Inequalize This!

There is an irony to progressives these days. I hear everyone talk about inequality, and I even it experience first-hand. The city I live in (Boston) has squeezed out the working/middle class in the last several years through the exorbitant real-estate prices, housing taxes, etc. Nevertheless, the progressives want to deal with it politically, and yet everything they have done up to now has undermined the working/middle class.

I recall reading a book by Joel Kotkin that posits that the increasing inequality and class divide has a different causation than the conventional wisdom assumes. Many progressive cities (e.g. NYC, Austin, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston) are paying lip service for the disenfranchised, and yet are supporting policies that have hindered the new disenfranchised: the working/middle class. These policies have included high taxes, rent control, a maze of housing regulations/zoning laws, stringent environmental regulations that have kept certain industries away, and a NIMBY mindset for low income housing developments.  

This new Left, who support such policies, includes the influential Clerisy that make up the media/academic/policy elites, as well as the tech oligarchs that have gotten a free pass from government impediments. While these are not the Wall Street bankers that often get lumped in as protest targets, they are perhaps more central to today’s power brokers in a world that is ever changing.

Beyond economic policies, we also have to consider the cultural issues even more so. Kotkin says, “Secularism, singleness, and childlessness have gained particular social cache for over a generation, especially among the well-educated. Contemporary social thinking, as epitomized by “creative class” theorist Richard Florida, essentially links “advanced” society to the absence of religious values. Indeed, the current fashions in urbanism not only disdain religiosity but often give remarkably short shrift to issues involving families.” And it’s these traditional values that are most needed for working/middle class families to succeed and feel supported in a community. 

Not to mention, cosmopolitan cultural elites often look down and are often smug when it comes to the working/middle class. That hypocrisy doesn’t go unnoticed. In the end, it creates an anti-establishment resentment that we are now experiencing in the political events of the day. 

Yes, we won’t be able to put the cultural toothpaste back into the 1950’s tube, but as Kotkin notes, there may be some hope in the mid-tier cities where the cultural elites have less prominence. 

(It should be noted while increasing inequality is an empirical phenomenon, much of the perception around it is exacerbated by human nature: greedy people who don't have that much money envying greedy people who do have money. Also, if we took a deep time perspective, we all benefit from wealth generation.)

Progressivism is very little more than the managerial class pursuing its own class interests under the cover of altruism -- Kevin D. Williamson

Bright Sadness, Sober Happiness

I have approached an age that brings me halfway to something, assuming I get to be a centennial. While these milestone years tend to bring forth self-reflection, I find myself getting less sentimental than I have in years past. This is an interesting phenomena that can only come about if one has a rich inner life. In the horizontal sense I have not accomplished some things my self-imagination would have expected by now, but vertically I have gone further than I could have imagined. It's as if a paradox ensues: as the body ages, the soul regenerates.

Richard Rohr says, “There is a gravitas in the second half of life, but it is now held up by a much deeper lightness, or “okayness.” Our mature years are characterized by a kind of bright sadness and a sober happiness, if that makes any sense.” In regards to the second half of life, he does not necessarily mean chronological age but soul arrival, where “instead of being ego driven, you will begin to be soul drawn.”

I can't say when this started to happen to me for sure, but sometime in the last decade it did creep in (without being creepy at all). My 20-somethings were full of hedonic cravings, although I intuited there had to be something beyond the raw enthusiasm of youth. As Shakespeare said, “God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.” I suppose this is a more sophisticated way of saying youth is wasted on the young.

“Basically, the first half of life is writing the text, and the second half is writing the commentary on that text.” Maybe that is why I started this blog. After all, if I was just writing text, I would be bored to tears. But commentary seems to have an unbounded flow to it that comes through me, where I can look back at all that text from a different vantage point.

“Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go; split people see and create splits in everything and everybody. By the second half of our lives, we are meant to see in wholes and no longer just in parts. Yet we get to the whole by falling down into the messy parts—so many times, in fact, that we long and thirst for the wholeness and fullness of all things, including ourselves. I promise you this unified field is the only and lasting meaning of up.” — Rohr

So it is, and I know it is the best choiceless choice I can make from here on up. 

Now, if I can only remember that other bit of wisdom that came from Sunset Boulevard. Oh yeah, “there's nothing tragic about being 50, unless you're trying to be 25.” Time to get rid of the hipster pants.

Letting Our Imaginations Get the Best of Us

I've been cursed and blessed with the omniscience impulse. It's not that I will or want to know everything, but I want to know what matters. That's why I am prone to move from one idea to another, but in some sense it all coheres around a single Truth. In the past, I would collect knowledge as objects in attempt to satiate my lack in self. And now, I am not bothering to collect anything, because all said and done I forget most things anyway. What I am hoping for is that all this reading, inquiry, and contemplation will leave an imprint in my soul. And as a whole, my intellectual endeavors do seem to strengthen my deeper convictions (even if I fall off the wagon after a family get together).

Robert Spitzer makes the point, "The heart’s reasons are essential, but without the mind’s reasons, they might seem to be ungrounded idealism that can undermine conviction and openness to God and grace." I've always sensed the anti-intellectual tendencies you get with some spiritual paths can be limiting and defeating. We should want to follow Truth in all things, with every aspect of our being! And that's what I am aiming to do with the blog. 

But I suppose where all us heady types veer off, is when the imagination has been repressed. We lose our child-like innocence for possibility in the stories we know. 

Take the greatest story every told. I, like many intellectuals, can acknowledge that Jesus did exist. But I was not so open to the idea of seeing him as fully divine, maybe just fully human. And assuming he was some "enlightened" sage, he was no different than the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Sri Ramana Maharshi, etc.   

In this latest video installment, Bishop Robert Barron reviews Rodrigo Garcia's film, Last Days in the Desert. While film is not well received for many reasons, Bishop Barron makes a great point that part of the problem is the director made Jesus so boring because it portrays him simply as another spiritual seeker among many.

And I get that this probably plays better to a secular audience who is sophisticated, intelligent, and imaginatively deficient.

But if Jesus was just another spiritual seeker, could he have had the transformative impact in culture that did ensue? And as Barron says, "what you sense on every page of the New Testament is that something happened to the first Christians, something so strange and unexpected and compelling that they wanted to tell the whole world about it."

According to the Church, Jesus is not quasi-divine and quasi-human, but rather completely human and completely divine: meaning he was completely integrated in his human will and God's will. But here's the real interesting thing that Barron brings out that rocks me to my core:

"There is a distinction between the Bible and practically all other spiritualities, religions, and philosophies of the world. Whereas those last three can articulate very well the dynamics of our search for God, the former is not primarily interested in that story. It tells, rather, of God’s search for us. Mind you, that first story is a darned good one, and it’s told over and again in spiritual literature from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Star Wars. It has beguiled the minds of some of the great figures in human history: Homer, Virgil, Cicero, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Newton, and James Joyce. In a very real sense, the comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell was right: in all of the cultures of the world, one great song is sung and one great monomyth is repeated. But the Bible is not one more iteration of the monomyth. It is the deeply disorienting account of how the creator of the universe hunts us down, finally coming after us personally in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is not one more man looking for God; he is God in the flesh, searching for his people: It is not you who have chosen me; it is I who have chosen you." 

Imagine that! It could very well be possible that the greatest story ever told allows us to stop striving for spiritual attainment/wisdom/enlightenment, and surrender to His search for us. Behold the imagination that gets the best of us!

We Have Met the Conspiracy, and It Is Us

Does the world seem less trusting and more paranoid than ever before? I can only sense this anecdotally, but I have met too many people who believe there is a conspiracy behind everything! Internet culture hasn't helped much since anyone can be screaming about something out there, including me. But I try to limit my demons out here, and hopefully offer a coherent view of the world. 

