Job Security and Lack Thereof

To me it seems that we often ignore solutions to institutional indifference or hostility that involve breaking away rather than moving in.

If I am already a playing member of some institution--deacon in a church, shareholder in a business, official in a government, tenured faculty in a university--then it makes sense to push for reform, as an insider, where I see it as useful or helpful ("the right thing to do"). I can campaign from a position of relative strength as an insider, using social and political capital that I already have to fix problems I see. As an outsider, I don't have that capital, the capital for reform. I cannot make a meaningful dent on insider culture, really, except insofar as I avoid participating in it where I find it obnoxious.

If I am a shareholder in a business, then I have a meaningful voice when it comes to decisions that business makes. If I am not, if I am merely one of several million faceless consumers (passive beneficiaries of business I don't make), then my most meaningful decision is often simply to take my investment elsewhere. If I were tenured faculty, then my outlook on academic culture would be different than it is. I would advocate more for political solutions involving existing powers. As matters stand, my advice is that nobody should bet too much on the success of an academic career (with "too much" loosely defined as "debt sufficient to procure a middle-class life like that of my parents, who owned homes and had pensions and vacations and whatnot"). I am open to publishing work in alternative venues (e.g. using Amazon to self-publish rather than submitting to journals or academic presses). I am open to distance learning, with or without the umbrella of institutional support. I am open to the reality that many of us do many different things over the course of variegated lives: there is no such thing, not even in my relatively small coterie of academic friends, as "the academic lifestyle" or even "the academic career" that moves predictably from grad school to tenure. If a student asks me about making a career in academia, you had better believe I will mention all of this stuff. I will mention that it is wise to have back-up plans, and a working partner, and reasonable expectations of the rewards available. It does not make sense to care more for institutions than they can care for you. Feel free to make professional inroads into business outside the tenure track, for strait is that gate, and narrow the way, and few there be that find it. 

My own situation is not wholly without hope, though I appear to be headed down an employment rabbit-hole that swallows some people whole (adjuncting as a career).  I am hoping that having really low expectations and being frugal will help us as we come closer to death of natural causes. I really like the tiny house movement, myself, and will never have a mortgage if I can help it. Maybe we can move into a shed or an RV (or a yurt!) when the kids grow up and move out. We definitely won't be paying their college tuition, if they go to college (which I am not going to push as a necessity, not least because there is no way in hell we could afford it).

Healthcare is a problem that persists, thanks in large part to the really stupid system we Americans have jerry-rigged in which the only way to see a doctor is to pay some bureaucrat (with a private or public company of dubious value to anybody except career bureaucrats). But for now my wife has benefits, even if I don't, and we are young enough to aim for good health as a long-term option. I suppose I may have to invoke sudden death if I get a really nasty disease that nobody can pay to cure--but honestly, those diseases are often death sentences even with the best care that money can buy. My great-grandfather fell on a pitchfork (the blunt end, not the tines) while working in a barn-loft. He spent a few weeks in agony, and then was dead. He was not even 30 years old. Life happens. Sometimes all we get to do is clean up the mess, bury the dead, mourn, and move on. It isn't Obama's fault (or Boehner's).

Cars are an expensive nuisance, as are computers, but so far we have been fortunate with used machines and good deals. I think there is hope that we may make it all the way to death without needing more than a serviceable jalopy and a few relatively cheap machines that are not phones that can handle word-processing and other activities our employers require. Beyond that, all we need are clothes and food--and time to spend together.

At some point, which I seem to reach sooner than many, I would rather forgo extra income and spend another hour with my family. I know that my academic employers do not value me as a human being: I don't expect them to do so. They have a need for services that I happen to be able to provide, for the moment--impersonal services that they can afford to hire for a relatively small sum. I know that they care more about the services than about me. That is the way of institutions, which necessarily value data over anecdotes, process over people. Seeing this truth as I do, I make a point of limiting my exposure to the institution. I want a relatively low ceiling on the amount of distress that the university is capable of causing in my life. When the dean hauls me into her office, swears at me, and tells me that I am a loser who should go fuck himself and die, I would prefer to smile, tear up my performance review, and walk out--rather than sweat and weep and wail and gnash my teeth. It is easier to be impervious to ill fortune that we expect, I think--so I make a point of expecting indifference and occasional hostility from the university, seeing that it often rewards my colleagues with such things (and I am not magically different or special or superhuman).

My family care about me as the university does not and cannot, even if it were to offer me tenure. I would be willing to care more about its future, and so its institutional decisions in the present, if I had a real stake in them (such as the prospect of tenure would raise), but even then I would not love it as my family. And I would not expect it to love me this way. As an adjunct, my principal loyalty is to students, and to the integrity of my work (as a teacher and a really independent scholar, free to read and write and publish what I want on my own schedule, without giving a damn for whatever intellectual fad is currently hot with tenured faculty whose collective attitude towards me is largely one of indifference or disgust). I value those professional people I know personally--the friends I have made at work--and I endeavor to be worth something to them as another human being, no matter where they may be professionally. I like many academics, including some with tenure, and naturally I hope that they like me back. But this is hardly the same thing as liking the university. I like teaching, if you want to know the truth, and thinking and writing, so for the present I put up with the university. I don't really like it, and I know better than to expect it to like me.

In brief, when buying something really expensive (a house, professional training that lasts a decade or costs decades of work to pay off), consider the worst-case scenario rather than the best. If the worst is more than you can bear, then don't buy it (no matter how nice the best looks). I would advise the aspiring grad student to look elsewhere if she cannot bear vows of material poverty and intellectual humiliation--for such is the lot of many academics (probably all of them, at one time or another).

