Why Mormons are Christians, Part 2

This podcast validates my own position that Mormons are Christians.  Historically speaking, Abrahamic religion lives in a milieu defined by pseudepigrapha ("false writings" whose historical authors assign their work to some mythical hero, e.g. Moses or Paul or some other legendary Christian apostle or associate of the prophet Muhammad).  Like other religious leaders before him (e.g. the Deuteronomists, the Christian writers who gave us the Gospels or some of the dubious Epistles, and Muslim authors of hadith), Joseph Smith (and/or his collaborators) made up stories, sacred stories that he credited to mythical heroes (Moses, Abraham, Mormon, Moroni, Nephi).  

Mormonism is just one outgrowth of the giant body of folklore that is Abrahamic religion (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, with all their different sects).  Folklore can be profound.  Folklore can be moving.  Folklore can teach you useful things.  But it is not history.  It cannot teach the lessons of history.  Its lessons are about human nature, not what really happened at some point in historical time, since most of it never did (certainly not as advertised): no historical Exodus, no Resurrection, no appearance of the Angel Gabriel to Muhammad, no First Vision for Joseph Smith.  These events are myths that explore human nature outside of history--myths like the Lord of the Rings, the Kalevala, the Nibelungenlied, the Volsungasaga, the Homeric epics, the Mahabarata, and the Ramayana.

There is definitely a useful place for myth in the world.  I can learn from Tolkien's work without believing in a historical place known as Middle Earth.  The character of Bilbo Baggins offers insight into modern human nature, not the nature of a nonexistent tribe of midgets living in a culture that has disappeared from the face of the earth (leaving no physical trace, just like the Lamanites and the Nephites!).  All these years I thought I was trying to be a "faithful" historian, I was really just doing my utmost to turn ancient science fiction into factual history.  I attended seminars in ancient history that were functionally equivalent to courses in "hobbitology" (complete with the latest research tracing the real history of Homo floresiensis: the Liang Bua cave is all that remains of the Shire)!  It would be funnier if people didn't take it all so seriously.

Bob Price is my kind of Southern Baptist, and I am his kind of Mormon.

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?"

Katabasis

Robert Bly.  Iron John: A Book about Men.  Originally published by Addison-Wesley, 1990.  ISBN: 0306813769.

Julien Smith.  The Flinch.  Domino Project, 2011.  ASIN: B0062Q7S3S.

For many years, I lived with a gnawing fear in the pit of my stomach.  In a very visceral way, I just knew that there were bad things abroad in the world.  I knew that these bad things were coming for me, and that I was no match for them: they were harder, stronger, bigger, and more complex than anything I was prepared to deal with.  I lived in fear of them, all the time.  The older I got, the worse the fear became.  I feared that I would get sick, that I would not be able to go to school, that I would flunk out, that I would would never get a job, that people would see me for the pathetic weakling I thought I was and reject me without a second thought.  As an adolescent, I attempted to deal with this fear in a number of ways: I retreated to books, to chores, to physical activities, and (above all) to religious exercises like prayer and confession.

My youthful attempts to escape the fear were not uniformly successful.  While I could put my mind out of fear temporarily with coping strategies (the books, the chores, the physical activities, and some religious activities), I could never really banish it.  My most excruciating experiences with it were religious: no matter how hard I prayed, I could not be permanently certain that I was worthy of God's love.  It seemed to me that no matter what I did or could do, God was always one thought away from condemning me to hell.  In retrospect, I can see that this was largely a question of puberty: I reached it, had some sexual feelings, and was convinced that the devil had taken permanent hold of me (since in spite of all I did--praying every day, studying scripture, serving in church callings, confessing to the bishop repeatedly--I could not make the sex go away).  But there were deeper insecurities here than just teenage sexuality, and my spirit was in some measure already broken before the correlated LDS gospel stomped on it for good measure.

