Category: Social Science

Never a picture of grace, despite that being the hopeful meaning of my middle name, Ann, I don’t suppose I have become nothing more than littered rubble yet. That time is somewhere in the future. Maybe not far though. You never know. I do find it helpful to keep a raven on my shoulder, to remind me of my death. That’s an improvement over Jiminy Cricket. I will allow myself to to go with my stream of consciousness. Stating that I am so allowing myself is an exercise of my yoga practice, the essence of which is to allow the witness to become established in itself. The witness is the truest version of the self. The witness is the one who calmly observes the activities, and even the great dramas, that every little self has to experience. So back to the blackest of black ravens on my shoulder, reminding me of my death. Death reminds me that the toil of life, the fog of memory, will not endure forever. Even if my soul is one of those who get to reincarnate, allowing a new effort to share hints of how to get by in the human condition, I think that the major portion of the dark, clinging fog of bad deeds will be left behind. Birth is a new start. By fact and rightly by human tradition. We might hold that parents, grandparents, and even more distant relatives cause pain to their descendants, but humans have never been punished by the law for something done by an ancestor who died before their birth. For better and for worse.

Subject to curse, subject to social reality, subject to group karma, but not punished by the law.

Animals in nature never disobey their instincts. They can’t. By definition, animal behavior is pre-determined almost completely, by genetics and environment. Humans are different. Our essence is that we can overcome these pre-programmed instincts. How was this achieved in humanity? Of course this is one of those unanswerable questions, but we have myths that hint at the deeper truth. The story of Eve and Adam is one of those myths. God told these adult-infants that they were to enjoy all the fruits of the garden, except the tree of knowledge. Now the slightest effort at objective thinking will reveal God’s intent to use reverse psychology to entice Eve and Adam to eat that very fruit. Duh. Self-evident truth. Of course, self-evident truth is not available to the casual observer!

If you are still not convinced, imagine a puppy in your kitchen. You hold up a piece of steak. You call your puppy. “Fido! Here Fido!” You hold up the steak in front of Fido’s nose. “Here Fido! Don’t eat this meat! No Fido! Don’t eat this meat!” Be sure you are using a pleasant, friendly, and nonchalant voice-tone when you say this.

Do you really think Fido is going to walk away, before he eats the meat, or tries to?

God might be infinite and omnipotent, but it would have been self defeating to remove all of the layers and layers of self-preservation instincts from the new beings. God knew his creations, and that’s that. Eve and Adam were set up to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge, but no parent is going to tell his or her kids the Truth about this. No. Because then the parental authority that allows the “younguns” to survive infancy will be undermined. Becoming an adult requires the discernment to know when to disobey. Disobeying, whether after proper discerning thought processes, or flawed ones, is the first step toward adulthood, and the promised freedom that humanity is working toward.

The Old Testament is hardly the only sacred literature to promote the idea of disobedience. Jesus tells his followers to disobey their cultural customs, which are basically experienced by most people as laws, and “leave the dead to bury the dead,” at the same time he insists that he has not come to change the law. If you are a Christian, or if not, but you believe that maybe those old texts have something to say about the human condition, pay attention here. There’s more than meets the eye.

The self-evident truth is that there must be another way to obey the fourth commandment to honor one’s parents. My personal take on this is that we honor our parents by living our lives in accordance with whichever of their values we can. For example, my parents probably don’t like my theory of how to deal with money, but they were pleased that I chose to become skilled at my chosen profession, and that I used my skills to promote the life of intellect and social justice. Jesus, whom my culturally Jewish parents didn’t study, understood the necessity of disobedience.

Moving on to India, the Ramayana tells the story of Ram, a powerful deity who decided to come to earth as a man to “re-enforce” the religious laws. He incarnated, the story goes, as a king. He married a beautiful woman, who loved him very much. Of course. Duh. But then, the evil demon king kidnapped his beautiful wife. Sita, the queen, remained faithful to her husband, and the evil demon king never forced her to sleep with him, although he invited her every night. Eventually, Sita was rescued and returned to her husband, as the property that most of the ancient laws considered her. But Ram had incarnated for the sole purpose of enforcing the laws, and the laws said that Sita must undergo a trial by water. She did not drown, proving her statement of fidelity to her spouse. But Ram was not satisfied. He feared that the other men of the kingdom would interpret his acceptance of Sita back into his household as weakness, that would undermine the cultural integrity of the kingdom. He made up more tests. Finally, after passing them all, Sita walked outside of the palace grounds, and called on Mother Earth to swallow her up, since Ram obviously did not deserve her as his queen. Any thoughtful person can see that Ram, god and king, the upholder of the law, was acting like a jerk. Plain and simple.