Hope and Change

I do not have hope that the oligarchs who run Washington will decide to burn bridges with their masters on Wall Street--to save me, or people like me (small statistics who don't matter, until we become part of a large mob demanding Coke or Pepsi).

I do not have hope that it makes a great difference whether the oligarchs identify as Democrat or Republican.

I do not believe that America is the hope of the world.  (If it is, then I suspect that is at least as much a curse as a blessing.  We might legitimately hope to kill or bankrupt the world, given our past, but how can we hope to replace its hopes with our own?  How is this not the worst kind of arrogance, even supposing--as some do not--that we are in some sense envied by the entire world?)

I do have hope that individual people can make a positive difference in the communities where they reside.  I believe in doing good that we can see and respect, among people we know (or might know--as people rather than "constituents" or "customers").  I believe in the community I reside in.  I believe in my neighbors, my friends, my family.  I might even believe in local politicians.  But that is the limit of my belief.  I cannot believe in what I cannot know (America), in ideals pretending to serve a population or populations so vast that they become incoherent to the point of being practically meaningless.  "We the People" of the USA are 300 million souls, give or take, scattered over a geography and ecology (political, economic, religious, social) so vast and diverse as to be utterly incapable of sharing much besides ignorance and hostility--in my considered judgement (that anyone is welcome to question, to dispute, to reject, etc.).

Too often, when stewardship of others is invoked--by Left or Right--it is in a context of somebody else doing something for me, in my place, without my having to lift a finger or take any responsibility.  I am asked to punish people I never met, to give money to people I never met, to hope against hope that people who don't know me from Adam know better than I how to reward and punish.  I am supposed to cede moral agency to "representatives" who act in my name, waging war and granting charity for reasons I am never supposed to learn.  All I am required to do is listen attentively to the latest commercials, put my hand on my heart when the music plays, and burst into tears as I affirm with emotional conviction that Coke or Pepsi, Democrats or Republicans, is certain to save the world.  I find this vision of my activity as a citizen of a free republic rather confining--since I have no love for Coke or Pepsi, no private inclination to prefer either as I make my diet of water, coffee, tea, and milk.  It would be easy to brand me as somebody with no hope--a desperate cynic with no commitment to the ideals that made this country great, blah blah--but what does this really mean?  I was born in the United States.  I have lived the greater part of my life here.  I pay taxes.  I even vote--though I confess my motivation is not hope for change that my sober judgement views as impossible.  I work (for money when I can, for the comfort and security of those I care about when monetary employment is lacking).  I observe the laws as carefully and conscientiously as I can.  I am polite.

I don't expect people to live like me, to like me, to "join my cause" and make it into the kind of nationwide farce that is Coke, Pepsi, the Democratic Party, or the GOP.  Whatever hope I have for humanity existing in relative peace comes from my trust that individuals like me tend to love their family and friends, and the community around them--without losing sight of the reality that this love is fragile and historically inclined to become hateful (when the interests of my family bring me into conflict with yours).  I can give you space to make a family that is not mine, but I cannot bear it when we must all become part of the same gigantic, dysfunctional family.  "One nation" of 300 million people is a disaster, from my perspective, when we must all have the same moral values--the same diet, the same healthcare, the same marriages, the same education, the same careers, the same uncritical devotion to factional politics that makes us pawns.

Rejecting the Robots

A rant in response to this interview of Bill Gates.  A pertinent quote from the article: "As for what governments should do to prevent social unrest in the wake of mass unemployment, the Microsoft cofounder said that they should basically get on their knees and beg businesses to keep employing humans over algorithms."

What we need are institutions and communities committed to human values over machine values (in the terminology of the late Lewis Mumford).  We need people to build communities redundantly, rather than efficiently, using technology that is old and outdated (from a mechanistic perspective).  We need to make it possible to be happy as a poor person again (fed, clothed, sheltered, and contributing meaningfully to a community that makes this possible without enslavement, i.e. without owing anything to large industry outside the community).  In terms of quantitative measurement, people may suffer or die more in these new poor communities.  The quality of healthcare will be lower (by some evaluations: note that this need not mean that mortality rates rise).  But qualitatively, our life with humanity will always be better than our life without it.

The future I see lies in disengagement and dispersion.  Leave the global society, the national power grid, the Internet (as an alternative to the village square), regular international travel, industrial agriculture and medicine as backbones of society (propped up by markets "too big to fail," which really don't exist).  Education should prepare us to live well and cheerfully with minimal reliance on industry and technology, particularly where these make our existence more miserable than not.  If the rise of robots makes men miserable, then we must simply abandon the robots.  Not reason with their masters.  Not beg for more scraps from people who couldn't care less.  Not look for dreams of expensive happiness that we are never going to achieve (many of our parents did not even achieve them, and their generation came closer than ours ever will).  Bill Gates is the voice of a past that I don't want, leading to a future wherein I have no place.  As I write these words using an operating system not designed by Microsoft (which I despise without hatred: it is simply shoddy) or Apple (which I despise without hatred: it is simply shoddy and pretentious), I am glad that Bill Gates and his like can never own the world, no matter how they might try.  Nature is bigger than any of us.  She does not make me live and die as Bill Gates, or the mindless minion of Bill Gates, not even when circumstances thrust me into a position where it is easy for me to imagine myself this way.

