Lessons from Abroad

The following essay comes from a discussion about the nature of healthcare policy in the United States.  I started out wanting to talk about healthcare, and wound up addressing the entire Spanish economy as an illustration of problems we deal with in healthcare, education, employment, and government--i.e. economic and politics generally.

My personal feeling is that the USA is simply too large to have a coherent, consistent public health agenda that extends nationwide. Europe benefits from smaller administrative regions, with more homogeneous culture(s). In my experience, Europe is a gated community built to exclude outsiders (who respond by seeking to replace rather than assimilate: immigrants from the Third World do not become French, or Spanish, or Scandinavian, by and large). America is the opposite (though we keep trying to repent and become more European; unfortunately, we need cheap labor, too).

When I was living in Spain, there were serious political movements in every place I stayed whose central goal was complete autonomy. I did not meet a single population in northern Spain (over two years, I lived in these provinces: Castilla y Leon, Galicia, Vizcaya) without a significant minority who wanted nothing to do with Spain or Madrid. Some parties even wanted autonomy for smaller regions (there was a party that wanted to get Castilla out of Leon). People grew up in small regions, in neighborhoods where they could point to the house their great-grandparents occupied (which often as not was a cottage predating modern civilization). There was a very strong trend to shut the world out, to suspect "growth" and "progress" as cloaking devices for "rape" and "pillage," and to distrust outsiders permanently (because they are not from here, they do not know this place, they will take our stuff and make good with it somewhere else, somewhere we cannot follow). In America, I can move thousands of miles to a neighborhood where people have never seen me before, and the common reaction is, "Hello! Welcome to the block!" In Europe (Spain anyway), this reaction is still there (particularly if I am talking to foreigners or people who live in the city), but it is supplemented by another: "You're not from around here? Fuck you! Go back where you came from. We don't need foreign shit. It is hard enough to deal with all our own."

Everything is different (healthcare, economics, religion) in areas where people have deep-seated distrust of the novel, the foreign, the unusual. America thrives on imagining the novel optimistically: "This new treatment could work wonders for me! I might survive this illness and even come out stronger than before!" In my experience, Europeans imagine it pessimistically: "This new treatment is probably going to make me die even faster than I was already, smoking two packs a day. Fuck it, and the white horse it rode in on." My experience is colored by the reality that I have never lived in the "really cool Europe" that American Leftists like to gush over. While I met plenty of German, Dutch, and Scandinavian tourists (who were invariably tall, healthy, and very articulate in English), the local populations I met were Iberian (short, not so healthy sometimes, and incomprehensible in English). I know that Spain is not Germany, or Holland, or Sweden (or Finland: man, I love that place, though it does have a rather high suicide rate for being so awesome in so many other ways). If there is anything I learn from my limited experience with Europe, it is that poor people (in particular) do better trusting authority and novelty less. The less we aim at "wealth" (move to a big city, get a nice job and a fancy-ass house, settle down) and the more we aim at "competence" (move to a quiet place, acquire skills that make any particular job unnecessary, and live in the cheapest hovel you can afford)--the happier we will be.

Happy Spaniards knew their neighborhoods (their grocer, their doctor, their teachers), and were busy building those neighborhoods themselves--they did not trust you to come in and fix them. Even when your motives were entirely pure and you had no evil track record, they wanted you out of the way so that they could keep planting and building what they wanted, not what you wanted to give them. My purpose living in Spain, as readers of this blog know, was offering folks a chance to become Mormons. Needless to say, that did not go over very well. But I learned a lot--including two really important things about myself: I am a terrible salesman, and I hate sales. I did not sell the Spanish on Mormonism, but they certainly sold me on hating sales. That visceral distrust and dislike of advertising is something I think Americans could stand to learn.

To end this interminable comment en pointe: the official policies coming from Madrid make Spain sound like utopia (or at least, like France): free healthcare, job security, political democracy, etc. But the reality on the ground is rather different. You see, making this utopia real requires more economic strength than the nation has (leading some of the least economically depressed regions, e.g. Catalunya and Vizcaya, to produce large numbers of citizens who openly, loudly, and even militantly desire to secede from Spain). This is because there is a high ceiling for legal employment (meaning that employers and the state together have to be able to guarantee healthcare, wages, votes, and acceptable living conditions to legally employed persons, such as I was during my stay). But crap jobs still need to be done, so as we do in America, the Spanish hire foreign slaves (Africans and South Americans, and some Eastern Europeans)--who are willing and able to work for pennies that people have as opposed to the euros that dreamers (officials, humanitarians, managers, EU bureaucrats, Spanish bureaucrats) want to give them. There is this perverse dynamic at play whereby native Spanish youth have nothing to do (employing them would be exploitation, i.e. illegal and punishable as a criminal offense), so they must sit around on the street and in their parents' basements collecting pensions from the state (mostly; it occasionally cannot pay!) while Africans, Arabs, native Americans (many from Ecuador and Colombia), Bulgarians, and Albanians keep everything running for wages. The Spanish folk in my age bracket, while I was there (as a 19-, 20-, and 21-year-old) spent most of their time walking around town, smoking, making out in street-corners, getting drunk, playing video games or watching TV, and harassing people like me. Were they better off than I, health-wise, job-wise, education-wise (tuition was cheap)? In some ways, yes. In others, no. 

On Prophets

A prophet is simply a spokesperson (προφήτης).  Historically, spokesmen for divinity divide pragmatically into two predictable groups: (1) the divine spokesperson who speaks for some human establishment or institution (the Sanhedrin, the Synod, Senatus populusque Romanus, the LDS church, Harvard); (2) the divine spokesperson who speaks for him- or herself, and for humanity outside any particular establishment or institution (Amos, Jesus, Cato, self-appointed Mormon apologists, rogue academics).  The two kinds of prophet have a history of fighting one another tooth and nail, with the establishment predictably winning battles (Jesus is killed) only to lose wars (when the response to their crackdown is the foundation of a new establishment dedicated to preserve the memory of a martyred prophet).  The new establishment relatively quickly becomes everything it claims to loathe in the old establishment (read Mormon writings on the Great Apostasy and then compare the modern Mormon establishment with Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox establishments: from the metaphorical 30,000-foot view, they are virtually the same in terms of how they relate to outsiders and insiders via bureaucratic process).  The original sin of fallen prophets or their followers, it would seem, is that they found a church to entrain, contain, and disseminate in some controlled fashion that which is fundamentally unstable, unentrainable, uncontainable, and beyond institutional human control.

We need communities, of course.  But these communities will not be managed (not for long at least) by visionaries who speak meaningfully for interests outside the community.  To lead a community is, historically, to shut oneself off to the world, to commit oneself to a position that cannot be changed easily, to become fragile (and make others fragile as a means of protecting the fragility one has discovered by incorporating as a community with explicit procedures for life).  Caiaphas is the leader of your community, semper et ubique.  He is not always a bad dude, viciously or maliciously punishing people who shouldn't be punished.  He is legitimately a prophet.  He is a punitive prophet, a conservative stick-in-the-mud who pulls society back from the wild ideas of anti-establishment prophets (who are also dangerous, though not the same way he is).

Outside the community or on its fringes, we get another kind of prophet.  Jesus does not write books.  He does not live by protocol (until he visits the temple or the city, where he makes a good show of paying tithes and taxes--and occasionally busts some heads, when he finds the establishment cheating flagrantly at its own game).  He does not have a church.  He does not aim to exist in history, but in eternity: the atemporal present wherein individuals become aware of themselves confronting a unique and personal mystery--that I exist, inexplicably, and there is something else out there around and with and through me, something larger than I am that has the power to mould my life in interesting ways.  Communities, history, taxes, bureaucratic process: Jesus dispenses with these things (necessary and helpful as they are, for the down-to-earth inhabitants of this world).  "My kingdom is not of this world," he says, deliberately abandoning church, country, and even the family to live naked before his Father in the wilderness (fasting and praying and being generally useless or even detrimental to the community, from Caiaphas' perspective). 

