PERSONAL COMPASSION VS. OBJECTIVE JUSTICE

This is a parable.  Two men on a river bank spotted a baby floating in the water, clearly drowning, and then another baby and another, so one man swam out to save as many babies as he could and the other ran upstream to find out what was making babies fall in the river, so he could prevent it.  The first time I heard this tale was when the first black Portland City Commissioner told it.  Since then I’ve heard it many times, as well as other versions.  It is about the insolubility of the choice between compassion for the single innocent victim and preventive justice for an entire category.  One cannot exclude the other.  Some people lean in one direction and other people lean in the other, but they must work together to be effective.

A most crucial tension of our times has been that between the community and the individual -- reacting to one baby or reacting to all babies.  Should we focus on the suffering and death of the individual baby?   Or to all babies in general?   Which is more important, my compassionate reaction to the baby, or my desire to find ways to save all babies?  So a moral conservative might want to save from abortion this specific “tiny little baby” (as they always put it, though not all babies are those pictured by Gerber), but fails to see that on a broad social level, far more babies will suffer in the long run unless they emerge into a world where they are wanted and cared for, a result that can only be reached by vigorous contraception and judicious abortion when necessary.   An alternative might be community responsibility for all babies through funding for counseling, material needs, and effective education on all levels.  Willingness to produce the money and energy necessary for this has only been present in circumscribed communities.  Of course, tribes find it natural to do this, but at a much lower level.  All children are the village’s children, so they all take responsibility for raising them but in those circumstances it’s a different sort of job.

These days it’s hard to defend idealism.  One needs consensus and, anyway, we’ve been so horrified by so much ripping away of masks that cynicism seems the only intelligent point of view.  And yet in some of the list-servs lately I see requests for papers about EUtopias -- good worlds.  What might they be like?  The trouble is that my good world might not be the same as your good world.  Even sharper, my good world at seventy is not the same as the good world of a person who is sixteen right now, even if we’re in the same small town.  How do we reconcile?  In my dog-catching days I used to propose that all the people with barking dogs should live on one side of town and all the people who wanted peace and quiet should live on the other side.  Who lives on the boundary between them?

If we can’t reach consensus about dogs or babies, what hope is there of reaching some understanding of how society regards sex?  Some of us feel it is natural and that intelligent people can manage consequences like pregnancy or diseases.  Some of us  (Oh, “US”? as though Congo brutes were like me?)  use forced sex against conscience -- painful and deadly, zombifying, destructive of all beloved relationships -- as acts of war.  Rape is used to destroy identity in ways that prevent ever living gracefully in the world again.  In short, EVIL  In that case our own defense seems to be limited to avoidance.  Denial.

So we manage not to know about it.  How can either justice or compassion come to bear on such a double aspect of being human: the best of things and the worst of things?  So full of pain, even at the level of second-hand empathy, and yet, at its best, so creating of trust?  Where can the justice possibly be?  Who can judge and who can devise a sentence?  How do we keep from hardening off into good versus bad?  Because the deepest impulse is to get control of people who do Evil and punish or eliminate them.  But what they wanted in the first place was power over US.  Thus the motivation on both sides.

I’m beginning to read Howard Bloom’s “The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History.”  This guy is not that literary sort of Anglophone conservative professor who offends feminists.  This one has lots of credentials -- he’s a polymath -- but he’s ALSO part of the Rock and Roll world that some people consider the very plow’s nose for Evil.  This is a 1995 book, which means it’s bound to be behind the curve, but right now that’s probably where I belong.  He’s a synthesizer: a reverser; kinda Jungian.  That is, Lucifer is a Fallen Angel and humans are Gollom, craving both the prize, the power of the ring, and to be enslaved by a master.  We want to be right and we don’t trust anyone else to get us there.

