Category Archives: politics

The Time is Out of Joint!

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“The time is out of joint. O cursed spite that I was born to set it right.”

But Hamlet’s observation was skewed by his own personal demons. It was his time (i.e. world) that was out of joint and from his anguished perspective he deemed the whole of Denmark “out of joint.”

The doom-sayers, the proponents of “apocalypse now” always trouble me. Been there, done that…but grew out of it at some point. Yes, the world is always “out of joint” in that it is populated with individuals who are all too human. And, yes collectively we need to attempt to address this “dis-jointedness.” And even individually we have some responsibility to participate in this collective purge of the commonweal.

But our main focus always needs to be on our own “dis-jointedness”, our own brokenness, our own grave limitations. It is much too easy to avoid our personal woes and obsess with how evil the world or particular individuals are. The evils of the world can most effectively be addressed when we focus mainly on the evil that lurks in our own hearts; yes, even our noble, kind, loving, Christian hearts.

Thoughts re St. Augustine

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It is amazing to note change. I’m now reading St. Augustine’s Confessions and enjoying it immensely. When I labored through part of it in college, I found it excruciating. Now it is invigorating to read of another man’s struggles with his Source nearly 2000 years ago. And I had forgotten what a randy son-of-a-gun he was!

I really liked his description of his moment of conversion as “that moment wherein I was to become other than I was.” I wander if “W” would have any idea what he was talking about or even Romney? I bet O’Bama would.

I’d like to share again my favorite Shakespearean sonnet which pertains to this notion that we have a soul within which “pines” to be seen, recognized, and respected. This is the most pressing need of human kind, always has been and always will be. For, “getting there” is a process individually and collectively. Enjoy:

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
(Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array),
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this the body’s end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:

So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men,

Mass hysteria besets us!

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Tacitus noted, “They terrify lest they should fear.”  He had in mind fear-mongerers who were always espousing the latest doomsday scenario, reflecting the fear that their own hearts were consumed by.  And then Aescychlus noted that “the gods send tragedy so that men will have something to talk about.”  Modern media fuels hysteria with “breaking news” and such. And we thrive on it. Sometimes I think we need to get a life.  Ok, I’ll admit it  Sometimes I think I need to get a life!

Life is inherently full of fear and tragedy strikes all too often . It could hit any moment, even to myself!  But I’m not inclined to live in terror of it.  I’ll deal with it when it happens. “Sufficient unto the day will be the evil thereof.”

The Illness that we Are

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In the book of Genesis the subject of nakedness is introduced to us.  Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit and felt naked, exposed, and God fashioned for them a fig leaf garment and hid their nakedness.  The Bible said that this garment hid them from their sense of shame.

Art in recent centuries, and movies in recent times, often includes the image of the nude woman, caught unawares, covering her breasts with an arm and/or her privates with a hand.  Most men also have had dreams or fears of that horrible feeling of being caught nude in public, being exposed, being vulnerable.

I think this fig leaf represents the function of the ego in human culture.  It is a contrivance that hides us from our nakedness.  It is a persona that we can present to our community and to the world and not have to show to them the frail, frightened vulnerable creature that we are in the depths of our heart.  And this ego consciousness is very important as without it there would be no “world” as we know it.  For without it, we would be teeming multitudes of quivering flesh and could not function as a culture.  We would not be a world.

But this ego consciousness has become a monster that is run amok and threatens to destroy us.  Instead of acknowledging our frailty and recognizing the frailty of others, we have organized into armed camps the purpose of which is to barricade ourselves behind piles of “stuff”.  Or, to allude briefly to one dimension of the problem, in our country we have isolated into ideologically-armed political camps, each camp unwilling to recognize its own vulnerability.  We are guilty of the sin of misplaced concreteness, “We chase the shade, and let the real be.” (John Masefield)

But as individuals we cannot correct the ills of the world. The only “illness” we are responsible for is illness that we harbor. But we can discover that as we address that illness in our own heart, as we “wage the war we are”, we will be a bit of an antidote to the collective illness that threatens us.

Political Polarization and Spirituality

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I am following this political brouhaha closely this year in part because it is such a look-see into the human psyche, individually and collectively. I’ve said many times, “We wage the war we are” (W. H. Auden) and that is true also on the individual and collective levels.

I’m really appalled at the overt hostility present today in the political process, the unabashed hatred of O’Bama in particular. At times, on the extreme, it is not even subtle. And I look at the other side…my side…and I see that we too, the “good guys” (wink, wink)…are dug in at the heels also. I recently casually noted to a couple of friends that the real problem in our country is a spiritual problem. But, I quickly backed down, realizing how dorky that sounded. And, merely trotting out the words “spiritual problem” can sound kind of dorky.

