Useless Man

Bryan Magee.  Confessions of a Philosopher.  Modern Library, 1999.  ISBN: 0375750363.

I have been reading Magee's book slowly since Christmas, when I received it as a gift (and a welcome opportunity to explore modern academic philosophy, the alien universe into which my last job thrust me unwitting but not unwilling).  It is very good.  Here I want to share some passages from chapter 15, wherein Magee describes what he calls his "mid-life crisis" (a mental breakdown which happened after he had achieved some measure of personal and professional success; I feel I have already gone through a very similar experience, though mine comes much earlier in my life and career).

Years before I made it conscious and explicit on this blog, I had the nagging feeling that I don't really value collective human activities that are conventionally very important (e.g. making money, making a name, making a career, being the kind of person people reward with power or prestige).  It is not that I actively hate power or prestige (now or in times past).  I just don't care much for them.  I have never pointedly avoided opportunities to befriend people or do interesting, important things.  I just haven't found "networking" (i.e. looking for useful acquaintances on purpose rather than encounter lifelong companions by accident, which I prefer) or "producing what powerful people want" (as opposed to producing what goods I can as best I can) inherently useful, beneficial, or desirable activities (to pursue as ends in themselves).

This attitude of mine is deep-rooted.  I remember playing on the playground as a kindergartner, usually alone or with one or two other kids, weirdos who decided to leave the group and join the hermit, for some reason.  I was not the kid people chose first for teams.  I was not the kid who cared, either.  I was not really picked on much.  (My only memorable trouble with bullies in kindergarten came from a girl in first grade, who took advantage of being bigger than I was to steal my lunch-box and hold it hostage for kisses.)  When the school asked me to join the gifted class that met during recess, I told them I would rather go out and play in the yard, with the trees and the sunshine.  (I still remember the confused and slightly angry look on the face of the little girl they sent to invite me.  Her name was Bethany.  She was very bright, and very nice to me.)  Magee offers a lucid, adult perspective on this attitude:

I felt I knew with some degree of certainty that if there were anything at all outside space and time we were at our closest to it in the private world of personal relationships, and of art and reflective thought, and were at our furthest from it in the public world of social organization and politics. I abandoned, or so I thought, the idea of becoming a member of parliament, and declined approaches made to me to stand for parliament. In all these ways the centre of gravity of my life shifted from the public to the private, from the impersonal to the personal, away from whatever it might be that was currently going on in the world of affairs to things of a more individual and abstract nature, and of much longer-lasting influence. I knew that many of my friends and colleagues saw me as falling out of life's race in a way that was cataclysmic for myself.  Indeed, some of them remonstrated with me about what they saw as my craziness in blowing a successful career. But the truth is that I no longer regarded the considerations they cared about as mattering (pages 256-257).

This has been my position ever since I was old enough to act with intention.  I did not care what teachers and classmates cared about in school.  When I went on a mission for the LDS church, I went to serve God, not the Brethren in Salt Lake City, who as it turned out had all kinds of impossible (not to mention immoral) expectations of what it meant to be a good missionary.  When I went to the university, I studied to improve Humanity, not to make a brilliant career or impress the bureaucrats in control of education (who are every bit as impossible and immoral as the Mormon leaders, it seems to me, with expectations that make a mockery of mankind and education).  I do what I see as the right thing.  I do it no matter what.  I see that this tendency is problematic (anti-social, dangerous, etc.), and I make efforts to correct it, but so far it is stubbornly incorrigible.  I am not always as keenly self-aware as Magee in this passage: more often than not, I simply don't see what institutions value in some activity that draws me, like a moth to a flame.  Institutions see opportunities for growth, for profit (that can be quantified), for results (that are evident to multiple players in an institutional game for survival outside the scholarly game of solving puzzles).  I just see interesting problems, problems to which I simply must contribute something--a process of personal engagement and development whose outcome is fundamentally uncertain and untrustworthy.

For me the process of study is always useful, always valuable, always to be pursued, even though its fruits are repeatedly, predictably, and predominately utter garbage.  The result of my life's process to date is a pile of stinking shit, hardly the reason I keep waking up eager to try again, to break my head once more against some problem that will not leave me alone.  I don't choose what to research, what to think about when I am not trying to keep my kids from killing themselves vel sim.  Problems simply find me, and I cannot let them go until I have read, thought, spoken, and written them out of my system.  I am not in control of my career, academic or otherwise.  I respond to the problems Life sets me, not the other way round.  This is the way it has always been.  Unfortunately, this means that I am always "blowing my career" (as Magee's friends would put it), failing as a good Mormon missionary or a good professional academic.  I ask the wrong questions, and answer them badly (from the institutional perspective, which I am constitutionally incapable of valuing the way leaders want me to).  Caesar has little or no use for Cato (who kills himself in the end), and I am Cato (esse quam videri bonus malebat).

The second passage from Magee that I want to quote is one I might have written. My own experience is almost identical to his (not quite the same, but close), in terms of what happened to me and the way in which I react to it (so far):

Perhaps I should stress that all this [mid-life crisis, blowing my career] was not primarily an intellectual experience, and was in no sense whatever a reading experience. It was not a matter of studying certain writers and being influenced by their ideas. Books and study had nothing to do with the causes of it. It was an existential experience, one long permanent state of mental and emotional crisis, in which I came many times near to breakdown. It consisted of agonizingly direct experiences, felt feelings, thought thoughts. And it was from this state that I came to my reading. Given the overwrought state I was in, some of what I then read impinged on me as if I had been skinned. For instance, there seemed to be a certain body of doctrine that was common to nearly all great religions and their famous sages, moralists, prophets, and so on, which I found self-evidently (and in that sense platitudinously) true and to the point, and which had an overwhelming impact on me, and yet which the world disregarded. Perhaps I might express it as follows (page 257). 

