Commentary on Sex

A friend pointed me to this article, which inspired a small rant on sex.

Good grief. I simply don't understand the "sex is violence" meme. That is not how I see it--and I find those experiences, all vicarious for me since I have never been party to violent sex, the opposite of inspiring. Unless the point was to make me want to avoid intercourse (and maybe fight someone, or least punch something).

The idea that one could have sex without any emotional hang-ups is similarly ludicrous to me. I just don't get it. There is no way I find myself in the position of not caring what happens to someone I know that way. So I don't understand the "sex is meaningless fun" meme, either. I do not think of myself as particularly prudish (though I certainly was that way at one point in my life). Even when I was a prude, that prudishness was something I aspired to apply primarily to myself (sometimes pretty harshly) rather than to others (whom it was never my place to judge). Getting married was very helpful when it came to defeating the negative aspects of this prudishness where these existed (primarily as reflections of self-loathing on my part); but that did not make sex meaningless for me, something that didn't particularly matter or connect me with other people (as people). More like the opposite: I became more acutely aware that people matter, that one cannot relate effectively to caricatures or stereotypes, that real love-making is about building people rather than breaking them.

Breaking people isn't even fun, from my perspective. If I were offered the chance to have sex without natural consequences, without emotions--I would not want it. The same way I wouldn't want to eat 'food products' deprived of all their nutritious value. The prospect of being allowed to eat meals of empty foodstuffs constantly (or ingest endless rounds of cheap alcohol or another 'fun' drug) would not make me happy. I would not choose it. In the same way, I would not choose to have sex without any emotional consequences, without any kind of relationship existing outside the particular expression of love that sex is. Eating one breakfast means not eating another one, at some point. Making love with one person means not making love to someone else. We cannot relate equally to all human beings. We cannot love all alike (unless we deliberately isolate ourselves from the kind of particular relationships that are familial, becoming monks and nuns, who are often celibate--not because they are prudes, but because they recognize the consequences of sex and seek to avoid them, to cultivate goods that sex obviates or negates). I think there are people for whom non-monogamy works better than it will work for others. But even these folks must recognize some limits, some boundaries beyond which they do not pass--unless they want to dissolve their relationships (and that will be hard, often really devastating, even if the relationship in question is a bad one).

We used to advise people to "think of the children" when letting their romantic fancies roam. We might also advise them to think of their spouse(s), who will always have (strong) feelings about the integrity of their relationship. We might even advise them to think of themselves, as beings incapable of transcending the need for human companionship that is more than momentary, that has more than sex to sustain it. To me it seems that the fetishization of sex, its reduction to the most important activity in romantic relationships, has impaired our ability (collectively anyway) to recognize that other things are at least as important, that sex without those things is not really worth much.

Why Do Wealth and Peace Exist?

A friend asked this question, and I wrote an answer.

Wealth exists because we invented agriculture, which gave us year-round access to stores of food from which some people can exclude others. This is why poverty exists, too, incidentally. I see wealth and poverty as two aspects of the same thing: scarcity. Foraging societies (like the Hadza in Africa) don't have the artificial scarcity that we civilized folk have, because every individual (including even fairly small children) knows how to go out into the bush and get food, shelter, and friendship (the basics we all need for survival: they don't call this wealth; it is simply life).

Peace exists when depopulation (from disease, famine, or war) gives agricultural societies breathing space to grow their wealth without having to protect it from other people. I see peace and war as fundamentally the same thing, complementary expressions of agricultural demographics. When foraging societies settle down to live in villages and cities, they become more fertile (producing more people in less time: this is peace--e.g. the Ara Pacis in ancient Rome, with pictures of motherhood on it). More humans (the outcome of greater fertility) means we need more stuff (wealth). Since we are sedentary and can only get wealth by access to land that we own (fence and work extensively)--we have to go out of our native habitat (overcrowded and overworked as it is) and occupy other land (virgin land). Eventually, we encounter other people--and the outcome of that meeting becomes war (not just the feuds of individual hunters and clans, which transcend agricultural society, but the organized genocide that is civilized war: we don't want mere revenge or justice or whatever; we want your land, and its wealth). 

Mercantilism and colonialism (or in their latest guise, globalization) allow us to enjoy peace and war, poverty and wealth, simultaneously. I send troops to Peter's land to take it or its wealth for me, and then sell that wealth on a "free" market to Paul, who has no idea that his diamonds come from the death of child-soldiers abroad. Poverty and war are outsourced to the frontier of civilization, so that the rich urban center can enjoy wealth and peace. To quote one of my favorite historians on the essence of peace: Auferre, trucidare, rapere falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.  

In sum: wealth and peace exist because somewhere someone died (often miserably and involuntarily, sometimes voluntarily or otherwise nobly).

Back to Nature

Why do so many body-builders and strength athletes die relatively young?  In response to this question, whose empirical validity I am not concerned to question right now (but witness this), I offer the following meditation. 

Keith Norris has written eloquently somewhere about the empirical reality that survival and performance become increasingly separate and even opposite goals as you reach the limits of human capacity for exertion. At some point, exerting more now means trading in longevity. I cannot go full-blast all the time, or most of the time, without burning my chronological candle down faster than I would otherwise.  

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that civilization teaches us to avoid "down time" in the name of achieving more. The elite athlete aims not to live long and happy, as an athlete, but to achieve something extraordinary with his (or her) body. There is no such thing as "resting on one's laurels" (as always happens in foraging societies: a big kill or brush with death is followed by a lot of napping and doing nothing, except maybe eating). The result of civilization's lack of contentment with survival is that we approach athleticism (especially the elite kind) as work, as a job. We seek short-term profits (big achievements) at the expense of longevity. When we go, we go full-bore (and burn really bright before going out early). When we stop (retiring with some career-ending injury or accumulation of injuries), we quit entirely. The forager works hard, yes, but he also rests hard. He cannot stop, unless he wants to die, and his life-rhythm is very different from the "all or nothing, win or lose" pace set by elite athletes. 

