Moving on!

For any who may still watch this space. I have left this blog behind to continue elsewhere: <caninalittera.blogspot.com>. Cheers!  --JGM.

Reflections on Identity

I have reflected much in recent years on what it means to work as an academic, to be a teacher. I think the most useful things I teach are not particularly or uniquely mine (languages, some great old poetry and culture that existed before me and will most likely endure after), and I don't want or need to be honored a great deal for them. A good historian, a good storyteller, has some place in decent society, I think, but trying to turn that place into a Distinguished Chair of Royal Astrology with free food for life and junkets around the world is not really ethical.

Academics could use more humility, as a species. I am fortunate--or not, depending on your point of view--in that my own mediocrity and historical circumstance (coming up in a time when too many qualified teachers exist) combine to make humility necessary, and relatively easy, for me. I can enjoy delving as deep as I can into culture that I find fascinating, without the burden of climbing a career ladder that does not exist for me (chasing tenure via publishing and service work, i.e. too many meetings whose greatest accomplishment is to waste time).

Some people seek a kind of personal identity from their career, an identity that tied their life up with being a certain kind of person. I started out in this manner, too, and naively thought that I could be a Mormon academic, i.e. that this identity was not only possible for me, but that it was good. Experience has shown me that I don't really want to be either a Mormon or an academic. If that is all that I am, if I get to the end of my life and can say only that I complied with some basic institutional protocols and had all my paperwork in order, then I will be profoundly sad.

A good friend died recently, and I attended his funeral in a Mormon church (where he was an active member). While I really enjoyed learning more about his very interesting life (cut short too soon by a sudden heart attack), I found the bishop's sermon at the end quite disappointing--an empty series of cliches whose bearing on lived experience was so little that the meeting would have been better served had he chosen to remain silent (as indeed he threatened to do at the beginning of his remarks). This experience confirmed what the past has taught: I cannot go back to being a good Mormon. It just won't happen. I lack the ability to force myself into a headspace where I need to hear remarks like those uttered by this well-meaning bishop without rolling my eyes.

When I first realized that I could not be a good Mormon, I thought perhaps to salvage my usefulness to society by being a good academic. My last decade working in the university has cooled me to that prospect. Most of the jobs I applied to fresh out of grad school are now jobs I would not want. Thank goodness I did not get most of them! While I really enjoy teaching, I have no illusions about being the gatekeeper to any knowledge required for human survival or thriving. Tuition is too expensive. The academic publishing industry is mostly a waste (to which I am grateful not to have contributed much as yet: when and if I do make something, it will never be required reading and I will never be offended that you haven't heard of it). The petty squabbles, the endless bureaucracy, the trading of favors, the snubbing and backbiting, the pretentious institutional claims to omniscience, etc.--all remind me vividly of the worst things I encountered in Mormon churches! I like sharing time with students looking at interesting culture. That we live in a moment wherein this activity affords me a small living is miraculous, a miracle that could always end at any time, and I would retire grateful, not shattered.

So, where do I find my identity? I could look in many places, but the ones that suggest themselves to me are all smaller than established American institutions seem to want. I have no interest in becoming identified with a race or a political party or any other giant mob of people belching smoke about how great they are in some vast process whose workings are inscrutable unless you are Hegel or P. T. Barnum. I love my wife. That is something I identify with, consistently. I love my kids. I love my family--the people I grew up with, and those I have become related to over the years by marriage and other accidents. I love my friends, especially the friends I have who aren't forced to be with me because we work in the same industry or found ourselves enrolled on the records of the same megachurch. The people I have studied jiu-jitsu with are some of my closest adult friends, as many of my closest childhood friends were fellow students of taekwondo. A few Buddhists, too, and the occasional Mormon (in or out of the institutional church) have also shown me personal kindness and interest that I still appreciate. These people are all over every ideological spectrum anyone might construct. They have no single commitment to any one idea or institution that joins us. What I love is their character, as individuals, something that cannot be abstracted away into skill-sets (let alone replaced effectively by mere intelligence, artificial or otherwise). I want to help these people, to spend my life with them, to get better at the things we do together; beyond that, I have no interest. Saving the nation with my vote is as futile to me as saving political science with publication, or saving my soul with an appropriately stodgy ritual. As long as I can have people I trust around me, I don't mind so much how we live. The right people make living in tents--or shoddy, overpriced cardboard boxes like the one I am in right now--just fine. Constant access to electricity and water is nice, but we can even find ways to work around that (especially if we know our local history!).