When too many people follow Jesus into the wilderness, bad things can happen: society might collapse entirely, or (what more often happens) the check Jesus provides on community values (traditional values) may be lost--as Caiaphas moves into the desert without leaving the world behind.  "We can build heaven on earth here with you, Jesus.  We can make it an external, communal experience.  We can deliver it to groups through an organized, efficient process of education that I will oversee carefully."  Wrong.  There is no church of Christ.  Paul, the Christian missionary to the West, was just another Caiaphas.  He was building community, not running away into the wilderness to commune with God and then speak to friends.  The paradox of Jesus is that the gospel must be preached without ever being established.  You cannot put new wine in old bottles, and even when you put new wine in new bottles, it ages (and becomes old, i.e. other than it was).  As Caiaphas runs the risk of being a vindictive, reactive stick-in-the-mud, so Jesus runs the risk of being a cheerful onlooker to the collapse of human civilization (which requires rules and procedures and tradition that is communal and so at some point antithetical to the prophetic gospel he embodies).

At the end of the day, all prophets are dangerous--for they are human beings, and carry within themselves the seeds of mortality.  We are all going to die at some point.  We are all going to do things on the way to death.  At some point, all of us will embrace or avoid tradition in ways that are dangerous.  There is no way to "fix" this, no way to make death go away (or become innocuous).  Integrity is something we seek as we embrace mortality, our own and that of the species (collectively).  No individual is made to last, just as no community is.  Integrity exists as we seek and discover the means to negotiate this reality with dignity and respect that looks both inward (to ourselves and the mystery of life as we perceive it) and outward (to other people and the mystery of life as it appears to communities).  We need Jesus and Caiaphas, and both are prophets.  But neither one will save us from death: nobody and nothing can do that.  The only way to deal with death is to die.  Die well, my friends! 

Apocalypse

Chris Hedges.  War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.  New York: Perseus, 2002.  ISBN: 1586480499.

This is a sobering book, packed with insightful observations of the human condition at its worst.  Hedges writes from the perspective of a seasoned war journalist, well aware of all that his job entails (especially the evil).  Here are several passages that really struck me.  Even though the first is quite long, an extended reflection on war built around anecdotes from modern conflicts (especially the Persian Gulf War), it is worth quoting entire (pp. 146-150).

It is hard, maybe impossible, to fight a war if the cause is viewed as bankrupt. The sanctity of the cause is crucial to the war effort. The state spends tremendous time protecting, explaining, and promoting the cause. And some of the most important cheerleaders of the cause are the reporters. This is true in nearly every war. During the Gulf War, as in the weeks after the September attacks, communities gathered for vigils and worship services. The enterprise of the state became imbued with a religious aura. We, even those in the press, spoke in the collective. And because we in modern society have walked away from institutions that stand outside the state to find moral guidance and spiritual direction, we turn to the state in times of war. The state and the institutions of state become, for many, the center of worship in wartime. To expose the holes in the myth is to court excommunication.

Edmund Dene Morel, the British crusader against Belgian atrocities in the Congo, denounced World War I as madness. He argued that through a series of treaties kept secret from Parliament and the public, Britain had become caught up in the senseless and tragic debacle. His fight against the war saw mobs break up his meetings with stink bombs and his banners ripped down. He finally could not rent a hall. His friends deserted him. Police raided his office and his home. The wartime censor banned some of his writings. He was flooded with hate mail. The government finally jailed him in 1917. It was only after 8.5 million dead and 21 million wounded that he was proven correct--the treaties did indeed exist. The war was a needless waste. But by then the myth of the war was no longer needed, since the fighting had ended.

The moral certitude of the state in wartime is a kind of fundamentalism. And this dangerous messianic brand of religion, one where self-doubt is minimal, has come increasingly to color the modern world of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, used to tell us that we would end our careers fighting an ascendant fundamentalist movement, or as he liked to say, "the Christian fascists." He was not a scholar to be disregarded, however implausible such a scenario seemed at the time. There is a danger of a growing fusion between those in the state who wage war--both for and against modern states--and those who believe they understand and can act as agents for God.

History is awash with beleaguered revolutionaries and lunatic extremists who were endowed with enough luck and enough ruthlessness to fill power vacuums. The danger is not that fundamentalism will grow so much as that modern, secular society will wither. Already mainstream Christianity, Judaism, and Islam lie defeated and emasculated by the very forces that ironically turned them into tolerant, open institutions. In the event of massive and repeated terrorist strikes or an environmental catastrophe, an authoritarian state church could rise ascendant within American democracy. The current battle between us and our Islamic radical foes can only increase the reach of these groups.

But whether the impetus is ostensibly secular or religious, the adoption of the cause means adoption of the language of the cause. When we speak within the confines of this language we give up our linguistic capacity to question and make moral choices.

The cause is unassailable, wrapped in the mystery reserved for the divine. Those who attempt to expose the fabrications and to unwrap the contradictions of the cause are left isolated and reviled. We did not fight the Persian Gulf War to liberate Kuwait, but to ensure that we would continue to have cheap oil. But oil is hardly a cause that will bring crowds into the street.

I was with young Islamic militants in a Cairo slum a few weeks after the war. They no longer attended the state school because their families did not have the money to hire teachers to tutor them. The teachers, desperate for a decent income, would not let students pass unless they paid. These militants spent their days at the mosque. They saw the Persian Gulf War for what it was, a use of force by a country that consumed 25 percent of the world's petrol to protect its access to cheap oil. The message to them was this: We have everything and if you try to take it away from us we will kill you. It was not a message I could dispute.

We allied ourselves with some of the most despotic regimes in the region during the war, including the Syrians, who sponsor an array of terrorist groups. Damascus demanded $3 billion as the price for sending its troops to support the war effort. The morning the invasion began, I traveled with a Marine detachment past the Syrian soldiers. They were drinking tea. They waved us forward. None of them ever saw any fighting. We did not see Syrian soldiers again until they were passed through our lines after the combat was over so they, and our other Arab allies, could "liberate" Kuwait City. The ecological devastation to the region, the fact that Saddam Hussein remained in power to slaughter thousands of Shiites who rebelled with our encouragement against his regime and then were abandoned by us to their fate, the gross corruption and despotism of the Kuwaiti rulers, who did not move back to Kuwait City until their opulent palaces were refurbished, were minor footnotes to a stage-managed tale of triumph. As in most conflicts, the war, as presented to the public, was fantasy.

When those who commit crimes do so in the name of a cause, they often come to terms with the crimes through an ersatz moral relativism. Facts are trimmed, used, and become as interchangeable as opinions. The Muslims may say the Serbs shelled the marketplace in Sarajevo while the Serbs may say that the Muslims fired shells on their own citizens there to garner international support. Both opinions, if one sits in a cafe in Belgrade, may be valid. Both the facts and the opinions become a celebration of ignorance, and more ominously, a refusal to discredit the cause that has eaten away at one's moral conscience.

Destruction of honest inquiry, the notion that one fact is as good as the next, is one of the most disturbing consequences of war. The prosecution of war entails lying, often on a massive scale--something most governments engage in but especially when under the duress of war. The Serbs who were eventually able to admit that atrocities were carried out in their name explained away the crimes by saying that everyone did this in war. The same was true among the elite and the military in El Salvador. All could match an atrocity carried out by our side with an atrocity carried out by the enemy. Atrocity canceled out atrocity.

Hannah Arendt noted this attitude in Germany after World War II, calling it "nihilistic relativism." She believed it was a legacy of Nazi propaganda, which, unlike that of non-totalitarian states, was based on the concept that all facts could and would be altered and all Nazi lies should be made to appear true. Reality became a conglomerate of changing circumstances and slogans that could be true one day and false the next.

Illusions punctuate our lives, blinding us to our own inconsistencies and repeated moral failings. But in wartime these illusions are compounded. The cause, the protection of the nation, the fight to "liberate Kuwait" or wage "a war on terrorism," justifies the means. We dismantle our moral universe to serve the cause of war. And once it is dismantled it is nearly impossible to put it back together. It is very hard for most of us to see the justice of the other side, to admit that we too bear guilt. When we are asked to choose between truth and contentment, most of us pick contentment.

In these pages, I feel that Hedges touches all the problems that define my personal struggle to exist in society as a moral individual, somebody with real moral integrity.  His rhetoric comes from physical battlefields, where people kill and dismember each other in the flesh, but it applies also to metaphorical battlefields, where fanatics wage "culture wars" to kill and dismember the souls of people whose existence makes them uncomfortable (for reasons that are usually specious).  I grew up rather close to the Christian fascism that Hedges mentions, hearing a lot of talk as a youth about my duty to wage war with the devil--and "the world" (meaning people with no affinity for the particular brand of fascism I was meant to identify with the will and cause of God).  I was told that the devil would use "the world" to destroy me, that I had to band together with God's faithful to resist him--with money, labor, votes, whatever God's generals wanted.