Looking back, I think the thing that bothered young me most about life in general and sex in particular was my lack of control.  I believed that there should be a way of living that gave me control over myself.  I wanted to take action to make myself strong--physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually healthy.  I wanted to do something that would help me face the fear.  In hard work, I found the closest thing to a panacea: I could toughen my body and my mind with intelligent and diligent practice, spending time in the yard, in the gym, and in the library with thick books.  But my spiritual practice seemed to leave me worse than I was before undertaking it.  I came away from hard work exhausted but relaxed (and unafraid), while spiritual work left me more worried (and afraid).  Even when I had a good spiritual experience, I knew it was only a matter of time before something shattered my fragile feeling of spiritual calm.  Every time I went with the youth to the LDS temple, I asked myself Do I really belong here? Am I really worthy to be in the presence of the Lord? and I was always afraid that the answer would be No.  When I did feel that negative answer, I wanted to kill myself.  The shame was almost unbearable, and talking about it with God and church leaders made it worse.  Family members could sometimes talk me down, but it was brutal.  I would fantasize about suicide or castration.  I feared to share this with anyone.  I just wanted to curl up and die, ridding an otherwise beautiful world of the blot that was my miserable, wicked existence.

Robert Bly and Julien Smith write about what ultimately saved me from this psychic death trap.  As part of his work on masculine psychic development, Bly talks about katabasis, Greek for descent, as something all of us have to undergo on the road from cradle to grave (Iron John, p. 70):

Our story simply says that after wandering around a while, having no "craft," the young man at last got a job in the kitchen--which is traditionally in the basement--of a castle.  The story [of Iron John] says that after all the gold fingertips and hair [the rich life experienced by the young protagonist before], what is proper next for the man is the whirlpool, the sinking through the floor, the Drop, what the ancient Greeks call katabasis.
...
When katabasis happens, a man no longer feels like a special person.  He is not.  One day he is in college, being fed and housed--often on somebody else's money--protected by brick walls men long dead have built, and the next day he is homeless, walking the streets, looking for some way to get a meal and a bed.  People know immediately when you are falling or have fallen: doormen turn their backs, waiters sneer, no one holds the subway car door for you.  Your inner psychology changes as an old shame surfaces; one walks with head down and feels it's all inevitable.  The inner masculine self changes.  While one is still grandiose and naive, a young man lives inside, shiny-faced, expectant, hopeful, dandified, a prince.  After the Descent begins, an old man takes the place of the prince.  To one's amazement a helpless, anti-social, brittle, isolated derelict takes over.

Katabasis is what happens when there is nowhere to run from the fear.  Stuck with nowhere to go, the only thing one can do is take the low road, the road that leads straight into the jaws of hell, straight into the place one has been desperately trying to avoid.  You face your greatest fear head-on, confronting Death like a mythic hero (think of Heracles going down to the Underworld, or Jesus going to free the souls in Hell).  You let Death give you her best shot, recognizing that she might utterly destroy you with it.  And then, something miraculous happens: the fear recedes, and your capacity to act effectively increases.  Death breaks you down, smashing your illusions to pieces, and you emerge from the conflict forged into something better, something different from anything you would have imagined before.  One might call it resurrection.

Bly talks about katabasis as one stage in the life of man.  Smith treats it as a recurring phenomenon, noticing how the people who achieve moral greatness in life are invariably those who are able to go through katabasis (which he calls facing the flinch) repeatedly without backing down.  Death pushes you toward torpid entropy, insisting that you live in an increasingly narrow comfort zone--avoiding conflict of any kind until you find perfect peace and flatline.  The submissive are too afraid of Death to rebel, too timid to confront their fears head-on (breaking out of old habits, which might be smoking, drinking, working a soul-destroying job, or cultivating a psychotic fascination with one's incurable wickedness).  Smith's thesis: Improving life requires cultivating the ability to change habits; one does this by repeatedly facing the flinch and refusing to back down.  If you are afraid of something, you confront it directly, deal with it, and move on past it.  If you want to be a champion athlete, you pursue your sport of choice to the point of exhaustion, pass that point, and discover the outermost limits of your physical capacity.  If you want to stop smoking (or doing any drug), you cut your use down to nothing and discover a new life (without the drug).  It hurts, of course, but the only thing that hurts more than confronting your fears is avoiding them.

There are a million ways to avoid the flinch, a million ways to do wrong by yourself in evading it.  There are a hundred names for those people and behaviors: lazy, avoidant, cynical, arrogant, and anything in between.  All of these names convey attitudes that encourage you to avoid seeing what is right in front of you, all in a different way, and each of the people who has one of these attitudes defends it.  In contrast, there is only one way to do it right and to see the truth.  It is to look at these ways of acting in yourself or others and cross through their verbal defenses, and not to believe them at all.