The real secret to life, I am starting to think, is finding good people and then doing what needs to be done to commit yourself to them, to become a member of some group you can respect that remains intimate enough to respect you back. Eventually, that respect turns to love. Wisdom teaches that I cannot reach the entire world with these goods: they require the kind of intimate, personal investment that will not be mass-produced, globally distributed, profitably monetized. Whatever nonsense the world at large is up to--in the courts, in the churches, in the universities, so many domains of petty gods who imagine they aren't the devil--it will never amount to anything I can love, ever again.

Wilderness Inspiration

These are some quotations that I found particularly thought-provoking as I participated in and reflected upon my experience with the Boulder Outdoor Survival School in southern Utah (24 May-6 June 2015, field course J106). 

"Nature and instruction are closely related.  For instruction remodels man [changes his rhythm or shape], and having remodeled him, it creates his nature" (Democritus, ap. Clem. Strom. 4.151).

"The civilization of nations consists in tempering nature with reason, where nature has the greater part.  Consider all the nations of the ancient world, the Persians at the time of Cyrus, the Greeks, the Romans.  The Romans were never such philosophers as they were when they bowed to barbarism, that is in the time of tyranny.  And likewise, in the preceding years, the Romans had made great progress in philosophy and general knowledge, which was something new for them. We can draw another conclusion from this, which is that the safeguards of a nation's freedom are neither philosophy nor reason, which are now expected to regenerate public affairs, but virtue, illusions, and enthusiasm, in other words nature, from which we are very far removed.  A nation of philosophers would be the most small-minded and cowardly in the world.  Thus, our regeneration will depend on what might be called an ultra-philosophy, which, through a complete and intimate knowledge of things, brings us close again to nature.  And this should be the outcome of the extraordinary enlightenment of this century" (Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone 114-5, ed. Caesar et al).

"And a certain scribe came, and said unto him, Master, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest. And Jesus saith unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head" (Matthew 8:19-20 KJV).

"And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:20-21 KJV).

"My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence" (John 18:36 KJV).

"To be like the immortals / you need a mind as hard as iron" (Meng Chiao).

"Advancing or retiring, grasping or letting go / people all have their own ways / Heaven and Earth let me be lazy / profit and fame put others to work / gulls sleep on piers with their backs to the sun / swallows build nests above house beams / misled by passion distracted by things / they remain unaware of the Master of Emptiness" (Stonehouse 74).  Bill Porter's comment: "The Master of Emptiness refers to the Buddha, who taught that since all things depend on other things for their existence, they are themselves empty of self-existence, and thus not ultimately real" (78).

"Live without making visits / die neither kind nor just / words include limbs and leaves / thoughts contain lies and betrayals / people who clear a small path / thereby give rise to great deceit / claiming to build a ladder to the clouds / they whittle it into splinters" (Cold Mountain 189).

"The whole Buddhist canon is worthless old paper / seventeen hundred tangled vines / who can see through the mess / one thought is still too many" (Stonehouse 132).

"Letting go means letting everything go / buddhahood has to go too / each thought becomes a demon / each word invites more trouble / survive instead on what karma brings / pass your days in freedom / make the Dharma your practice / lead your ox to the mill" (Stonehouse 181).  Bill Porter's comment: "Buddhists recognize an infinite number of demons, or maras, one for every thought, word, and deed. The purpose of these demons is to obstruct us from understanding the true nature of reality. Dharma is the Buddhist word for what is held to be real, especially the Buddha's teaching. As early as the T'ang and Sung dynasties, Chinese monks used the ox as a metaphor for the untamed mind" (196).

"People ask the way to Cold Mountain / but roads don't reach Cold Mountain / in summer the ice doesn't melt / and the morning fog is too dense / how did someone like me arrive / our minds are not the same / if they were the same / you would be here" (Cold Mountain 16).

"Before the cliffs I sat alone / the moon shone in the sky / but where a thousand shapes appeared / its lantern cast no light / the unobstructed spirit is clear / the empty cave is a mystery / a finger showed me the moon / the moon is the hub of the mind" (Cold Mountain 10).

