Cactus Juice

When the Journey of Life Means Nothing At All

I have recently read a not terribly good novel.  To protect the guilty, I I won't name the book, but part of the reason for reading it was to distinguish more clearly the particular qualities of Tolstoy Lied (blogged here).  I finished Tolstoy Lied feeling certain, first, that I could never write to that level of quality, and second, that a great novel requires much more than unusually good writing (because Tolstoy Lied, for all its attributes, will never be a great novel).  This recent read left me with the thought, "I could do that!"

I suspect that is what the author thought too, though instead of reaching that conclusion after reading a mediocre novel, she reached it after watching a mediocre action flick.  The novel has become the poor man's cinema: if you don't have access to the capitol and connections to create a movie, you can write a book instead.

The primary feature of these made-for-movies novels is that the climax and resolution of the story are conflated, and both are offered with considerably less detail than the build up.  The reader can envision the credits rolling up as they dump their popcorn on the theater floor and caste a sidelong glance at the sole movie goer who has been brought to tears.  Reality television also conflates climax and resolution, or more accurately it attempts to present climax as resolution.  Resolution is swept under the rug: the B-list career that follows the American Idol appearance will not be televised.  On the front end, a lifetime of artistic development and accomplishment are compressed into a few weeks.

But artists have always been dreamers.  Viewed as more insidious by me and my fat friends is Biggest Loser, where the contestants go from fat to svelte in one season.  They then disappear to that dark corner where the fat grows; 99% of people who lose 75 pounds or more regain it within 5 years even if they lost it on TV.

The peculiar heroism of the action movie, the determined heroism of the artist and the everyday heroism of the successful loser are turned into compressed actions devoid of decision and meaning.  This is not a template for heroism that the reader or viewer can apply to his or her own life.  When it comes to heroism, these dramas and plot lines that anyone could write turn into patterns of heroism that no one can live.

In the novel, the fatally ill heroine takes a few courageous steps that dramatically change the last days of her life and of the lives of those who she leaved behind.  At one point, she pointedly decides that she doesn't want to know the future effect of one of her decisions.  The reader never knows just why she made that decision to start with.  After her death, nothing has changed that much.  A few pawns have moved here and there on the chessboard, but how they feel and the possibility that in fact everything has been changed isn't communicated. Soft focus and cue the credits.

I'm not requiring all entertainment to be intellectually nuanced; shallow entertainment has existed since time immemorial and the very best entertainment --think Shakespeare-- is so true to life that it can be enjoyed as pure story or as something more.  I do think that the failures that I have highlighted in current entertainment are peculiar to our time.  In contrast, consider The Three Stooges.  Not serious work at all, but work that showed a simplified pattern of stimulus, reaction, and resolution.  Indeed, the extreme simplification was part of the comedy.  On the highbrow side post-modernism played with the link-up of those three items, but you can only play with them if you have their structure to launch off from.  Our current popular art seems to be losing the link-up.  As much as that is failing to tell our society something, it is also telling of something in our society that is failing.

Nashville Country Music Half-Marathon

Done.  My web page for the event, complete with drowned rat picture (um, it rained), is here.

Perversion of Truth: The FLDS Crisis in Texas

While I'm aware that there is no one block of mainstream Americans (or Canadians, since they're a part of this too), there are a set of elements in the media and in law enforcement / judiciary who are meant to speak with one voice for all of "us" as a block to "them", the FLDS.  At this point, these Representatives of us have created so many manipulations and perversions of the truth that they far better exemplify The People of the Lie (a concept created by The Road Less Traveled author M. Scott Peck) than do the FLDS people that they are trying to bring into line.  The FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs may have magnified the distrust that the FLDS reasonably feel after being persecuted for more than 100 years, but it took our legal representatives to make his prophecies come true.

(Image: girls being removed from their home on the first day of the raid.  Underage girls were taken and only their mothers were allowed to accompany them, so it is possible that the white haired lady in the background was being separated from her entire family.  Image from the FLDS website.)

I have recently seen and heard news articles criticizing a lifestyle which would result in women with such drawn and haggard faces.  To get up every morning, face a crowd of people who have taken your children, and do it with precisely placed hair and not a tear shed before the enemy takes a level of courage I cannot imagine.  There are photos available from happier times.  There are also photos available of young mothers in tears and supported on the arms of their elders.  CNN published an fashion article criticizing the hairstyles of the women, which it claimed were identical.  This text ran with a  photo of a group of drawn and haggard women, each with unique and complicated up-do.  The minutia of the lies is absurd.

The telephone call supposedly prompting the raid did not come from within the FLDS property (CNN reports, and has been reporting since last week), something investigators surely knew before the raid occurred.  The stated purpose of the raid was to follow up on the topic of the phone call, statutory rape of girls given in marriage.  The actual purpose of the raid appears to be the dismantling of the FLDS community, as evidenced by the fact that all children down to infants-in-arms have been removed from their parents.  In a move of relief, the judge has allowed nursing mothers to return to their children twice a day so long as they are supervised by a religious authority (she's suggesting the LDS oversee this in order to pull the women from the FLDS, something that baffles the LDS leaders who have made it clear they want no part in this).  In other words, the mandate the mainstream public was willing to give to the Texas authorities to protect pubescent girls has been expanded all the way from infants to the re-training of grown women. 