Let me interrupt Magee a moment here to comment on my own experience.  In the wake of blowing my own career (first as a Mormon, lately as an academic), well-meaning people (friends, advisors, mentors, and so forth) have come to me suggesting that I am just reading the wrong people, following the wrong gurus, attending the wrong classes--that my crisis might vanish in a moment if I just found the right book, entered the right class, dis-identified as a post-modernist (which I am not), got religion (the right one this time!), wrote more stuff in a more pedantic style, etc.  This advice is very frustrating to me, because my experience is not something external.  While it is true that certain authors, teachers, and religious folk have made a big impression on me over the years, personally and professionally, the overwhelming source of my personal and professional angst and its expression has always been myself (my very own self, the identity that I construct every moment I breath with conscious awareness, noticing phenomena to which I respond voluntarily and involuntarily).

How to put this into words?  I lived staring into the abyss and watching it stare back long before I encountered Nietzsche verbalizing that experience--a very harrowing experience that will always shape me in powerful ways, even if I hate Nietzsche and decide to refrain from reading, writing, or thinking of him for the rest of my life.  Even if I don't practice Christianity as a "believer" (however anyone defines that, anyone who is not me), that will not change the truth that Christ has a powerful impact on my existence.  I came unto my own, and my own received me not.  I know these words.  I have lived them.  They are written on the fleshy tables of my heart, in blood that will not be erased--my blood.  In the same way, my relationship to Mormonism is intimate and personal, not impersonal, objective, historical.  For I had seen a vision; I knew it, and I knew that God knew it, and I could not deny it.  I don't especially care what Joseph Smith really saw (anywhere, at any time), but I know my own vision--and like him (in the story, which need not be true history in any sense) I cannot deny it.  Similarly, when I encountered Buddhist teachings like all compounded things are impermanent and all emotions are pain, they stuck with me because they honestly, accurately describe my own experience.  I am like the legendary arhats whose response to the Buddha's doctrine of emptiness was to die.  Like them, I do not experience thinking, reading, speaking, and writing as abstract exercises, separate (or even separable) from the business of life and death (the same business, whatever we call it at various moments that taste different to us).  For me religion and research are intimately bound up with life (and its other face, the one we call death).  I cannot live outside my life, mi camino propio hacia la muerte.  I cannot write outside it.  I cannot read outside it.  I cannot speak or think outside it.  I cannot pretend I care about it in ways I do not.  When I do, the result is obscene--and fools no one.  Even if people cannot put words to it, they sense the reality.  He is not one of us.  He does not get it.  He never will.  He is a witch-doctor, a sorceror, a wolf in sheep's clothing.  Stone him!

What do I see, then?  What do I live?  Magee gets it (nails it, makes me hope foolishly that there might be wolf-clan for me out there somewhere, a group that I might not have to despise for having me as a member):

The world is governed by false values. People in all societies seem anxious to do what they think is the done thing, and are terrified of social disapproval. They set their hearts on getting on in the world, being thought highly of by their fellows, being powerful, acquiring money and possessions, knowing "important" people. They admire the influential, the rich, the famous, the well-born, the holders of rank and position. But none of these things have any serious relationship to merit: as often as not they are ill gotten, and nearly always they are partly dependent on chance. None of them will protect a person from serious illness or personal tragedy, let alone from death. And none of them can be taken out of this world. They are not an inherent part of the person himself but are merely external decorations, hung on him. They are the tinsel of life, glittering but worthless. The things that really matter in human beings are things that can matter more than life itself: loving and being loved, devotion to truth, integrity, courage, compassion, and other qualities along entirely different lines. But human beings are all the time sacrificing these true values to the false ones: they compromise themselves to get on, bend the truth to make money, demean themselves before power. In behaving like this they are pouring rubbish over their own heads. If they stopped abasing themselves in this way and started living in accordance with true values their lives would become incomparably more meaningful, more genuinely satisfying. They would even, to put it at its most superficial, be happier (pages 257-258).       

Insofar as I have a gospel to preach, this insight is definitely a very important part of it.  I see it as good news, an evangelion worthy of worship, but my worship is not that of society:

In the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, in the Old and New Testaments, and almost everywhere I looked in the works of prophets and mystics, wise men and teachers--of any century and any society--some such message as this was to be found. Perceptive people seem to have been saying it since writing and teaching began. Even creative artists: the great ones seldom preach, and are diminished when they do, but, unspoken between the lines of what many of them write, these values are to be discerned. In the world's greatest opera and drama the conflict between private and public values is the most common theme of all, with the artist invariably enlisting the audience's sympathies on behalf of the private. And while the members of the audience are in the theatre, or reading the book, they respond almost universally this way. But the moment they come out of the theatre, or close the book, they revert. It is true that in temples, mosques, synagogues and churches they offer lip-service to true values, and feel better for having done so; and those values may even sometimes be taught in schools; but again, no sooner do people leave such places of instruction than they behave in their old ways. Worse than that; if any of them does not so--if one of them sacrifices his interests to someone else's, tells the truth to his own disadvantage, declines to be sycophantic to people with a lot of power or money--the others remonstrate with him and tell him not to be a fool. If he persists, they lose respect for him: they come to look on him as stupid, someone who does not know how to manage his own affairs, someone making a botch of his life. The truth is, then, that the values people publicly acknowledge and pay lip-service to are in reality values that they not only repudiate but actively despise. It took me a long time to realize this, but when I did I came to understand in a new light the evident frustration and even despair of so many prophets and teachers, their isolation, and their characteristic tone of railing at people who they know are not going to take much notice of what they say (page 258).

