HAS DAVID BROOKS GONE CRAZY?

David Brooks

Though I don’t often read David Brooks’ columns, mostly because I’ve usually hit my pay-wall limit before I get to him in the NYTimes, but also because of his conservatism. I enjoy his exchanges on NPR with E.J. Dionne, and always respected him.  But now I think he’s off his rocker.  The most recent column includes this:

Lisa Miller is a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University. One day she entered a subway car and saw that half of it was crowded but the other half was empty, except for a homeless man who had some fast food on his lap and who was screaming at anybody who came close.

At one stop, a grandmother and granddaughter, about 8, entered the car. They were elegantly dressed, wearing pastel dresses and gloves with lace trim. The homeless man spotted them and screamed, “Hey! Do you want to sit with me?” They looked at each other, nodded and replied in unison, “Thank you” and, unlike everybody else, sat directly next to him.

The man offered them some chicken from his bag. They looked at each other and nodded and said, “No, thank you.” The homeless man offered several more times, and each time they nodded to each other and gave the same polite answer. Finally, the homeless man was calmed, and they all sat contentedly in their seats.

Miller was struck by the power of that nod. “The nod was spirituality shared between child and beloved elder: spiritual direction, values, taught and received in the loving relationship,” she writes in her book “The Spiritual Child.”

Carefully blow-dried Lisa Miller

Miller defines spirituality as “an inner sense of relationship to a higher power that is loving and guiding.”   She claims it can heal adolescent depression, substance abuse, and etc.  I could not differ more from this gray/blonde pop journalism writer.  She is an example of discombuberated education, always guided by some authority (like God) and always focused on “being nice,” esp. to stigmatized lesser beings, always showing the rest of the crowd how they should act.

My interpretation of what was going on in that train car was that this grandmother was from a different country or rural down south, a place a lot safer than NYCity.  A person raving and dirty (how else would she know he was homeless) might be pretty dangerous, maybe insane or maybe on drugs.  One should leave a lot of space around him.  If he offers food, you have no way to know whether it were clean or refrigerated.  He may have gotten it out of the garbage.  Eat it yourself, but don't give your kid a stomach-ache.

The gloves with lace trim are the real tip-off that this is fantasy.  Only Michael Jackson and working men wear gloves now.  Well, except for latex.  Spirituality has NOTHING to do with whether a person wears pastel clothes or gloves.  It doesn’t even have anything to do with treating crazy people nicely.  Miller is describing a part of the social contract (Rousseau, remember) which is about behavior, esp. in public.  It is about church on Sunday morning, but not about the content of the liturgy practiced there.  

It is not about the SACRED, but about propriety.  Brooks' previous book was "The Social Animal," but he seems to be describing the lonely animal.  I'm reminded of a student minister who took the Sunday service in the church I attended in the Seventies.  His subject was supposed to be Paul Tillich's idea of "ultimacy," which is close to spirituality, an urging to think at the outside edges, far beyond mere humans.  Instead, this young man lamented that he had no date for the weekend. That was his "most important" ultimate.

This imaginary woman is not helping the child learn how to survive in today’s world, she is exposing her to present danger and possibly setting her up for a terrible disillusionment later in life, maybe the dreaded depression and maybe even suicide.  (Has she thought about the scientific observation that depression is paralyzing and often PREVENTS suicide until the depression begins to clear?)  I am more convinced that suicide is a product of rage, often at a cruel God.  Sometimes at grandmothers who have managed to evade reality.

This story is a set-up -- fried chicken indeed!  The innocent Sunday dinner bought at a KFC drive-up window.  No thought about how it got to the deep fat fryer.  Just comfort food via dumpster diving.

This trivialization and emptying of a big ultimate concept like spirituality is not just due to the secularization of the country according to the statistics about nones (those who don’t attend or claim any church).  Brooks' idea of the “spiritual” is partly sentimentality about the past and partly contempt for the social contract.  “I’m too good to relate to anyone but God. Therefore I will not participate in any efforts to make the world a better place for other people, esp if they are in a category I dislike.  Or if it will cost me money.”

The world's largest superconducting solenoid magnet at the European Organisation 

for Nuclear Research (CERN)'s Large Hadron Collider

The secular has more ultimates than church.

