THE SCRIVER SAGA

Meadville/Lombard Theological School

On my shelves are a set of two 3-ring binders labeled “The Scriver Seminary Saga.”  They are the collected one-page typed weekly reports to my home church (First Unitarian of Portland, OR) during my four year seminary education, including the summer of Clinicial Pastoral Education in Rockford, IL, and the year as an intern minister in Hartford, Connecticut.  (78-82)  Once I began to serve churches, their newsletters replaced the practice.

Firmly, I believe that anything closely examined over a period of time is worth preserving evidence from to look at again when one’s mind and being has evolved or cooled or caught on fire or whatever other change might happen.  I was very much impressed by a course with an historical bent that discussed a church record in Europe that was kept for centuries but had some mysterious gaps.  The point of the discussion was how powerful the gaps were once a person inquired into their cause:  like, for instance, the Black Death.

But there are no gaps in the Scriver Seminary Saga because in those days (and now) I considered one of my virtues to be consistency and tenacity, partly natural temperament and partly reinforced by marriage to Bob Scriver who also valued those characteristics since he was a musician and the way to Carnegie Hall is practise, practise, practise.  (He didn’t make it past the Montana Historical Society warehouse.)  But I haven’t gone back to see what I said or, as Kenner would put it, what it meant.  I have been discouraged by the collapsing of both seminary and denomination.  But maybe it’s time now.  There's been a gap.

A small part of the reason I left the ministry in 1988 turns out to be related to a big part of the UUA’s problems.  The Unitarian Universalist Association that so attracted me changed into something else and it was — in my eyes — ugly.  I didn’t realize until recently that others shared my opinion, at least in part.  This morning I stumbled upon “Regaining Balance” by Michael Werner, a monograph published by the American Humanist Association which is a kind of sibling to the UUA that is sometimes pulled in and sometimes pushed out.  It’s a history of the roller coaster ride both movements have been on for the last decades as the cultures surged around them. 

I can’t order the booklet at the moment because someone fraudulently used my VISA to order car parts (!) which was evidently detected immediately -- maybe because I only order books and cat food.  A “fraud specialist” called me to explain and to tell me to cut up my invalidated VISA.  A new one is on the way.  I gather that there are plenty of these cases, thus justifying a specialist, and I also gather that most of the fraudsters are amateurs, easily caught.  (Is this a clue to religion?)  

So to get the booklet, I went to the AHA to request a review copy.  All copies are Kindle via the Internet, so if they refuse, the delay will only be the time it takes to mail me a new VISA, not mailing the booklet, but the mail is entirely unpredictable these days.  I don’t know whether AHA will send a review copies since I'm only a blog.

"Starhawk" he's not.

So I read the part of the publication that’s on Google Books and was startled that it was so clear and that I am so much in agreement.  BUT it’s old-fashioned.  (Consider the source.) Or at least "old-school" which sounds a little better.  These days, everybody who is more than ten years behind on the avalanche of technical scientific discoveries is old-fashioned. Even "The Edge" is old-fashioned.  So are Aeon, TED, maybe not Nautil.us.  They are ALL culture bound.  To the dominant culture.  Even Ozy.  Al Jezeera went under.  Indigenous equals invisible.

Anyway, why is it is that the American Humanist Association never takes on the current assault on the humanities?

The shifts (indeed, explosions!) in paradigms they (logically) demand, the radical revision of our cherished 19th century humanist and religious ideas, our tanglefooted integration of contradictions, and the necessary economic/governmental implications, require some working premises to anchor or center ourselves for the sake of sanity.

Many, as always, are finding that anchor to be a life in community, maybe simply growing where they are.  Ecology, IMHO, is the root of harmony.  Happily, the Internet means possible virtual community online.  My additional strategy is a rather ascetic private life (AKA poverty) in order to wring out enough time to think and to find sources beyond sensational media skewings and commodifications.  

Werner’s book is part of a series.  I would like to add to it the implications of the new science that I read about and that are so deeply suggestive.  The findings continue to unroll, so it’s not worth a bound book, but there's enough evidence to write something.