Civilization seems to represent a kind of ongoing fragmentation in humanity whereby accidental strengths--and their concomitant weaknesses--are allowed an exaggerated expression. If I am predisposed to be very quick and strong, then civilization offers me the leisure to become an extreme phenotype. If I am predisposed to be mentally agile, then civilization offers me the leisure to become an extreme phenotype. The viability of extreme phenotypes is always less in nature than in civilization, and even in the latter we observe that extremity is often associated with early mortality (and other material handicaps: I am thinking in particular of purebred dogs here, as well as humans; one could also think of domestic sheep and cattle, which offer their human masters more milk, flesh, and wool at the expense of being too stupid and fat to survive without supervision). 

'Uncivilisation' as a corrective to the extremities that civilization increasingly pushes requires some 'return to the mean' where physical and mental activity is concerned. If humans want to avoid dying early and prematurely crippled in some facet of their phenotype, they need to return to a life more like that of their ancestors--a life that offers them unstructured time for recuperation from strenuous labor. We need strenuous labor. But we also need rest. And we need both, the labor and the rest, to take place in environments less structured than the boxes constructed by civilization (the job site, the gym, the university). We need to return to nature, to learn again how to work and rest under the sun, moon, and stars. We need to learn the rhythms of nature outside in addition to the rhythms of our own internal humanity.

Religion and Violence

Part of the problem with "the real reason" for human violence, I suspect, is that it simply does not exist. My kids, for example, fight like puppies (not always fairly or kindly), and when asked, "Why are you punching your brother, after I explicitly asked you not to?" often look up with genuinely blank faces (and even on occasion answer honestly, "I don't know"). I suspect many people genuinely don't know why they are violent (in ways that historically prove helpful--look up the benefits of play-fighting with kids--or not, e.g. jihad). They just are, and so inevitably their mind works to create justification(s) (Deus vult! national security! etc.) for a prior existing condition (must punch someone!).

The really intractable problem here is that it is genuinely wrong (bad practice) to arrest people for thought crimes, but that is essentially what I see us having (in many cases). By thought crime here I don't mean "carefully planned, conscious crime" but pre-rational determination toward violence (without any pre-determined method or justification).

Rather than take an approach like Karen Armstrong, who seems to suggest that religion is never to blame (as a legitimate rationalization of violence: I don't believe this), I prefer to observe that religion is simply one of many tools available to foster and culture (the old word would be civilize) human violence (which is simply there in humanity, an unavoidable part of our biological heritage).  Sometimes, we use our tools to express violence well (in ways that improve quality of life); other times, we don't.  Religion, like all our tools, is in itself neutral.  It is neither evil nor good.  How we use it determines what it is in individual circumstances (its immediate valence for good and for evil).

When people talk about transcending religion, leaving it behind, etc., what they are really advocating, it seems to me, is leaving behind some aspect of humanity whose momentary expression (as violence or superstition or whatever) they don't particularly like (indeed, they might hate it--with righteous indignation).  To seize upon some momentary justification for genocide (or some other awful crime in recent human history) as itself the cause for all genocide, to proceed in the righteous struggle against genocide on the assumption that (for example) de-converting people from Islam en masse will radically alter our species' expression of violence--to me this seems fundamentally wrong (ineffective, resting on a misprision of the reality that we are a genocidal species--we commit crimes of violence, historically, including the crime known as genocide, and we invent stories to illustrate, explain, and facilitate this aspect of our character).  If we got rid of Islam today, then tomorrow would bring us another myth equally obnoxious.  If we got rid of all Abrahamic religions, the same thing would happen.  If we got rid of every traditional religion, we would simply re-invent them (and tell ourselves, as many Nazis and communists did in the last century, that our crimes against one another were justified by some modern and progressive myth--clothing our genocide, etc., in the trappings of science). 

This is why I roll my eyes when people talk of abandoning religion for something better.  There is nothing better.  People really are that stupid (and violent, and whatever it is that you don't like that you are calling 'religious').  What we can do, what we should do, is learn to confront the evil we carry inside ourselves (Christianity gets this part right with its doctrine of Original Sin).  This evil is not something separate or separable from us (Christianity gets this wrong: Grace and Salvation are bullshit, at least as commonly taught among most believers; I don't mean that nothing good can ever come from believing in them, only that most people seem to derive more lie than truth from them).  We must learn to live with ourselves as we are--with tendencies toward crime that are inseparable from our other tendencies, which as often as not are those same tendencies, in different (and better) circumstances.  We have an instinct to love: this instinct carries implicit an imperative to hate.  We have an instinct to protect what (and whom) we love: this instinct carries implicit an imperative to destroy what (and whom) we hate.  Religion, and other forms of collective and individual culture, can help us prune these tendencies.  It can direct us toward better or worse ways of expressing ourselves in whatever circumstances we might be.  But it cannot remove these tendencies entirely, not even when we make the mistake of externalizing our evil and assigning it to religion that we dislike (for any reason).  Leaving my childhood religion behind might help me become a better person, empirically speaking, but there is no guarantee that this must happen.  I will still be a human being, no matter what I do.  I will still carry with me all the causes and conditions for superstition and violence and other potentially criminal behavior that comes coded into humanity (my own and everyone else's).

This is why Greek tragedy is so gripping.  It is about looking oneself in the face, honestly, and seeing everything there.  Katharsis is not a matter of expressing or indulging rage (as many modern readers of Aristotle seem to think); it is looking deep into the recesses of one's own humanity, and seeing there the little baby emotions that might become rage (homicidal and suicidal), envy, lust, etc.  It is seeing the strength and the weakness of our species, and realizing that they are the same thing.  The same qualities that make Oedipus king and savior also make him criminal and outcast.  Until we see this reality and accept it, we are fundamentally separate from ourselves--broken, lacking integrity, unable to help others or ourselves without running an unacceptable risk of causing harm (because we think we can love without hating, serve without ruling, help without harming).  We are like children who imagine themselves able to fly because they have wings patched together with feathers and wax.  Such fantasies are cute until we walk to the edge of a real cliff and jump.    

On the Ennui of Civilized Man

One of the great problems of our times is how to deal with the angst of civilization. We used to be happy to survive, back when food and shelter were our main concerns. Then, we invented ways of mass-producing necessities, and discovered "free time" (time that could be spent doing something other than looking for food, looking for shelter, or recovering from that search). Free time allowed us to play around more--to do things like build, trade, and make war.

