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).

My Mormon Drama

Nam et multa incidunt quae inuitos denudant, et, ut bene cedat tanta sui diligentia, non tamen iucunda uita aut secura est semper sub persona uiuentium.  Lucius Annaeus Seneca, De Tranquillitate Animi 17.

I was raised Mormon.  For whatever reason, I was not the kind of Mormon who has strong faith in the faith of other Mormons.  I did not resent or dislike others' faith (quite the contrary), but I needed my own.  It was always vitally important to me that religion mean something personal, something unique to the individual.

Though I was baptized at the age of eight, I never really considered myself Mormon (i.e. to the point of using the word Mormon to describe myself) until I experienced conversion--a long, slow process of deliberate reflection and introspection that began when I was about eleven years old.  I spent many hours poring over the Mormon scriptures (The Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants, The Pearl of Great Price, and the King James Bible).  I read them all several times over a period of years, to the point that when I entered the mission field at age nineteen I was intimately familiar with them.  They were permanent fixtures in my mind, comfortable pieces of mental furniture that I both knew and loved.  I use the word love here on purpose.  My interest in the scriptures was not dispassionate.  I was emotionally attached to them.  I invested myself in them, all-in, no backsies.  Why?  I am not a psychologist.  If I were, I might say something about adolescents needing some kind of identity, some persona to put on as they confront the world around them and inside them.  I like these myths psychologists tell.  It seems to me that we really do need a persona, a "mask" (literally translated) to reduce the chaos inside us to something resembling coherence, so that we can defend ourselves from the raging incoherence all around us in the world outside.  Some people find their persona in politics, some in economics, some elsewhere and anywhere human activity might reach.  I found mine in religion, which in my personal circumstances meant Mormonism.  Religion was there, wearing a Mormon dress; I was there, wearing my naive adolescence; and I fell in love with her.

Reading the scriptures, I encountered some important truths that have defined my life (and continue to define it): 

(1) You will know righteousness by its fruits, which are love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, gentleness, self-control.  

(2) Righteousness requires doing the right thing. 

(3) Righteousness requires doing the right thing for the right reason, with the right motivation. 

(4) Righteousness means leaving yourself open to correction, recognizing that you cannot always know what the right thing is and that your motivations are always imperfectly righteous. 

The last truth is one that has proven especially important to me over the years, as I have discovered again and again how human righteousness, individual and collective, is always insufficient to solve or remove all the problems we point to with words like evil.

For some people, I have discovered, this fourth truth of mine means subjecting personal judgment to someone else--another person with a "mantle of authority" (in Mormon terms) that allows him to make decisions that individuals are uncomfortable making for themselves, for whatever reason.  I tried this approach to my fourth truth for several years.  I tried it, and the fruits I harvested were not righteousness.  I had moments of joy, it is true, followed by hours of agony (striving to rekindle lost joy).  I was kind, gentle, and forbearing with others.  I lived at peace with them and even loved them, with a love that was not utterly self-serving (as love so often is, not least when it pretends to be charitable).  But inside I was a mess.  I did not control myself well.  I hated myself.  I was anxious about myself, on edge that I would do something awful and ruin life (my own and others').  I was not gentle with myself.  Self-control for me meant turning upon myself viciously, violently, masochistically.

Laden with the immense weight of conforming to someone else's righteousness, I became ruthless toward myself.  I saw my own imperfections vividly, viscerally, graphically, all the time.  I was tortured by them.  I was fascinated by them.  Try as I might to break their power by confessing to my Mormon authority-figures, I never succeeded.  Confession made them stronger.  Confession made me feel weak, powerless, and vulnerable--the perfect mark for domination by something strong.  Confession made me the man in Christ's parable: 

When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth [it] empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last [state] of that man is worse than the first (Matt. 12:43-45).

Breaking this destructive cycle required stepping outside the ritual of confession, which was manifestly wicked for me--a source of destruction rather than salvation.  I had to reject my idea that confession would bring me heaven.  I had to see how it was bringing me hell instead.

In the end, I did see this.  It was not a pretty sight.  Imagine for a moment that you are Oedipus.  Imagine that you have crafted the ultimate righteous identity for yourself: you are the savior of Thebes, the one who solved the riddle of the Sphinx, the husband of a worthy queen.  In defiance of the evil future prophesied by the Delphic Oracle, you have taken whatever junk the fates gave you and fashioned out of it a worthy persona, a mask for heroes (perhaps even for gods).  Then, something happens.  New information appears.  A plague strikes Thebes.  Prophets rant in the streets.  A messenger comes to you.  The outcome is that you are not what you thought.  You are the very worst scum of the earth, the sole cause of Thebes' plague, the man who murdered his father and married his mother--breaking all the laws of heaven and earth.  Your persona is utterly ruined, smashed beyond all repair, a source of damnation rather than salvation.  What do you do? 

For years, I thought that I could be a certain kind of person (a righteous Mormon with personal integrity unique to myself).  I thought my Mormon identity was one that fit within the society of Mormons (to which I aspired to belong).  I wanted to belong, to participate, to learn from others and share my own experience (without imposing it where it was unwelcome or unwanted: I never aspired to make all Mormons like me).  I spent years practising for this part, conforming to this role (that I fondly imagined myself playing), hoping against hope (as time went by) that I could reconcile my Mormon truths with the Mormon truths of the community around me.  At some point, I had to give up.  I recognized that my Mormon persona was too hard for other Mormons to bear.  Healing myself, as a Mormon, I ceased to be the kind of Mormon other Mormons want to associate with.  For me, this peripateia (Aristotle's word for what happens to Oedipus; if I were less snooty, I might have written reversal) involved more than just Mormonism.  I began questioning my identity in every community to which I belong, starting with my family and proceeding on to the United States of America (where I am a citizen), the university (where I have spent almost my entire professional life), and the local supermarket (where I buy things and become part of another kind of organized society).

I discovered that I wear an infinity of masks, that I hide under personae all the time, that I change from one to the next as circumstances around me change.  I am always working on these mask--tinkering with them, fixing them, breaking them, looking for new ones to replace ones that have outlived their usefulness.  This was quite unsettling for me, especially when I came face-to-face with the real me--and that me was merely emptiness, an incoherent possibility that might exist or not, depending on one's point of view.  It was also liberating.  I realized I could change the mask if it didn't fit.  I didn't have to spend my entire life suffering from a bad Mormon mask (that made me a self-hating masochist).  I could fix that Mormon mask, removing the masochism.  I did fix it. Unfortunately, some Mormons loved me for that masochism.  Without it, they see me as something evil--with or without good reason: I have no need to validate or attack their reasons.  The masochism that made me hateful to myself made me lovable to the Mormon community.  Maybe they loved to pity me.  Maybe they loved to see me humiliate myself.  Somehow, the process of my self-destruction made their lives better, and the reversal of that process makes their lives worse (to the extent that they come into contact with me, intimately enough to perceive my Mormon persona).