Here’s a partial list of what I mean:

1.  New understanding of how the human body works, what “thought” means in bodily terms, the evolution of the brain, the actions of neurons, the 200 specialized sense cells that are in our brain besides the familiar organs, how memory works (it’s complex), gut thinking, limbic thinking, and the capacity to share thought and feeling simply by looking at each other.  Why consciousness is not the key to survival.

2.  Instead of the bricolage interpretations of pluralistic “equal” religious tolerance, an environmentally informed deep understanding of metaphor drawn from living experience, and the dangers of institutional rigidity and “ownership” if it becomes dogma.

3.  The idea that a print-based culture, “People of the Book”, is better than all others;  how that suppresses the more basic speaking-only small-group cultures; and what iPhones means to them.  What many identify as a fall from grace because of agriculture with its walls and hoarding, it’s priests and lawyers and kings, might really be about the hegemony of writing: record keeping, laws, hierarchies.

4.  The slow realization that there is no such thing as “rationality” and logic, as opposed to deep feeling of the Sacred, because both emerge from the formation of basic theories of life when we are infants, structures of conviction that are nearly impossible to escape.  Both rationality and emotional responsiveness are part of it, always in conversation with each other.

5.  Humans, including the 200 estimated hominin species preceding us, cannot be defined as the end point of evolution or even the apex.  The march of life up the beach to the triumph of progressive humans is a broken metaphor.  Rather there is a surge, a sheet, a symphony of unfolding life that emerges from itself in surprising ways.  Salvation is not going to heaven, it's participating in the furor and ferment that we both receive and pass on.

6.  We need far better ways to balance resources with their uses.  Food, rare metals, energy, water, soil fertility, each other.

7.  People, some on the other side of the planet and some just down the street, are suffering terribly and being actively destroyed.  We cannot address this by making ourselves oblivious.  Instead we need to approach, to question, to sift through the shit, get dirty.

8.  Religious denominations are controlled by demographics and economics, much of it unconscious and propelling evil forces. They can stifle all progress and replace genuine responses and observations with whatever makes them feel good:  inclusion, therapy, economic safety, elitism.  They are not about beliefs.  They should not be controlled by political factions in the larger world.  The killer of both AHA and UUA is arrogance, privilege, entitlement.

My tenacity is still paying off.  Consistency is a lot tougher.  People who have not been keeping up with this new research don’t even understand what I’m talking about.  My seminary has literally been gutted, the library and faculty moved downtown.  But the building, now housing the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, IS addressing this new body of inquiry by supporting a series of scholars and lectures.  That’s nice and a good use of the building.

But “nice” is a very suspicious category.  If you think your church is “nice,” you are stuck in the past.  What IS a church anyway, but an institution?

Neubauer Collegium of Society and Culture

REFLECTING AT LEISURE

I’m formally taking the position that spirituality is physical, biological, the most basic of concepts and entirely felt -- no theological content.  No organizations. No moral content  Can happen anyplace, can be culturally defined as evil or blessed, and is not felt by everyone.  (Not missing -- just not activated.)  From one time and place to another it is defined differently and offered different places in the culture.  Often it is displaced or reduced or expanded because of other ideas about what human is.  The concept grows when times are tough.  It diminishes when "rationality" dominates.

Right now both are the case.  We are still in growing “enlightenment” times based on science, which is growing in part because of expanding technology that allows us access to so much more.  Science claims a dimension that offers a supra-cultural mathematical strategy for avoiding some kinds of conflict: the scientific method.  Science is, of course, accompanied by a lot of clutter -- bad claims, counter-claims, corrupt results.  “Spirituality,” defined as an individual pre-conscious biological response to the world, is a way of escaping all that by going to meaning of a different kind, farther back in the head, closer to the spine.  I am defining it as awareness of the meaning offered by participation, wovenness, continuousness with the galaxies. 