"Born thirty years ago / I've traveled countless miles / along rivers where the green rushes swayed / to the frontier where the red dust swirled / I've made elixirs and tried to become immortal / I've read the classics and written odes / and now I've retired to Cold Mountain to lie in a stream and wash out my ears" (Cold Mountain 131).

"I have a single cave / a cave with nothing inside / spacious and devoid of dust / full of light that always shines / a meal of plants feeds a frail body / a cloth robe masks a mirage / let your thousand sages appear / I have the primordial Buddha" (Cold Mountain 163).

"Pole your three-winged galleons / ride your thousand-mile stallions / you still won't reach my home / it's called the darkest wild / my cave is on a distant ridge / clouds and thunder last all day / I'm not Master Confucius / I have nothing to convey [var: teach]" (Cold Mountain 29).

"The Dharma realized and taught by the Tathagatha is incomprehensible and inexpressible. It is neither a dharma, nor is it not a dharma" (Diamond Sutra 7).

"Parrots live in western lands / hunters bring them back in nets / courtesans tease them dawn to dusk / somewhere behind palace curtains / they're given a golden cage / but locked away their plumage fades / not like the wild geese and swans / flying up in the clouds" (Cold Mountain 19).

"People search for cloud roads / but cloud roads can't be found / the peaks are high and sheer / the streams are wide and dark / ridges rise in front and back / clouds stretch east and west / I'll tell you where cloud roads are / Cloud roads are in space" (Cold Mountain 255).

"I longed to visit the eastern cliff / countless years until today / I finally grabbed a vine and climbed / but halfway there met mist and wind / the trail was too narrow for clothes / the moss too slick for shoes / I stopped beneath this cinnamon tree / and slept with a cloud for a pillow" (Cold Mountain 9).

"One bottle is cast in gold / another is moulded from clay / take a look at these two / which is bound to endure / knowing these bottles differ / surely you know that karma does too / examine the seeds of rebirth / cultivation begins today" (Cold Mountain 190).

"I saw some trees by the river / more weathered than I can describe / a couple of trunks remained / with thousands of ax-blade scars / their dry yellow leaves had been stripped by the frost / their rotten hearts battered by waves / but this is how habitats are / why blame Heaven and Earth" (Cold Mountain 198).

"Heaven and Earth are heartless / treating creatures like straw dogs / sages are heartless too / they treat people like straw dogs / between Heaven and Earth / how like a bellows / empty but inexhaustible / each stroke produces more / talking only wastes it / better to protect what's inside" (Lao-tzu 5).  Su Ch'e: "Heaven and Earth aren't partial.  They don't kill living things out of cruelty or give birth to them out of kindness.  We do the same when we make straw dogs to use in sacrifices.   We dress them up and put them on the altar, but not because we love them.  And when the ceremony is over, we throw them into the street, but not because we hate them.  This is how sages treat the people."

"A state relies on people / just as a tree depends on soil / if the soil is deep it thrives / if the soil is thin it withers / and if its roots are exposed / its limbs produce no fruit / draining a pond to catch fish / gains only a short-term profit" (Cold Mountain 222).

"True emptiness is clear and always present / masked by delusions for reasons we don't know / how could what is real and what is fake exist apart / flowers bloom and flowers fall when the spring wind blows" (Stonehouse 92).

"Calligraphy unrestrained / physique robust enough / alive a body with limits / dead a ghost with no name / it's been like this since ancient times / what else can you do / join me inside the clouds / I'll teach you magic mushroom songs" (Cold Mountain 25).

Letter to a Loser

Salve!  Hearing of your recent misfortune (the job you lost, the class you failed, the savings you burned in a hedge fund, etc.), I decided to be kind and compose this letter.  Rather than commiserate with you in the usual maudlin fashion (which certainly has its place), I am going to be frank--for we are very good friends, and I honor our friendship.

I am very happy that Fortune has denied your bid to check out on life.  Over the last few years, I have watched you slowly disintegrate, breaking yourself into pieces (public and private, polished and rough, good and bad) and hawking those pieces in the marketplace.  Up until this moment, you always found a buyer for something, and so you kept excavating--kept digging that hole in your heart a little deeper, searching desperately among your entrails for shiny things to polish and feed to the market.  You felt very nervous about this process, clearly, and there were times when you thought about cashing out--taking a break, doing something else, finding a way to exist that didn't involve betting your livelihood on people's finicky taste for whatever shit you could scrounge to offer them.  You said you would take that break if Opportunity knocked.  Well, she is knocking now--very loudly.