The real problem I have here is not these Mormons.  It is larger than any single community.  Today I find myself in a very difficult position where communities of human beings are concerned.  On the one hand, I affirm Aristotle's declaration that man is a social animal: I want to be part of societies.  On the other hand, I find that society is not really comfortable with me.  No matter what I do to serve her, I am not really what she wants.  If I am trying to serve her as a Mormon, other Mormons are more righteous.  If I am trying to serve her as an American, other Americans are more patriotic.  If I am trying to serve her as an academic, other academics are cleverer (and more successful when it comes to getting published and "making a career" from whatever masks they have created for themselves).  If I am trying to serve my family, worst of all, I find they need things that I am unable to provide without society.  They need food, shelter, clothing, etc., and they have expectations set by their past experience, expectations that life will provide for them as it has done (once upon a time).  My desire to serve them drives me back into the arms of Society, whom I woo in the guise of a failed lover.  Society has gotten over me.  She has moved on, and found better suitors, but I have not gotten over her.  If I try to explain my reasons for failing ("I was having a major wardrobe malfunction: my face kept dissolving"), she just laughs and says that shit happens sometimes ("Maybe you'll get lucky with someone else, darling").  I want to believe she is right.  I want to retain the hope of existing someplace where my love is not unexpectedly poisonous (to me or to those I am attempting to serve).  But I find it hard.  I have not quite recovered from the realization that I am Oedipus--a curse to all who know me.  I don't say this to be pitied.  I don't say this to attack the success of others (more fortunate in their masks than I have been) or to belittle their failure (I have been quite fortunate in many respects, chief among them being that I still have a family and some standing in certain societies that value me momentarily).  I say this because it represents the problem that worries me most currently, an adult problem to replace my defunct adolescent angst.  

Damn the Singularity

Recently I have run into this thing known as "the Singularity."  To me it seems fishy: here are my reasons (for the moment; in the conversation where these ideas came up, the topic of discussion was immortality, which I abjure).

Every historical development in technology ever seen has been accompanied by unexpected "evil" effects. To get to the heart of the matter immediately at hand, the advances of modern medical science have come to us at the expense of iatrogenics. There is no such thing in history as an upside without a downside, a pro without a con.

More importantly, when we come to consider systems as complex as the human body (or any ecosystem whose existence requires the cooperation of multitudes of cells and cycles), we have a species-wide tendency to think reductively (trying to explain non-linear realities in terms of linear causality, as though the reasons for a particular biological phenomenon--like, say, schizophrenia--were unitary and constant for all cases, such that my schizophrenia occurs because of the same generic malfunctions that cause yours: research is showing that this idea is simply bullshit; for a very good layman's discussion, see Matt Ridley's chapter "The Madness of Causes" in his book The Agile Gene).

If we build immortality, there is no guarantee that it would ever work for the entire species. Inevitably, the price for making some people immortal will be killing other people (when my immortality becomes your mortality, or vice versa). In a best-case scenario, future generations will be the one eating the bullet here (they will be eliminated, I guess, until we find some other environment for immortal offspring to colonize: Earth is not currently big enough to accomodate an infinite crowd of immortals; if such a group appears, you can be sure that some of them will begin living out the myth of that god-awful TV series "Highlander"). And that is being ridiculously optimistic (i.e. assuming that there are no untoward side-effects en route to the kind of immortality naively imagined by guys like Ray Kurzweil). How is society supposed to exist without death, seriously? If history is any guide, we would become a bunch of petty, selfish bastards (think of the Olympians in the Iliad and the Odyssey: they are basically immortal human beings, and most readers agree they are douchebags).

I am very skeptical of the Singularity. I doubt it will happen (since I don't see death ever being defeated: from my viewpoint, death looks like something permanent in the nature of life). But even if it does, I would reject it (as something bad--Satan's plan, if you will). As an atheist and a materialist, I choose death (which is what makes my life enjoyable, meaningful, and worthwhile: if I were immortal, I would lose my humanity, the heroic vulnerability that gives me integrity).   

These ideas came up in the context of a discussion of Mormonism.  (Some Mormons embrace the Singularity as an affirmation of their beliefs, e.g. the idea that we will eventually become gods and inhabit a glorified world.)  Some see a great divide between Mormonism and the Singularity, but I don't.  Here is why.

To my mind, the value that Mormonism adds to this conversation is that it reminds us how dumb we really are. The Singularity, in my mind, is just a modern version of the same stupid ideas that found a home earlier in Mormonism. Joseph Smith was a progressive in his time, a visionary who wanted to marry naive human fantasies (like living forever or having group orgies without any unpleasant repercussions) with practical reality. He is one illustration of the weakness (or as Nassim Taleb would say, the fragility) inherent in this kind of approach.

Nature is bigger than us, even if we are all brilliant scientists (and we're not). Cheating her is dumb. You can try it if you want, but I will always bet against you (as I bet against Joseph Smith). I think history will show the Singularity to be as silly as Mormonism, a piece of twenty-first-century lunacy that future generations will shake their heads over the same way I shake my head over early Mormons hieing to Kolob.

The Family Is Perishing! So What?

I have spent a lot of time thinking about the demise of the family.  It is an issue that continues to bother me, especially as demagogues of every political and religious stripe repeatedly invoke it to push through social programs whose positive utility I doubt (even as I see their negative utility clearly in some cases: trying to control the sex lives of your neighbors via legislation causes all kinds of obvious problems, but no clear benefits that I have ever seen).

What are we talking about, in concrete terms, when we invoke the demise of the family?  Many of my friends adopt a position here that looks more or less like this: the population of the First World is dropping precipitately, and we must counteract this by getting married and cranking out more kids, come hell or high water. Assuming that this problem is really a problem and that my procreating wildly would put a dent in it (a rather large assumption), I wonder if it is really good for kids to be born into a society where they exist merely as stop-gaps: "We had you because we need to make sure our genes don't get diluted by weirdos who aren't like us." I am not sure I like this as an approach to procreation. I doubt its utility for the population as a whole (stuff happening in the global community occurs outside of anyone's agenda), and I really doubt its utility for individuals (who might not have the resources for the giant families that God seems to want them to have: do we all have to live like farmers in Bangladesh? is that God's plan? really?).

