Category: Philosophy

Community

Imperial Theology

I made an off-hand reply last week on FaceBook to a question that has become so common as to almost be meaningless. How can so many people who claim to be christian follow an exemplar who is the exact antithesis of everything Jesus stood for? The usual response—well, they aren’t really christians—will not serve. Because it overlooks too much of what is going on and what has preceded it. My response was that they are Imperial Christians, adhering to what the religion became after 313 C.E. Prior to that date, it was pretty much just one of dozens of religions, having no better claim to relevance than any other. After that, it became the state religion of Rome, thanks to Emperor Constantine’s mandate.

That changed everything. What Jesus said (may have said, the other inconvenient fact being that we really do not know, even if he existed*) played less and less a part of what then unfolded, because it became then an arm of the government, and governments are never pacific. At best, governments are pragmatic. In this case—and it can be argued—Constantine was a pragmatist with an eye toward posterity. (Also there was this little thing called the Battle of  Milvian Bridge, which Constantine won and took the throne under the sign of the cross, which he then parlayed in his justification for being emperor; right there Christianity was inextricably tied to military victory and an imperial mandate) The constant tumult that had emerged with the advent of a faith that had the temerity to declare that it was the One True religion and had an obligation to convert (Judaism had a similar claim, but it was never an evangelical doctrine and kept pretty much out of politics, except in the question of a homeland, so they actually caused little trouble for Rome) had created a degree of civil unrest that made governing difficult. Time to settle things. Constantine’s mother may have had something to do with it. In either instance, Constantine decided it would be best for there to be a single state religion and decree that the others should get in line.

The details comprise several bookshelves of historical research. We can try to analyze the whys and wherefores, what was he thinking, and so forth, but the fact is christianity ceased being what it had been and became an imperial tool, which meant conversion with the backing of the Law. Not Yahweh’s law, but Roman law. That aspect—that character—of what has come down to us has pretty much corrupted the whole thing. When people refer to the New Testamant and the red letter sections to try to point out the hypocrisy of certain people, they unfortunately overlook the real world aspect of christianity, which is that is a colonial movement, an occupier, a set of principles designed to privilege a single worldview even to the destruction of all others. It is a Roman artifact. So when a Leader steps forth who holds up the sceptor of that movement and declares that it will triumph, whatever Jesus might have said is utterly irrelevant to those who follow. They adhere to a conquering religion. (That’s one reason right wing christians almost never refer to the Beatitudes. What a lot of weak-chinned, namby pamby pacifist nonsense! You have to force people to believe and all that tolerance and empathy will gain you nothing!)

All religions that become aspects of government end up evolving into something other than their presumed intents (or almost all, since some religions are designed from the start to be governments). What we’re seeing in the screeling irrationality of so-called fundamentalists (so-called because if they truly were “fundamentalists” they would adhere to what Jesus presumably said—indeed, they would first know what he said, instead of regurgiting updated takes on Old Testamant Angry God theology—but instead they are soldiers in the march to be religious imperialists always with an eye on the “reward”) is a revelation of what christianity has become for them. They are christians, but they are Constantine’s not Yeshua’s.

Personal aggrandisement, either of wealth or reputation, and a need to silence detractors are the hallmarks of this brand. Naturally they will follow a leader who promises both. We should stop trying to shame them into reason and get some explanation from them as to why they aren’t christians. They are. But they belong to an 1800-year-long tradition of an imperial theology that doesn’t really take Jesus very seriously.

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*No, we actually do not. Not concretely. This is the fly in the ointment in all this. We have no “original” documents, only copies of copies, and none of them agree with each other. It’s a morass of supposition. But. My own personal view is that Yeshua bar Joseph did exist. Someone said some things that have come down to us as his words and whoever that someone was, he was a serious philosopher. There are some radical things in those attributions, and if taken seriously would have posed a threat to the status quo at the time. Whether we call that man Jesus or Sam, it doesn’t matter. Ideas came down to us that still have resonance. The pity is that such a large number of people won’t really look at those words in any but metaphorical and ritual terms.

Art

Simpler Complexities

There are times I wonder why I do what I do. I mean, the thought occurs that there are simpler things in life. How did I ever convince myself that I could be a writer?

I cannot retrace the steps, not at this point. Somewhere back in the restructured haze of youth I had this idea that it would be cool to tell stories and get paid for it. I can do that, I can make things up, I do it all the time, all I have to do is write it down and send it in.

Well, I will not retrace the learning that showed me how wrong I was about my abilities. Death by a thousand rejection slips.

I’ll admit, I was baffled. I don’t know about others, but for a time I honestly could not see a difference between what I read in the magazines and what I was putting down on paper. You just tell what happens next. What does logic have to do with it? Life doesn’t follow rules like that, why should fiction? And this is science fiction, so rules should apply even less. I mean, what does it mean, it doesn’t make sense?

Because I did not know any of the rules, not even the rules of submission, I received no feedback in those early attempts, and drifted away into something else. Something I thought would be simpler. As much as I appreciate complexity as such, I was not good at creating it or dealing with it. How I managed to reach adulthood with any capabilities at all is one of those mysteries never to be fully—or even partially—answered. It was never that I thought the rules didn’t apply to me, it was that I never recognized the rules.