As a trusting kid, I gave those generals everything they asked.  I took my marching orders, and I went to the battlefront (or "the mission field," as it is also called).  There I saw everything Hedges describes--less immediately and awfully revolting, but revolting nonetheless.  I saw that "the world" were mostly just people like me--fools following orders, idiots trying their best to make sense of the mess that is human society, and (yes) a few malicious criminals playing the fools against the idiots to get power and swag. I saw people condemned to hell-on-earth by God.  I saw them redeemed by the devil (and "the world").  I saw families ruined by specious "defenses of marriage" (which somehow required me to attack all the intimate human relationships that God's generals disliked, for reasons that amount to nothing objectively defensible: I know this because I tried to defend them--to good people, to myself, with words and deeds of integrity, words and deeds I could not and cannot find).  The immediate outcome of this experience was that I became alienated from Christian fanaticism.  The long-term outcome is that I am permanently alienated from human society on the large scale.  I mistrust all institutions too big to treat me, and individual people like me, as having more than statistical significance.

My experiences with religion led me to disaffiliate with organized churches on the large scale.  I can join small groups of people doing work I believe in.  I cannot and will not join a world-wide church (or movement).  I do not believe in world-wide movements as offering on balance more reward than risk, more good than evil.  I also disaffiliate with political movements on the large scale.  I will support politicians to whom I might matter as an individual.  I will not support factions (Left or Right, Republican or Democrat, communist or fascist).  There is a certain amount of calm that comes with this resolution of mine, a resolution that has some integrity.  But that calm is undercut by the realization that worldwide movements exist and use me, even when I wish to depart from them permanently and absolutely.  I am too weak still to take the road trodden by Diogenes of Sinope, and others whose attitude toward society (in the collective) I admire.  I aspire to be a good person--not a good Mormon, or a good Christian, or a good American, or a good capitalist, or a good global citizen (unless that is something I do by refusing to recognize any meaningful collective as acting for all people everywhere).

To the extent that I do participate still in society at large, I recognize that I am complicit in all kinds of political crime (that Hedges writes about in his book) and religious thuggery (that I write about on this blog).  I don't believe there is any way to exist in society at large without leaving a messy footprint, unfortunately.  I try to balance the evil I cause (when I must rely on large corporations in society) with good (that I do with small groups of people close to me), but I fear it is not enough (and never will be).  I have at last come to the place where the lines of the lyric poet Theognis (425-8 Gerber; Bible-readers should compare this with Ecclesiastes 4:3) make sense to me--become something I might think, feel, and say for myself:

Πάντων μὲν μὴ φῦναι ἐπιχθονίοισιν ἄριστον
    μηδ᾽ ἐσιδεῖν αὐγὰς ὀξέος ἠελίου,
φύντα δ᾽ ὅπως ὤκιστα πύλας Ἀΐδαο περῆσαι
    καὶ κεῖσθαι πολλὴν γῆν ἐπαμησάμενον.

This brings me to my other citations from Hedges:

It has been rare in every war I have covered to find a reporter who did not take sides. I believed--and still do--that in Bosnia and El Salvador, there were victims and oppressors in the conflict. But along with this acknowledgement comes for many a disturbing need to portray the side they back in their own self-image. The leftist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the rebels in El Salvador, the African National Congress, the Muslim-led government in Sarajevo, or the opposition in Serbia were all endowed with the qualities they did not possess. The Christian ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr warned us that moral choice is not between the moral and the immoral, but between the immoral and the less immoral (p. 144).

"I, too, belong to this species," J. Glenn Gray wrote. "I am ashamed not only of my own deeds, not only of my nation's deeds, but of human deeds as well. I am ashamed to be a man" (p. 176).

To be a human being, it seems to me, is to be a dangerous animal. We need certain things in order to live.  To put it simply, we need death. Something must always die so that we may live, and the inevitable outcome of that reality is that we create evil. We embody evil. It is not something separable from our entity. It is precisely the same, in purely material terms, as the good we embody. If I am not careful, my love (of humanity, of God, of justice, of family and friends) becomes hatred (of humans unlike me, of others' gods or the devil, of injustice, of my tribe's enemies).  Even if I am impassive, resisting the transformation of love into hatred, others must still die so that I (or the collective I associate with) may live.  Plants, animals, bugs, ecosystems, and other people.  They will all die to support me, sooner or later, until it is my turn to die for them.  That is Nature's way (or God's or the devil's or whatever: they are all the same to me).

The moral dilemma in all this mess, as Niebuhr recognizes, is not to find good and maximize it.  It is to find evil and make it as small as possible--without eliminating it entirely, because that would destroy humanity.  God and the devil are really the same, it turns out.  We cannot have one without the other.  Love implies--creates, demands, is even--hatred, or at least indifference.  This remains true even when we deliberately set out to love all things.  "I love all things, including all those things that just died because I wanted to go on living."  We might feel justified in such love.  It might improve our quality of life.  But it does not change the reality that that life is built from death, death in which we remain complicit as long as we live.

If you are not the sort of person to care about this kind of thing, on an emotional level anyway, that is fine.  I have always felt somewhat guilty for existing, I confess.  I was inclined to read Theognis, even before I had learned to feel the pessimism and cynicism he expresses so eloquently.  I felt the evil of man early in my heart, and my experience in the world has confirmed my fear that human good is also evil.  I still love humanity--and myself, too.  I just cannot join the choruses of people working to fight terror (politically), to defend marriage (socially and religiously), to educate us all in the one true path to virtue, etc.  I believe that all such endeavors are fundamentally evil, and that that evil compounds awfully as movements gain traction in society--spreading from small groups to large factions like a deadly plague.  I hate it when people find me with some cause, political or economic or social or religious (they are all the same), and invite me to join the mob.  "Solidarity!" They cry.  "Let's all get in this together!"  My soul abhors this, the wild abandon with which we throw ourselves into the latest lemming charge--as though the past never happened, as though we know nothing of our condition as social animals (and indeed, many of us are clueless, naive in a way that is cute when we aren't heavily armed and full of deadly moral conviction).

"What keeps this misanthrope in society?" the reader might legitimately wonder.  "Is he a hypocrite as well as a miserable wretch?"  I stay for many reasons.  My family.  My friends.  Inertia.  My aptitudes and frailty (I have no love for death, no Stoic conviction as strong as that of Cato the Younger, and I lack the means to survive without civilization).  There is also art:

All great works of art find their full force in those moments when the conventions of the world are stripped away and we confront our weakness, vulnerability, and mortality. For learning, in the end, meant little to writers like Shakespeare unless it translated into human experience.

"As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary," Proust wrote. "It becomes dangerous, on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place" (p. 91).

I love life, even though it is sometimes an awful thing.  I love it, though its fabric is woven with death.  I do not desire life without end, life without death, heaven without hell, etc., for I know now that such a thing is impossible (for gods as well as men: I speak here of the life and death known to men, of course, not some life and death too remote from our experience to mean anything to us).  I desire merely to paint the best little portrait I can with the life I have, a life made of death, a life that some will legitimately hate or ignore, though I love it.  I desire to make my life and death a work of art, something that points to realities beyond me that I will never fully comprehend (realities that we point to vaguely with words like love, virtue, integrity, health, work, and even divinity or justice).  I don't want to force others to live my life.  I don't want the death that builds my life to arise in conditions where it is unwanted (though I know beings have died unwilling to keep me alive thus far, and they will do so again: still I will that my life be built of willing deaths, and I will that my own death find me eager for it; I want to give myself back to the world as ransom for all that I have taken from it). So I remain a man among men, an active participant in society, even though I can never again embrace any society (anytime, anywhere) as purely good (or just or fair or divine, etc.).

I love the process of making mistakes, even though these are sometimes catastrophic, and then struggling to overcome them.  I love combining the thoughts of other writers with my own personal experience, and then seeing what comes out--even when that is not always what I want or expect.  I love striving for virtue, even when I fail to achieve it, sometimes even when I see good reason to deem it unachievable (in certain domains).  I see how this love of mine is similar to the alcoholic's love of whiskey.  Let him die of his poison, and I will die of mine.  I wish us both happy, but not so bent on happiness that we die killing one another.  Better to die doing what we love than to waste time trying to convince the other to be like us.  He isn't, and he never will be.  Let him be, and make art of your own life, not his.  Muérete jodido, como quieras, sin joder al mundo entero, como haría un santo o un demonio.