The Wiki entry about spirituality is an extensive checklist that’s helpful, but I wish I knew who wrote it and who altered it or edited it, since I’m finding that point of view is crucial.  For instance, they didn’t get Unitarian Universalism quite right.  Still, if a person wanted to really study spirituality, this might be a good place to start.  It would not give you a spiritual experience (a Wiki entry is just anonymous words) nor would it tell you where you fit but you’d have some vocabulary to throw around.

I hope it's not a butterfly.

These overviews always surprise me in two ways:  the first is how many versions there are and the second is how far back the historical discussion can reach -- in this case, mostly to the Greek/Roman foundation of Euro-thought.  Contemporary understandings are always intriguing.  Can we reach into pre-history?

“During the twentieth century the relationship between science and spirituality has been influenced both by Freudian psychology, which has accentuated the boundaries between the two areas by accentuating individualism and secularism, and by developments in particle physics, which reopened the debate about complementarity between scientific and religious discourse and rekindled for many an interest in holistic conceptions of reality. These holistic conceptions were championed by New Age spiritualists in a type of quantum mysticism that they claim justifies their spiritual beliefs, though quantum physicists themselves on the whole reject such attempts as being pseudoscientific.

Reflections and refractions

My view is that core spirituality cannot be discussed, programmed, owned, sold or acquired at workshops and seminars.  It’s possible to trigger some related experiences by exposing parts of the brain to magnets or ingesting what are now called “entheogens”, drugs that offer a blissful experience.  In my view it’s like that exercise called “bicycling” in which one holds one’s feet in the air and imitates pedaling.  It’s supposedly good for the body, but when you stop, you actually had gone nowhere.

Nevertheless, sometimes the spirit can be called and I’ve always been curious about what the effective trigger or “bait” might be.  After reading a bunch of saints’ accounts of their beatific or horrendous experiences, it appeared that binaries of experience that were internally contradictory had something to do with it.  Current research suggests that sensory experience (not the five senses but the constant hurricane of electrochemical information tracking the world both outside and inside the skin in hundreds of ways) is what the brain sorts and acts upon.  If that great clamor of particles falls into a relatively resolved state, then the experience might be what we call “spiritual.”

Most thinking about spirituality/religion is confined to the English-speaking world, esp. in Europe and Asia.  It simply ignores African, American, or indigenous Australian notions.  Australia is particularly intriguing since the culture (like the geology) is extremely old and pretty much self-contained, characteristics that seem to relate to spirituality.  Except for the Americas and Mediterranean Africa, there have not been the bureaucratic, hierophantic, city-like, empire-craving organizations of “religion.”  Religion is always wanting to combine with government and power.  

 Today spirituality as a characteristic of the individual is often considered a marker of superiority, as a kind of intelligence in a world that thinks “smart people” are better than others, but this has to be covert and unspoken because the consensus through the ages has been that spirituality is a force for unity, the reconciliation of differences.  People who try to make spirituality trump science are playing with superstition and magic.

Art is spirituality in drag.  --Jennifer Yane

Another humanities realm that interacts with spirituality is arts that can capture the unspoken, the felt meaning of life.  Probably one of the most powerful of the arts today is photography, since that’s what gives us visual access to both the star nurseries of space and the busy mitochondrias of the cells, plus startling face-to-face confrontations of so many other creatures and their vegetal world.  Even minerals photographed can be stunning.  It is good to be stunned, esp. if it results in humility, a key to spirituality.

It is not good to use spirituality as a scourge to punish organized religion or secular government.  That’s the work of rationality and justice.  

Compassion is often seen as an element of spirituality, but my severe (Scots?) temperament and experience in the world -- possibly out of arrogance -- sees deep spirituality as ignoring that dimension, though it is a key to the meaning and value of human beings.  Suffering cannot touch the depths of spirituality.  For a while there was an understanding of God as that great power and meaning that comes to suffer WITH humans in the most literal way, so that if one is tortured, God is right there also being suffered.  This is one element of the idea of Jesus, to show that a deity cannot really care about us if they are so exalted that they never feel anything.  But it never struck me as very comforting.

