The Opium of the People

A missionary-minded friend sent me a link to an evangelical Christian book discussing the Marxist dictum: "Religion is the sob of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world ... the opium of the people."  I cracked the book and had some ideas of my own.

 

To me the title of this book--Opium or Truth?--begs an important question.  In what way is opium not truth?  Regarding Marxism, I agree with Karl Popper, who called it a modern humanitarian religion (which the Bolsheviks and their ilk practised the way the Holy Inquisition practised Christianity).  So Marxism is just another kind of opium, subject to the same accidents and afflictions that attend the brands it aims to displace in the marketplace of ideas. 

I think the Daodejing is a better book for understanding the world, from the perspective that Life (or God) has given me, than is the Bible.  That does not mean that I resent people reading the Bible (or similar books), only that I don't personally find in it the deep meaning that they do.  I thought I found that meaning, for many years, but I kept searching the world and experiencing new things--and at some point I realized that the Bible is not the only or even the best guide for my life. 

My religion is not primarily about books or beliefs, in the end.  Books and beliefs for me are just tools, means to enable a kind of existence that is bigger than they are, that includes more things.  I need some connection to people, people who don't live on the other side of the world (or in an office building I can never visit in Salt Lake City).  I need some connection to the non-human environment around me that I can believe in (as I cannot believe in the gods I meet in the Old and New Testaments, the way these are commonly interpreted).  I need friends, nature, and service. 

The Bible does not offer me any of that.  In fact, it seems to take that away, when churches founded around it want to spend all their time talking about the Bible, instead of living what I see as a holy life.  I understand Jesus differently today than I once did.  I think his message was likely a bit different from what many people seem to think.  He did not write anything.  He did not command people to write.  He came to fulfil the Law: so why are we still reading it?  The Old Testament is done, gone, a curio--no different to Christ, in my mind, than the Epic of Gilgamesh.  The New Testament is not really much better: somewhere in the midst of miracle tales, sectarian rants, and pseudo-philosophical speculation (not to mention the straight-up insanity known as the Book of Revelation: that is some strong opium there, maybe LSD), the basic Christian message of universal love and political renunciation ("my kingdom is not of this world") gets buried and lost, so lost that hardly anyone finds it (especially not the people who spend their entire lives bloviating about the secret meaning of the impossible riddles we find in Isaiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, or the Book of Revelation).

I know you love the Bible.  It allows you to build a coherent life, one in which you get some kind of regular access to whatever it is that you need to be a good person (relating well to God, to yourself, and to the rest of us).  That is great.  Not all of us can have that the same way.  I don't want to take your life away and replace it with mine.  I am not sure that reading the Daodejing would improve your life.  I don't know precisely what it is that you need to live well.  I leave the negotiation of that problem to you and God (without any definitive idea myself of what that means: deity is a mystery for me, a mystery that people don't understand--especially not when they think it is clearly visible in some book like the Bible).  I rejoice when you are happy in your religion.  I am sad when you are sad.  I am here to help you in any way I can. But I cannot share your faith anymore than I can share your mind or body.  We are not the same--similar though we might be, much as we might share (in terms of inheritance, of culture, of history and experience). 

If I were to identify myself as a practising Christian, a thing which could happen, I would not make the Bible central to my Christianity.  What appeals to me in Christianity is not the Bible, but the renunciation of attachment--to the world and its ideas, including all the worldly ideas in the Bible (which is a very worldly book, in my experience, one that includes reading many books).  I could see myself becoming some kind of Orthodox (probably not Catholic) hermit, monk, or recluse--retiring from life to pray, sing, and grow a nice garden someplace remote, with a cave or cell I might inhabit peacefully (with or without a Bible: I don't particularly care).  At this point in my life, this option is not really a good one.  I have a family to look after, and the Christian traditions that surround me are not really friendly to contemplative approaches that eschew theology.  Instead, everyone wants to debate the Bible, to establish orthodoxy, to get the sacraments right, to make the kingdom of heaven come down to earth so that we can all see it the same way, in the same things.  I really dislike this vision of religion, of Christianity.  It is not my religion.  It really never was, not even when I was a good Mormon.  I did not want to impose faith on people; I was not interested in convincing or converting folks against their will.  I just wanted to understand myself better, myself and the mystery I know as God.  That is all I have ever wanted.  I am still pursuing my quest; I have just left behind the conviction that it must lead me to active affiliation with religion that is not mine--with life whose integrity I cannot know and embody for myself. 