My Mormon Mission

Jesus wants me for a salesman,
To shill for him each day,
In every way try to pimp him
At home, at school, no play!

A salesman, a salesman!
Jesus wants me for a salesman!
A salesman, a salesman!
I'll make my quota each day!

When Mormon youth reach social majority, they usually go out and spend two years (or 18 months if they are female) "serving a mission" in some place remote from their home.  This activity is a right of passage for Mormons, for young men especially, and is often described as "the best two years" of a good Mormon life--a kind of palate-cleanser between childhood and adulthood that prepares the young to find their way from naive incapability into mature responsibility.  This essay represents my latest thoughts on my own mission experience, about which I have very mixed feelings.  I definitely learned many valuable lessons from my mission, lessons that I carry with me to this day as a kind of treasure that I am very grateful to possess.  Some of these lessons were a joy to learn (and I carry them fondly to this day).  Others were very painful (and I carry them gingerly to this day).  Here I will try to share a little of them all.

First, the good stuff.  The brethren sent me to northern Spain.  I already spoke Spanish, so I got to spend only three weeks in the Missionary Training Center (in Provo, Utah), heading directly into "the mission field" after I had finished memorizing the six "discussions" that missionaries in my day shared with "investigators" (people interested in learning more about Mormonism).  I was very excited to be visiting a foreign country, and to have something real to do.  During the last leg of my very long flight from Salt Lake City to Bilbao (where my mission president had headquarters), I struck up a conversation, in Spanish, with some guy sitting next to me.  We chit-chatted a bit, and I told him who I was, what I was doing, etc.  He was very nice about it.  I was, too.  I didn't try to pressure him into anything (to make commitments to baptism or reading the Book of Mormon or whatever).  I just told him what I was up to (and felt very flattered when he asked if I was from Bilbao: apparently he was visiting there from the south, and my accent was good enough to pass for native).  Throughout my mission experience, I followed this same pattern: I talked with people.  They would tell me things about themselves, as they pleased, and I would respond by telling them about myself.  I never felt comfortable pushing them to take something from me that I wouldn't take from them.  I think this is an important balance to respect in relating with other people.

I came into my mission with some serious psychological problems.  (Every young person is crazy, right?  Well, I was no exception.)  For years, I had worried more or less constantly that every sexual experience I had might be a sign that the devil finally owned me, that I could not ever serve God or do good in any meaningful way.  The mission helped me a lot with this problem--though I almost didn't go, when I was too afraid to answer questions honestly in the "worthiness interviews" that candidates must have with their local priesthood leaders: I was so afraid my leaders would sense my evil and kick me out of the church.  The mission did much to break me from this fear.  In the first place, it placed me among a cohort of hormonal young men for the first time in my life.  (Unlike most of my fellow missionaries, I did not go to high school.  I stayed home, got a GED, and went straight into college.)  I quickly learned that my sexual experience was tame (and practically nonexistent), comparatively speaking.  If the Lord could not be served by horny lads, then the entire mission was in trouble--and I was somewhere at the bottom of the list of people to worry about: somewhere below the elder who baptized a well-known local prostitute, went home under a cloud of awkward gossip, and then came back to marry her and take her to the US.  God didn't sent that guy straight to hell (far from it: I think he was a district leader), so maybe I was OK.  Besides putting me with peers, the mission also gave me a ton of work, so much that I had little time or energy to waste on the endless soul-searching that I had done before.  I was too exhausted to stay up at night wondering whether I was worthy in the eyes of God.  Instead of praying and crying and debating my next visit to the bishop's office to confess some spurious sin, I was sleeping or working.  Every few months, I would have a slight relapse into guilt (a memory that I should feel bad about something, that I hadn't been confessing much recently, that I still "looked upon women to lust after them," etc.), but these relapses were few and far between--and the pain they caused me was much less than I experienced before I became a missionary.  

Getting out and about in a foreign country was good for me, in many ways.  I met a wide variety of people: poor and rich, immigrants and locals, educated and not, religious and not.  I learned not to judge people prematurely: some of the nicest folks we met were pretty rough on the exterior (like the branch president in the last town where I served, who lived in a ramshackle house surrounded by chicken coops and wore rags around his house; I love that guy).  I learned that people have a very different view of me than I have of myself.  People who considered themselves friendly or hostile to the United States would randomly walk up to me and offer outlandish praise or blame, as though I had something personal to do with whatever American policy they loved or loathed.  Outsiders constantly mistook us for Jehovah's Witnesses, to our mutual consternation--but both faiths are American, rabidly dedicated to proselytizing, and fond of Bible-thumping.  The more I got to know the people in Spain, the more I learned to see myself from their perspective(s).  The more I saw myself from their perspective(s), the more sense their view of me made.  They taught me to look at myself critically, to examine my motives and activity skeptically (why am I asking you to do X? is that a fair request for me to make of you, given our mutual positions, the circumstances that bring us together? am I taking unfair advantage, or vice versa?), to put my feelings aside enough to consider those of people unlike me (as so many of them were). 

I love the people I met in Spain.  I love the guy sitting next to me on the plane in.  I love Courage (his English name), the crazy Nigerian who gave me the scariest car-ride of my life in Bilbao.  On the way to his house, where we met his wife Faith and their little baby Wisdom, we changed lanes with abandon, honked constantly, grazed at least one little old lady (not to mention lots of cars), and never went less than 40 mph (seemingly).  I love Jacinto, a nice old guy from La Coruña who would always talk to us, respectfully and at length, feed us, help us, come to meetings with us, etc., though he had no intention of joining any church.  I love Jairo, who invited us into his home and his church (a very charismatic church from Brazil, in which the gifts of tongues and prophecy were loudly practiced).  I love Felipe, a Venezuelan refugee who took us into his home for Christmas and shared so much with us, though he too had absolutely no interest in Mormonism.  (I can hardly blame him.  The one time we did take him to church, our local members spent the entire time babbling about the Book of Abraham and the necessity of submitting to priesthood hierarchy.  Felipe responded by calling them scribes and Pharisees, quoting the New Testament liberally from memory.)  I love Andrés, the kind old Jesuit who introduced me to the reality that some really good people read scripture allegorically.  I love Juan, who from a chance encounter in a crowded street has become a life-long friend.  I could go on, of course.  I could talk about Daniel (and our visits reading the Book of Mormon back and forth in Spanish and French), about Prince (and his epic trip across the Sahara in a broken-down jeep: he had to bury himself in the sand for a few days and drink his own urine), about Santiago (and his willingness to be baptized, to please us, if only we wouldn't make him give up sex), about José Luis (and his facility with English, unusual for a Spaniard, though his Catholic atheism was par for the course).  There is no way I would ever wish these people out of my life.

Now the bad stuff.  When I became a missionary, I thought I would be helping people improve their lives.  I thought I would be performing a service for them.  I aspired to be a kind of saint or hero (writ small), a person known for his dedication to making the world a better place.  That dream died within six weeks of the day I stepped off the plane in Bilbao.  I quickly realized that I was destined to spend two years annoying the shit out of most people I met--in the church and outside it, as it happened.  My church associates came in three varieties: priesthood leaders with direct authority over me, local church members in the areas where I worked, and fellow missionaries.  Outside the church, I dealt with whatever people crossed my path (or had the misfortune to encounter me knocking doors: there were only so many neighborhoods in the areas where I worked, and most of them were already tracted out before I arrived to confirm for the umpteenth time that José Manuel and Maria Luisa had absolutely no interest in leaving their family, friends, or society to join some crazy American cult).

Inside the church, most of my time was spent attending meetings with mission leadership, meetings during which we missionaries were regularly berated for poor performance.  You see, the apathy and active disgust that most non-Mormons (especially Spaniards) felt for us and our church was apparently our own fault.  We were not righteous enough.  We did not pray with enough faith.  We lacked vision.  We kept forgetting to brush our teeth (or if we remembered, we got to bed five minutes late--and wham! amen to the priesthood of that missionary).  If we could just keep all the mission rules, if we could just walk faster and smile more, if we could just use this brilliant new technique for stopping families that our local General Authority learned from Jesus, etc., miracles would occur: we would step out of our miserable existence into the life of Wilford Woodruff (who didn't have to tract because he could simply walk into an English country church and expect to preach to a crowd of people eager to listen).  The pressure from mission leadership was unremitting, with missionaries internalizing lots of responsibility (I have to do this for Jesus! today we cannot be even five minutes late for anything) and, even worse, policing one another (with the best intentions, of course).