Modern physics is about sharing, but not about feeling.  It is not about God the Creator but about existence as co-creating itself, unfolding and unfolding in complexity that has only one meaning: survival.  Not of the individual, but of the cosmos itself.  All the emotion is on the part of the witnesses, which are us.  It’s our specialty, more important than just talking about spirituality or even admiring it.

When we calm down enough to really pay attention, what we see is that everything is connected, everything is moving, and we can’t stop it, so we might as well join it.

EPIPHANY

“The physiological mechanisms of epiphany, not necessarily religious.”  Catchy little subject, don’t you think?  NOT.

I used to preach about this -- the moments that some of us feel (not everyone) in which we are flooded with awareness of how hot and sweet the world is.  We stand motionless for a moment, not wanting it to end.  It’s real, but we don’t seem to have control over when and how it happens.  What the heck is it?

If you’re a god-believer, you might use the terms “theophany” meaning god (theos) breaking through to you or if not religious, “epiphany” which the anonymous writer at Wikipedia broadens and secularizes as a sudden insight into a problem after a long period of study.  In fact, the entry illustrates our Western cultural tendency to make everything explicable (explainable) and the product of rational thought or else some obscure Christian doctrine.  Those are your choices.  Be a grad student in the sciences or be a learned old guy in a church, both male.  

I’m trying to evade all that.  It’s not easy because the idea is SO deeply embedded in us and anyway it is the product of a lot of underlying ideas that people aren’t even aware that they believe, even after decades of countervailing strategies from feminists, Aquarians, and even psychologists.  Their sorting categories prevent them from having a place to put the knowledge and therefore it evaporates.

I’m saving for reflection an article on fMRI studies in which the experimenters challenged deeply held beliefs of people and actually got them to change their minds, to shift to a new point of view.  You can SEE it on the computer screen.  The experimenters did not record what it felt like, because now the idea is to switch from the logical rationality of people to their computerized brain synapses.  Both logic and neurology neglect “feelings” and yet feeling is our true guide in life.  

Suzanne Langer developed many relevant ideas.

Feeling is the whole-body response to one’s inner metaphors.  All thinking is metaphorical.  Rationality is a particular metaphor system -- it is the SUBset of thinking, which is really feeling.  By over-emphasizing rationality, particularly that which is represented in writing, we have suppressed and denied much of our feeling and therefore distorted our humanity.

We’ve lost our ability to perceive subtlety, what the Japanese used to call “shibui” -- elegance, sensitivity to small nuances.  We commodify everything into the symbolic invention of money and then play with its value by making it “worth” more and less according to mysterious rules about gambling on the stock market.

We help the needy according to symbol systems that render the help useless:  convening to wring our hands, writing poems about the emotion of compassion for others without any sharing of the plight of the objects or translating it into effective help -- turning it all back to ourselves in the Mother Teresa image of self-denial and sadness.  We don't let the needy speak for themselves.  Yet people in the most broken societies of the planet are often joyful, full of song and dance, giving it away.

Of all the most obvious “felt” symbol systems, sex in the most direct sense of body contact
is the feeling most commodified and disconnected from the new reality created by lab technology: petri dish conception, three-parent children from mitochondrial donation or from surrogate gestation, viagra-caused hydraulic responses without eroticism or bonding, deflected paraphilias, dab-on pheromones, transgressions of all kinds.  I was startled that a philosopher seeking a “new religion” would give as an example of degradation the habit of “watching porn.”  How does one tell porn from mainstream programming?  

More than that, how can one seek a new religion without first breaking apart the old ones into the hierarchical, institutional, patriarchal corporations they are.  The word "religion" as we were taught in seminary, is rooted in semantics.  Remember Wikipedia is a collaboration of male grad school students with tenured academic pedants, both types common in the “Western world” still yearning after empires.

“The Latin term religiō, origin of the modern lexeme religion (via Old French/Middle Latin) is of ultimately obscure etymology. It is recorded beginning in the 1st century BC, i.e. in Classical Latin at the beginning of the Roman Empire, notably by Cicero, in the sense of "scrupulous or strict observance of the traditional cultus".