This is quite simply the truth!  Whenever I hear the spokesman for some large group saying things I like (e.g. we should express love for our fellowman), I remember the words of God (as they occur in Jewish, Christian, and Mormon scripture--search and ye shall find): They draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.  And they really hate it when you point this hypocrisy out in public, even if you go out of your way to be nice about it.  (Some folks actually believe their own bullshit.  That doesn't make it less shitty, but it does make them decent folk, and I would not wish to dishonor that decency while noticing where it cloaks dangerous hypocrisy.)  What should you do if Life makes you an obnoxious prophet?  Run away?  (That did not work for Jonah, did it?  I get that story much better today than I did as a kid in Sunday school.)  Lean in?  (Or as my non-feminist friends would put it, Eat shit?)  That can be devastating, too.  At this point, I find myself stuck between the urge to run (away from society, away from people, away from all the lies) and the urge to fight (against society, against people, against all the lies, especially those that demand uncritical obeisance--as though they were simply true).  I cannot break my integrity, and every company I work for is determined that for them I will.

Like many people before me, I find myself wandering about in the proverbial desert, lost and hoarse (vox clamantis in deserto), wondering as I wander whether that desert might blossom as the rose (and then wilt of old age rather than succumb to hordes of hungry locusts).  I don't know whether my garden can exist or not, whether my life will yield anything to others besides shit in the desert, but my integrity forces me to cultivate it anyway.  I till.  I plant.  I water.  I avoid the company of those who do not know my desert, those fair-weather gardeners who think I live in Eden and despise my meager harvests accordingly.  And I wait.  I wait to see what lot Zeus casts, where he weighs me in the scales of fate, whether I will live to till, and plant, and water again, another crop of bitter herbs infused with the harsh, poisonous flavor of my wilderness.

Odi et amo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chasing Dreams

I have been reflecting lately on the spiritual journey I embody. I use the word spiritual deliberately to point to what I see as a junction between my past (as a religious fundamentalist in the Mormon cultural tradition) and my present (as a lay Buddhist very interested in Christianity of all kinds, including Mormonism).

My personal quest has essentially been a search for happiness that is not poisonous, to me or those around me.  I have always wanted to find joy and to share it.  When I was happy as a Mormon, it was because of the joy I found and shared (with my family, my friends, my mission companions, my comrades at BYU, my fellow Saints in graduate school).  When I am happy now, the underlying cause is the same: I find joy and the means to share it.

Looking back into my past, I see a tendency to reify joy improperly.  I see a tendency to mistake it for something too particular, too singular, too unique to one individual set of circumstances (something that Buddhists would refer to as karma; Christians might call it grace).  I choose the word spiritual to describe my journey because I want to dissociate myself from the idea that joy can be equated with a single set of circumstances, that it can be found predictably where particular circumstances appear to repeat.  Maybe the following example will help people follow my meaning.

I really enjoyed studying at BYU.  My time there was one of the best times in my life.  I learned many great things, made lifelong friends, and laid a foundation for my future. Buddhists would say that I acquired a lot of karma there.  Christians might express that as growing from grace to grace, and remind me that "unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required."  I found joy repeatedly, and shared that joy with many others, whose companionship I still cherish today, even where circumstances have separated us since (in more ways than the purely spatial: our minds have drifted apart, too, in many cases).  Over the course of my experience with BYU, the future that presented itself over and over to me was one in which I returned to my alma mater.  The narrative for this future directed me to go out into the world, find whatever joy I might find, and then bring it back to share with the BYU community (where I had a place, a place I worked to build).  Unfortunately for the coherence of this narrative, I encountered a dissonant joy.  At some point in my experience (at BYU and away from it), I became aware that my personal integrity as a Mormon and a scholar was threatening to the personal integrity of various other Mormons (some scholars, some not), with the result that I could never be useful to BYU the way I wanted to be.  My place there ceased to exist.

Given my karma with BYU, it is still possible for me to create the causes and conditions that would allow me to find very good work there.  I could happily do a job I am qualified to do well, among people I respect and enjoy.  But the price for that would be abandoning my dissonant joy (which my enemies would call sin, though I do not name it this way).  I do not want to give up (or pretend to give up, since I cannot really unmake them) insights that seem to me critical to my well-being, to my making a meaningful contribution (that heals people more than it hurts them), i.e. to joy.  I am thus faced with a difficult decision.  I must decide how to deal with the load of karma I carry from BYU (and my Mormon past more generally).  I must put the broken narrative of my impossible future as another Hugh Nibley to rest, and make some other story to give meaning to my life.  I need a story, because that is what human beings do.  We cannot find joy without some kind of story, some illusion of coherence that lets us aspire to goals we worship as worthy.  Life broke my Mormon story, but I can still write another one.  It may not be as good (in my eyes or the eyes of outside readers), but it will always be better than any futile effort I might make to deny what really happened to me as a Mormon.

As a result of my journey through Mormonism (at BYU and elsewhere), I cannot believe that the Great Apostasy is a simple event or series of events in human history, like the Battle of Lepanto or the Hundred Years' War.  As a younger man, I went into the historical records convinced that I would find there a simple vindication of Restorationism (the idea that Christ originally created a single church with coherent institutions that was then lost over time, only to be restored at a later date by reformers).  I did not.  Not only that, I discovered somewhere along the way that my lived experience did not vindicate important tenets of my Christian faith.  I learned that the power of sin in my life did not diminish as I confessed to bishops, that temple worship did not enrich my spiritual practice, that reading the scriptures could lead to all kinds of bad things if one did it carelessly (as many Mormons do, especially in seminary manuals, conference talks, and other official church publications).  I cannot unmake these experiences of mine.  I really had them.  I really noticed them.  They made an impression on me.  I was offended, my enemies would say, and they are right.  But that does not mean that I must be angry, or live my life as a constant bitter war against them.  That would be no kind of joy that I want.