Every person has his own way of being avoidant and overly confident.  It's impossible to name all the ways people do this.  But the solution is always the same: ruthless yet compassionate honesty in the face of all the lies you tell yourself.  The flinch will keep you avoidant your whole life if you let it.  You will see nothing of the magic or serendipity or incredible experiences that others have if you keep your blinders on.  For this reason, taking them off may be the single most important challenge you ever face.  There are enough viewers.  There are enough cheerleaders.  There are enough coaches and enough commentators.  What there isn't enough of are players.  Do not put this down and return to your normal life.  Fight.  Don't flinch.  Don't ever be afraid again. 

At some point, I confronted certain fears and grew past them.  In the gym, I confronted the physical pain and danger associated with active movement, and I became stronger.  In the classroom, I confronted my fear of ignorance and mental ineptitude, and I became more intelligent.  But at church, I remained stuck in my old patterns of fear.  My progress outside church came from a willingness to doubt everything.  I came into the gym and the classroom prepared to unlearn everything I thought I knew about strength and intelligence.  I was open, humble, and critical (without being mean: finding the right answer was my goal, not denigrating the wrong answer).  But religion resisted these attributes, telling me that there were things I could not question, things that I could not under any circumstances doubt.  Initially, I accepted that religion was unique, above questioning.  I avoided the flinch, swerving away from the gates of hell.  But this was a bad strategy: it was slowly killing my spirit, just as mental or physical stagnation would have killed my body.

As time went by, I became more and more conscious that I was running from something every time I went to church, and it seemed more and more that what I was running from was the best part of my character--the happy part, the part that knew how to do something besides cower in fear of the wrath of the Almighty.  The more time went by, the more I wanted to confront my fear.  I knew I needed to confront it, or it would destroy me.  Still, that confrontation was one of the hardest things I have ever done.  It required me to look deep into my soul and see what was really there.  It required me to let go of my preconceptions about life, my religious faith that everything would be OK if I just avoided the flinch.  As I turned down the road to hell, finally, it occurred to me that I had spent many years talking about something I had never really done.  I talked about trusting God.  I talked about letting go, about falling into the abyss with faith that whatever happened would be right.  I talked, but the whole time my eyes were screwed shut, and my feet were planted as far away from that abyss as they could be.  This was particularly striking when I looked back on my experience teaching church lessons to "investigators" (as LDS missionaries call potential converts): I would tell these people to let go of their ideas about life and throw themselves entirely on the mercy of an unknown God (I thought I knew him, but they knew they didn't).  I was like the skydiving instructor who coaches other people to successful jumps without ever attempting one himself.  I needed to get out and do something.  I needed some skin in life's game.  I needed things to be real, more than I needed them to be safe.  So I finally turned down the forbidden road.  I followed all the great heroes whom life has ever produced (and many more whom we will never hear from), and I took the low road to an unknown place.

When I came back from that awful place (a place of awe), I was a changed man.  Some things were better: I was no longer constantly afraid.  Some things were worse: many of my cherished dreams about the nature of reality (and the character of God) were shattered, and some of my old friends could not bear to see me without these.  Some even seemed to value these dreams more than they valued me, suggesting that it might be better that I had died or suffered anything rather than face the flinch and overcome my fear.  I understand how these people feel.  I do not think less of them for feeling, and I am truly grieved that they are grieved, but I do not think I would do things differently if I could somehow go back to where I was before the descent.  The descent destroyed some parts of me, yes, but the parts that it left make a much better person--a person less afraid of his own shadow, a person more able to make real moral decisions for himself (rather than relying blindly on others with more social capital or more guts).  I am no longer ashamed to be alive (or at least, not as ashamed as I used to be).  I do not live in permanent fear of the Almighty, or anything really.  Death will come for me again, of course, but meantime there is nothing to be gained by worrying about her.  I have discovered the courage to recognize and live by my own moral convictions.  I would not trade that for anything.  It has given me unexpected faith in my own humanity, tapping internal reservoirs of moral strength and conviction that I did not know I possessed.  These days, I really want to live, and my fears have become challenges to be met with defiance rather than a fate I must endure in submission.  I love Henley's old poem:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Life can be truly miserable sometimes, for me and for other people (including many who suffer more than I ever have).  Sometimes, it makes no sense.  But fear is not the answer.  Fear will not save you; or, at the very least, it was not saving me.  After my descent into the underworld, I have a new message for whatever is out there commanding my fear (whether humans, gods, demons, or an impersonal, indifferent nothingness): "Bring it!"  I may not have what it takes to win (and eventually everyone loses), but you had better believe I will go down swinging.  No more cowering and cringing for me.  No more flinching.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Jared Diamond.  "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race."  Discover Magazine, May 1997, 64-66.