To me it seems that the family has always been falling apart. Read what prudes wrote about the collapse of morals among the working class in the nineteenth century.  They said all the same kinds of things we hear today about families in the inner city.  Somehow, despite the collapse of the family before I was born, I managed to make it into the world--into a nice family--and do pretty well.  So far, my kids are getting lucky, too, though there are fewer of them: my wife isn't prepared to crank them out the way my mom was (she isn't physically fit for that task, for starters), and I am not rich the way my dad was (for many reasons).  Society now is much different than it was, and no amount of hand-wringing by the Barack Obamas and Rick Santorums of the world is going to change that reality: they can cook up schemes to make me more educated and better housed all day long, but wishing won't make it so.  I know I cannot afford a house, and that paying for more school would be a wasted investment, and I am moving on. Screw the American dream.

I am tired of living in somebody else's world, an old man's world in which you can interview with a company on the spur of the moment, right before you graduate with a BA, and then work there for the next fifty years (the way my grandfather did).  That was great, when it happened.  But life went on.  History happened.  That world is over, finished and done just like the Roman empire (or the Confederate States of America, or the Soviet Union, or the Mormon state of Deseret).  I am tired of being told that my mission in life is to revive it, no matter what the cost to those I hold near and dear.  I am tired of being expected to sacrifice all I have (and all that my kids will ever have: hello crushing debt!) so that old farts can go to fancy malls and pretend that the Great Depression never happened.  Screw that.  Here's a thought: life is not static.  The family participates in life, ergo families aren't static.  This is even true if we make people immortal (since we're Mormons and we like to think this way). The relationship between Jesus and God the Father is not the same since Jesus got nailed to the cross.  You don't just pick up where you left off and pretend that kind of thing never happened.  Life is about moving on (inherently, necessarily).  I will not relate to my kids the same way I do now in twenty years (assuming we last that long in this world).  I don't relate to my parents the same way now as I did when I was five years old.  If eternity is our destiny, then I expect my post-mortal relationship with my family will go on evolving: after an infinity of years (measured by any standard you like, human or divine: but let's say KST, Kolob Standard Time), my family relationships will have shifted infinitely.  My family will be destroyed and rebuilt all the time, essentially--the same way my body is destroyed and rebuilt regularly.  That is what life is, and if there is such a thing as eternal life I know of no other way to conceive it than as an indefinite progression of what already happens.

Immortality is just mortality with no ending.  Once you see that, these arguments about "the destruction of the family" become ridiculous. Is the family always going to be falling apart?  Then why save it?  I just don't have the energy to get worked up every time another demagogue tells me that I have to give him time and money and votes or my family will implode.  It's like they want me to spend all my time standing in a highway, staring down the oncoming traffic and screaming, "Yikes! I'm going to die!"  Eventually, my hormonal pathways are all exhausted and I embrace the inevitable: "Yikes.  I really am going to die (unless I find something better to do than stand in the highway screaming with these crazy people)." You can only spend so much time scared to death, even when the threat is real. Fear isn't static any more than life is.  It comes and goes, rising and falling in dynamic waves whose very nature is to avoid static equilibrium (in spite of all the bloviating and hand-wringing of priests and politicians since the dawn of history).

Here's a thought.  The next time somebody tells me that the family is dying, I am going to smile and walk away.  Then I am going to find my kids and give them a hug.  I am going to find my wife, and give her a kiss.  And then I am going to spend a tender, thoughtful moment embracing the reality that we won't always be the people we are right now.  How grand!  Just think that everything wrong with us right now will not always be wrong.  Time will pass.  Stuff will happen.  Our problems will move on with it.  We will find new things, new successes and new problems.  We will do our best to meet them, and then life will go on (with or without us: it doesn't really matter; we cannot last longer than we last or do better than our best).  When I do reach the end of my life on earth, I don't want to look back on a history of fear. 

I don't want to spend my whole life running from the mortality of my relationships.  (No matter what they are today, they will change in the coming years.  Always.  Dying and being reborn as something new, unless you kill them dead and embalm them to keep them from evolving.)  I don't want to look back and remember only that I was terribly scared of losing everyone and everything that ever mattered to me.  I want to look back and feel grateful for all the good things I had, good things that came to me as gifts--unexpected, unsought, unearned, but no less sweet for all that.  I want to leave my kids with an appreciation for life's fragile, temporary joys rather than an expectation that these last forever, uninterrupted by any change or sorrow.  I don't know whether life is immortal or not.  But if you know how to take the good with the bad--the sweet with the bitter, the way life mixes things all the time--then you will always be fine.  If you last forever, you will know how to endure eternity without wishing for death.  If one death is the end of you, then you will know how to meet it with joy, having made the most of your experiences.  I have made my peace with my life--with my family and myself and the world around me as it exists right now--so the demagogues have nothing to offer me (no matter what they claim to stand for: I don't care).  If they are really interested in defending my family, then they would do best to leave us all alone; when we need their help, we will come asking for it.

The Dark Side of Happiness

Recently my attention has been drawn repeatedly to the (disconcerting and even unpleasant) reality (1) that human beings do not understand why things happen and (2) that individual recipes for happiness are not universal.

(1) Life is full of problems.  This appears universal (to the animal world, not just the human species), and so as observers we slip easily into the habit of talking about it as something singular: we point to it in the aggregate with words like evil or the human condition.

Confronted on a daily basis with evil (the human condition), we naturally react.  There are as many reactions as there are individuals, but two common reactions are anger and sorrow.  These emotions drive us to move (an emotion is what propels us to act in response to stimuli, breaking the trance that holds Buridan's ass forever between water and food).  Our motion takes many shapes, too numerous and different to define (e.g. lashing out in anger or scorn, or reaching out in sorrow or pity).  We cannot help this (our reaction), though we can with effort learn to control it a little bit (muting reactions so that we don't express them in ways we find unsettling).

Life does not wait for our reactions, however.  It goes on.  More importantly, it does not depend on our reactions.  We don't get this.  We think that we can make things happen the way we want them to.  We think that if we do the right dance, performing each step perfectly, the universe will give us release from our troubles (a release that we refer to with words like happiness).  Some of us base our entire outlook on life around the idea that we can make our own happiness, that we can defeat evil (the human condition) and avoid the suffering that it brings.  This attitude is problematic when we apply it to ourselves (for reasons I hope to get into in a moment).  It is disastrous when applied to others.

What I am trying to say will make more sense if I give you an analogy to illustrate it.  Think of the fly that charges against a closed window repeatedly, doing its best to escape the stifling environment of the house for the great outdoors (where it can end its brief existence properly, experiencing whatever it is that flies have developed to regard as happiness over the course of their evolution).  Sometimes, the window that the fly is bumping into is closed, and it remains closed.  In these cases, unless some factor intervenes (e.g. a human with a flyswatter), the fly that charges the window will eventually wear itself out, give up the ghost, and fall dead on the windowsill.  From the perspective of a fly, that death is almost certainly evil.  But not all flies charge the same window.  What happens when the window is open a crack (or more)?  Under these circumstances, the fly that charges it may eventually get out (and find happiness in its release from prison).  Now, imagine that the second fly (whose window happened to be cracked open) somehow finds itself able to communicate with the first.  Naturally, it will tell the first fly that happiness depends on pursuing the ritual that it used to escape from the prison that both of them experience.

