim hood, knowing that “they” are always out there to get me, mistreat me, and shame me.  It was so ego-rewarding back then to know that my tribe was a “band of brothers” beleaguered by forces greater than I/we could control but that “we” were together in our faith and knew firmly that we were believing and doing the right thing.  And if anyone should challenge our belief system, we would merely rely on the comforting premise, “We are right, and they are wrong.”  And we knew this because God was leading us.  And armed men in Oregon have the same comfort today, knowing they are “right” and they are willing even to die and to kill because if their convictions.

But this emphasis on “being right” and certainty of having acquired this status always stems from a deep-seated lack of security and feeling of “wrongness”.  This existential doubt is buried deep in the unconscious and, of course, those driven by those subterranean forces never will consider its influence in the choices they make.  To consider these “influences” that are beyond the grasp of consciousness would require a knowledge of the mystery of life, feelings of not being as much in control as once thought, existential doubt all of which lead ultimately to a need of faith.

These feelings of powerlessness often evoke an expression of physical power often in the form of overt aggression.  The pain felt within has to find expression and inevitably leads to acting out, a phenomena vividly illustrated by anthropologist Rene Girard in his classic book, “Violence and the Sacred.”

(New York Times article related to the above:  The delight of victimhood—http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/opinion/sunday/the-real-victims-of-victimhood.html)