I don't deny our government has been involved in some surreptitious, ignoble activities. We know that to be true. But once you start viewing any event through that lens, you need to look from where the claim is being made. 

I often believe that conspiracy theories are a psychological mechanism that helps people come to grips with their lack of control over the forces shaping their lives.

Look at 9/11. Huge event, and we all tried to make sense of it. Somehow the idea of Islamic terrorists wanting to bring the center of Western capitalism down wasn't enough. Many believe it had to be an inside job. But we all know that government would never be competent enough to orchestrate such an event (and don't get me started on Building 7). And even if they were, why wouldn't they have also planted some WMD's in Iraq during the invasion? It would have been easy enough for them to do, instead of having egg on their face. 

I acknowledge evil exists, but not from our government to this extent and the way our uber-cynical culture has come to see things.  

Walter Russell Mead said, "Conspiracy theories give true believers the illusion of power by offering a “secret” and, to believers, a convincing account of how the world works; but they simultaneously disempower the believers because they buy into a narrative in which the Powers are so smart, so well-organized and so far-sighted that nothing short of an apocalyptic meltdown will ever bring them down."

Now, that packs a punch to allow our limited selves and our puppet masters to feel pretty huge. But, as they say, it's all in our minds.

Robert Godwin mentioned, "Most ideas about reality are just a form of paranoia, which is really just a premature closure of the psychic field. It results from a combination of laziness, fear of ambiguity, and discomfort with mystery... Also, in the absence of religion, politics has become the central means for people to express and contain existential anxieties and conflicts that are universal and insoluble."

And the sad part is, when it does come out it can't be reasoned with. It's too far entrenched down the limbic-reptilian nervous system.

All said and done, it's probably not a big deal when it's just a few paranoid crazies floating around. But when it hits critical mass, then you've a problem. At its worst, it can lead to an Utopian movement conflated with a distorted ideological teleology.

In his excellent book, The Varieties of the Millennial Experience, Richard Landes says "although Marxism and Nazism come from almost diametrically opposed ideological positions, by their commitment to a vision of a total salvation in this world, and in their violent engagement in apocalyptic time, they came to resemble each other in two of the most appalling aspects of millennialism—(1) their obsession with “redeeming” their chosen “people” at any cost to “private” life; and (2) their terrifying willingness to engage in coercive purification as a means to accomplish their visionary goals with the stunning numbers of lives lost as a result."

So when a conspiracy theorist comes knockin at your door, don't bother to reason with him and walk away. 

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man. -- H.L. Mencken

It’s Sexy Time and It’s Serious

Maybe it’s time for me to acquire more readers, hence the topic of discussion. But it’s more to the point that I’m acknowledging the Freudian-lovin drive that unconsciously consumes culture these days.

Once Nietzsche killed off God with our permission, some were forced to find a new faith. It’s just our nature: we are condemned to religion. Dylan got it right when he sang you Gotta Serve Somebody. And if it’s not transcendent, it’s probably going down the road of the profane. Once you mix in some good, old procreative impulses with a counter-cultural pleasure seeking ethos, there you have it: an overly sexualized culture.

As Bruce Charlton notes, while “we inhabit a culture which, while dominated by sex, simultaneously denies the power of sex.” For many, it’s no big deal. And if you’re getting in the way of it and c---blocking me, you’re the problem.

We have become so arrogant these days that we aren’t even aware how crazy we can be without proper constraints.

Every so often (or maybe too often), I’ll encounter a female who I find especially attractive on the subway. I will then muster enough will power to not glance over to her again. Not so much to avoid her noticing and thinking I am some sort of creep, although that is a partial motivation, but to see if I can really do it. And guess what? I fail most of the time. While this may be an innocent enough vice I am partial to, it does confirm the strength of this tendency. 