I peeked at the end.  Bloom is saying “pluralistic democracy.”  That depends on nations.  When he was writing there was nothing like the nation-erasing Internet that is webbing the world now.  It’s revealing secrets, turning out tyrants, but at the same time revealing what you’re thinking and just where you’re standing right now in case some government, some drug mafia, some secret intelligence agency, some madman stalker is trying to rub you out.  That’s one-by-one.  On a larger scale it’s also a way to juggle and intercept arms and drugs so as to let nations die of AIDS (already approaching fifty percent infection rates) by withholding the meds or die of starvation or internal wars.  I get so intense about this that I become a little incoherent.

Bloody Mother Nature creates millions and millions of babies and then kills most of them by simply adjusting the climate or sliding tectonic plates under nuclear reactors.  (all that cradling and feeding is one-by-one).  Those who survive will be tomorrow’s people.  Nassim Taleb keeps talking about “robustness,” by which he means (at least in part) survival qualities.  The small, the deeply rooted, the most naturally pleasing and nourishing.  He comes back to a shared meal in a tavern or on a noonday plaza.  Nothing fancy.  Often repeated.  A cradle for ideas.

CAUGHT DIRTY HANDED

“Wash your hands!” cry flu epidemiologists, mothers, nurses, and Tim Barrus.  That last because he cares for boys with HIV, meaning they have no immunity to germs and no ability to develop immunity.  When I took a job at a nearby county nursing home as ward clerk, I thought that since I sat in an office at a computer, hand-washing was not so crucial.  I bristled and balked at the infection control nurse whom I thought was a bully and took her position as an excuse to target and persecute people.  

My neighbor thought I was funny when I described my feelings about this nurse.  When she took a job as a nurse’s aide in the same place, she had the same class in hand-washing and she liked it, thought it was very worthwhile.  One looks at statistics and microscope photos of germs.  One puts red indicator stuff on the hands and then tries to wash it off to illustrate that it takes a lot of careful scrubbing with systematic effort and time.  One is supposed to scrub hands for as long as it takes to sing “Happy Birthday.”   Then one day my neighbor discovered that an unknown aide had stored a wheelchair with feces caked onto it.  She quit.

The best protection is human effort.  Only motivation can protect us.  But there is a webwork of forces in play.  One of the most unexpected and difficult to address has been antibiotics, the miracle med that changed everything for childbirth and war trauma.  They were such an effective force that it was thought justifiable to be more casual about surgery sterility or ordinary patient care.  But antibiotics became a blunt-force weapon, used even for viruses, which antibiotics do not affect.  They are useful only for bacterial germs.  And the fact that when given to livestock as a preventative, they released energy in the animal that let them grow larger faster, meant that they crept into meat.  A third force was that people took their pills casually, not completing the full span of what the doctor prescribed and giving their leftovers to friends or children with the thought of doing a healing kindness.  On the rez they became a political element with patients who were refused antibiotics by doctors who said they were wrong for the diagnosis becoming irate and demanding them, thinking that they were being denied a magic element out of racism.  All these things left germs opportunities to mutate resistance.  

Leland Ground was in my original English class of seventh graders when I was first hired in Browning, Montana, in 1961.  His family is distinguished (some will recognize the name of Mary Ground as a ceremonialist and matriarch) and that particular class was also identified as high achievers.  (In those days we weren’t afraid to say so.)  Decades ago Leland was in an auto accident that badly broke his leg.  Surgery mended the bone with rods and screws.  Over the years the screws worked loose, so about five years ago Leland went back for more surgery.  A veteran, he used the VA hospital.  

His leg became infected with a MRSA -- methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.  The next four years were hand-to-hand combat on the part of both Leland and his dedicated doctor to save his leg from amputation.  Antibiotics, even the ones that are reserved for worst cases, failed.  Installing ports through his skin for dripping antibiotics directly into Leland’s system, which he did daily himself at home, failed.  Except that it caused nausea and memory lapses, general fogging of thought.  Re-opening the incision to clean it out failed.   Radioactive tagging of the infection so as to follow it into the bone failed.  The doctor did not give up.  He finally won.  The whole VA system has been struggling with this and now the media are beginning to report success.

