Spirituality: an Inquiry (Part 1)

It’s questionable how useful a statement of convictions can be, if it’s only that, and not a stimulant to further reflection. I am here undertaking a clearer definition of my views on theism, atheism, and spirituality, not because I benefit through such an act of definition, but in the hopes that I can aid readers in finding their own way through these issues and perhaps gain some wisdom along the way.

Atheists don’t seem to spend a lot of time defining what theism means. Most of the literature I’ve seen attacks traditional religious texts and beliefs in a piecemeal fashion. It’s no wonder, really. I’ve often remarked that people generally assume that they know what we mean by the word “God” when such questions are asked as “Do you believe in God?” or “Are you religious?” When we get down to actually asking folks to define God, the diversity of the answers is often astonishing.

The general conception, however, if I had to summarize it, is of a being or entity that is all-powerful and created the universe. Since it is a being or entity, it is separate from us in some way. Even if we allow for the idea that the being is “everywhere” and is beyond space and time, there is still the assumption that this being is greater than, and not the same as, people and things.

If we define theism, then, as the belief in this general concept, then I am an atheist. For me, such a being or entity is logically impossible. I also consider it morally impossible, on historical grounds. I have no intention of presenting the full range of this argument here. I would point curious readers to David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion for starters.

There are two prominent aspects to the current debate. The first is that theists put forward “God,” and the attendant religious texts and doctrines, as explanations for natural events, and as ultimate explanations for nature itself. In other words, they claim scientific truth for theistic beliefs. Atheists, along with scientists in general, challenge this, as they must if they are to retain the integrity of reason and method in science. For complex reasons, evolution has become the focal point for this struggle, but it really encompasses all of science, and particularly its fundamental reliance on evidence, demonstration, and logic. There can be no compromise with an approach that relies on an a priori acceptance of authority outside of reason.

The second aspect is actually more comprehensive, although it gets less attention than the struggle over science and evolution. Theists put forward “God,” and the attendant religious texts and doctrines, as the absolute authority on human conduct and sociopolitical organization. Here we run into the issue of separation of "church and state," and all the problems involved with religious groups attempting to implement their religious convictions as public policy. Atheists challenge this, of course, favoring a secular society in which freedom of belief and opinion is absolute and government is not affiliated with religion in any way.

In both aspects, I stand with the atheists. Religion is not science; it never has been, and it’s a dangerous folly to try to pretend that it is. And the social and political authority of religious groups has proven vulnerable time and again to the common human maladies of greed, cruelty, domination, and self-destruction. The age-old appeal to blind obedience is a terrible dead end. Even propagated by well-intentioned and virtuous people, it stifles human freedom and understanding—and increasingly, the most prominent voices of religious authority are neither well-intentioned nor virtuous.

My experience, however, has led me to part ways in crucial respects with the mainstream of atheist thought. I don’t believe that religion is just superstition, or that it is inherently wrong and destructive. I am convinced that the religious impulse, for lack of a better term, occurs in human beings because of a vital and central truth.

Many atheists seem only to comprehend religion as a failed attempt to explain natural phenomena. In this paradigm, reason is awakened through science, and therefore no longer needs religion, since science explains everything adequately. But in fact, religion has never been primarily an attempted explanation of natural phenomena, but only marginally so. A mythological creation story, for instance, doesn’t function as an answer to a curious mind looking for the how and wherefore of the universe. It is, rather, a metaphorical formulation of a shared cultural perspective within a community. As such, it reflects whatever values and necessities are primary in the tribe or group, both conscious and unconscious. Many themes are intertwined in the mythopoetic tale, and usually they are connected to ceremonies and celebrations involving central aspects of life for the group, such as the finding or growing of food, sexuality and procreation, life cycle stages, family dynamics, authority within the tribe or group, and the entire world of nature surrounding and sustaining the community, especially animals and plants. Social cohesion is achieved through metaphor, along with levels of self-awareness and personal development that increase through time. The ultimate source of wonder and awe in human society is subjectivity itself, the very fact of experience, which is inherently ineffable because it is the precondition of human life. Culturally we find at this source the shaman, and later the holy man, mystic, saint, or guru. The poet is the direct descendant of all these, although this heritage has often seemed obscure to modern eyes.

My contention is that this religious aspect of life, which I prefer to call spirituality because the word is less contaminated by literalist or authoritarian influence, will never go away. Human beings would die without it, because it is essentially the intuition of meaning, and there is no society without meaning. I get the impression that many atheists believe reason and science is a substitute for spirituality, and that we should work towards eliminating religious belief altogether for the good of humanity. On a practical level alone, this is naïve. It’s the same mistake that proselytizing religions make when they work towards everyone believing the same way, i.e. their way. There’s just as much chance of humanity becoming all atheist as there is of humanity becoming all Christian. None. But I go further and say that such an outcome would not even be desirable. We need metaphor—poetry and myth—and metaphor ultimately always points to an intuition of eternity, the absolute and unconditioned reality as symbolized by subjectivity itself, or what we call spirit, soul, or self, albeit these words have implications that become problematic for us.

If you, the reader, are at all familiar with my writings, you know that I reject all literal interpretations of religious symbolism and consider such interpretations as nothing but methods of domination by authoritarian groups. But you also know that I find religious metaphor to be meaningful in the context of subjectivity, as symbols of self in all its journeys, suffering, discoveries, and fulfillments.

The secular viewpoint on social and political organization necessarily involves freedom for religious people to practice whatever religion they may choose. So it’s not a question of trying to force a more enlightened point of view onto people who choose to be literalists, fundamentalists, or religious believers of one sort or another. The problem involved here, as any atheist will tell you, is that religious authoritarians are not satisfied in practicing their faith undisturbed—they want non-believers to be converted to their beliefs, and they want society and government to conform to their views. This aspect, then, presents a purely social and political problem that needs to be dealt with on that level.

My concern here is of a different sort. What does spirituality look like when one has renounced theism? What meaning, if any, does the word “God” have from a non-dualistic perspective? What would a healthy relationship between spirituality and science look like, and what is the role of reason in spirituality? Can one find wisdom and spiritual nourishment from the various religious traditions without succumbing to group-think, obscurantism, or other kinds of irrationality? What is the purpose of spirituality anyway? Is there a social purpose as well as a personal one? Rather than dismiss spirituality out of hand as some sort of aberration, I seek to understand it better, and to follow the strivings of my understanding as far as I can, without fear.

Born Again

Hey, Mister Jesus. Get back on your throne. There are plenty of threatening, thundering things to do. Sinful cities are waiting for earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes and typhoons. There remain more poxes and plagues to be visited on those who disbelieve. We need to get on with our business.

Hey, Mister Jesus. We’ve got a gold crown for you here, and—whatayacallit—a scepter. The earth is your footstool, and I don’t mean naugahyde neither. It’s a genuine jewel-encrusted golden kind of stool I’m talking about. You just sit there, and anything you say to have done, it will be done, that’s a fact. So let’s get on with our business.

Hey, Mister Jesus. We’ve read about all that walking around you did, living on loaves and fishes and cheap wine, healing sick kids and talking all cryptic and such. You did your part. Now you take your well-earned rest up there in the cloud country, and let us manage the details. We know the plan. You can count on us. Relax and be at your ease on that throne. Enjoy the view, while we get on with our business.

Hey, Mister Jesus. It’s been awhile. We’re still waiting for the trumpet call and the marching band and the light show and the handing out of the party favors and the banishment of the bad people. I know it’s all on your time and everything, but it sure looks like the finale and the curtain call coming up. Do you need help? Just a little note, or even a nod of the head will do. No need to say more. We’re with you all the way. We’re ready to take care of business.

