Moving Around the Deck Chairs, Because We're Not Prepared to Face the Facts

There is an everyday scandal in the WH, everyday the administration hands more and more of the country to the oligarchs, and what is left of our faire land is now "deregulated" for profit. The crisis before us is America's deeper failure of character, a reckoning with our shadow that may never happen. But we may yet bring about a pause that thwarts the current disaster and _appears_ to address our more serious problems.   We must make sure that everyday reveals another Trump scandal.   Fatiguing as that is, it must be part of our daily bread to make sure that their trespasses remain unforgiven.

The Obama Presidency demonstrated perfectly just how far we are from considering our nation's real divides and needs, and the deeper issue at stake is our national shadow. No matter amount of virtue in the White House will "fix" that. But we must address surely our venality, at least insofar as we attempt to thwart its advance.

Our immediate solution is not a "revolution." Sorry, but we did that and _this_ is what we have to show for it. A revolution may sound appealing to some but it is a losing strategy for practical electoral victories. Those kinds of victories ---pyrrhic and hollow as they may be--- are what I think we need _first_. Further, revolutions destroy things and that's the wrong idea. We have enough destruction. The best solution would be realization, not revolution, but we are not prepared for that.

Our temporary electoral solution is right before our eyes and that does not depend on any deeper reckoning with the American heart. We may indeed be able to oust the villains by virtue of mere discontent and rage, without any unified claim to political values, much less virtue. "Stop Trump" may well be enough to wrest the power to slow down this fast lane to catastrophe. We may talk a better game than mere anger and rage but those emotions may be enough for now.  Of course, we may actually rouse enough anger that we never come near our real issues but only set them back.  But we don't have in place any of the structures we would need to address our real issues. The right doesn't want that conversation because it represents the old forms of privilege and entitlement to which they desperately cling and the left is failing because it refuses to admit that virtue does indeed require individual assessment as much as it does structural change.

I would not be opposed to some kind of victory _first_. By that I mean a directive of the electorate to send Trumpism further back into its bunkers of ignorance and into the darkness that is its natural habitat. Let the Balrog go back to its lair. There may be no better remedy for now. As for us, I say "run, you fools" towards some kind of temporary safety until we can do better. We can talk about the hard work from wherever we stand.  None of this will stop the abusers or the racists because our victory will, in fact, energize them too. But we might outnumber them if the system is not so rigged that it just fails to represent the majority. That could happen. Our strategy would not provide real hope because hope requires a future in which there is change--- and real change requires real reckoning. In the meantime I think we should take _any_ level of pause and reprieve that grants us at least three more years of life.

No, I don't think Mueller's report --- even if it demonstrates obstruction, perjury, money laundering, or treason--- will move Republicans to act. Get it through your heads: _nothing_ is too debased or too corrupt or too morally bankrupt for the likes of Ryan, McConnell, and all the rest who want reelection and power. Not Collins, not Murkowski, none of them. The bar for them cannot be too low to protect Trump because they are Trump and without Trump they will be replaced by Trump. Hannity will decide their choices. So unless 2018 brings electoral change, expect things to become much worse, much more rapidly. Is that even possible? We need a short term strategy because the cure is truly beyond our national reach. If we buy time will the more honest reckoning begin?

No, it will not.  Like I said, that requires the kind of hard work that no one likes.  We keep trying to make school “fun” when a lot of it demands plenty that is just hard.  It all depends on what you want.  And by “school” I mean both school and whatever it is that gives you the skills and the aptitude to do something worthwhile.  Excellent things are rare because they are difficult, ask Spinoza.

Our "ultimate" answer is a process for realization, not revolution. That realization is one of values and claims, the ideals and birthright aspirations that have never been realized.  But they have been articulated by philosophers, statesmen, poets, thinkers of all sorts and kinds. Those goals are fundamentally secular, human, and so fraught with failure and foible under the best of circumstances.  The people who present us with our ideals, like those who invite us to the hard work, need those things as much as the rest of us because they too have to live with themselves.  And living with yourself, well, that should be hard too.  Sorry.  For those of you looking for an ultimate solution, you've come to the wrong planet.  Or you can just retreat to some inner “state.”

The slaveholder Jefferson offered up much of that secular ultimacy theory; the incrementalist Lincoln looked for a new birth of freedom. And MLK stood on the mountaintop looking ahead, hoping and believing. But we will not have realization, or any proximate ultimacy, without reckoning the shadow. It's not the light we must search for, it's what the light allows us to see, the shadows it outlines more plainly. There can be no redemption and no real change without coming to terms with the facts of history; inequities can change only when we are willing to have the difficult conversations. America has no stomach for seriousness, much less for learning or addressing the difficult tasks of personal and community self-interrogation.

Our national shadow begins right around 1619 with the first settlements that commence the pogrom of the native peoples and introduces as legal the inexcusable crime of slavery. The implications of those _founding_ actions cast long shadows that require an incandescence of truth that requires us to burn far more brightly. And then, once we are willing to burn inside, we would require the maturity not to burn down the outside. Literally. When you know the truth, it makes you mad.  How could it not?  But there is even more that would have to happen _just to begin_ our national reckoning.

Our collective shadow also requires us to take seriously the fact that _under the best of circumstances_ the American notion of identity never fails to invest in tribal ethnic communalisms, religions that divide and claim moral superiority, and actions that prefer the familiar rather than Statue of Liberry ideals. What we say we want or stand for is not enough yet to change our familiar patterns and historical structures.   This is a human situation, not just a problem endemic to we Americans: its easier to take care of your own than to imagine that your own is everyone else too.

We can describe at any length these failures in terms of individual responsibilities or of collective and structural inequities--- but at the heart of the matter involves deeper issues of character and human nature. We might well have to defy our human nature in order to recast our character, even to come _near_ to our aspirational values. In fact, I'm pretty sure that is exactly what we would have to want. To be the humans we _say_ we want to be we would have to admit the strife that compels us to be better than how we have been made or how we say we make ourselves. We will not become better human beings by "becoming who we really are" but rather by investing in being more than we are, more than nature or culture has taught us to be.

