Ronin

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

Since my disaffection, several people have expressed concern to me about "the leaders I choose to follow" since turning my back on Mormon prophets.  This concern is profoundly troubling to me, mostly because I don't believe in following leaders.  I am my own person.  If I do something, then I am the one doing it: I have reasons of my own for doing it, and I am personally answerable for any consequences that result.  I don't do anything merely because someone else told me to.  Even when I act under duress, I am doing the best I can for myself, from my own personal perspective.  For me, that is what being a moral person is.  I cultivate my own spirit, and scrupulously respect the right of other people to do likewise -- even when the spirit that they cultivate is very different from my own.

Just as I don't take unilateral dictation from someone else, I refuse to impose it.  I even give my baby sons choices: there are some things that they cannot do because they are not capable (like use the oven), but among the things that they can do, they have freedom.  I am not going to force them to play cars when they would rather be reading about Calvin and Hobbs.  Respect doesn't mean that they never disagree or talk back to me.  (My wife and I actually like to get them talking, since that often distracts them from acting out in ways that might be dangerous or bothersome.)  Moral education, in my view, is learning to behave oneself without external control: the perfect man is the one who makes and is answerable for his own decisions.  He doesn't hurt other people and then tell them they get no apology because he was simply "doing God's will." 

To my mind, it is acceptable to invoke the will of God as your reason for personal decisions, but it is no excuse for imposing yourself on other people.  I can choose to wear a burkha because I feel that is the will of God for me, but I have no right to make you wear one because of my feeling (which you may not even share!).  People who go around complaining that society is going to hell in a handbasket because we don't all wear burkhas with them (or shop at Whole Foods or vote Republican or Democrat or whatever) get on my nerves.  If you believe in burkhas (or Whole Foods, or the GOP, or the Democratic Party, or Scientology, or Mormonism, or atheism, or socialism, or anything similar), then by all means live your beliefs.  As long as you respect my right to live my beliefs (which are different!), then we are cool.  We can even be friends.  But I have a hard time being friends with people who think that friendship means one of us forcing the other to change his habits for no other reason than "God told me so" (so you think God never talks to me, is that it? you get to speak with God for everyone, and I cannot even get him to talk to me for myself? forget it, kid: I'm a grown man, and I don't need you to change my diapers).

There is a great passage in Blevins' account of Crazy Horse that captures the contrast between moral autonomy (freedom) and moral dependence (slavery).  Crazy Horse's uncle Spotted Tail is describing how the whites (wasicu) see the world (pp. 124-125, 126-127):

"The worst is, they have a terrible blindness, these wasicu.  They do not understand choice."

He was referring to a most sacred subject, and none of his hearers needed any explanation -- no Lakota who had even started on the path to adulthood did.  A human being had skan, something-that-moves, spiritual vitality.  The force of life itself [God?] gave the person skan [agency?] when he or she was born.  It also gave him choice, and through choice he or she grew into the man or woman he or she became.  Skan was the motive power, choice of direction.

A Lakota had a choice between good and evil, the red road and the black road, between what made life beautiful and what made it ugly.  He or she had help in making choices -- the quiet voice that is in everyone, the spirit helper (usually in the form of an animal), what he or she saw when crying for a vision, personal medicine, prayer, ceremonies performed alone or with others.  Still, choice remained, inviolate.

Whether your way was to paint yourself in a certain manner, to wear something of iron or never touch iron, or whether you should charge the enemy first or simply swell the ranks, that was your nature, your vision, the route of your spirit on the earth.  Other Lakota would respect it.  None would try to coerce it or even influence it.  None would mock it.  Your understanding was the essence of you, and to follow it was your sacred choice.

All this was so fundamental as to not need saying.  So what could it mean that an entire people did not understand choice?  It was almost unthinkable.  Were they human beings?

"Among the whites some think they can see and choose for others."  It was so stunning that Spotted Tail just let the words hang in the lodge, heavy and oppressive.  "Then comes what you would expect.  They quarrel with one another not only about small things, but about the biggest.  They fight and kill each other.  Instead of respecting another man's way, they stop at nothing to get him to adopt their way.  Like the Mormons [!]."

The Lakota knew the U.S. government this very summer was sending an army against the Mormons at the big salty lake to make the Mormons live like other wasicu, especially not to take more than one wife.  Incomprehensible.

"They hate our way," said Spotted Tail.  His voice was weary now and faint.  "Their deepest desire -- believe me about this -- is to change our way of living.  Their deepest desire is to make us like them.  I swear it" ...

