Tag Archives: Conservatism

Mental Illness is a Reference Problem

It is axiomatic in clinical lore that mental illness is a reference problem arising from having formulated too narrow a field of reference, one’s decision-making guided by internal whims and fancies with little or no concern for external validation. In recent months I have “discoursed” re the extreme close-mindedness of the Republican Party in my country and yesterday’s post might make one think I had them in mind. Well, kind of, but only “kind of” for if I would deign to call the Republican Party “mentally ill” then I would be revealing my own “mental illness.” For they are not “mentally ill” though they do have a “mentally ill” dimension in their collective psyche just as do all groups, including the Democratic Party. This “mentally ill dimension” is the inordinate need to maintain and perpetuate group identity to the exclusion of any long-term, broad-based, inclusive agenda.

All groups function like individuals and have a need for homeostasis and go to great ends to achieve this objective. And this is good, if it is not carried to an extreme. When homeostasis becomes an inordinate concern for a group they will become excessively concerned with boundaries and self-definition. Inevitably a need for purity will emerge and one will see a tendency to threaten or exclude anyone who departs from the party line. This is reflects a profound insecurity in its collective psyche—the aforementioned homeostasis is perceived to be very tenuous and great energy is invested in shoring up its precarious internal sense of identity. The reinforcements employed to shore up this tenuous identity become profoundly important as without them the fear that “the center will not hold” and a beast will come “slouching toward Bethlehem.” (See W. B. Yeats poem at conclusion)

The key is for homeostasis…or the bedrock of identity…to be based on some belief system that finds unity in a whole larger than oneself. This belief system will allow the group identity to be maintained but without such inordinate emphasis that the larger context of which the group is part will be de-emphasized or even rejected. Such an impoverished identity does not see…and feel…its connection with the larger context (i.e., “the world”) as it cannot forego its pristine, private, “unique” view of self and opts to live in an autistic shell. It makes me think of Hamlet who pined, under his great duress, to “flee to a nutshell and there be king of infinite spaces.”

The following poem by William Butler Yeats conveys the terror of a group or individual who experiences existential insecurity and fears that “the center will not hold” and will fall prey to “the beast” of chaos:

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Be a Voice, not an Echo!

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I recently saw a quip on Facebook that grabbed me, “Be a voice, not an echo.” I feel I have spent most of my life merely echoing what I have been taught and what I have been rewarded for thinking and believing. I have dutifully mirrored back what “they” have wanted in the interest of the approbation that is always promised for this behavior.

But, due to my own internal “non-sense,” I realized I wasn’t feeling the approbation in the first place. And I saw that I had been guilty of this spiritual “offense” and am finding that I live less in an echo chamber now. But notice I said “less.” We can never think with perfect clarity…unless we achieve deity; and if I ever have intimations of having done that I hope someone is nearby with a hypodermic of industrial strength Haldol! We always live and think in a context and we always have a human tendency to interpret things to fit with our old-brain, ego-template of the world. When this understanding comes to us, we can back off more readily with our “certainties” and allow some doubt to filter in, making room for others. I love that line from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets about the need to “live in the breakage, in the collapse of what was believed in as most certain and therefore the fittest for renunciation.”

Bigotry, Racism, & Extremism

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“True Believers” are always scary because they are idealogues, believing in ideas over reality. Sure, all humans have ideas and respect them as they allow us to communicate and to get things done in a group. But idealogues do not see ideas as merely a means to an end; they worship their ideas, seeing them as an end in themselves. Now they do have an hierarchy of values on this matter, having designated some ideas as “really important” and then assigned designations to them such as “god” or “truth” or “right” or as I like to sum it up, “truth, justice, and the American way.” These really big ideas are so important they will fight for them and in extremes they will kill for them and will often proudly announce they are willing to die for them.

Now I too believe in “god” and “truth” and “right” and value the American way of life. But since I’m not an ideologue…being in recovery from that malady…I see those words as being sounds we utter to refer to phenomena that lie beyond the grasp of words. “God”, for example, is a label we use to refer to that which is the Ungraspable, that dimension of life which we cannot wrap our head around but some of us feel very strongly is present…or Present…in this Mystery that we are encompassed by.