And still I managed.

It’s remarkable that I’m even alive.

But there were guardrails. My parents, other adults in my life, the rough outlines of general rules, a certain unexamined caution in my approach to daily life. And limited opportunities to get in over my head. In many ways, I had a sheltered upbringing.

That and I read. (One of my favorite films is Three Days of the Condor and one of my favorite scenes is the one where all these CIA operatives are discussing Robert Redford and how dangerous can he be. He has no field experience, why are we worried. “He reads,” Cliff Robertson tells them. Clearly most of them don’t get it. I loved that. He reads.

I read. A lot.

Not as much as I once did, but I retain more now, so it balances out. While I can’t point to a specific example (other than in a debate or argument) where having read something made a difference in a given situation, the cumulative effect has been like a form of experience.

I grew up at a time in a place soaked in the kind of received nonsense that requires outgrowing. At one time or another I have believed a great many false narratives, especially about the relative value of different people, different kinds of people, and like most of the people around I would let proof of my beliefs dribble from my mouth from time to time.  Some of my contemporaries, no doubt, never grew out of that. For whatever reason, I was fortunate in a disposition that made it impossible for me to categorize anyone I personally knew according to prevailing stereotypes, and by extension whatever group they supposedly represented. Little by little, over time, I left a great many prejudices behind. Can I take any kind of credit for that? I’m not sure. The simplistic veneer of easy discrimination always gives way to the complexness underneath, and I have always preferred to embrace the complex—even when I didn’t understand it. And what I eventually understood is that prejudices, especially towards people, are products of simplistic thinking. The defense of such thinking, when pursued far enough, results in complicated structures that ultimately will not even support themselves. That genuine understanding results in simpler structures that allow us to see clearly.

Because I have learned (eventually) that complex is not the same thing as complicated and that often, perhaps usually, complexity manifests in simple forms. When we examine the properties of a nautilus shell, we see something quite simple in presentation. We can take it in at a glance and appreciate what it is fairly easily. It is a simple thing. But the layers of complexity is contains and offers up with investigation amaze us and lead to a trove of questions which, pursued diligently, offer up a glimpse into the underpinnings of the universe. A simple tune, easy on the ears and elegantly comprehensible in its performance, yields up myriad mathematical, harmonic, and even cultural aspects, an onion in its layers, beautiful complexity that manifests in simple melody and harmony. As noted by Samuel R. Delany, a simple declarative sentence—The door dilated—unpacks in ways that suggest an entire civilization beyond the threshold, all the assumptions necessary to result in the logic of that sentence and what it tells us.

Learning to see the two in collaboration can give us a more satisfying experience of life itself.

As a youth, I was dazzled and delighted by the complexities. Sometimes I mistook complications for complexities. Detail can fascinate, even when it might not add up to anything coherent. A consequence of age and continual observation is that I learned to see the whole where before I might only have seen the components. The art of recognizing and assembling complex ideas and details to create a comprehensible something is the art of recognizing that elegance, truth, and understanding should not confuse. We strive for clarity, which usually presents as simplicity.

But like the misidentification of complexity with complication, we have to learn to tell the difference between simplicity and the simplistic.

Thank you for your attention while I did some sorting.

 

 

 

Community

Belief and Other Matters

By now it should be obvious to everyone that the so-called Pro-Life movement is not interested in confining itself to abortion. They have a definition of it so flexible that some designate birth control as a form of it. The line is not clear. Not to mention that in individual cases there is an evident record of hypocrisy. It’s all right for me, but no one else. It should not be legal.

It makes me uncomfortable.

I do not wish to get into the gears of the matter. I have a couple of observations about the framing issues.

Firstly, the division is largely (though not wholly) a consequence of Belief. At base, if you believe that the fetus is fully human, separate and distinct as a person from the woman carrying it, then you established a moral line difficult if not impossible to cross. There can be no compromise over that. Like other questions of assumed rights, it will not matter what counterarguments are made, the reality is you believe this and there can be no fact that will persuade you otherwise. For a change to occur, you would have to abandon your belief. That would not alter the substance of the belief, only your position in relation to it. Either it is a belief you embrace or it is not.

And no reasoned argument will alter that.

If, in other words, somehow it could be demonstrated that the fetus is not a person, it would change nothing. That would have no validity in the face of your belief.

(To move this out of the abortion arena for a moment, take for example the debate over the Second Amendment. For some, what the framers of the constitution actually meant would now make no difference—the belief in the right to personally own firearms is unassailable, regardless of what facts may be shown to the contrary.)

In any confrontation between deeply-held belief and fact-based alternatives, the latter has no purchase.

However, the chief flaw in the overall Pro-Life argument lies in its deployment as a feint. Again, this is connected to a species of belief, but since it was for so long buried in the rhetoric of “unborn rights” it only recently emerged. Given that a fairly substantial number of those who align themselves with that movement have proven to have feet of clay—namely, many who talk the talk end up availing themselves of the services they so loudly decry—it becomes clear that abortion is not the main issue. They are now going after contraception.