The consequences were many different kinds of bad.  Some missionaries became raving lunatics, scarcely able to function in a normal fashion as they wondered how they might be damning Spanish souls to hell today (did I smile at that old lady right? is it really my fault that this guy just told me to go to hell and blow American Jesus?).  Nervous breakdowns were pretty common, only occasionally so catastrophic that mission leadership noticed (and sent the missionary in question to a doctor, who usually recommended things like "more exercise, more free time, less stress," etc., i.e. stop being such a good missionary, kid).  Others slipped quietly into depression, doing whatever they could to maintain appearances of working hard (like management wanted) while they died inside.  I was one of these.  Others yet learned how to game the system.  They would teach an impressive number of discussions to teen girls, or mental patients, or immigrant workers.  Most of these "investigators" were completely unaware of their commitments to Mormonism--right up until the day when they failed to show for their scheduled baptism in one of our store-front chapels.  Some of the girls were genuinely sad (not to say heartbroken) when their boyfriends moved off to a new area, to convert new chicks, and neglected to stay in touch (let alone come back and take them to America).  Immigrants who could not speak Spanish caused all kinds of headaches for local church members, who were left with responsibilities they could not meet (your home-teaching assignment, should you accept it, is to venture into a ghetto of desperate foreign toughs speaking a language you cannot comprehend; good luck finding the guy we just baptized: he has probably been stabbed, moved to France, or become a Seventh-Day Adventist by now).  The game we played was always lose-lose.  If we pleased the Spaniards by avoiding work, mission management would breathe fire and brimstone down our necks.  If we pleased mission management by committing every biped in sight to baptism, we annoyed the heck out of most folks (who wanted nothing to do with Mormonism and were tired of having to affirm their disinterest to a new set of missionaries every few months) and ran the risk of annoying our local Mormon church, too (when the only people we could baptize were minors with angry parents, junkies with no mind, or immigrants with no fixed address and no cultural ties to Spain or any of the Spanish peoples).

When I applied to serve a mission, I imagined myself doing lots of service work (kind of like Ammon in the Book of Mormon).  I thought I would get to put principles of Christlike devotion "out there" in the world for people to see, doing deeds whose goodness other people could not deny.  Instead, I found myself confined to a crushing schedule of street contacts and door-to-door salesmanship (10 hours per day, 7 days a week, with 2/3 of a day off to do laundry and clean).  Every moment of every day was planned out, regulated, allocated (and set in stone: the first rule of mission life is that nobody admits to bending the rules).  It was really suffocating.  The only service we got was a little four-hour window, which we didn't always fill: as a rule, management was much more interested in making sure we were hitting the streets at least 60 hours a week than in helping us do any meaningful community service.  (Why did you only get 50 hours of proselytizing in last week, Elder?  Oh, you were wasting time with that volunteer clinic again, packing medical supplies for doctors abroad, who insist that they need contraceptives?  Do we need to pull you out of there so you can get back to the Lord's work?)  We could help people, sure, as long as this frivolous waste of time did not distract us from the real work ("the Lord's work") of proselytizing (which I recognized as a complete waste of time within two weeks of landing in Bilbao: imagine the horror I felt then as I contemplated the prospect of doing useless busywork virtually non-stop for two fucking years).

I admit that my dream of being a real servant, not just an annoying shill, died rather hard.  I still did everything I could to make myself feel that I was representing the Lord and the church to the best of my ability, in a way that was at once honest and attractive.  But my lived experience made this illusion really hard to maintain.  I still recall vividly the afternoon when another salesman knocked doors two floors above us in a rather large apartment building.  We started on the building first, buzzing our way in (or using a credit card to jimmy the lock open, I don't remember) and going to the top, where we commenced knocking doors and being sworn at.  About halfway down, we heard our competition coming behind us--a gravelly-voiced Spanish man pounding on doors as loud as he could, shouting, "¡Máquinas de coser!"  He got precisely the same reception we did, for the most part, though some of the people uninterested in our polite offering of American religion were apparently more intrigued by his brusque offer of sewing machines.  He was moving through the building really fast, much faster than we were, and in the end we bolted rather than face the prospect of confronting him in the hall for an epic sell-off.  But the incident burned itself into my mind--painfully, especially when I would go to mission conferences and hear blatant sales rhetoric from my priesthood leaders (Help your investigators feel obligated in some way: it will assist them to come to Jesus).  Growing up I had a good friend who was really into authors like Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie, and being naturally curious I gave these guys a look-over.  I found them rather distasteful (even sleazy).  They approach life from a position that in my experience is either hopelessly naive (take this drug! nothing bad happened to me when I took it!) or wickedly malevolent (take this drug! it will make me rich, and who cares what it does for you?).  I don't want to win friends and influence people naively or malevolently.  As a 19-year-old kid, I didn't want it.  It was hard to hear that God really wanted me to want it.  While I definitely felt some guilt about being a failed missionary (terrible sales numbers from start to finish), I admit that this guilt was much less than my youthful guilt associated with sexuality.

There were rebellious missionaries.  I was not one of these.  When I first came home from my tour of duty, I used to have nightmares that I was back in Spain, back under the thumb of mission leaders and their impossible expectations.  Today, I no longer have those nightmares.  Today, I wish I could back.  I wish I could go back, sit down for one of those cursed early-morning planning sessions (mandatory of course), take my little blue day-planner out of my pocket, rip it to shreds, and say to my companion, "Elder, today we are going to make a list of soup kitchens and start contacting them to see what we can do to help. Fuck baptisms, discussions y la puta que los parió."  (Perhaps I should apologize for all the swearing in this post.  But in my defense, I have never heard as many expletives in my life as on my mission, which was practically a two-year course in being sworn at--by some of the most renowned and disgustingly eloquent potty-mouths of Europe.)  I wish I could go back and do what felt right to me, instead of wasting so much time doing wrong because some wannabe Napoleon Hill just knew that his little manual of marketing techniques was a better teaching tool than the New Testament.  This aggressive response was a long time coming to fruition, but the seeds were definitely planted in my mission.  I saw myself and other elders walking around like zombies, trying to implement stupid sales tactics that only sounded good to morons with no field experience.  (We called the new missionaries "greenies" and praised their wholehearted faith in tactics we knew to be worthless as though it were some kind of virtue.  The sad thing is that within our corrupt mission culture, it was.  We aspired to be cheerful dupes, eager to believe the latest tripe from mission headquarters even when we knew it would never work.) 

The more I lived as a missionary--the more nonsense I heard from the pulpit (have faith, keep making goals, and miracles will happen: Spanish people will flock to the church and transform their lives for better), the more I failed to make positive contact with non-Mormons, the more insults I fielded (from everybody--Spaniards angry with me for being an American, a missionary, and a god-damn nuisance; mission leaders angry with me for failing to meet their sales quotas; church members angry with me for crap other missionaries did, like baptizing immigrants or drug addicts; missionaries angry with me because I was a convenient outlet for all the frustration they felt as they confronted a hopeless situation), the less I could believe in the integrity of what I was doing.  What does a devout young Mormon do in these circumstances?  Naturally, you turn to God.  You pray.  You break down and cry.  And you sit back and wait for answers.  I am still waiting.  The silence of God was initially very tough for me, I admit.

There was at least one time in my mission experience, that I recall, when I let my thoughts become explicit as deep doubts.  I was riding in a car to some zone conference (to be browbeaten and force-fed another fake sales push guaranteed to save the world), and the missionary at the wheel put on a tape containing one of Truman Madsen's lectures on the life of Joseph Smith.  I listened to Brother Madsen go on and on, in his melodious voice, telling me about all the wonderful spiritual experiences that accompanied the foundation and dedication of the Mormon temple in Kirtland (Ohio), and I wondered where the miracles were today.  Why did I get no miracles?  Maybe I was faithless.  Was the entire mission faithless, too?  Our conversion rate was less than one baptism per missionary per two-year mission.  I was not the only one failing miserably, from the standpoint of our leadership (which ran things by the numbers, collecting statistics carefully every night from each companionship and then rewarding people whose numerical outcomes were best--in public and privately, in the regular personal interviews our mission presidents conducted with their sales force).  Where were the angels, the trumpets, the pillars of light on the road to Damascus?  We got nothing.  Nada.  (That's not quite true, of course.  As you already know, we got a lot of mierda, from everyone, all the time--and Jesus did nothing to stop it.)  I was terrified by these thoughts.  I was not ready to drop the only hope I had left in what was a very bleak psychological wilderness, the hope that God might at least be grateful for all my effort on his behalf, despite its being utterly worthless (or worse) to everyone and everything I could see around me.  So I abandoned my doubts.  I retreated from them.  I had almost no access to books (though the special permission I got to bring copies of the scriptures in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek was a real life-saver).  I had no leisure time to speak of.  I had no strength or time to do much more than grimly hang on, pound sand, and wait for the blessed day when my time in hell-on-earth would end.