What I must do--my task since I was offended--is to find a place to heal my wounds.  I must move on to something else, some other community or communities with mythology for story-telling that will not be mortally offended by my experiences.  Of course healing will not erase them--the experiences, the wounds, the offense--but it can help me bear them well, turning the pain into joy.  My wounds have alienated me from Mormonism--the Mormonism inside me as well as the Mormonism of my friends at BYU--but they have also brought me closer to other things in my experience.  Today I can derive joy from sitting in a Catholic cathedral meditating on a bloody crucifix, or chanting Tibetan prayers that remind me how the fundamental essence of reality is a pregnant emptiness (not nothing, but the infinite sea of possibility from which all things arise).  I have much less certainty today about my future.  I don't tell stories in which I meet my dream job and live happily ever after, working my way into the eternities.  I know now that these stories need not be true.  More importantly, I see that they are already untrue for me.  I see my wounds, the unexpected end of my Mormon story, and I realize, viscerally, that death is out there.

Everything that I have, everything that I am, everything that I ever could be, is a compound of some kind, an amalgamation of matter or possibilities or desires.  The nature of compounds is to come together, and to fall apart.  There is no such thing as coming together without falling apart.  Life is built from death.  This story is true no matter where I look.  My clothes are made from the death of other beings (displaced so that factories might exist and produce textiles I can afford).  My house too, not to mention my food.  My individual cells are constantly dying to make way for new versions of themselves.  Eventually, I will die to make way for my children (and other living species that need space in this world we inhabit, a world that does not exist simply to serve us humans--as individuals or communities).  I see death at the heart of life now, as before my wound I didn't, and that has become a powerful insight.  Seeing death changes the way I live, not because I choose to be sinful now, but because I see limitations.  I see how my joy is limited: it is not your joy, and there might be good reasons for you to avoid it; maybe it would make you miserable.  I respect your right to find joy that is not mine, to deal with suffering and wounds as I would not, to be wounded in ways that I find obnoxious or disturbing.  That is my compassion now, a very different compassion from the one that charges out into the world determined to make everything better for all people by making us all the same.  What a disaster that would be.  We would have to maim or kill (at least metaphorically) everyone who didn't meet the standard of some committee somewhere.  We would crush their joy and tell them to take ours instead.  That is nothing I want to be part of (in any religion, society, or culture: particulars don't matter).  The compounded nature of my reality means that my joy is always eventually pain, even as my life always turns to death.  I cannot deny this unity or defeat it, breaking life and joy away from suffering and death.  I cannot tell stories in which life and death are separate.  What I can do, what I must do, is learn to find joy in the processes whereby life and death transmute, writing themselves into the matter or possibility or desire that I embody right now. 

If that means that I lose dreams (the dream of being a good Mormon, the dream of working at BYU, the dream of being a successful academic, the dream of writing books, the dream of having time to think and think and write, the dream of having time free to spend with family and friends instead of working hard nine-to-five, etc.), then I must let go of them joyfully rather than grudgingly.  I must give my dreams a good funeral, put them away quietly in their graves, and then let them rot without resenting them for failing to be more than just dreams (mortal, fallible, weak, and so on).  I must see how I am too attached to dead dreams so that I can release that attachment, offering it on the altar and freeing my mind to create new dreams.  I cannot say that the new dreams will be better than the old.  They may not be.  But chasing live dreams will always be better than dwelling on their predecessors that have already died, and resenting these for being dead without finding proper fulfilment (whatever that might be).  

Reflections on Sex (and Pornography)

Some friends were discussing Mormon approaches to sex and pornography recently, and this inspired me to write another retrospective reflection on my own experience.

It makes absolutely no sense, in my experience dealing with myself, to validate a worldview in which seeing erotic images (anywhere, everywhere) is sinful (let alone a sin on par with serious offenses like lying to one's spouse, coercing people into sex they don't want, etc.). All this approach does is make me angry--with myself, for being incorrigibly weak, and with others, for being incorrigibly sexy. Neither option is good. I realized early on that I was not cut out for the second kind of anger (directed outward against things that "trigger" sexual thoughts, in my case women): it leads ultimately to slut-shaming, victim-blaming, and a kind of active misogyny (for straight men like myself) that I find utterly disgusting. The first anger, meanwhile, leads to self-loathing, inability to form romantic attachments (owing to the fact that intimacy is evil), and eventually some kind of suicide (the literal thing, or a metaphorical murder of one's masculinity--e.g. by castration). I spent most of my adolescence struggling to contain this self-directed anger (without cutting off my balls or killing myself, since I had reason to believe neither option would be very pleasing to God, whom I was determined to please). It was very hard. It wore on me. While my friends went out with girls, I stayed home and read scriptures. My LDS bishops weren't pervs, looking for excuses to quiz me in-depth about my sex life, but that was no help in my case, since I went to them voluntarily to confess every "impure" episode that seemed "serious" (by which I mean that it made me anxious, angry, in doubt of my ability to serve the Lord worthily as a priesthood holder).