In a recent CNN online article about Carolyn Jessop, author of Escape, her tale of leaving the FLDS with her eight children, readers turned on her in their comments postings.  When a woman on the one hand talks about the supportive underground network of women within the FLDS community that she was privy to, and on the other hand claims that no one helped her with her children, not even on the days of their births, until the day she left the community and was provided a moment of rest by the first non-FLDS woman she housed with, you know she's playing tricks with her story.  Carolyn Jessop, by the way, is in Texas providing "cultural competency" to authorities for the sake of the people she has supported herself by vilifying.

One thing Carolyn Jessop claims is that the community used children as a threat to women: if you fail to follow the dictates of Jeffs, your children will be taken from you.  It took a woman not even of the community, a woman playing a hoax of unimaginably cruel proportions, and the willing accomplices in authority down there in Texas, to turn Jeff's prophecy into reality.  The compliance of the women over the last three weeks, starting with their willingness to leave their homes, has been called "voluntary," but what can voluntary possibly mean when their nursing infants are being held captive?

Another FLDS community has existed in the Canadian province of British Columbia since the days when polygamy was banned from the main LDS church (dismantling families obedient to that prophet and leaving their children illegitimate).  Yesterday the Attorney General of British Columbia was interviewed on the news show As It Happens.  He stated that the only difference between his response to that community and the response in Texas was that there had been no under-aged complainant in British Columbia.  At the time he said this, he had to have known that there is no underage complainant in Texas either.  He also stated that the American Consulate in British Columbia has been in contact with them over the years wishing for American citizens of the FLDS to participate in the American Census.  This the FLDS has been unwilling to do, fearing that the information would be used against them.  Probably fearing that the American and Canadian authorities were in cahoots to dismantle their community, which in fact they are.  The AG, by the way, is primarily concerned with the legality of polygamy.  His concern with statutory rape, like that of the Americans, is only in that it provides a legal hook for dismantling a polygamous community.

In Texas, failure to census has resulted in DNA testing of the entire community, the first legally enforced DNA testing of any community in the world.  While some of the actions in Texas mirror human rights violations in other countries --such as communities in South America where all children were removed from their parents and adopted out to more politically compliant families or aboriginal women in Australia who were removed from their tribes to be re-educated by white Protestants-- the DNA testing puts America on the cutting edge.  No one could call the fears of the FLDS irrational any more.  And as far as the AG of British Columbia is concerned, the Canadians have every wish to out-do America in this respect.

Groups who can see themselves ending up in this group are expressing concern.  The LDS church has refused to have anything to do with it.  Perhaps that Baptist church that allowed their sign to fly over the buses dismantling this community on the first day of the raid will someday regret their decision.  Rick Fisk is anti-charity in his evaluation of the FLDS, but he's outrage at the current events equals mine.  LDS blogger Russell Arben tried to be even-handed on Day 1, but eventually he had to agree that the details weren't making the Texas authorities "look very good" (and he links to other LDS bloggers on this topic).

(Image: Some of the firepower that was brought in to remove the girls from their homes.  Also from the FLDS website.)

The homeschoolers are worried that the attack on the FLDS can be turned into an attack on home and private schooling in general.  And the breastfeeders are pissed.  This has become an attack against women as decision makers in their own lives and against the power of women as mothers as much as it has become an attack against a polygamous society.  It is peculiar that the men and teenage boys have been left out of re-education.  Is it that men are considered uneducatable?  Or is it that women are still chattle, only to be controlled by the Texas authorities rather than by the conscience of their own religious sentiment?

At the FLDS website Captive FLDS Children you can donate directly to the FLDS organization.  Quite frankly, the finances of the FLDS leadership are curious and I'm not sure that is the best way to respond to the specific outrages of this event.  I have heard reports that the ACLU is providing legal support, but there is no information about this matter on their website.  For now, all a citizen can do is read the news with a critical eye, provide outrage when we are lied to by our own representatives, and demand that human rights abuses like this not be perpetrated in our name.  What's going on down there in Texas is being done to "them"; it must not be done in the name of "us."

Change a Behavior and Finding God May Follow

The Business Self Help Book That Helped Self

Influencer: The Power to Change Anything isn't deep philosophy.  It isn't say, The Varieties of Religious Experience, where we will end up today.  But it is one of the best books in the self-help / business segment genre that I've read- I'll be adding it my shelf with First, Break All The Rules (a book that every parent should read on behalf of their children and every high school student should read for herself), The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and Getting Things Done (issue these two books and a good secretarial manual to each new college graduate).

A self-help book must give a prescription for change, preferably in a numerated list.  Influencer offers in the categories of personal, social and structural solutions a prescription each in the motivational and ability categories- six total.  For best results, the authors recommend throwing all six solutions at a problem.  Best of all, the book explains that these methods can be used not only to influence others, but to influence yourself.  The example provided is of a man who lost a large amount of weight; a real person.

Another requirement of the self-help book is that it speak from authority.  Statistics and case histories are presented to illustrate that the author knows more than you do.  Much more.  Your job, therefore, is to not worry about thinking but to simply follow the prescription.  I did, and I've lost eight of the 23 pounds I've gained since my last VFT (Virgin Fat Territory- a lowest number ever seen in a weight loss journey).

The particular lesson that influenced me was told in the history of the fat guy: Influence must be aimed at behaviors.  A goal does not contain within it the elements of influence that will lead to the goal being achieved.  My New Year's Resolution included getting to onederland (a weight starting with a one) this year.  Twenty-three pounds up was not getting me there, but the desire to get 23 pounds down wasn't enough to make it happen. 