I think my own way to a death uniquely mine--uniquely tragic, uniquely comic, an intimate, personal experience I savor for myself with faculties that come to me from something much richer and more ancient than elite snobs with dreams of robots and rigid world-systems (wherein the future belongs to efficiency and algorithm rather than redundancy and imagination).  I think Bill Gates is full of shit.  As shit-stirrers go, he means well enough, and does his part to fulfil the little measure of that which he conceives to be virtue.  For that I respect him--as a man (not a prophet, certainly not a prophet I am eager to follow, since his heaven looks like hell in my eyes).  In his advice to governments, Bill Gates makes the same mistake that Occupy Wall Street did: you don't beg bureaucrats for anything you really want to get, ever, whether they serve private shareholders or pretend to represent the public.  It makes no difference.  To beg them is to give them power, to feed their dream at the expense of your own, to love the Devil more than God (waxing Christian again).  I do not beg Wall Street for anything.  I do not beg Uncle Sam for anything.  I do not beg Bill Gates for anything.  I expect nothing from them but death (and thus greet each new moment of my life with conscious wonder and gratitude, as the arrival of something blessed that I did not expect, that will certainly end soon).

A Personal Economic Manifesto

A brief diatribe summarizing my take on contemporary economic policy in the United States of America (particularly, but my outlook has relevance elsewhere).

As long as we the people are stuck playing on Wall Street, its insiders will always have us by the throat. It does not really matter what their motives are, whether they are philanthropists or misanthropists or psychopaths or sociopaths. People like me will always be invisible ciphers to them, chips to move around in games where the outcome is some profit or goal that is remote from my experience. They cannot relate to me personally, humanly, or humanely--not even if they try. All the courses in good business ethics in the world will not change this. All the bureaucratic red tape in the world will not change it, either. There is simply no substitute for creating a street small enough for the individual to interact with people who see his personality, who respect it because they see it as the peer or mirror of their own integrity.

We don't need to fix the Street. It is irredeemable. We need to walk away and build new Streets (not one Street to rule them all: that is precisely the problem with our economic system as it exists right now; it is too unifocal, too centralized, too big not to smash little players like me to smithereens). The rhetorical dichotomy between Wall Street and Main Street is too neat the way most people conceive it. Main Street is not a unit the way Wall Street is. It is a bunch of incommensurate and incommensurable stuff, an incoherent plurality that resists reduction to monotony. How it looks in one geography is no indication of its appearance elsewhere, and there is no prescriptive blueprint for building it the same way everywhere (to make regular profits for all people on it, implementing the same principles the same way). Saving Main Street is impossible, because no matter what anyone ever does, some Main Streets will die as others live. Wall Street is just the biggest Main Street trying to avoid its own death, unnaturally, by making all other Streets die prematurely so that it can harvest their organs to keep its defunct carcass breathing (barely).

There is no economic recovery because the Street is dead. It already died. It doesn't matter who killed it (Republicans, Democrats, greedy businessmen, bankers, ignorant suckers pouring their money into business they didn't and don't understand, etc.). Passing the guilt, and there is plenty to go around, will not patch Humpty Dumpty or get us moving on toward cleaning up his mess. We need to build new Streets. And we need to consider that each and every one of them will be mortal the way Wall Street was. I want to puke every time I hear people talk about the economy (in the United States of America), only to discover that they conceive that entity as Wall Street and (mehercule!) they have a plan to save it. I don't want to save that sack of shit. I want to drop it like a hot potato, burn it, and never look back (except to remind myself what not to build, what not to carry, what not to care about).

Understanding Identity Loss

Jonathan Lear.  Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.  ISBN: 0674023293.

The following passage comes from Lear's book, a very interesting study of the collapse of the Crow culture (in the American West). Throughout the book, Lear tries to explain what the Crow chief Plenty Coups might have meant when he said, "[W]hen the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened."  This explanation of Lear's really touched me:

Imagine that pieces of a chess game had inner lives.  And imagine that each took itself to be a center of agency.  I am a knight!  I see myself in tribal terms: I am a black knight!  I am proud to be a black knight!  We shall fight a glorious battle and capture the white king!  I think strategically in terms of my possible moves: two up and one to the left.  Perhaps I should wait here quietly for several moves, and if that white rook comes my way ... I understand all the other members of my tribe in terms of the roles they play: and I understand that we are all aspiring to excellence in the sense that we are trying to win.

Unbeknownst to me, my world exists because it is protected by a group of humans.  These are the guardians of the chess world, who insist that the only acceptable moves are moves that are allowable within the game of chess.  From my point of view as a thoughtful knight, the humans are as unknowable as the transcendent gods.  But suppose these chess-guardians were one day just to give it up: as a historical phenomenon, humans got bored with playing this game, and the game of chess goes out of existence.  My problem is not simply that my way of life has come to an end.  I no longer have the concepts with which to understand myself or the world.  I understand the other pieces in terms of their roles, but there are no longer any such roles.  Perhaps I am found attractive by humans as a physical object.  I am put on a bookshelf as a curiosity, an objet d'art.  I might sit for generations on a series of bookshelves--get traded as what humans call an antique--and all this while I am in utter confusion.  I have no idea what is going on.  This isn't primarily a psychological problem.  The concepts with which I would otherwise have understood myself--indeed, the concepts with which I would otherwise have shaped my identity--have gone out of existence (Lear, pp. 48-49).