To nurture those matters of character we must look deeply into human nature and into a long sordid history of failure rooted in the incongruity between who we are and what we say we want to be. Such a conversation puts everything we are familiar with in jeopardy and, more importantly, puts us face to face with irresolvable facts, facts of nature and history. This means that our most humanizing ideals put us in conflict with ourselves and that requires more than an education or achievement or even our best spiritual or religious aspirations. Love is not the answer. Love is another indispensable feature of our pursuit of reckoning with ourselves and that reckoning will include much less pleasant tasks. We're going to need _all_ of ourselves to find _more_ of ourselves. That will force us to make our lesser angels be just as involved in the conversation with our better.

This week we learned that a Rhodes scholar, Harvard educated administration official is a serial abuser and that his church counseled his wife to remain in their marriage. There is no educational achievement or worldly accomplishment that insures decency or virtue of any kind. We also heard heartfelt denials of climate change and raging tirades directed at immigrants ---along with real stories of families being broken up, deportations, and, of course, more about how all this is making America great "again."

We heard plenty more from Evangelical Christians, praying in the Oval Office, talking about Trump getting "a mulligan," and about how ends justify any means, including any admitted abuse, flagrant misogyny, or vulgarity. Where are their values? Have these behaviors always been their values? Does that question, that observation, or this kind of invective about hypocrisy actually matter? What will _change_ people? Not redemption. Not admission of sin. Learning what we need to learn is going to take much harder work than that.

We saw too the minority leader Pelosi make a dramatic effort to draw attention to injustice and to advance the cause of decency only to be largely ignored except by those who already agree with her. But we heard nothing much about the structural facts of history, the need for truthful individual reckonings, or the ways in which our actions inform our values. What we apparently _cannot_ talk about are the ways we would have to change in order to realize ---and by that I mean simply _approximate_ something like our "ultimate" social ideals.

America needs an honest conversation about itself the way sex needed Dr. Ruth. Whatever happened to _that_ conversation? Porn is free tells us what we really need to know about that. We humans are not really interested in what it would take to be an _American_: equity under the rule of law, generosity and compassion for those less able, the birthright of honest work, a living wage, health, children, retirement, old age, and a decent death. I don't say we don't want these things. I say that we are not willing to have the conversation that would _realize_ these ideals . But that doesn't mean we can't have something better soon, or even now.

We can buy time. We can arrest some of the decline and catastrophe even if we cannot stop the end game. If you are serious enough to say that we might be past the point where human life could stop planetary destruction, then you might also be serious enough to do what it takes to buy time and see what more might happen if we just do that. My thesis is simple: we are not prepared to take on the issues that would cause our society to realize its stated aspirations and we are not in a situation in which we may be able to save ourselves at all from planetary self-destruction.

Our solution at present may involve the same lofty optimisms that proclaim our inner goodness or our hope. This doesn't make them true but it might provide some important motivation--- especially for those who have neither the tools nor the willingness to do the actual hard work of self-interrogation. We're not as a society willing or prepared for that hard work: it's a calculus we can't do because we aren't willing to do the simple arithmetic prerequisites.

Our recourse for now is this: use whatever emotional tools and manipulations we have to buy us enough time to survive this destruction. In the meantime, _you_ try to do that work to become a person of deeper reflection and character. Even if you're just buying time. Play music while the deck chairs show you the ship is sinking? Sure. But make sure that the music you are playing is looking for lifeboats too, the kind that don't leave out others.

Maybe, just maybe we'll figure out how to have the more serious conversations we would need to have to create a better world. So far, that is not happening. Electing Democrats will not change my Republican neighbor's hearts or minds ---even if the Dems change their lives for the better with policy. We may have to be "satisfied" with what we can do until we can do what we actually need to do. In the meantime, don't let the villains win, don't give up, figure out how to do what Trump does so well: buy time by pretending or just saying what you need even when you don't have a clue. The difference we might make could be enough to find a lot of lifeboats. Take to the task inside yourself but remember that that requires facing the facts. Time is all we have. Make just a little more for the hard work.

Atheism, the Grinding Axe, and the Mortal Coil

There is an interesting piece in The Atlantic magazine about the first chair of Atheism in a University and the study of atheism as a movement, etc. It lays out the facts, all of which strike me all too obvious; for example, not being a believer in god is vilified and largely unacceptable to the American electorate, etc. But the principal matter here is to treat atheism as a belief and as an oppositional belief to theism. I get that: this is what Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, and others do when they write about atheism. This is a conversation that sells and seems to be the one that most people want to have. They posit their atheism as the correct alternative to theism, as if the facts could be made into correct belief. But I'm not interested really in the theist vs. atheist conversation. I mean, it's there and we can think about it. But this is not of particular concern to me.  I'm looking for a different conversation.

Let me suggest a different way of thinking about the "there is no god" statement. No one will be particularly surprised by my point of view but here are a few points about teaching from an atheism perspective.

First, we all live with the stories that we need and plenty more that we wish we did not have to live with. Consolation stories about god, compassionate nature, enlightened souls, puppies, altruism, goodness, whatever we need are an important part of human psychologies. I take my own solace in things that strike me as factually true, that is, I begin my own consolations with a drenched in acidic truth with the proviso that these truths and facts are incomplete, provisional, and subject to revision. All facts must be placed in those unfinished categories but that doesn't make them less our-best-story-so-far. That go with what we know is better than believe what you wish were true, at least for me. This leads me to my second point.

I'm only mildly interested in atheism as a world view, that is, as a competing narrative to theism. Sure, it's there and it may be more factually true than any theism claim but most atheism is offered up as an alternative with an axe to grind. It wants to tear up the theists ---and sometimes for good reasons. Hitchens does a good job of showing the ills and potential evils of religious belief and that axe he grinds is sharp, effective, and largely irrefutable. So this proves largely uninteresting since the criticisms are so plainly true. But facts never get in the way of beliefs, which is why studying religion will always still be important. It doesn't matter if what people believe is not true, what matters is that they believe it.