"Keep charging the window!" it will say. "That is how you get out!"

The first fly may agree or not.  Being a fly, it is likely to agree: flying against the window is what comes naturally for it.  But the promise of happiness that seems so certain to the second fly is really anything but.  Hard as this is to understand or accept, the condition of happiness lies outside the power of the individual organism (whether we talking about flies or human beings, as far as I can tell).  Things happen to us, things that have consequences beyond our power to control, no matter how we may react.  I could do anything, but I am not going to change the fact that I was born at a particular time to particular parents. I am always determined by more than just my next emotion, and not everything that determines me is under my control.  I cannot control what other people do.  I cannot control the weather.  I cannot always even control myself (when I react involuntarily or lose consciousness or capability owing to external factors like poisonous gas, to give one example that occurs to me right now).  Even if I do everything in my power to secure what looks like happiness to me ("charging against the window" with all my might and main), that happiness remains fundamentally and irrevocably dependent on factors beyond my control (the window has to be open).  As a human being, I do have more resources than the fly.  I can think.  I can reason (using the experience of others to guide mine).  But I cannot control historical outcomes, and my lack of control is not momentary or fixable (with the right regimen).  There is no "right" way for a fly to charge a window; when the charging fly fails to escape, it is not because its flight was deficient in any way.  It simply did what flies do, did it well even, and did not get lucky.  Sometimes that is what happens.

(2) Because of all the foregoing, success can actually be a bad thing for understanding (even if it is good for happiness).  The fly that succeeds has no patience for its friend that doesn't.  It doesn't understand that the happiness which it found through charging the window isn't universal.  This happens all the time in human life.  Somebody makes a lucky bet in the market.  Somebody gets a nice job.  Somebody stumbles into very good health.  Somebody has really good relationships with friends and family.  And, inevitably, somebody starts telling other people how to be happy. 

"If you live the way I do, then you will be happy!  Just make this bet (not that one).  Go for this job (not that one).  Read this book (not that one).  Do this exercise (not that one).  Say these words (not those ones)."  And so on.

But life doesn't work like this.  My happiness is not yours.  I cannot tell you what makes you happy, what will make you happy, because I cannot know that.  If I could tell you, the answer would almost certainly reveal that happiness exists beyond human control.

("Well, you need to be born to good parents in perfect health, live your long life free of troubles that you can handle without breaking down, avoid the foods and climates that make you ill, and remember to pass this advice along to others--for a small fee, if you like!")

I advise all people to avoid being hit by cars.  I think that getting hit by a car would be unhappy.  But some people are going to be hit by cars, no matter what they or anyone else does (and if we somehow lose all access to cars, then they will die by some other accidental means).  What is happiness for them?  The good news is that many of them do discover happiness.  The bad news is that they must always find it for themselves.  You cannot make others happy. 

You especially cannot make others happy when you do not understand how they are miserable.  Misery and happiness are really just two words for the same thing in human experience (our attachment to ourselves and those around us, our expectations for life).  We call it misery when we don't like it, happiness when we do.  But it is in itself neither miserable nor happy, neither evil nor good.  Flies crash into windows because that is what flies do, pure and simple.  It does no good for the fly who made it out to lecture the fly who hasn't ("Charge harder! Have more faith! Power through it!").  It may be comforting to think that we make our own destiny, that we control where we end up and how, but that does not make it true.  It is certainly comforting to think that we can help those around us, but when we actually attempt this, it becomes clear pretty quick that "helping" is much more about "compassion" (literally "shared suffering") than it is about anything else (e.g. "happiness").  You can hold someone's hand and say that you are sorry that she feels bad.  You cannot make her feel better.  You don't have what it takes.  She doesn't have it, either (at least not all to herself, under her control).  If she is lucky, then she will stumble across it someday (when the window happens to be open). 

When it comes to explaining and/or creating happiness, much moral advice is worse than useless.  It merely makes "failed" people feel worse (they already feel bad).  It makes them feel helpless instead of hopeful (since the easy solutions that work so well for others don't work for them: if the window is closed, it doesn't matter how a fly charges it).  It closes them to new solutions rather than opening them (since they see how the obvious ones really, really don't work: this causes them to lose hope altogether sometimes).  It makes them feel like irredeemable pariahs (all their friends made it through the window: why are they so dumb? so lazy? so whatever that they cannot power through the glass in front of them the way others have?).

So there we are.  Happiness is not universal.  It is not even securely happy (since it is at root the same thing as misery: happiness is what we call life when we like it; misery is what we call it when we don't; none of us likes life all the time).  It is not verbally communicable.  It cannot be handed down in easy recipes.  The most we can do for those we love when they are miserable is "mourn with those who mourn" and hope that they stumble across the bright side of misery eventually.

Taming Human Nature

This morning a vivid image came to my head as I was walking home in the rain after dropping my boys off at preschool.

Imagine that pleasure and pain are the same thing: emotion.  Now imagine that your soul is a nice little valley, and emotion is a large river running through it (providing fresh water, fish and other wildlife, hydropower, etc.).  Naturally, the nature of the river Emotion is going to vary over time.  Sometimes, when the winter snows melt or heavy rains fall, the river will become rough and turgid, rising up and flooding the valley of Soul with dark water.  It will destroy things.  Other times it will be smooth, clear, and peaceful.  It will create things.

Human nature is to observe things and react.  We see the river Emotion.  We observe how it changes over time, and we naturally want to minimize the harm its flooding causes and maximize the good that comes from its calm.  For some of us, this means building a giant dam to hold it back (and maybe release some of its energy in a controlled fashion to accomplish some specific tasks, like creating energy for the community and washing out wastes from the artificial lake created by the dam).  There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, nothing at all.  But not all rivers are easily dammable (because nature makes each valley unique), and sometimes damming brings unexpected consequences (drastically altering the environment in the soul valley in ways that might be worse for its health than some seasonal flooding).

In my valley of Soul, I built the strongest dam I could come up with.  I followed the best blueprints I could find to construct a wall that would tame the river Emotion completely and indefinitely.  But my river was not one of those easy to dam.  The artificial lake I created became a breeding ground for bad things, anxieties that festered and spread like noxious algae, poisoning the atmosphere of my little soul valley.  Then, to make matters worse, my perfect dam began to leak.  At first, the leaks were small and manageable: all I needed to clean them up were a few Dutch boys with some basic engineering skills.  But as time progressed, the viability of this maintenance crew proved less and less, until one day, the dam broke, and my valley was hit with the flood of the century.