I am that knight.  Outside the various games I have played over the course of my brief life, I have no identity.  Historical circumstances have forced me beyond those games--the game of being a good family man (as I understood it), the game of being a good Mormon, the game of being a good Christian, the game of being a good academic.  I am simply a curio now, a museum piece, a disoriented bit of misshapen matter that aspires to be part of a work of art--a game that it cannot find.  I need a game, a place to identify with, a geography to occupy--to contend for with others who see things that I see as mattering in some sense.  My fellow contenders and I don't have to agree precisely on everything, of course, but we need to share a sense of value, integrity, honor, culture.  We need to value the same kind of information, and to value the intellectual process that the other uses to address it--even when that process is not our own.  It might be hostile to ours, as the Sioux were hostile to the Crow: that hostility actually gave their lives meaning, as the hostility between black and white gives meaning to the game of chess.

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.  

Katabasis Again

I am not sure how I feel about this.  On the one hand, it is sad to see that I might be unemployable even if I weren't such a loser (i.e. if my books were already written).  On the other hand, I have less to lose now if circumstances force me out of the market.  I can transition to another life without the interlude of fake success that is a temporary lectureship or visiting professorship.  I don't have debts, yet.  My kids are young.  I still know them, still interact with them regularly.  My wife and I are close, and she has a job that isn't going to vanish overnight (the way mine will).

I can still read.  I can still write.  I can still teach, even, and make a positive difference in the life of some community where I will be something other than an empty cipher (with the label “failure” trailing me everywhere I go, as I fail to live up to expectations that move inexorably to inspire more effort, more busywork, more committees sitting in dark rooms demanding that people have dreams and then destroying those dreams so that they can meet again next year and do it all over again).

I don't think the humanities are a dead end.  I love the liberal arts.  I don't need to be rich or famous, or a professor, to have a meaningful life as a humanist.  What I need now is the confidence to transition from being a big-company man (a big-company humanist, a mercenary willing to do anything to work for the big-time winning army on a shrinking battlefield) to being something else (a small-company man?).  I do need a community of sorts.  But it doesn't have to be your standard academic department.  It doesn't have to involve prizes and piles of cash and loads of time spent currying favor (by writing the right way about the right things for the right audience).

My friends have done all sorts of interesting things with their lives—unexpected things, educational things, seemingly unimportant things that became very meaningful to them and their families.  I am open to that now.  I don't need academic success.  I might want it, like the guy in this article, who is a much better scholar (in terms of track record) than I am right now—but that does not matter.  My wants are empty and vain—vanitas vanitatum.  I can want anything, superficially speaking.  What I really want, what I really need, is the kind of two-way commitment that Mormons call a covenant.  I thought I had this with the LDS church, but I didn't.  I wondered whether I might have it with the university.  I don't.  So I need to move on.  The big church does not love me.  The big university does not love me.  Maybe some small group will.  I promise I am worth investing in.  I will give back, and what I give will not be worthless: it will be the best that I am capable of, the highest expression I can muster of whatever qualities Nature has given me.  I do not take credit for these qualities.  I do not demand respect for them.  I merely seek to use them for the improvement of humanity—my own and that of other people, who might be students, colleagues, friends, family, enemies, etc.  Es macht mir nichts.  Whatever comes from my own job hunt, in and out of the academy, I am ready.

Success to me looks small and modest.  A little group of people who care about me, as I care about them.  A little culture we share together, contributing to one another as we are able without reference to something as abstract and meaningless (not to say poisonous) as "the field" (or "the market" come to think on it).  My ideas are not produced for the market.  I did not go to school to serve the market--to teach it, to enrich it, to enlarge it, to make its fattest denizens "too big to fail."  The masters of the universe--economic, academic, and religious--appear to me in the guise of vultures who batten on the corpse of culture.  They pretend that this vampirism of theirs is necessary, is the very apex of culture even, but that is precisely a lie.  They might argue that it is a noble lie in the tradition of Plato.  I don't personally experience it that way.  If it turns out that I cannot embody this lie well enough to live by it myself, then I will have little problem leaving it behind--and living by some other lie, a lie of my own construction that I can believe instead of a lie some other person tells me.  "Sour grapes!" they will call after me, as I leave their feast, and the charge will be true.  What do I care that it is?  I must go on living.  If that means that I must fight the church, the academy, and the market instead of joining them, then so be it.  We shall be enemies, and I shall do my very best to wage honorable war, aspiring to a death (literal or metaphorical) like Cato's.

I have given those vultures all they asked.  I gave them my youth, my strength, my faith, my sweat, my blood, my tears, my time at home and abroad--and what do they give me?  Scholarships, so that I have no debts now?  Libraries I can still aspire to access?  Years to read and learn about all kinds of human culture more or less at my own will?  These are no mean gifts.  I value them quite highly, actually.  Even if I find the end of the vultures' feast obnoxious, when I am meant to be the main course, I cannot fault its beginning.  I see the bad and the good--in the church, the university, and the market--and I see how they are the same.  I enjoyed the good, and so I must suffer through the bad.  My suffering is easier to bear when I realize that it need not go on interminably, that I need not join the author in that line of whipping-boys begging the masters to let them into the good-old-boys' club (with tenure, healthcare, library funds, paid leave, and all these other vanishing privileges that I don't need or afford).

I reflect that my LDS mission has prepared me well for life.  I spent two years in Spain, two years during which I woke up every day to be insulted by almost everyone I met.  The Spaniards hated me viscerally because I was trying to force my religion upon them.  My LDS mission leaders hated me because I was so unsuccessful in this endeavor.  I bore it all stoically, for the most part (there were a few lapses into passionate rage that I regret).  I became hard.  I learned that it is useless to plead with people who hate you.  It is useless to invest too much of your own fragile identity in the opinion of some stranger who sees you as a cog in his bureaucratic machine (be that a church, a business corporation, a political faction, or a university: they are all at root the same nuts and bolts repeating the same process, a reduction of individual humanity to bland corporate profit that managers call "the greater good" and use to justify giving themselves all kinds of perks and privileges for which they risk nothing of their own if they can help it).  Every time you give your soul to these vultures, every time you let their bureaucratic process override your individual humanity, you die--and become a little less moral, a little less able to maintain that precious illusion of integrity that we require to exist virtuously.  The recurring lesson of my youth, adolescence, and young adulthood is that you don't compromise yourself to serve corporate ends, no matter what some official suit tells you.