What was a behavior that I could change?  Overeating is so complicated.  There are so many different reasons I overeat.  I recently saw a study that claimed the average adult made more than 1,000 decisions per day about eating.  I've spent more than a decade now with therapists and overeating comrades analyzing my eating.  All I needed was one behavior.

I decided not to eat food the minute it was in my possession.  Specifically, I decided to wait five minutes from having food until eating it.  For the most part I haven't waited five entire minutes, but I have broken the cycle of grabbing food and stuffing it in my mouth.  While I wait, I "write-before-bite", another important behavior in controlling eating but not the primary goal.  I also do general journal writing, which has been missing from my life because I "don't have time" for that.  I've lost those eight pounds.  But most importantly, I feel in control of my eating again for the first time in more than six months.  One behavior.

Where God Comes In

I have been meaning to write a post about the limiting nature of happiness, to go with the post on the limiting nature of strength.  You know the old footprints poem: God is rarely seen in happy times.  For an addict having the time of her life with good health, a great job, and fabulous friendships, getting one inch past Step One into that God stuff is difficult.  I'm a proclaimed theist of the Christian variety, but my sense of spiritual connection has been at an all time low.

And yet notice what happened when I started pausing before my food.  My selected behavior was not prayer, which would be more directed toward God and would be another means of pausing, and yet the behavior of pausing just for the sake of the space caused me to start writing in my journal again.  Not in itself prayer or intended meditation, but a space for a spiritual experience.

William James considered this space to be important.  On a separate page I offer a lengthy excerpt (pp. 395 - 398) from The Varieties of Religious Experience for those who wish to read it.   It is an excellent defense of creating space for spirituality through practices of asceticism.  Waiting a few moments before eating is a tiny asceticism, but an effective one in a life that is just too easy.  James, referencing the ease of 1902, wrote:

...it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty amongst the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers. (p. 403)

Poverty isn't just a matter of zip code, it's a matter of separation from ease.  It is an asceticism enforced or chosen by interactions with the outside world.  Avoidance of poverty at all costs includes the willingness to sell one's soul at any cost; this is what makes it a moral disease.  Single-minded devotion to the things of this world is what makes it a spiritual disease.

Many years ago I read an a book of existentialist psychology.  There is no possibility I could recall the identity of this book, but it made the argument that addiction is a kind of necrophilia- a chasing after death.  When I mentioned this to my therapist he was so startled that it ended the conversation immediately.  Reading James, I realize that the concept was wrong.  Addiction is a maladaptive chasing after life.  One thing that the fat on my body says is that I have provided life for myself.  One thing that choosing food before anything else says is that I choose nourishment and life.

American culture has made an idol worship of not dieing- we don't spend a quarter-million dollars on the last few days of life on accident (the cost of the typical American dieing process); it is the final sign of respect to the idol.  According to James, asceticism is about increasing life through an acceptance of death.  The final paragraph from the excerpt mentioned above:

The metaphysical mystery, thus recognized by common sense, that he who feeds on death that feeds on men possesses life supereminently and excellently, and meets best the secret demands of the universe, is the truth of which asceticism has been the faithful champion.  The folly of the cross, so inexplicable by the intellect, has yet its indestructible vital meaning. (pp. 397-398)

I happened to finish reading  The Varieties of Religious Experience this week.  Much of it is relevant to  my spiritual struggles, and I shall surely be devoting a post just to wrapping up my interaction with the book.  The book is wide and souring and exactly the kind of philosophy that is central to my existence as a human being, but I know that this specific topic required changing a behavior first and letting the meaning follow.  As I mentioned in a previous post, without any experience of life the book was meaningless.  With the experience of one tiny, very tiny, behavior a "metaphysical mystery" became clear.

The Price of Grain: Selling Morality by the Bushel

Today I took a six mile walk in a Canadian metropolis, and each bus stop that I passed had a banner advertisement for the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association.  On the grey city street, the ad was a dreamscape of flowery meadowland.  Given today's headline on CNN, "Riots, instability spread as food prices skyrocket," complete with grimy riot photographs, the advertisements seemed misplaced.  The contrast between the flowers and the riots was downright un-Canadian.  For today, the farmers behind the advertising have been stripped of their sunshine and daisies image and their bloody-handed ruthlessness had been laid bare.

"Ha," thinks the American of the slightly sappy Canadians, "That's what they get for being so gullible."  The Canadian Renewable Fuels Association would argue otherwise: they have posted some statistics showing how renewable fuels have little to do with food prices and how food prices are actually being driven up more by oil scarcity than by food scarcity.  And some other stuff that amounts to, "Those riots have nothing to do with us!  We're flowery meadowland!!"

Despite our supposed sophistication, us Americans are as gullible as our neighbors to the north.  We have a brick wall against marketing it is true, but brick walls aren't very responsive to change and the flow of capital is.  Since we can no longer be marketed to directly, pharmaceutical producers sell diseases rather than drugs and energy producers sell morality rather than megawatts.