But, let me say the same thing but in different words. We have a problem of “values”. The issue is, “What do we value, individually and collectively?” Our need is some unifying ultimate value, “Ultimate” if you please, toward which we can strive individually and collectively. Without this Ultimate value we are inevitable fragmented and any collective purpose is difficult to achieve. Now as far as naming this “Ultimate Value” I have no problem with the word “God”. But that word has been so banalized and vulgarized that many people find it off-putting.

And let me close with a John Masefield sonnet which explains why this word has become so banalized, so vulgarized:

How many ways, how many different times
The tiger mind has clutched at what it sought,
Only to prove supposed virtues crimes,
The imagined godhead but a form of thought.
How many restless brains have wrought and schemed,
Padding their cage, or built, or brought to law,
Made in outlasting brass the something dreamed,
Only to prove themselves the things held in awe.

Masefield saw that so often the object of our worship, our “highest value”, or “God”, is merely our self.

The Dialectics of Identity

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In yesterday’s blog I discoursed re Lewis Thomas’ Lives of a Cell and the symbiotic relationship between the setting of boundaries and willingness to “relax” them for the sake of the collective. Someone once described this process as the competing drives for homeostasis and change and is relevant to the individual and the collective. If the drive for “homoeostasis” is unbalanced, the individual will be trapped in a static, autistic world. If the other need becomes predominant, the individual will be trapped in an incorporative mode of being in which “strange” is so needed that it overwhelms the ego. This individual will be trapped in perpetual “hunger.” This can even describe the addiction process.

On the collective level, I like to illustrate with politics and there is no better illustration than our current political and social polarization. To function healthily, a culture must have “conservative” forces present as well as “liberal” forces. There must be a tendency to “conserve” tradition but that tendency must be balanced by a willingness to engage with “strange” or “difference.” There must be a setting of boundaries but this boundary-setting must be balanced by a willingness to “relax” boundaries here and there. On one extreme there is stagnation and ultimate death. On the other extreme there is “change” run amok and ultimately death.

Re this dialectic of the collective noted above, there is an interesting article in today’s Washington Post newspaper. The article describes the conservative response of one Oklahoma community toward changes that seem to be threatening them. The article reported the citizenry’s anxiety, fear, and anger toward an over-reaching government, creeping socialism, and liberal values from that bastion of liberalism “up north in Norman.” But this was not a hatchet job on conservative values. It merely conveys to the reader the genuine sadness that some communities feel when their world view is perceived to be threatened. And on the same idea, you might find PBS’s American Experience from this past week as it portrays the Amish response to encroaching civilization.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/to-residents-of-another-washington-their-cherished-values-are-under-assault/2012/03/01/gIQAsbhXlR_print.html

Sociobiology and Lewis Thomas

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Though I am steeped in the liberal arts, I have been increasingly curious about the biological sciences. Those of us who have “escaped” into abstraction must always remember that there is a biological dimension to all these “new-fangled ideas” that we revel in. One of my favorite books in biology dates back to 1963, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, by Lewis Thomas. Thomas vividly describes this “biological dimension” and suggests at times its inextricable relationship to human behavior, individually and collectively.

From this book I posit the notion that life itself is basically about the creation of boundaries and the evolution of these “boundaries” into increasingly complex relationships. These relationships require that boundaries be there in the first place but at the same it time means that these boundaries cannot be so rigid that communication between the various “boundaries”, or entities, is not possible. Either extreme leads to grave complications and ultimately death itself.

On an individual level this means that an ego, a specific identity that wells up from within a body, must have boundaries to exist psycho-socially. Without an ego we would have only a blob of proto-plasm with no process of differentiation that can lead to higher-order organisms and eventually human beings. But simultaneously this “ego” must not be too impermeable. It must be firm enough that it can quickly learn to endure Shakespeare’s “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” And for this “learning” to take place, this ego must not become a fortress but must be open to the world outside of itself, it must be a “human” at some point, a social creature.

I would like to here share one tidbit from the book itself, an observation about the Iks culture from Uganda. Thomas argues that impingement from the outside, “modernity”, encroached so much and so quickly on these people that they could not function. They devolved into a very reproachable, detestable tribe of erstwhile human beings. Their talk with each other was rude and self-serving, they stopped singing, they lost emotional connection with their children, and they even would defecate on each other’s doorstep. Thomas’ intention here is a demonstration on what will happen on the collective level if the outside world does not respect the boundaries of a specific culture. And the impact that the “victim” culture experiences depends on two things—-1) its own “ego-integrity” (the ability to handle feedback from the outside) and 2) the rapacity of the outside world.