Listen to what she says.  "Look, buddy, I'm going to do you a favor.  I'm going to cut through all the bullshit everyone else in this marketplace will give you--about how you're a wonderful person with some impressive skills and you just have to try harder next time, blah blah--and tell you the truth.  Being a prostitute is no good if you have to beg for clientele.  Trust me on this one: the clients you want are the ones who come begging to you, not the other way round.  Never give your soul to any of the vultures here.  Don't go into a job interview you must ace.  Don't take a class you cannot fail.  Don't bet any money you cannot lose on a hedge fund.  That divine fire that people rave about?  Those 'impressive skills' you spend so much time honing?  At some point these gifts turn against you, becoming the weapons the market uses to destroy you rather than the tools you use to better yourself.  Have you reached that point yet?"

"People are weak, and the Market makes some of you weaker.  It pretends to love you, to want you, to need you, to value you, and so on.  The wise among you know that it is lying, that what it really wants is something impersonal (some quality or value that exists independent of individual personae such as you).  The Market is secretly very happy when there are too many people vying for its limited favors (that will always be limited, by nature): the issue of a room full of eager prostitutes is that the Market always gets well laid, but it cannot sleep with everyone.  It cannot love everyone.  It cannot make everyone its special one-and-only.  What it can do is lie.  The wise are not hurt by its lies, because they have learned not to make their livelihood at the Market.  They are available to take the Market's favors, but they do not require them (as you do).  They are not dependent on the Market (as you are, right now).  The Market is only really good for people who do not need to be there.  Become one of those people.  Until then, stay away from the Market: it will always break you more than it makes you."

Where am I to go? is naturally your next question.  You need a larger perspective than the one you have right now--the close-minded perspective of the narrow Market you have been courting in vain.  Your Market was too little for you, too small and specialized.  You have to find a larger Market (one that allows you access to more clients, more needs, more opportunities to put yourself together without pulling yourself apart).  You have to re-assess your persona.  What do you really need to survive?  Food?  Clothing?  Shelter?  A community to which you can contribute something meaningful?  There are many ways to have these things.  Many poor people have them.  Many losers.  Be the loser you already are: just enjoy it more, and waste less time wishing you could find some other way to lose (e.g. the kind of loss that your petty little Market calls success).

Is it really true that there is no such thing as life without loss?  I think this is true, for we are all mortal.  That means everything we do leads eventually to death (at least as a way-station: even those who embrace immortality do so by making death a gateway gods must pass).  You must learn to love loss, to love yourself as a loser.  You must see that losing contains valuable information, particularly when it is mitigated loss (rather than the total loss you have encountered recently).  Success is a dream, a lie, a fairy-tale that unscrupulous Markets sell to prostitutes that they want to have on the cheap.  It weakens those who pursue it, because they fail to learn from their own loss, and it weakens those who gain it, because they fail to learn from others' loss (and see a false security instead of the volatility that Nature makes).

Since you must lose, make yours a beautiful loss.  Don't lose someone else's game.  Don't let the Market define your loss.  Lose your own way, doing something you believe in.  Instead of cutting yourself apart in desperate hope that someone else will love your guts, cut yourself apart because you already love them.  The best loser is the one who loses his own game, on terms that he has made purposely for himself.  Be that loser.  Vale.

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.

Why Do Wealth and Peace Exist?

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

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

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

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

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

Back to Nature

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

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

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

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

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

Real Education

The power of degrees to draw salaries wanes as more people obtain degrees: this is one viable lesson that they still teach in economics, though many PhDs seem to have missed it (or to think that creative mathematics can make it disappear, more or less the same way astrology used to correct character flaws).

What matters more than "education" is the right kind of education (i.e. training in a viable, sustainable method of living). Given our current circumstances, this sort of education is really unpopular: it does not put money or influence or raw power into the hands of established interests (who consequently found few institutions to teach it, endow few scholarships or professorships to facilitate it, and use whatever political and social clout they possess generally to mock and undermine it). The right kind of education requires a student able to imagine living a life unlike that of his parents (or the rich people of his parents' generation, whose mores he is constantly bombarded with as desirable insofar as they make him easier for established interests to manipulate--via debts, social obligations, and desire for "nice things" made in a sweatshop somewhere). It requires radical freedom of thought--not the kind of regimented bean-counting that stops short of articulating any idea remotely threatening to established interests (who understandably position themselves as pillars of social and political and economic stability, even as history reveals that they are built upon sand that is shifting as we speak).