The ancestral economy makes sense to us. Assuming you survive, it is not hard to live and be relatively happy while you are looking for food (that you expect to find), looking for shelter (that you expect to find), and recovering. Primitive, uncivilized people we can observe are often happier than their civilized counterparts, particularly as you look toward the bottom of civilized social hierarchies.

Civilized "free time" provides many benefits, of course, but these come at the expense of significant social and psychological turmoil. I don't know how to get my own food. I must rely on someone else to get it for me. I don't know how to get my own shelter. I need someone else to provide it for me. If I am living in a cultural backwater like the Middle East (or Africa or many parts of Eurasia and the Americas), then I am keenly aware that everyone really close to me lives subject to the whims of people we never meet. People with power. People who inherit a long tradition of free time, complete with awesome ways of making food, shelter, and war. I have three choices: abject worship ("please, god on earth, don't kill me! you want these shiny things? please, take them!"), avoidance ("better to avoid dealing with gods altogether: I think I will take up residence in a mountain cave and chant with some beads"), or revolt ("death to the evil gods who run my life without my consent!"). The choice between fight and flight is one that each person must make for herself, and we all make it differently. But some of us always choose to fight. Fighting is part of human nature.

For me, the really interesting question becomes one of finding ways to manage the fight-response to civilization. Can I take the urge to revolt, to burn civilization down for its crimes (which would be a crime, of course, but that did not stop the Mongols, and I am guessing that it will not stop the terrorists today), and turn it into something good? Can I build a cure for civilization into the death-wish that it spawns in certain people? We are always trying. (Politics and economics historically involve warfare: they struggle to contain and suppress and redirect it towards less destructive outlets, so that instead of burning your house down with fire I do it with bankruptcy in a court of law. It is easier to recover from bankruptcy than from war, on the one hand; on the other, going bankrupt too often will eventually drive people to war.)

The angst of civilization ultimately comes from lack of control over one's own life. The more you can convince people that they make decisions that really matter to their individual lives (and deaths), the less eager they are to blow themselves up (and seek another life beyond the grave, whether as glorified Homeric heroes or mujahideen copulating with crowds of virgins). The more invested people become in civilizations' games as active players, the less they want to burn every game to the ground (and start over, building new games--new ways of occupying people's "free time" that always resemble the old ways in time). When I hear people calling for more education (as a solution to problems of civilization), I think this is really what they are aiming to do: they want to show the desperadoes--the outlaws, rebels, and terrorists--that there is a productive place for them in existing civil games, that society has a nice place for them right here, if they would just put down their arms and play cool instead of fighting. Part of the problem with this idea, however, is that civilization is dynamic. People always lose its games; you have to lose (sometimes, something) in order to win. There is no such thing as a civilization that endures unchanging and perfect ("with liberty and justice for all," blah blah). If you play civil games (the market), you will get burned. Eventually, you will die. Confronting that reality is too hard for many of us (not just the poor or the outlaws), and some people cannot see it without going berserk. I don't have any easy answers for this problem. All I can do is observe it closely, and then take what measures are available to insulate myself maximally from its harmful effects (as I observe them in myself and the people around me).

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! 

Reflections on Violence

In light of recent events, specifically the murderous rampage of a young male college-student from Southern California who explained his attack as the fruit of being rejected sexually and hating American women (for wounding his self-esteem by rejecting him "unfairly" for other men who struck him as inferior), I offer the following thoughts.  I refer to this particular individual as R in my comments.  

Personally, I feel that there is a profound benefit to be had from breaking the illusion that my importance somehow trumps yours, that my integrity (or esteem or in a word, life) matters more than yours. How do we break that illusion? How do we provide space for young fools like R to realize the limits of their importance or worth without destroying themselves or others? I don't think there is any way to build a society utterly proof against accidents (that will on occasion give us criminals like R who must be put down), but I do believe there are things we can do to mitigate these accidents.

I have heard some folks say that boys are socialized to be violent, and that this is responsible for the creation of monsters like R. I disagree with this idea, though I might agree with some of the practical approaches to dealing with violence that come along with it.  (It is not always clear to me how we are supposed to stop "socializing boys to be violent." With therapy? Religion? I am uncomfortable with these options, for reasons which appear in articles like this one).

Why do I disagree? My disagreement comes from a lifetime (more than 20 years now: I am getting old) spent around boys--my peers growing up, and now my two sons, who are 4 and 6 years old. As a kid, I was drawn to martial arts. This is not unusual in itself, but other things about my life were undoubtedly strange. Unlike many kids, I grew up without access to much TV or movies. My parents put an end to our TV-watching when I was about 7 or 8 years old; the last shows I watched "live" as a kid were Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street. Once a week, on Fridays, our family would gather around the VCR (remember those?) and watch one or two movies from my parents' collection. The Internet did not exist as a public utility until I was a teenager. What does this mean? Well, I was drawn to martial arts without knowing who Bruce Lee was (in the '80s), what boxing was, what video games were (we didn't have any), what violent movies looked like (my parents were not into that), etc. I just wanted to move, and to fight. There was no "because"--no social pressure from my folks, no social pressure from my friends, no cogent aspiration on my part to be tough or manly or whatever.  Later on I discovered words and rituals aiming to express the values I already felt as a 9- and 10-year-old kid: martial values, fighting values, values built around violence. The point is that I was not a blank slate upon which society wrote violence. As a little kid, I already contained something people call violence, something my martial arts' instructors recognized and taught me to control with respect. For that I am still grateful to them.

Fast forward to the present. My wife and I have two kids, boys whom we aspire to raise right. I suppose you might say that with my background in martial arts (which I still practice), I accidentally provide some kind of subliminal message to them that violence is golden, that they must fight one another. But my wife certainly doesn't convey that message, and I spend more time breaking fights up than starting them. My observation of their experience (as good little kids, who are learning to be responsible and respectful: I hope they don't grow up to be like R) is that it mirrors my own. They fight naturally with each other or with me (not with strangers, and they are learning not to fight with kids at school, not even their friends). I did not teach this, any more than I taught my dog to bark and bite my heels when we bought him as a tiny puppy. The violence is already there in animal nature, masculine nature especially (perhaps). The question is what to do with it.

