DON'T EAT YOUR HORSE

Our reading corner.

The framed picture on the wall was Van Loon's map of all civilized knowledge.

Believe it or not, I vividly remember the moment when I understood reading.  I’ve described it before and there is a picture of me and my brothers in our “reading corner” about that time.  It was an internal sensation, like the moment one begins to be able to ride a bike.  I still had to ask about specific words, not so much because I couldn’t “sound them out” but because I didn’t know what they stood for in the world.  I didn’t know that is what’s beyond just “reading” -- the construction of understanding what is symbolized.

It wasn’t until seminary that I understood that it was a CONSTRUCTION and not a reality, and not until maybe a decade later that I understood that reality is something that morphs and is either shared with others or denied by others.  It’s a deeply rewarding feeling to share concepts with people who agree (though it always makes me a little nervous about whether they are just pretending, which people do all the time in order to get along) and much more challenging to try to see what those others are perceiving that makes them think differently.  If I saw what they see, would I be different?  

Yes.  And that’s scary.  For instance, not many people can grasp that by depending on Big People to run the world, instead of doing the work themselves, they are selling out, escaping back to childhood.  It’s hell to realize that one’s whole college education, all the history and theory and processes learned, are now worthless because of the Internet et al which has triggered a total revision of everything, as well as revelations of what we didn't want to know.  I know very few white men over fifty who can operate a computer. They are the television generation: turn the knob, sit across the room, and simply receive with the channel changer in hand.  I do know some liberals who watch in couples or families and mock the news as having nothing to do with them.  It's a defence.  They are in danger and don’t quite know it.

I found a fascinating blog called nakedpastor.com who posts a cartoon every day.  He’s starting an online support and discussion group for ministers who have left their calling after struggling to stay, so here’s what he “says” with his drawing. 

Here are his words:  “The difference between the first few times leaving the ministry and the last was huge.

The first times I always felt I was still in the game, and it was a matter of time before I’d find another opportunity to serve as a pastor.

But the last time I knew I was leaving for good, and it was devastating and traumatic. It took me years to transition. . . . The biggest factor in me leaving the ministry was the loss of meaning.” 

The neurology people tell us that meaning is a PHYSICAL reality contained in cells (both in the mind and in the rest of the body at the molecular level) and this pain is a signal of change, possibly dangerous.  Meaning is not a matter of logic, but of existence.  My personal theory of how to recover meaning has been to return to the place where I was happiest — I mean physical place — and rekindle that relationship.  That was 1999.  It worked.

Humans are a phenomenon of humus, the earth beneath our feet.  The earliest “we” rose up out of water and muck.  Then the whole action was interaction with the environment and others like ourselves.  We moved through it, we smelled it, we ate it.  As time passed, we began to vary, and then the world kept changing so that some variations were better adapted and thrived and survived.

I used to explore “process theology” which was originally an effort to create a theology based on quantum mechanics, but it’s such a head trip and uses such rigid categories and definitions that it doesn’t really work.  It’s god-centered, abandoning Jesus and Mary because they interfere with the sterile logic of equations.  Anyway, it’s been overwhelmed by the incredibly powerful images of outer space and increasing knowledge of the subatomic world.  We are gob-smacked, but not God-smacked.

The most fascinating story in the online science "feeds" this morning is that water is being created — that is, H2O molecules are created — by the chemical and mechanical pressures of the earth’s deep mantle acting on quartz, an abundant substance.  There is a LOT of water, but it’s more than 1,000 miles beneath the surface.  If there is a hell down there, it must be pretty steamy.

Our skins are our boundary, and also our access to the world outside us.  But somehow our brains are able to do more than just receive and sort the coded electrochemical information it receives from skin.  Somehow, some of us realize that print and images are code for an intense and trembling world to which we belong, Tillich’s ground of being.  Of course it punks us all the time.  Like this idea of GodPapa. just for one person or group.  It’s not that this or that God is dead — most of all the crazed Valentine god of love that quickly converts to sex and then “polyamory” and then a credit card.  Not that sleeping around is essentially evil,  But it might not be a survival strategy.