To my mind, going back to those with marrow-deep commitments to the Second Amendment, the reasons for such positions emerge only later. The why of such positions. We should all know now that a sizeable cadre of such gun rights advocates are not insisting on them for matters of self-defense or sports, but because they believe they have a right, even a duty, to overthrow the government. They are nascent revolutionaries. Along with this, there are those who seem to believe they are in an unacknowledged war for the supremacy of one tribe over others. The philosophic issues surrounding the constitution and its presumed properties are secondary to their assumed “right” to defend themselves against the boogeyman of potential oppression. Often in the guise of other ethnicities, immigrants of all stripes, and even political opposites. The insistence on personal firearm possession is part and parcel with an ingrained paranoia that holds that a presumed set of cultural privileges is sacrosanct and will have to be defended against abrogation. We do not have to go far to find historic examples—the entire history of the KKK is based on exactly this kind of thinking.

Such duplicitous thinking underlies many otherwise insurmountable divisions. Within a given group, the supposed “purity” of purpose can be seen to break down on closer examination. It is not a monolith.

Curiously, the one thing that seems to offend them all within their group is the idea that it should be left up to the individual.

So the two issues I’d like to address are conjoined in this instance—firstly, the presumed sanctity of Belief, and secondly the shell games that come about when belief runs into politics.

Let me clear up first the potential pitfall—belief vs Belief. In order to navigate the day, we all have to base certain actions on a level of belief. You have to believe certain things just to get by because there is simply no time to verify every single thing we take on some species of faith. We have to believe that the food we buy from the grocery store is safe. When something goes wrong and there’s an outbreak of e. coli, we have to believe the agencies responsible for our safety will do their jobs. We would go insane to act otherwise. And as a consequence of statistical reality we are right to do so.

(For me, one of the most important things to cultivate in life is a healthy skepticism and an appreciation of doubt. Doubt is essential. I was asked once by someone, quite sincerely, why they should doubt that which they know to be true. The only answer that serves is that while the thing being believed may well be innately true, it is our ability to understand and interpret what it is that we must always doubt. That we have it right is the necessary question. I have no doubt the universe is real and operates according to certain principles. What I must always doubt is my ability to know and understand what those principles are and how they operate. What the True Believer seeks is to eliminate doubt altogether. I do not know if it laziness or impatience or insecurity, but I find this the most baffling aspect of such a position.)

In the back of our minds, though, it is conditional. Under certain extraordinary circumstances, we are also right to suspend our belief in all this, at least temporarily.

I’m not talking about that kind of practical assumption of reliability.

I’m talking about the moment belief becomes Belief, which is a different order perspective. It is the conviction that in all instances under all conditions, Something Is Always True and Reliable, regardless of any evidence to the contrary. With Belief comes intransigence. With Belief comes a conviction that one is being lied to by those who do not share said Belief. With Belief comes a rejection of evidence arbitrarily, based on how it may or may not conform to the scaffolding of Belief.

With Belief comes a vein of conviction, often constrained but always there, that anyone living otherwise is a potential if not actual enemy. And because of the presumed lies and the nonconformity and the absence of like-mindedness, any level of duplicity is justified because this is a war. In other words, Crusade is an acceptable response to differences of opinion and an insistence that there is more than one way to live one’s life.

Most of the attributes of a personal view of life well lived have long since subsided into minor things that cause little friction between people. All that is required for social harmony is a modicum of attention and respect for differing choices. We do not see seismic convulsions over dietary differences (although it may be possible to imagine one over the omnivore vs vegan question). We simply recognize differences and do not impose a monolithic preference.

Underlying and permeating this level of Belief is a deep and often unexamined insistence that the world conform to our expectations. That contrary positions be extirpated. That differences over key issues be eradicated. That everyone should be the same. And underlying that is the assumption that the Believer has the right viewpoint and has not only the right but the obligation to impose it on everyone else.

Mostly, this rarely rises above an ongoing anxiety that things do not conform.

But the central tension resides in a refusal to acknowledge that those who do not share your Belief have a right to hold their own.

We come now to where it erupts into conflict, namely social policy.

We’re seeing another example in Oklahoma right now, where a debate over the opening of a new—religious—charter school is unfolding because public funding is involved. I understand the concerns of both sides of this argument, and have felt personally for years that this is a conundrum with an easy solution, at least in terms of policy. My solution, however, would have the added consequence of driving partisans into the open to declare their actual intent. People have a tendency to camouflage their true desires, probably because a bold statement will be met with bold resistance. We live in an era in which major policy demands are too often couched in euphemism or hidden inside secondary or tertiary issues in order to slip the real goal in like a trojan horse. To state baldly that you want a school where children are spoon-fed religious ideology is a non-starter. So all the other reasons for establishing a separate, non-public institution are given. (My solution? Include religion in public schools, as part of history or even separately as a class on World Religions. Teach them all, give them all equal time. I suspect the howl of protest would quick strip the veneer of First Amendment concerns touted by partisans of a given creed.)

This is where Belief comes into conflict with the World. Belief dictates a preferred state, a template of how things ought to be, and where possible informs a drive to make the world conform. Giving equal time and respect to competing Beliefs is simply nonsense against such deeply held desire.