Of course these examples seen in this light do not mean that the stories are not sacred. They are all sacred and the persona of God depicted in each one sheds light on how humanity saw itself at a certain time. God can only reveal God’s self in a way that at least the most enlightened humans of the time in question, have at least a thin hope of understanding. (Blue text added for clarification after initial publication.)

Cultural laws are never perfect for every situation, because laws are always being made in response to particular situations. Being a human means that we must cultivate the discernment needed to know which rules and laws to break, when.

The concept of disobedience being a good deed, rather than a sin, was indeed difficult for humans to grasp. As we look around us, it’s clear that, for humans, blind obedience to cultural norms has taken over blind obedience to natural instinct. But obedience to cultural laws is only an intermediate step in our spiritual evolution. This step has been and continues to be necessary, as Mother Nature was so thorough and redundant in making sure her creations would be able to survive.

For example, in order to ensure propagation of a variety of human societies, Mother Nature endows us with hormones that drive us to find mates who are attractive to us. But the criteria of attraction vary widely. Then we are provided with hormones that attach us to our mates, and their families and friends. Then we are given different sets of skills, making us more and more reliant on each other. We have a very extended time of dependency as we learn what it takes to survive in the climates and terrains that we are forced to inhabit, as we become more and more numerous. Our need for each other must be made strong indeed, to overcome the already robust instincts for individual survival. The choice facilitating urge to disobedience is a latecomer to the game, and struggles for acceptance.

Really, at some point, humanity as a whole will realize that we must give up the entire idea of the “dis/obedience dichotomy,” and substitute a “sliding discernment skill scale.”

Let’s look at a few more examples of teaching stories on the subject of obedience. In Genesis, we find another of God’s attempts to teach humans that blind obedience is not always a good deed. When God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his favorite son of his beloved wife, Abraham is supposed to figure out that he is supposed to disobey. In one way, we can see that the whole point of God telling Abraham to get the hell out of Ur was so he could create a new culture that substituted love for fear, and the first step on the path forward on that was to eliminate sacrifice of one’s fellow humans.

Even many rabbis agree that Abraham was supposed to disobey. But he didn’t get it. Perhaps it was too much to ask. Of course, if God was to find a new prophet, he had to pick someone who could hear him. The words hear and obey are related in many languages. So poor Abraham. He failed this test. And this set up the poor daughter of Japthah to later be sacrificed, which then necessitated the sacrifice of Jesus, as the son of God, so that God could prove that he wouldn’t refuse to do what one of his subjects was willing to do. This time, again God tried to make it clear. No more human sacrifices.

However, we still believe in Holy War. So once again, we can see that we have not come to the end of the spiritual path, or even that short section called “love your neighbor.”

As the great Swami Vivekananda said, had it not been for the horrible demons of sectarianism and fanaticism, which continue to lead to war, human society would be far more advanced than it is now.

Step one on a spiritual path is for “spiritual” leaders to start acting like spiritual leaders, and tell their “flocks” that humans are meant to creatively disobey. There will always be consequences of disobedience, sometimes extremely painful. But that is a result of the human condition. Learning to think for ourselves is the foundation of living the fullest possible human life.

Just what is a character?

Are you one?

Are you also a hero?

A person?

An individual?

What about a self?

A soul?

Are you a soul? Or do you HAVE a soul?

What about the person sitting next to you?

What about Pollyanna? Is she a character? A person? I think she’s an example of one of the intermediate forms known as a FIGURE.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A FIGURE is a “character” meant to emulated. Pollyanna is disgustingly optimistic in cases, but if we look beyond the surface, her father had taught her how to do this. Her optimism was not presented as “natural.”

Yesterday, Karen Bota, founder of the Mid-Michigan Word Gatherers, organized a FREE writing conference. I had offered to share my gleanings from my recent readings inspired by Amelie O. Rorty’s article “A Literary Postscript: Characters, Selves, Persons, and Individuals” in the academic philosophy conference proceedings she edited.

If you would like a copy of my slide show, please download it by clicking on this link.

Character-Defined

After the writing conference yesterday, a few of us went to hear / see Bob Dylan. Why do people go to rock / folk concerts anyway? For most people it’s to have a more vivid experience of the songs we love than can be obtained through a recording. Bob Dylan doesn’t really care about that. He’s going to put on the show he wants to, how he wants to, and decades of fan disapproval (documented if you look around) aren’t going to pressure him into “pandering to his audience” and playing even a single song from his early career in the way we listened to it then.

One of the articles I found about one of the songs he played said that Bob Dylan is the last word in the artistic Modernist movement. After contemplating this, I see that modernism carries with it the idea of the character, which is much more modern than a hero. Characters have more choice of action, even if they obviously don’t have total free will, than heroes. Even as Joseph Campbell notoriously told us that “We are all the heroes of our own lives,” I have never liked the idea that humans NEED heroes. Why can’t we agree to build a society where superhuman features are not a necessary prerequisite for getting a reasonably happy and productive life?