Meaning is an integrating strategy that matches the context in ways that sustain life, defined as growth.  It’s not just about humans or just about mammals or even about life, because it includes the mineral earth and the flowing air and a lot of bugs and the virome.  Sid Gustafson, the Montana writing veterinarian, talks about the meshing of horses with humans, a grasslands phenomenon.  He says horses require three things: abundant friends, forage, and locomotion.  Humans need about the same things.  So what goes wrong?

Some suggest that the humans ate all the horses in North America before they figured out they could ride them, so it was thousands of years before horses were reimported from Europe.  It wasn’t the horses that evolved their vulnerability, it was something not in the North American humans that was in the people of the high steppes of Eurasia.  Was it Denisovian genes?  Maybe.  In Africa there were zebras but they were too ornery to ride.  Camels took the niche.

A vocation like ministry is a negotiable element of meaning.  “Doing it” will change the doer and maybe reveal different choices, riding the horse instead of eating it.  One of the criticisms of process theologies is that they don’t offer a moral context, recommendations about what to do or not do.  The answer I finally came up with is that what a person does, where they go, “makes the world.”  The guide is whether your action, your attitude, creates a better world, a broader landscape, or whether it takes you into a deadend — a cave where you can only see shadows.

Learning to read is a matter of shifting to a new paradigm, which leads to another one, and on and on.  It’s a response as much as a skill.  I love the visceral felt shift of understanding in a new way, a curtain drawing back, a sky that opens.  Here on the prairie that’s a very real image — it means the Chinook wind is blowing and we can be warm again.

COMPLEXIFICATION AND "COOL"

There are two issues in this post.  One is complexification and the other is the hard meanness of so many scholars today.

First, complexification.  This is all coming from online conversation about an excellent and provocative article which I posted about in December (12/17/15).  The article in question is “The inhumanity of literary criticism”  by Lisa Ruddick. “Interviews with 70 young English scholars and a survey of papers published in a major journal reveal a troubling side of current literary criticism: academic norms scorn discussion of people’s inner lives, leaving critics hesitant to advocate for anything that smacks of “uncool” human feeling.”    http://thepointmag.com/2015/criticism/when-nothing-is-cool

At first, just after the post, comments were positive and plain spoken, but when a link was made to a specialized blog for psychoanalysts, comments soon went to this kind of thing:  

In contrast to reinvesting one's narcissism or power in the child, what is classically called a masochist, can invest her echoism or her goodness into the child. Her interest for harmony or unity in the world is played out in the child-mother relationship.    

Freud also refers to the baby as the 'erotic plaything of the mother.' This comes from how he pairs the two drives of aggression and affection (1933, p. 120). 

The echoist can fall away from sexual interest and self-assertion (at the phallic stage) and regress back to affectionate impulses. They like sentimental things like cute, fuzzy animals, babies, and want massages, comfort foods, or soothing.

I think what this Freudian is trying to say is that “cool” became a value in order to escape mushy emotion, which finds massages, comfort food and soothing childish.  (Watch this space for a post about “inconsolability” — the rejection of all comforting, which seems widespread.)  What strikes me even more is how devoted many of respondents were to their own particular interpretation of a system that goes far beyond what most people understand about Freud.  Rocket science as applied to the psyche.

In seminary (actually, Ruddick’s U of Chicago) I took a course in “Process Theology” from Chicago Theological Union, an affiliate.  It was soon clear that Process Theology was also dependent on what looked like the schematic of the wiring in a three-stage outer space rocket.  After months of building whiteboard diagrams to explain what was meant to be quantum physics applied to Christianity, the professor admitted that most Process theologians can’t quite figure out how to get Jesus into all this stuff.  So why do they think it’s Christian?