“The classical explanation of the word, traced to Cicero himself, derives it from re- (again) + lego in the sense of "choose", "go over again" or "consider carefully". Modern scholars such as Tom Harpur and Joseph Campbell favor the derivation from ligo "bind, connect", probably from a prefixed re-ligare, i.e. re- (again) + ligare or "to reconnect," which was made prominent by St. Augustine, following the interpretation of Lactantius.”

See?  Everything defined by categories and specific men whose thoughts have been saved in writing and used by ecclesiastical authorities to bind together their constituencies, which are always based on money, more pleasantly called “prosperity.”

I’m thinking that “religion” works best in times of distress, then deteriorates when the crisis is over.  The people who nearly starved in the Great Depression and then desperately fought to save the world from Nazi ideas felt they were honorably religious and that a big entity overhead was therefore supporting them.  The two forces, one-two blows, in spite of being deeply felt, have by now been corrupted and commodified into terrorists and plutocrats.  It’s all forms of blackmail, extortion, and piracy.

Unless you step clear out of that metaphor system. 

Luckily, sort of by accident, I have an alternative.  I did not enter through mathematical logic, but through actor’s training which is about feeling.  (The Method, as taught by Alvina Krause.)  Not one’s endless stream of feeling, the narcissistic pondering of one’s reflection in a puddle, but rather the empathic sharing of experience.  Inhabiting the Other.  Not just humans, not just pets, not just working animals who have been bred to know what you want, but extension into the metaphorical “feelings” of things and their way of fitting into existence.  People love to make fun of trying to become a tree, but it’s less scary than trying to become, for instance, Tim.  Or one of the boys.

They can explain it themselves, but not necessarily in words.  Image, music, and maybe a private language, jargon or slang.  I love it because it makes me feel.  Not from out here, but from inside their desperate lungs, their spasming guts, their stinging feet.  And their seeking hands, their soaring leaps, their nobly shaven skulls.  

My level of success varies.  The effort is always rewarded.

There’s another source of my metaphor system, which is the Blackfeet reservation.  They teach me that what seems solid might be illusion and might disappear, that deceptions can be entrances never suspected, that -- as the Asians teach -- one must pay attention.  Always.  

In the end, it’s geology: watching the mountains being forced up from the depths, feeling the catabatic winds warm your face, walking past a tipi circle of stones, realizing that you’re smelling sweetgrass.  Even as I struggled to grasp theology, I was taking writing classes from Richard Stern.  The class, three women, were all writing fiction, though no one said we had to.  What Stern was urging us to see (urgently -- sometimes impatiently) was how to build a metaphor system, a poetry of living, so often shocking but more dangerous when quiet.

How can anyone devise or discover a theology for boys who have been thrown out on the street, making a living with their bodies, stunning themselves with drugs?  There’s nothing rational about it; nothing is bound together (ligere) for the sake of institutions.  But it can be felt.  If one has the courage.  There’s no reading list.  DO something.  I’ll go on trying to figure out how to trigger an epiphany, hot and sweet -- salvific.

COGNITION IGNITION

The third Domain of Brain Systems is about cognition, which is not the usual five senses plus “rationality” or “emotion.”  Instead there are very specific ways the brain acts on sensory information to filter, transform, and record it.  A brain is not the conscious directing of attention to the world, a pool of light like that in front of a miner’s helmet, though one function, the working memory, is like that.  It’s a sort of desktop, a dashboard.  They say most people can only consider five to seven things at once, interacting, but that something like a threat signal (gun going off or door slamming that sounds like a gun going off) will wipe everything off the "surface" and even a simple distraction like someone laughing somewhere, can throw part of the task off the "surface".

The brain is complex, doing an assortment of little stuff all the time with each part specializing the way a carburetor does one thing in an engine and the crankshaft does another.  Thinking is driving a car without knowing what each part is doing or even that they exist.  No need for that because all conscious attention needs to be focused on the road.  The "under the hood" stuff is left to the "unconscious."