A-i-i-i, surely they were impossible to understand.  You might fight your enemy -- that had respect in it.  You might even kill him -- respect again.  But to do what the wasicu did: afflict your enemy with disease, pen him up, starve him, and then rescue his body on the condition that he surrender his spirit ... Incomprehensible.  Not the way of men.

But he [Crazy Horse's father] believed Spotted Tail.  Everything about his brother-in-law sang conviction.

What a peculiar people, the wasicu.  They had a certain genius.  They could make things -- wagons, wheels, guns, knives, watches, far-seeing glasses, and much more.  But these were only things.  In return for them ["Let's go shopping!"] the wasicu wanted you to relinquish your own genius, which was not of things but of the spirit.

From the beginning, said the oldest men, what the wasicu wanted was your spirit.  From the beginning, their real desire was for the blackrobes [mantles of authority!] to gouge spirit out of you, like a man scraping seeds out of a gourd.  Then they would fill the empty gourd with their religion.  [Religious freedom means you shut up and wear my burkha!] 

There is such irony in this passage when you consider that so many Mormons today are eager to impose on others the same way other Americans imposed on us back in the day.  Even in the nineteenth century, Mormonism puts a high rhetorical value on agency, the ability of individual people to make choices without coercion.  The only problem is that we also put a high rhetorical value on following the prophet: historically, following the prophet is more important to Mormons than being true to oneself.  For me, this is pure bullcrap.  There is no moral problem I can think of that would not become easier to solve if people took more responsibility for themselves and gave less to leaders.  Grow up and go your own way.  Leaders are for babies.  Grown-ups have friends, associates, people they respect (and even look up to), but they don't have leaders.  Thomas S. Monson is not my leader.  Barack Obama is not my leader.  Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche is not my leader.  Christopher Hitchens is not my leader.  This does not mean that I hate these gentlemen (or all the good that they may stand for: quite the contrary!), but I am long past offering them the total devotion of a helpless little boy desperate for a superhero.  For years, I did my very best to believe in superheroes.  It didn't work very well for me, and I am very grateful to have outgrown it (finally!).

I do not adopt a fixed posture toward life anymore.  I don't have final answers.  I don't speak for other people (until they say I do, and even then I do not answer for their behavior: they are responsible for themselves).  And on the other side of the coin, no one else speaks for me (until I claim their words for myself: even then, I am still answerable for my behavior, for my reception and interpretation of the words that someone else has uttered).  I am not standing firm with this band or that one -- with this religion or that one, with this university or that one, with this company or that one, with this philosophy or that one.  I don't believe in leaders.  I am a ronin -- a wolf who goes his own way.  I am all done playing the sheep, no matter who the shepherd is.  God himself cannot separate me from mine integrity (unless he kills me, which is what it would take -- for me as for Crazy Horse: even so, I will die true to myself and to the truth I believe in).

The Dark Side of Religious Fervor

A friend brought these clips to my attention.  While I don't endorse Christopher Hitchens without qualification (since I have my own opinions), here he summarizes an insight that was crucial to me as I came to doubt my old, naive faith in religion (leaving God out of it for the moment).  Religion doesn't make people better.  I am not certain (as Hitchens is) that it makes them worse, but it certainly can countenance bad things, including some things so bad that they take my breath away.

In at least some cases, religion seems to exacerbate human situations that are already suboptimal, taking something bad and making it truly rotten.  My faith crisis involved seeing this on a small scale in my own life (as I recognized toxic ideas I was clinging to because I had religious faith in them), and on a large scale in the world (where I awoke slowly in the wake of 9/11 to the fact that religion kills as much as it creates, that it is at least as cruel as it is kind, that I was ignoring the vast potential for ruthless destruction that lurked under my innocent willingness to do without question whatever a particular group of older men might tell me to do).  This was something horrible to contemplate, but I am honestly more scared of the results had I not dared to look into the abyss and ask myself, "Do I really want to pledge my soul to somebody else? Can I live with faith in an institution that demands unqualified, uncritical obedience?"

My New Church?

Judging from this podcast, my ideal church might be a gym.  I would really like to participate actively in MovNat, at some point in the future.  (And I already wanted to walk the Camino de Santiago in minimal footwear: Julien Smith beat me to it, of course!)

The Problem with Gurus

Geoffrey D. Falk. Stripping the Gurus: Sex, Violence, Abuse and Enlightenment. Million Monkeys, 2009. ISBN: 0973620315.

This book is available online, for free, and it is actually quite informative and entertaining.  It presents a number of anecdotes illustrating what typically goes wrong when one person surrenders his moral authority abjectly to another (a demonstration often referred to "faith" or "obedience" in my experience).