When the suit offers you religion, ask him how much tithing he wants (and notice that you cannot afford it).  When he offers you food, examine the label (notice that it says "food product") and the advertising (notice that real food doesn't require a prostitute to make you buy it).  When he offers you a job, read the contract (notice that being paid for 2-3 years to do busywork is one of the poorest definitions of "freedom" that exists if this process leaves you dependent on suits for the basic physical necessities of life: Aristotle would call this freedom slavery).  When the suit offers you glory and honor and meaning, the ultimate prize, look closely at those he passes over. 

Look at the people who don't get honor from the suit because you do.  Look long and hard at the grim reality that honor is precisely the linchpin holding the entire framework of the suit in place.  It is the crux of the game, the keystone that allows suits like Agamemnon to run idiots like Patroclus to early death.  When I first read the Iliad as a naive undergraduate, I was perplexed and bothered by Achilles.  "What an ungrateful, irascible wretch!" I thought.  "He should make things up with Agamemnon.  After all, the big guy did say sorry, and then offer him all kinds of stuff to make up for what he stole. Society requires forgiveness to exist and get on, right?  We cannot carry grudges forever.  We cannot afford to sulk forever like Achilles, the big baby."  Today, I see things differently.  I would never take anything other than the bare necessities of life from Agamemnon, and even then I would think twice.  (Maybe if I didn't have a family, I wouldn't even take those.  Sometimes, it is better to die than to live.)  The virtuous man, the man with real integrity, doesn't take anything from people like Agamemnon.  You don't fight him by becoming him, either.  The answer to that awful question that Popper discovers behind all the talking in Plato's Republic--the question who should rule?--is very simple.  Nobody with any self respect should rule.  Nobody with any decency should go about telling other people how to die.  The good ruler is the one who abdicates soonest and makes himself first to suffer most from his rule, which is always going to be bad (no matter what ideology informs it). 

I get Achilles now.  Sometimes, I feel just like him (meaning I want to throw my hands in the air and yell, "Fuck that shit!" when Agamemnon comes into my office to demand some new token of servility from me or one of my subordinates).  But I am not made to fight the system.  I am not built for virtuous suicide, though I finally think I understand it.  No, I am Odysseus, the hateful wretch who serves Agamemnon so well that nobody notices his rebellion until the war is over, the ships are gone, and he is heading home to claim the only thing that really matters to him--his family.  When it comes down to fight or flight, I will always flee (like Odysseus: he only fights when the other side is asleep or unarmed or otherwise at a significant disadvantage).  I run from shipwreck to shipwreck--from the ruin of my religious vocation to the ruin of my professional career, and so on and on being hated and cast out until I finally find my death.  But I have my family meantime, which is more than Achilles or Agamemnon (especially the latter, for all his rhetorical fuss and bluster about traditional values) can boast.  My wife won't stab me in the back.  My sons aren't out to eat their parents.  My parents aren't distant Olympians.  Agamemnon can keep his gifts, his kingdom, his honor, whatever carrot or stick he is currently using to goad sweating slaves.  I don't want it.

Now, if you will excuse me, your Majesty, I am going to get busy building some kind of boat, so that I can leave your Highness and the Achaeans to do whatever it is you came to do with the Trojans.  I have other things to do, other places to be, other paths to tread.  Viam aut inveniam aut faciam ultra te saevosque canes tuos.   

An Authentic Life

It occurs to me that what I really want from life, and have always wanted, is something we might call authenticity.  I want to find myself in circumstances where I have a useful outlet for the impulses I carry inside.  I want a field to labor in.  I want friends with whom (for whom, in whom) I can make a positive difference in the world.  I want to belong somewhere.

The hardest thing for me to deal with as I struggle to find a job, a church, etc., is the recurring realization that there are many places I exist but few where I really belong.  I am a transient, a vagrant, a mercenary, a useful idiot (whom the real community dismisses with a smirk or a smile when his contract is up).  I want to be something more.  I don't want riches or honor.  I am willing and able to make sacrifices to belong.  But I cannot sacrifice my commitment to doing good (as I see it) and avoiding evil (as I see it).  I cannot look away from evil I see myself doing and pretend that it is somehow good, unless I see clearly how the pretence is justified.

As I look for somewhere to belong in the world, I run across many other people with different ideas of what I should be, how I should belong (to them or some gang like theirs).  To some I look like a good recruit (though they don't always recruit me); to others I look like shit.  I understand.  I don't expect everyone to like or want me.  I see my own limitations clearly all the time, as I attempt to do things and find myself incapable of carrying through as I thought to: this does not have to be bad; some of my greatest achievements have occurred as unexpected outcomes from failure.  The hardest thing for me to deal with is unremitting failure, with no immediate positive pay-offs in sight.  This is particularly hard when I see how I might be very close to fulfilling someone's need--so close to belonging in some gang where I might make a positive difference--but circumstances mean that I cannot carry through on that promise, that it remains a dead end rather than a live opportunity.