Real education involves living, not just thinking. It cannot come from a classroom, not even when that classroom has been outfitted with all the best technology that a committee of experts can imagine and acquire. Real education teaches us how to adapt and survive along an entire lifetime--and beyond. (One utility of studying history is that it reminds you of a time when people didn't think in terms of single generations, let alone market and election cycles measured in terms of a few months or years.) Real education does not teach us how to get and maintain jobs in a narrow market defined by scarcity and fragility. It teaches us how to maximize independence rather than servility. It costs a lot in terms of effort, and little in terms of cash (the reverse of many degrees offered by modern universities). It incentivizes process over completion, independence over employment, integrity over profit, and virtuous failure over depraved success.

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.

Writing Books and Making Art

Some random thoughts inspired by this observation from Nassim Taleb (NNT): "For a book to survive at least decade, it should not be summarizable, and if summarized, no two independent summaries should be alike" (posted to Facebook on 9 January 2015).

The quality of longevity is one that tends to belong (it seems to me) to books whose relevance to society exists outside the realm of summaries. People don't write summaries of romance novels, especially not of romance novels that they really like. They re-read them (for the experience, not the "information" that Jane was hot and Dick lived up to his name). People often compose summaries of books that they wish they did not have to read (e.g. many of the summaries I wrote for my dissertation)--so that they can refer to an argument without having to care or know too much about it. This kind of summary exists to facilitate lack of experience or engagement (with an idea that one does not really want). Another kind of summary exists to help synthesize what one knows about a book one loves (and this kind of summary is typically idiosyncratic, in keeping with NNT's heuristic: my retelling of the Iliad is not yours).

The deadest dead-wood literature out there is academic books like one I am currently reading on Herakles. It contains much valuable information, presented in such a fashion as to erase any valuable idiosyncratic perspective from the author (who speaks not for herself but for "the field" and writes not a monograph but an extended encyclopedia entry that might as well have been composed by a machine--as maybe one day it will). She writes summaries of her argument at the end of each chapter (like a bad dissertation), and makes each sentence with as little care as needed to convey the essential information (which is the only thing keeping my nose in the book, long enough to write my own summary and return it with hope that I never need to check it out again--not because the author is not a fascinating person, but because she barely exists as a meaningful voice in this book).

Why does an author write such a book as this? I don't know. I suspect that the academic culture ("one must write a book to get tenure ... and/or other nice things like reputation") is to blame. Of course we need people writing books (and making music, painting, building, designing, dreaming, etc.). But not all art is created equal. Most of it, in fact, is shit.

The really great art does more than merely convey information: it conveys what pseudo-Longinus (delightfully anonymous, as most literary critics should be) calls "the sublime" (an insight into the human condition that is at once universal, recognizable to a large population, and particular, arising from conscious awareness of human particularity, the individual perspective of a thoughtful author). Few works of art achieve this, and that is well: if it were easy, we would all do it, all the time. The pernicious aspect of cultures like the academic is their tendency to over-value production for its own sake, as though we might atone for failing to become the next Mozart by writing a bunch of shitty cantatas (or whatever) instead of taking whatever time we need to produce the best work of which we, particularly, are capable. I do not write music to become Mozart. I do not write books to become Nietzsche (though that is much more likely for me than becoming Mozart). I do not wrestle to become Cael Sanderson (or Alexander Karelin). I do not paint to become Picasso. I do what I do, I make whatever art I make, to express who I am--a quality and experience unique to me. If I never develop that quality, if I am so busy accumulating a curriculum vitae to impress tenure committees that I neglect my muse, then my work will only ever be shit. The only people who read academic shit, in my experience, are academics, and we mostly do it holding our noses (especially if we love literature). We grit our teeth and "shit out another book every year" (as one of my best profs in grad school said of a prolific scholar in my field) because that is how one obtains academic laurels--but these pitiful rewards (such as they are) are not really κλέος ἄφθιτον, not even when history conspires to make them endure for centuries (as the garrulous farrago of disjointed thought composed by Athenaeus of Naucratis, zum Beispiel). They are means to some end, not any end in themselves. Their significance to human experience is remote, and a better work might easily replace them (if only by offering a really good summary--one that keeps all the information artists want and omits the shitty facade).