We don't all react the same way to the same opium.  When the truth sets us free, we don't all use our freedom the same way, to do the same things.  This too is part of the mystery we call God.

Commentary on Sex

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

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

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

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

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

The Coming Age of Bust

If capitalism is the pursuit of monopoly, then I must be anti-capitalist. The question is how to do this. How to offer meaningful opposition to something so ubiquitous as the pursuit of zero-sum games in which winners embrace unlimited growth. This is not easy. I suspect it involves re-imagining what constitutes wealth (in ways that people who think like Peter Thiel will find ludicrous, perhaps dangerously ludicrous as they realize that my intent is to become less involved and less susceptible to involvement in business that will make them richer, on their own terms). The current, integrated economy needs to shrink, so that smaller, decentralized economies can become larger (but not too large, never again as large as the system we have now). The immediate outcome of this will be economic depression and conventional poverty ("austerity"), but I think the long-term prognosis is better for people who know how to live well with less than for people who think the solution to all economic woes is more of Keynesian stimulus (administered by public or private powers that be, via "free markets" rigged by monopolists on the Right or "fair markets" rigged by monopolists on the Left).

I do not think that there is such a thing as reforming Wall Street or Washington, if by that we mean making them serve their current populations in such a way that our conventional wealth increases without limits. I think the current system is running pretty close to optimal (as close to perfect as it gets without crashing prematurely), and that it is over-taxed (set to blow, with the real question being one of how to manage fallout rather than how to avoid crashing). Life exists, it seems to me, as a series of boom and bust, with the volatility occurring in less devastating fashion as society depends less on any one market (or regime) to serve its needs. We need more markets, not better versions of the ones we already have. We need more businesses, not better monopolies than the ones we already have. We need more (and smaller) governments, not a bigger or better version of the one we already have. In light of the economic depression that is clear on our horizon, we also need plans for living well with less (less wealth in the conventional sense: less growth, lower wages, fewer luxuries, weaker businesses, less taxes, weaker governments, etc.). The boom is over; now is the time of bust. If we manage the bust correctly, it might be a good time for us. We might come out on the other side alive, with a better appreciation for what it means to be wealthy in really straitened economic circumstances. We might have more control over our own destinies (in material terms) than our richer grandparents (who were able to out-source production to social conglomerates whose existence we can no longer support). Or we might be like those people on the side of the road out of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.  That is not what I want.  I do not want to hang about as the hurricane approaches, praying that the crumbling levee holds.  I want to build a boat ahead of the storm, or pack whatever vehicle I have, and move out--with the idea of making new worlds, new societies with mores and expectations that match our new human environment.

Holy Mirth

Some thoughts inspired by the recent slaughter of French cartoonists responsible for the comic Charlie Hebdo, a slaughter perpetuated by Muslim extremists angered by the comic's crude mockery of Islam.

When I put myself in the public sphere, with an agenda that I want you to accept (or at least grapple with in some way), then I become fair game for ridicule.

When I was younger, I served an LDS (Mormon) mission to northern Spain. As a result of being out and about talking to people regarding religion, their own and mine (which I was available to offer those who wanted it), I was fair game for ridicule--and I was ridiculed. While this experience was not always pleasant, I think it was valuable--and I did my best (succeeding for the most part, I hope) to "roll with the punches" (which I knew that my position invited, and even required). I learned that people often use humor to facilitate friendly relations with outsiders whom they might otherwise hate (and perhaps physically injure, even to the point of death). I would much rather be mocked than beaten (let alone killed). But we do not all tolerate mockery the same way. I think we learn to deal with it better, as a population, when we must endure it without the means of an escalating retaliation: as a Mormon missionary, I had neither the friends, the time, nor the resources to plan a violent strike against the people who mocked me (some kindly, some viciously, all with some kind of moral justification that I respected and still respect). I might go home and cry, or get mad on the street and make some aggressive gestures, but there was no such thing as declaring war on society. (There really isn't for the jihadis, either. As a result of their activity in Paris, most of them are dead--right?--and more people will die. Even if society falls apart, the people of France are not going to rise up and convert to Islam en masse. Even if they did, they would promptly divide into separate Muslim factions--such as exist already in dar al-Islam--and commence hostilities with one another. If they were lucky, these hostilities would involve lots of mockery and little actual violence. If not, France becomes another Syria or Iraq.)