All this comes on the heels of BwP reading The 48 Laws of Power (I hear there is going to be a follow-up post), me reading Influencer (there will be a post), and me finding myself in a snit because I didn't qualify for a government program that I thought was straightforward with no exclusions.  I felt betrayed, I felt gullible, I felt that as a citizen I had been voted off the island.  I was suddenly supremely aware that whatever ethics I had been sold (and ethics are very much about the sale, about creating a tribe that can be counted on to behave in a consistent way), that whatever sort of spiritual being having a human experience I may be, I am an animal in a world where every animal is out for their own interests.  Patriotism or any other interest in the public good suddenly seemed worse than that famous "last refuge of scoundrels;" it seemed the first pitfall of Pollyannas.

My mood has shifted by the realization that there are a lot of people, people much more powerful than me, who want a lot of the same things that I do.  Yes, there is a tug-of-war of power over every single thing that exists in the minds and/or the reality of the humans on this earth, but it is a tug-of-war which has a certain kind of stasis.  Value has been maximized.  Sell me meadows or sell me riots, the statistics suggest that actually the price of food hasn't changed that much.  Counting up the balance of power each morning, meadow-flower posters seem incongruously benign.  Counting up how little has changed from mornings past, giving quotidian ruthlessness a meadowland veneer doesn't seem so wrong.

The Addict as Object: trapped between moral condemnation and biological determinism

The cover of 03 March 2008 issue of Newsweek displayed the headline: "The Hunt for an Addiction Vaccine."  Inside, a more ominous title: "What Addicts Need."

"Addicts," author Jeneen Interlandi tells us, "like the rest of the public, need to recognize the fact that we are entering a new era in addiction treatment."  This comes near the end of the article, after a prim "...most people reading this article probably can think of someone they know who owes his or her life to it [AA, and by implication NA, OA, etc.].  Some readers themselves have surely benefited." (emphasis mine) The article may be about what addicts need, but it is written to the rest of the public.  Indeed, drawing a line between addict and non-addict is the focus of the article.

In order to enter the new era in addiction treatment, the biological determinism of addiction must be accepted.  Just like it was for depression.  Steven Paul, head of research for drug maker Eli Lilly (developer of Prozac), is quoted as saying, "There used to be a stigma attached to depression, too, but the development of Prozac put an end to that."

Yes and no.  The marketing of Prozac did indeed shift the stigma.  There is no longer moral condemnation for having depression.  Indeed, having depression and seeking treatment is now considered somewhat laudable.  What is not morally acceptable is being depressed; the stigma has shifted, not been obliterated.  If you are depressed, it is because you aren't willing to consume the pills offered.  Marketing depression as a biological disease has created the assumption that it is "highly treatable."  Many recipients of the message would probably be surprised to learn that only about half of patients treated with antidepressants report improvement of any kind (and so do about half of subject treated with a placebo), and fewer than that show a high level of improvement.  But a consequence of the message is that if you are depressed there is only one possible explanation: you haven't taken the treatment. And that is unacceptably irresponsible behavior.  Indeed, the tolerance for people exhibiting depression as a natural response to loss or grief seems to be on the decline.  College students upset over romantic breakups report being pressured by parents and peers to take antidepressant medication.  Widows reports being advised to, "See your doctor."

The article concludes, "...there's hope that science may some day help put that power [as opposed to the "powerlessness" that is Step One of the 12-Steps] within the reach of anyone who needs it.  And then who would choose not to grasp it, and begin the long war for sobriety-- a war without end, but one worth the fighting."

Once addiction is sold as biologically determined there will no longer be a stigma associated with being an addict, but there will always be a stigma associated with addiction.  That stigma will be wider than the stigma associated with powerlessness; it will be the moral condemnation of the irresponsible behavior of not grasping, of refusing to be treated (nevermind whether the treatment works or not), or not fighting.  The depressed addict will be double stigmatized.

Biological determinism is a metaphysical concept, not a scientific fact.  Concepts are presented and tested as scientific theorems.  The testing of the theorem is the scientific process; the conclusions are the scientific facts.  Needs and desires outside of science prompt the creation of the theorem; Edison wanted to provide light without the use of fire.  What needs and desires prompt this theorem, and why is it being prematurely sold as fact?  One reason is to reinforce the moral condemnation that biological determinism supposedly squelches.  Just as the Puritans could watch for who tripped on the church steps in order to determine who was most loved by God, moderns can determine with satisfaction that they are not-addicts.

There is no scientific dividing line between the addict and the not-addict as they are observed.  Addict to not-addict, like most things in nature, run on a continuum.  Efforts at line drawing are moral statements.  Therefore, the line between addict and not-addict is not an argument about what is, but an argument about what should be.  As scientific terminology, it has no meaning.

To set up the line-drawing fundamental to the biological determinist case, the author draws on the field of neuroscience.  "Neurological scientists don't talk about 'will-power,' which is a philosophical concept..." but rather "three kinds of self-control".  Note the line-drawing the author finds in neuroscience (emphasis mine):

• Addicts always take the immediate reward.
• Addicts typically act without processing all the available information.
• ...addicts were much less able to ["consciously stop a behavior that has become automatic"]

These three points are meant to make the biological determinist's case.  An "always" statement is always suspect.  In this case the article itself provides the exception.  From earlier in the article:

It has been years since the pleasure of drinking outweighed the pain it caused Fuller.  Looked a that way, the "social" and "spiritual" aspects of her problem seem insignificant compared with the contribution of biology.  If you weigh advances in neuroscience over the last few decades against social and spiritual progress, it's clear which field is more likely to produce the next break-through in treatments.