I think it is very dangerous to let people spend their lives unchallenged, to accumulate experience winning that does not involve loss. My martial arts background was very useful to me in that it taught me to respect not just myself but also my opponent, who might not look like much but could now and again whip my ass (in ways that I would have to respect: getting caught with a stiff kick to the liver teaches you not to gloat too much when you are the kicker). The values my martial arts instructors had were explicitly geared toward minimizing physical damage: you don't want everyone leaving the art prematurely aged and broken, even if you are a selfish bastard as my teachers weren't.  As a result, I came away from my years of training physically developed (enhanced rather than broken) and mentally balanced.  I was not going to go out and hurt other people because "Life is unfair!" I knew in my gut, from years' experience, that you don't complain to the ref when the other guy takes you down and wins the match. You smile, shake his hand, and give your best effort the next time. Defeat is simply the other side of victory, a price that we must pay to win responsibly. The contest need not be fair--your opponent is different from you, with physical attributes that you don't have, and vice versa--and the best way of handling that asymmetry is with respect and deference (particularly when you win: you must show the loser that you respect his effort, that you are not the kind of asshole that R would call "alpha male"). 

For those who wisely require more than just my personal observations and experience to back these ideas up, I offer this National Geographic article on elephants.  Consider these two paragraphs in particular:

Bradshaw speculates that this early trauma [seeing older elephants killed or carried off by poachers], combined with the breakdown in social structure [no older elephants left to guide the tribe in the bush], may account for some instances of aberrant elephant behavior that have been reported by field biologists. Between 1992 and 1997, for example, young male elephants in Pilanesberg Game Reserve in South Africa killed more than 40 rhinoceroses—an unusual level of aggression—and in some cases had attempted to mount them. The young elephants were adolescent males that had witnessed their families being shot in cullings at Kruger National Park—sanctioned killings to keep elephant populations under control. At that time it was common practice for such orphaned elephant babies to be tethered to the bodies of their dead relatives until they could be rounded up for translocation to new territories. Once moved to Pilanesberg, the orphans matured without the support of any adult males. "Young males often follow older, sexually active males around," says Joyce Poole, "appearing to study what they do. These youngsters had no such role models."

One effort to repair the torn fabric of an elephant group lends further support to the idea that early trauma and a lack of role models can lead to aggression: After Joyce Poole suggested that park rangers in South Africa introduce six older bull elephants into Pilanesberg's population of about 85 elephants, the aberrant behavior of the marauding adolescent males—and their premature hormonal changes—abruptly stopped.

My observation of R and his kind tells me not that we socialize violence too much, but the opposite: we socialize it too little. Too few violent kids like R grow up without the kind of socialization into violence that I experienced (with peers and older men, mostly, who served me as role models for respectful, socially constructive ways to channel violence). Instead of watching older men court older women respectfully, R was watching college freshmen. Instead of watching older men fight in the arena, R was watching reality TV (or some other garbage remote from real life, until he mistook himself for the hero in an action film and charged out to die stupidly). I am profoundly grateful that I do not live R's life, that when I graduated with a BA as a virgin (no sex for me until I married at age 26), I was not homicidal. I knew that "real men" (the men I grew up with) don't kill women who don't want to go out with them. I knew that "real men" don't jump from "Life is unfair!" to "Kill everyone!" These are really valuable lessons, lessons that I hope to pass on to my sons as they grow up and come to terms with the violence they embody.

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.

Odi et amo

Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

The past two decades have been quite an experience.  I have seen so many things come and go from my life.  I have built things, some without noticing and others with great care and deliberation.  I have broken things down, some carefully and some not so much.  Hardest of all, from my perspective as an agent who aspires to control life: I have seen things broken, despite all I tried to do to save them.  Some of the things I see broken now are things I cannot look upon easily.  I see many of my most long-cherished illusions lying dead and destroyed beyond all hope of recovery (redemption, resurrection).  I think it is fair to say that my identity, the persona or mask that I use to identify myself alone and in company, is currently broken (or breaking: I keep trying to patch new identities together only to find at the last minute that they simply cannot hold).

Buddhism has been a great blessing in that it allows me to deal honestly with the reality I experience, a reality in which my self does not exist as something simply, intelligibly, coherently permanent.  But the practical utility of Buddhism is limited, since the reality I experience is one in which retirement from samsara is impossible.  I would like to flee into the wilderness, to leave society with all its impossible expectations that I have never met (and will probably never meet), to die to the world and then see if that might teach me how to love it without killing it (or myself).  My reality is closer to that of Kierkegaard: my self might be called an illusion, a fiction without any permanence (speaking ontologically, objectively), but it is an illusion I cannot shake (speaking epistemologically, subjectively).  I must carry that illusion with me in the world, where I must live (as other selves depend on me), and where it is broken beyond hope of repair (I begin to suspect).

My self might be unreal, ontologically, but from the perspective I must inhabit, it is eternal and inescapable.  I have watched it die a thousand deaths without perishing.  I have seen it smashed and smashed again, on a thousand different battlefields, and still it lives on.  Its life is changed by every loss, torn and disfigured by its continual failure to achieve victory (that may be ontologically impossible, but is subjectively necessary, at least as a goal, an aspiration).  I am Prometheus, the fool who finds himself waging useless war with the universe.  For my sins, for the mask my self embodies, I must stand chained on a mountaintop while Zeus' eagle eats my liver, eternally.  How did this happen?

I thought my self was a good family man.  So I went out into the world and had a family, only to discover that this requires me to become a political and economical force.  I must sell my self to politicians and bankers to be a good family man.  I hate politicians and bankers, not least because I don't know any of them, and all the ones I know of seem to lack basic human qualities (like honesty, decency, humility, a sense of responsibility larger than their greed for profits or victory).  So I am a terrible family man.

I thought my self was a good Mormon, a good Christian.  So I went out into the world and tried to practice Mormon Christianity.  I read my scriptures (the Bible too) till they fell apart (literally and metaphorically).  I noticed every sin I committed and repented constantly and sincerely -- in private prayer and verbal confession to my priesthood leaders.  I paid tithing on my gross income.  I served a Mormon mission to northern Spain, where I did my very best to share my religion thoughtfully and non-confrontationally with people who had absolutely no use for it.  I attended Brigham Young University, where I tried to learn everything I could about early Christianity, which I was taught would be ontologically the same as modern Mormonism.  It isn't, for the record.  Worse than that, my religious practice eventually became so harmful to my self that I simply could not do it anymore.  I couldn't pretend that confessing sin made it less powerful in my life: my experience is that confession made sin a stronger influence, leading me to find it in almost every moment of every day that I lived.  I was utterly miserable as a good Mormon.  The rational arguments I was given to make me endure this misery without apostatizing did not work (because I put in the legwork to learn what early Christianity looks like, what early Mormonism looks like, and I saw clearly how neither one resembles Mormonism today).  So I let go and became a terrible Mormon.