In a democracy, it is the back-and-forth that we recognize as the Will of the People that undermines any and all such attempts at enforced conformity. This is a brute-force method, of course, and too often satisfies no one, but it allows for the one thing that does effectively alter Belief—experience.

Even a cursory look at history shows that once deeply-held Beliefs have changed significantly, that the unquestioned givens of one period are the subject of bewildered speculation now. The only thing common to all this is experience, which erodes the details and eventually forces what we know to be true to change to accommodate a world that apparently had never been what the Beliefs of the Day said it was. Time and experience work like tides to alter and sometimes obliterate Beliefs.

Which understanding serves only to underscore the impermanence of them. We are taunting fate to insist that we must hold fast to ideas in the face of a reality that cares nothing for our wishes.

But then we come to the most intransigent aspect of Belief and that is where it coincides, reifies, and validates Identity. Our Beliefs, we imagine, are who we are.

What we have done historically in this country could be described as a series of holding actions, one part of the community erecting barricades to another until something new emerged from the confrontation. This has happened repeatedly and rarely without pain. The one thing that makes it all seem different now is our ability to see it as it happened, even if we are not directly involved. And that seeing elicits an opinion, a stand. The buffer of long communication has eroded to almost nothing. In many ways, this is a good thing. We have no excuse being surprised by injustices happening somewhere else. But the erosive effect on Belief has also accelerated. We are trying to establish that which will not change, under the assumption that principles are eternal. Well, perhaps some may be, but their formulation and the conditions in which they are expressed are not. What they are is water. Water is always water but the way it flows, where it rests, its very manifestation is mutable.

What makes this all the more difficult is the fact that there are dispassionate forces willing and able to take advantage of these differences to exercise power. I say dispassionate, but only in very specific aspects—those who crave power could actually not care less for the specifics of a given Belief. If they could get what they want by fostering and manipulating completely different sets of Beliefs, they would. All they want is the chasm between partisan advocates into which they may step and benefit by the conflict.

And we let them, because we are blinded to that by the nature of the Beliefs they exploit to their advantage.

I’m examining all this in order to find a way to navigate the current landscape. It has always bothered me when reason, backed by fact, fails to persuade. It took a long time for me to realize that I was not facing a reasoned position, but an expression of Identity that cannot yield, not without fundamentally changing its own nature. That is a tremendously difficult ask. It may or may not help to understand that eventually, the separation itself will yield to the erosion of experience. When some one or some group thrusts their Belief into a question that bears on people with whom they disagree, such disagreement a consequence of those same Beliefs, it comes down to a matter of assertion alone. Commonalities go by the wayside until—finally—experience erodes the division enough that some kind of compromise or altered perspective has a chance to manifest. In the meantime, other factors enter into the argument that most of time alter the question sufficiently that it becomes a new issue.

This is not conclusive. I’m still working all this over. But my inclination is to reject the assertions of those who offer only the testimony of their Belief as sufficient argument to impose their views on everyone.

I’ll come back to this in future.

 

 

 

 

career

Assessments, Arnold, and Aspirations

I recently had to find a new gym. The facility I had been going to for, oh, hell, 25 years I suppose, closed because they lost their lease. They evidently had no plans to find a new location in South St. Louis (they have one still in St. Charles). I had made friends over the years. For a time there was what might be viewed as a Geezers Club, three or four of us Of An Age and hanging on, but they all passed away, one after another. One may yet be alive. For the last several months there, going in at my usual time, I usually had the space mostly to myself. Four or five others would be there, spread out.

And then, closing down.

I took a few weeks off to shop around for a new place. Interestingly enough, there was one not a block away. This one is clearly a higher end club. Clean, spacious, newer equipment. They even have a big dance studio space. It’s more expensive than what I had been paying, but that didn’t surprise me. A few others I checked out were considerably pricier, so I finally bit the bullet and signed up.

It’s taking some time to acclimate. See, every gym is a bit different, especially with the kind of equipment they offer. No matter what, some things are just not going to be a smooth one-for-one transition. What you thought you were doing may not be what you can do here, at least not yet. Again, fine. I’ve changed gyms before, even though it’s been a while.

But this I did not expect. I’m doing better, at least in the way my body is responding.

The new facility is a two-story affair. Free weights are downstairs, machines upstairs. I go directly downstairs first. I’ve already established a routine (which will change in time; the best thing to do is change things up every two or three months, otherwise your body gets too used to what you’re doing and the benefits diminish) and I work through about 12 to 14 separate motions. Then I go upstairs to do my legs and a few other shaping exercises on the machines. At the end, I’ve done 20 to 22 motions, which is considerably more than I’d been doing.

I’m not sure where I’m getting the energy, but I think just the fact that I have to break it all into two distinct periods is psychologically beneficial. By the time I walk up the stairs to do part two, somewhere in my brain there’s a reset and it’s like I’m starting over.

And it’s beginning to produce results.

Now, it may seem curious to some that at my age this is even a thing. I will be 69 this year. In certain respects, I’m as if not stronger than I have ever been. It may be that one day I’ll run into a wall and crash, but for now I intend to hang on to whatever physical ability I have for as long as I can.