Another person in that class of seventh graders was Mike McKay -- from another distinguished and achieving Blackfeet family.  For some years a while ago he was in charge of cleaning and maintenance of the Browning Indian Health Service hospital.  Once he said something offhand to me about it not being a very high status job (one brother is a lawyer and  a sister is the superintendent of the Browning Public Schools).  I jumped all over him!  He had one of the highest responsibilities on the rez!  He was a crucial partner of the doctors!  Since then he has gone back to college for graduate degrees in science.

Among the things the VA tried -- besides hand-washing -- was changing protective gowns between rooms, wearing masks, and more completely sterilizing rooms.  No matter what they tried, it was effective EXCEPT that people wouldn’t do it.  They were in a hurry, they didn’t really believe it mattered, they forgot.  It was expensive.  The experts could get maybe eighty per cent compliance, tops.

Another strategy was to test patients as they came in to see whether they were carrying MRSA germs, so as to isolate them for treatment.  This is controversial and opinions differ about how effective it is, but everyone was surprised to see the results of the tests -- so many germs!  So wicked!  The best result was that when people could see the extent of the problem, they bought into the solution and tried harder.

But there is another entirely different school of thought out there.  Immunity results from an interaction with the environment.  Medical interventions like vaccination are only an imitation of responses normally triggered by mild infections.  They are good because some of the infections are NOT so mild, in fact, deadly.  (There is backlash even against  vaccination from people who fear interventions with nature.)  Apart from the major diseases that sweep around the planet, killing people in pandemics that keep populations within previously unexceeded limits, there is constant daily interaction between creature and ecology that “teaches” the body how to live there.  Scientists who are thinking along these lines think we don’t get enough dirt in our systems to connect our bodies to the web around us.

Small wonder.  Chemical companies are making fortunes by promoting fear of germs and contamination and then selling us potent “sterilizing” molecules that go to work on the cells of our own bodies, interfering with the systems that control our functioning.  Now we’re beginning to fear those substances and move to “steam cleaning.”  It seems like a better alternative though it means yetanother expensive appliance.

That bossy nurse with her bar of soap was right.  Wash your hands.  But no need to get phobic about it.  No need to boil the patient to cure disease.  Though Leland, who has a strong sense of the ridiculous, laughed when I suggested he unscrew his leg, boil it, and then reinstall it.

CONSOLING THE WINDIGO

Brace yourself.  This is a Sunday sermon.

When I listen to the email and listserv issues and blogs and e-articles, etc., I hear inconsolability -- the belief that there is no comfort or relief for loss and suffering.  The only palliative seems to be domesticity but it is never enough.  Life is acquisition, remodeling, fortification.  Dominated by prescriptive advertising.  This is pretty understandable when people are raising children, which is much of the point of domesticity. -- making a nest for ducklings.  I remember a hippie friend who wasn’t afraid of anyone until she had a baby and shocked herself with her sudden fear of street people rooting in dumpsters.

But I don’t understand the constant seeking out of trouble to watch, the active compiling of disasters around the world (some human and others geological), the hunger for photos of explosions and dead bodies, the greed for the details of rape and torture -- all of it replicated as realistically as possible in CGI movies about Zombies or CSI shows about murder.  It’s like the old Calvinist fascination with hell, which still continues in some quarters.  I think it comes from a denial of the dark side, an effort to encapsulate it as the Devil or Evil or objects of disgust so as to get it named, confined and excluded -- esp. from inside ourselves.

Timothy Morton’s thoughts about “dark ecology” seems to be partly focused on mystery -- the impossibility of a human mind big enough to encompass the universe, with the markers being black holes and “dark matter” -- and partly on the idea that the muck, infection, slime, excretion, rot and death we so reject and label (in Martha Nussbaum’s word) “disgusting” is the source of raw material and reciprocity.  That is, one bug’s rejected excretion is the next creature’s wine.  So part of the darkness is fearing the unknown and part of it is believing we are shit.