I thought my self was a good Christian, but my experience investigating early Christianity made me realize that this identity was as weak and unstable as my Mormon one.  I believed -- and still believe -- in what I call human values (justice, decency, reciprocity, honesty, cooperation, etc.).  But historical Christianity adds a lot of extraneous stuff to these values, sometimes obscuring them altogether with expectations that the body of Christ function as a tool in the hand of some inspired leader, or text, or historical tradition.  I could not bring myself to submit unconditionally to leaders, interpreters, tradents (traditores!) -- not even when they called upon authoritative texts and traditions to justify their leadership, so I became a bad Christian.  The body of Christ, it seems to me, is built on war and death.  The eye, the foot, the hand, and other members all make war against each other, invoking the head to justify their quarrels, and the end is that they all come away slashed, burned, cut off, and crucified.  As soon as the church emerges in history, we have orthodox and heretics at one another's throats, and the schism continues today (as in the day of Joseph Smith, who called it "a war of words and tumult of opinions" -- in other times it has manifested as war in deadly earnest, the kind of war in which men, women, and children take up arms and kill one another).

My two cents?  If you meet Christ on the road to Damascus, prepare to be crucified.  Like every Christian, bad or good, I can offer you reasons for this faith: Nolite arbitrari quia venerim mittere pacem in terram; non veni pacem mittere sed gladium.  Omnes enim qui acceperint gladium gladio peribunt.     

I thought myself a good academic, so I went into the university.  Here I discovered yet another impossible conflict.  As a good academic, I am supposed to care passionately what other scholars working in my field think about information and questions deliberately removed from public relevance.  This pedantry manifests as multiple publications in academic venues (journals, or book-publishers expert in producing curios for libraries that no ordinary private citizen could afford to purchase even if he were inclined to read them).  I am also expected to interest modern undergraduates in my field, seducing them into thinking that I am not really the boring pedant I pretend to be with my colleagues.  So I am supposed to have a bucket-load of bulletproof publications under my belt guaranteeing my pedantry, while students give me rave reviews for being such a great comedian in class that they couldn't help but major in the particular brand of pedantry that I represent.

Why the requirement for a double life?  Well, the university needs money.  To raise money, it needs me to look smart (hence the requirement for pedantry), busy (hence the requirement for teaching and other service in addition to pedantry), fun (hence student evaluations), and profitable (hence all the insufferable bloviating about education being job-training, as though people investigated the liberal arts for the same reasons that they read technical manuals or sit through seminars on company policies and procedures).  What is the university doing with money?  Well, it is building bigger, fancier dorms (to attract more and richer undergraduates).  It is building bigger, fancier sports facilities (to attract more and richer undergraduates, who have a real taste for our modern American improvements on old Roman bread and circuses).  It is hiring more -- and more expensive -- bureaucrats to manage all these games.  It is also cranking out more tools like myself -- ignorant pedants so focussed on publishing more and more recondite information that they fail to notice how the whole system of cancerous growth is doomed to collapse, when people don't have the resources to pay $600,000+ per student.  No economy on earth can sustain the levels of consumption we are actively encouraging people (students, faculty, administrators, staff) to enjoy at the modern university.  The whole thing is simply Wall Street writ small in the Ivory Tower, which it turns out is just as vulnerable to human greed and ignorance as every other man-made institution in the history of history.

How am I supposed to ignore this colossal disaster going on all around me in academia?  How am I supposed to ignore colleagues and friends broken on the Wheel of Fortune to which we have hitched our academic apple-cart?  I cannot.  I cannot just burrow down into the library and compose my perfect, perfectly pedantic articles, pretending that I don't see people suffering all around me (students gulled into dead-end careers built on economic castles in the air, adjuncts struggling to survive in a culture that rejects them as useless failures, smirking punks with tenure passing righteous judgment on everyone else, administrators doing their best to make the whole charade appear stable and desirable).  Instead of writing those articles, I appear here emoting about the collapse of civilization and my personal existential angst.  So I am a terrible academic (and probably a terrible educator in general, at least at institutions which measure academic value in terms of perpetuating our current economic system, which I find rotten to the core in academia as on Wall Street).

After failing at so many things, it naturally occurs me to suspect (to my wife's frustration) that I am simply a failure.  My eternal self, the mask that I carry with me from one disaster to the next, is one that inevitably finds its weakness in every corporate environment.  I find my weakness and write it clearly upon my face in blood, sweat, and eventually tears.  As an individual, I have many wonderful friends and great experiences (that have taught me much and given me real cause to be grateful).  I take things well.  I am a good dependent, a good person to owe things to (since I don't demand retribution or restitution when circumstances make it inhumane to do so).  I am a terrible provider, though, a terrible person to be dependent upon (since I let debts go and refuse to fight seriously until my back is really to the wall, where I am no use to the religious, political, and economic mobs whose institutions create human justice in this world).  My tendency is entirely against the spirit of the age that demands growth, recovery, and an imperious hand maintaining the powers that be (in the face of information that indicates their incorrigible insolubility, to me and to others).  My integrity (decency? honesty? virtue?) as an individual human being requires me to commit social, religious, political, and economic suicide.  I hate what my personal integrity entails, for me and my dependents, but I love that integrity, too.  I cannot abandon it.  I have tried.  I spent much time and effort working to overcome my limitations -- the honest ignorance that keeps me from being a good family man, a good Mormon, a good Christian, or a good academic -- but after two decades my conclusion is that this exercise is futile.