But my thought about God, as well as the rest of these thoughts and the whole of this blog posting, will be described as “straight from the pits of hell” by all idealogues as they cannot, or will not, handle ambiguity. They are horrified with the notion that life is dynamic, that there is a flow or fluidity to life as the notion threatens their illusion that they are in total control of their world. To understand this approach to life, to understand with the mind and with the heart, would require faith and there is no room in their heart for faith. Of course, they proudly announce that they have faith and they know that they that they do have faith because they know that they do. Our world has an object lesson in this blight on human consciousness with the Taliban, and now with Isis, and also the extreme right-wing of the American Republican party.

Yesterday Salon.com offered extensive excerpts from a recent book that addresses this issue with its analysis of racism and bigotry. The book is, “The Bigot: Why Prejudice Persists“ by Stephen Eric Bronner. The Salon.com excerpt is entitled, “This is your brain on racism: Inside the mind of modern bigotry” and here is the link:

http://www.salon.com/2014/07/27/this_is_your_brain_on_racism_inside_the_mind_of_modern_bigotry/

Here are some highlights in the Salon.com excerpt that I want to share:

The bigot has always felt queasy about transforming the visible, the ineffable into the discursive, and the unknown into the known. Observation and evidence, hypothesis and inference, confirmation and validation are thus selectively employed by him to justify what Cornel West has termed “the discursive exclusion” of those who are different and what they have to offer.

(The bigot) is always primarily concerned with proving what he thinks he already knows. He insists that the answers to the problems of life have been given and he resents everything that challenges inherited wisdom, parochial prejudices, and what he considers the natural order of things.

Other than his prejudices, he has no core beliefs. The bigot likes it when his interests are being served, when people of color are exploited, but he dislikes it when he feels disadvantaged.

Competition is good when it works for him. When it doesn’t, the bigot will insist that his competitors are cheating—and that they cheat because it is a trait of their ethnicity, nationality, or race.”

To summarize, the bigot is guilty of what Sartre called “bad faith.” “Bad faith” is a bogus faith in that it goes under the name “faith” but if subjected to scrutiny, is only egotism run amok, an ersatz spirituality which the Apostle Paul would have described as a, “work of the flesh.” But the bigot will not allow any questioning of his motives and in a sense has no capacity to do so for his heart has long sense been darkened by Darkness so that he sees only darkness and, of course, calls it Light. And, to employ the same circular reason offered earlier, it is then “Light” because he knows that it is “Light” whereas if he would allow that “Spirit of God” that he often purports to worship to visit his heart, he would see that he only at best sees faint glimmers of Light and can at best see “only through a glass darkly.” That experience would then allow him to tolerate more the possibility that people different than him have intrinsic dignity and deserve respect, that all of us have only a finite perspective.

To quote Goethe once again, “They call it reason, using Light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

Jesus Taking on the Religious Establishment

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Yesterday, I paraphrased the teachings of Jesus as simply, “Get rid of your stuff!” Today, I’d like to elaborate on that theme a bit, hypothesizing about his view on the human race.

You see, what happened was that Jesus came down here and pretty soon found this a bewildering place. Often in his youth he would exclaim to his parents, “What the hell! This can’t really be happening! Why don’t these people get their heads out?” Mary and Joseph would often roll their eyes as they watched him grow up and periodically express his frustration with the human race. Much later when Jesus’ frustration became more intense they began to worry and once Mary even anticipated the mother of Hamlet and said, “Oh what a noble mind is here o’er thrown.”

It took a few more years of maturity but it dawned on Jesus that the problem was that people invested in the material world to the exclusion of the spiritual world. Even worse he realized that this was also true for the religious establishment of his culture, that the Jewish religious tradition was nothing but pomp and circumstance, summarizing one visit to Sunday School when he was 13 with the words, “Yada, yada, yada.” (You see, Jerry Seinfield was not the originator of this expression.”)