So here's my take, my point to add:
I don't treat atheism as a belief. I think of it as a prerequisite fact. All of our very best evidence points to the simple fact that the physical universe can be explained without a god or creator, etc. and life evolving through natural selection seals the deal. And it _really_ does once we understand what is being presented as fact. All theist responses to these physics, chemistry, and biology arguments are lame, inadequate, and usually just wishful thinking, that is, theists need to believe so they do. So, as far as I can tell, the facts are pretty much in, that is, as in as any fact could be. So _let's start there_.

Atheism is not a conclusion, it is a beginning. It's really not unlike what Rajanaka has to say about non-duality. Unity, non-duality isn't a _goal_ we achieve or an insight that somehow changes us. Rather it's just how the world started: it started in less complex ways, likely from singularity, and it unfolds as that process of itself. It's MUCH more interesting to think of "not me" and "like me" than it ever is "just like me" unless we are looking for certain prerequisite needs such as we all love or we all get hungry, things that are _human_ and so shared, natural facts.

If we start by NOT arguing about atheism then we can ask more interesting questions.  As a "Hindu," I ask myself these sorts of things:
*Who are the gods (and the demons) in our stories?  Why mythologize?
*Why express devotion or do ardor in temples?  Why ritualize?
*What is darshan when there is no god there?  What are we doing and why are we doing it?
*If we are what modern science suggests we are, that is, material forms of energy experiencing only mortal life, then how do we construct meaning, morality, and value because _this is all we are_?
As for the theists or the "we are really universal consciousness" or some primordial consciousness or some claim that makes us more than our mortal experience, I think those folks are more (often less) interesting to study. Why do they want these claims? What happens to them when they live with these claims? What do they do and not do with their lives?

I feel no need to participate in some sublime effusion of absolute anything, be that god or consciousness. I'm quite comfortable and not entirely thrilled that death is real, suffering will happen, and I will exit this life only to become memories of others and nothing more. I live with that not as consolation unless what the facts suggest is true is what we think we must face.

Appa thought that mortality creates our poignancy, our importance, our urgency, our value. That we are _only_ mortal and then die to become again the stuff of the world means that living is the miracle, consciousness is a wonder, and we'd better appreciate it now while we can. That's all I got, at least for now. The link is below.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/how-should-atheism-be-taught/551885/

The Wall Inside

As Trump goes to Davos and events of the past week once again included talk of building walls, I admit to being a bit slow on the uptake. We can carry on about Trump's wall with practical and honest arguments, declaring it to be unnecessary given rates of real undocumented border crossings or for the colossal waste of money it represents, all reasonable arguments that seem impenetrable to his sycophants. We can even agree that spending that money, even building some portion of that wall does not mean it will either be completed or can't come down soon enough.

So why not trade it for Dreamer legislation, protections for other immigrants ---Salvadorans and Haitians are of immediate concern and there is so much else to do. Is this choice so corrupt, that American taxpayers waste billions of dollars on something we don't need and only evidences our failures of national character? Is this really so unusual? Let us hope Democrats have made a smarter than we think tactical move that will extract some decency from this inane folly.

But it finally occurred to me why "the wall" is so important to Trump and his supporters. It's so plainly obvious that's it may seem to trite to point it out: they need something more to hide behind, an exercise that they repeat again and again. They hide behind the fantasies of their nostalgic past where "America was great," behind "guns and religion" as President Obama so plainly put it (much to reproof), behind the fears, terrors, and shadows of selves they will not interrogate or even acknowledge are in need of deeper consideration. Their wall is the outward and visible form of their inward and concealed fears, a shroud of ignorance that creates for them a real and necessary boundary.

That boundary is imperative, urgent, it will be "big and beautiful" because it stands at the end of a dead end they don't even know exists--- as they stand alone, isolated in the darkness of the unexamined self. Aided and abetted by the State Meida arm of the Party, Fox News, they are given a constant reassurance that there is an "other" out there that they need to contain, a policy that speaks to law and safety when in truth it is merely themselves that they rage against, that that fear more than all. Their other is themselves they project upon their wall. Locking themselves behind this "wall," it is the only way they can cope with living within such a shameless darkness of self-made clarities and conspiracies, hiding from their hearts and averting any reckoning with their failures, their needs, their unrealized hopes. Rather than tear down these walls and begin the more compelling task of looking into lost shadows, they prefer to project them into the world a symbol of their certainties. And the only thing more dangerous than ignorance is certainty.

For the rest of us, I hope we see a way through this latest cloak of hypocrisy and obloquy so that we accomplish some greater good, looking as well into the hearts of those who refuse to look at themselves. We may revile their hatred and mock their ignorance but until we take seriously the walls they build around themselves we won't look more carefully at our own. As we tear down these kinds of walls of toxicity let us understand the importance of making more meaningful boundaries that help us create healthy invitations to relationship. Even with those who might be unwilling to help themselves.

A Letter to Men, Part One. To Strive And Not to Yield: Moral Lassitude, Collective Responsibility, and Respecting the Shadow of Corruption

We have intimacy problems. Perhaps like we have never had before. Those problems are not only a feature of our gross failures as men since the beginning of civilization but a result of incremental strides forward as women have empowered themselves and pursued both equality and equity. Not all men resent progress though the majority or near-majority of all races right now support Trump or find him tolerable. That fact points to deeper moral failure; it is a symptom of more serious shortcomings. But even those in the minority who wish to further a progressive understanding of masculinity and relationships that take gender and identity seriously need to make greater commitment. Let’s begin with the difference between equality and equity, important enough to give us a first pause.

A useful definition:

“Equality alludes to the identical apportionment where dealings, values or qualities are concerned. Equity represents fairness, or what may be termed as the equality of outcomes. This involves factoring in aspects of the system that have put particular groups at a disadvantage.” 