I think mockery is actually an important human art, a liberal art that people generally need more practice giving and receiving. The art of laughing at others without losing sight of one's own absurdity is really one of the most civilized--and civilizing--arts available to us. Too many people study how to laugh at others without learning to laugh at themselves. Too few among us are brave enough to face our own absurdity and laugh (instead of crying or becoming very angry and wanting to make someone else suffer because we appear weak, foolish, or stupid at some point--as we all do). Thus, when I teach humanities today in the classroom and tell my students, in a jesting tone, that I see my role as that of a professional clown, I am actually being serious. Seriously silly. I am teaching humanity to laugh, at itself and the world--to laugh and let the little things (a cartoon here, an insult there) go, without rancor.

Religion and Violence

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building My Identity

This article touches the fundamental problem with identity politics: the real Muslim (the real Christian, the real feminist, the real white man, etc.) does not actually exist. The identities we construct for ourselves are at some point uniquely personal, an expression of the particular self whose idiosyncrasy rejects (and breaks) every universal mould. Identity politics as an exercise require me to identify myself wrongly with people who look like me in some fashion, and then to go out and apply this mischaracterization to other people, as well. Identity politics, even when they are most factual (dealing practically with people who for whatever reason appear to act en masse), ask us to behave as pawns (the agents of some collective to which we must belong, to which we owe our identity). It is unfortunately true that I will owe many of my life's goods to groups that include people and things I find immoral, but that seems to me like something to limit wherever possible, rather than to celebrate. I would not choose to enumerate at great length the ways in which I am and must be the helpless agent of some larger identity (religious, political, cultural) that controls me against my own better judgement. I would prefer to dwell on the ways I can break these moulds, can defeat the mandate that I pick a faceless tribe and then stand with them no matter what.

It seems to me that the best way to defeat identity politics (which I regard as evil) or the evils of identity politics (for those who think that identity politics are good) is to quietly refuse to conform to the agenda of your "tribes" (the groups who seek to claim you as their pawn because you practice a certain religion, dress a certain way, come from a certain ethnic background, etc.). My identity is a temporary thing, fraught with many limits such that it inevitably becomes evil, to me and to other people, at some point. In light of this reality, I seek to make that ego as little active as possible in the world around me. I don't lend my weight to causes waged by "my tribes" against others merely because "everybody who looks like you is doing it." I do not know what all academics, all males, all white people (etc.) are up to, as a group. I don't want to put myself in a position where I have to know, where I make myself liable for some kind of gang activity that pretends (inevitably falsely) to speak for "our kind." We have no kind: you are one self, and I am another. Superficial likeness might conceal vast oceans of difference, so vast in my experience that I always assume we are more unlike than like until I see you acting, until I know you--as a person, not a stereotype.

The tribe that I want around me is not a nation, not a race, not an ethnos, nor a worldwide religion. I want real family and friends, people I know personally from historical interaction. If I am to go to war, to make bets with my life, to take risks with uncertain causes and conditions in a troubled world, then I am going to do it not for an imaginary identity or camaraderie (nationalism, racism, chauvinism, capitalism, Christianity, etc.). I am going to do it for friends and family I love, because I see immediately how their survival demands it. I do not care that my friends and family look like me in some superficial way (i.e. that they have language like mine, skin like mine, ethnic background like mine, or religion like mine). I care that they show me moral integrity I can respect, especially where it differs from my own. The more I embrace this integrity, and the people who come with it into my life (from all kinds of odd places), the less I identify myself with the "tribes" that sociology textbooks want to put me in. My friends and family can come from any religious background (I am on intimate terms with many different kinds of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and atheists). They can be any number of races (and they are). They can come from many different countries (and they do). I want to make my identity from them, from their small diversity, rather than take the large monotony of society's tribes as my heritage. I want my ego to reflect the people I love and care about, more than the people who look like me superficially.

On the Ennui of Civilized Man

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

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

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

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

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

On Prophets

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

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

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

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

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

Intellectual Property

One thing that has persistently fascinated me is the manner in which ideas refuse to be owned, despite our attempts to claim them (e.g. Newton and Leibniz fighting over calculus, Darwin and Wallace over natural selection). My own research consistently discovers people saying utterly ridiculous things about individual responsibility (e.g. "Plato is largely responsible" for some trope that runs thick through culture before and after him). It seems to me that ideas find people: a really powerful idea will find more than one person (over and over, as people bump into the circumstances that enable it).