I discovered Diamond's essay for the first time several years ago, while I was reading up on human health (in an ongoing quest to improve my own).  I was intrigued, and eventually convinced, although I know that there are important points to be made against Diamond's pessimistic take on agricultural civilization (e.g. the arguments raised by Steven Pinker).  That said, this post is going to be my version of Diamond (dumber, shorter, and with less references).  I wrote the original version of the post in response to a friend, who forwarded an article lamenting recent decline in the birth rate among nations of the First World.  I have seen several such articles, all of them implying that social upheaval (broken economies, crime, etc.) is owing to a lack of babies, a lack that these writers (if I understand them correctly) seem to ascribe to widespread laziness.  My fellow First Worlders are not "putting out" as industriously as they should, and will be rewarded with the implosion of their padded social safety nets (as fewer kids exist to care for more and more parents, aged and helpless).  I doubt this.  Following the train of thought developed by Daniel Quinn, I further doubt that a reduction in human population worldwide would be a bad thing (necessarily: I am not saying that it would be great, either; it might, however, be natural -- as good or bad as rocks, waterfalls, and bacon).  Here is what I wrote, with a little minimal editing.

I think population reduction is a healthy response to imbalance in resources.  We simply don't have the goods to fuel endless growth (in people or the things they require to exist, things like food, water, shelter, clothes, entertainment -- unless we are willing to drastically reduce our expectations in these areas).  We are adjusting to several environmental factors, e.g. globalization (and concomitant competition for increasingly scarce resources), climate change (which may or may not have anything significant to do with us), and technological revolution (which has addicted increasing numbers of us to luxuries like running water, food that someone else prepared, housing that someone else built, gadgets that someone else invented and mass-produced, and lifetimes spent working narrow careers with companies that don't go belly up). 

Historically, the agricultural model for human survival has been to reproduce like insects: we made lots of people -- lots of sick, blind, stunted, relatively weak people -- and took over from the hunter-gatherers (who were healthier, sharper-sighted, taller, stronger, and even more mentally capable than we) by sheer force of numbers.  One familiar episode in this ongoing saga is the displacement of the American Indians by boatloads of European riff-raff (whose guns, germs, and steel paved the way for them to become a dominant force worldwide).  Indians were healthier (as individuals), more sustainable (as communities), and less numerous than the immigrants who replaced them.  We were the mites and moths and hornets who overran their beehive.  Now, it's our turn to be overrun.  Maybe the result will be just another opportunistic parasitism, but I don't know.  I get the feeling that other societies are collapsing too: people are living shorter and sicker lives all over the world; standard methods of producing the energy modern civilization requires to exist are failing; economies are imploding (not just in Europe and North America: India, China, and their neighbors are also looking less than robust these days).  I think we may just have to learn to live with less; and that may mean that there will be less of us.  Our old methods for solving these dilemmas are (1) plague and (2) wars: the last century saw us pushing (1) away while embracing (2) with all our might.  I think we might be due for a switch, with (1) returning (in the form of rampant diseases of civilization: diabetes, syndrome X, autoimmune disorders, obesity, failure to thrive, infertility, heart disease, stroke, cancer, etc.) and (2) fading (as we stagger away from a century of vicious fighting).  I could be wrong, of course.