(Read more: Difference Between Equity and Equality | Difference Between http://www.differencebetween.net/language/difference-between-equity-and-equality/#ixzz54RcGFxKt)

We are not equal by certain measures of gender distinction since we are not identically apportioned. When it comes to matters, say, of birthing or perhaps even child nurturing those apportionments are facts of nature that turn to complex questions of human evolution. Our woeful ignorance of natural selection, cognitive science, and social theory is inexcusable, like the rest of our woeful ignorance. That we should be equal under the law and in matters of economics, political franchise, and other basic human rights and social facts seems to me beyond dispute. That we are nowhere near those benchmarks is outrageous and unacceptable. “The Census Bureau calculates that the median woman in the United States makes 79 cents for every buck paid to the median man. The gap widens by race, with black women earning 60 cents and Hispanic earning 55 cents to every white man's dollar.” (Cited from Wiki, dated Mar 8, 2016).

These social facts could be remedied by law in ways that would not even require men to evolve personally, or even espouse different attitudes and views. We could force these changes upon society and may well have to. Conservative men have never willfully agreed to relinquishing any of their privilege, power, or ideological claims to superiority. We have had to force upon conservatives the changes that bring greater justice, both in terms of equality and equity. American men elect men who refuse to act on even these basic matters of inequality and inequity. Alas, we cannot ignore values when they inform actions. We need majorities to change the law even if that causes deeper division and further polarization by gender: the majority of men in America are going to be required to be forced to change. And when has that not been the case? Matters of equality clearly cannot be separated from matters of equity. Our values have not evolved and this points to certain elemental failures I mean to address here first.

Insofar as equity marks fairness, it is in this respect particularly that we need to come to further reckoning of our intimacy values and our self-reckoning. We are failing as human beings and it is reflected plainly in political facts.

I rarely have a moment of patience for conservative columnist Ross Douthat whose prudish backward religiousity makes my skin crawl. Just how men can maintain a moral stance that dictates to women is beyond me, except that it is not: the history of patriarchy and efforts to control and impose our will can never be overlooked. Who willingly gives up power? Who ever wants their authority diminished over their personal preferences? More qualified persons than myself have written about patriarchy and particularly the ways religions have devised their own insidious coercions and rationales. I am reminded that the myths, literature, and poetry can be better than the people who use them for their own purposes but that too diverges from our current discussion. How men believe they can make choices about and over women’s bodies and lives is not utterly beyond me and that is what is so deeply disconcerting. How any person can decide for another in such deeply personal and painful situations is a fundamental violation of autonomy and freedom.

We are not perfectly free. Never as human beings are we beyond the paradoxes and impossibilities that stake out our best ideals. We cannot be free without boundaries and constraints. We want to be both safe and unbound and that involves mutual contradictions that require sophisticated choices. All human decisions happen under circumstances and constraints that are natural, social, and personal. Americans cherish the individual over the group or the State and yet we cannot live any kind of moral life without choosing to govern and be governed by terms that limit our individuality. We live in relationships that place our every choice in contexts of power and authority.

Until we address the relationship between power and authority more directly we’ll lack the tools to understand ourselves more deeply ---and this is no small topic in either form or gravitas. Again, a subject to which we must return. But men are particularly culpable here because we have had the power and what we fear is losing it. “Fear is a mind killer,” Herbert wrote, but it is not merely controlling fear that is crucial to our integration but bringing it into a deeper conversation as the shadow form of courage. We will not have the courage to change and evolve ourselves until we bring fear more resolutely into our conversations as a companion and ally, not merely an adversary. Shadow comes with light but we men, we love to deny the shadow and so burn rather an illumine the soul.

I reference Douthat however to make another point. In today’s New York Times (17 January, 2018) he references extensive surveys and an article by Ron Brownstein for The Atlantic. Douthat observes, “Relative to where American politics stood before his rise, Trump’s campaign polarized America more by class and gender than it did by race. And then, by jettisoning much of the populist economic agenda he campaigned on, Trump’s actual presidency has made class less important and gender more essential to understanding how Americans divide.” He goes on, “But if you’re looking at what Trump has directly changed…it’s with the large female backlash that may be poised to swamp the male backlash that helped make him president.”

And here is where I find myself in reluctant agreement with Douthat ---reluctant not because I take issue with his claim but because despite his reductionism, I think he is correct: “But there is strong evidence that our problems with sex and gender and male-female relations are worsening — which is why it’s understandable that they’re at the heart of how the country has reacted to the Trump presidency, and fitting that this year of public protests and intimate revelations have thrown them into sharp relief.” The current women’s movement is far more complex and nuanced than Douthat contends and that fact demands more equitable and thorough responses. But let us, for the moment, agree that Americans and particularly American men ---no, let us say, just men are in a worsening state regarding their identity and relationships with women.

I would regard myself a man of many foibles and faults, complexities and failures with respect to life and human intimacies. I would also, without attempting apology or excuse, suggest that being a student of literature and criticism, religions and philosophies has brought special attention to certain issues of masculine intimacy. To wit, I have a few opinions about our problems and a few suggestions about what we need to do. Say what we might about the puerile mockery that comes with drumming circles and tearful confessionals, I think Robert Bly has over these past decades done us a serious solid. Every American man should, I think, make a careful study of his Iron John, The Sibling Society, and his Small Book on the Human Shadow. And more importantly, we should not undertake that task without first understanding that the content and concepts of these works highlight more fundamental problems. Let me make this a twofold issue. First, one of individual moral responsibility and choice, and second, one of our collective failure and need.

Men have not learned how to evolve much inner conversation, the real and deeper conversation they need to have with themselves. This conversation must not only look at personal history but it must also take history and sociology seriously, it must take matters of psychology and mythos to heart, it must evolve in ways that dedicate life to a kind of serious personal literacy, enquiry, and self-education. We are ignorant of ourselves, ill informed about nearly every serious subject, and unwilling to do the necessary work of auto-didacticism. We don’t read, don’t take time to contemplate and think, and we estrange our feelings and emotions because we have not created the required resources to develop any serious inner conversation. We cannot hope to become better human beings unless we commit to the content of our humanity as individuals with histories and needs. The constraints of modern life ---time, capitalism, and our willful anti-intellectualism--- are all part of the rationale we make not to work on ourselves. Garbage in, garbage out. We will not have much to work with if we don’t do any work. (Truth to tell, I think I can help with this. I’m not much for carpentry but I know a thing or two about books, ideas, and learning to learn.)