Some of our ancestors from the Greeks on were very aware of this, and were able to instill constraints through norms, laws, and religion. I recall reading a book about Marriage and Civilization, where the author William Tucker says “In almost all species, males spend most of their time fighting among themselves for access to females. The unique social contract of monogamy— a male for every female, a female for every male— lowers the temperature of sexual competition and frees its members to work together in cooperation. It is at this juncture that human societies— even human civilizations— are born.”

But here’s the interesting point, while “Monogamy does not maximize the interests of every participant. What is does is optimize everyone’s individual outcome in a way that maintains the integrity of the entire society.” So while our natural state may lean more towards polygamy (or just screwing around), there is a strong bonding-effect to a community when we are organized around families. 

(Genghis Kahn and other uber-alpha males are probably the exception here. Interesting stat: approximately 16 million people can claim descent from Genghis and his male relatives.)

So with the family and trustworthy local communities losing ground the last several decades, what will that mean for us going forward? It’s shaky at best without hallowed ground.

Not All Faiths are Equal

I just finished a book by Rebecca Bynum that packs a lot of punch for such a short read. Essentially, she distills what the book title says: The Real Nature of Religion. She definitely has her biases, but they are legitimate in the way only a legitimate believer can know.

It seems these days, you have many non-believers (all truths are relative), but you also have the pseudo-believers (all religions are equal). Have you ever been to an interfaith meeting? If not, you haven't missed much. It's generally a kumbaya gathering, where people try to equate all their core beliefs (but coming through a very superficial lens). 

Truthfully, all the religions are not equal like a co-exist bumper sticker. 

Now, I am aware of the Perennialists take on the View where they go down to the ontological essence of God: and that all faiths are grounded in same esoteric experience at the mountain's peak. While this may be true, although debatable, most people of faith are not mystics. Moreover, it always comes down to the metaphysics that gets interpreted through ultimate experience or revelation.

And so today when you get the interpretations of all the original interpretations of a faith, it all gets very messy.

So what makes one religion better than another? Bynum starts by going after what doesn't a make a religion True (or even a religion). For example, “when a religion becomes completely reduced to a doctrine and only a doctrine, it is no longer a living faith.” And that's definitely a problem, but not as bad as this issue: “If there is no difference between man’s will and God’s will, there is no God to see. Oh I see. So now man has no autonomy and is in complete submission. And “if there is no difference between man’s will and God’s will, there is no God to seek.”  And if God is unknowable, then it's no longer about God... but something else. Maybe, an ideology?

I think you get my point.

So what makes a True religion? Bynum even offers a checklist:

• Is love, the progressive experience of God, encouraged? Check. I'll keep drinking.
• Are the fruits of the spirit, (truthfulness, joy, peace, loyalty, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance) encouraged? Check. By my fruits, you shall know me.
• Is loving service to humanity, without prejudice, encouraged? Check again. Not prejudice, but definitely discernment! 
• Are hatred, selfishness, intolerance, intemperance, disloyalty, deceit and violence discouraged? Big check! 
• Is violent coercion employed? No check. Wow, what would be the point? And the loss.

Did you pass?

Those who are unsure of right and wrong have no defense against those who are absolutely certain of the rightness of their cause and the purity of their motives. — Rebecca Bynum 

Here I Am Stuck in the Middle with You

Tip O’Neill was wrong. Politics are not just local. It goes deeper than that, but most are just skimming the surfaces with their thinking. And that is especially true these days! If you don’t think political discourse has devolved, just watch a cable TV pundit debate next to an old video of Buckley and Vidal going at it. Okay, even Buckley lost his cool at one point and wanted to sock it to Vidal (and who could blame him). 

We are metaphysically abiding in assumptions that puts one on either the Left and the Right. The issue is whether or not you are conscious and/or coherent about them. 

Bruce Charlton writes, “Modern people who do not consciously think are therefore on 'the Right'; and so are those who follow-through their thoughts to their conclusions.” Now that’s compelling; the extremes of the bell curve: the dumb and the wise. So I suppose there’s some folk right in the middle. Let’s call them the Left.