The flood utterly destroyed my old dam, along with many of the improvements and opportunities that that dam afforded.  Because of this experience, I was obliged to rethink everything I thought I knew about soul valleys (mine in particular) and dams.  I went back to the drawing board, with a new team of engineers, since my Dutch boys had no clue what had happened or what to do about it (other than rebuild the old dam and hope that the recent flood was simply a fluke).  As I rethought things and consulted with new engineers, I learned many things about the nature of soul valleys and emotional rivers (my own and those elsewhere in universe of humanity).

Meanwhile, my valley began to recover from the massive flooding.  Life returned to an equilibrium.  Time passed, and I still had not replaced the old dam.  I had spent years in terror of what would happen to me without the protection of that dam, of the seasonal flooding that some said would utterly destroy life in my valley.  As it turned out, the seasonal floods were nothing compared to the collapse of the dam: my valley recovered nicely from them.  In fact, they were actually kind of pleasant, a much tamer version of the wild water that destroyed the dam.  Also, I realized that the environment was much better without that great stagnant lake of fear around, the lake whose black darkness the dam had created and then vomited all over my valley of Soul.  Why remake that lake, I wondered to myself?

Everything I heard from the engineers convinced me that my valley was always going to be flooded at one time or another, and it seemed to me that regular seasonal floods were much easier to manage (and much more pleasant) than occasional tsunamis.  The deciding factor in my decision not to rebuild the dam was how lovely life without the lake was, though.  Some people like lakes.  Some lakes are really quite likable.  But mine wasn't.  I did not like it.  Why rebuild something unnecessary and unpleasant?  People who like artificial lakes in their soul valleys are always telling me how much fun they have in them, how they make so many nice and convenient things possible (advanced hydropower, irrigation, fishing, water-skiing), and I don't deny that.  But my lake was not like that (or perhaps better, was not just that).  It was also a home for the Loch Ness Monster, whom I am very glad to be rid of.

People who want absolute control over their valley of Soul see me as backwards, chaotic, primitive, and uncivilized because I have not dammed the river Emotion.  I let her follow her natural currents.  When she floods, I am flooded.  When she dries up, I am dry.  It is not always easy or pleasant.  But neither was having a dam.  Every choice we make in dealing with Emotion will necessarily involve both pleasure and pain.  Every valley is different, with different inhabitants who value different things (and have different traditions, different types of culture that allow them to live in the unique habitat nature has given them).  In my valley, we live better with natural rhythms, and no dam.  We aren't out to dynamite your dam, at all, but we aren't going to build one for ourselves, either.  We know what it will do to our valley.  We have seen it, and we did not like it.  Much as you like dams (in your valley), we dislike them more (in our valley: we like them fine in yours, if you want them there).  Much as you hate seasonal floods (in your valley), we like them more (in ours, where they are part of the rhythm that gives our life shape and meaning: we need them for the same reason that you need dams).

Recently a number of people have reached out to me, offering to help me build dams (or at least attend meetings where teams of Dutch boys tell us how to make the sort of dam that once graced my valley).  Much as I appreciate the offer, I really don't need a dam (certainly not one like that), and I am not really interested in spending a lot of time discussing the proper design for something that is useless to me.  (One does not go to study with a master trumpeter if one wishes to learn the violin.  As beautifully as you might play the trumpet, it is not my instrument, and I am not going to spend hours learning it, though I am happy to listen to you play sometimes.)  To quote a venerable old book, your love and interest are much appreciated, but I would be at Jerusalem.  

Taming the Beast Within: My Misspent Youth

Win Blevins.  Stone Song: A Novel About the Life of Crazy Horse.  New York: Forge, 1995.  ISBN: 0812533690.

The story of His Crazy Horse (Tasunke Witko) is fascinating, and Blevins is a very good storyteller.  I recommend this book without reservation as one of the most thoughtful, interesting accounts of the old American West that I have read.  Like many good novels, it also offers a great window into the human soul, a window through which I would like to look at my own soul for a minute here.

Blevins does a very good job of portraying the Sioux religion: he is accurate, thorough without being overbearing, and compelling ("almost thou persuadest me to become a Lakota").  The Sioux believe that every human being is born with a special character (unique to them) that it is their personal duty to cultivate.  For Crazy Horse, this character takes the form of a spirit animal dwelling inside him: a hawk, whom he refers to simply as Hawk.  Hawk guides him toward the crucial decisions he must make in life, helping him cope with difficult circumstances and emotions. 

As a young man, Crazy Horse's most pressing task is becoming familiar with Hawk and the other, larger spiritual powers at work in the world: he does this by going out alone into the wilderness, where he fasts, prays, and meditates.  For a long time, he does this with no issue: he feels ashamed, rejected by the universe, worthless.  Then, when he is about to give up and return to his village empty-handed, he receives a waking vision that shows him his place in the world (a Rider with a Hawk going to war alone).  The rest of the book tells how he uses this vision as a tool for understanding and overcoming the challenges that life brings him.

I really like thinking of the individual human psyche as an animal.  We are all animals, in my view, and growing up is about coming to terms with that reality -- hopefully in a way that enriches us as individuals and communities.  In this essay, I want to talk about my personal experience growing up and dealing with the beast within (i.e. with my character, my habits and thoughts, my soul).  I am going to try to be very honest and straightforward, but this is a tough subject, so I apologize in advance if I appear unclear or untruthful.  One very important thing to keep in mind, I think, is that my journey is not someone else's journey.  I cannot talk about someone else the same way I talk about myself.  I do not know others the way I know myself.  I do not judge them the way I judge myself.  I do not expect from them the same things I expect from myself.  In other words, what follows is about me, not you (no matter who you are).  Another thing to remember is that our memories are constantly changing: the more we look at the past, the more it changes.  If you do not like the way I remember myself today, hang on: you may like my memories better tomorrow.

Adolescence is a hard time: it is difficult being trapped between childhood -- with the freedom to learn and explore infinitely without much fear (if you have a good childhood as I did) -- and adulthood, with its larger responsibilities and dangers.  It strikes me, as I look back at my own experience, that I tried really hard to reject my spirit animal.  I did not want to grow up, mostly because this seemed to involve me falling into patterns of behavior that I could not avoid that were extremely evil.  When my inner Hawk began to wake up, I was not always happy with it.  I did not make it a personal guide for dealing effectively with moral crises.  There were times when I hated it and even tried to destroy it.  How did this happen?  How did I change from a happy kid into a brooding teenager?  How did I go from being relatively happy (as it seems now) to being depressed, scared, and paranoid?  Well, the matter is really complicated (resisting any easy understanding), but I think it began with sex. 