So our first major issue, I submit, is our individual moral lassitude. We will have to go to real lengths in this age of distractions and endless labor to make these efforts to learn more about what history, literature, and art can teach us. We are going to have to make time to think and feel, to register these ideas and our learning by integrating into our own personal stories. We are going to have to learn to write our own story and live with that. When we fail the humanities, we are sure to fail as human beings.

Most of us have never been taught to learn or to think; most of us have had debilitating, enfeebled education, and that means we don’t even know what we are missing because we never acquired much skill or pleasure from “book learning.” It’s not just a matter of poor schooling. Lincoln became himself by little more than his own temerity and without any encouragements from men in his childhood. He was depressed, beleaguered, and suffered but he made the effort to consider who he wanted to be by sheer dedication to self. And more pointedly, he took seriously words and ideas when others rejected his interests. In this age in which nearly all the resources of learning are available for free (it requires little in the way of privilege to access), our inaction and weakness reflects personal commitment that has never been properly kindled or inspired. We don’t do the work for ourselves because we have not been taught by those who have, and too few are willing to teach.

Somewhere between apathy and exhaustion we find every reason not to do for ourselves what would make us better. Better for ourselves and in the vital relationships that are demanded of us as human beings. Scolding like this may not help but it sure can’t hurt. The failure lies not only individuals but in groups, in our collective and how we act collectively. I call this enervation and ineptitude a “moral” failure for at least two reasons.

First, we will require extraordinary efforts. By this I mean extra, more than we are easily willing to admit or to do. We are going to have to make time and make commitments to ourselves. In Sanskrit we call this vrata and I’ll have more to say about that another time. Suffice it is rich and helpful but the core of it is that we are failing at a self-obligation because we are failing others by failing ourselves.

Second, the work is not going to be easy or necessarily fun, and in fact will likely be painful, tedious, and require industry that we’d rather forsake. There is not likely going to be a monetary payoff anymore than there is going to be less ardor as the work goes forward. It’s going to be hard and get harder. And--- you’re not going to like this either--- our proclivity to be doers over thinkers and feelers is going to also get in the way. My second point is that learning to learn and doing the work is going to feel a lot like an unwanted, sometimes hopeless task that’s going to make us feel stupid even as it threatens to bore us to death.

Tough luck, that’s part of the reason it’s a moral sensibility: it requires doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do, not because the bottom line might bring some pleasure or success. Now it’s not all just walking barefoot on Legos ™ for forty-one days in a jungle that is trying to kill you--- though I’d be happy to do that with you too. I’m not even kidding. It’s that as it goes faster and becomes more do-able, the work needs to go deeper and gets harder still. The reason why men have done so little work doesn’t reduce to this point but these disincentives are surely an important moral obstacle. We must face our moral obstacles and decide who we want to be. But to do even a little of that we must see our first level of obstacle as moral. We have to want to do good by becoming better. That’s a lot to ask and what you want may not be what you become but without that desire, well, you’re nothing.

Given these facts, we can’t count on much progress because most will not sign up for the work, much less do it. It’s unsafe and un-fun because we would have to change (a lot) and we’d have to think and feel with the same ardor that we seem to willing to do when things are easy and pleasurable. Katha Upanishad admonishes us not to mistake the good for the pleasurable and however we know that to be true, we have to commit to the deeds that make the difference and the distinction real. What we lack in mentors and leadership, which we so desperately need, we could possibly compensate some with if we were willing to make, as Bly suggested, a collective effort. Nothing quite motivates men to act like the competitions and coercions of other men. How to learn to learn from one another without allowing those challenges to devolve into anger, jealousy, and greed is another matter for our serious consideration.

There is nothing inherently wrong with competition ---there is nothing more natural about nature--- and when it is coupled to the paradox of cooperation we come closer to how we can both survive and flourish. We need a moral commitment to both so that we can act in collectives. Men need to check in on and check other men. Leadership needs to guide with competence and compassion but our strength will at last depend on our willingness to participate in ways that create more permeable and willing boundaries. We need more giving up to get, not loss of autonomy or personal choice as we manipulate ourselves to believe, but with a greater sense of compromise to advace the better angels of corruption. Let me explain that idea a bit further.

Men lock themselves up in certainty, conviction, and habituation. The older we get the harder it is to listen, to doubt, and to change. But to learn we must develop these resources and that means that we will have to move off our marks, sometimes compromise our most cherished or guarded convictions. 

Lincoln gives a good example here of what I mean. We can say honestly that he corrupted his personal convictions when he refused to side unequivocally with the cause and actions of the Abolitionists. He knew he was doing as much; he knew this was a serious moral failing on his part.  He accepted that failing and took to heart the shadow that came with his choice.  He suffered for it and will be ridiculed for it.  But what he did was important: he chose his shadow by reflecting seriously on power, authority, and moral failure.  He burned and he was illumined by this shadow, which entailed a reckoning with corruption.  He did it because, as McPherson and others have demonstrated, he made a political calculation that were he not more incremental and willing to corrupt his personal views then the politics around him would have left us far worse off. To wit, the end of slavery might never have happened had he lost the election on the basis of his uncompromised convictions, or it may have gone on another hundred years. But the argument is that he knew he corrupted himself but did it for a purpose deemed worthy, a more calculated but less justifiable morality. The same can be said of the story of Yudhisthira the Prince and Arjuna on the battlefield that is the Bhagavadgita. But the point is the same: To change we must admit some form of moral corruption but not fail the tests of moral lassitude or lose our moral conviction. We will need real learning and contemplation to know the differences here that can make all the difference.