The paragraph is meant to support the argument that the biological determinism of addiction is so extreme that it will cause the addict to behave irrationally, against their own interests by every definition including the interest of taking an immediate reward.  Addiction, in other words, can shift fundamental laws of psychology that are not even shifted by severe mental illness such as schizophrenia or suicidal depression.

Addicts "typically"- and yet this information Interlandi gleaned from Thomas McLellan, a psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania, elsewhere in the article:

Addicts are by no means unique in their propensity to relapse.  In a study comparing alcoholics and drug addicts to patients with diabetes, asthma and hypertension, McLellan found nearly identical rates of noncompliance and relapse; between 30 and 40 percent of each group failed to follow even half their doctors' guidelines.

"Much less able" refers to a test with a clicker and a computer screen.  I'm inclined to respond that if you put a clicker and a computer screen in front of me and used it to measure my will power, at least my hands would be full and I couldn't eat.  Meanwhile, if you have a scientific definition for "typically" or "much less able," let me know.

Another reason to promote the hypothesis of biological determinism is to increase money and power.  The scientist out to make a name for herself in her field; the pharmaceutical executives out to make a profit; the government agency out to create a constituency and a block of support.  The support is required from the non-addict and the addict alike.  To get support from the non-addict, aside from appealing to his elevated standing, one can also appeal to his fear that drugs really do alter the laws of psychology.  This magical view of drug use, countered in the book The Cult of Pharmacology and discussed in an earlier Cactus Juice entry, is trotted out for the article.

The appeal to the addict is simple:  this problem, this enormous problem that you have been cursed with, can be solved with no input from you.  And it can be solved with a pill.  Addicts are resistant to that message for a variety of reasons.  One is that after being offered opium and cocaine as treatments for addictions to substance such as alcohol addicts know that drugs get pushed on them premature to science.  Heroin addicts are simply switched to methadone, a synthetic heroin available through the legal drug market.  The author acknowledges all of that, but also describes a heroin-turned-methadone addict as being "in recovery for 20 years."  The addict states "some people feel recovery from addiction should not be easy or convenient."  I don't know about that, but I do know it should involve recovery.  Most addicts know that their addiction isn't a separate part of them but, for better or worse, integral to their place in the world and their experience of it.

Despite the appeal of the biological model, the director of the pharmacotherapies division of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, Frank Vocci, is quoted expressing caution:

The idea that we can restore "self-control" or "free will" with medication is a very, very exciting one.  It could be paradigm shifting.  But we need more studies to see how consistently that impacts recovery.

The author continues on about biology: discussing the difficulties in shifting the biochemistry of the brain.  But that isn't what Vocci's quote is about; the question is how does shifting biochemistry impact recovery.  It is possible that biological determinism is false; that even with perfect brain chemistry the psychosocial elements of addiction will prevail.

Injection drug studies and an actual real word event (where what amounted to placebo heroine was released onto American streets) have shown that addiction to injection drug use can be shifted to addiction to the injection ritual itself (with more innocuous drugs such as caffeine or without any drug at all).  Chemistry isn't everything.

Following Ms. Interlandi's article, is a one-page rebuttal by Mitchell S. Rosenthal, M.D., writing in opposition to biological determinism.  His statement includes the following line, which I read with an amusement that was probably unintended:

...we should recognize that drugs alone are not the answer to addiction.

His conclusion is that treatment "can be empowering" and "...it is hope, grounded in self-awareness, that is the best safeguard for recovery we now have."

There is no line between the addict and the not-addict.  The motivations that put science in the place of ethics must be recognized, and cheap efforts to simplify both science and ethics must be avoided.

Reading the Economist, Finding Frank

I picked up The Economist in the airport this afternoon because there was an article about Jeremiah Wright, subject of Sunday's Cactus Juice.  The article was of no particular interest; how to deal with your spiritual adviser is not the purview of The Economist and the text cleverly diverts into the more familiar territory of Hillary's tax return by the end of the article.  This issue also covers:

• the McCartney divorce (marriage and the reckless pursuit of money)
• politics (of course)
• global warming (it all comes down to money)
• historical pronouncement (in the form of an obituary that strained that approved Economist vocabulary)
• race relations (more about money)
• race relations and politics (that was Wright)
• psychology of religion (under the heading of "Science and Technology"
• and historical pronouncement on another tack (John Adams and the HBO series)

The final was my favorite.  Economist.com occasional names "US and Britain" as one of the divisions of the globe.  A pack of writers that were more correct than the King and fomented revolt ultimately to create institutional stability is something The Economist can really sink its teeth into.

In the review of the psychology of religion,  The Economist comments that religion "consumes huge amounts of resources."  Psychology of religion, it turns out, could be reviewed using various theories of Darwin or the Darwinian type.  And those are economic arguments.

I say The Economist because I noted that there are no bylines.  In fact, one writer charmingly refers to him (or possibly her)self in the text as "your correspondent."  Near the end of the issue is a review of Worlds at War: The 2,500 Year Struggle Between East and West.  The Economist comments of the author, "He is so frank about his prejudices as to be almost endearing."  I haven't read that book, so for today The Economist has charmed me the more.

I've been doing a very careful reading of a Newsweek article from the first week of March.  Not charmed.  The institutions of journalism are meant to give us something, something that blogs and democratization of journalism can't match. The Economist is well respected for a reason.  Every article has the stamp of the institution.  They don't publish the best a stringer could manage that week; they publish their best.