Dear Mister Jesus. Thanks for the check. It came right when we needed it. I don’t know how we could have ever doubted you. Stay in touch. We’ll talk business.

The Elitists

Rhetoric is notoriously fluid, never more so than in this media-saturated age. A case in point is the term “elitist.” The word gets flung about now and then, but you can take it at least two ways.

Obama was accused of being elitist when he talked about people clinging to their guns and religion during the campaign. Politicians are supposed to make obeisance to such symbols of blue-collar life, without of course doing anything to actually help blue-collar people.

A CNN “reporter” recently called people who criticized the wall-to-wall Michael Jackson coverage “elitists.” It reminded me of Ted Koppel defending the O.J. coverage on the basis of “that’s what the people want.” (Both examples concern African American celebrities, but significantly their stories were freakish and atypical.) The media can justify avoiding the actual practice of journalism, and its ever-increasing reliance on entertainment as “news” fodder, by calling critics elitists.

This use of the term is actually more general than the examples might indicate. Elitism in mainstream discourse simply means educated, book-learned, someone who thinks critically. It’s another code word for the fine old American tradition of anti-intellectualism. The Republicans have been milking this one for decades: “Hey, we’re just regular dumb folks like you with simple values. Our opponents are pointy-headed academics who go to the ballet and read the New York Times.” Spiro Agnew called them “effete snobs.”

Everyone hates snobs, right? You just want to be a regular guy, one of the gang, one of the boys, not some uppity college professor who reads books. This is really what “elitist” talk amounts to. And by this definition, I would have to say that I’m proud to be an elitist. I wear the title like a badge of honor. I am educated. I read, and I understand concepts. I can think critically, and discuss issues intelligently. I consider all these to be virtues, in fact necessities, and I refuse to apologize for them.

There is another meaning of elitist, however, which is more than just a verbal weapon to intimidate smart people and win gullible ignoramuses to your side. I am referring to actual elitists, people who are members of the elite groups that make most of the decisions in this country. These elitists are not distinguished by their education or intelligence, but by their money.

The one or two percent of the population that makes a million and a half a year or more, that runs the major corporations, owns the major media outlets, and makes the laws in this country – they are the elite. They give themselves and their kids the top jobs, the positions of influence that determine their continued dominance. They reap the profits of oil, of weapons, of war. They determine what plays on the TV and radio. One percent of the U.S. population owns sixty percent of the stock and forty percent of the total wealth. Government benefits flow overwhelmingly to them, not to you. They are able to avoid paying taxes and avoid getting killed in wars. It is their game. They own it, and run it. They own the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court. They pay for those people to do what they do.

Those are the elitists. And fittingly enough, it is those people, and the ones who directly serve their interests, who most often point their fingers at others accusing them of being “elitists.” They have no idea what it’s like for you and I to hold a job, to struggle to make the payments, to worry if a health crisis will bankrupt us. And they thrive on the deaths of millions of people, millions of children in other countries, who starve and die of disease and are killed because these elitists must continue to live in their selfish bubble of gratification. Yet they won’t hesitate to throw around the “elitist” label at someone in order to gain advantage.

When a powerful person in this country talks about morality, or religion, or faith, or freedom, they are lying, either consciously or not. The only real value in their world is self-interest. The only chance for justice is for their elite status to be eliminated, and the centralized power of super-capital to be brought down.

The End of the Map

“The knowledge of Truth as gained through the established creeds is like the knowledge of a town which one gets by studying it on a map. To see and know the town one has to take the trouble of actually going there.” –Meher Baba.

Meher Baba’s formulation is about as close to a perfect metaphor for the difference between literalism and actual spirituality as one could expect. Religious groups and individuals who cling to their sacred texts and proclaim them as literally true and binding are very much like a travel agent selling you a tour guide instead of getting you an actual ticket to where you want to go. Yet like all metaphors, and especially those pertaining to spiritual truths, this one is limited.

To extend the idea further, then, let us admit that there are many maps of the same town, and that each map is significantly different in key respects than the others. Each one also includes a bunch of material that may not be specifically relevant to finding one’s way around in this town, such as advice on sex, food, children, politics, family, and war; advice that is not only different in each map but often contradicts itself within the same map. On the margins of the map are written stories and legends concerning inhabitants of the town, of widely varying credibility and value. Finally, notwithstanding the confusing nature of the map in terms of the actual layout of the streets and buildings within it, there are practically no indications of where the town is located within the larger map of the world, which begs the legitimate question of whether the town exists at all or is merely an illusory destination invented in order to benefit the manufacturers of the map.

Even this amusing and complex metaphor, however, is ultimately too simple to encompass the real conflict between religious tradition and spiritual experience. The knowledge of Truth, with a capital T as indicated in the quote from Meher Baba, is not really like a town because a town exists in space and time and is therefore subject to all the conditions that characterize the phenomenal world. Truth with a capital T can be nothing else than reality itself, which is unconditioned since it constitutes the only absolute condition by which all relative phenomena can be. The human mind, and consequently religion, abstracts even this Truth into something separately immutable, when in fact if there were a separate Absolute over and above the conditioned world, this Absolute would be only another conditioned thing. The correspondence of language with the description of phenomena is practically effective, but as a description of reality itself, it becomes metaphorical in the most radical sense, a pointing or an indication that falls away as it is being uttered.

The main difficulty, I continue to maintain, is that Truth can only be intuited in the context of self, or to be more accurate, subjectivity. Humanity’s struggle with this intuitive awareness, which involves a struggle against it, is in my view the central story of organized religion. It is a political struggle in the sense that society became organized around the figure of dominant authority—the supposed separate Absolute known as the gods and later as God. The personal nature of this metaphor is significant precisely because the intuition of reality is always in the context of all experience, i.e. subjectivity, which is ineffable in its aspect of absolute context. The self as context for all experience corresponds to reality or Truth as context for all phenomena. Abstracting this into an authority separate from self is an unconscious process of alienation from ourselves and the psychological elevation of an all-powerful force existing in an “external” world. I believe that this alienation springs from the survival instinct and the fear of death unique to humanity.

The undoing of this alienation is the real goal of all spirituality. This fact is largely a secret because it runs counter to the basic organizing principles of the established creeds, which affirm the original alienation as necessary. To wake up to this Truth, then, as Meher Baba might put it, is to go beyond religion into actual experience. To return to the map metaphor, this is a peculiar case where once you actually reach the town, you don’t need the map anymore. You can throw it away, or you can draw on it as a source of metaphor in order to help others. Some things in the map may actually be detrimental to the goal, other aspects may be metaphorically potent. But the map has no ultimate significance—it crumbles and disappears like all things. Only reality itself is eternal.

Throughout history, teachers have stressed the continuity between religious tradition and spiritual experience as being to their advantage. I think that this policy has in many respects proven to be a failure. I’m aware of the risk that this statement is presumptuous, disrespectful, arrogant, perhaps even dangerously foolish. I still feel the need to make this statement on the evidence of history. Literalism, the use of the map as a way to organize a society through domination, has always constituted a threat to spirituality, and I think more so today than ever, when the wisdom traditions are increasingly scattered and powerless in the world. The proclamation of the Bible, for instance, as the so-called “Word of God,” is an excuse for every kind of cruelty and vice under the sun. Without requiring any spiritual experience, the mainstream Christian churches, and particularly the fundamentalists, simply rely on a book to allay their unconscious fears of death and limitation, while wildly projecting them onto the “enemies,” the people outside their clans. The same destructive idolatry occurs with followers of the Koran, the Torah, or any other book, even including books by secular ideologists who share with religious literalists the view of human beings as mere means towards some ideal end.