I almost didn't go on a mission because I wasn't sure I could be "worthy"--and I remember really hating myself at that time. My thoughts ran something like this: "I really want to serve this mission. I want to do something with my life. I want to speak up for things important to me. I want to share love and wealth with the world, not sit in some dark corner crying because I have a stupid penis that won't stop working. I am going to live in spite of that terrible thing, that worthless piece of trash that always manages to ruin everything simply by existing. Why did God even create it--or me, for that matter?" When I read the story of Origen taking a knife to his genitals and hacking them off (he was a young fanatic rather like me), I was a little envious: part of me wished I could solve my problems this simply and neatly (since the most anxiety-inducing experiences for me were wet dreams and persistent erections, experiences impossible without a penis). But Mormons believe you have to have a family, so I hung on. I never dated. I was too ashamed, too afraid of staining women with my impurity. I look back and cringe at how rude and aloof I was. Some of that is no doubt my own fault--I have always been something of a jackass, a cynic, and a misanthrope--but church certainly didn't help.

When I did finally manage against all hope to find my wife, still having no romantic ability or experience to speak of, I continued "taking things slow" in a manner that most people would find intolerable (with good reason). Until we were married, I never kissed my wife (for kissing was practically sex, i.e. murder). I wondered if I should confess to the bishop every time I found myself thinking about sex again--though I was older and wiser, and it was about this time that I realized the confession ritual was a piece of destructive adolescent folly rather than any kind of help. I ditched it, and told myself I would never do that again, no matter what might happen to me over the course of my life. The first year or two of marriage was very eye-opening for me. I learned so many things about myself--and my sexuality--that completely gave the lie to everything I tried to do as an adolescent. I realized that I couldn't live my whole life hating something that is an inescapable part of me. I realized that the sex I hated didn't have to be hateful--that it didn't have to make me destructively angry or horny. I could learn to control it the same way a toddler learns to use the potty. Yes, I would make mistakes, but these need not be felonies (or come anywhere close). Contrary to everything I taught myself as a teen, I was not a rape-machine, though some people will always see me that way (and I understand: I saw myself that way for years). I realized that sex is like language or sport, that I could approach it as an interesting game instead of a fight to the death (in which there is no such thing as valuable "failure"). I realized that perfect sex does not exist--that sex is about process rather than results, and that the process is more about playing nicely with other people than rendering abject homage to some arbitrary list of rules (mistakenly taken for the final word of God).

As for God, I came to realize that he need not be as hard and unyielding as I took him to be. After years of reading Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount (i.e. "whosoever looketh upon a woman to lust after he hath committed adultery with her already") as an angry accusation ("stop seeing women, you evil bastards!"), I realized finally that they were merely pointing out that we all lust. There is no such thing as a slut in the conventional sense, Jesus says. We are all sluts. We all have limbic systems. We all desire something, and we follow that desire, the way dogs follow interesting scents. Without denying the reality that our lust can prove dangerously poisonous to ourselves and others, I can nevertheless learn to see how this is not inevitable--and even if it were, the best response is not anger (homicidal or suicidal). I learned to accept my lust, as I never could when I was younger, and in acceptance I found that I could turn it to very good use. I could use to make relationships stronger instead of weaker. This required some effort, of course, some mistakes, but as long as I maintained respect for myself and others the pay-off was always greater than any damage (in hurt feelings or unmet expectations). If you can learn to be respectful, to take turns, to be safety-conscious, and to listen thoughtfully and attentively when other people talk, then lust doesn't have to be a big deal. Sex can be murder, but it definitely doesn't have to be. I wish somebody could have told me all this when I was younger. I wish I could have realized the futility of hating myself sooner. But we all have regrets. I am just glad I finally found a way to live without hating myself and others, or causing too much hurt.

Some Mormon Mysteries

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Religion

In response to this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Small Meditation on Modesty

In response to this essay.

Modesty is an internal awareness of the signals (including mating signals) that we all project. We cannot help projecting these signals. We cannot turn them off the way one turns off an electric appliance. But we can become aware of them in a way that will empower us and enrich our human experience (along with that of people around us).

We can condition our response to signals--notice it, temper our reaction to it, and make our participation in signalling more thoughtful, conscious, and compassionate. It is a profound mistake to insist on externalities as being crucially important, when what really matters are internal attitudes: what am I feeling? what do I want or need? why do I feel this way? how are my feelings influencing others? what can I do to make myself and others more likely to respond well to these feelings?  Cultivating an attitude of empathy and compassion for other people is much more important than picking the right wardrobe, language, or bodily posture.

Every day, I actively seek out time to contemplate myself and those around me with compassion.  I look at myself and the world consciously, deliberately, and gratefully--noticing the signals that people send, consciously or not, and trying to see how those signals offer insight into a moral instinct that could be the most beautiful human virtue imaginable (if cultivated properly).  I observe people flirting or snarling at one another, and I try to see underneath the basic impulse to love--to protect something vulnerable, to find and savor happiness without harm.  I see that my misplaced signals, and yours too, are merely bungled attempts at loving, and I forgive both of us.  I laugh at us where we are stupid.  I cry with us where our stupidity causes harm that we didn't want (or that we did).  I imagine how we might do better in future, and I encourage us to keep trying (aiming not for perfect success but for minimally disastrous failure).  This exercise has taught me more about modesty (and other human virtues) than any course in external etiquette (of which I have taken several).  Practice compassion, and modesty (real modesty, not the sham stuff) will follow.  Esse quam videri is a saying that really applies here: you are the only one who can see how modest you really are; your modesty will only improve as you learn to see it through practicing compassion for yourself and other people.  There are no shortcuts (that I have found), no external fixes that effectively substitute for deliberate personal investment in seeking empathy.