Serendipitously, I recently saw a new three-part documentary about—Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Now, I have never been even close to a fanatic about body building. I’m vain enough to try to keep a fit body, but the kind of devotion, nay, obsession that body builders give to their sport is just not in my repertoire. I admire them, yes.  Have I ever wanted to look like Mr. Universe? Not really. But that doesn’t mean one can’t find inspiration in them.

Schwarzenegger is a cultural icon. The body building, the films, two terms as governor of California…there’s a lot going on there. I was unaware of most of the details. It’s quite an informative documentary. Plus, he has a new series on Netflix, an action comedy called FUBAR, and I have to say, it’s fun. Not great art, but it does what it intends to do rather well. In the first episode there is an action sequence which includes him running after a fire engine, dropping down a manhole, killing some bad guys, etc. The usual kind of thing. His handler remarks that he’s the fastest 55-year-old he’s ever known. It is a plausible assessment.

But Schwarzenegger is 75.

There are brief scenes of him still working out. He says of himself “Right now I’m just trying to hold on.”

It’s not so much the exercise, but everything else he’s doing at the same time, that I find inspirational. what I would like to be able to do is operate at 80 to 95% capacity until one day I just stop. (Not 100% because I believe that running like that is an invitation to burn-out, to injury, to some kind of loss that can’t be recovered from. I have personal reasons to hold back that last 5 to 15 percent, not least of which is I feel I’ll last longer and manage better results.) It helps to see someone apparently achieving that.

On those other fronts, I’m working on a new novel and preparing for some other publisher things which I will talk about later. I’m seeing more of my mom than before, because dad is gone and I don’t want her to feel in any way neglected, or pass up a chance to just soak up more of her. My daily schedule is a bit of a mess, so I’m trying to find a way to fit everything in that I want to do.

Other stuff. One other thing I took from the Schwarzenegger documentary is his “philosophy” of life, if you can call it that, and why not? A philosophy like that doesn’t have to be complex, and this is not. “Keep busy and be useful.” Be useful. Apparently his father taught him that, Whatever you do, be useful. That resonated.

You never know where you might find reasons to do more.

I’ve been keeping busy.  I hope I’ve been useful.

Absurdity

Courtroom Chaos

I answered my civic summons to jury duty this week. One day, Monday. I confess to being annoyed by this as I have Things To Do this week and would have preferred another week. I do not object to being called to jury duty. I think it’s important. The last time, I was selected but never got the chance to serve because the judge had had a ruling overturned and they had to start all over. I was disappointed in that one, it would have been fascinating as both lawyers appeared to be at the top of their game and it was a murder trial with some interesting features. Ah, well.

This time, though it was a civil case.

I reported to the court building on time, got my number, and settled down to read a book until called. As it turned out, I only got 20 pages read before that, and I was the third number called.

It became clear fairly quickly that this was not something that would be especially interesting (in fact, about 30 minutes into voir dire I more or less deduced the issue). An insurance suit, the twist being that the plaintiff was suing his own insurance company. There was man at the defendant’s table wearing a rather ordinary polo and a drawn, permanently discommoded expression who was the representative of the insurer. The plaintiff was a rather well-dressed man who did, after watching him for a time, seem to be limited in his movements. The lawyers seemed competent if underwhelming. This was a bookkeeping matter that had gotten contentious and if my assumption was correct, my sympathies already lay with the plaintiff.

The complication—and the reason for the suit—was that the driver who had caused the accident at the heart of all this had fled and no one knew who he was, so he/she and their insurer could not be sued.  (My assumption therefore is that the plaintiff filed an injury claim with his own company and was denied.)

We all had little white paddles with our seat number and when answering questions or asking them we were to hold them up so the court recorder could efficiently identify us. The plaintiff’s attorney finished up by lunch, we broke for food, and returned for the defendant’s attorney.

That’s when things got interesting.

He wanted to establish that we could all fairly judge the facts of the case (fair enough) and treat the insurance company like any other person. He then pointedly asked if we could accept the company as a person.

I felt a tingle over my scalp.

Several paddles went up to admit that, no, we could not. He then said, “Corporations, according to the law, are people. Do you disagree with this?”

Someone said, “No, I can’t. Corporations are not people.”

“Anyone else feel this way?” the lawyer asked.

And a flurry of discussion erupted around the jury pool about that. When it wound down, he pushed “Even though it’s the law?”

That’s when I opened my mouth. “It is the law, but we all know it’s a legal fiction. It’s used as a convenience to circumvent certain procedural difficulties for the purpose of an expedited trial. Of course a corporation is not a person. An individual generally doesn’t have a machine behind them.”

He blinked at me. “What does that matter?”

“Well,” I said, “you can’t actually put a corporation on the witness stand. At best, you get a representative. He’s limited in what he can say by prior instructions. The entity giving the instructions is not actually present. Responsibility becomes a moving target.”

Everyone—all the lawyers, the court clerk, the judge, many of the potential jurors—was staring at me.  The defendant’s attorney’s mouth opened, then closed.

And then several people pointed at me and said “I agree with what he said.”

The questions wrapped up quickly then and we were sent out of the courtroom while the selections were made. In the hall, a woman came up to me.