It has become necessary to proclaim openly that there is no scripture that is literally true, that all such scriptures are metaphorical, and are therefore only useful in a religious sense as metaphors for spiritual experience. As long as we ascribe supernatural origin to human writings, we succumb to an unbridled sense of pride and entitlement. It is a kind of blindness that we cannot afford as a species. Furthermore, the metaphorical nature of scriptures is not uniform—the metaphors are widely various and often conflicting, and it is impossible for one person to agree with all of their meanings at the same time. Far less is it possible for everyone to agree. Neither is it necessary—we need only recognize their nature as symbols of meaning.

The scriptures also contain material concerning the range of human action, history, and culture; ordinary metaphors, if you will, as distinct from spiritual ones. You may take them or leave them, but to insist that everyone take them is madness, and unattainable in any case. The Zulus say that Unkulunkulu was the the first human. The Israelites say it was Adam. Outside of mythology’s cultural resonance, by which a people weaves its identity through story, this matter has no importance for me spiritually. There is no stake involved in believing one or the other unless someone is trying to force my obedience to a central authority through an organizing myth. We must see through mythology if we are to be nurtured by it and not destroyed.

As long as humanity exists, there will be spiritual literature. There is no danger of that going away. But those who maintain the absolute authority of such literature are in fact doing a disservice to their own traditions, because such practices, such beliefs, sap the power from religious traditions and turn them into dead relics, monuments only to the human need to rule through fear.

There is a life.

Cold thoughts in the morning, when my shaky hand lights a cigarette, and the sounds of traffic are already swallowing my heart. There is a life where stale verities sustain their hum and drone in the skull of a woman in dressing gown and curlers, and the old man in the back room slurping his soup. The local rapist is moonlighting as a cop. He patrols the neighborhood dreaming of crime, cursing the privileged and ungrateful homeowners who assemble around the TV before emerging into the open air, where any number of insults are possible and some inevitable. A barking dog refutes all my attempts at argument. I shrink inside, divesting the casual talk around the clothesline of its meaning, only hearing the sounds spitting and gurgling. This routine is desolate when most we do not notice the overpowering forces of sun and wind, when we say good morning and goodbye and don’t forget your lunch. On the way to work I pass the wall again where obscure messages are spray painted, hostile to my comfort, speaking of blind realms that I prefer to forget. The Messiah is sure taking his sweet fucking time. There is a life where the same story continues without pause, no hint of doubt or crack in the faultless façade, the mud-streaked glass of the window behind which we watch the world, murmuring in our coffee about great men and wars and kingdoms below the ocean. Members of the local amnesia society are going door to door, offering blank pamphlets, prophecies of the return of memory, when sore bones will shudder and shake and be forced to turn out of bed and show ID. I won’t open the shutters today. Most terrible is the clock with its ticking. The hands point aimlessly at the hour, a radio crackles next door, a stranger lies amidst discarded plastic at the bus station, and someone’s coarse rasping laugh echoes back. I flick the cigarette, please self, please whoever I am, save me from this my self. There is a life raw and blinking in the winter light.

Tyranny in Iran

As I write this, Iranian cities are exploding with protests against their fundamentalist right-wing government’s fraudulent elections. Fox has been fairly silent so far—they haven’t figured out how to frame this in anti-Obama terms yet (but they eventually will).

It’s important to remind ourselves that the Bush-Cheney regime did everything they could to turn Iran against us. Neocons seek to foster and create threats against the U.S., rather than work towards peace. As a result, we have an entrenched theocracy in Iran that sees a fair democratic process as the enemy.

My thoughts also turn to the two fraudulent elections we recently had in this country, in 2000 and 2004. The American people chose to stay asleep and apathetic, for the most part, and the fact that we were ruled by an illegitimate executive branch for eight years is still suppressed in the corporate media.

When a government rigs an election, it makes manifest the powerlessness of its own people in the face of authoritarian rule. Ultimately, however, it is a symptom of weakness in government, not strength. A country is fundamentally weak when there is a fundamental divide between those holding power and the masses of people who constitute the majority of the population. This is as true of our country as it is of Iran. Countries like North Korea or Egypt have thrown off all pretense of representing the consent of the governed. Currently, the U.S. government supports whatever state it considers advantageous to its economic hegemony, regardless of whether it is democratic or not. As long as this hypocrisy continues as sanctioned foreign policy wisdom, any protests by our government on democratic grounds (such as Bush’s absurd claims of promoting democracy in the Middle East) are empty and will have no effect.

Pro-democracy Iranians, on the other hand, are demonstrating political courage in protesting against their political enslavement. Freedom-loving people everywhere should support them in whatever way is possible.

The Iranian embassy in Washington can be contacted at the following numbers: (202) 965-4991, 965-4992, 965-4993, 965-4994 and 965-4999. Address: Interests Section of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 2209 Wisconsin Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20007. Email: requests@daftar.org

The belief delusion

Consider how much death and suffering has been inspired by the notion of belief—religious belief in particular. One group says that God is such-and-such and so-and-so. Another denies that, and affirms something different. And this becomes a reason for bloodshed. The absolutism of religious doctrine and belief ends up manifesting itself in secular beliefs as well: one group says that the correct political system is such-and-such, and another affirms something different. The stakes in the latter case may seem more evident to modern eyes, but my concern here is with belief itself as a motive for behavior. My point may become clearer if one considers that medieval Christians professed to believe in forgiveness, yet practiced great cruelty, and that Communist states professed freedom and equality yet practiced greater repression than the capitalist and feudal systems on which they supposedly improved. Statements of belief, then, have consistently failed to match real practices and actions, or rather the beliefs have provided cover for practices and actions that have been consistent throughout history regardless of varying belief systems.

A basic error underlying all this, in my view, is the notion that if I believe something fervently, it is true. The tension between human desires and whatever conditions and circumstances set limits on these desires produces the wish that my thinking can turn my desires into facts. This is supported by the undeniable truth that we can produce desired effects through planned and purposeful action. And in order to plan actions, we must think them through. But that the wish itself creates the effect is an error prompted, I would say, by the frustration of a subject felt as free yet limited by conditions. One might even say prompted by desperation, like the fundamental desperation of an infant who feels a need that isn’t met, and therefore cries. The baby cries, and if she has an attentive parent, the need is met by the parent. Nature, however, is not always attentive in this way. The whole, so to speak, does not take orders from the part. But the human self, the conscious subject, experiences an inherent freedom that manifests as a seeking of power over conditions. Thought is the expression of that search. This phenomenon known as thought is so remarkable that we become dazzled by it. Magical thinking, as it has been called, is really just thinking in its beginning stages, when the child identifies thought with truth, and truth, above all, with that which is desired.

What, then, is belief? It is a kind of way station on the path of knowledge. Once we actually know something, belief is redundant. What we really know comes from experience. In addition, there is knowledge as the fruit of reason, but the process of reasoning has its own structure (we call it logic), experience must enter into this process in some way, and the results are open to further reasoning. Knowledge is therefore open to change, and this, paradoxically, is part of its security. It cannot depend solely on thinking, but must correspond to experience. I can say that I believe that day will follow night, but this belief is so firmly founded on experience that unbelief is not an option. Knowledge, then, is when thought is in accordance, to some degree, with experience. Belief by itself, without knowledge, is either the possibility of knowledge conceived without yet being confirmed by experience, or—and this is where we founder on the rocks of religious belief—a conviction concerning something of which we have no experience, and of which it may not even be possible to have experience.