I remember when I first learned what sexual intercourse was: I was about eleven years old, and I thought that it was about the grossest thing imaginable.  People "urinate" into each other: how disgusting!  But this also made it paradoxically intriguing (like any weird fact about life).  My mom had the right response to my shock -- she said something like, "Oh, it's actually quite nice: don't give up on it just yet."  About the same time, I started having unexpected, unwanted thoughts about women.  I would be reading or playing the recorder or doing some routine task and BAM! the thought of some woman I had seen would appear in my mind's eye unbidden, unlooked for, and strangely attractive (at first, they were always older women: teachers, newly-weds in our church congregation).  Also, I would wake up every morning with a boner: my dad had already warned me about this, and to do him credit he never said anything about its being any kind of sin.  It was just another weird fact of life, something that adults had to deal with.  So far, so good.  But unfortunately, my parents were not the only people I turned to for help with sex (or life in general).

At the same time of my life, right on the threshold of puberty, I heard the call that drove young Crazy Horse into the wilderness to look for a vision.  For me, answering that call meant reading a lot of Mormon scripture (the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price, and the Bible, which I read many times in the King James Version), praying intensely, fasting, and looking for God in the world around me and inside me.  As a result of all this activity, I had a very intense religious experience (akin to the vision of Rider and Hawk that Crazy Horse received).  I was converted to Mormonism -- really converted, wholly convinced.  I went up to the pulpit several times as a youth with no prompting and bore my own testimony (no rote memorization required) that God had spoken to me.  As I look back, it seems to me that the reading, praying, fasting, meditating, and testifying were all important things: they represented a positive attempt on my part to contact and connect with the adult personality waking up inside me.  I was reaching out in a peaceful, nurturing way to my spirit animal, offering Hawk my arm and inviting her to tell me her secrets, secrets that I really needed if I was going to survive the process of growing up.  And then to my delight, she came and perched on my arm.  But success is never simple: every victory comes with a problematic aftermath.

In the story of Crazy Horse, the vision of Rider is a curse until young Crazy Horse goes to his father (the village medicine man) and confesses it as part of a special iniatiation ceremony.  Crazy Horse is initially on bad terms with his father, so he avoids speaking of his vision (and must wear shabby clothes to avoid angering the higher powers that the Sioux recognize behind lightning, thunder, and sudden turns of fortune -- powers that my background would lead me to name God).  Another medicine man from nearby notices Crazy Horse's unkempt attire, reads its significance correctly, and tells the young Lakota that he must confess to his father.  But no one forces him.  No one makes the decision for him: in the end, he goes to his father on his own, receives purification, and becomes integrated into the tribe as an adult.  But this process takes a long time, during which Crazy Horse wanders in the wilderness while his father remains available but aloof (respecting his son's privacy).  Here my story diverges from that of Crazy Horse.  After my epiphany, I wanted to talk.  I wanted to confess to a medicine man, have my dream interpreted, and improve my connection with Hawk.  But my Mormon priesthood leaders were not like the Lakota medicine men who helped Crazy Horse.  While I do not doubt that their intentions were just as good, they did not respect my privacy -- Hawk's privacy -- and I was too naive to defend myself -- to defend Hawk -- from their pointed inquiries about the state of my being, about the welfare of my soul.

I came back from the wilderness far too early.  I came back and walked directly into priesthood classes where my well-meaning leaders told me (1) that masturbation was a sin comparable to murder; (2) that women who didn't wear enough clothing were walking pornography; (3) that I could not participate or integrate with my community as long as I was sexually active (in any way) outside the boundaries of a heterosexual marriage; (4) that the only course for setting myself free from a lifetime of terrible depravity was confessing every sexual misstep I might make to my bishop.  I internalized this message with all the fervor of a medieval Catholic saint, and the results were not pretty.  (1) I became obsessed with making my boners go away, and I felt very bad (sometimes even physically ill) every time random thoughts of women invaded my mind.  (2)  I lost my ability to communicate freely with nubile women and girls my own age.  Since they were sexy and I couldn't have any sexy thoughts (let alone actions) outside of marriage, why bother talking to them?  The risk was greater than the reward (from my naive perspective).  Sometimes, I judged them when they wore clothing that I found provocative (though I am happy to say that I never let this attitude get out of hand: I always recognized that the fundamental moral problem was weakness in myself, not some gigantic flaw pervading almost the entire female gender living outside the burkha).  (3)  I worried all the time about my worthiness to participate in Mormon ceremonies (which I really loved: I relished getting to church early each Sunday to prepare sacrament; I loved saying the prayers; I loved passing the bread and water around the congregation; I loved attending the temple to do baptisms and confirmations).  It tore me up inside to think that something so wonderful might be taken away from me merely because I couldn't make a boner go away in time (e.g. before I had a bad thought or got too sexually excited).  It made me angry, at myself (for being so weak!) and the world (for being so mean!).  (4)  I became a regular visitor in my bishop's office, where I was constantly begging for forgiveness -- more and more wretchedly, as it became ever clearer to me that the only way to make the boners go away for good was to castrate myself (a solution to which I gave more than passing thought, though thankfully I never actually tried it).

Because I followed the well-meaning counsel of my Mormon leaders, the delicious taste of heaven that my religious conversion had brought quickly became as bitter as hell.  Hawk shredded my arm with her talons, gouged my face with her beak, and flew away screaming where I could not follow.  After she left, I would sit up late at night or rise early in the morning, sobbing -- longing for the peace, the happiness, the openness, the safety that I felt before sex came and destroyed everything good in my world.  In my head, I was wearing the rags that Crazy Horse wore.  I hated myself.  I despised my weakness -- my inability to follow simple instructions from God, who reached out to me through my priesthood leaders (generously, continuously, even though I kept letting him down over and over again).  I was the lowest form of life imaginable, worse than the most noxious animal anywhere: animals fulfilled the measure of their creation, whereas I couldn't follow simple instructions from a loving God who just wanted me to avoid things that were bad for me anyway.  Many times, more than I can count, I really wanted to die.  It was awful.

For many years, I lived in a kind of perpetual dark night of the soul: I would be happy momentarily, engaged in some worthwhile pursuit (like gardening or studying or working out), and then I would remember that Hawk was gone, that she was never coming back, that I had driven her away with my sinfulness.  And I would get angry -- at myself (at Hawk), at the world, at people who looked at me askance (or wore bikinis, or did anything to remind me of the gaping wound I carried around inside).  But the overarching emotion that defined my experience was despair, the black hopelessness that comes from being in a caught in a problem to which there is no solution.  The Pretty Reckless have a song that expresses my emotion(s) very well:

"Under the Water" (from Hit Me Like a Man, 2012)

Lay my head, under the water  

Lay my head, under the sea  

Excuse me sir, am I your daughter?  