Seeking Eden

A friend pointed me to this very interesting article discussing the role that the British played in turning modern Iraq into a terribly dangerous place.  In essence, the article argues that the Brits possessed an idea of their own history that they sought to make into Iraqi reality, at great expense (in terms of life wasted, in pretty much every sense of the word: the idea was so important and compelling that people failed--and continue to fail--to notice how its implementation caused more harm than good).

To me what matters is not so much what people see (a vision of primitive Eden) or even what they do (e.g. become bodybuilders or political propagandists) but how they treat others.

I don't care what crazy nonsense you want to believe in. Believe in anything you like (with or without something I would recognize as good reason). I don't care what you do to yourself as a result of your beliefs. Smoke dope. Do yoga. Build a tent and go into the wilderness, or start a multinational corporation dedicated to spreading the gospel of GMOs. As long as you don't coerce participation in whatever stupid scheme you may have (a scheme that might be "modern" or "ancient" in character, "progressive" or the opposite), I don't mind. I may disagree with you and even work against you (especially if you are into GMOs), but I respect your right to live just as I want you to respect mine.

My problem with the status quo is the recurring trope that demands all of us be on the same page, no matter what. I want the freedom to dissociate, to disavow, to work for Edens that are not yours using means that you despise (even as you despise my own view of Eden, with or without good reason). I don't want to force you into my Eden; to do so would be to invite you to do the same to me, and I would rather rot in hell (thanks, anyway). This means that I necessarily have to make my Eden small and non-threatening: I don't want to "assert myself" on Hegel's stage of history, inviting you to create WMDs and discharge them against the hell you see lurking somewhere in my Eden (just as surely as I see it all over yours: I know you think yours is pretty, that to see it must be to love it, but that just isn't true). I want to step away from "fixing the world permanently" and concentrate instead on doing whatever I can to fix my own little corner of it impermanently.

I cannot dictate to other people, especially not those with whom I must live and rub shoulders every day. Living with others means accommodating (changing my idea of Eden when it proves unexpectedly poisonous to my wife, my kids, my friends, my parents, my siblings, my students, my work colleagues, etc.). Accommodating means paying attention to data that move all the time, changing overnight in ways that are often wholly unpredictable. I cannot become so attached to today's Eden that I fail to allow for tomorrow's. And that is just within my own life--a ridiculously tiny piece of the gigantic throbbing mess that is humanity. Humbled by my own inability to deal perfectly with the impossible vastness of my own small humanity, how could I dare presume to deal with yours? How could I take that charge away from you--unasked, uncalled for, with no respect for the autonomy that Nature gave you (as she gave it to me)? I am not special. I don't know myself (except insofar as I know that the exercise of seeking such knowledge improves my experience). How could I presume to know you? The most I can do for both of us is graciously give you the space you need to meet Nature on your own terms. Make your own Eden. Until you come to blow mine up without noticing, I won't mind (not even if the world ends tomorrow, and it turns out to be all your fault--when God's angels fire up the celestial supercomputer and discover a butterfly effect emanating from something you did or failed to do).

Life is made out of death. I accept that--and live in a constant struggle to be ready to die. Enjoy the journey, and be mindful of others on it. That is really all I have to offer.

Letter to a Jesuit

Below is part of a letter I wrote recently. As an attempt to capture my spiritual path over the last 10 years or so, it seemed worth saving. I have removed anything that might identify the recipient.

I was born into a very devoutly religious family. My parents are both converts to Mormonism (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with headquarters in Salt Lake City), which they found in early adulthood and have adhered to faithfully since before I was born (the eldest of six living children). I grew up Mormon, far away from Utah, in a small and close-knit congregation of Saints (as they like to call themselves, perhaps a bit pretentiously from your point of view). I went through the entire cursus honorum that contemporary Mormonism offers young men—attending weekly meetings faithfully, receiving and carrying out the duties of the priesthood (first Aaronic then eventually Melchizedek), graduating from seminary, receiving my endowment in the temple, serving a two-year proselytizing mission in northern Spain (I spent many months working in Galicia), graduating from Brigham Young University (the LDS church's university in Provo, Utah), and eventually marrying in the Salt Lake temple (which you may have seen: it is rather pretty, especially when compared to more modern Mormon architecture). Experience has taught me to beware of judging the quality of one's faith in terms of external career. In my case, almost everything I did from the age of about twelve came from a motivation informed somehow by my Mormonism—a Mormonism that was very sincere and earnest, perhaps too much so as it happens.

As part of my Mormon formation, I was taught church history and doctrine (I hesitate to call it theology, but the term is not utterly inapt) formally and informally. My formal schooling took place in church, in seminary, in special retreats held for missionaries, at BYU (my alma mater), and in the temple (where Mormons take part in complex rituals that dramatize the creation, fall, and redemption of the world). Informally, I did a lot of reading on my own. I was drawn very early to scripture, and over the course of my youth became very familiar with the King James Bible, in addition to other books the LDS church regards as holy scripture (including the Book of Mormon, which I have read many times). I was naturally interested in the history of the books I read—the context out of which they arose and took their first meaning before being handed down to me. Before I went out as a missionary, I had already begun studying religious history and had even decided that I would need to study biblical languages (Latin, Hebrew, and Greek) in college. As a youth, I did not notice any great imbalance between my personal religion and the religion preached and practiced at church. The more contact I had with the institutional church, however, the more this changed. My two-year mission in Spain was revelatory in this regard: I saw the church doing things that made no sense to me, things that seemed to me to cheapen the gospel in the interest of gaining converts to it (superficial converts, with no great understanding of what it was they were committing themselves to). At BYU, I began studying church history in great detail, on my own and in company with others, and I slowly came to realize that the church history I had been taught throughout my youth was by and large a complete fairytale—a transparent hagiography of the early Mormon movement that transformed men like Joseph Smith and Brigham Young from nineteenth-century mobsters (with good and bad traits) into modern Saints (with no evil qualities worth noticing).