Religion deals with absolutes. Religion is about reality itself, especially including consciousness as the absolute condition of experience. Belief, however, is nothing more than a thought or series of thoughts expressing a wish or a desire concerning reality. All thinking is limited. It can only indicate the absolute. Thought itself is not absolute. Attributing magical power to thought in the form of belief is the primary manifestation of what I call the error of misplaced absoluteness.

I may believe that God is so-and-so or such-and-such. I may believe any number of stories handed down about God, or people that were God, or spoke for God, or in the case of Eastern traditions, perfect masters and gurus and so forth. No matter what I believe, my limited nature as a human being has not changed. Furthermore, the power of my beliefs to cause beneficial or good actions, actions desirable for humanity or even just for myself, is limited by time and place. They are merely motivating thoughts, that compete with all the other components of my character—habit, desire, unconscious tendencies, inherited or acquired capacities—in determining my actions and the psychic modes of my experience. History has shown time and again that beliefs are ineffective in causing the kinds of changes in the human personality that are claimed for them. Believers in a humble savior of love and forgiveness still went ahead and practiced slavery, torture, and war, and justified it on religious grounds. Believers in the righteousness of the one God (Islam) still perpetrated the same crimes on their fellow man as those who believed in multiple gods without righteousness. Buddhism and the other eastern religions stood by while the social order violated every tenet of the faith that it supposedly supported.

Why? I think that people instinctively realize that the notion of belief making something true is an error. But they refuse to admit it to themselves because of a second primal error: Common belief is necessary for society to survive. Belief became a tool for the maintenance of power and authority. The state and its religion, originally identical, was founded on the perceived necessity of enforced common belief. Physical force ultimately fails unless society also coheres through belief.

The power principle failed, and continues to fail. War, injustice, cruelty, and greed continue to hold sway despite the patina of religious belief. Since the 17th century, society has been battling over what to do about it. Believing something is merely a mental operation—it is not transformative. Forcing people to believe something is even less successful. What kind of inward belief can be compelled by a sword or a gun? The slave will of course bow down because he has to, but to call this religion is nothing more than massive self-deception. And this lie, this compounded falsehood of the centuries, is what we now commonly call religion.

There is a secret that is concealed in religious history. It is only a secret as long as one focuses on beliefs and all the particulars of belief. This is the truth of the mystics, the truth of union. In the eastern traditions, it is the truth of enlightenment, non-duality, realization. As soon as you turn it into a belief, it becomes limited like every other thought. One must see through all beliefs, see them as essentially limited human constructs, without lasting force or significance, in order to understand reality. It takes some bravery to do this, because it essentially places one outside the accepted religious structure, outside the political structure, outside the social order. That is why it has continually been forced to hide, prevaricate, and compromise itself throughout history—because it threatens the basic illusion that we need common belief in order to survive. The power principle is driving us to the abyss, and like lemmings we are encouraged to go off the cliff by absolutist thinking, i.e., deluded thinking, whether it is through religious fundamentalism, sociopolitical ideology, or combinations thereof.

All religious beliefs are misguided metaphors for the self. The self seeks liberation from its ignorance and delusion. Beliefs are sold to us as a way of release, but they only chain us more securely in bondage. The transformation we need comes from experience itself, qua experience. Spirituality is not the acquisition of beliefs, but the shedding of them, the penetration of them all as conditioned. Then the source of all thought, all experience, may become evident. That is what humility really is. At that source, there is no religion, no doctrine, nothing to fight over, nothing to separate me from you. There is no more belief, only knowledge.

Official Resolution Concerning Our Predicament

For the first time, the dead are outnumbered by the living. If they could reflect, Charlemagne, Columbus, General Custer, and the rest of them, might understand what a mess they’ve made. The dead at least have learned humility, albeit too late for amendment.

Learned scholars mourn the end of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, lost forever and too early. Yes, these classics would eventually disappear with the implosion of our star, five billion years from now. But damn it, this is too soon.

Probability experts say that life on other worlds is a certainty. Small consolation to us that the Zoozongs are enjoying Glickgluck on the planet Klang. Who knows if they even have poetry or if all they read are cheap Kag VaWamach stories. It could be very boring there.

Time was, we could tend our little garden with Candide, and let the maniacs have at it. Out of sight, out of mind. But then they muscled into the gardening business and we got frozen food. Then came frozen sex. Before long, Walt Disney was frozen solid, for our own protection, and in the hopes of resurrection, when Walt would wake to the shattered pestilent landscape and horrified, seek means of ending it, this time for good. A scream is a wish your heart makes.

Most of us just wanted to be left alone, to enjoy what there was. Most of us cared not for structured asset-backed securities, nor did we fondly dream of multi-mission mobile processors. What little ambition we had, for home and hearth, children playing on the lawn, was usurped by ravenous, conniving, global grab-ass grandiosity-mongers who had had a few too many drinks at the club.

No, I’m not in the mood for fireworks. No, I will not sign the cooperative spectatorship agreement. No, I don’t think it was all worth it. I do not accept coupons.

The Nietzschean Uberman, I am sorry to report, got lost on the Cross-Bronx Expressway. He ain’t comin’. The meek have inherited the earth, and being meek, we don’t know what to do. It’s just us left here alone, the faint-hearted, the knock-kneed, barely able to raise our arms in salute—hail shepherd, lead us back to the pen! We’ve had all the history we can stand.

The dead do not laugh any more. They do not look upon us. We outnumber them now, and there’s no telling what could happen. Here is what I say. Mr. Chairman, my proposal is as follows. We must settle. All hostages must be released immediately, and the weather report submitted for arbitration. There is no shame in surrender. You may return home with your swords, uniforms, and the remainder of whatever pay is owed you. Put your little medals on the mantle and brag all you want to your grandchildren, if you still have any. Just go. Stop everything. Let silence be our treaty.

Reality Check

Mr. President, “indefinite” or “preventive” detention is not compatible with the rule of law. Merely saying that it is does not make it so. A person cannot lawfully be detained without charges. To do so is in essence an act of unchecked executive power. Even if the Congress were to authorize such detention, it would violate our principles as a nation. Human rights are not privileges bestowed by the government, at the whim of whatever individuals are “in charge.” If we were founded upon trust in the benevolence of authority, we would not need a Constitution. In that case, a king would suffice for us. It is of no account whether the people trust you as a leader more than they trusted your predecessor, when there is no safeguard against abuse of power. A benevolent ruler may always be succeeded by a tyrant. The concept of inalienable rights was established precisely for this reason.

You talk about detainees at Guantanamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people. This is double talk. If they have committed crimes, they can and should be prosecuted. To say that they cannot be prosecuted is to say that you have no case. It creates a system of perpetual imprisonment without due process. If the executive has the power to determine that someone poses a danger to the American people, and yet not have a case, that means that the executive’s power is unchecked by the rule of law. There is nothing to prevent a President from declaring that his administration’s domestic political enemies pose a security threat. As far as I can tell, the only safeguard you are offering against this untrammeled power is trust in your character. Even if I were to accept this as a valid safeguard (which I don’t, since I retain a healthy mistrust of all politicians who claim special powers not stipulated in our Constitution), it would still not protect us from the ambitions of a future untrustworthy President.

There is nothing to prevent the “indefinite” detention of a U.S. citizen deemed to be “dangerous” by the White House. In fact, this was already done in the case of Jose Padilla. The supposed guilt of a suspect has been used over and over as a justification for the violation of our Constitution. There is nothing in what you have said that bars that practice from continuing.