I do not resent the success of other people.  I do not think that life owes me anything for happening to exist as I do.  Mine is and has been a very privileged and blessed existence, I judge, and perhaps it is my turn to suffer for that, to pay a little back for all the good things I have been given in the past--not because I was deserving of them, but because Nature and the people around me were very kind and I was not unappreciative (of that kindness).  I do feel sorry for my dependents, the people who rely on me to help them stay alive and find happiness on the way (we hope).  I wish I could provide for them better than I do (not that I would like to be materially richer necessarily; what I would like would be to give them some stability, a place to grow up without the constant threat of unnecessary change that currently looms over them).

I see more clearly now why the scholar's life is historically a solitary one (locked in an empty garret somewhere, reading, writing, living on pennies, finding friends in the library without getting to close to anyone).  It is not really secure (as few lives are in this world).  Taking dependents is something strong people do, and the young scholar is not strong (usually, typically--and I am quite typical in this regard).  The honest pursuit of truth is not one that lends itself well to wealth-production; even in academia, what gangs love most is a smooth lie.  Smooth lies get you tenure where complicated truths get you rated and written off (as an ignoramus, which I admit that I am: I have struggled to correct this flaw my entire life, only to realize at last that it is incorrigible).  If only I could find the right gang, a gang that might have some use for my ignorance.  If I were a better man, I might be able to say with Oscar Wilde, "I have nothing to declare but my genius."  Alas, instead I find myself echoing that poor fool Socrates: "I have nothing to declare but my ignorance."  And I am not ready to drink hemlock.  What an idiot I am!  

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.

Leadership

Someone remarks casually that "it's hard not being the top dog," and I have a sudden torrent of thoughts to offer.

I think it is actually pretty easy not being the top dog. It can be problematic when people have radically different views of where some collaborative project is (or should be) headed, but even in the latter case I think it is easier to get things done with peer-to-peer conversation rather than command-and-control.

In my marriage, for example, nobody presides. This was true even when we were newlyweds (and were approaching our relationship even more naively than we still do). My wife and I talk about things, express opinions, come up against decisions that must be made quickly, and work things out (without making somebody "be in charge" of everything or have "the final say" in whatever we do individually or together). At some point, I suppose we could become incompatible: even if that happened and we went our separate ways (divorce), I would like to do so amicably rather than angrily. In the same way, if I am ever collaborating with other people in the workplace (or anywhere, really), I always want them to feel free to give honest input, and to walk away if at any point they are too uncomfortable with the way things are going (or some much better opportunity presents itself to them and they feel a real desire to take advantage of it).

The difficulty of leadership is that it really isn't such a good thing, when life is going well. Historically, the great leaders are the people who encounter some disaster and react against it powerfully (with some kind of communal support), unilaterally (without backing down)--and most importantly, successfully (they achieve something that the world recognizes in hindsight as success, e.g. victory in war, economic prosperity, survival in a savage wilderness). But life is not always throwing us into do-or-die situations (wherein we must all look to Napoleon and hope that this is Austerlitz and not Waterloo). We shouldn't deliberately put our backs to the wall and then look for somebody to play Julius Caesar (and "get the bad guys" at all cost by "being a great leader").

Ideally, we never have any need for leadership (the way it is commonly understood). Ideally, we never find our backs to the wall as we gamble everything on the success of some singular encounter with fortune (who giveth and taketh away without regard for persons: even "great leaders" can lose--at terrrible cost to themselves and their communities). Ideally, we don't make every decision an occasion for Caesar to throw the dice and cross the Rubicon. Never cross the Rubicon unless you really have to. If you really have to, then by all means be a leader--just as you might become a murderer to save your own life or the life of someone you love. But don't love leadership (or homicide) for its own sake. I am pretty sure it doesn't love you back; if it does, then history says that its love is really dangerous (as likely to kill you prematurely as to save you from present danger).

Ideally, instead of leadership we have peer-to-peer negotiation. Instead of noticing something bad in the world (e.g. people are dying in Syria!) and responding with leadership (e.g. bomb the crap out of Syria, stat! show the world that we mean business, that Caesar is burning his boats and preparing to take Britain at all costs!), we should respond with negotiation (e.g. how can we help refugees? is there anything we can do to encourage better behavior among enemies? maybe not all crises need to be solved with bombs and other tools of leadership). Leadership will always be with us (like death and other such things), but it need not be the only thing available when problems arise. We should actively cultivate alternatives to it (or alternative forms of it, if you like, but I mistrust the word too much at present to be interested in redeeming it).

Wu Wei (無為)

If all culture is poison, as I have come to believe, then it is also to some degree healthy.  This is true even of the most awful culture anyone can imagine.  Health is a matter of dosage, not substance.  From this it follows that the most dangerous poison in my life is the one that appears to do no harm.

When I first experienced my faith crisis, there were many contributing factors.  One of them was the terrible shame I felt as a result of contemporary Mormon teachings about sexuality.  As a young man experiencing puberty in the LDS church, I felt that my existence as a sexual being made me inherently evil.  Every time something occurred to remind me of sex, I felt evil, and there was nothing I could do to escape the horror of my own judgement (a judgement that I found confirmed by Mormon leaders, rightly or wrongly, on purpose or not: it doesn't matter).  I was wounded a great deal by my experience with puberty, and the church did thrust some daggers in those wounds, causing them to fester.  This is my story.

Moving out into the world, I meet people with stories like mine, people broken by some toxic encounter with culture.  Occasionally, we victims like to imagine a world in which our personal monsters don't really exist--a world in which no young man is ever ashamed of his sexuality (in my case), a world in which authority is never abused, a world in which perfect justice is something impossibly good rather than awfully evil.  The older I get, the less I believe in the utility of such imagination.