So let me summarize this, our initial missive:
First, men must commit to themselves as individuals, as persons by recognizing their own desperate need for self-education and improvement. We are failures of personal character and this is moral failure because there are no amoral choices in life. Not to choose or to commit is to lapse. When those failures manifest in power then we get the likes of Cheney, Weinstein, and Trump. We torture, we abuse, and we fail in every way to create decency, integrity, and clarity of purpose. The process of change is going to be hard and that can’t be said too infrequently.

Truth is, I am not sanguine that our necessary project will trickle down or become in any way “popular.” If that were the case then the hard lessons of Mahabharata, Iliad, the poets and critics like Bly, Hitchens, and McCarthy would be our true guides. Instead the majority of men are deciding for Trump. We need to understand why that is true. To be reductive, it is true because are failing ourselves, we are not doing the work either as individuals or in the necessary collectives of conversation

What else would we be doing? We would be listening and reading women’s works to understand better our need to learn; we’d take these matters to heart and, honestly, that seems unlikely. Most would rather watch the game, ignore the issues, or vent their complaints by electing the worst manifestation of their shameless ID in the form of Trump. What it will take to evolve is going to be up to you because you’re not going to get much help from the majority of other men. Remember Thomas Lincoln had no use for Abe’s idle reading and talk. Who do you want to be will require courage because that is the prerequisite to virtue. We will not become good or better without that courage to engage. We will be few but that can make a difference even if it fails to make all the difference.

Second, we need to do this work fwith leadership and in collectives. It’s time to look each other in the eye and work on the material we need to learn together. We need a vast canon of conversation and we’re going to need more emotional intelligence to deal with one another. Bly long ago now lamented the lack of leadership and our unwillingness to act in collectives. We need ways to engage the shadow of our corruption and become better for it.  We cannot do this without acting together to understand these choices and experiences of success and failure.  No matter what you do for yourself and by yourself, that will not be enough. We need each other to compel the better angels.  

The poets are critical, so let’s for now end with one. Take this bit to heart and see what happens. This is not a process that brings immediate results nor can we expect enlightenment or breakthrough as much as the slow, often painful recognition of little by little, again and again. Tennyson is underestimated and while he may suffer from all sorts of shortcoming, the message here should not be forgotten:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
---Ulysses, lines 65-70

A Few Words about Dr. King and Donald Trump: A Reckoning with America's Light and Shadow

“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.”
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In celebration of Dr. King today it strikes me as particularly important to begin with the truth. We need a reckoning with truth itself and, as I see it, we are both succeeding and failing in our aspirations. With Trump the truth itself is under siege. What he deems “fake” is true and his alternative narratives, the ”alternative truth”--- better known by it’s real name, "lying"--- holds nearly half the population in its throes. The very structures of democracy depend on credibility and trust as we contend for meaning. However we have contested in the past for policy and ideology, we today contest for the facts and for the integrity that is necessary to sustain even a semblance of decency. Truth will only fail us if we fail to tell the truth.

We must ask ourselves who we want to be by examining who we really are, who we have been, what we could become. Only by facing the truths of history will we find the better angels of our nature. We have never been wholly truthful or honest with ourselves as a nation and so have yet to enter this conversation as seriously as we might. Now is a particularly good time because Trump is everything about America that we know we have been and the very form of all we must not be or become.

So let us be plain: we have before us in Trump--- this vile, corrupt racist and incompetent narcissist---an example of all that America must never _truly_ become, the very rejection of our ideals, a person who fails even the most elementary tests of decency. In Dr. King's teaching and in his memory we can create an alternative that speaks to an America that we might become, one that is more honest, decent, and true to its impossible propositions. In Dr King we have a chance to ask ourselves about both our failures and our hopes. We can learn about an America that has in its shadow a more vivid possibility for understanding our true identity and our possibilities. That true identity includes the institutions and structures of systemic white supremacy that are as real as our most cherished and valued propositions of equality. We have failed to take our shadow seriously and today, on Dr. King's birthday, I think we have yet another opportunity to reflect. Everyday could be a "new birth of freedom" if we choose King over Trump.

Let us begin with Charles Blow who offers us a useful definition: "Racism is simply the belief that race is an inherent and determining factor in a person’s or a people’s character and capabilities, rendering some inferior and others superior." Trump is racist. Period. This is what Blow and all of us recognize to be a fact. There is no alternative fact or plausible interpretation of his words or behaviors.

Our American racism is built not only on a history that includes the institution of slavery as lawful but on the value of white supremacy as its foundational basis. The history of our politics is the history of these facts, Trump's facts. Trump is a white supremacist, racist as the day is long and the night longer still. This implicit claim to white supremacy is as _fundamental_ to the origins of America as the immortal words of our self-evident truths and ideals. This is America’s shadow truth that follows its light.

To be clear:
White supremacy values, which appear plainly in the American Constitution as law, in the correction of the 13th Amendment, in the entire history of our inequality under the law, are the great shadow truth of America. Lincoln, Kennedy, Johnson, Obama, and King particularly give voice to _both_ the light and the shadow that forms us. They all knew that the words of the Declaration are but half our story, the light of impossible but beautiful declarations of human possibility. We are _not_ ALL light, not in politics, not in spirit, or in any honest assessment of human reality. We are humans seeking a more perfect union with our better selves only when we are willing to see the shadow that follows along with the light.

Trump makes it plain that we are failing and that his very presence in the office of the Presidency is a reminder of our failure. That failure is both political and moral, it is factual and deeply embedded in our national character and in our individual experiences. We speak as if there is only the light of freedom to which we must aspire, but the truth cuts more deeply. To understand America is to see those higher aspirations in the burning light of the truth of our pain, our failure, our shadow that is so vividly presented in the person and in the presidency of Trump.

There will be no American greatness until we embrace both the shadow and the light of our deepest truths. Jefferson the slave owner put into words our light, our most precious ideals, as did the incrementalist and flawed presidency and person of Lincoln. Today we celebrate Dr. King, himself a complex person of great light and real shadow. We know he had his own demons and personal failures. Are any of us exempt? Had he lived I believe he would have had the opportunity to confront these facts of self and politics with even greater honesty.