A central concern here is quality of life.  If we are all willing to live in really primitive conditions (such as many of our forefathers endured), then the agricultural model offers a kind of haven, but it comes with a price, deliberately breaking the individual to save the community: better 1000 people barely alive than 100 thriving.  The price for the civilization that is India is the dung-heap that is Mother Teresa's Calcutta.  The price for the relatively few rich and prosperous people worldwide is a much larger group of starving and miserable people (who make clothes for the rich, grow their food, clean their houses, etc.).  This is the way agriculture is and ever has been (even in Mormon Utah: Brigham Young and his close friends were millionaires while others eked out a hardscrabble existence in a howling wilderness that has yet to blossom as Temple Square).  Do we want to perpetuate that?  I am not sure.  I don't have final answers.  But I think a lot of people with elective power are using it (in their own lives) to build a kind of middle-class freedom that is ultimately anathema to the agricultural model (which requires them to be serfs).  Women don't want to be baby-making machines.  Men don't want to spend their lives slaving away for the Man so that their fourteen sons can fight for the privilege of taking their spot on the line when they are too wasted and decrepit to hack it any more.  Nobody wants to bet on the longevity of social contracts that are collapsing all over (as education becomes increasingly overpriced and meaningless, at least in terms of securing long-term gainful employment that serves the employee rather than his feudal masters).  There is your threat to the family: good, old-fashioned supply and demand.  If there is no food for my family, no place for them to live, no job that will allow me to provide them with these things, then how am I supposed to have one (a family, that is)?  Many people just cannot afford it (unless they are willing to bring their kids up as serfs, which those of us in the First and Second Worlds are loathe to do: we were raised as gentry or honorable artisans, not slaves).  So population declines, with acts of God (plague, environmental conditions) and human anxiety (increasing uncertainty about the future) as proximate causes.

Since this is a topic of recurring interest to me, there will be more about it on the blog.  I am not done with it yet by any means.

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!)

Gangsters for God

Harold Schindler.  Orrin Porter Rockwell: Man of God, Son of Thunder.  Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1983.  ISBN: 087480440X.

Marco Amenta.  "La siciliana ribelle."  Music Box Films, 2009.

I just finished Schindler's biography of Porter Rockwell, which I have been reading while walking to and from my office: it breaks up the monotony of my day, and gives me something to think about besides all the jobs that I am not going to get.  I have actually enjoyed it a good bit.

Rockwell was quite a character.  Many people loved him (not just the LDS leaders whom he served faithfully).  Many people hated him (especially after he was implicated in the attempted assassination of Lilburn W. Boggs, the infamous governor of Missouri who signed the extermination order evicting the Mormons from his state).  Many people feared him.  Whatever your personal reaction to the man, it is really hard not to be interested in him, at least.  I learned that he joined the church young, that he befriended the prophet Joseph Smith, and that (like the prophet) he was rendered lame by an accident (which left one of his legs shorter than the other).  I learned how he was personally affected by the war between the Mormons and the Missouri settlers that ended in Boggs' extermination order, a war that saw lawless violence on both sides.  I learned that he spent nine months languishing alone in jail, waiting to be tried as Boggs' murderer, attempting at least two escapes before he was finally exonerated due to lack of evidence.  Early Mormon history contains many stirring tales; one of the most dramatic is undoubtedly the one of Rockwell's unexpected return from Independence, Missouri (where he was freed from jail December 13th, 1843), to Nauvoo, Illinois, where he interrupted the prophet Joseph's Christmas party (December 25th):

Fifty couples had accepted the prophet's invitation to dine and dance at his home, celebrating not only the Christmas season, but also Joseph's victories over the forces against him.  He had been three times arrested and three times acquitted during the year on charges preferred by the state of Missouri.  Bennett had been defeated.  And Joseph had successfully weathered the storm of controversy surrounding the doctrine of plural marriage.  Most important, Joseph had secretly decided to become a candidate for the presidency of the United States.  Suddenly the festivities were interrupted by a noisy scuffle at the front door.  Members of Joseph's Life Guard were struggling furiously to control what they thought to be a drunken Missourian who was punching and jabbing in every direction.  The prophet, resplendent in his Legion costume, pushed through the crowd to the center of the disturbance and ordered the guards to throw the intruder out forcibly.  As Joseph turned to walk away he was caught by something familiar in the filthy, disheveled specter of a man whose hair dangled in greasy snarls down his shoulders.  For a moment Joseph looked the creature full in the face.  It was grinning at him.