The reality of life is that something will always hurt you.  Something will break you.  Something will kill you.  And no matter who tells you otherwise, there is no silver bullet.  There is no Fountain of Youth, no panacea for human suffering that will make it all vanish or reduce it all to something universally benign (let alone pleasant).  Life is hell.  The trick is not to deny this reality, not to escape it, but to meet it head-on in the best manner possible.  If heaven is a place where nobody gets hurt and nothing goes wrong and it does not matter what you do, then heaven does not exist.  To the extent that I am serious about engaging with the world as it actually exists, I must give it up.  I must make hell minimally painful rather than try to replace it with something else impossibly pleasant.

The problem with people who are hurt (people like me), is that we see only what hurt us.  We don't see how what hurt us helps someone else.  We don't see how banning the drug we OD'ed on will not improve universal human health.  We see life narrowly, generalizing from our own experience naively into the experience of others (who are not like us, not even when they appear to be so).

I cannot tell you how to live.  I cannot tell you how to meet the unique and personal hell that you will face in your existence.  I can support you.  I can be a resource for you.  I can offer sympathy and respect.  But more than that would be immoral--harmful to both of us.

Back to sex.  What saved me in the end from the crippling weight of my own judgement was not a sudden lift in universal human sexual taboos.  People continue to have sex today the same ways they have for eons: my story was never about them.  What saved me was meeting people who supported me, people to whom I was not ashamed to bare my soul.  As long as there are people like this somewhere, people like me will be fine: we just need to find the healers.  We don't need to make everyone practice the same kind of medicine.  We don't need to ban sexual shame, no matter what harm it has done us. How could we?  My shame was interior and autonomous.  The LDS church did not put it there.  Its mistake was to treat me with a generic soul-medicine against which I experienced a severe allergic reaction.  Some people need the kind of medicine that the church practices.  Some people need external shame (lacking the kind of massive internal inhibition that I have, not because I am better than anyone else, but because I am me).  Shutting down the social therapists that dispense external shame will not fix the world; a few guys like me might feel a bit better (for a while), but other guys out there will be suffering for lack of the shame they can no longer find.  My life is not worth more than theirs.  My suffering is not worth more.  They have the same claim to health that I have, and we cannot live by the same lights: our health is not the same.

The ultimate lesson I take away from my experience is that I cannot speak for other people.  I cannot tell them how to be happy.  I cannot pretend to design a single regimen for human life that will "maximize utility" (to borrow the convenient expression) for all and sundry with more benefits than deficits.  I don't believe that this "single regimen" exists (anywhere).  There is not one good way of life.  There cannot be.  All attempts to build and enforce such uniformity end up being more evil than good, hurting more than they help.

This means that people have to be wary.  We have to mistrust others and ourselves.  We have to diversify.  Never trust one institution or regimen with all your soul.  Don't worship one god.  Don't attend one support-group.  Don't bet on one stock, one company, one government.  Don't depend on a single career.  Within whatever career you have at the moment, don't depend on a single path to get the results you want.  Be redundant.  Be inefficient.  Doubt everything.  Don't be quick to identify yourself positively with any group or group ideology, even if you like it.  Be yourself.  Have multiple friends, but not too many, and never burden any of them with more trust than they can bear.  Own yourself (including the reality that you have no concrete self, no permanent essence that persists through all the various permutations other people call "you").  Know your limits, and don't let yourself think you can transcend them.  Don't make others dependent on you.  If you must be a leader for some reason, ditch that role as soon as you can (especially if you are successful at it: success attracts people to court ruin, their own and that of others).  Don't hate the things that hurt you (even when they hurt you really badly, even when you have to defend yourself by attacking them head-on).

Be hard like water: hard enough to break rocks, but not so hard that they break you.

Taking Offense

Some more random thoughts about how to construe hatred (hot and cold, small and grand) from other people in a way that minimizes harm and maximizes benefit. 

I. Offense must needs come, it seems to me. If I must be offended in order that somebody else may live freer and at greater ease (with herself and the world), then I am willing to be offended (especially when the offense comes through words). I embrace the reality that my psyche is blind and weak, and I seek to temper it, hardening it through manageable adversity to the point where it can encounter hatred and misunderstanding in the world without falling apart.

Serving a foreign LDS mission was eye-opening in this regard, in a very useful way (as was growing up in the Deep South, where my Mormonism made me an automatic outsider among the evangelical Christians who constituted the majority of my neighbors). People hated me--as a foreigner, as an American, as a Mormon. There was nothing I could do. I might smile or snarl, and the result would be the same (with this one difference, that snarling was likely to cause physical confrontations that might easily end much worse than the endless flytings). I learned to grin and bear it. It was hard sometimes, but very worthwhile. If I could listen to the hatred of the Spanish people for me patiently, then I can listen patiently to feedback from people to whom I appear, to my consternation, as an advocate for chauvinism or slavery or some other kind of thuggish behavior.

Nietzsche goes hard on contemporary Christianity for being decadently soft (if I get him right). I think this is what he means, that too many of us project our own weakness onto other people (demanding that they be strong where we are weak) instead of looking inward and steeling ourselves to face our demons however we must (mustering the courage to let others be honest about how threatening and insensitive they find us, even when we come with what we see as peaceful intentions).

II. It seems to me that almost all attempts to define just hierarchy are doomed (historically, when we judge them by their fruits over some arbitrary time period). I don't believe in just hierarchy, personally (except as a fiction in the minds of philosophers like Plato or Hegel). The most we can hope for is more non-fatal volatility in whatever hierarchy (feminist patriarchy) we have got going at the moment. Shift the burden of leadership around more. Let someone else screw the world (and take the blame for that) or save it (and take the credit). Maximize opportunities for the oppressed du jour to recover from their bad luck without being destroyed.