When the end of my mission came at last, I was not an atheist, nor even an ex- or post-Mormon (as I have since become, not because I hate Mormonism per se but for reasons which include but also transcend my mission experience).  I still believed (and to be honest, still in many respects believe) in the Mormon gospel as a useful moral framework, a valid paradigm for assessing difficult ethical decisions (that historically find no easy or definitive resolution, at least never one that obtains for all men and women in every circumstance).  But my testimony of missionary work was completely changed.  From the perspective of many faithful Latter-day Saints, we could correctly say that it was utterly shattered.  When I went into the mission field, I had a naively beatific vision of what I was as a missionary.  I thought I was a child of God, an altruistic saint dedicated to serving others.  I thought church leaders had my back.  I was willing to believe in proselytizing as a worthwhile human activity.  When I came home, I knew I was an hijo de puta, a selfish cabrón whose idea of community service was pestering people to change religions and refusing to take no for an answer.  I knew certain church leaders didn't give a flying fuck about me as an individual capable of making useful decisions.  And I knew that I am terrible at marketing, that I hate it with the passion of a thousand burning suns, that I would rather shoot myself in the face with a shotgun than do it again.  To this day, I still recall with awe the sense of overwhelming joy that washed over me when I thought that in a few weeks, a few days, a mere handful of hours, I would take off that idiot badge--and never have to knock another door in my life.  I was still deep enough in organized Mormonism to feel a little guilty about this.  I knew David O. McKay's dictum, "Every member a missionary," and I had already been admonished that this required some enduring dedication to proselytizing.  I confess I did not care.  I was done, and I still am.  If there should come a day when I am presented with the stark option, Proselytize or go to hell!, I will gladly take my chances in hell.

One of the last places I lived as a Mormon missionary was the ancient city Santiago de Compostela, an object of pilgrimage even before it acquired the remains of a Catholic saint and became Christian.  I spent a lot of time walking in and around the cathedral in this town.  I spoke with pilgrims and locals, including some people who were devout Catholics.  I remember thinking to myself that it would be a real shame, culturally speaking, if all these people suddenly stopped being Catholic--stopped maintaining the cathedral, stopped saying mass there, stopped walking on foot from central and northern Europe, stopped caring about their religious heritage (which some of them held differently from others: each pilgrim walks his own path)--and replaced it all with my Mormonism.  I imagined the cathedral boarded up and shut down, while all the town flocked to our little strip mall, to dress in awkward American suits and talk about American religion as though it were somehow more universal and universally beneficent than it really is.  I thought of this, and the thought filled me with sadness.  I realized that I, good Mormon that I was then, wanted there to be good Catholics.  I did not want them to stop saying mass.  I did not want them to convert to my religion, even.  I had seen enough of them to know that some of them were genuinely good people--as good as any Mormons I ever met, and as likely to make it into heaven as I was.  To me it seemed that they would be taken care of, that God did not need me to pester them, that he would attend to any external requirements needed to save them (whatever that means or meant to anyone then) in his own time, in his own way, and that I should just butt out and let them be. 

Seeing so much Spanish heritage laid out for me there in Santiago, warts and all (the Catholic saint I mentioned bears the epithet Matamoros), I realized that I did not want to erase or replace it.  I did not want the coffee shops to go away.  I did not want the bars to close.  I did not want the bare naked ladies to put on three shirts in the middle of summer, to cover their sunburned shoulders or their plunging cleavage.  I loved the Catholics, the Spaniards, the Basques, the Gallegos, all these people, for who they already were, not for their imagined ability to look like me.  On a very deep level, I perceived truth that came to me as a revelation: proselytizing, the way most of us do it, is the work of the devil.  If we aim to do good in the world, real good, then we should aim to help others live their own lives, rather than attempt clumsily to shoe-horn them into ours (as though that were even possible).  We should not be there to teach but to serve.  This does not mean that we should abandon our own integrity.  I am not Spanish today (nor Catholic, nor Catholic atheist, etc.).  But we should deliberately build that integrity as something unique to us, something personal that exists between God (or nature or the universe or whatever you like to represent the mystery of life outside us) and ourselves.  We should not pretend that it can be easily transferred to other people, that the results must be good when this happens.  To do this is to ignore the facts, plain before our very eyes every day, that we are all different and require different things to exist, move, and have our being with any kind of happiness.  I am not you.  My happiness is not yours.  My marriage is not yours.  My family is not yours.  My love is not yours.  My health is not yours.  My diseases are not yours, and their cure will not be yours.  Don't try to make me take your medicine.  The fact that it helps you says nothing definite about its helping me.  What if the drug that saves you becomes a poison that kills me, eh?  (The ancient Greek word pharmakon nicely captures this paradox, as real today as it ever was, by meaning both drug and poison.  Life is built out of death.  What brings one civilization up to a better state of being might easily plunge another into rigor mortis.  Caveat medicus, diffidat gravatus.)  There is no such thing as "the good life" that involves us all doing the same things the same way.

This lesson recurs throughout my own lived experience.  One of my favorite anecdotes for conveying it (e.g. to a class of undergraduates studying philosophy) comes from my own family.  A sister of mine suffers from Celiac disease.  Eating wheat makes her die.  I do not suffer from this disease.  It is demonstrable that we cannot get the same effects from the same food.  The imperative to find one single diet that must serve both of us is fundamentally stupid.  I am a man.  She is a woman.  I do not have Celiac disease.  She has it.  I am one self.  She is another.  If we went to see God today, both of us, and he cared enough to give us the time of day and prescribe a regimen aiming to give us perfect health, then he would give us different regimens.  Because we are different.  Obviously.  And yet so many people, not just naive Mormon missionaries and their clueless leaders, don't get this.  They insist on finding "the one true diet" and then forcing whatever that is upon the rest of us.  If they are Mormons, they come by insistently asking you to be Mormon, too.  Just ditch your family, your friends, your culture, your upbringing, your nationality, everything you know and love, and join this weird American cult that wants 10% of your income, the right to tell you what kind of undergarments to wear, and lifelong loyalty.  No wonder so many Spaniards told me to go fuck myself (¡por el culo, maricón!).  When you read my message from their perspective, with empathy, you realize that I am asking them to commit suicide.  I am telling them to give up the reality that they embody for a dream I have of what they might be, a dream most of them don't even like--with good reason, since it involves destroying whatever integrity they have spent a lifetime building.  I am telling them to close their eyes and jump off a cliff, in hopes that something good results.  Even as a very young man, I knew I could not offer this challenge with integrity unless I was willing to make that leap myself.  I knew I had to lay myself open to the possibility that God might not exist the way I thought he did, that he might not want from me the things I thought he wanted, etc.  I had to be willing to put myself through the same rigor I demanded from them.  I had to face my own doubts (referenced above) honestly.  No hiding behind some prophet's skirts for me.  I was the one standing in people's doorways, offering them the gospel.  If I was not willing to take it myself, then I had no business dishing it out.

In sum, then, my Mormon mission taught me (1) that I had a moral duty to test my faith the way I invited investigators to test theirs; (2) that I hate marketing more than death; (3) that I am a terrible marketer, in part because I care more about how people use products than about what particular products they use.  Being good for me is a matter of personal moral integrity, not affiliation with some group (any group anywhere: it does not matter, until membership in the group requires you to sacrifice your integrity; at that point, you have a moral duty to disaffiliate, it seems to me).  These lessons I am not sorry to have learned.  I think they have made me a better person--and unfortunately a worse Mormon, from the perspective of many faithful Latter-day Saints.       

Useless Man

Bryan Magee.  Confessions of a Philosopher.  Modern Library, 1999.  ISBN: 0375750363.

I have been reading Magee's book slowly since Christmas, when I received it as a gift (and a welcome opportunity to explore modern academic philosophy, the alien universe into which my last job thrust me unwitting but not unwilling).  It is very good.  Here I want to share some passages from chapter 15, wherein Magee describes what he calls his "mid-life crisis" (a mental breakdown which happened after he had achieved some measure of personal and professional success; I feel I have already gone through a very similar experience, though mine comes much earlier in my life and career).