But what King brings so vividly to our Amercian story and to our spiritual hearts is the acknowledgement that our shadow is just as real as the light that burns brightly. King understood that our founding was not only rooted in uplifting aspirations of the Declaration but in the facts of the Constitution that reveals our deeply flawed American character.

As a nation have not prepared ourselves to do that work, we show little interest in engaging our great task. We argue with and about Trumpism but what we are seeing is a citizenry unprepared and largely unwilling to contend with the contradictions of our history.

In Trump we have a tragic opportunity: he is that darkness of our shadow. Today we celebrate King as the light that can look into that shadow. Dr King gave us an alternative, a land of hopes and dreams that will not forsake the immortal words, even if they were composed by a slave owner, ensconced in our flawed immorality. He taught us, and invited us to look into our souls and to see the darkness as clearly as the light, to examine and contend with the shadow of America so that we might yet create a vision of the shining castle on the hill. It is a day to celebrate King's possibilities and to refute just as plainly the falsity and corruption that is Trumpism, America's latest failure of its greatest promise.

“Religion” We Can Live With: An Essay on Belief and the Impossible

I was born to believe and I’ve spent my life trying that on. It’s not for lack of trying but I’m a believer in nothing supernatural. And I’d rather not quibble over what “supernatural” means either. I won’t substitute either a belief in humans or some claim to the goodness of humanity. What’s important about belief is that we need it, like the air we breathe, just to do the next thing, however ordinary or sublime. Belief is the task of reckoning with what comes next. Belief is how we address the possible, for better and worse.

Now, if there is anything left of “belief” by the time I am done with this, it will be that belief needs strange company to do its job, to perform the tasks of making do. That companion is religion, which when I am done with that, will be nothing more than reckoning with the impossible.

As a religion professor I think about what “religion” means all the time. I cringe just to say that about myself, or even confess to my chosen profession. I’m often embarrassed to say that I am a University Professor of Religion. Truth is, religion and the professing part chose me and I’m usually none too happy about either of those things. When we are really lucky in life we not only do the thing we need to do, we find a way to make a living doing it.

I used to defend religion as a subject, the one that can be our catch-all for all that is culture--- the place to study art and music, history and language, the refuge for a humanist who wants all that philosophy, politics, and human reflection can create. Add into the mix the irrational, the indirect, the mythic, poetic, and the pageantry of ritual, consider how the truths of feeling write over reason at every turn, and there you have it, a subject to embrace for its humanist possibilities. I still make that argument when I need either to defend my place in a humanities curriculum or console myself for a lifetime of choices. But nearly all of that is apologetics, self-consolation, mere rationalization. Religions deserve no excuse, certainly warrant no privilege or exemption, and still we must study them.

No sane person can dismiss religion’s role in oppression and horror and, more occasionally, in altruism and beauty. And given the fact that nearly everything about religious belief that is not art and imagination invites charlatanism, absents seriousness, and calls upon stupidity, we are all left wondering how to collect ourselves, where to put the stories that endure past the individual memories that possess them. We can say we are socialized with religions but that is something we can study too. We need nothing from religions to be moral, however much we need to learn how to be moral to be human. We long for irrefragable values or principles to guide us, but however we take a stand for more enduring truths, our most noble confessions serve us better as ideals and beacons. It is the power of questions over answers that will occasionally save religion from itself.

Let me pose the matter in more candid, even less romantic terms. If we can make religion a question, I would make it this: how can humans create more than cruelties of self-interest? Religion may offer ideas, even examples, but humans prefer to reject the tawdry facts of power and the criticism that must follow from honest questions. We instead prefer to look for immaculate answers and tell ourselves there is a plan, a mystery, an anything to console the pain or justify the unjustifiable. We must find room to celebrate and illumine hope because without those things, well, we know what will happen without those things. Life needs to celebrate life, not merely endure its tragedies.

It’s taken me nearly a whole life--- and my entire professional life--- to realize ‘religion’ is not my favored subject, at least not “religion” by any conventional definition and all of the historical unraveling of the strange human phenomena it features. My subject preferred subject is our humanity, with a special turn towards thinking about the impossible. For just one moment, maybe even just here, I want “religion” to mean the entirely human pursuit of holding the world together. We do this with words and art, with ideas, values, with the collective power of institutions, the unconscious, and the longing for life and liberty. We want a world that holds together, and if that is the meaning of “religion” then we’re on firm ground. That definition would take us back to the etymology of the word “religion” itself but we need not digress there.

This holding the world together is something we do all the time; something we need to do no matter how we acknowledge it or pursuit it unwittingly. That historical religions have been dishonest in offering serious answers about ‘holding together the world’ is a feature of power, not an absence of human imagination. There is phrase in the Gita that makes this idea I am calling “religion” plain; it’s actually a simple compound in Sanskrit, lokasamgraha. Literally it means “grasp together the world.”

“Holding the world together” is what Krishna says when he is asked why he acts at all. Yeats knew too the fact we all know: the center cannot hold. The Buddhists made it the very feat of liberation to release into that void, claiming there was never a need to hold on to anything at all. But no matter who we ask, we all know that we cannot hold the center, and neither can anything else. So I add here: not God or Buddha, certainly no self-proclaimed or, far worse, declared to be saint. Our more human task is the impossible, and that is something I can embrace, something I can believe in.

I can love the impossible not because it is someone or anything that can solve our problem or answer my question. Not because Krishna will save the day any better than anyone else. I can love the futility and abhor the hypocrisy of “love thy neighbor,” “may all men [sic] be created equal,” that we are “dedicated to a proposition,” you name it: a thing of beauty is a joy forever. The list goes on, doesn’t it?

I can love the impossible because I can also reject the implausible ---may that I walk on water, find the god to save me, be freed from suffering and all beings be happy. If that can’t happen then I can go about the more dangerous business of admitting to the terms of a shared humanity. We aspire to what cannot be and are better for it, or we can be better for it if that is what we aspire to be.