Another aspect of the Modernist movement is that endings are ambiguous. That is a reflection of life in modern times. In the old days, every story of every person didn’t have a neat, tidy end. But the stories that were thought to be worthwhile to preserve were those which did. This morning, I see that the ambiguous story ending is simply another aspect of intellectual honesty, which allows the stories of everyone to be told, up to the present moment, whether it feeds our need for certainty (usually not) or helps us to gain maturity by learning to tolerate ambiguity.

The way we tell our stories influences how we see ourselves as humans, and the way we see ourselves as humans influences how we tell our stories.

Over time, this self-reflection from story to person and back again morphs, and morphs again. We are able to see new possibilities of how to approach our own lives.

The stories we told ourselves in prehistoric and early historic times tended to have a clean ending with a lesson that most listeners would agree on. People lived in the collective consciousness and didn’t see themselves and each other as individuals whose lives were influenced by decisions they made. People saw themselves as stepping into pre-made roles in their groups, and doing what was to be done.

All she wanted was for people to be a little nicer to each other. In her youth, she had been more naive, and then all she wanted was for people to be nice to each other. But now, she had discernment, and realized that was way to much to ask. So nicER. Just a little bit nicER.

She had spent decades wishing for understanding. Understanding for the sake of itself. At that early part of her life, she had perhaps been confused into wanting understanding due to a misplaced belief in the inevitability of beneficial consequences flowing from understanding. She hadn’t encountered David Levy’s book, so she did not know that sometimes, to understand is to change, but often, simply to understand a situation results in no practical change at all.

As time marched on, she got what she wanted. She gained more and more understanding of human nature. Eventually, she understood that there are lots of excellent reasons that most people want money or love much more strongly than they want understanding. Her father wanted money. He told her so. He also told her that it was clear to him that he would never understand people, but he could understand money. Her mother wanted justice. That interfered a little with her father’s accumulation of money, but that is life. We are all conflicted. Because whatever most of us want to sustain our bodies in comfort, most people also want to climb the stairway to heaven.

She had a colleague. A friend. He will remain nameless for the purpose of this article. His actions (the organizations he supported with this time and energy) say he wants the Protestant Christian vision. He spends some significant part of his time hanging out with financial planners, claiming he is working to help the poor to get their piece of the pie. As far as she saw it, investing in the stock market would do nothing to bring the Kingdom of Heaven.

She knows that it is a mistake to believe that the fantasy of financial stability  can ever be a foundation of social justice. Those who believe this clearly don’t even bother to flesh out the meaning of social justice, or realize that social justice is both the original and ultimate, and effectively,  only real type of justice. The concept of social justice is one of the ideas that the symbol of the blindfolded lady is intended to demonstrate. Justice has to close her eyes to the particulars of the case,  and consider the whole picture, which only becomes visible in the metaphorical darkness (freedom from distraction). To quote Billy Joel, it can only be seen by the eyes of the blind. In other words, at least in Western Civilization, we don’t believe in cutting off the hand that stole food to feed the hungry.

She knew that there was more to justice than punishing a book crime. She knew that the judge was supposed to be able to see into the heart and mind of the accused, and weigh the needs of the accused against the resources of the society.

Hunger in a land of plenty is a sin. Hunger in the land of scarcity may be as benign as a sad fact.

She knew, she understood, that her colleague with the misplaced focus on money was a mirror, sent by God to remind her of who she was, by virtue of what she wanted and what she knew. What she didn’t know was why others couldn’t understand that we can never escape the consequences of the wants of others. We can ignore them, at least for a time, but never escape. She knew that wants drive thoughts, and then action.

She knew that thoughtful thoughts have a greater chance to eventually drive elevating action and hasty or superficial thoughts drive actions with higher probabilities of negative unintended consequences.

She sometimes allowed herself to feel depressed by her colleague’s belief that social time spent with part time financial planners who were funding an orphanage in India was the most effective step he could take on the stairway to heaven. But she was usually able to treat the depressive thoughts by reminding herself of the teachings of The Great Merwegon (a fictional wise woman).

For over twenty years, she had devoted herself to cultivating clarity, and to teaching any others who were open to it, to doing the same. She knew that the basest wants are the strongest wants in most, which opened her to criticism for empowering people to hurt themselves and others, as they experimented with the cultivation of clarity.

She ever hopefully opened her mind to arguments that there was a more direct path toward increasing humans’ tendency to being nicer, but, to date, no convincing ones had been offered. With the possible exception of the book highlighted in this link. Instead, she was accused of manipulation, and even brainwashing, by her own father, no less. She would have felt that as a greater burden had she not already worked through the flawed thinking of a past accuser.

To her, that was the saddest thing. That people couldn’t distinguish someone teaching self-empowerment from someone seeking power over them. For now, she rededicated herself to cultivating clarity and teaching the teachable.