This is supposed to be a nation of laws, and not of men. The fact that you are turning from some of the flagrant abuses of the Bush administration does not give you permission to continue using such spurious claims of executive power in your current administration. I regret to say that I will be unable to vote for you again if you continue to adhere to this line. No, I will not vote for your Republican opponents, who openly advocate lawlessness. But I can stay home on election day. There are certain things that I cannot in good conscience tolerate. The fundamental principles of our republic, including the ancient and venerable writ of habeas corpus, and the 6th Amendment to the Bill of Rights, are not negotiable. I know that I am not the only one who feels the way. To take supporters like us for granted, as if our votes belong to you, could be a serious mistake. I urge you to follow your profession of faith in the Constitution, in actions as well as words. Otherwise I must vigorously oppose you. And I will not be alone.

Pink: the Color of Justice

I’ve noticed that of the many groups on the left, Code Pink raises more hackles than most. Of course right-wingers hate them and demonize them pretty regularly, but I’ve also heard them catch flak from leftists for their tactics, and just from casually informed people I hear more rejection of them than I would normally expect to hear about a political group.

Code Pink’s style of protest is to get into the face of people in power and call them out. Recently, at the Washington press dinner, they started yelling “Here comes the war criminal!” when Donald Rumsfeld showed up. A few years ago, famously, a Code Pink member with fake blood on her hands got right up in Condi Rice’s grill at a Senate hearing. I find it remarkable how offended many people get at this sort of thing.

The right’s antipathy is fairly easy to dissect. Code Pink is basically a women’s organization. Any activist organization on the left that is primarily composed of women is going to be a special target of the right because the right wing hates feminism, along with any woman who is aggressive in the cause of peace or human rights. The basic position of the right is that male supremacy is the way it should be, and that anyone challenging that is a scary extremist.

In terms of the mass of only casually informed people, it’s my belief that we have been instilled with a sense of “propriety” that pretends to be about respect, but is in fact based on blind deference to authority. Boldly and loudly confronting political authority seems frightening because of the unconscious fear of retaliation from those in power. It’s as if we’re all tiptoeing around the powerful, doing everything we can not to upset them so that we can stay out of harm’s way. Code Pink violates that unspoken fear, and it frightens people.

Now, if a group of people were to go up to Casey Anthony, a woman accused of murdering her child in a case hysterically covered by the sensationalist media, and yell “murderer!” at her, I would guess most people wouldn’t be offended. Casey Anthony is not an authority figure, but a media-sanctioned object of our moralistic scorn. Donald Rumsfeld, on the other hand, is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. But because it’s a war, and we’re not supposed to criticize war, since that would be unpatriotic, then people get offended by Code Pink calling Rumsfeld a war criminal.

Again, think of the socially sanctioned hatred that many have felt towards rioters and looters. I remember vividly the disgust and disapproval people openly expressed about the looting that occurred in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict in 1992. Fair enough, it’s looting and it’s wrong. And yet, during the late 1980s and early 90s, the perpetrators of the Savings & Loan collapse looted on a scale thousands of times greater, robbing ordinary people of their life savings to the tune of billions of dollars. Some went to jail, most didn’t. In fact, Reagan-Bush policies allowed and encouraged the looting to occur, and taxpayers ended up paying the bill when the industry needed bailing out. Was there a comparable sense of disgust, contempt, outrage among the populace? There was not. These looters were elite bankers and politicians in suits and ties. Their power made it less safe to attack them.

Cowardice is the basic moral currency of American political life. The Republicans turned this into an art form. They learned how to divide white working class from black working class, men from women, straights from gays, Southerners and Midwesterners from Californians and East Coast residents, and any number of variations on the basic theme of scapegoating. The ultimate scapegoat was the liberal, who became the author of everything wrong in the country. The rule of thumb is that the scapegoat is always less powerful than you. To attack those who are actually powerful is taboo, and will result in attacks being aimed at you.

Code Pink breaks that taboo by calling the powerful what they are—criminals. They reject the passive spectator role that has been assigned to ordinary citizens, and especially women, in this country. Some on the left sincerely believe that their tactics are counterproductive. I understand that point of view, but I don’t agree. In my view, one of the functions of a progressive movement is to break through the false propriety, the denial of what is right before our eyes but goes unnamed. If someone were to scream at an SS or NKVD officer who has gone unpunished for murders they committed or ordered, we would consider that normal. But there is a common assumption that America is magically different, and that we don’t have war criminals in our midst. For the truth to get out in this case, someone must first yell it in public, despite all the social taboos against it.

War remains an abstraction for many of us. A Rumsfeld or a Rice may have loving relationships with their families, and their pets. At the same time, the suffering they cause is put at a far remove from their actual experience. As a people, we have become accustomed to thinking of war in these abstract ways. We don’t imagine what it’s like to be the father or the sister of someone who has been suddenly blown to pieces for no reason. The car bombings and the so-called collateral damage are just statistics to us. But war is very real, and real people’s lives, many thousands of them, have been cut off because of the lies and manipulations and greed and self-interest of people sitting calmly in a Washington office. Code Pink gives voice to the outrage that is real and that needs to be expressed. And I think the degree of condemnation and hatred that they receive is a measure of how important their work is.

I haven’t heard of them killing anyone yet. I cannot say the same of their targets. We must learn to channel our outrage towards the powerful who continue to cause untold suffering without having to endure meaningful consequences for it.

History Occurs at Night

The following is a recently discovered fragment of an introduction to the history of a neglected era by an intrepid academic at the turn of the century, who to this day remains anonymous.

History records roughly two thirds of what we know to have happened. The other third consists of when people were asleep. The textbooks are strangely silent on that period.

To be fair to historians, it is more difficult to keep track of the many changes occurring during sleep. One person has often changed into another; many have combined into one; one has split off into many. Locations and times have shifted suddenly and wildly. The dead frequently reappeared, and people were known to flap their arms and fly through the air to escape danger, or just to impress others of their acquaintance.

The frequency of embarrassing and even scandalous occurrences was remarkable. Many went to work or school in their underwear, or without any clothes at all. Society was correspondingly more tolerant of these lapses in etiquette during sleep. During this period, most people acted as if a naked person walking down the street was, if not a completely normal event, at least an understandable one, whereas in waking history it usually led to an arrest. This phenomenon seems ripe for sociological study.

Despite the loosening of moral standards, this historical timeframe seemed to be, on the average, fraught with considerable fear and anxiety. Reports of people searching frantically for lost items were very frequent. There were very many incidents of people being late for appointments, classes, work, or even major events. Many others forgot the names of their family and best friends, while having intense and intimate encounters with complete strangers, or people whose identity is at best obscure.

Magical powers or occult abilities of one sort or another were considered routine, which is fortunate, since violent attacks by others were a constant threat. On the one hand, a person might have been able to slay an opponent by firing bullets out of his hand; on the other, he may have suffered a bout of slow motion when attempting to flee. The need for constant vigilance was countered by a persistent vagueness and confusion of mental outlook.

As to sexuality, the range of practices seems to have been incredibly wide, with voyeurism, paraphilic infantilism, coprophilia, urophagia, and numerous other fetishistic behavor being extremely common. Incest, rape, and other forms of sexual assault appear to have been so popular as to be considered almost normal. It is difficult for the objective historian to credit this, yet virtually all available testimony confirms the startling fact of complete sexual chaos as characteristic of the time.

What accounts there are of governments, treaties, wars, and political arrangements are so various and complex as to challenge the abilities of the most skilled researchers. Democracy would appear to have been almost unknown. Dictatorship was the most common political arrangement, yet there were so many autocrats that they seem to have actually outnumbered the subjects under their rule. In truth, the political situation during sleep came closest to the concept of anarchy as this is popularly termed, and many scholars find it both puzzling and significant that society survived the period relatively intact.