“Are you a lawyer?”

“No, I’m a writer.”

“Oh. What do you write?”

“Science fiction.”

“Oh, well that figures,” she said and walked away. I wanted to ask what she meant, but I never got the chance.

When the selections were made, not one of the people who had voiced doubts about corporate personhood was chosen. Predictable if a bit disappointing. As we were all receiving our slips of paper confirming our service, several people smiled at me. I assume they all had pressing matters to attend that jury duty would have made more difficult.

Thus endeth my current civic duty. I do have to wonder what they would have done had everyone in that pool voiced the same skepticism. Well, draw another pool, yes. But then…

 

 

blog

A Mechanics Of Grief

We have an emotional field, generated by what goes on inside. Much like a gravity field, the space-time field, it distorts in the presence of other bodies. The degree of distortion is relative to the size of their presence in your life, which can explain why someone we never met can be the cause of genuine grief when they’re gone. That well created in the field you project is a result of how much value you put on their place in your life.

The orbits thus created shift and jostle for equilibrium. When one disappears…

Back in the Age of Burgeoning Awareness (the Sixties through the Nineties) many introspection disciplines advised us to leave nothing unsaid. Finish your business, lest the chance vanish in a puff of mortality. Having undergone a degree of this in an attempt to find handles on various dilemmas, I took this one to heart. The first time its utility was tested, I fell apart at the seams. I did not feel okay, even while being relieved that the suffering of my departed friend was over. It’s not so much that the advice was wrong, but they say nothing very useful about what comes of it. Judging the success of something by an absence is frankly impossible.

People die. They leave a space in our lives they once occupied and that emptied space must be dealt with, because it exerts a pull on us and now that mass is gone. Adjustments must be made. The reassessments of going on with a new relation to our living ecology is required and you simply cannot do that in advance. Those spaces they occupied in your life supplied stabilizing effects. We relied on them to be there for navigation. Remove one and we have to find a new stability.

That is even before the emotions unleashed by loss come to the fore.

Not every loss that causes grief is a necessarily close or even active relationship. The weight of their importance in your life is not always of their doing.

But when it is, when it is mutual, when it goes both ways, that sudden absence can be seismic.

We are taught to assign reasons to things, especially important things. Why this, why that. We reduce to detail, catalogue, justify. We want to seem reasonable and, often, unfazed, especially by things which by their nature unhinge us. We want to understand, of course, but also we want to appear to understand, for, among other reasons, those around us who need us to understand so they might anticipate understanding themselves. We start negotiating with the universe to somehow let us be all right with what was never in our power to do anything about.

Someone dies. Their position in our ecology is suddenly empty. Memory remains, of course, and those around who who also had them in their fields remind us, but there is now a hole where once a person was, someone who affected us, influenced us, drew us along pathways in a complex web of tangled suasion along with others, who they also drew along, and by so doing added to the total set of forces molding our journey through life. Gone, that complexity must readjust, find  new equilibrium. That unbalancing creates a sense of powerlessness. It hurts. Just by its absence.

Things will come back into equilibrium. Not the same kind and the difference may linger to haunt us with a sense of not quite right. And it will happen again. And again.

Trying to pretend nothing is changed or that you were all right with the loss or any of a dozen other sophistries to avoid the ache…it only hurts in a different way, but it doesn’t ever not hurt.

My father died on May 19th. These are some thoughts I had in the aftermath. He isn’t there anymore. It feels off. I miss him.

 

 

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Eyes Open, Mind Engaged

To me, that is the definition of Woke. I’ve been bemused by the backlash of people who, without too much interpretation, are obviously complaining about something else loudly hurling “Woke!” as if it is a pejorative. It’s not that they have a legitimate argument, it is that they are discomfited by the implications and wish to go back to pretending there is nothing to be woke to. It’s not even subtle.

Consider one of the consequences of the backlash—the attempt to ban books. Now, this is nothing new. Banning books that unsettle the comfortable is a long American tradition, quite often less political than the kindred forms of censorship practiced elsewhere. We don’t usually protest books here because of political ideology so much as out of a reflexive defensiveness of cherished myths. Some of these are family stories left unquestioned for generations, some of them are the kind of origin stories surrounding the establishment of this or that institution. In most cases, people have embraced these stories and incorporated them into their sense of self, their identity, and when the story is challenged, their apprehension of Who They Are is called into question.

Somewhere along the way the practice of review has either been abandoned or was never inculcated. It comes as a shock that perhaps they should never have accepted uncritically all the things they were fed as children.

But I suspect the most violent reactions are coming from those who perhaps sense the truth beneath the myth and simply do not want to accept it. They do not want to feel responsible. Maybe their concept of a Good Life depends on those myths. Whatever.

Once, in conversation with acquaintances who were very proudly Catholic, the question was raised (by them) “just what was the Reformation all about?” I took it at face value and said, “Many things, but the trigger was over Indulgences.” “What are those?” When I explained what a Plenary Indulgence was, they regarded me with the blank expressions of the never-before-informed. They didn’t believe me. I had to be misinformed. Why would the Church do that? Why would people believe these things would work?