So decades later Jesus saw the potentates of the religious establishment together in the village plaza and overheard their conversation enough that he understood them to be sincerely discussing ways in which they could improve attendance each Sunday at the synagogue and also trying to be subtle in their comparison of the size of each others phylacteries. (Yes, Jesus did note that this probably had Freudian overtones.)

So Jesus was in a pissy mood that morning and decided just to saunter up to this august group in which he had no standing in the first place. “Hey guys,” he said, “Just a thought here. I see you guys are having a good time with this religious thing you got going on here. You really get a charge out of this ‘holy’ thing and you succeed in teaching your congregations to drink the same kool-aid. But may I suggest that you simply get over your self which will require getting rid of your stuff, certainly including this religious falderal which amounts only to the dissonant racket of ‘sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.’ If you don’t catch my drift, I’m saying your worship services and spiritual practice have become simply a lot of noise which provides you and yours a whole lot of satisfaction but does nothing for the world outside of yourself. Now forgive me, but I can’t help but liken this particular little tete-a-tete you are having this morning as reflective of the circle-jerk that I see at most of your Sunday morning dogma-fests.” He paused a moment and listened to the deafening silence and noted the apoplectic visages. “Anyway, just a thought here. Excuse me. Carry on. Talk amongst yourselves as you were doing. Oh, and have a nice day,” and he walked away.

So Jesus resumed sipping privately on his cup of latte as he watched these religious elders out of the corner of his eye. He saw them intensely discussing something and he knew it was him, he knew that he had put a bee in their bonnet; but he didn’t care. Occasionally he would catch a furtive glare from one of them as they continued to angrily discuss what he had said and they were gesticulating wildly. He occasionally heard words like “bastard” and “son of a bitch” and something about “probably was born in Kenya”, a reference which Jesus, even with his omniscience, did not understand.

After a few minutes, he saw them coming his way and he thought with amusement, “Uh oh!”

They approached him and the leader of the group announced, “Jesus, we don’t appreciate what you had to say and no one had asked you say anything in the first place. We are left with only two choices—a)ignore you and let you continue in your lunacy or b)to vote you off the island.”

Jesus interjected, with a wry smile, “And let me guess which one you have opted for!”

Mother’s Day Thoughts

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Indulge me while I think out loud. I’m trying to decide what to blather on about today…perhaps the “meaning of meaning” or the “intricacies of the time-space continuum” or even the old tried and true “How many angels can God sit on the head of a needle?” Now I spend hours and hours each day wrestling with these important issues, stopping occasionally to gaze for a few hours upon my navel which, after 62 years, is really one handsome navel! I kid you not!

But, I don’t know what is coming over me today as I want to “hold forth” about something that really matters…perhaps I took my medication today! So, well…oh, I know, mothers, as it is mother’s day!

Let me start with my beloved mother who is just into her 12th year of watching her six children from heaven, grimacing from time to time at the bad choices they make, trotting out one of her favorite expressions, “Aw shaw” after I’ve done something really stupid. But also, I’m pleased that now she has gotten the opportunity to get the education she wanted so badly when she was here on earth and just the other day she whispered to me when I was moping through the house immersed in a book, “Look yonder. The poor wretch comes reading.” Yes, she now has the wisdom of Shakespeare and can offer those words to me that Hamlet’s mother had for him.

Mother knew nothing about this aether that I swim in and I am so fortunate that she did not; for, she could not have been the good mother that she was if she had found her navel so enchanting. Under very grim circumstances of Southern red-neck poverty, she demonstrated great courage and cared for her six children and brought them all to maturity before the bitch Alzheimer’s claimed her in 2001. She was dutifully “under dad’s thumb” for the first 12 years or so of my life; but then he made a bad mistake in that he insisted that she go to work. She hated going to work and leaving her beloved children alone in the evening but she had no choice. However, she discovered that she liked working and she thrived on the job as a nurse’s aide. She thrived so much that within a decade she had acquired the status of Licensed Professional Nurse and became the administrator of the convalescent home that she had started out as a mere grunt.