More matter for the cream of the scholiasts has no doubt dripped from the statue of the hearse in barns of square. We have reported again soon how in fact unreliable fists of fancy dress preponder the food they ate. Leaders of sexual insurpency coffin contradict the delusions we have run to, and I would not deign to outrage this steaming crowd with more toots than it can fester. Pending verification to continue and

Here the manuscript breaks off. Is est optimus nos permissum lemma somnus.

The mythology of modern life

Celebrities are the gods and goddesses of our age. A sordid, petty pantheon they are, but they are all the culture offers to fill the vacuum caused by the death of mythology and folklore.

Commercialism does not recognize awe and wonder unless these emotions pertain to products that are being sold to us. In the commercial world view, nature is only a place for consumption and entertainment. Therefore the sense of awe before nature, the intimate experience of nature as power, being and sustenance of humankind, is replaced with empty acquisition and spectatorship. An entire realm of mythology and spirituality has been banished to the margins of life.

Much of the organized monotheistic culture has staked its authority on the flimsy notion that its myths are “literally” true, i.e. science. The unintended result is that “myth” has now become synonymous with “falsehood” in the popular mind. Fundamentalism blames science for this, because literalist religion is blind to the potency of myth, considering it only as a means to enforce obedience to the social order. We are left with a religious culture that has been drained of meaning. When myth is hardened into dogma, it dwindles down into superstition.

Spirituality as such is tainted in the popular mind, both by commercial culture which ridicules it, and organized religion which has largely neglected and abandoned it. In the debate between theists and atheists, there isn’t even any conception of spirituality as a phenomenon, since it essentially lies outside the endless and futile struggles over “belief.”

People need folklore and mythology because our imagination discovers meaning through stories and symbols that illuminate all aspects of life. Their significance is subjective. The historicity of King Arthur is of no account when considering the power of the mythos surrounding him. Even in the case of Jesus, where his historical existence is an essential aspect of the religious tradition, the power of the tradition as it affects the soul of the Christian is not historical.

The modern age, then, finds itself in a predicament whereby the subjective is not considered meaningful. Commercial culture promotes the “meaning” of owning products, of prestige through material possessions. The dominant religious cultures promote the “meaning” of obedience to a patriarchal social order. It hasn’t worked. People still need mythology, and so we end up with the pathetic mythos of the celebrity. Homer’s gods and goddesses fell in love and squabbled and broke up and fought over children as well—as I said, myth illuminates every aspect of life. But they did much more. Our present-day pantheon does nothing but reenact the blind dramas of romance and personal conflict. Our myths reflect badly on ourselves—the horizon of imagination limited to the most narrow boundaries of alienated self-involvement and powerlessness.

The Barbarism Issue

There appears to be policy differences between the left and right on the barbarism issue.

The President recently made public certain documents in which barbarians from the previous administration discussed the kinds of barbarities they planned to commit. Prominent barbarians have reacted with outrage. Revealing our barbaric practices, they argue, makes it impossible to effectively practice them on our enemies.

Is barbarism effective? Experts in the cruelty community are divided. Many of them are arguing that civilization is better for our security in the long run, but proponents of barbarism are loudly accusing the President of putting us at risk by being a weak little girl.

“If your child’s life was at stake, you better believe that you’d rape whomever you had to, burn your enemies alive, eat their babies, whatever,” said talk show host Bill O’Reilly. “Hey, we were attacked. Descending into barbarism was what we had to do to protect the nation.”

Political observers are saying that the President is being torn between the urgings of angry civilized supporters and the caution of moderate barbarians who advise leaving the past behind and “moving forward.”

“Look, barbarism won’t come back. We’ve turned a corner now, and we shouldn’t waste time seeking retribution,” said an anonymous official wearing a moose pelt on his head. “These loony civilized people are just making it harder for us to deal with pressing issues.”

Primitive barbarism and bloodlust came back into fashion during the last eight years, and the President’s stance against them is perceived as a distraction by many pundits. On ABC’s This Week, Cokie Roberts said that she’s glad that videotapes of barbaric, cannibalistic rites have been destroyed, since they would be “great recruiting tools for our enemies.” George Will pointed out that no less an authority than Torquemada, one of the great intellectual figures of the Church, approved of the rack and the garrotte. Peggy Noonan appeared faint and said that her sensibilities were too delicate to discuss such things, and that these matters should be left in the dungeons where they belong.

“I’ve never seen such deep divisions in our society between civilization and barbarity,” said David Gregory of NBC. “People are worried that it’s being exploited for political reasons. There are many good Americans who think the President should be burned at the stake, or drawn and quartered. I don’t know what to think. You decide.”

Twisting in the Wind

Sometimes I like to think that Obama is playing rope-a-dope with Republicans. It's probably wishful thinking. But the recent release of the torture memos, along with assurances that the Prez opposes prosecutions, seems like a prime example. Of course I'm in favor of putting Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, and all the rest of the vicious thugs who ruled us illegally for eight years on trial. But let's say we don't. The release of the memos alone brings the stench of their crimes vividly into the public nostrils. Which is why our right-wing perverts and their media lapdogs seem more worried about revealing the truth than they do about the moral sinkhole of torture itself.

The truth has been known for some time, folks, This is just more detail, and further confirmation. And those who say we should keep it secret know full well that the goal is to conceal the truth from the American public, not from foreign enemies who already knew. George Will (who floated the attractiveness of torture early after 9/11), Peggy Noonan, Pat Buchanan, and all our good friends at the Zombie Channel--their concern is that YOU be kept in the dark, and that your knowledge not interfere with the elite's management of your government, your money, and your life.

Transparency is the enemy of the right, and of the national security establishment. The more transparency Obama allows, the more the rotting corruption of the political class that has dominated Washington for the last 50 years will be exposed.

So, Mr. Cheney and all your enablers, take your immunity, and your pardons, and your Nuremberg defense, and crawl into a corner while your crimes continue to be cataloged on the front pages. I hope you enjoy your "freedom."

Tweet tweet

A friend of mine recently introduced me to Twitter. I’m not sure whether to thank him or not. Don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter. But I love it the way an addict loves crack.

Twitter is a social networking system in which a whole bunch of people post messages in short little bursts of 140 characters or less. When I first heard of this, it sounded unappealing. And if the messages are something like “Just stopped at the pizza place, ordered a veggie with olives,” then yes, it is unappealing, at least to me. And believe it or not, a lot of tweets are like that.

But if you are a political junkie, like I am, and you “follow” as many like-minded political junkies on Twitter, the result is an endless scroll of pithy comments, wisecracks, and pronouncements, seasoned with links to the latest news, blog posts, and general snark. If you add a few dozen very amusing people who say whatever is on the mind—well, you can end up spending hours on Twitter if you’re not careful. So far I haven’t been careful enough.

The appeal for me is that Twitter simulates an experience of being part of a very smart and talkative community, or a never-ending cocktail party, take your pick. Blogs go into much more depth, but the comments sections on blogs don’t have the same sense of immediacy and back-and-forth engagement between people. So if in your everyday life you don’t have that much opportunity to talk casually about politics, or culture (my other area is film), or whatever, Twitter is almost like the real thing.

Whether the short form dumbs everything down, or instead forces you to clarify and tighten your thoughts into a more potent expression, depends on the tweeter. In my case I think it does the latter. On this blog, I tend to go on at length, unraveling whatever subject I’ve tackled to the end, or what seems like an end. It’s my style, and it usually feels like my duty. That takes work, and unfortunately I don’t always feel like working, so I end up posting here only four or five times a month. But when I twitter, on the other hand, I can just go in there, write what I hope is a nice little bon mot, and then go on to something else. Instant gratification. Plus all the other little bon mots end up stimulating my imagination, and so on.

Like I said, crack.