I once tried to express this insight to a fellow student (in grad school), and his response was to worry that I would steal his research--and claim it for myself--as though my assertion that I could never really own an idea amounted to an excuse to lie (about ideas that might not even have occurred to me). I was surprised by this (and a little saddened, honestly, that I presented myself so poorly to this person that he came away from our encounter taking me for a thief). For me, the reality that I don't really own ideas is one that invites honesty and openness rather than the reverse. I don't care if you steal my ideas: I relinquish them as assets that I control. I cultivate ideas not because they make me rich or famous or respected (famous in the right places), but because I enjoy thinking--and want to do it mindfully. If there were no external fame and glory in my work as a thinker, I would still do it--and have "a real job" on the side, as so many other thinkers (more skilled than I) have in the past. To live by one's wits is fundamentally, for me, to be an honest charlatan. I see that I claim a kind of superiority over my own thoughts that I don't really possess. I see that thoughts possess me at least as much as I possess them. I see that it is silly to worship me when I am possessed by a thought that society judges to be cool (for whatever reason: the judgement of society, even learned society, is always at some point absurd). I feel this very deeply. I hope I can learn to express it without coming off as some kind of sleazeball (the academic version of an empty suit).

Every good idea I have, including the one for which I get credit (and tenure and κλέος ἄφθιτον), is one that someone else has probably also had (or will have, with as much claim to originality as I). Seeing this reality, I cannot take too much credit for my ideas. This does not predispose me to take credit for your ideas, but to take less credit, and give less, for the mere possession and expression of an idea. Ideas are valuable. People are valuable. People are not valuable to me because of their ideas, but because of their character (the way they use those ideas). This means that I am very comfortable sharing ideas with people whose character I would never adopt. I can think with Hitler, or Lenin, or Osama bin Laden, or anyone, really. I can see their ideas with the realization that these are present, powerful, and real to them--and perhaps to me. But I cannot then act as they do. I must keep my actions, my responses to ideas, filtered by character.

Musings on Market Share

I hear people talk about there being an 'asset bubble' in the Western education market, similar to the one in the US housing market that popped around the turn of the century.  I agree that there is probably a bubble in education, and here are some thoughts I had about it, and about asset bubbles (or "economic growth") in general.  In sum, I do not believe in progress without regress, life without death, up without down, etc.

Every commodity can be over-valued. I think many people pay far too much for education right now--largely because they confuse education with institutional affiliation, as though learning or professional vocation were somehow inextricably dependent on possessing the imprimatur of a particular institution. The more the latter becomes true, the closer to collapse the market is. The more institutions corner the market on education, the more they invite the kind of corruption and abuse that sow seeds for a regime change that will severely depreciate the social value of their imprimatur (which may go extinct as a valid way of offering credentials, the way Bear Stearns is extinct as a means of managing finances).

Why do I oppose Monsanto? Not because I don't believe in science (or evolution, or agriculture). I don't believe in putting all eggs in one basket. I don't believe in cornering markets. I would like to find the smallest margin of profit I can maintain without going under (as an individual or institution), and then seek to maintain that (as long as the environment supports it)--not grow it to the point where I dominate (and invite the lightning-bolt of Zeus).

I oppose Monsanto because I see them doing to agriculture what universities aspire to do to education, what GoldmanSachs aspires to do with banks (and the nations that rely on banks), etc. To control all shots is dangerous, semper et ubique. I want minimal control (enough that I don't die), not too much (so much that I become "too big to fail" and wind up dragging entire communities down with my inevitable failure). Whatever we build must eventually fall down. I want to engineer institutions with this reality in mind--with the mortality of all companies clearly present in the mind of those creating them and working for them. We should aim not to live forever (nobody has achieved this, and you are not smarter than the guys who built Rome), but to die with minimal harm to those in and around us. We want to minimize corrosion, not maximize utility (or profit or advantage or brand or control or market-share or whatever anyone wants to call it). Losing well, over a history of multiple market-cycles, is more important than winning in any individual cycle (and there is no such thing as winning over all cycles).

Apocalypse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This brings me to my other citations from Hedges:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Mormon Mission

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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