This post represents my official surrender on all fronts.  I see my vulnerability in all the battlefields where I stand, where my self exists transient and impermanent. I see that I cannot heal that vulnerability, no matter where I hide myself, no matter what rituals I perform to any gods (who may or may not exist, like my self: questions of ontology don't matter to me anymore, if they ever did).  I see that I have had a good run.  Now I have finished the course.  I have fought the good fight.  I have kept the faith (the only faith I ever really had, which was my individual integrity).  In reliquo reposita est mihi iustitiae corona quam reddet mihi Dominus in illa die iustus iudex, non solum autem mihi sed et his qui diligunt adventum eius.  Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant.  

My Mormon Testimony

Someone asked me if I consider myself Mormon still.  I do, and here I am going to try to explain how and why.

I have always thought, and think still, that it is impossible for me to escape from my past. I can respond to the past. I can grow from it, away from it even, but in the end I am always going to be a product of it.

I am a product of Mormonism. I was raised Mormon, by devout converts. I converted myself as a little boy, reading the scriptures on my own and coming up with an adolescent identity that was very Mormon. My adult identity is also Mormon: I served a mission honorably (with real intent and honest effort: I say this to talk about myself, not to denigrate anyone else); I earned my BA at Brigham Young University; I was married in the Salt Lake temple, to a woman I still love very much (more and more each day). I still construct my identity in dialogue with ideas I learned as an active, devout Mormon (e.g. the Mormon canon of scripture). Even as I have moved beyond my Mormon-ness, compelled by personal need to seek help for problems to which our culture currently lacks useful solutions, I have never transcended it completely. I don’t think I ever will. I don’t even want to.

Unlike some people, whom I in no way judge unfavorably, I don’t wake up wishing I had never heard of the church or that I could escape its influence in my life. I see the good and the bad in my own personal journey as a Mormon, and I embrace both. If I am strictly honest, I have never left Mormonism, and I don’t plan to leave. I have stepped away from the church, because I found the doctrine and practice there hurting my soul more than it healed me, but I retain many of the core values I took from my time as an active Mormon. I still believe very strongly that people require community, that we need ways to offer service (even when that service appears trivial to others or even to us), that rituals are an important constant in human life (an anchor for our wandering minds full of fear of the unknown and irregular), and that people must be free to receive new insight from their individual experience (i.e. “personal revelation”). While I am comfortable with the label atheist, I am equally comfortable with the labels agnostic, believer, Buddhist, humanist, deist, theist, Christian, and (yes) Mormon. I see religion as language. Just as I can speak various languages, I can practice many different religions (rites, ways of expressing human values, including the values we construct to respect things we don’t understand, e.g. God). One language is not categorically better than another, and the point of language is not perfect grammar but meaningful communication--and the minimization of evil (which we all know from our own experience as well as that of others around us). How you practice religion is more important to me, infinitely more important, than what religion you happen to practice.  How you speak says more about your individual character than the language you happen to use.  I do not write in English here because I am superior, and anything good I offer is good for a reason that transcends its being expressed in English. The world would certainly not be a better place if we all forgot how to speak any language but English.

There are things I love about Mormonism: its history contains a lot of heroism to go along with the mafia politics, bigotry, and small-mindedness, and I honor that heroism. I admire the successes of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and I weep for their failures (the same way I do for my own). I respect the moral integrity of other Mormons, including those in power (in the church or outside it), even when I firmly disagree with some strong moral stance that they have taken (e.g. the stance that brands all explicit criticism of priesthood leaders as evil: I do not believe this, and I never will; I see it as a betrayal of everything good in Mormonism, but I respect the right of other Mormons to hold it and defend it). I still get a kick out of watching General Conference (for more than just the eye-rolls), and I think BYU represents a valuable educational experience (for me and other students, Mormon and not)--provided the administration does not curtail academic freedom there.

Even though history has separated me from full activity in the church, probably forever, I am not above making common cause with it, and I will always have a cultural affinity with people who self-identify as Mormons. I wish them and their churches well, even when they do things I would not do, say things I would not say, reveal the will of God as I would not reveal it. Like Joseph Smith, I know what I know, and I have to stay true to that (even when the church doesn’t like it).

Some Mormon Mysteries

I interrupt a long hiatus to offer the following responses to two simple questions: (1) What is God to you?  (2) Are families forever?

(1) I would say that God to me is uncertainty, probability, unpredictability, the blind spot in my human mirror onto the vast thing that is reality. I am a machine for looking into reality and seeing discrete variables causally: I see X, and I see Y, and when one follows the other I can always tell you why. Unfortunately, I will not always be right. But this does not mean that life is utterly purposeless (or utterly random: we experience things that are regular all the time, even when there is no possibility of doing a scientific study to rule out coincidence as ultimate "cause").

I can do many things with my blind spot. I can paint it to look friendly or scary. I can personify it, pray to it, wear little trinkets and whatnot to remind me of it, or I can take an opposite route--depersonifying it, refusing to pray to it, finding some other reason for whatever little trinkets I want to wear. The approach I take is heavily influenced by my personal history. Who are my mentors? What books do I read? What music do I know? Do I interact more with Jesus or the Pharisees in my particular faith tradition? (Every cultural tradition includes people focused on broad principles, that can become too broad to make useful sense, and people focused on narrow laws, that can become too narrow to be useful. If I am poisoned by hippie Jesus' lackadaisical approach to life, then I am likely to react by running towards a more strict Phariseeism to correct my fault, whereas if I am poisoned by strict Phariseeism, I become more likely to course-correct by running towards hippie Jesus. I am in the latter category, but I have met quite a few people on the opposite trajectory.)

Eternal families? I don't really know what eternity is. If it is temporal, then it is just time going on and on and on without stopping (physicists, is that really even possible? I doubt it, since time is something that exists relative to other things that change, e.g. when universes bang in and out of existence). What would one do forever? How would one live (without going insane)? I don't know. I like some change, some narrative, some regrets, and an end to life's story (with possibilities for new stories: who knows what comes after my story? not me, surely). When I see "the eternal perspective" invoked in Mormonism, I also note a disturbing trend towards preserving some (galling) injustice in the status quo: "From an eternal perspective, it does not matter so much that you are currently unsuccessful (unmarried, female, black, enslaved, etc.). Just live with that, and God will eventually set it all right" (by having some king and priest who isn't a loser like you look after it? this isn't what is meant always by any means, but it is often the message transmitted, unfortunately).