It didn’t take Dad too long to see his mistake and when he did, his various interventions to stifle mom’s ambition could not succeed. He was right, articulating the hyper-conservative belief that “you better not let the women folk off the reservation.” Mother got “off the reservation” and discovered there was a world “out there” that she could find a place in and she did not have to live rest of her life “under the thumb” of my dad.

I have watched my sisters and other young women over the years get married and then suddenly they step into “motherhood.” And, I don’t mean merely that they have babies, but they magically know how to “mother” their children, intuitively feeling a connection with them and it is this “feeling” of connection that they offer that provides an existential anchor for the developing soul. And yes, it must hurt to me a mother and watch their “young’uns” grow up and make many of the same mistakes they did. And it must hurt father’s also. But, you can be impressed with me, as I avoided that mistake—-I DIDN’T HAVE CHILDREN!!!! (Now, on this final point, please remember I am pathologically ironic!)

(Btw, on Father’s Day, I hope to offer a more sympathetic note re my dad with whom I increasingly identify.)

A Real Fine Blog on Fundamentalist Craziness!

Epistemic Closure and the Republican Party

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I had my weekly cup of coffee with God earlier this morning. As we sipped our celestial Starbucks, he pointed to an open-air classroom nearby where young gods were studying, preparing for their future rule of various worlds. “Let’s listen in,” he suggested to me. I obliged readily, knowing of course who I was dealing with.

The “young gods” were being lectured to about epistemic closure, the notion of living in a bubble and assuming that one knows about everything when in reality he/she “knows” only through a small prism. The teacher then ran a video that I have shared here before from Saturday Night Life, illustrating the phenomena vividly. (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9yn49_mr-belvedere_shortfilms#.UUWfUDctU9U)

Then the teacher continued, “Now for a couple of days we are conducting a laboratory experiment in epistemic closure on an obscure little planet called Earth. We are very concerned about this cosmic poison for wherever it gains a foothold, it is almost impossible to eradicate; and it is the one thing that prevents us from accomplishing our Purpose. It is Satan’s favorite weapon.” He then pointed to the screen and zoomed in to a place called “The United States” and suddenly the din of the Republican Party’s internecine squabbling filled the room

Now laying aside my reverie…

Those of you who look on from other countries must be appalled at what you are seeing in the current performance of my country’s political circus. But, please note that the gods are giving you a lesson about what can happen in your own country if it, or any faction within it, draws its boundaries too narrowly and refuses to broaden them. Now I am wont to note at this point of this argument that this tendency is present with all groups, liberal and conservative. HOWEVER, let me note this time that the “open-mindedness” I advocate will never be found on the extreme right fringe of any group as people of that sort desperately hate open-mindedness and desperately cling to “truth” as seen through the narrow prism of their hate-filled heart. It is amusing on one hand to watch the ultra-conservative’s quest for “purity” in their own rank as it creates frustration and consternation within their own ranks. But on the other hand it is not amusing at all, but very sad, as we see in the Taliban what would happen if our culture did not have sophisticated structural limits.

But this boundary dilemma is part of the human experience and reflects a tendency that we have to watch for even in our own heart. With my government’s current impasse…and specifically the Republican imbroglio…we have an object lesson in the lunacy of the human heart, individually and collectively. We are our own worst enemy; as Pogo once noted, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” The human temptation to create a cocoon…an Eden on earth…can be so compelling that it is counter-productive and can even lead to our own demise. As W. H. Auden feared, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”

The answer is “self” awareness or “consciousness” which we can never acquire unless we first recognize that we don’t have it in the first place. In other words, the first step in seeing the light is realizing that we live in darkness just as Plato told us in the 5th Century BC and Jesus told us a few centuries later. And that is to name only two who have offered light in our darkness. Others certainly preceded them and many have come since and are even present today. “But Truth met him and held out her hand. And he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.” (W. H. Auden)

Perils of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Misogynists.