It remains to be seen whether this development will be a good one for me as a writer, or…otherwise. But in any case, you can follow me here.

Infowhores

Alex Jones appeared on Judge Napolitano’s Fox show a few weeks ago, talking about “globalists” and how Obama is taking away our freedom, and how finally Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Michael Savage (!) are catching on to what Alex Jones has been saying for years, etc.

But do you know what Alex Jones never mentioned? 9/11. He said not a word about how the 9/11 attacks were an inside job.

Now, if you’re at all familiar with what Alex Jones has been saying and doing for the last eight years, you know that 9/11 is a central aspect of his thinking. For him to go on Fox and not mention 9/11 is an unbelievable bit of theater, because it means not mentioning the most important aspect of his own stated world view in the last decade.

It’s self-evident at this point that Fox wouldn’t put Alex Jones on the air to talk about how Obama and Hilary Clinton are part of the scary globalist conspiracy unless he promised not to say anything about 9/11 being an inside job. For those who are new to Alex Jones, he therefore comes off as another soldier in the wingnut rebellion. But those of us who aren’t new to Alex Jones are supposed to think, I can only suppose, that 9/11 no longer matters now that Bush is gone. It would take a severe case of myopia to believe such a thing, but readers of Alex Jones are not generally known for their critical thinking.

I am actually a 9/11 skeptic. I don’t believe the official story, and I don’t think that atrocity has been properly investigated. The collapse of the WTC7 building still makes no sense to me, and there’s a lot else that stinks about the case. Nevertheless, I could always tell the difference between a sincere investigator of the facts like David Griffin, and a self-promoting huckster like Jones.

It may seem ridiculous for me to be even spending time discussing Alex Jones, but the fact is I’ve know many people in the online community who follow him and send me links from his Infowars sight. Occasionally, very occasionally, there’s been some good information in the links. Naively, I assumed he was on the left, albeit of the deranged variety. But his willingness to go on Fox without mentioning 9/11, and implicitly praising neofascists like Glenn Beck and Michael Savage to boot, proves me to have been woefully mistaken.

Alex Jones is a right wing troll. And a whore. Not mentioning his belief that 9/11 was an inside job, so that he could get on Fox, proves him to be a whore. The truth, as it turns out, doesn’t matter to Alex Jones. The only thing that matters to him is Alex Jones.

He’s also the worst thing that could have happened to the 9/11 truth movement. It seems inevitable nowadays, though, that conspiracy, even when the suspicion of one is well-founded, is going to attract the unscrupulous exploiters of fear, who end up discrediting everyone else involved. The larger issue involved here is that conspiracy, such as it is, represents only a symptom of a systemic problem rather than a cause.

Meanwhile the incredible hysteria of the hard right drives the Republican Party further into the ground, possibly destroying it forever. I don’t have any interest in preserving that institution, but at the same time we shouldn’t underestimate the mischief that brownshirt-style rhetoric and a lynch mob mentality can cause in this country. Every civilized person should be speaking out against this barbarism, but instead the maniacs seem to have an open mike on the national stage.

Spiritual Feminism

“Our inner being, which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced.”—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Solitude of Self.

Stanton’s famous 1892 address captures the essence of the feminist idea. With allowances for the language and culture of that time, the message is just as relevant now as ever. It is a refutation, in what I would call spiritual terms, of all arguments for male supremacy.

Every person experiences her life singly, as the one and only center of that life. The preciousness of one’s life lies precisely in the fact that it is the only life one has. Moreover, all human beings desire the free exercise of their wills, minds, and faculties. When a person is treated as if she were an object, a means towards an end not her own, this is perceived as unjust at some level of consciousness, because it is essentially a lie, a denial of her reality as self. Even if she is so thoroughly socialized that there is no conscious awareness of injustice, the denial of self will exact a psychological price. The suppression of truth at such a fundamental level cannot be maintained without destructive effects. In the long view, this sums up the history of the subjection of women by men.

Engels seemed to hint that the domestication of animals led to the herdsman’s application of the same idea of ownership and control to women, and later to other men. This is of course speculation—the origins of the problem are murky. The outcome, however, is clear. Women were eventually made the slaves of men. The patriarchal social order limited women to the roles of sexual mates, mothers, and domestic laborers. Slavery as it developed in the ancient world was not much different in principle from what already existed in the family structure.

The system was powerful and all-pervading, so embedded in the social order that most people couldn’t even see it. In addition to being firmly established through law and custom, women’s “role” was deeply internalized and transmitted from parents to children for thousands of years. The limitations of patriarchal culture made it almost impossible for anyone, male or female, to see beyond it, until the intellectual rebellion of the 17th century, and the subsequent gradual widening of education in society, awakened the long-dormant thirst for freedom. But even before any of this, from the most ancient times, lack of freedom was perceived at a subconscious level as painful and unjust, and there were sporadic instinctual rebellions, sometimes only suppressed by the cruelest measures.

The act of force, the establishment of patriarchy through domination, far preceded the various reasons and justifications offered for male supremacy. Nevertheless, the anti-feminist arguments lead us to the awareness of certain assumptions about men and women. The basic assumption, as Stanton so shrewdly divined, is that selfhood is a prerogative of the patriarch, and that women are meant to serve the patriarch as a means towards his ends. That’s what objectification ultimately means, in the sexual and every other sense: the subservience of the female self to a power outside of her—in effect, the denial of any absolute value to her self.

A secondary assumption, following from the basic one, is that men are superior to women. The idea of superiority arises, as in the debates on slavery, from the need to justify the already existing power structure. A lot of words have been spent arguing the merits of either side of this question. After modern feminist gains, the superiority idea has been supplanted for the most part by the notion of essential difference. In other words, neither is superior; it’s just that men are designed to do certain things and women to do other things, and these things shouldn’t be mixed. Of course it’s really just a new version of the old idea: the things men are designed to do turn out to involve the exercise of their wills, minds, and faculties; while women are romantic nurturers and mothers.

Concepts of superiority and inferiority are, in any case, completely determined by what one considers more or less valuable. The anti-feminist argument sometimes even falls back on physical strength as an absolute value, as if we were still hunter-gatherers. The point is that the feminist argument for equality is based on the inherent worthiness of each human life rather than on comparisons of perceived qualities peculiar to the different genders. In fact, even if one were to concede (purely for the sake of argument) that men possessed some sort of natural superiority, the claim doesn’t even touch the validity of the point Stanton is making. For my self, the one life that only I experience, there can be no imposition of an absolute role based on some sort of natural or social comparison. I still desire freedom as my condition, and in my heart I cannot fully accept myself as a mere object of someone else’s will or purpose.

So the superiority debate is a sham, a cover for the basic assumption, which is that the male authority is the only valid subject. We come back to earth and find nothing but a simple self-centeredness that exercises its power and control over other people in order to gain more power and control. This is what patriarchy amounts to in the end.

In our imagination we can turn the mirror around and see how a man would react to becoming an object. A man is encouraged to strive in a realm of action, or to explore a realm of ideas, or perhaps even both. At the least, he is expected to have some measure of ambition in the world, however modest. He is also expected, usually, to find a mate and raise a family. But try to imagine if he was told that his primary purpose was to find a mate and raise a family, and that all else was frivolous compared to that. Would a man accept this? Of course not. There is more to life, he knows, than romance and babies, and it would be an intolerable restriction on his free will for society to limit him so. And what if his appearance, his sexual attractiveness, was valued above everything else—mind, creativity, commitment or effort? Most men would be driven to despair by such an arrangement. And yet, because of the hypnotic effect of the ancient patriarchal structure, many men fail to see that this is exactly what women are faced with.