When I “talk” online about intelligence, cognition, rationality, as being the smallest part of the work of being human (esp. when one is considering the whole body to be a source and destination of neural information: the little bit that tells you you’re standing upright, the gut signals of wariness), I sometimes get hooted down by a certain kind of person.  Usually it’s a youngish, male, grad-school degree-holder who has a rather prestigious job which he assumes is his because of superior learning and rational thought.  He’s unaware of social patterns and has an unhappy wife, unless she’s in the same system.  He KNOWS that humans are better than animals only because of language and KNOWS he is better than other humans because he has a Ph.D.  In some places we haven’t progressed much beyond Victorian Vienna, except to cast sexier actors in their stories.  They run Wikipedia.

So these new NIMH/RDoC categories arrived at by the “best and brightest” of the academic and institutional psych world, by going to the basic level and working up, are threatening some of the standing order.  I think they’ll agree with that.  We’ve sort of backed into taking into account the evidence from neurology research because of realizing that our thinking strategies leave big holes in reality, sometimes blanks that far more “primitive” people can fill in with no trouble.  This work is entirely and dangerously like the astronomical rethinking by Copernicus and Galileo.  Reconciling psychotherapy with neuroresearch is scary.  Even worse is the idea that perhaps our very cultures are making people psychotic by imposing damage to child brains from poverty or misguided child-raising methods.  Not quite as vicious as lobotomies, but just as chilling.

The Copernican Heliocentric System

Interesting that this RDoC list is not so hard to read as the last one.  I won’t paraphrase.

Cognitive Systems: The category of systems responsible for various cognitive processes.

Attention: Attention refers to a range of processes that regulate access to capacity-limited systems, such as awareness, higher perceptual processes, and motor action. The concepts of capacity limitation and competition are inherent to the concepts of selective and divided attention.

Perception: Perception refers to the process(es) that perform computations on sensory data to construct and transform representations of the external environment, acquire information from, and make predictions about, the external world, and guide action.

Declarative Memory: Declarative memory is the acquisition or encoding, storage and consolidation, and retrieval of representations of facts and events. Declarative memory provides the critical substrate for relational representations—i.e., for spatial, temporal, and other contextual relations among items, contributing to representations of events (episodic memory) and the integration and organization of factual knowledge (semantic memory). These representations facilitate the inferential and flexible extraction of new information from these relationships.

Language: Language is a system of shared symbolic representations of the world, the self and abstract concepts that supports thought and communication.

Cognitive Control: A system that modulates the operation of other cognitive and emotional systems, in the service of goal-directed behavior, when prepotent modes of responding are not adequate to meet the demands of the current context. 

Additionally, control processes are engaged in the case of novel contexts, where appropriate responses need to be selected from among competing alternatives.

Working Memory: Working Memory is the active maintenance and flexible updating of goal/task relevant information (items, goals, strategies, etc.) in a form that has limited capacity and resists interference. These representations: may involve flexible binding of representations; may be characterized by the absence of external support for the internally maintained representations; and are frequently temporary, though this may be due to ongoing interference. It involves active maintenance, flexible updating, limited capacity, and interference control. 

For further details, see Working Memory: Workshop Proceedings (July 11-13, 2010) at: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/research-funding/rdoc/working-memory-workshop-proceedings.shtml

Go for it, kid!

Grad school is where a person learns to manage these things.  It has a lot to do with success in life.   If you don’t experience this huge shift in seeing the world, then it’s either not a proper grad school or your brain has not finished the final stage of maturation that happens in the early twenties.  Some people never let this stage develop -- it coincides with starting families and work, so demand is high.  But it doesn’t exclude “emotion”, which is a cultural prejudice.  The brain needs emotion, is a-slosh with emotion.  Maybe emotion is the gasoline that powers the velocity forwards.  What’s the use of knowing how to survive if you don’t want to?