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There is a story in today’s New York Times about the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and its concerns about women’s rights. I will share just one tidbit to illustrate the absurdity of their efforts. “A woman needs to be confined within a framework that is controlled by the man of the house,” said a Brotherhood “family expert.” He further explained, “ Even if a wife were beaten by her husband,” she must be shown, “ how she had a role in what happened to her.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/15/world/middleeast/muslim-brotherhoods-words-on-women-stir-liberal-fears.html?_r=0)

The empowerment of women in my country, the United States, is one of the most significant developments I have watched unfold in my lifetime. The importance of this development is very much related to having been born into a very traditional, patriarchal, and impoverished southern family in the United States in 1952. Of course, I knew nothing of family politics in those early years as “power structures” was a notion that I didn’t learn about until much later. But once I had completed college, began reading the social sciences, philosophy, and literature voraciously, I became aware of their presence and began to interpret my own personal life from the perspective I gained.

My Dad was the “head of the household” and he had the Bible to affirm this status. He and the local church emphasized his supremacy and the duty of his wife and six children to dutifully obey his authority. And for years we complied though early in our lives we began to see the inconsistencies in his teachings and in his day to day life and our loyalty was increasingly with mother.

A key feature of dad’s power was control of the purse strings and on that note he made a politically disastrous move in the late 1950’s when he coerced mother into taking a job at a nursing home. She later would recall how she hated doing taking this job, she hated leaving her children alone in the evening hours, and hated not being able to provide the “mother-hen” love that she showered upon us her brood But she, of course, had to cave in at some point and relent because our financial needs were pronounced and dad was the “head of the household.” She worked a bit more than a year before he changed his mind and wanted her to quit though at that point she liked working, her sense of accomplishment was rewarding, and the increased disposable income was a welcome relief from the tedium of abject poverty. But, still dutiful, she acquiesced and quit her position. But, within the year she returned to work, probably because of economic need but also I’m sure because of her wish to return to the life that she was discovering in her job.

This return to work sealed dad’s fate, setting in motion forces which would allow my family to modernize and, more or less, join the world. For, mother thrived in this job as a nurses aide, gained the confidence of her boss, even enrolled in nursing school (LPN school) and completed her licensure requirements. All this time, she was bringing in steady income and this income actually superseded that which dad made in his work as a laborer in the community. Meanwhile, we kids were growing up and becoming more and more aware of dad’s short comings and, admittedly, were always being enticed by mother’s love and not-too-subtle frustrations and anger at her husband.

And, to make a long story short…and perhaps I will try to develop the story more in the future…mom finally succeeded with her quest for independence and left dad, along with her brood, in 1969. This was necessary as dad had become increasingly depressed, hostile, and had even threatened aggression on one occasion. Within two months of this separation, dad had died of an heart attack.

The point of this personal anecdote is that when women gain employment, they gain empowerment, they have the opportunity to find an identity, and to engage in the world. But when they make progress of this sort, it does pose threats to the family dynamic and, in sociological terms, to the social fabric. For one of the bedrocks of traditional, conservative cultures is the subservience of women. If women gain liberties…if I might misapply the wisdom of Todd Akin and making, admittedly, a contorted statement…the gods might just “shut this whole thing down.” Men want control.

The Muslim Brotherhood stance is very telling and I can imagine how it has the Saudi political/religious establishment “shakin’ in their booties.” If they allow these “uppity” women to make any further inroads into their political fiefdom, it will place profound stresses on the social and cultural fabric. But, reality is that a dynamic culture must allow stresses to occur and to find that as they address these stresses they can benefit immensely. But, of course, Egypt is not a dynamic society. And the “gods” always fight change, “tooth and toenail.” (And this same dynamic can currently be seen in my country particularly with the far-right extreme of the Republican party.)