By the time I was married and about halfway through graduate school (far from BYU), I realized that I could not participate actively in LDS Mormonism any more. Under the influence of my ongoing studies into church history (early Christian history as well as Mormon history), I could not see the LDS church's version of Christian history as anything but an increasingly transparent fable (as literal history: as a symbolic narrative, it has some merit). To make things worse, the church demands that the individual conform his private thought and (at the very least) public utterance to its versions of events. It does this by controlling access to temples (etc.) through a process of ecclesiastical confession that involves meeting regularly with local church authorities (the bishop or one of his counselors, and then the stake president or one of his—perhaps a bit like talking to your local parish priest and then the bishop). These gentlemen inquire into your orthodoxy (“Do you believe in the divinity of God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost? Do you believe Joseph Smith to be a Prophet, Seer, and Revelator?” and so on). If you cannot answer questions to their satisfaction, then your status as an active Mormon is revoked until you repent. I cannot answer questions as they would like, and I cannot repent (for when I look into the historical record, I do not see what they want me to see—viz. that I must subject my opinion on doctrinal matters to theirs, whatever it may be, without critical judgement).

When I was no longer able to practice Mormonism actively, I did not cease to have a spiritual vocation. I needed to feel myself part of something larger than myself, but I also needed the freedom to express myself openly and honestly, even when others might possibly construe my expression as a threat to faith (not the way I construe it, but I can certainly appreciate that I am not the only person with a point of view that matters: we all see things, and we all matter; I am certainly as open to taking criticism as I am to dishing it out). Fortunately, my wife was not a dogmatic Mormon: she was one of the few external things that remained constant in my hour of confusion; I am very grateful for her unflagging moral support. Initially, I felt something of a gulf between myself and institutional Christianity. (To be completely candid, I still sense that gulf today, but experience has prepared me to confront it with curious interest rather than defensive hostility.) As a result, my first spiritual home outside Mormonism was a small Buddhist sangha in the Kagyu tradition (Tibetan). I found (and contine to find) Buddhist rhetoric very liberating (it is nice to be told that the self is impermanent when your own has just been brutally shattered), and I continue to enjoy the Kagyu liturgy (which involves meditation and chanting prayers, with or without the aid of tools such as a rosary or icons). But there is something important missing in my Buddhist experience, something that I cannot help but call Christianity.

It is hard to put into words, but let me try. Buddhism satisfies my intellectual hunger entirely, offering an outlook on the world that appears appropriately wise and skeptical (important to me, given my past history of being gulled into what the Buddhists would call “wrong views”). While it is very beautiful, Buddhism does not satisfy my aesthetic hunger: I find the bodhisattva distant and aloof, rather like the gods of Epicurus. Mormonism such as I grew up with was not a religion of passive acceptance. Mobster that he was, Brigham Young was also determined to build heaven on earth, and while I shrink back from some of the evil consequences of his efforts (e.g. the Mountain Meadows Massacre or the suffering of people involved in polygamy against their will), I still admire the aim. I want to make the world a better place, actively—or at least to see the examples of others engaging with sin or crime or other natural hardships in authentic ways that I might possibly emulate. I love retiring from the world, but I need to build something in retirement (“the kingdom of God”)—and I have years of exposure to Christianity that predisposes me to find meaning of some kind in Christian scripture, discourse, and ritual.

While serving as a Mormon missionary in Spain, I attended a public mass in the Cathedral of St. James in Santiago and conceived a desire that I carry to this day of completing a pilgrimage there on foot. If I ever have money and time, I will certainly carry this desire out, whether or not I become Catholic. I feel a great internal need to do it, to see the places where I came bearing Mormonism and give thanks for the many unexpected gifts I received in return. One of those gifts was a chance encounter with the Jesuit Andres Torres Queiruga, who invited me into his apartment to discuss religion and left a very profound impression on me (as being utterly sincere and good, even if his belief in the resurrection is metaphorical rather than literal—as mine now is, too). Regardless of how I feel toward what are sometimes called “religious truth-claims” (i.e. whether God is personal in some particular way or the Bible a literal history composed in the manner of Thucydides), I feel drawn toward Christian tradition, especially older versions of it that have a sense of their history—a memory of the good and the evil done in God's name over time. I don't know what to do with this attraction, whether I should abandon it to continue on as a Buddhist atheist (see below) or pursue it (as I am trying to do in reaching out to you).

My reading of the historical Buddha is very like my reading of the historical Jesus. What draws me to both is not the idea that they are more real or powerful than ordinary human beings, but the aspiration that they have come to represent to so many of my fellow creatures, an aspiration to make life beautiful where it can be ugly. I share that aspiration, no matter what I may happen to think right now about the ultimate order or disorder of the cosmos. “The kingdom of God is within you” is a statement that I continue to find incredibly edifying (and frustrating, as I seek some means of relating my window on that interior kingdom effectively to others—in ways that edify them and me, recognizing and respecting the reality that we need each other, that we are all part of a vast ecosystem of overt and hidden relationships that have the power to become incredibly beautiful even if they are occasionally also ugly).