The useful eternal perspective for me exists outside time. Eternity is not time going on with no end, but a space outside time, a metaphorical space where possibility exists untapped, unexhausted, unreached (and in some sense unreachable) by human understanding. It is what Buddhists call emptiness (not nothingness, but the indefinite possibility that something might happen--or not). Instead of inspiring us to come up with self-serving stories to justify evil in the status quo ("blacks are roughing it here because they were fence-sitters in the pre-existence, women because Eve ate that damn apple," etc.), it reveals to us the poverty of material success. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, and I choose to love him (and life) anyway. Replace "the Lord" with Nature if you like. Feminize him (it, them). Do whatever you like! It is your life's work to make art of your religion. But you will not exhaust reality; you will not escape the blind-spot built into your humanity. That is not a bug, I fear, but a feature--and the only cure we have found is death (not really so bad, when one approaches it correctly: I can have really happy thoughts about rotting somewhere in the ground, providing nourishment to the biota all around me--the same way so many other beings have died to keep me alive through my mortality; I want to give something back).

(2) Families? I don't know how they exist or last universally (for all observers everywhere). I don't think I ever will, but I know that I love mine. I know that I value them in a way that I cannot value others (not because I have no use for non-family, but because I cannot be that intimate with all humanity, let alone all sentient life). In the context of my own life-story, they are essential: they are the people who hear my story, who share it, who find meaning in it, and who enrich me with their own stories--stories that contain meaning I can see (because I am close to them, for whatever reasons). I don't know how we are together. Forever? What would that mean? My sons eternally in diapers? Eternally squabbling because someone threw up or punched someone? Eternally meeting with relatives each Thanksgiving to spread diseases (and good cheer)? I prefer to think that we are together now, and that I hope to remain with them for the duration of my story: no matter what happens, they will always be important to that story. That is all I can say.

Good Religion

In response to this.

There is no such thing as a religion of peace. Historically, all religions become religions of war when they need to. Christ brings a sword, too, just like Mohammed and the Buddha. So people who go around expecting practitioners of one religion to be uniformly peaceful will always be disappointed (or shocked, or whatever) when circumstances reveal (again!) that this expectation is not justified. Buddhists respond to this reality by saying that we live in samsara, which I suppose somebody could translate as "hell" (though the Buddhists themselves imagine hell-realms that are even worse than our world and use that word for these places).

Similarly, there is no such thing as a religion that only produces "civilization," by which the article seems to mean something like "good behavior." In my view, there is no such thing as good behavior that is not sometimes bad (and vice versa). Historically, civilization is certainly both good and bad: good when we replace pillage and piracy with a free and peaceful market; bad when we wage total war on people we don't like, for reasons that may be justified or not.  War is always bad, and really destructive war is not possible without the awesomely terrible WMDs that civilized people create.  Note that the religious orientation of civilized people has relatively little effect on their capacity for generating and deploying WMDs.  The nation with the most nukes and the most nukes deployed is definitely not Buddhist, and the Buddhist Japan that we bombed to hell in WWII was not particularly peaceful, either.

“He who does not climb the mountain of Christ does indeed fall into the abyss of Buddha.” He who does not climb the mountain of Mohammed does indeed fall into the abyss of Christ. He who does not climb the mountain of Thomas Muenzer does indeed fall into the abyss of Martin Luther. He who does not climb the mountain of Torquemada does indeed fall into the abyss of St. John of the Cross (or St. Teresa of Avila). He who does not climb the mountain of Hugh B. Brown does indeed fall into the abyss of Bruce R. McConkie. So what? Chesterton is a great wit, but I am not sure what he is trying to say here.

The modern world is not unique in being "on the verge of a mental collapse" (assuming it is): humanity is on that verge all the time, and we periodically fall over (witness the fact that history has always been about wars and rumors of wars, paranoia, obsession with our neighbor getting his clothes and sex habits right, etc.).  Life feeds you poison, all the time, in the form of phenomena that your faculties (mental and physical and everything in between or beneath or above) cannot help but respond to.

Historically, different people manifest different kinds of response. Some meditate this way. Some meditate that way. Some read and chant Sanskrit. Others read and chant Latin (or Greek, or Arabic, or Chinese, or any number of other languages). Some manage to deal with their particular demons without causing themselves or those around them undue harm. Others don't. We cannot say precisely why. We can try to make generalizations, but history falsifies these ruthlessly, revealing to the most honest and far-seeing among us (no matter what our religion might be) that the good life lies outside human ability to predict or control perfectly. Ancient people called this Fortune or Luck. Some worshipped it as a god apart from other gods (like the god responsible for justice). Others considered it an aspect of perfect deity (God contains luck the same way he contains justice, making him utterly incomprehensible to us limited humans, who cannot experience these things as commensurate). But in the end we are all flying blind. We are gambling with power(s) we cannot perceive or control (even if we can influence them in particular moments). Sometimes we win, and sometimes we lose. Pick the gaming strategy that comes easiest (and most helpfully) to you. Make your own bets with Nature (or God or whatever), and stand by them (even when the consequences are bad: own that, learn from it, die for it if your life is required).

The real question that matters to me in all of this is not what religion should I practice? but how should I practice religion? How can I place bets with Nature that I am willing and able to stand by? Where can I find tools and training helpful to developing and deploying my innate ability to see and place those bets that we all must make every day? Not all people need to eat the same food to be healthy. My diet is not a universal diet. What is good for me right now may not be good for me in 10 years, and it may not ever be good for you.

I came to Buddhism not as a believer but as a skeptic, and I don't feel that I owe it any special allegiance. I have heard many horror stories of people who fled into the arms of predatory Buddhist gurus, giving their life to enlightenment (and the guru) the same way Christians are supposed to give their life up to God (and the priest or prophet). There is nothing magic about Buddhism per se. It is just another religion, another language, another tool for dealing with human reality that can easily become a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands (and we all have such hands, near to us if not attached to our own arms). I have not "taken refuge" at this point (the Buddhist analogue to Christian baptism), and I doubt I ever will--mostly because I don't like committing myself totally to an idea. My history has broken me from the habit of "finding absolute truth" and then clinging to it no matter what.  I cannot do that.  Truth in my experience is like a series of small life-rafts that come together and fall apart regularly in a swirling ocean of uncertainty. You have to be ready to ditch your truth when it breaks and starts to go under. This insight is not something I "found" in Buddhism: I found it before I found Buddhism; Buddhism just has a history of admitting it as a valuable insight, which makes it easier for me to talk about it and approach it usefully among Buddhists (who unlike Christians don't cut me off halfway through my attempts to communicate with, "Silence, thou fiend of the eternal pit! Vade retro, Satana!").