Managing Encounter with Spiritual Genius: creating religious experience

I've just begun reading The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James for the second time in my life.  Now that I have a few years of experience as an adult, it has been a goal to re-read a few books first encountered in my teens and early twenties.  This book was not selected for that project: I cannot compare the two experiences of reading it because on the first exposure the book held no meaning for me.  I picked it up now because I'm feeling a great deal of clarity about philosophy and, after some various religious experiences of my own, not so much clarity about my relations with spirituality and religion.  This time it is proving much more engaging.  And timely:

There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric.  I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammadan.  His religious has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit.  It would profit us little study this second-hand religious life.  We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-settings to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct.  These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather.  But such individuals are "geniuses" in the religious line... They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological.  Often, moreover, these pathological features in their career have helped to give them their religious authority and influence. (pp. 8 - 9)

James then goes on to give as an example George Fox, founder of the Quaker religion and very odd duck.  Martin Luther King, Jr., who has been canonized in American culture and will be of special note next week on the fortieth anniversary of his murder, and Malcolm X, ignored with diligence in the same culture, are examples that I spent more time pondering in my early college days.  Today the focus is on Rev. Jeremiah Wright and whether his rhetorical fervor has tainted the politician Barack Obama.

Genius of all kind has always been suspect because of its destabilizing aspect.  The canonization of Martin Luther King, Jr. is troubling where the intent seems to be to tame his message into bland tradition.  We know that this was President Lyndon Johnson's outright goal.  Canonization is a more civilized means than whipping to turn King into a trophy in the sitting room,with the bonus that he's no longer around to open his mouth and get himself sent back outside. Christ, Mohammad and most anyone else that really matters have suffered the same civilizing indignity.

On the King holiday, when I will sometimes make it my civic duty to suggest reading Malcolm X instead, the response can be ferocious and insane- occasionally someone will suggest it is racist.  Appearing to speak against Dr. King or elevating any other leader near him is Bad.  Mentioning King's personal failings can be met with the same ferocity, although they are discussed evenhandedly in the landmark Parting the Waters, a three-book series discussing all aspects of King's life and influence and which is intellectual bedrock for the King canonization. (Malcolm X has many biographies, but no similar book of such substance and therefore I simply suggest reading his Autobiography.)

Is there such a thing as spiritual genius?  Can spiritual leaders impart a special kind of wisdom, despite their inability to live balanced, measured, lives?  In most of the world, the answer to the first question is seen as "yes."  Europeans of the modern era, with their post-totalitarian wariness of all extreme ideas, are the only culture that leans toward a "no."  When America is labeled backwards in relation to Europe, the issue almost always comes down to America's continued willingness to grapple with contrasts in ethical extremes.  In less-developed nations it isn't about willingness; the factors of limited means make it an absolute requirement.  The European slant sidesteps ethical decisions by declaring an underlying balance and unity of ethics which is still stuck on a form of the idealism that feeds totalitarianism.

America at large, long freed from philosophical idealism, nonetheless turns ideas into cartoons ("tradition", as referenced by James above).  Literally: the canonization of King means that all good school children learn all good things about him, including in their cartoon books.  The cartoon is that King was Good (and Malcolm was Bad).  Somewhere, there is probably a cartoon that he went potty when his Mommy told him to.  No one wants their children to imitate King literally: tilting at windmills in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, selected specifically because he was young and didn't know any better, copying someone else's homework.  We Americans tend to sidestep the question of how wisdom comes from the unbalanced, attempting to isolate out wisdom while burying the questions of ethical difference and ethical failure.  This leads to the absurdities of snake-oil televangelists and their followings.  If you saw a flash of genius, the next step is to bury your head in the sand about the snake-oil.  Sometimes it means you end a racist institution.  Sometimes it means you pay for someone else's castle and vat of mascara.

My own thinking has been to view spiritual leadership with suspicion.  Prior to my encounter with James' argument that the role is different from the role of citizen or philosopher, or politician, I considered the role dangerous to the individual.  The way I saw it a good person (a good citizen, a sound philosopher, given to being a good theologian) sometimes found himself called to spiritual leadership.  Accepting the call did bad things to people; it made them bad citizens.  A person who took the role outside of an established religious institutional structure was in even more grave danger.  James suggests that the person will find themself in the role because they are already unbalanced.  My error was one of philosophical idealism- that all existential roles are fundamentally the same.

Given these common errors, Obama's speech on race was not just sane, but remarkably sane.  He starts by asserting the argument for political genius, as bland as that may be: unity, unity, unity.  The politician has a different job, and ethical challenge is not it.  Think of Roosevelt's fireside chats.  Balance.  Stability.  Obama, as a civilian in the world of spiritual genius and as a politician, is required to divide Wright's statements into good/bad and this he does.  Here he fails somewhat- he isn't clear about the existential divide between his own locus of judgment and that of Wright, but this is a political speech and not a philosophical treatise.

His sanity is that he refuse to label Wright as Good or Bad.  Wright is familiar to him, and in that familiarity Obama has been spiritually inspired.  But he also places Wright's excesses at a distance.  He judges, not as the European disdainer of religious genius judges and not as the American snake-oil viewer judges, but with honest judgment rooted in the reality of his experience.