My idea of the spiritual is old-fashioned but not based on ideas like "God" or proper baptism or wearing pastel clothes.  It is being gripped by a sense of the Holy, feeling intensely the relationship of Being itself in all its variety and surprise, and dissolving the separations that confine us to our own narrow lives.  It is FELT, not reasoned, and it is often unexpected.  It can easily be defined by society as madness.  The shouting man in the story might be the spiritual one.

Miller’s other dumb idea is that she thinks spirituality can be taught and she thinks it should be taught in schools regardless of the separation of church and state.  But the Sacred is often claimed by political forces using specific religious terms.  The deepest value of Spirituality is that no one owns it or controls it.  There is no practice that will guarantee contact with it.  It is not anthropomorphic but rather about the mystical existence of everything.  For instance, many people had this experience on first seeing the photos of the planet earth from outer space.  We’ve grown used to this now.  Maybe the deepest space where the stars are born has that capacity.  Still, Spirituality doesn’t have to be so cosmic -- it might be dew on the grass early in the morning.

The farthest we can see so far.

Much of my writing is aimed towards boys at risk, their identities nearly destroyed by what they have endured, sometimes at the hands of their grandmothers.  They are not pastel.  We say they are “very dark,” and most fight schools as hard as they can because it means confinement, criticism and losing their autonomy.  In short, they are like the characters in the dystopic movies and music that are so popular.  How can this not be true after hearing or watching the news? 

Luckily, there are many comments on this misguided -- even nutty -- Brooks column (more than two hundred so far).  Some are pretty insightful -- the ones that aren’t trying to offer their own personal allegiance as an example of Spirituality.   This constant assertion that “I know best -- do what I say,” is infuriating.  But what undermines and disperses Spirituality more thoroughly is the Mommie sentimentality.  Of course, that’s the way parts of the whole culture have been going.  No dragons.  Just predator drones.

I want a new word to replace the pastel and lace-trimmed corruption of “Spirituality.” I have no idea what it is.  Maybe something like “cosmic fusion.”  Oceanic feeling is not bad.  After all, on this planet that’s probably where life began.  You don’t have to take a course or join a group to be a eukaryote.  There are many ways to take the Eucharist, many of them extremely bloody, literal carnal fusion.

CONFESSION/ASSURANCE OF PARDON

The classic confessional furniture

This second step of my little five-step schema is the least defined and understood by me, and yet I see value in it.  In the places that I find it, all Christian, this “confession of sin” paired with “assurance of pardon” is always in terms of religious dogma.  It is specific.  Maybe it comes out of the relationship with a powerful being who has control of one’s survival and welfare.  This quickly pushes one into the problem of “theodicy,” which is that if God is the “good parent” who forgives and teaches, then why would he seem so punishing and arbitrary, so vengeful and destructive?

There is a difference between public communal "confession/pardon" and the private act between priest and petitioner.  The "box" has become a symbol of private corruption and victimization.  Priests now sit on a chair next to but reversed in direction from the person and they sit in plain sight, sometimes in the middle of a big space or in an open alcove room.

There is a second problem with a confession/forgiveness formulation which is one of dimension.  If one is confessing little tiny crimes, social blunders, why waste God’s time?  Why not just shrug and find better things to do?  But if the sin confessed is a criminal act, we no longer put God above the law.  Confidentiality is a very shaky concept.   

This paired sequence is key to the current angst sweeping the world's conscience, the church’s problems with destruction of the innocent.  But is the Pope’s audience with symbolic representatives of priest rape victims, and even his personal apology, enough to compensate for broken lives?  Is the US payment in reparation for unjust treatment of slaves or interned Japanese citizens enough?   Is any amount of money ever enough for moral, emotional, physical suffering?  

Why is it confession of sin instead of petition for redress of suffering?  Why do we assume that suffering is produced by sin, either ours or that of others against us?  Is virtue any kind of defense from harm?  Doesn't virtue sometimes make us suffer?  Why do we want a fully detailed admission of sin?  What difference can it make if the damage is already done?  What if it was a sin without perceptible damage?  (What would that be like?)  What if it were far away and long ago, like the fact that my ancestors kept slaves on sugar plantations?  Is this a kind of bookkeeping?