Part of my affiliation with Buddhism is accidental. In the West, Buddhism is very weak. It cannot demand the kind of total submission from me that it does demand from monks in India, Tibet, or Japan. I like that. I don't want to be dominated and subjugated and "civilized" by religion (or religious masters). If I moved to Asia, to a community where Buddhism is much more entrenched and domineering, I might easily defect to some weaker religion (even some variety of Christianity: I have nothing against Christianity per se). For me, virtue is not primarily Christian or Buddhist or Muslim or Jewish: it is primarily human, and secondarily whatever particular historical people and traditions make of it. Christian charity and Buddhist compassion are just two historical faces of the same human love. They are not opposed necessarily, or even very different from one another (I would argue that their similarity is more compelling than any difference). People who point to one historical instance of difference between them ("this Christian works in a homeless shelter while his Buddhist brother goes on a violent, homicidal rampage") ignore the importance of accident in human affairs--and the fundamental likeness between humans that appears clear to people like me: Islam is not more violent than other religions; it just wears an angry mask right now, as other religions have in the past, do now, and will in future. When Christians go on violent rampages, it will not be an indictment of Christianity, but of the rampagers (who are not bad Christians, but bad people, plain and simple).

I see myself working not for this tradition or that one, this religion or that one, but for humanity--human virtues, human integrity, human goodness (which comes in more varieties than I can usefully pretend to comprehend or define, other than to recognize that all historical religions seem capable of facilitating their expression). I am first a humanist, and only then a Buddhist or a Christian or a Mormon or a Muslim. I have no intractable hostility for Buddhism or Christianity or Mormonism or Islam as ideologies (or families of related ideologies). My conflict with religion is not about opposing this or that idea (all ideas are more or less dangerous and helpful at the same time), but with the way people practice their ideas (whatever those are). I want to avoid implementing my ideas where they are bad, saving them for the time when they are good. I want to avoid your ideas where they are bad, taking them where they are good. I don't think that moral problems can be solved by making all the world convert to the same ideology (any more than I think the problem of miscommunication should be solved by making us all learn the same language).

I want people to use ideology (religion) well. From my perspective, this happens more when life gives us multiple ideologies (religions)--different maps of the same human territory that we keep traversing but never really understanding (because it lies ultimately outside our comprehension: we can never understand it as it exists, larger and more complex than we will ever be). I want people to practice many religions (and speak many languages). Of course I want them to practice these religions well (giving more benefit than harm to themselves and the communities where they exist). I am always interested in improving myself and helping others improve (in ways that they can recognize: I don't want to make others agree with me or my ideals where these become dangerous to them). If your moral improvement requires you to become a Catholic monk with no outside affiliations (no fraternizing with degenerate Buddhists for you!), then that is fine. I am not invested in making you practice Buddhism against your will (any more than I am determined to make you learn Latin against your will).

I am not interested in forcing myself on anybody where they don't want me, unless I really have to be there: I will not come to Catholic mass and chant Tibetan prayers, but I will not tolerate Catholic monks invading my home or the local Buddhist shrine to shout me down with psalms, either--not even when these psalms are rendered in exquisite musical harmony. I do not mind if you want to wear a burkha, but I will not let you force it on me without vigorous protest (not even if you convince a majority of our fellow-citizens that my donning the burkha is essential if our community is to preserve its traditional values and avoid the wrath of Allah).

Good religion, in my mind, is about retiring from the public square--not charging out and seizing it (for God or Allah or nirvana or Zeus). The public square is like a marketplace where many different traders come to offer wares (all of them at once different and alike: different because Ali's pots are not exactly the same as Karma's; the same because they are both pots, useful for holding food or the severed heads of slain enemies). A good marketplace has many traders, many varieties of pots, and the people there get along with one another--even when you buy Ali's pots and I choose Karma's. I may think Ali's pots are shoddy merchandise (or I may not). I may try to convince you that Karma's are better. Somebody may use Karma's pots (or Ali's) to commit a terrible crime. The best solution to these problematic circumstances (we don't like the same pots, and pots can be tools of destruction) will never be violent suppression of some pot-trader we think of as evil. Ali's pots are just as good for committing crimes as Karma's. Crime is a problem of people, not pots (or ideologies, which all of us possess and use in the same way we possess pots, and knives, and cars, and bombs, and other tools). As long as I am not being coerced to do business I cannot believe in (to buy pots I don't want and cannot use), I have no problem with the marketplace (or the existence of vendors selling pots that I personally don't use or endorse for others' use). This attitude does not change even when I wind up being appointed market-controller.

As controller, my job would not be to put "bad" traders out of business. I would merely keep people from committing clear criminal damage against each other where possible (i.e. where it is clear what the damage is and that the people inflicting it are doing so without the consent of their victims). If you sell pots that nobody wants or can use without immense suffering, then the market will put you out of business much faster and more effectively than I could. If I interfere with violence (in the form of a political referendum banishing you, say), then I set a terrible precedent. I teach the market to depend on something other than peaceful negotiation for its results. I teach the traders to avoid trusting their customers (and vice versa), endorsing the formation of cartels (which aspire to become monopolies and control the violence I have let loose in the marketplace). To will the supremacy of one trader or group of traders against the will of the market, to will the supremacy of one religion (or religious cartel, e.g. Judaeo-Christian values, sharia, Catholic values, Buddhist values) against the will of hapless converts, is in my mind to destroy everything I love and cherish about human virtue (which religions should exist to protect, I think). As market-controller, my place is to encourage people to get along civilly, peacefully, and authentically: you can wear your burkha, and I can wear something else. Nobody has to die, or go to jail, or pay massive fines, or suffer otherwise for buying one brand of pots rather than another.  The pot you buy for yourself is its own punishment (or reward).  Just don't force your neighbor to buy it against his will.

Good religion is about what I as a person do in voluntary association with other people.  It is not about me forcing people to do things against their will or inclination, and it does not require everyone to have the same ideology (or the same language), thank goodness.