We can seek a humanity that knows love is always imperfect, knowledge always provisional, life’s conditions permit only human achievements and certain failures. I can’t achieve anything impossible, but I can believe in impossible things like freedom, life, the majesty of imagination, and the consolations of human touch. Our human arc towards the impossible sometimes touches greatness but that greatness fails to be perfect, or just fails, does not dishearten me. To love the impossible tells us we can be more than our cruel self-interest, however flawed we might be for the trying, however the center does not hold. We are not going to be free when we know that and nothing special is going to happen; we gain no privilege when we create impossible beliefs, but we might gain a few reasons to love life. We are going to have to try, no matter what, until we can no longer. When we give up on the impossible that serves self-delusion and cruelty, the impossible that is left is worth our hope and every effort.

Religion has created all the worst impossibilities and yet features the impossible as its most important claim. To study the impossible is to ask what is worth living for and how we might hold this world together when we know that will not last. To study those impossibilities is to examine human folly in the midst of great creativity, aspiration, from inside a heart aspiring to decency and goodness. People have always used religion to hold their center, which is another way of saying that whatever we use to hold our center is our religion. However that may be too loaded, too uncomfortable a definition because of all the things religion already is. But we can still say the impossible matters in human life. I revel in the impossible task that claims this being born human is a wonder and a chance to savor what is possible by seeking what rages and burns, what soothes and consoles, all that engages and inspires us to revel in the impossible.

Moving Aside and Moving Forward: The Rot vs. The Circular Firing Squad

Today's one screed is brought to you by multiple editorials in the WaPo, NYT, etc., all inspired by Righties embarrassed but not enough by being Republicans. They are still wrong. The Left, meh. Not a winner. You needn't read further if you just came for the 411.

As a kid I thought the best version of the Star Spangled Banner was Hendrix, the best version of a politician was Bobby Kennedy and Shirley Chisholm, that a judge should think like Thurgood Marshall, and then much later than that Presidents could look like Barack Obama. Everything, and I mean everything, that those leaders thought should be the future is under threat, being rolled back, or destroyed.

As soon as we stereotype we lose the difference between a likely demographic, which has documentable features that can point to expected patterns of behavior, and incipient bigotries, blanket condemnations. I submit that the Left is just as likely to fail to make this distinction as the Right. Substitute the stereotype for the demographic and there's any easy choice that is, in truth, not going to prove helpful. (Let's use "Left" and "Right" rather loosely enough, okay?)

On the Left there are substantive differences in viewpoints and policies. Or are there? There are certainly other kinds of real difference in terms of age, culture, ethnicity, etc. There are substantive differences no matter what leadership thinks or what people want. The Left is likely to shoot its dissenters. On the Right there is in both substance and fact no important differences--- I will return to this point. The Right in America is white, older, and almost all members of the same religion (or that weird other thing that makes evangelicals put Israeli flags next to their Confederate flags--- I have -seen- this where I live.)

But first, Lefties might have some spectrum of economics and different priorities based on ideological, even ethical views. For example, on the death penalty or 2nd Amendment rights, people inclined to vote for the Left may have substantive differences. Lefty leadership might want to think twice or more about imposing litmus and purity tests or it can be happy to stay in the powerless wilderness with their principles intact. I am not sanguine about any Left leadership. I am an anachronism. Bobby, Thurgood, and Hendrix are dead. Obama can't help us because the Right had an effective plan to render him largely ineffective. They succeeded, for the most part, because he failed to rally the Left and the Left failed to make its case. Left leadership coming up the ranks seems to me, well, just as lost but I am willing to concede any role to them. Let them try. Personally, I'm on to do the last 15 years of my own work.

Much of the criticism of the Right about Lefties silencing and censorship, purity tests and branding whole groups as enemies has at least some merit. What they say about academia may be exaggerated, often silly, but it is not entirely wrong. I work there and there's plenty of ideological loyalty standards for someone to be in or out. It's not a friendly place unless you're on one and the same bus. Righties are, however, far, far worse hypocrites. I choose the lesser of two weevils.

When David Brooks, Scarborough, Gerson, Rubin, Wehner, along with Flake and Corker and Collins lament the fate of the Republican Party's turn to Trumpism, they all fail to acknowledge their complicity and hypocrisy. They did this. They cheered the Tea Party and the white nationalists until it just got to be too ugly. If the faces of those fanatics were just slightly less ugly, they would still be cheering. The real issue is that they are not _substantively_ different. All Alabama had to do was put up one of their candidates ---whose Senate votes would be just as regressive, driven by oligarchs, and proven failed policies-- and they would have won in a landslide. There is no _effective_ difference between Roy Moore and Luther Strange and Mitch McConnell and the rest of them know this.

Right policies are anachronistic, failed (think e.g., trickledown), and worst of all willingly and shamelessly imposed on the majority. They are also racist and sexist and that will eventually hurt them more than it does now. They have created non-majoritarian rule, not governance based on compromise, and there is nothing about any revision to the Republican Party that will change that. How many pro-choice Republicans are there?

In contrast there actually are on the Left views about abortion that offer some shades of difference. Interestingly, the Left is more libertarian than the Right, move live and let live. Or is it? But that's another argument. I'm not trying to argue a position here, I'm merely pointing out that Republican/Right _rot_ is entire, that there is nothing _at all_ about the Right that allows the rest of us, the majority, any room. The question is: will the Left make room for difference, the difference it claims to represent?

The issue I see is twofold. Democrats are the only hope for the republic's _survival_ since Republicans seek the End Times. Lefties who fail to acknowledge how the system works will, as usual, fail. Will they lead with shades of ideological difference? A real inclusive that means a "middle"? This means the Left has to find room for more points of view _or_ it can just become the Not The Right party. Divided we stand? That could work for now. I think the Right might force this position and they will still lose because they are extremists and the majority knows this.

But for Democrats to win and be _for_ something, they are going to have to take that big tent of their coalitions and try to avoid the circular firing squad routine. So far, they have not shown me they can do that. So I am not yet for Democrats, I am just wholly opposed to Republicans. That might be enough to get me through the bonus period of life. The future is up for grabs.