Won't you take me back, take me back and see? 

There's not a time, for being younger 

And all my friends, are enemies  

And if I cried unto my mother 

No she wasn't there, she wasn't there for me 

Don't let the water drag you down 

Don't let the water drag you down 

Don't let the water drag you down 

Broken lines, across my mirror  

Show my face, all red and bruised  

And though I screamed and I screamed, well no one came running  

No I wasn't saved, I wasn't safe from you 

Don't let the water drag you down 

Don't let the water drag you down 

Don't let the water drag you down  

Don't let me drown, don't let me drown in the waves, 

Oh I could be found, I could be what you had saved 

Saved, saved, saved!

 

Lay my head, under the water 

Aloud I pray, for calmer seas 

And when I wake from this dream, with chains all around me  

No, I've never been, I've never been free 

No, I've never been, I've never been free 

No, I've never been, I've never been free

It was remarkably like drowning all the time, loaded with chains that wouldn't come off, and other people just didn't understand: my parents didn't understand (though they really tried, I think), my church leaders didn't understand, and I was too ashamed and insecure to reach out to anyone else.  I should emphasize that it didn't overwhelm me utterly, at least not every moment: I enjoyed some very good times as an adolescent, times I remember fondly to this day -- but this mess was always in the back of it, like a monster lurking inside me, waiting for a lull in the action to emerge and eviscerate me.  Hawk felt betrayed, and she really took it out on me (over and over again: I sometimes wondered if we would ever be friends again, the way we were before sex came into the picture).

Decline of the West?

Some thoughts on this article, attributing much of the problem with American values to single parenting, and a concomitant decline in moral values.

Quotes like this give me pause:

Across Middle America, single motherhood has moved from an anomaly to a norm with head-turning speed. (That change received a burst of attention this year with the publication of Charles Murray’s new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” which attributed the decline of marriage to the erosion of values, rather than the decline of economic opportunity.) 

We might be seeing a decline of values in modern north America.  (I am not yet convinced that we are.  Since at least the nineteenth century, the morals of the "working class" in the West have provided a freak show at which the better off have stared in alternate horror and fascination.)  But if we are, then the solution is emphatically not socializing marriage (or healthcare, or housing, or anything else, if we can help it).  Disrupting stable homosexual relationships -- devaluing them, attacking them (with specious "defend the family" arguments) -- does nothing to make fewer dumb heterosexuals go the way of Britney Spears (who seems to flout the Deuteronomistic narrative of people like Charles Murray by being at once wealthy and a tramp: maybe her children will be utterly ruined, or maybe they will retire happy with the hefty fortune their mother has piled up shaking her booty).

The people saving marriage are the ones making theirs work.  They don't have time to save yours.  That's your job.  As is deciding to have sex (or not).  No one can make those decisions for you.  There are no shortcuts.  Blaming the people who make what end up looking like "bad" decisions might make us feel a little better (for avoiding the trap), but it cannot really help those making the mistakes.  The most we can do is provide information, and accomodate others with as much grace and dignity as they will allow.

I don't despise single parents.  I don't think that they "failed" because they were somehow morally inferior to me.  (Heck, if something happens to my wife, then I am in the same boat -- not necessarily because I am a sinner, but because life is tough and we don't always have all the resources necessary for optimal human expression.)  I don't think it is useful to cultivate a moral outlook that pats the lucky winners (who were rich, went to school, and fell in love with partners who happened to remain alive, mentally stable, and still in love) on the back, and calls the losers (who lose for many different reasons) to a belated repentance: "Your life sucks now, because you are a hopeless jackass.  I thought you should know this.  You'll never be as cool as those of us who didn't slip up, but we'll generously let you have a place at our parties (where we celebrate our good fortune and lament the existence of miserable wretches like you)."  This is not the message that always makes it across, of course, but it is too often the way things shake out, in my (limited) experience.

Instead of fearing failure so much that we punish people (and ourselves) reactively, we really ought to cultivate success.  Not everyone gets it right the first time.  Not everyone gets two parents (or one) who care.  Not everyone gets sufficient food and shelter.  More important than assigning blame is learning how to recover from (inevitable) setbacks.  If you need to beat yourself up a bit, confess to a priest, and go through the whole sackcloth-and-ashes routine, then that is fine -- but it isn't going to help everyone, and I find its application in real life to be quite limited (much more limited than its widespread prescription would suggest).  Maybe if we allowed sex education ("hey, if you have sex all the time, i.e. inserting this tab of his into this slot of hers, then you should be aware that children are a common consequence") instead of pretending that such things are better ignored, then young people would think more before doing it.  Maybe if we modeled better relationships, they would have more to aspire to.  Maybe if we spent more time cultivating really useful relationship tools (empathy, honesty, openness, compassion) -- and less time teaching bad history ("eighteenth-century marriages were all ideal") and worse psychology ("God loves sinners, so he makes them miserable single parents") -- then we would see fewer marriages fail.

I am speaking past the article that triggered these thoughts at this point (as I may have been doing the whole time), but I think this is important (for me, if for no one else).  If we are experiencing the implosion of our culture, then what saves us will not be a heftier dose of whatever medicine we are already taking.  If we are losing our heritage as moral beings, then the answer is not more of whatever is already not working.  For me, the solution starts with radical honesty: what do we really know about human behavior? what is success? how do we cultivate it?  I don't believe those who pretend that there are easy universal answers to these questions that anyone can have for the price of tithing.  I think reality is more complicated than that.  I doubt these kind of pat solutions very much.  But I have faith in the human race.  We can rise above the challenges that face us.  The first step is to confront them directly, swallowing our fear and denying our desire to pass the buck to someone else (like the parents who don't get married, the priests who promise absolution for tithing, or the politicians who are always vowing to save the world in exchange for a few votes).

Bottom line: from my perspective, there is a lot more to success and failure (and life generally) than a deceptively simple "I do" (which I didn't even get to utter at my wedding, by the way).

The Problem

Man is a social animal. We make clubs. We make corporations. We make churches. We make governments and mafias. We then use these organizations to order our lives, to bless and to curse. All organizations subsist by a give-and-take between conferring advantages and causing harm (both to those who belong and to those who don't). There is no historical organization that has not hurt somebody. I am going to go out on a limb and say that I have yet to learn of an organization that didn't hurt some innocent person, at some point. And yet we need organizations to survive. This puts us in a sticky place, a place from which there is no easy exit.