The facts opened a shelf-full of cans of worms that required a profound revision in their understanding of the institution in which they had invested a great deal. Delving into all that threatened their sense of well-being in their self-identification as Catholics. The fact that, as members of that institution, they not only did not know about significant parts of Church history but strenuously did not want to know, dismayed and saddened me, but it served as a good example as the kind of mindset we encounter in those most stridently condemning Woke-ism.

But I have rarely seen a clearer example of “getting it wrong” than this. It is sharper, more clearly delineated, than its predecessor, the rejection of so-called Political Correctness, which was also misunderstood, mostly by those who simply did not want their assumptions about history and culture and politics and personal identity called into question. They did not want to be reminded, held to account, called on the carpet, or simply be required to do the work of realignment necessitated by an acceptance of realities not in evidence in their own lives.  Political Correctness devolved at times into a game of constantly revising what things were called. That, of course, should have been merely a consequence of revising our understanding of relationships, taking into account the realities of others, but that’s complicated and tedious and hard and for people who never internalized actual learning but skidded by on doing well on tests and knowing how to interview successfully and going along with those in power just to get along, it was a slog and often resulted in long periods of just feeling like eggshells were everywhere in their path.

Woke—and, more to the point, being Anti-Woke—is less ambiguous. Woke is a requirement to not privilege ignorance over reality and Anti-Woke is a demand to enshrine specific kinds of ignorance in order to maintain privileged conditions. Every time someone stands up and opposes being Woke, I hear someone insisting on being callous and stupid.

Except for those in leadership positions. They are not stupid. Callous, certainly, but not stupid. (Clever, but not very intelligent.) They know their audience. They’re just venal. In order to attain power, they’re playing their supporters for saps.

The more you know, the more you can know. The more you can know, the less power demagogues can wield over you. The less power they have, the freer you are. The freer you are, the less you have to fear.

So wake up.

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Revisiting

Nostalgia can be a narcotic. Lately I’ve been going through the accumulated evidence of 50 + years and wondering why I kept it even as each bit triggers memories I’m glad to have. Do I really need this gew-gaw? This piece of paper? This book or album? Part of me can’t bear to part with any  of it, but the practical side of me is starting to sort and allocate in anticipation of the time I just have no more room, no more interest, and no further use. I’m already cutting back on acquiring more. I have enough music on my shelves to last another couple of decades, by which time I could start all over. I don’t need any more. I’m trying to figure out how to arrange my days so I can hear more of it. As for books, well, good lord…

But getting rid of it?

I go through periods of expunging my belongings, making the hard decision that I will probably never read that book (again or even once), that I haven’t listened to that album in 30 years, so why do I still have it. I’m starting to be worried about my photographic archives, which are sizeable and I haven’t made much of a dent in digitizing them (too many other things to do getting in the way, time is finite, and so forth). Recently some opportunities have presented themselves that have taken a little pressure off.

The thing is, I’ve never been able to ignore the practicalities for any length of time and pretend everything will simply go on as it is now. I’ve always known I had to prepare for the time when I won’t be here.

Does that sound depressing? It’s not, I assure you. Better, I think, to know where everything’s going to be and manage to have less of it to deal with than leave a godawful mess behind for somebody else to clean up.

There are two writing projects I have on backburners for which I have a lot of research material to hand. One of them is actually written, but I haven’t found a publisher yet. The other I have to find some time to start. I have very practical reasons therefore for keeping all those books. Believe me, I would like to get them off my shelves, many of them are not the kinds of books I would bother to reread for pleasure.

But I have other sets of books about subjects that I have vague notions about using for future projects, and I’m wondering if I’m ever going to get to them. (As I sit here, I can look up at a row of biographies of American presidents. I had a notion once of reading through them chronologically, but I haven’t read a one of them yet, and I stopped collecting them. It’s not that I don’t know anything about these people, but what I have learned I gleaned from histories of the periods, not specific biographies. Am I ever going to get to them?) Part of my conundrum is that I do not read particularly fast. I have the Oxford Histories of the United States on another shelf, each volume covering a specific period and each one a brick. Reading one can take up to a month of my time. (Fortunately I’m usually able to keep four books going simultaneously, but even so…)

And then of course there’s the music and the movies and tv series…

I have a hunger to absorb as much as I can. I never thought about this for years, because there was always more time, but.

Nostalgia combined with dissatisfaction can be genuinely painful.

There was a time I thought—carelessly—that I could do anything. You can go through life thinking that as long as the things you do do are successful. If you never turn your attention to the rest, you’re never confronted with your actual limitations.

But once you are, you have some choices to make. Howl at the injustice, turn inward, resent the short span of life and the confines of your imagination, or—

Or take inventory, acknowledge reality, and embrace what you can. You might be surprised at just how fortunate you have been to do, be, and experience what you have. And that taking life as it comes without worrying about what won’t come leaves you with an open field for the next wonderful thing.

Clearing one’s inventory can make the coming experiences fresher. That whole Zen notion of letting go (more or less) and letting the past remain the past. There is one central question I’ve found useful to ask and answer, providing we don’t take it as some kind of final judgment.

Have we done what we’ve done as well as we could?