"To my great surprise and joy untold," he wrote, "I discovered it was my long-tried, warm, but cruelly persecuted friend, Orrin Porter Rockwell, just arrived from nearly a year's imprisonment, without conviction, in Missouri."  For Joseph, his friend's appearance was the fulfillment of his prophecy of March 15 that Rockwell would "honorably escape" the clutches of the Missourians.  Rockwell was the center of attention, and after partaking of a glass of the wine which flowed so freely at the festivities, he sat down with Joseph and a knot of church dignitaries to recount his trials since fleeing Nauvoo.  At the conclusion of his story, the prophet sat silent for several minutes; then, placing his arm around his friend's shoulder, [he] announced for all to hear: "I prophesy, in the name of the Lord, that you -- Orrin Porter Rockwell -- so long as ye shall remain loyal and true to they faith, need fear no enemy.  Cut not thy hair and no bullet or blade can harm thee!" ... From this day forward through thirty-five violent years in which Rockwell encountered hostile Indians, desperadoes, and other characters on the western scene, he managed to avoid a single physical injury at the hands of another man (Schindler, pp. 101-102).

This anecdote tells you a lot about Port (as he was known to friends).  He was loyal (enough to spend almost a year in jail for protecting the prophet, who was his friend).  He was tough (almost too tough for a posse of the prophet's Life Guard, even after a year spent running from the law and starving in jail).  He was a legend in his own time.  Before we get too excited about Smith's prophecy, it should be noted that Rockwell did cut his hair once.  Many years after the prophecy, he encountered Don Carlos Smith's widow Agnes Coolbrith, who was bald in consequence of a recent bout with typhoid fever.  Rockwell, generous friend that he was, had his hair cut to make her a wig:

Porter wore his hair long, as he said the Prophet had told him that if he wore his hair long his enemies should not have the power over him neither should he be overcome by evil.  When he met Sister Smith he had no gold dust or money to give her, so he had had his hair cut to make her a wig and from that time he said that he could not control the desire for strong drink, nor the habit of swearing (Letter of Mrs. Elizabeth D. E. Roundy, quoted in Schindler, p. 220).

By modern LDS standards, Rockwell was undoubtedly a strange-looking Saint: a long-haired, hard drinking, swearing, gunslinging bear of a man.  I am pretty sure the BYU Testing Center would have forbidden him entrance, though I am willing to guess that people on the street might have taken him a little more seriously than they did me when I did my tour of duty as a missionary.  He certainly made an impression on Richard Burton (the famous nineteenth-century world traveler, not the modern actor):

Porter Rockwell was a man about fifty, tall and strong, with ample leather leggings overhanging his huge spurs, and the saw-handles of two revolvers peeping from his blouse.  His forehead was already a little bald, and he wore his long grizzly locks after the ancient fashion of the U.S., plaited and gathered up at the nape of the neck; his brow puckered with frowning wrinkles contrasted curiously with his cool determined grey eye, jolly red face, well touched up with "paint," and his laughing good-humoured mouth.  He had the manner of a jovial, reckless, devil-may-care English ruffian.  The officers called him Porter, and preferred him to the "slimy villains" who will drink with a man and then murder him.  After a little preliminary business about a stolen horse, all conducted on the amiable, he pulled out a dollar, and sent to the neighbouring distillery for a bottle of Valley Tan.  The aguardiente was smuggled in under cloth, as though we had been respectables in a Moslem country, and we were asked to join him in a "squar' drink," which means spirits without water.  The mode of drinking was peculiar.  Porter, after the preliminary sputation raised the glass with a cocked little finger to his lips, with the twinkle of the eye ejaculated "Wheat!" that is to say "good," and drained the tumbler to the bottom ...

Of these "squar' drinks" we had at least four, which, however, did not shake Mr. Rockwell's nerve, and then he sent out for more.  Meanwhile he told us his last adventure, how when ascending the kanyon he suddenly found himself covered by two long rifles; how he had thrown himself from his horse, drawn his revolver and crept behind a bush, and he had dared the enemy to come out and fight like men ... When he heard that I was preparing for California he gave me abundant good advice -- to carry a double-barrelled gun loaded with buckshot; to "keep my eyes skinned," especially in kanyons and ravines; to make at times a dark camp ... and never to trust to appearances in an Indian country ... I observed that, when thus speaking, Porter's eyes assumed the expression of an old mountaineer's, ever rolling as if set in quicksilver.  For the purpose of avoiding "White Indians," the worst of their kind, he advised me to shun the direct route, which he represented to about as fit for travelling as h-ll for a powder magazine" (Richard Burton, City of the Saints, quoted in Schindler, pp. 309-310).