“Breaking Bad” and our Collective Shadow

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I have recently been watching the first four seasons of Breaking Bad, finally relenting to the pressure of a good friend who insisted it was television at its finest. He was right. It is the most compelling television presentation I’ve ever seen. The story-line, the plot, the character-development, the acting, the directing, the cinematography is absolutely magnificent. I don’t watch a lot of popular television but once I started viewing this series, I could not stop and even now have embarked on the recently available season five.

BUT, this show is intensely disturbing and dark. Usually with a description like this I would refer to grisly violence and sexual perversion; and there is some violence but the real disturbing violence is psychological, emotional, and ultimately spiritual.

The story is about a benign…even lame…high school science teacher who learns he is dying of cancer and is going to leave his family nothing. He happens to be suddenly exposed to the world of methamphetamine manufacturing by his DEA brother-in-law and decides, “Hey, I can do that.” And he does. And he does it well.

From episode to episode he is lured down the dark path of drug culture though he always avoids use of the meth himself. But relentlessly he makes poor decisions which lead to other poor decisions which brings him to a point where he has gone over to the dark side…he has “broke bad”…even though he continues to have the façade of a middle class citizen who is recovering from cancer.

But Breaking Bad is not about the drug culture, nor is it a “made for tv” morality story. It is about human ugliness and the way in which good, upright people can suddenly find themselves in the middle of this “shadow side” of life through a series of unfortunate events, compounded by the willingness to forego moral principles. Early in the series I found myself asking, “Why am I watching this?” It was so disturbing, creating unrest in my heart that I usually find only with violence in movies.

As I paid attention to my reactions as I watched the series, I could not help but observe that many world cultures would not permit this kind of social analysis and criticism. The Taliban, for example, would never allow self-reflection of this sort to take place. In fact, ultra-conservative ideologies of all stripes would not allow such self-reflection and would radically extirpate the first hint of such a tendency. In fact, in all ultra-conservative extremency there is always a theme of “purity” which serves the purpose of keeping out this “shadow side” which our culture permits in shows like this and in the arts in general. (Anthropologist Mary Douglas and psychologist Julia Kristeva are two people who have addressed the problematic nature of this “purity” obsession.)

And, for all the problems that our culture does have, I feel that ultimately to own this “ugly” dimension of our experience, to articulate it through various forms of art, is to give vent to it. Otherwise, we always project it onto others, that ubiquitous “them” out there, that “barbarian horde” which is always threatening our perimeter. We fail to own up to the wisdom of Charlie Brown, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

“We Rattle the World for our Babies”

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I love the image created by this poet…and I think it was Edgar Simmons. I recall in my youth in the early sixties shaking a piggy bank and hoping to come up with six cents to get a “soda pop” down at the local mom and pop store in central Arkansas. Those coins were precious.

And so are our babies. I have deep appreciation for the beauty of nature…for birds, flowers, butterflies, deer, and certainly for doggies, being the devoted father of two lovely dachshunds. I gaze upon them, or look into their eyes, and I see the glory of God holding forth. But none of these can offer the glory of God that I see when I encounter one of God’s little children. They are our hope, our future. They represent millions of men and women voting with their feet…or some other part of their anatomy!…that life is worth living. Children represent the will of the species expressing itself.

In my retirement years, I have returned to work as a substitute teacher and I am deliberately focusing on early grade school and special needs children. They are teaching me so much about myself and about human nature. They are so fragile, so needy, and I’m so aware that even in my temporary role in their life I am part of our collective effort to “care” for them. And I’m so proud to see that even in Arkansas…always near the bottom of the education spectrum in our country…we provide such quality education and care. Some of these children would not have a chance in some countries. They would not be considered of any value at all and at one point in some cultures would have been left in the forest for nature to dispose of. But we value human life. That is a powerful decision that our culture has made. And it costs immensely but it is money well spent.

Ultimately, spirituality is about our values. What do we value? And, yes, our country is very suspect in many respects; we are so immersed in consumerism, for example. There is so much tawdry in our culture. But we do have our strong points one of which is our value of human life.

(And this is not even addressing the abortion issue! I don’t have the temerity to get into that yet.)

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