And the Left, “regards himself as a kind of perfection of balance - enough knowledge to be superior to the masses, but not so much as to lead to hard work and dealing with troublesome consequences: he feels himself to be both prestigious and pragmatic; with enough learning to justify his authority, but not enough to risk being expelled outside the pale.” 

So some of those boorish, populist Trump followers are probably not the greatest thinkers in the world, but then again, those smug, pseudo-educated Leftists know just enough to be dangerous.

And I was this guy for a long time (with some residual parasites remaining). I was so smug, until I met someone who did circles around my square thinking. Then I realized I need to re-consider a worldview that didn’t line up with reality.

But being “expelled outside the pale” is an issue for many of us. Who wants to be ostracized from the club? David Mamet made this point on why he stayed on the Left as long as he did: 

“One may reason (as I, and many readers have) with honest, intelligent, moral Liberal friends, who may, in one instance after another, grant the validity of one’s Conservative theses, and acknowledge the discrepancy between their own actions, and their voting habits, but yet not only vote Democratic, but proclaim that nothing on earth could induce them to do otherwise. Why? It means leaving the group. It is not difficult to endure, but it is painful to recognize the incredulity and scorn which one encounters from one’s native Group (the Liberals) on announcing a change of philosophy. It is shocking. And it is sobering, for it reveals this truth: that the Left functions, primarily, through its power as a primitive society or religion, dedicated above all to solidarity, and not only to acceptance but to constant promulgation of its principles, however inchoate, as “self-evident” and therefore beyond question. But, as Hayek points out, that something is beyond question most often means that its investigation has been forbidden. Why? Because it was untrue.”

Life experience and being exposed to more independent/intellectually honest thinkers soon got me to a similar spot. I could no longer not investigate and live untruly. Yes, I lost some friends. And I also found myself spending more time alone. But, I am no longer stuck in the middle with them...

The Passion Pit

I think there is a change in the wind when it comes to one bit of bad advice: follow your passion. I got this advice, and it probably screwed me up longer than it should have. I never had a career trajectory that I would consider to be a calling. And it often made me envious of those that did. So I often would let the idea of the perfect dream job consume me in ways that were counter-productive to the decent job that I did have. 

Somewhere along the line in culture, it became all about self-expression over self-mastery. I suppose we can blame the post-1960’s counter-cultural revolution for this. Thanks hippies.

Now, some hipsters are on to this! Even Neil Gaiman offered a mantra of “do good art” at a commencement speech a few years ago, in place of some glib remark of doing the art you love. 

Yes, we have bamboozled to believe we can do anything we want, and that just isn’t the case. I think Mike Rowe speaks well to this in this Prager U video:

It should be obvious at a young age, most people don’t have a clue what their passion is and what it can become. One of the best books I’ve read on the topic is Cal Newport’s So Good That They Can’t Ignore You.

Cal makes the great point that “passion is an epiphenomenon of a working life well lived. Don't follow your passion; rather, let it follow you in your quest to become so good that they can't ignore you.” So in other words, passion is not a bad thing. It’s how we use it.

Now we all know people that may be good at their job, but damn unhappy with it. Well, it may be that “mastery by itself is not enough to guarantee happiness,” but that career satisfaction “moves beyond the mere acquisition of useful skills and into the subtle art of investing the career capital this generates into the right types of traits in your working life.” 

What are these traits? According to Cal, they are creativity, impact, and control. Sounds foundational to me.

Sometimes we can’t connect the dots until we’ve embodied the dots. And so like any healthy character disposition for delayed gratification, passion for craft is to be cultivated in time. And during that time, you may begin to see things in ways you never once envisioned.

The Psychological Oppressed verses the Real Oppressed

David Brooks recently took on student radicalism and the heightened cultural atmosphere of identity politics that permeates many colleges and universities these days. Brooks states that “what one sees in the essay are the various strains of American liberalism crashing into one another: the admiration for achievement clashing against the moral superiority of the victim; the desire to let students run free, clashing against the desire to protect the oppressed from psychologically unsafe experiences.”