Modern Economics: A Quick Look

The reduction of economics to science has destroyed the ability of people to see value that is not monetized, to the gross impoverishment of society (even when material profits have never been higher). People who cheerfully tout the superiority of "modern" to "ancient" society are dealing mostly in caricatures, which they turn into facts by manipulating mathematics. Also, I observe that many of them assume a view of "modern" that is incredibly narrow (excluding the 19th century, for instance, and even much of the 20th): "modern" society thus becomes the latest vision of a "return to Eden" that has yet to occur. 

People who want to make money these days in the US become, by and large, administrators (with degrees in economics, business, political science, communications, and various related fields that are all aptly euphemized under the title "marketing"). Administrative work consists largely in creating opportunities to squeeze money from people and institutions for spurious value (no "value added" to justify the expense that administration requires).

Why does college tuition continue to rise into the stratosphere? Administration. The people taking the money are not your professors, your instructors (who will soon outnumber the professoriate), nor your janitors and groundskeepers. They are deans, sub-deans, vice assistants to the provost, etc. Why do banks and car manufacturers require public money? Administration. The people taking the money are not your line-men, your mechanics, your bank-tellers. They are mostly middle management (with CEOs and CFOs and their like representing the flower of the cancer, not its root). Why are healthcare costs so large? Doctors and other providers are not hell-bent on making large sums: many of them work appalling hours for less money than the people who trained them (and the trend is to pay less and less to the providers, who are increasingly forced to avoid private practice and become the mercenaries of large corporations). Again, the people raking in the dough are middle managers, who sit at desks and fill out forms and pass absurdly high bills back and forth (from the middle manager in the hospital to the middle manager in your insurance company to you, and your jaw hits the floor when you realize that your ER visit cost $7000, and you must pay it all out of pocket).

When you investigate closely what it is that this middle management does to justify its increasing (and in my view unsustainable) expense to society, you find that it is engaged in a kind of legal piracy. Where it used to be "economical" to deal directly with the people you wanted something from (e.g. with a professor, a doctor, or a local banker--even a local politician), you must now call upon some middle manager (or a call center run by middle managers), take a number, and wait for a bill that will always cost as much as possible (and will cost more over time: next year, it will more expensive). You become used to this phenomenon; indeed, some of you are so used to it that you don't bother to wonder why it is that aspirin, tuition, cars, houses, justice, and basic healthcare cost so much more all the time. You don't stop to look at the deals other people (including some "poor" and "Third World" people) get from their providers (largely by having no time or infrastructure to impose the costly regime of middle management upon a public understandably eager to avoid paying a pirate for the right to live their lives). You accept the regime of extortion as "the way things are" even when you go to "fix things" (usually by voting for a change in the identity of your extortioner, as though swapping one face for another were the crux of the problem: it isn't).

The solution is both simple (to understand) and difficult (to apply in a practical fashion). Simply put, you must avoid doing business with middle management. Don't waste time talking with them, paying them, reforming them, voting for them, etc. Instead, you must build alternatives to them. Recreate relationships with service providers who exist without middle management. This will not be easy (or even "cheap" in the short-term; in the long-term, however, it will be much cheaper than any scheme that involves paying the pirates their protection money). You must put away the notion of being a consumer. There are no passive customers in a real market: instead you have to offer something to get something. You have to be trustworthy yourself, and have the acumen to recognize for yourself when someone is trying to take you for a ride. No "consumer protection" agency is going to help you (unless you give them real money, and even then, I would not trust them--whether they were public or private). You have to realize that abstractions are meaningless without some kind of concrete environmental referent. I don't care what the GDP is doing: it is a meaningless thing, since its rise might just indicate the proliferation of piracy rather than the creation of something really good (real value). Growth is ambiguous that way. I care what is growing, how it grows, more than that some growth occur. Middle management is eager to sell you growth, without drawing your attention to the fact that it wants to grow at your (and the world's) expense, via a process of piracy whose moral ethic is, "Make more money, no matter what: more is always better, no matter what the fallout is." If you like that ethic, then buy into it with your eyes open, instead of falling for the commercials that repackage it as something less brutal or short-sighted (like Adam Smith's capitalism or Karl Marx's humanism).

Job Security and Lack Thereof

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope and Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.