Without intending to, Obama's speech draws focus on the absurdity of the spiritual leader gone politician.  These are two separate roles.  Obama speaks of Wright's sermon in terms of "mistake" and it would be mistake- if he were a politician.  But in terms of evangelism and a call to repentance in the tradition of the Old Testament and the words of John the Baptist in the New, Wright was spot on.  This is what Obama said:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society.  It's that he spoke as if our society were static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country... is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.  But what we know-- what we have seen-- is that America can change.  That is true genius of this nation [sic].  What we have already achieved gives us hope-- the audacity to hope-- for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

Obama is a politician.  Repentance is not his game; the future is.  Wright is part of the meaningful discourse that has influenced Obama, but Obama must make different judgments.

Back to the question of whether these odd ducks can impart any wisdom.  I think the answer is: not directly.  We make a mistake when we expect them directly feed wisdom into our minds and our hearts.  Across America this morning, legions of Christians have walked into their churches, notebooks at the ready, expecting to get direct advice on how to live.  Run-of-the-mill preachers, imparting tradition and providing solid leadership, are going to step up to the pulpit and give it.  That is a valuable continuation of social norms and stability, but it is not spiritual genius.

Spiritual geniuses do not impart wisdom by direction, but rather by inspiration.  Where they provide direction, they create tradition.  Fox with his Quakers, Wesley with his Methodists, Smith with his Mormons.  These men purposefully created institutions, but institutions pass on tradition rather than genius.  Spiritual genius is not passed on, but rather interacted with.  At best, the institutions create a environment where the spark of genius may survive from generation to generation.  Obama is not meant to model his forward-facing politics on his Rev. Wright, but rather have it informed by Wright's calls to repentance.

Human growth requires an input from outside the models that we have already nurtured and established.  I already have an idea what my ethics are and what my ideals are for most humane lifestyle.  Continuing to interact only with what I see as balanced approaches to ethics and lifestyle isn't going to change anything.  As James wrote, "It will profit us little..."  I may not go in for the instability, I certainly don't want the crowd-at-large to turn to instability (really the number one reason some would like to duct-tape Wright's mouth shut- "It isn't that I'm too stupid to be allowed to hear him, but you might be."), but institutions are going to teach us nothing.

When Obama portrays Wright as the sometimes embarrassing uncle, I think he has made the correct judgment about how you or I should interact with the spiritual genius that we encounter.  Close, but not too close.  In the interaction with instability I will shift my stability.  James would say that I continue to create my own individual interaction with divinity, an interaction which must be made and not copied.

P.S.

Where the topic is prejudice and complexity, I always have to bring up The Nature of Prejudice by Gordon Allport.  My opinion is that this book should be required-reading for every high school student.  I just learned today that both King and Malcolm X were also fans of the book.

Barry Saunders, a Raleigh News & Observer columnist who frequently comments on race and what I shall call (with absurd formality given the context of his columns) "the Black experience," had an excellent column on the flap over Wright.

To see how intellectually vacant, morally flat-footed, and in some cases utterly failing in courage the cartoon response to this question is, you can unfortunately do no worse than today's Sunday Forum (a kind of expanded letters-to-the-editor) "What to make of Obama and his pastor" in the Raleigh News & Observer.

Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story

While wandering Barnes & Noble to pick up Notes from Underground (previously discussed on this blog), I picked up a copy of Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story by Rachel Kadish.  The book was written with much support from the fiction awards, prizes & fellowships structure.  But what caught my attention is that the book is meant to be about a belief in happiness.

One of the other things the novel must face is a belief in the novel itself.  In the new millennium, how do you are write something meaningful when the culture is skeptical whether there is anything meaningful to be written?  Or, as Kadish has her character think about falling in love:

How are you supposed to conduct yourself when you believe you've had some kind of soul connection with a stranger, but-- being a modern rather than a character in a nineteenth-century play-- you are still have to suffer the petty indignities of dating?  Indignities about which you are, as a habit, skeptical? (p. 59)

The reader has picked up this awarded & fellowshipped author rather than a simple romance novel because, actually, really, you don't believe the romance formula.  And yet for the formula to work, you secretly do have to believe in it.  The disappointment of the girl-loses-guy turn cannot be completely expected; you had indeed been hoping for something else.  It is impossible that this attempt at love wasn't good enough.

Love is real... And it is impossible in this world. (p. 253)

Such is the thought that crosses the heroine's mind.  I'll leave it to the reader reaching the end of the book to find out if she was right or not.  (Meanwhile, for more on the romance novel formula, I suggest this essay from the Raleigh News & Observer by the author of the blog Breakfast with Pandora.)

The heroine is a literature professor, and along with the romance-formula for the man in her life, she and a student she labels "the canary in the coal mine" also follow the same ups-and-downs in their love for literature.  The emotional turmoil and perils-to-career being more hazardous for the canary, of course.  Some wisdom about the hazards of love comes early in the novel:

...don't pursue love against the interest of your own health, like an addict in need of a fix. (p. 12)

Advice about love, of various quality and from various sources, weaves through the rest of the novel.  The heroine is attentive, shocked, dismayed, uncertain.  Developing certainty for herself is of course part of the chick lit formula, and in this book it weaves through both love stories.  Developing certainty in the ability to obtain happiness, and how to do it, was of course advertised as the main theme of the book and culminates in a good essay on courage.  (For more on courage, I highly recommend Courage: A Philosophical Investigation by Douglas N. Walton, which is no longer in print and will have to be found at your local university library.)