That women have made gains, particularly in the West, in recent centuries, is almost entirely due to the struggles of women who have awakened to reality. There have been male allies, many of them perhaps not fully realizing the implications of the movement, but the institutional structure has resisted feminism every step of the way, and continues to do so. The oldest form of oppression, it would seem, dies the hardest.

With all the gains, however, we can sometimes minimize or forget the fundamental importance of the struggle. In the conventional discourse, it is framed in terms of women’s rights and the need for equality, especially in economic and political terms. This is all very important because women need more power over their own lives, and everything that works towards that end is worthwhile. Still, feminism ultimately looks beyond the symbolism of the woman executive or soldier or politician, the woman integrated more equally into the system, and extends its thought to a radical critique of the patriarchal structure itself.

Behind the anti-feminist argument, grown softer and subtler and more ingratiating in the modern age, stands the unacknowledged shadow of slavery. It still survives undisguised in the poorer nations. It is important to remember that the argument always leads to the same place. Male supremacy, in the end, is founded on force. Rape is not an aberration, but a primary symptom of the central problem of human society. You’ll notice that rape always accompanies war; it’s an essential expression of it. Domination, the power principle, is the illusion that an inviolable, free, solitary self can be transformed into a mere object, sacrificed on the altar of authority. This is the tragedy of human history, and patriarchy is at its very core. Feminism is the awakening insight, the recognition of freedom as an absolute and inherent value in the self. Its significance embraces the political, social, and cultural realms—it is ultimately a spiritual liberation.

False Memory

Conversation between a Republican and a non-amnesiac:

R: The country’s going to hell. What a rotten mess!

NA: You’re only noticing this now, after eight years?

R: I’m talking about the huge amounts of money we’re just throwing down the toilet.

NA: Yeah, I agree about the Iraq War.

R: No, I mean the stimulus bill. It’ll make Iraq look like a garage sale.

NA: Really? How many people have been killed in the stimulus bill so far?

Most real colloquies aren’t so polite, of course. More typically, a wrong winger will start yelling, wildly gesticulating, frothing at the mouth, and bleating hot-button words like “socialism” and “communism.”

My position is this. If you aren’t outraged about what happened during the last eight years, if instead you make excuses for the Republicans and other crooks who lied and stole and killed and tortured, and disgraced the country—then I have nothing to say to you. There’s nothing that can be said. It’s no use wasting my time trying to persuade people that what actually happened, happened. If after all this time, you’re ignorant of what happened, willfully or otherwise, then you have no place in rational political discourse.

That doesn’t mean Democrats should be immune from criticism. By no means. But if you’re angry about Obama, and you weren’t angry about Bush, then you are out of touch with reality.

Politically, the Republicans still have influence because they still have some power. But it’s only by virtue of power in the most naked sense that they have any role to play. In terms of values, perception of truth, or desire for the good of the country, they have no role. They represent exactly that which has brought us to our present crisis. They are the spokesmen for what is destroying us. I’m sorry, but there is no reaching across the aisle when the person across the aisle is a delusional maniac. Whatever progress is made, will be made in spite of the liars and looters, not with them, and every single day since Obama was inaugurated has confirmed that truth.

Nobodaddy

I was talking about a Higher Power with someone and she said, “I have a hard time believing that there really is something out there that cares about me.”

The language she used brought questions to my mind. Questions by themselves are often more valuable than answers because they challenge our assumptions and take us beyond what we think we already know.

Here are the questions. Where exactly is “out there”? How far “out there” would God, or the Divine, really be? Above the clouds? Farther than the moon? A few light years? A trillion light years? A few feet? Six inches?

And ultimately, if this Reality is “out there” somewhere, no matter how far it may be, can it ever really be in contact with me, with us, over “here”?

If I touch something, or if something or someone touches me, doesn’t that mean there is no distance between us? And with literally no distance between us, what becomes of “in here” and “out there,” “you” and “me”?

If you ask these questions long enough, you will begin to understand what those wily old Chinese masters meant by “putting a second head on top of your own.” The chasm opening up beneath your feet marks the difference between spirituality and religion.

Techno-Hubris

How civilized do you think the human race really is? It depends on what we mean by “civilized.” I happen to be a student of history and politics. And when I survey the events of the last century, I see two world wars and dozens of other bloody conflicts, the proliferation of weapons that can destroy all life several times over, environmental destruction on a scale that seriously threatens to make us extinct, and a catalogue of genocides, cruelties and oppressions that would have made our 19th century ancestors turn insane with horror if they could have foreseen it all. If nothing else, such awareness should foster a sense of humility. But let’s stop for a moment and listen to what technology guru Ray Kurzweil has to say, according to a recent article in Rolling Stone:

“In our lifetime, Kurzweil believes, machines will not only surpass humans in intelligence - they will irrevocably alter what it means to be human. Cell-size robots will zap disease from our bloodstream. Superintelligent nanotechnology, operating on a molecular scale, will scrub pollution from our atmosphere. Our minds, our skills, our memories, our very consciousness will be backed up on computers—allowing us, in essence, to live forever, all our data saved by supersmart machines.”

Okay, Kurzweil is a lunatic. But Freeman Dyson is a highly respected scientist, one of the leading modern writers on physics. Here he is in the New York Review of Books a couple of years ago:

“Within a few more decades, as the continued exploring of genomes gives us better knowledge of the architecture of living creatures, we shall be able to design new species of microbes and plants according to our needs…Green technology could replace most of our existing chemical industries and a large part of our mining and manufacturing industries. Genetically engineered earthworms could extract common metals such as aluminum and titanium from clay, and genetically engineered seaweed could extract magnesium or gold from seawater. Green technology could also achieve more extensive recycling of waste products and worn-out machines, with great benefit to the environment. An economic system based on green technology could come much closer to the goal of sustainability, using sunlight instead of fossil fuels as the primary source of energy. New species of termite could be engineered to chew up derelict automobiles instead of houses, and new species of tree could be engineered to convert carbon dioxide and sunlight into liquid fuels instead of cellulose.”

Kurzweil thinks that immortality is a good idea, even though population has exploded beyond a sustainable level. Dyson, the more reasonable one, thinks that manipulating genes will solve our problems. His error seems less obvious. In fact it’s the same error. They both believe that humanity can be trusted to wield technological power in a benevolent fashion, and even that technology is a kind of agency in itself. But the history of technological advancement proves them wrong every step of the way.

A fool can sometimes teach us more than an intelligent man, if he makes a fundamental error more clear. Kurzweil with his “singularity” (and believe me, there are enthusiasts out there who really buy into this stuff) does us a service precisely in this way. The error is simply egoism and its corollary, intellectual pride—the belief that self-interest and reason is all we need. Technocrats simply refuse to see that there is an element of human nature that is independent of their goal-oriented model of control.

It’s not that technology is bad. Of course it isn’t. The problem is that human culture has not matured sufficiently to handle the almost god-like powers of modern technology. Instead we’re using them to kill each other and ourselves. The problem that faces us is actually the same that faced the ancient philosophers who puzzled over the problems of political life. How do we foster a civilization based on love, respect, and mutual cooperation, rather than the habitual structures of power, domination, and greed? Reason plays a part in this, but so do emotions. Without taking human emotional needs into account, we have no vantage point from which to understand love and hatred, peace and war, kindness or cruelty.

The techno-fix will not work. I wish it would, because it would be so much easier. But for a species that doesn’t understand its limitations, that chooses arrogance over humility and ignorance over self-awareness, in short, for an uncivilized creature, a barbarian in a suit and tie, technology will only reflect the emptiness and vanity of his soul. The task is to free ourselves from our inner chains, and only then can we use our tools with wisdom, and for the good.