Years before I made it conscious and explicit on this blog, I had the nagging feeling that I don't really value collective human activities that are conventionally very important (e.g. making money, making a name, making a career, being the kind of person people reward with power or prestige).  It is not that I actively hate power or prestige (now or in times past).  I just don't care much for them.  I have never pointedly avoided opportunities to befriend people or do interesting, important things.  I just haven't found "networking" (i.e. looking for useful acquaintances on purpose rather than encounter lifelong companions by accident, which I prefer) or "producing what powerful people want" (as opposed to producing what goods I can as best I can) inherently useful, beneficial, or desirable activities (to pursue as ends in themselves).

This attitude of mine is deep-rooted.  I remember playing on the playground as a kindergartner, usually alone or with one or two other kids, weirdos who decided to leave the group and join the hermit, for some reason.  I was not the kid people chose first for teams.  I was not the kid who cared, either.  I was not really picked on much.  (My only memorable trouble with bullies in kindergarten came from a girl in first grade, who took advantage of being bigger than I was to steal my lunch-box and hold it hostage for kisses.)  When the school asked me to join the gifted class that met during recess, I told them I would rather go out and play in the yard, with the trees and the sunshine.  (I still remember the confused and slightly angry look on the face of the little girl they sent to invite me.  Her name was Bethany.  She was very bright, and very nice to me.)  Magee offers a lucid, adult perspective on this attitude:

I felt I knew with some degree of certainty that if there were anything at all outside space and time we were at our closest to it in the private world of personal relationships, and of art and reflective thought, and were at our furthest from it in the public world of social organization and politics. I abandoned, or so I thought, the idea of becoming a member of parliament, and declined approaches made to me to stand for parliament. In all these ways the centre of gravity of my life shifted from the public to the private, from the impersonal to the personal, away from whatever it might be that was currently going on in the world of affairs to things of a more individual and abstract nature, and of much longer-lasting influence. I knew that many of my friends and colleagues saw me as falling out of life's race in a way that was cataclysmic for myself.  Indeed, some of them remonstrated with me about what they saw as my craziness in blowing a successful career. But the truth is that I no longer regarded the considerations they cared about as mattering (pages 256-257).

This has been my position ever since I was old enough to act with intention.  I did not care what teachers and classmates cared about in school.  When I went on a mission for the LDS church, I went to serve God, not the Brethren in Salt Lake City, who as it turned out had all kinds of impossible (not to mention immoral) expectations of what it meant to be a good missionary.  When I went to the university, I studied to improve Humanity, not to make a brilliant career or impress the bureaucrats in control of education (who are every bit as impossible and immoral as the Mormon leaders, it seems to me, with expectations that make a mockery of mankind and education).  I do what I see as the right thing.  I do it no matter what.  I see that this tendency is problematic (anti-social, dangerous, etc.), and I make efforts to correct it, but so far it is stubbornly incorrigible.  I am not always as keenly self-aware as Magee in this passage: more often than not, I simply don't see what institutions value in some activity that draws me, like a moth to a flame.  Institutions see opportunities for growth, for profit (that can be quantified), for results (that are evident to multiple players in an institutional game for survival outside the scholarly game of solving puzzles).  I just see interesting problems, problems to which I simply must contribute something--a process of personal engagement and development whose outcome is fundamentally uncertain and untrustworthy.

For me the process of study is always useful, always valuable, always to be pursued, even though its fruits are repeatedly, predictably, and predominately utter garbage.  The result of my life's process to date is a pile of stinking shit, hardly the reason I keep waking up eager to try again, to break my head once more against some problem that will not leave me alone.  I don't choose what to research, what to think about when I am not trying to keep my kids from killing themselves vel sim.  Problems simply find me, and I cannot let them go until I have read, thought, spoken, and written them out of my system.  I am not in control of my career, academic or otherwise.  I respond to the problems Life sets me, not the other way round.  This is the way it has always been.  Unfortunately, this means that I am always "blowing my career" (as Magee's friends would put it), failing as a good Mormon missionary or a good professional academic.  I ask the wrong questions, and answer them badly (from the institutional perspective, which I am constitutionally incapable of valuing the way leaders want me to).  Caesar has little or no use for Cato (who kills himself in the end), and I am Cato (esse quam videri bonus malebat).

The second passage from Magee that I want to quote is one I might have written. My own experience is almost identical to his (not quite the same, but close), in terms of what happened to me and the way in which I react to it (so far):

Perhaps I should stress that all this [mid-life crisis, blowing my career] was not primarily an intellectual experience, and was in no sense whatever a reading experience. It was not a matter of studying certain writers and being influenced by their ideas. Books and study had nothing to do with the causes of it. It was an existential experience, one long permanent state of mental and emotional crisis, in which I came many times near to breakdown. It consisted of agonizingly direct experiences, felt feelings, thought thoughts. And it was from this state that I came to my reading. Given the overwrought state I was in, some of what I then read impinged on me as if I had been skinned. For instance, there seemed to be a certain body of doctrine that was common to nearly all great religions and their famous sages, moralists, prophets, and so on, which I found self-evidently (and in that sense platitudinously) true and to the point, and which had an overwhelming impact on me, and yet which the world disregarded. Perhaps I might express it as follows (page 257). 

Let me interrupt Magee a moment here to comment on my own experience.  In the wake of blowing my own career (first as a Mormon, lately as an academic), well-meaning people (friends, advisors, mentors, and so forth) have come to me suggesting that I am just reading the wrong people, following the wrong gurus, attending the wrong classes--that my crisis might vanish in a moment if I just found the right book, entered the right class, dis-identified as a post-modernist (which I am not), got religion (the right one this time!), wrote more stuff in a more pedantic style, etc.  This advice is very frustrating to me, because my experience is not something external.  While it is true that certain authors, teachers, and religious folk have made a big impression on me over the years, personally and professionally, the overwhelming source of my personal and professional angst and its expression has always been myself (my very own self, the identity that I construct every moment I breath with conscious awareness, noticing phenomena to which I respond voluntarily and involuntarily).

How to put this into words?  I lived staring into the abyss and watching it stare back long before I encountered Nietzsche verbalizing that experience--a very harrowing experience that will always shape me in powerful ways, even if I hate Nietzsche and decide to refrain from reading, writing, or thinking of him for the rest of my life.  Even if I don't practice Christianity as a "believer" (however anyone defines that, anyone who is not me), that will not change the truth that Christ has a powerful impact on my existence.  I came unto my own, and my own received me not.  I know these words.  I have lived them.  They are written on the fleshy tables of my heart, in blood that will not be erased--my blood.  In the same way, my relationship to Mormonism is intimate and personal, not impersonal, objective, historical.  For I had seen a vision; I knew it, and I knew that God knew it, and I could not deny it.  I don't especially care what Joseph Smith really saw (anywhere, at any time), but I know my own vision--and like him (in the story, which need not be true history in any sense) I cannot deny it.  Similarly, when I encountered Buddhist teachings like all compounded things are impermanent and all emotions are pain, they stuck with me because they honestly, accurately describe my own experience.  I am like the legendary arhats whose response to the Buddha's doctrine of emptiness was to die.  Like them, I do not experience thinking, reading, speaking, and writing as abstract exercises, separate (or even separable) from the business of life and death (the same business, whatever we call it at various moments that taste different to us).  For me religion and research are intimately bound up with life (and its other face, the one we call death).  I cannot live outside my life, mi camino propio hacia la muerte.  I cannot write outside it.  I cannot read outside it.  I cannot speak or think outside it.  I cannot pretend I care about it in ways I do not.  When I do, the result is obscene--and fools no one.  Even if people cannot put words to it, they sense the reality.  He is not one of us.  He does not get it.  He never will.  He is a witch-doctor, a sorceror, a wolf in sheep's clothing.  Stone him!