In the alternate universe of identity politics, we are now asked to consider the “new” oppressed: the victims of race, sexual orientation, gender, or whatever arbitrary circle you can draw around people (or their private parts). 

If we look at this from a higher context, we are definitely in a bit of a mess.

It’s not that all group identities are bad. Heck, we are tribal by nature. And sometimes it helps orientate us and gives us coherence. But the concern is when we allow these identities lose all objective standards and become one’s primary locus.

There was a time in the US when people saw themselves as Americans first, and then maybe by creed. But these identities were grounded in deep values that cohered around a nation or a faith. Now we have fragmented ever more into more superficial categories with the power of words and thrown away our deeper roots. 

Many religions note that we are to look after the sick and weak. Goethe even had noted that “[Christianity] brought reverence for what is below us” during a violent time in history when the real oppressed were often seen as the scapegoats of society. Until then, we didn't give hoot about your problems (see Rene Girard's work on this).

But when we really consider the people who are to be revered as weak, it does not mean they are coming from a place of weakness. Unlike the students who are offended by any off-putting comment, there are people who can come from an inner strength no matter what their life conditions. And that’s all the difference in the eyes of the highest beholder. Again, it’s all about the interiors and if you don’t have much depth in that area, then you’re just going to get knocked around by the world and all the projections you throw at each other.

So when considering the real oppressed, it may be best we have some standards instead of the whims of one’s subjective experience. And “people who try to use politics to fill emotional and personal voids get more and more extreme and end up as fanatics.” And fanaticism won’t get you anywhere outside those campus gates.

Shocker: The Mystic is Not Necessarily a Saint

A friend who studies with Jeffrey Kripal at Rice University recently posted this excerpt from Kripal:

"The mystical is not the ethical. The former arises from the death or temporary disappearance of the ego; the latter emerges from the affirmation of the ego among many other egos, that is, from an uncompromising privileging of the human person within a community of persons. The mystical cannot lead to the ethical without considerable help from outside and elsewhere, that is, from reason, political theory, moral debate, and a love of human beings, not as ciphers for grand metaphysical realities (“Christ,” Brahman,” “emptiness,” or whatever), but as human beings in all their mundane and messy glory. Mystical experience may thus gives us a unique access to the ontological dimensions of human experience, but this ontological level cannot help us with our social and ethical tasks. It is certainly possible that we may find its apophatic and deconstructive powers helpful in our initial task of calling into question our own dominant fictions, but in the end we must turn elsewhere, well outside the mystical, for the tools we will need to construct another, more adequate fiction." -- Jeffrey Kripal, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom

I was considering how it all comes back to metaphysics: “as above, so below.” I’m not sure I agree with Kripal’s emphasis on ontological humanism or his use of the phrase “more adequate fiction.” As we know, some fictions are also more true. But we do need a story that moves us, that allows us to pursue it in a way that changes us, and offers a relationship that is open, dynamic, and inspiring.

There are plenty of non-dual neo-advaitists shuffling away from any story, and where does that lead us? Maybe with some contentment, but is that the whole point? I hope not, because it sort of makes the past 14 billion years seem like a waste of time.

Ultimately, it’s all about realizing that we become what we love. So while mysticism can unpack and enliven a lot for us, it may not be ethically sufficient for most (see Da Free John).

So while I agree with Ken Wilber’s assessment that there are lines of development, and the mystic may be underdeveloped here and there, I do believe we need to take it a step further. Or maybe this step was already taken for us, but we are too clever to buy into it.

"One cannot dispense with the experience of others, i.e. with authority, if one wants to avoid the traps set along the way of spiritual experience." – Meditations of the Tarot

"Experience is the worst teacher. It gives the test before giving the lesson." – unknown