COGNITIVE SYSTEMS  (Longer list of possible subjects for study, also taken from the NIMH/DRoC materials)

Attention

Perception

Visual Perception

Auditory Perceptions

Olfactory Somatosensory Multimodal Perception

Declarative Memory

Language Behavior

Cognitive (Effortful) Control

Goal Selection

Updating

Representation and Maintenance

Response Selection, Inhibition and Suppression

Performance Monitoring

Active Maintenance

Flexible Updating

Limited Capacity

Interference Control

AK coaching students

Since parallel to writing these blog posts, I’m also working on materials from Alvina Krause acting classes with emphasis on the “Method” which is managing memory and emotion through sensory triggers, it’s easy to see that this RDoC list in particular is what we were working on without knowing it.  Stanislavski was coming from the same Russian science-respecting tradition as Pavlov and his dog, but moving beyond Stimulus/Response to explore the contents of the “black box” between S and R, where the brain and body did the mysterious things that produced theatre.  We worked as much on focus, self-awareness, motivating movement, finding realizations -- as we did learning lines and remembering blocking of a scene.  In many ways, the instrument (the actor) controls what is available to the mind.

I was not a good actor, but I was beginning to be a good writer.  I vividly remember the contempt of the writing instructor when I showed up as an undergrad, the only woman in the class.  I also remember that he gave me an A+ on my last story.  There was very little actual teaching in the class, but I was learning what I needed from acting class.  Also, I was taking psych -- it was rat psych and unsophisticated, as were the students.  The prof had to lecture us about not laughing at the poor tortured rats as they tried to escape foot-shocks.  It has turned out that empathy is crucial for being human, for a rat in a tube, or even for being a professor of psych.  Undergrads just aren't there yet, which is perfectly clear when we look at the news.

http://brighterbrains.org

SURVIVAL DEMANDS EVOLUTION

What lurks in us?

The crown of evolution turns out not to be rational thought, but rather empathy: the ability to see what others are feeling in their own heads and to respond to it.  Of course, those who don’t believe in evolution don’t believe in doing that.  But then, they don’t believe in rationality either.

Rationality is one of the excellent reasons for empathy-driven social progress, when the evolution of memes is prompted by understanding how other people feel and using that understanding to benefit us all.  It is rational to make social progress -- meaning developing a world in which everyone has a place and all of the individual worlds are woven together into a planet where survival at every level is possible.  It is irrational to let huge populations of any life form be eliminated out of failure to understand or deliberate destruction that DOES understand but only wants benefit for our selves.  Some of us still think that survival is a matter of taking everything for ourselves.

I’m talking about all the life forms, all the territory, and the air -- the basic fabric of life for creatures.  Survival of the fittest doesn’t mean the biggest, strongest, most potent -- it means what can survive the circumstances.  The planetary circumstances become more and more subtly hostile to humans, in spite of their evolved empathy which has helped them work together to create circumstances that diminish disease and send research vehicles to the moon.  We aren’t saving the frogs, the bees, the coral reefs, the acid/alkalai balance of the ocean.  This is irrational.

My sort-of denomination has been trying to attract new members and improve their reputation for do-goodery based on 19^th century reforms, marching at Selma, and developing principles.  They are doing this the high school way: t-shirts and slogans.  At least the t-shirts aren't pink, but the slogan is “standing on the side of love.”  Every teen can get with that -- there must be a song.

Compassion: does she know how he sees the world?

But it makes me think of a meeting in the eighties at the former Beacon Street headquarters.  In attendance were newbies like me, but also some of the most revered and dignified of our leaders -- all white males over sixty at that point.  We were in a conference room with ground-level windows that opened behind a lot of shrubbery.  Suddenly we were distracted by a shabby whiskery young man who was inadvertently mooning us because he was doing his business in the shrubs, not realizing he was presenting his nethers to a mixed group.  One of the most intellectual and brilliant of the leaders opened a window and berated the man with profane and damning shouts.  The man, unimpressed, took his time rearranging his jeans and leaving.  I forget what his t-shirt said.  Given the times, it probably said "peace."