Reading Falk releases a cascade of conflicting emotions in me.  On the one hand, I want to believe in the guru-disciple relationship: for many years I assumed it as a given, taking the word of my parents, my religious leaders, and my martial arts instructor as law (and worshipping them as its administrators).  In the case of my parents and my martial arts instructor, this blind, absolute faith proved harmless; in time, I grew to the point where I no longer needed the crutch of someone telling me exactly what to do in crucial situations (e.g. in the bathroom, in the car, in the sparring ring), and they stepped back to let me "do my own thing" without any fuss or recrimination.  Their goal was to make me a fully fledged individual (like them, but not eternally under their thumb: in fact, if I had continued requiring constant supervision to perform "like a big boy," they would have regarded their teaching time as wasted).  I was safe trusting these people absolutely because they trusted me back and did not take undue advantage of my youthful gullibility (in taking them for gods when, as they would tell you, they are just human beings like everybody else).

On the other hand, my religious experiences with the guru-disciple relationship have not turned out well.  This goes back at least as far as puberty, when I joined the Aaronic priesthood and became personally answerable to my local LDS bishop.  My bishop was a family man--kind, interested, and good--and he did his best to help me grow up righteous.  Unfortunately, this meant interrogating me regularly about my sexual proclivities, which I was very uncertain about (having scarcely any practical experience with them).  I was gradually becoming aware (1) that sex existed, (2) that it was part of my life (whether I wanted it or not), and (3) that if I had anything to do with it before marriage, I was hell-bound (not because I would actually go to Outer Darkness, though that was ultimately a possibility: meantime, I would be unable to fulfill my public duties as an Aaronic priesthood holder; everyone would notice my failure to perform and conclude that I was a miserable sinner).  The latter point (3) was especially distressing, since I was always in doubt as to what inroads precisely sex was allowed to make on me before marriage.  Could I have a wet dream?  What if I rolled over at night and something happened?  What if I woke up in the middle of something happening?  What if I woke up touching myself?  What if ... ? I had just experienced a very emotional conversion to the "truth" of my religion (the Mormon equivalent to "getting saved" as a born-again Christian), and religious observance was very important to me.  I wanted to be a good Aaronic priesthood holder.  I did not want to fail in my public duties, and I was not willing to lie just to go through the motions: for me (as a very sincerely religious person), that would the ultimate sacrilege.  I took the church's nebulous prohibition on premarital sex (of any kind) very seriously, and thus I found myself confessing repeatedly to my bishop, the "judge in Israel" with authority to handle such matters before God and the faith community.

I was told that confessing to the bishop, repenting (which might involve formal discipline, like having my ability to participate in public ceremonies revoked), and being forgiven would make me feel better, would improve my moral standing (as an individual and a member of the LDS community), would make me a better person.  Unfortunately, all I got was several years of agony, wherein I would go running to the bishop every time I had a wet dream or any other unusual sexual experience whose "appropriateness" struck me as being in question.  While this occasionally did result in momentary happiness (when the bishop happened to say something like, "Oh, don't worry about that"), relief was never lasting: sex was still out there to destroy me.  And there were times when I came close to being disciplined; I felt scared and powerless (since I could not make the sex go away), as well as humiliated (since I was constantly letting my community down and having to confess my awful sinfulness to the good bishop, who just wished I could be a good little boy like everyone else: I was really, really naive).  I desperately wanted to control my sexuality "appropriately" -- so I dutifully did everything my bishop told me (pray, study the scriptures, don't think about girls) and even tried to read Spencer W. Kimball's Miracle of Forgiveness on my own (not an exercise I recommend to anyone trying to cope with intense shame, guilt, or fear).  None of this helped, at all (except insofar as the scriptures occasionally distracted me with a story that was not my own, though I still felt personally condemned every time any sexual misdeed was denounced).  It was like pouring endless rounds of saltwater on an open wound that never healed.  Instead of learning to control myself and be responsibly comfortable with sexuality, I learned to react with abject shame and fear every time anything reminded me of sex.  I learned to mistrust (and even hate) myself: what abiding worth could I possibly have if I was unable to avoid continually tumbling in the direction of sexual sin, the sin closest to murder (a closeness that was drawn to my attention repeatedly in church meetings especially for youth)?

I have many happy memories from my youth.  I also have many unhappy memories, times when I wished I could end it all by castrating myself physically (as I read that some of the early church fathers did) or committing suicide (when I figured I was already headed to Outer Darkness as an all-but murderer).  My parents shared a few of these sad moments, and they did their best to make me see that I was crazy.  My church leaders shared a few of these sad moments, and they did their best to make sure that I continued to suffer indefinitely (not because they meant to hurt me, but because they genuinely thought that all of this anguish was somehow good for me, that my sinfulness would be washed away in the pangs of "godly sorrow").  I went to my parents, and they said, "Don't be ridiculous."  I went to my religious leaders (including that bishop, whom I honestly never want to see again, not because he is a bad person but because I have so many bad memories of sitting in his office, telling him things he did not need to know), and they said, "Confess. Repent.  Go and sin no more."  Tragically, I listened to my leaders over my parents.