One of the reasons I got so interested in “worship” or “liturgy” or “ceremony” in the first place was that so much of what I sat through on Sunday morning was self-indulgent, miniature, trivial, hackneyed.  I was looking for something that was either deep or vast, Tillich’s “ultimate”.  Instead I heard stuff that was political, therapizing, sociologically in a box (usually middle-class, surburban), making (in Annie Dillard’s words) teeny-tiny statues to teeny-tiny gods.

I came to the conclusion that the confessions were teeny-tiny because once the whole concept of God comes into question (which it has), then our assurance of pardon stops working, because there is no one to give assurance.  The idea of such a thing is connected to kingship and legal records.  And yet the whole idea of a religious formulation is to give a person enough relief to proceed with life calmly and effectively.  We don’t want to cringe in dread of a thunderbolt -- nothing would ever get done.  Maybe we'd accumulate amulets and garlic wreaths for our necks.  Superstition, voodoo, indulgences.

The UUA had a kit called “Why Do Bad Things Happen?”  (It was assumed we were all “good people.”)  There were ten “reasons,” including “because you did something wrong,” “because your ancestor did something wrong,” “you will be compensated in Heaven,” “everyone is essentially bad,” “it’s all just an illusion,” “you’re earning your release from the wheel of suffering,”  “God is the only entity able to know the reason.”  Then there is ONE formulation of why good things happen, which I don’t remember.  It would seem obvious that it would run along the lines of “because you set out to do it,” or “it’s a matter of cooperation with others of good will.”

The point I would make is that this sort of reasoning has to fit the socio-ecology of the place and time.  This is why religions are always local, even if the "locality" is the span of the galaxies.  (“Why do you think what any human does matters at all?  You are so very tiny and brief.”)  There are philosophical positions like this, but I can’t think of any bureaucracy that has gone to the trouble of developing a whole institution about despair.  Maybe academia?  Is it existentialism?

This sketch was once a depiction of trust and protection.

Now it gives aware people the shudders at the predation that was protected.

So the main consideration to this mind and emotion expanding element is to provide dimension and identity to the proceedings.  It could be dropped out.  If it is included, then the assurance of pardon must be commensurate with the confession of sins.  When media (writing or film) take on the Roman Catholic rite of formal Confession as a preparation for Communion which is supposed to be real absolution and restoration in faith, the narrative often mocks either the sin (little boys confessing to wet dreams) or the penalty (ten repetitions of “Hail Mary”).  Few stories address the sin of the abusing priest.

The church itself collaborates with this by not following through on the penalties, like denial of Communion or excommunication.  It has not even enforced preventative remedies like de-frocking of priests who are predators.  In terms of church doctrine, the idea is that Communion administered by such a priest is effective because he is only the instrument and not the source of grace which is from God and supernatural.  Why would a perfect God protect a betraying instrument?  Is that not a sacrilege?  Are not all the priest's acts annulled?  It’s a morass.

A “felt” sense of brokenness, limitation, regret, and so on, could be met by a “felt” sense of pardon, inclusion, restoration, and “healing,” though I hate to invoke a word that takes on so much trivialization these days, probably because we have medicalized so much that was once considered a matter of transcendence.  For many, if not most, people a circle of understanding and forgiving people is an effective source of forgiveness, which is often defined as “inclusion,” particularly if one accepts the common definition of “sin” as being separated from God.  That’s a little too close to social exclusion to suit me.  Social standards of who is “us” and who should be ostracized are far too relative and easily converted into overt evil, the source of stigma and even holocaust when whole populations are defined as legitimate targets of God’s wrath.  (God’s little helpers standing by with machetes.)

If persons composing an event are doing something small and personal, maybe habitual like daily prayer, there’s no need to get grandiose.  If the awareness of sin/assurance of pardon is meant to be reaching out to others, a effort at mercy, then it must be defined on THEIR terms, what constitutes THEIR wound and what will close it.  Middle class people who assume they know what is right and good become a new affliction, not a support.  Maybe what I’m saying is that none of this post is meant to be a dogma, a doctrine, a syllogism, a legal requirement, a recipe, but simply one way of interpreting going about the act of empowering the brain connectome to reach the meta-level of reflection on our assumptions, a creative approach to action in the world.  These are a kind of transcendence.