If there are no perfect organizations, then there are at least some that appear decidedly better than others. I can readily understand why someone with means would want to belong to these groups and not others that work against them. I think it makes perfect sense for someone in John Larsen's shoes to come to the conclusion that he has reached and work against the LDS church. But not all people are John Larsen. Some people lack the tools (mental, emotional, physical) to save themselves from bad (or at least suboptimal) organizations. Calling for these people to throw off the chains that oppress them is like telling a cripple to ditch the crutch and walk already. Worse than that, some of the cripples function even worse without the "oppression" that the church gives them. (A good friend of mine, when asked the rhetorical question, "Would you go around committing crimes if you weren't LDS?" has responded, "Yes, actually, I think I would." I believe he is sincere, and he might even be right. I don't want to push him. For what it is worth, he didn't reject me when I decided to distance myself from LDS Mormondom.)

In my experience (actual and vicarious), what really improves the quality of human life is something more subtle than simple affiliation (with any group, including churches of all kinds). Some people are better at empathizing with others. Some people are better at learning from others. Some people are better at coming up with methods for cultivating and spreading the benefits of civilization (humanity en groupe). There are ways around these people: historically speaking, many groups like to suppress them, control them, use them for the group's own purposes, etc. But if the world survives, then their work always rises to the top (even if some dead ne'er-do-well like Joseph Smith gets the credit for it). Real quality is something against which there can be no effective argument. Even Muslims (to name one religion frequently mistrusted these days) believe in things like compassion, charity, and honor (which has some positive meaning for them, too, not just rejoicing that another idiot has blown himself up in the marketplace praising Allah).

There are moments in history when we would like to pull humanity up by the bootstraps, raising the moral level of every person such that each and every one might see that suicide bombing (or nuclear war, or any war waged for profit) is just wrong. We would like to make the bad mafias go away and replace them with good ones. But the bad ones are all good, in some way, or they would not exist. (This is true even of the worst Muslim sect you can imagine, I think.) And no good one that has ever existed has not, at some point, been bad. This is part of why I am having a hard time disentangling myself from Mormonism (even as I leave the church behind, along with any kind of positive theism). Maybe in time I will advance to the place where John is today, but for the present I am not there. I do not see how it is possible to strip superstition and ignorance out of the human psyche. I do not see how kicking the religious idiots out the front door doesn't inevitably turn into admitting them in again through the back. (A good example of this is Soviet Russia, which secularized enough to lose God but not enough to get rid of all the worst aspects of human organized behavior, i.e. religion.)  People are stupid. In large numbers, it seems that our stupidity compounds. There is no easy way out of this (that I can find, anyway). In the end, our best hope is for thoughtful individuals to take the time and make the effort necessary to publicize human stupidity, warning the people (the way prophets are supposed to) that they are all idiots.  (Naturally, prophets are idiots too, being human.)

It really doesn't matter what clubs one belongs to, or what "doctrines" one espouses (in the abstract). Theory is often wrong, and its wrongness can lead to unnecessary suffering and death whether practitioners are rational or not (and many are simply never going to be: until people in the Third World stop having to fight for survival every day, some of them are always going to be violent lunatics, with some justification: if I had been born in their place, I would be as they are; fortunately for me, the USA is not Yemen or Saudi Arabia, and LDS Mormonism is not conservative Islam, though Brigham and Joseph tried to take it that way in their time). What we need is a massive dose of introspective, individual skepticism--something that does not come with declarations for or against this or that company. If we want to convert the idiots, we have to speak their language. Some of them will respond well to explicit deconstruction ("you are wrong and your prophets are full of shit"); others will respond to something less harsh ("there is another way to find peace between heaven and earth: this war is not the will of God").

If you take a tally of the deaths caused by the LDS church and compare it to the deaths caused by other companies in human history, I think you will find that the LDS are small potatoes. I could be wrong, and Sam Harris would no doubt say that we are still a time bomb waiting for our chance to become the next al-Qaeda. He could be right, but I don't see it happening, at this point. Where any individual stands relative to Mormonism, institutional or otherwise, has relatively little bearing on the central problems facing humanity (e.g. how to live in harmony when our big brains require socialization that leads to tribalization, and then turn around and invent weapons of mass destruction). I think these problems might be better served if more energy were spent engaging them directly, which necessarily means spending less time quibbling over whether a like-minded person is Mormon or not, Christian or not, Jewish or not, Muslim or not, religious or secular. In the fight against barbarism, the humanist finds all kinds of unexpected allies (including some who choose, for reasons of their own, to retain organizational affiliations that strike the outsider as dangerous and/or ludicrous).

Jung on the Unconscious (God?)

Carl Jung. Civilization in Transition. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. 1970 (2nd edition).  Princeton University Press.  ISBN: 0691097623.

This interesting quote (pp. 358-359, paragraph 678) caught my attention as I was returning this book to the library:

The differentiated function [reason, guided thought] undoubtedly depends on man, on his diligence, patience, perseverance, his striving for power, and his native gifts. With the aid of these things he gets on in the world and "develops." From this he has learnt that development and progress depend on man's own endeavours, his will and ability.  But that is only one side of the picture. The other side shows man as he is and as he finds himself to be. Here he can alter nothing, because he is dependent on factors outside his control. Here he is not the doer, but a product that does not know how to change itself. He does not know how he came to be the unique individual that he is, and he has only the scantiest knowledge of himself. Until recently he even thought that his psyche consisted of what he knew of himself and was a product of the cerebral cortex. The discovery of unconscious psychic processes more than fifty years ago is still far from being common knowledge and its implications are still not recognized. Modern man still does not realize that he is entirely dependent on the cooperation of the unconscious, which can actually cut short the very next sentence he proposes to speak. He is unaware that he is continuously sustained by something, while all the time he regards himself exclusively as the doer. He depends on and is sustained by an entity he does not know, but of which he has intimations and 'occurred' to--or, as we can more fitly say, revealed themselves to--long-forgotten forbears in the grey dawn of history. Whence did they come? Obviously from the unconscious processes, from that so-called unconscious which still precedes consciousness in every new human life, as the mother precedes the child. The unconscious depicts itself in dreams and visions, as it always did, holding before us images which, unlike the fragmented functions of consciousness, emphasizes facts that relate to the unknown whole man, and only apparently to the function which interests us to the exclusion of all else. Although dreams usually speak the language of our particular specialism--canis panem somniat, piscator pisces--they refer to the whole, or at the very least to what man also is, namely the utterly dependent creature he finds himself to be.

Jung's unconscious here sounds very close to what many people seem to mean when they use the word God.  All of us are larger than we know, containing and embodying processes larger than ourselves that constitute us and enable the decisions we have to make: we are all conditioned and constrained by an alien unknown that is at once external and internal.  We cannot understand this constraining factor.  We can only listen to it, and react to it (well or badly).