Somehow I managed to get off on a mission in spite of my recurrent lapses into sexuality.  (If I remember correctly, my dad got really exasperated with my doubts about worthiness and said something about real people having to live normal lives in spite of wet dreams: the work of the world still needs doing, even if you might have accidentally masturbated, moron!  Good for him.)  There, I managed to avoid having too much to do with sexuality: it was still around, but the increase in other stressors put a sudden (and surprising, to me anyway) damper on its power over me.  I was still intensely religious.  I still believed in my leaders absolutely.  Though I had long since started distancing myself from my parents and my martial arts instructor, I was still tied to my church leaders' apron-strings.  When local leaders, mission presidents, and visiting General Authorities told me to spend 60 hours proselytizing every week, I did.  When they promised baptismal success if we were righteous, I believed them.  When nothing happened in spite of our best efforts (i.e. our numbers remained very unimpressive), I should have concluded that I was still a miserable sinner ruining God's plan with my incorrigible wickedness, but I did not.  Instead, I started thinking, and something inside me snapped.  I was tired of feeling ashamed, guilty, scared, and powerless around my religious leaders.  I was tired of having my best efforts never be enough for them.  I was tired of being the miserable failure who couldn't do anything really good for God because he might have accidentally masturbated.  I was tired of "authorities" giving me plans that did not pan out and then blaming me for the failure.  Slowly, I stopped listening fearfully to the authorities.  I started looking at life for myself and asking myself honestly what I thought about it.  The apron-strings began to come off.  It would take years for them to be removed entirely.

I still remember the last time I confessed anything to an LDS bishop.  I was a graduate student in my mid-twenties, getting ready to be married in the Salt Lake temple.  Thinking innocently about marriage and everything it involved, I found myself one day in the art library of my institution.  I pulled a random book off the shelf, opened it up, and confronted a painting of a pregnant nude (by Lucian Freud).  It was like a dash of cold water to the face: I did not know what to think, and the old panic welled up.  Would I be unworthy now to be married?  Would I have to spend the next several years explaining to everyone over and over again why I could never have a normal life?  (Ha!)  I went in to see my bishop--another kind, interested family man--and told him about the painting (but not the rest of my life).  He smiled, said that it was normal for me to be thinking about marriage at this point of my life, that there was nothing wrong with enjoying beautiful art, and that was that.  As I left his office in a painfully familiar rush of adrenaline, I thought to myself, "I am never going to play this game again.  I am not going to burden this man or any man with my private neuroses, no matter what calling God has given him.  I will not take a friendly mentor and turn him into an almighty guru."  The apron-strings went really slack that day.

Today, I think there is an important difference to be made between mentors and gurus.  The mentor knows that he has limitations.  He does not speak the absolute will of an all-knowing God.  He just tells you where he is been so that you can take his wisdom as a road map (if you want to).  If you are really young or naive, he might have to control you a bit (especially at first, as anyone with toddlers knows), but his goal is always to set you out eventually on your own.  He never demands respect for ideas that don't work.  The guru, on the other hand, believes that he has transcended whatever limitations he may have.  He does speak the will of God.  When he speaks, you listen or go to hell.  He will always want to control you.  If you give him your fear, your guilt, your shame, then you have put yourself entirely in his power, and he will ride you into the ground.  Even if he wants to do you good, his "guru-ness" (the mantle of authority that Boyd K. Packer likes to talk about) will not let him: that is what they mean when they say that power corrupts, not that it turns people's heads (though it can do that too), but that it inevitably leads to people getting unnecessarily hurt.  Every time hierarchical power is exerted, people get hurt.  (This actually makes good biological sense: I refer you to Robert Sapolsky's work on stress in baboons.)  The mentor knows this and tries to help prepare his protege for inevitable blowback.  The guru ignores this, whether ignorantly or maliciously, and leaves his disciple naively, nakedly vulnerable.  By refusing to take full and permanent responsibility for another person's morality, the mentor (no matter how he might express himself verbally) is demonstrating love.  By claiming absolute devotion, the guru (no matter how he might express himself verbally) is demonstrating contempt.  I am done learning from people who despise me, people whose teaching always boils down to "F*** you!" (though they are not always aware of it).  I let them do me (only metaphorically, thank goodness) for years, and I cannot recommend it.  It is bad.