Many people whose circumstances appear externally very similar to mine—people whose history has brought them into significant conflict with some fundamentalist, literalistic religious tradition (such as modern Mormonism has increasingly sought to be)—become atheists. Some of them find all the socialization, all the service, all the spirituality they need outside established paths. I have examined their ways of life thoughtfully, and I find much to admire in many of them. But at the same time, I cannot believe that “the old ways” are defunct, dying, or useless. To me it seems that history shows humanity existing with certain constant strengths and weaknesses. Occasionally, these express themselves in ways that are incredibly destructive (and we get something like the Holy Inquisition in Catholicism or the Danites in Mormonism), but that does not deny that they can also be very good—and dropping a particular ideology does not insure us against their destructive recurrence (as the last century has proved to me: atheism or secularism carries the same capacity for evil that religion does, more in an age where science exists to supply leaders of any ideological stripe with WMDs). I see that religion is occasionally poisonous (like all medicines), but that does not mean that I can abandon it (any more than I can abandon eating, though its eventual consequence is death). I value tradition, I am trying to say—even when I disagree with it, even when it challenges me, even when my response to its challenge is more negative than positive. A good man needs good enemies, friends who know how to wear their friendship in disagreement and disappointment as well as concord. I did not find that in Mormonism. I wonder whether I might find it somewhere in the universe of Catholicism.

Is there some way a person like me might become Catholic, or at least engage Catholicism in a meaningful way (mutually useful in terms of building the kingdom of God)?  No matter what happens, I will always be grateful for the faith of men like Thomas Merton, whose books have been a real blessing to me over the past few years as I have sought to rebuild myself in the image of God.

Love Is Not My Answer

"He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me" (Matt. 10:37 KJV).

This scripture is an interesting one, about which I have had occasion to think quite a bit over the past few years.  Here are some insights that have come to me, as a result of my personal experience with religion, family, and the community at large. 

The family is a problematic institution, historically. The love that it produces turns easily into hatred. The peace that it cultivates often produces seeds of war. Saints and ascetics have been trying to tame the wild human family for years (castrating it, chaining it, smothering it, attacking it with violent hatred or seducing it with sweet love). It is a myth that religion and the family are peaceful companions on the road to heaven. A nice myth. But reality shows that they are enemies more than friends, and the family doesn't always fight on the right side (any more than religion does: we all fight dirty eventually).

Read in a positive light, I think anti-family Jesus is appealing to people to step outside their tribalism (outside the mafia that is "the family" so often in history), recognizing that the other guy out there has a family just as real and worth preserving as yours. (Hector has a family as real, human, and valuable as the family of Achilles.) I support this kind of reasoning, up to a certain point: there is a limit to the pain I am willing to cause my own family in order to avoid hurting yours.

This limit is part of what holds me back from embracing "pure compassion" as preached in some Buddhist sects, or "the pure love of Christ" as it often appears historically (usually in contexts like the monastery, where the family is something dangerous and suspicious that we would do better to avoid). I don't have an equal love for all beings. I care about the things close to me (that I am conscious of) more. I love my people more than the people I have never met. I don't see this distinction as completely overcomable (and I actually embrace it, within certain limits: I accept that there are and must be limits to the lengths I am willing to go to defend my private love; I see that love is not equal, fair, or nice all the time, and I strive to keep my love as docile as possible).

For me, part of the process of growing up has been sorting out explicitly where I stand vis-a-vis my family, myself, and the community at large. I cannot help loving myself. But I can doubt my self-love as something useful when it causes me to do others obvious, unnecessary harm. I cannot help loving my family. But I can doubt my family-love when it causes me to do others obvious, unnecessary harm. I cannot help loving my community (less than I love myself or my family--that's simply how I roll). But I can doubt my community-love when it causes me to do others (including myself) obvious, unnecessary harm.  I cannot help loving.  But I can stop loving blindly, reflexively, unconditionally.

I have realized that love is not the answer. It is the question, often, but as an answer it is very dangerous (precisely because it has an historical tendency to turn into vicious, violent hatred: the worst crimes in history are those that come from love, with the worst love being the love for community that loses sight of the individual utterly out of an awfully pure desire to save and exalt the collective). 

If I had to respond to anti-family Jesus, who invites me to follow him, giving up my love for family in order to replace it with love for God, this is what I would say.  "In my experience, the best answer for one love is not another one. A better answer than love is indifference, doubt, hesitation, inaction. 'Do unto others as you would that they did unto you,' you say? Better not to do unto them, say I.  Let them be, and keep out of it until you see an obvious need that you can meet--because somebody needs it, not because you love them. Leave love out of it!  She is too wild and dangerous.  Her remedies are worse than the diseases they pretend to cure."

The more experience I accumulate, the more important it seems to me to notice that there is no such thing as life without death, success without failure, love without hatred.  Another way to put this: the nature of life is to die; the nature of success is to fail; the nature of love is to hate.  I think life makes its own morals, and these are inevitably mortal (causing death as well as survival: we live by making other things die, then prolong the life of organisms around us by dying ourselves) and parochial (favoring one party or parties at the expense of others: my love for life necessarily means that I long for the death of other things, and eventually for my own death).  In brief, I don't see any possibility for a world in which love (or life) is an unqualified good, something to be embraced without any reserve.  I cannot love God with all my heart, might, mind, and strength, because such love creates a hatred of the Devil that is too powerful.  My unconditional love of God becomes unconditional hatred for all that is Not God, and the danger threatened by this hatred is greater than the safety offered by love, in my experience. 

I do not renounce love, for that is impossible.  But I do renounce unconditional love, reluctantly but firmly.  Such strong brews are not for man (or this man, at any rate: I do not presume to dictate to others; this much love I can offer them!).