25 Beacon Street

Why do people want to be do-gooders and why doesn’t it translate into rational provisions for the needs of others?  If a minister can't understand the urgent need to move bowels, what CAN he understand?  Do we ignore such matters because we think angels don't shit?  Politics is one reason.  But it’s not enough to have the American flag flying over the front door and be located by the State House with its gold dome, if there is no support downstairs for rest rooms the public can use.  Oh, well.  The new building has no shrubbery.

Love is an emotion so Hollywoodized and splintered into sex, dependence, and commodified into Valentine candy and diamond rings that it’s pretty much empty now.  The internet is jammed with pastel glittery butterflies and clever infantalized ponies and rainbows, all declaring love.

Compassion is often the watch word.  It’s taken me a while to realize that compassion is not about the receiver but about the provider.  This is why Christopher Hitchens got so upset by Mother Theresa -- it was all about how “compassionate” she was in the many images of her in her plain cotton sari, embracing babies and dying adults.  Our own empathy went out to her as we “became” her, and felt the aching desire to help those suffering.  We didn’t even look at the faces and bodies of the emaciated people on racks of beds -- who would want to empathically share what they were feeling?  Questions about providing meds or preventing starvation didn’t come up until late in her career.  And then we found out that our ability to empathize accurately was faulty.  Her journal describes a terrible darkness, depression that holding infants did not help.  Nor did her fat bank accounts get used rationally to improve conditions.

Can you empathize with this man?

Without scolding him for smoking?

Rational response to suffering is addressed by our nation and our various religious affiliations who send subsidies, food, used clothing, various chemicals produced by our industries.  It’s true, as Rev. Bill Holway used to say, that it feels good to give, but that’s about us, isn’t it?  It’s sometimes a good chance to get rid of stuff we don’t want: the two worst (but funniest) examples I remember are crates of high-heeled strappy shoes sent to Saharan tribes -- evidently because they were labeled “sandals”-- and tons of canned tuna fish but no can openers, also sent to the desert where no one even knew what a fish was.

Such nonsense is good for the survival of politicians who want to please those who provide generous election donations by disposing of excess production of food or by providing living experiments for pharma corporations.  Opportunities for international extortion and blackmail abound when large segments of a nation are dying from malaria or HIV.  Empathy never arrives, but the sudden realization that ebola travels by airliner can speed up our meme evolution to at least protect us -- which can only truly be achieved by protecting those interfacing with the diminishing jungle.  

Not Mother Theresa

Justice is a more stern and durable source of rational intervention for the common good.  Médecins sans Frontieres provides a valiant and life-threatening counterforce to ebola.  For once there is focus on the victims -- the engulfing spacesuits prevent us from even distinguishing the doctors from the local practical nurses, their billowing tyvex other-worldly against the black and bloody bodies of the dying, every figure in front of those ubiquitous turquoise walls. 

Still, less noble and professional institutions are careless enough to let pirates and profiteers skim off profit for their own survival.  What would empathy with the bad guys tell us?  Crippled brains, irrationality, desperation, dead hearts.  But they DO survive.  Up to a point.

Empathy-based compassion is not pretty stuff, often painful, but it offers the real stuff of survival: if not truth, than reality or as close as we can get to it.  When Jack Nicholson sneers, “you can’t handle the truth,” he’s really saying we can’t handle empathy, the knowledge -- no, the FEELING -- of what the others are experiencing.  Of course, that was a movie character he was playing when he said that.  In real life he had no insight into the people who loved him.  He didn’t allow empathy to penetrate his personal life even though the work of an actor is exactly that: empathy.

The model of compassion is often mothers, who undeniably must empathically understand what their infants need and who mostly will privilege the child’s survival over their own.  But this pattern can become controlling, a capture.  A father who is constantly “mothered” instead of partnered, can be crippled.  “Love” can be used as ownership, entitlement, justification for imposing goals “for your own good.”  Then empathy thins and disappears.  The Lover becomes the Joker.  And Batman?  We hope for justice at least.