All the “post modern” systems, some of them psychoanalytical, seem to be based on “manning up", hardening for a coming culture war.  Challenging authorities.  I guess that’s what it actually was, but when do we get to the post-post modern phase, the “stand down” and reflection about what was accomplished?  Can’t we sit under a tree in the grass for a little while without being mocked?  And what do we use for reference points now?

Some of Lisa’s respondents confirmed her premise:   “Last year I set out to catch up on the psychological and psychoanalytic Shakespeare criticism of the past 2-3 decades and was appalled by the ideological stridency that has occupied the field.  Of course, the critical works varied a great deal in sophistication, and there were many astute post-modern perspectives.  But the reductive mischaracterizations of the so-called "humanist" critical tradition (of which I am a contributor, as are others who have responded to Lisa's essay) amazed me in their party-line consistency.”

Another laments:  “I have to give a paper based on the theories of Jules Weiss, who asserted that reciprocal love is dangerous to the self, since it compels a regression that threatens mental stability, while frustration and pain re-inforce the reality principle and make for mental stability.”   Even if "reciprocal love" is a delusion that would make a person weak, would we want to live without it?  Why aren’t frustration and pain a challenge to mental stability?

Of course, these are psychoanalysts who have spent their lives learning and elaborating systems of introspection and pathology, only to have it all swept away by happy pills and the new neurology research.  It turns out that much psychoanalytic theory is embroidery on the Emperor’s clothes.   If infusions of ketamine once a week can lift crippling depression, why obsess over your mother’s toilet training strategy? 

Our institutions and laws, our economics and education systems, are not keeping up with the human needs of many people.  Surely the answer is not to get more callous so as to ignore them comfortably, though that might save money in the short run.

But the daily complexification that drives me nuts is the Internet.  Not the big questions about how it affects civilization or mental health or how to guarantee the power supply or whether there is enough capacity. I guess it is a confluence of trying to attract customers by using the doctrine that adding new features will please them.  It’s the conviction that makes the breakfast cereal aisle a head-swirling riot of alternatives.  I was amazed a couple of decades ago when I was in Saskatoon and saw maybe only ten kinds of the stuff.  Same in other categories.

If it were a simple matter of settling on one stable OS, that would be all right, but instead every time I open my screen — not just when I am forced to switch to some new version or else lose my Netflix subscription — there are new bells and whistles, a whole new language, that I must learn in order to produce my daily essay.  It eats hours out of the day to re-locate functions, to establish that they’ve dropped something out that I depended upon, and so on.  Sometimes it means seining through forum websites where people have dozens of other problems.  There are constant impositions of new policies about privacy or connectivity and always the suggestions,  “Why not favorite us on Facebook?”  And worst of all, “Tell us what you want.”  Like a stupid lover who can't pay attention.

We have a circle, a sucking whirlpool, that forms when the tech is more important than the content and the content gets worse and worse because tech stuff drains off all the energy and desire.  So a website like medium.com starts out proclaiming that it will be plain, elegant and intuitive, and ends up playing some kind of three-dimensional chess with their features, until few who seriously write are still posting and Medium has to pay regular writers regular fees in order to have content.  People intent on standing out from the crowd indulge in cruel games of mockery.

The deepest irony in me writing about these harsh, possessive, rigid kinds of thinkers is that here in Montana I’m constantly grumbling about how shallow, middle-class, comfortable, assumed, commodified, predictable, most of the thinking and writing is.  It is so safely smug.  If it isn’t, it won’t sell, it won’t attract people.  That's not theory -- it's fact.  This is why (outside of professional groups that enforce their own internal standards) religion ignores theologians, therapists ignore hard-core psychoanalysis, publishing ignores challenging material, and all the “post” stuff seems of limited usefulness.  Why can’t we find a clear, user-friendly alternative to internet complexity?  There’s no use in expecting the kids to do it — they revel in all that intricate strategy of video-game style.  It takes wisdom to be simple.

* * * * * * * 

Here's a much tougher and ruder version of meanness that is not academic.

http://www.vice.com/read/how-to-raise-the-level-of-online-debate-in-2016?utm_source=vicetwitterus