The above example illustrates the “abuse” that one culture, or even the “world culture” at large, can impose on a particular culture. It also vividly illustrates what can happen on the individual level if a child, in particular,  is abused—sexually, physically, and even emotionally . In human terms, the “soul” gets ravaged and often the soul cannot function meaningfully any longer or is at least gravely impaired.

Social Awkwardness & the GOP

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One of my favorite vignettes from The Simpsons TV show is Mr. Burns attempting to curry favor with his rank-and-file employees. His role in the show is that of the mega-billionaire owner of the local nuclear power plant and thus his arrogance and obnoxiousness is stretched to the max by the writers. But in this scene he has decided that he needed to be seen as “one of the boys” at the plant and so he sidles up to a small group of workers. Social banter is underway and Burns seizes the moment to offer an overture, “Hey, how ‘bout that local sports team, eh?”

Romney is socially awkward and stumbles in this social arena so often that I actually fill sorry for him. (I really liked that bit about “even the trees are the right height!”) The press just pillories him and I’m sure his party leaders just grimace every time he speaks publicly. But, heck, there is nothing wrong with being socially awkward! And I can live with that if he happens to persevere and when the nomination and election. It takes tremendous courage to trot yourself out every day, know that you have a problem of this sorts…and continue to show up. I admit it, I would just want to run to a corner of the playground and cry.

Ronald Laing once wrote extensively about social interactions and taught that to function socially…at least in an adroit manner…one had to offer a “tenable performance.” For, even though one might not be ostracized to the same degree as with sociopathy, maladroit performances make people, i.e. the “social body,” uncomfortable. And those who cannot muster a “tenable performance” might not be imprisoned or executed, but they will have a real problem is achieving the heights of Romney. How he has done it so far I can’t really explain. Other than perhaps money.

Conspiracy Theory

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I have a virulent disdain for conspiracy theories.  This stems from my youth where I imbibed a variety of conspiracies from my community, especially from my little church.  There was always the impending doom of “the communist conspiracy” that sought to overtake our country.  And on that note, I owned my own copy of John Stormer’s magnum opus, None Dare Call it Treason.  There were the “godless atheists” who wanted to destroy Christianity.  And there was a hefty dollop of anti-Catholicism conspiracy—the Pope waiting in a submarine off the coast on the eve of the 1960 election, ready to step ashore and take control of the government should Kennedy win.  And John Birch Society chatter was often in the air.  The “Tri-lateral Commission” was supposedly promoting “big government,” thus facilitating the ogre of them all, a “one-world government” that was an essential part of the “end-times” scenario.

Let me skip then to the 1990’s and Bill Clinton.  One of my all-time favorites was the notion then that Clinton was operating a drug-smuggling operation out of the tiny village of Mena, Arkansas.  And, most recently there is the falderal about O’Bama being a Muslim and not being an American citizen.

So, I have thrown the baby out with the bathwater and roundly dismiss anything that smells of “conspiracy theory.”  And I do this at my own peril; for, true enough, “conspiracies” do take place from time to time.

(Btw, one of the best books I’ve ever come across on this subject is Richard Hofstadner’s The Paranoid Style of American Politics)

Aspirin and contraception

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Foster Freiss, the Rick Santorum’s designated“millionaire” really stuck his foot in his mouth yesterday with his decades old joke about aspirin as a contraceptive. Later, Santorum tried to cover for him, dismissing him as a jokester whose jokes are sometimes not funny. He continued, “He told a bad, off-color joke and he shouldn’t have done it, but that’s his business.”

Well, first of all the “off-color’ note reflects Santorum’s prudery. When I first heard the joke 40 years ago, I too was quite the prude and was taken aback when I heard it—-my late-teens sister had been told the joke by her dentist. But Santorum does not grasp the issue here. The issue is horrible judgment on Freiss’s part as he trotted out a lame, ages-old joke in the midst of a very intense debate about a very personal matter for females. One would think that Freiss would have had the presence of mind, or to allude to a recent blog posting, an “observing ego”, and would have not trotted that inanity out there.

It is kind of relevant to Gingrich’s recent proposal of a moon colony “by the end of my second administration.” At that time he was being hit hard by critics about his narcissism and grandiosity. His “observing ego” should have given him pause and let him know, “Oh, wow, I can’t say that. It sounds very grandiose.” But he is “meta-cognitively challenged.”

(Oh, back to the Freiss joke. Here is how I heard it. And, it was designed to be told by an older male to a virginal young lady for maximal shock value. Question from the dentist to my sister, “Hey, did you know that aspirin can prevent pregnancy?” Taken aback and curious, my sister responded, “Well, no. How can that be.? Answer, “When you go on a date, put an aspirin between your knees and don’t open your legs.”)