What do I see, then?  What do I live?  Magee gets it (nails it, makes me hope foolishly that there might be wolf-clan for me out there somewhere, a group that I might not have to despise for having me as a member):

The world is governed by false values. People in all societies seem anxious to do what they think is the done thing, and are terrified of social disapproval. They set their hearts on getting on in the world, being thought highly of by their fellows, being powerful, acquiring money and possessions, knowing "important" people. They admire the influential, the rich, the famous, the well-born, the holders of rank and position. But none of these things have any serious relationship to merit: as often as not they are ill gotten, and nearly always they are partly dependent on chance. None of them will protect a person from serious illness or personal tragedy, let alone from death. And none of them can be taken out of this world. They are not an inherent part of the person himself but are merely external decorations, hung on him. They are the tinsel of life, glittering but worthless. The things that really matter in human beings are things that can matter more than life itself: loving and being loved, devotion to truth, integrity, courage, compassion, and other qualities along entirely different lines. But human beings are all the time sacrificing these true values to the false ones: they compromise themselves to get on, bend the truth to make money, demean themselves before power. In behaving like this they are pouring rubbish over their own heads. If they stopped abasing themselves in this way and started living in accordance with true values their lives would become incomparably more meaningful, more genuinely satisfying. They would even, to put it at its most superficial, be happier (pages 257-258).       

Insofar as I have a gospel to preach, this insight is definitely a very important part of it.  I see it as good news, an evangelion worthy of worship, but my worship is not that of society:

In the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, in the Old and New Testaments, and almost everywhere I looked in the works of prophets and mystics, wise men and teachers--of any century and any society--some such message as this was to be found. Perceptive people seem to have been saying it since writing and teaching began. Even creative artists: the great ones seldom preach, and are diminished when they do, but, unspoken between the lines of what many of them write, these values are to be discerned. In the world's greatest opera and drama the conflict between private and public values is the most common theme of all, with the artist invariably enlisting the audience's sympathies on behalf of the private. And while the members of the audience are in the theatre, or reading the book, they respond almost universally this way. But the moment they come out of the theatre, or close the book, they revert. It is true that in temples, mosques, synagogues and churches they offer lip-service to true values, and feel better for having done so; and those values may even sometimes be taught in schools; but again, no sooner do people leave such places of instruction than they behave in their old ways. Worse than that; if any of them does not so--if one of them sacrifices his interests to someone else's, tells the truth to his own disadvantage, declines to be sycophantic to people with a lot of power or money--the others remonstrate with him and tell him not to be a fool. If he persists, they lose respect for him: they come to look on him as stupid, someone who does not know how to manage his own affairs, someone making a botch of his life. The truth is, then, that the values people publicly acknowledge and pay lip-service to are in reality values that they not only repudiate but actively despise. It took me a long time to realize this, but when I did I came to understand in a new light the evident frustration and even despair of so many prophets and teachers, their isolation, and their characteristic tone of railing at people who they know are not going to take much notice of what they say (page 258).

This is quite simply the truth!  Whenever I hear the spokesman for some large group saying things I like (e.g. we should express love for our fellowman), I remember the words of God (as they occur in Jewish, Christian, and Mormon scripture--search and ye shall find): They draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.  And they really hate it when you point this hypocrisy out in public, even if you go out of your way to be nice about it.  (Some folks actually believe their own bullshit.  That doesn't make it less shitty, but it does make them decent folk, and I would not wish to dishonor that decency while noticing where it cloaks dangerous hypocrisy.)  What should you do if Life makes you an obnoxious prophet?  Run away?  (That did not work for Jonah, did it?  I get that story much better today than I did as a kid in Sunday school.)  Lean in?  (Or as my non-feminist friends would put it, Eat shit?)  That can be devastating, too.  At this point, I find myself stuck between the urge to run (away from society, away from people, away from all the lies) and the urge to fight (against society, against people, against all the lies, especially those that demand uncritical obeisance--as though they were simply true).  I cannot break my integrity, and every company I work for is determined that for them I will.

Like many people before me, I find myself wandering about in the proverbial desert, lost and hoarse (vox clamantis in deserto), wondering as I wander whether that desert might blossom as the rose (and then wilt of old age rather than succumb to hordes of hungry locusts).  I don't know whether my garden can exist or not, whether my life will yield anything to others besides shit in the desert, but my integrity forces me to cultivate it anyway.  I till.  I plant.  I water.  I avoid the company of those who do not know my desert, those fair-weather gardeners who think I live in Eden and despise my meager harvests accordingly.  And I wait.  I wait to see what lot Zeus casts, where he weighs me in the scales of fate, whether I will live to till, and plant, and water again, another crop of bitter herbs infused with the harsh, poisonous flavor of my wilderness.

Religious Freedom and Related Matters

Dallin Oaks is at it again, saying stuff that sounds crazy to me.  Of course I no doubt impress him (and others) much the same way.  In proof whereof I offer the following disjointed observations.

1.  How are religious people being abused in contemporary Western society (especially American)?

Religious people are being abused by having their private lives turned into weapons that large corporations (that may identify as religious or secular--es macht mir nichts) can use against one another to jockey for market share.

The problem is that we have hordes of people who cannot find religious identity without forcing themselves unconstitutionally on other people, against the will of those other people. When you break the hordes up into individual personae, you discover that most of them don't actually want to engage in litigation, culture war, etc., against "the enemy" in some individual, personal way. Peter does not hate Paul and want to destroy him. But Rome hates Antioch. Christianity hates Islam (and vice versa). Religion hates secularism. Science hates ignorance. Republicans and Democrats hate the other party (not their aunt who belongs to it, at least not the same way). The individual feels powerless to exist without a community (legitimately), and all communities (or the loudest, most politically active ones at any rate) are currently led by people who demand that he must join their fight against rival communities to have a place with them. I must force you to wear my burkha because if I don't, then you will force me to wear your cross. Religious freedom does not exist in this contest. It has become an oxymoron, a dead letter that people invoke as cover for what they are really saying: "My god has a bigger dick than yours, and I am going to prove it."

Think of Elijah challenging the priests of Baal. That is how we do religious dialogue in the modern fashion. I pray to my god, you pray to yours. We go to court. We duke it out. If the court fails us, we go to the battlefield (and kill terrorists). Freedom in this context is just Nietzsche's will to power. Having told myself that I am painted into a corner, that I must fight for my religion or be crushed ruthlessly by yours, I lash out and try to destroy you before you destroy me. I don't see your humanity. I don't see your vulnerability. I don't see that your motivation, your movement, is fractured, fragile, fragmented, and falling apart (the same way mine is). I put my chin up and charge into the fray.

2.  Is religion failing?   

It is not the failure of religion or science that confronts us today, it seems to me, as much as the failure of leadership. We have forgotten, if we ever knew, how to contend well with those around us (be they of our culture or not). We don't deal in dialogue, compromise, inaction, etc. We are all business, all about making decisions and then doubling down when they prove bad. We are fighting dogs that value gameness over survival, over anything really, because we think that loss is impossible (inadmissible, evil, cowardly, wrong).

I don't personally believe that religion is dead or losing anything. What is changing in society is what has always been changing. Religion is simply changing its clothes, putting away the frock it wore yesterday and making (or buying) something new to cover human nakedness (itself a garment, the clothing of Nature). Religion will only really die with the last human being (who will be religious, on my view, no matter what he thinks about anything or does with those thoughts).

Secularism is just another kind of religion, with a new pantheon of gods (that like different rituals). And it is not really that new, from my perspective. (The very word "secular" comes to us straight from Roman religion, which lies close to the heart of our Western political culture, historically very much a religion. A religion that strives to be ecumenical, sometimes, but that does not make it any less religious.)

3.  Should we invoke politics to strengthen religion?  (No!)

I would argue against Oaks (and others who agree with him) that the strength of religion must be built outside the US court system. To the extent that religion relies on civil law for its strength, it loses that strength, conceding that we do not make important religious decisions outside the courtroom, a move that makes our only really powerful religion the US government. I hate that idea.  I see that idea as one to avoid legitimizing at all cost.

Religion is stronger and more powerful as it needs less external civic intervention, not more. The religion that must invoke violence (politics, court orders, police, military) to assert its strength has already conceded incredible weakness, practically admitting its own moral bankruptcy.  If I cannot strengthen families, live a decent life, love God and my fellowman, etc., without charging into the courts and demanding that you live my life against your will, insisting that I make no concessions to your weakness and you none to mine, then decency becomes impossible.  Dialogue becomes impossible.  The open society dies, and we get yet another iteration of Plato's kallipollis (a theoretical utopia on the books, and in courtroom babble, that manifests in reality as hell on earth).  Eso no quiero, no busco, no deseo jamás.  Mejor en pie morir (o en la cruz, los que queramos ser Cristianos auténticos).

"My kingdom is not of this world." As a Christian, I invoke these words from the Lord to justify my decision to walk away deliberately from Elijah's stupid quarrel with the priests of Baal.  "Depart from me, ye that work iniquity."