Being a woman of my era, I expect the heroine to find happiness in her certainty.  Chick lit is about kicking romantic concessions to the curb.  Being a woman of philosophy, I expect happiness to be detached from the happenstance of events and made to stand on its own.  I don't know what is required to write The Novel That Matters, but I know one thing is that it must be true.  This novel is not true; it a takes a fairy godmother to wrap it up in a bow.  The bow, alas, says, "turn of this century chick lit," not "Truth."  It almost seems as if that is all the novel could possibly be: very good.

And it is very good.  Nearly every paragraph, page after page of them, present a fresh and creative idea or view of the world.  Even her sex scenes are fresh, without delving into originality of the prurient sort.  I myself have doubts about the continued Progress Of The Novel, where Thomas Pynchon-level (mentioned in the book) strangeness seems to be required to do anything original.  The high level of quality of this book, which none the less doesn't quite get there, makes me feel even more dark about that particular subject.

Meanwhile, the subject of Anna Karenina must be addressed.  The title Tolstoy Lied of course refers to the opening lines of Anna Karenina:

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

I have to admit it has been more than 10 years since I read the book.  (The novel, by the way, assumes that you have read the book, just like it guesses you may have read Pynchon, but you won't miss anything if you haven't.)  I did make reference to it in the letter I wrote to my church releasing my ex-husband from certain religious obligations to me.  As I remember it, Anna Karenina is not an indictment of hope, but an indictment of cruelty.  In my letter, I was making a commitment to avoid being cruel.

Each character in Anna Karenina is free to find happiness in the circumstances of his and her life; there is the Truth in the book.  Happiness, in that novel and in life, isn't about a fairy grandmother giving you what you want; it is the one thing a person can create their own certainty about in a world where nothing else is certain, indeed, where everything else seems to be anarchy.  It is perhaps the brilliance of that novel that it can illustrate this fact without actually showing it.

After all of that, my advice is this: read Tolstoy Lied on the plane.  This fellowshipped and awarded woman is a lovely writer and deserves for you to buy her book.  Read Anna Karenina with the tea and the cat: you deserve to read about an unhappiness that is real, and see the reality of happiness that lurks in those shadows.

*PS: Thinking over this novel keeps turning my mind to the lyrics of the Garbage song, "Sex Is Not the Enemy." Youtube here.  It's a tangent, but at several different angles.

And here a link to a blog post and many more links about Tolstoy Lied.  The amazon link at the beginning of the post contains a very good review from Publishers Weekly.

Easter, Ongoing

My Easter Day started on a very Emerson note at my Dad's cattle ranch on the Central Coast of California.  My Dad drove me away from the ranch house, out the canyon and up the neighboring canyon until I was eight miles away from the ranch by road.  The route had me walk past a Sunrise service, set up in a pasture.  Following the service one of the celebrants found an abandoned car further up the canyon than I had walked and turned back to ask me if I was okay or if I needed anything.  We'll leave it to Emerson's ghost to determine whether she was motivated by sunlight on wildflowers, or her pastor's words, or simply because she was a good and kind person no matter what.

Our household for the day was myself, my Dad, my Dad's girlfriend Betsy, and a mentally handicapped woman named Louise that Betsy had befriended at some point in the past and had sprung from the group-home for the weekend.  Louise was overcome by the magic that had been created that morning- an Easter basket that had appeared overnight and the beautiful Easter table that had been set by Betsy.  Louise is somewhat lost in her own world, creating conversations between herself and herself, most of which focus her beloved Beatles and Monkeys.  She has plenty of CDs and DVDs of each, provided through the kindness of the near stranger who has now been her friend for many years, and after the enthusiasm of the morning wained she returned to her principle pleasures.

My Mom died a few years ago, with each of the two household dogs dieing immediately before and after her, leaving my father in a house full of history but devoid of almost all living things.  For the table, Besty had set out many of my Mom's most beautiful things and added a few of her own.  She told me that before an event such as this dinner she has to say, "Thank you Susie!" for having everything she could need or want there in the house.  For lunch we had added two married couples, each friends of my Dad and of Betsy.  One couple hadn't seen me in a while and asked after my husband, no longer a member of my own household.  I told them he wasn't my husband any more.  I told them the history of my Mom's things.

I had to leave after lunch.  I'm driving to San Francisco, and tomorrow I'll be flying back to the East Coast for work.  I've stopped at a Starbucks to write this post.  The sunshine is out and I'm not at the ranch and I'm not on the road with time to spare to stop at some of the sights along the way.  I've cut a little bit out of the middle of my experience of the day to write this post and communicate with the people I care about and anyone else who cares to read what I write.

The world is not perfect.  People misunderstand a beautiful morning walk for a mishap in the wilderness, perpetually innocent women are left without family, people who thought they knew enough to know how their lives would play out find themselves living very different lives.  But with some kindness, and with some appreciation for the kindness of those strangers that may choose to be our family rather than strangers (or perhaps we will choose them!), that which is broken in the world can seem not fixed, but just right the way it is.

I'll be getting back on the 101 in a moment to continue my drive.  Today my hope is not that I have fixed anything, or that there is anyone out there on the road or on the internet to fix me.  My hope is that the broken world is good, that if I forget how good it is there will be kindness there to light the way, and that I will be kind enough that the world will be good for someone else.

Easter Table, set by Betsy.