No wonder we’re inconsolable.  No wonder we think someone might try to murder us.  It’s as though we felt existence must be held open around us by our constant effort and achievement or it will close on us as though we were three dimensional figures in a two dimensional world.  Constant vigilance seems necessary but it wears us out, so we invent burglar alarms but they get triggered all the time which defeats the feeling of safety we want.  We feel ourselves in opposition to this world, superstitiously trying to be “good enough” to get to the next world which is imagined as effortless.

I think the remedy for our inconsolability is in participation and acceptance.  Easier said than done, esp. when one’s culture designates one for exclusion and stigma.  Stupid.  Gay.  Old.  Foreign.  Criminal.  Poor.  Sick.  Crippled.  Indigenous.  The trouble with religions based on books (Bible, Torah, Koran) is that there’s too much reading and not enough cultivating the gardens.  (Of course, this is my personal shortcoming so I take it seriously.)  I’m not saying we need the vegetables from the garden.  I’m saying it will do us good to get out there and dig around in the worms and compost,  Darwin’s tangled bank all mucky and weedy.  The word “HUMan” comes from humus, fertile soil.

“Dark ecology” is actually far darker than dirt.  I’ve rejected the common idea of evil for a long time, not because I don’t think there is any but because I think it is a human construct, a concept created by humans that only applies to humans both in terms of motives and in terms of consequent suffering and destruction.  The Japanese earthquake and consequent tsunami were not evil.  The nuclear reactors were the result of human evil -- failure to recognize, over-optimism, denial, false statistics and engineering.  The Japanese as a category are not evil.  The suffering is human.

The real darkness is that every creation is also destruction and it doesn’t care.  Jesus doesn’t love you.  Jesus is imaginary, only a concept.  (A good and useful one, but human-invented.)  The same with God.  We only have each other and sometimes not even that much.   But personal existence, attached to the world and each other as we get, doesn’t matter.  One winks out, another is conceived.

The curse and blessing of being human, the key inconsolability, is that we know this.  When we give up our denial and fear, we know very well that everyone dies.  All living things die.  Animal or vegetable, we go into each other as fuel and emerge as shit.  Once a person accepts that, dealing with the facts and hallucinations of our lives becomes much easier.  We only have to do as well as we can.  It will take some testing to see what that is, so we must tolerate our mistakes or it won't be a real test of boundaries, which are found by exceeding them.

We cannot comprehend the cosmos, but we can try.  We can imagine that there might be a color greener than green, but we can’t SEE it.  We can invent the premises of eternity or infinity, but we cannot perceive them.  So maybe this is the source of our fascination with evil and suffering:  trying to perceive the imperceptible.  What is the tortured person really feeling?  What is the torturer is feeling?  What makes a person able to do such things?  I would say it’s not the evil itself but the denial that such an act is evil and the refusal of the empathy that would force them to share the suffering.  

The same denial and refusal are what prevent consolation.  In our vigilance against what might kill us, we also wall out what might renew us.  This is not a new idea.  It’s in stories over and over and over from every culture.  I’ll tell you one I heard from Joseph Bruchac, a wise and generous Native American writer.  I heard it from him personally when he told it in an assembly in Browning, where most people are Blackfeet.  It was about a horrible Iroquois monster, a windigo which is a starvation cannibal embodying the struggle with winter hunger.  It was wailing and staggering across a frozen lake, looking for people to eat.  A young woman, unafraid, went to him, took his hand, and said, “Come with me, grandfather.”  She took him to her lodge and fed him hot soup.  Shrieking with the pain of it, he shrank down from his monstrous form and did indeed become just an old man again.

She was able to do this because of her confidence in what was right (feed the hungry) and her willingness to die in the effort.  People like her are doing this right now all over the world.  They are living consolation.