Sometimes, that means that we have to hear things we don't like (no matter who we are). We need to be OK with that. And at some point it is always good to "shut up and listen" (no matter who we are) and even "take our toys and leave" (no matter who we are, again: nobody should hang about somewhere they feel threatened, even if the threat is entirely harmless to somebody else). My sister has Celiac disease. If she eats our mom's whole wheat bread, she starts dying (literally). I don't. My sister shouldn't have to eat bread because I can. Hierarchy (feminist patriarchy) is like food, I think, a necessary poison that all of us must come to grips with individually, subjectively, as we can (not as someone else tells us to).

There is not one -archy to rule them all. There shouldn't be. To the extent that there is, it inevitably becomes hell on earth (no matter who runs it).

III. Any actionable opinion carries inherent the potential to become painfully, dangerously personal. It becomes personal ("about me") when people judge me for looking or speaking a certain way--as though my superficial physical resemblance to rapists made me a rapist, as though my hesitation to lynch every accused rapist meant that I endorse rape.  

People should do whatever they feel a need to do in order to feel safe. If that means they take me for a rapist, I am open to that--provided I have the option of then avoiding (or ending) any relationship with those who have no use for me (for reasons that I absolutely do not invalidate: if my appearance or expression scares people, then I need to know it, preferably before I am lynched).  

Some of your relationships will always be unsalvageable, historically speaking. Nobody should have to live with constant fear (or domination or whatever anyone wants to call it). Sometimes, divorce is necessary (by which I mean separation physical and psychological, separation that might be permanent). If my wife ever reaches a place where her relationship with me is unbearable, where I am the proverbial ball-and-chain, then I will encourage her to dump me (and not feel any remorse about it, at least not any that she doesn't want to feel). 

Nobody owes me a life free from challenge, a life of "privilege" (however anyone wants to define that). And I don't want to be caste in the role of "leader" (which I have never sought, not even when I come to places like this and write advice that some readers might construe as authoritative: my opinion on anything is worth to you precisely what you make of it, which might be nothing or a great deal--your decision, not mine).

For those with kids, I think the best we can do is emphasize the importance of respecting other people as individuals (giving them maximal freedom to be honest and autonomous without regard for their genitalia)--and then let the cards fall. If that means that my kids crash and burn (failing in every way society measures success, e.g. in terms of establishing themselves in stable long-term relationships and living above grinding poverty), then I will still be happy--provided my kids are polite. I care more about how my kids react than what happens to them. As long as they retain the ability to love (themselves and others) authentically, I don't care much about anything else (though of course I won't go out of my way to set them up for failure!).

IV. We all give offense, but only the really good people take it well.  I cannot make myself utterly inoffensive, but I can learn to attune myself those around me, trying to see how they perceive me and adjust my persona accordingly (so that I don't hurt them unnecessarily).  I can make the offenses I receive opportunities for growth rather than threats to an imaginary personal security (that I must renounce as a dangerous lie: I am never utterly safe--from other people or to them).

One common cause for offense is the natural desire we have to protect ourselves and those close to us from what we perceive as harm.  If I see my wife or my kids (or my friend or my sibling) in a social circumstance where they appear overwhelmed, I step in and try to help them (by talking other people down, shouting them down if necessary, and even "taking charge" momentarily to defuse the situation: physical confrontation is not off the table as an appropriate response, though it is one that I have been fortunate to avoid most of my adult life, probably because of my lucky childhood, which involved lots of time practicing and thinking about fighting). This is not done because I am a man (or a Mormon or a white supremacist or an American or a liberal or a hero or a scumbag), but because I don't like to see people I love suffering uselessly (some suffering is necessary, useful for growth, helpful--a fact I respect).

I think this "urge to protect" is something that transcends gender (my wife can be very protective of our kids and me in this same way, for example)--but it sometimes becomes gendered (when certain people, for historical reasons, assume that having male anatomy means "being the default protector"). The problem with this "default" position is that it inevitably infantilizes and weakens (psychologically at the very least) the "protected" by placing them in a place of default dependency ("help! save me! I need protection!"). Stepping out of a dependent relationship is always hard (like learning to walk after spending one's entire life crippled--a nice/awful gendered example that comes to mind is the practice of female foot-binding in ancient China). For those who have experience with the Mormon "faith crisis" (or whatever anyone wants to call it), it is very much like "leaving the church"--an experience involving shock and awe, anger, defensiveness, aggression, PTSD, and eventually a new stasis (we hope! I like to think I have found one, anyway).

As you move forward from a personal crisis of identity that involves confronting and removing unhelpful dependency, it is not always possible to salvage relationships whose existence dates to "before the crisis" (certainly not in the same form they had then). Ceasing to be a dependent is not a painless process. It produces a lot of "bad results" (no matter whose perspective one takes: I see bad results of my own faith crisis every day), but that does not mean that it is a fundamentally evil process (one that should be avoided or squelched). The only thing worse than dying free is living an entire life enslaved to some empty shadow of yourself that you loathe. This is true whether one is male or female (Mormon or evangelical, black or white, American or not). If women (or Mormons or Americans or black people or white people) want to rebel or hate men (or Mormons or Americans or black people or white people or me personally) as part of their quest for freedom, I am open to that. I embrace it. Be impotent and angry (from somebody's perspective). Waste your life (from somebody's perspective). At least it will be yours, and for that I personally will respect you (even if we disagree about something important and/or you hate my guts).