Burton was not the only stranger impressed by Rockwell, and (frankly) there was much to admire about the Mormon Samson.  He survived the Missouri troubles and the Nauvoo disaster, managing to run successful businesses (a ferry service in Missouri and a tavern in Nauvoo, though Emma Smith evicted this establishment from the Smith home, where the prophet Joseph wanted to locate it).  He was Brigham Young's prairie scout and mountaineer.  He carried mail.  He played a key role in thwarting Johnson's army during the Utah War (not without some personal embarrassment: the first time he and some others tried to drive off the army's mules, they only succeeded in losing their own mounts).  He had another tavern at Point of the Mountain, and he was famous in Utah for his stock (horse and cattle).  He had a reputation for being at once honest (so that outsiders looked to him for advice, scouting expertise, and protection) and dangerous (so that he was implicated in several grisly deaths, like the botched assassination of the Aiken party and the mysterious beheading of an otherwise unknown Missourian).  As gangsters go, he was "all wheat" (as he would have said).

I grew up with immense reverence for the prophets Brigham Young and Joseph Smith.  They were heroes who could do no wrong; the crimes alleged against them were anti-Mormon lies.  Inevitably, this distorted picture of reality left me vulnerable to demonizing their less well-known associates, men like John D. Lee, Bill Hickman, and Porter Rockwell.  Today, I see the early LDS church as a mafia.  This is not really as black a mark against it as some might think: the government of Missouri that tried to crush it with mob violence was also a mafia (with different factions: remember Bleeding Kansas).  The American frontier was just not a nice place back in the day.  This does not mean that nothing good ever happened there, or that pioneers like Porter Rockwell were generally bad people.  But they were not really what we moderns would call civilized.  They lacked scruples that we consider basic; death was a constant reality for them, and killing a necessary part of life.  What would you do if you woke up one day and found yourself in danger of sudden death from ruthless strangers?  Would you think calmly to yourself, "Maybe I should move somewhere else, ditch my family and friends (with their weird religion which I believe heart and soul), and start over" or would you fight back?  Some early Mormons thought better of it and turned tail, no doubt.  Others fought back -- becoming "gentlemen of honor" just like the Italian mafiosi depicted by Marco Amenta.  Of these latter, some became renowned as despicable criminals (like Lee and Hickman), while others (like Rockwell) attained a kind of outlaw respectability.  Rockwell's strength was his honesty and integrity; in his own words (shouted to American vice president Schuyler Colfax when Rockwell was in his cups), "I never killed anyone who didn't need killing" (quoted in Schindler, p. 343).  Unlike Bill Hickman, Rockwell never turned state's evidence (becoming a snitch) or killed people for purely mercenary reasons (though some alleged that Joseph Smith at least rewarded his attempt on Boggs' life); he was the kind of mafioso who killed to defend life and honor (his own, and that of his close friends, who just happened to be mafia bosses).  Unlike John D. Lee, he never stooped to killing women and children (a circumstance which might owe something to luck as well as his character, to be punctilious; but facts are facts).  You might not agree with Rockwell, but you knew where he stood, and that he was totally committed.  In many ways, he is more admirable than either Joseph Smith (who was a philanderer and a liar, two things Rockwell never was) or Brigham Young (who was also a liar, and thus more of a coward than Rockwell: hanging Lee out to dry alone for the mistakes at Mountain Meadows despite promises of immunity was a dastardly thing).

Modern Apocalypse

"Prophets of Doom."  History Channel, 2011.

As I prepare to hunt for a job puttering around like most academics, it is interesting to take a look at the big picture of what is going on in society.  The world as we know it is crashing, as it always has, only it is bigger now, so it falls harder.  I hope I can prepare myself to live in a world without all the things I depend on subconsciously.

I wish universities studied this stuff.  I feel like this is really what I am interested in.  What I really want to learn is how to live happily like the people in "less developed" economies, which are more sustainable than the cancerous, obese behemoth that is the imploding First World.  My research into antiquity is an attempt to get back to something better than modern civilization, without making the same mistakes that were made.  I want to return to the Bronze Age (or earlier), without being stupid the same way my ancestors were back then.

My journey into the past is also a journey into the future.  It is not a "restoration" (in the Mormon sense) really; it is more of a cautious reformation.  There is no Eden to return to.  But there is a purgatory before the modern hell, and right now that purgatory is looking like the place to build if you want to last.