Certainly we’ve all left some things twisting in the wind. All kinds of reasons to walk away or, often, we are prevented from seeing something through to some ideal conclusion. But in the moment, did we do the best we could, honestly, and with care? All those things you wonder if you should keep—none of it has an answer other than to remind us of the question.

I’m not advising complete divestment. I love my books, my music, my home, my things. But certain of them I love more and maybe would appreciate better with less competition around them. Many of us use our possessions as markers, extensions of identity, augments to personality. That’s why getting rid of some things is so hard. But it’s not an accurate way to see things. They do not make us more, we make them important. It behooves us to choose carefully what we invest with that kind of authority.

Anyway, it is not my intention to be maudlin. I’m just ruminating n the midst of the archaeological dig of my life to date, and thought I’d share some observations. I’m going to go work on some fiction now.

Oh, and—yes, I think I’ve done what I’ve done as well as I could. To paraphrase Arthur Miller, I’m going with the idea that the goal is end up with the right regrets, the worthwhile second thoughts. Those would be those that add to the achievements not bury you in pointless nostalgia.

Anyway, be well.

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Year One

A year plus since retirement. October, 2021, I left the regular work-world. It was a harder decision than anyone knew, even me. I’d certainly given myself enough advanced notice, letting my employer know eight or so months in advance. Plenty of time to train replacements, let people get used to the idea. Even me.

Now it’s December of ’22 and I wonder at the time.

I’m sure most people have plans. Plans. “I’m going to do—.” Sure. And then reality swallows everything and what happens happens and maybe some of those plans survive. I’m looking around an office I had every intention of thoroughly cleaning, rearranging, and updating. Well, the piles are in slightly different places, and some of them are different piles than before, but in the main it doesn’t look like I’ve done a thing.

The same goes for the rest of the basement. Attempts have been made, but frankly I need a month in which nothing else makes demands on my attention.

I have, however, managed to clear some dust off my career (writing) and make some headway in getting it back on track. After my novel-writing period more or less crashed and burned, I finally decided to turn back to short fiction, and to my pleasant surprise things picked up. I’ve written and sold a score of new stories. And now I have a new novel coming out in the spring. (Not science fiction, which is a bit of a surprise, though very welcome. More about that later.) In recent weeks a few things have occurred to give me hope that matters will turn around even more. Allow me to leave that vague for the time being.

I include as an element of any advice I dispense to want-to-be writers that of paramount importance for a career is Persistence. Just showing up is inestimably vital. You cannot succeed if you quit. Persistence does not guarantee success, but surrender pretty much guarantees no success. I’m now of the opinion that this is a matter of playing in traffic. Put yourself out there, in the flow, and eventually something will hit you. Not the most coherent plan, but with few exceptions the one most of us are able to act on.

The thing I did not count on is the fading of desire. I remember the fire, the urgency, the firestorm of optimism, and the excitement at the creation of new work. The impatience with the molasses progress of execution. Why should it take so long to get these words down in the right order? Why did everything take so long…

And now, forty years after making the decision to pursue this thing, that burning eagerness has lessened. I’ve become a bit jaded and quite tired. Partly this is a kind of maturity that counsels me to use myself more efficiently, that the fire never added much to achievement. It still takes so much time to write something, to edit it, to shepherd it through the stages of getting it out into the world, and that now it seems to take the same amount of time as it did when in the grip of the fever. Calmer impulses marshal resources to better effect. 

But more than that, I simply don’t suffer from disappointment and disillusion as much. Rejections still hurt, but not as much, and there’s a muffling kind of acceptance that seems therapeutic now. If it will happen, fine, I can only work the machine the best I know how and wait.

I wonder if this is not just the result of callouses grown thicker and that I’m missing out on something that I once felt to be so significant, possibly even the point.

Still, I’m working. I believe I’m writing better than ever, the work that goes out is better. My impatience is the only thing that seems lacking.

And then there is the rest of life…

I’ve begun reading philosophy again. Once upon a time, I was a casual admirer of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I appreciated some of his approaches to what was known as Logical Positivism, part of the Analytical School of modern philosophy. Primarily, it was his (quite arrogant) thesis that all of philosophy’s “problems” stemmed from misapprehension and misconstruals of language. That if we just figured out how to be absolutely clear, we would understand. Granted, he realized later how simplistic this claim was and embarked on a deeper analysis of language structures and their application to questions of the real. 

I have believed for some time that science fiction is at base the most philosophical of literary endeavors, that the primary assumptions in most of it have no relevance outside an attempt at understanding the nature of reality in a unique way that emerges in the array of speculative presentations against which human struggle might be understood in evolutionary terms. In a way, the very idea of The Future has no actual meaning outside a philosophical framework. The best we can say is that something will follow the Now in which we exist. We call that the Future, but it has no material reality that we can examine. By the time there is something to examine, it is no longer The Future, and from our position Now we can only make assumptions about the Future because Now is the Future of a Past we can cite.

That is the exact sort of proposition that one would find in a good piece of science fiction. It is also the sort of thing that informs philosophical propositions.

It relates here, now, in this, because the day I retired I had a speculative framework of what my Future would be like. Ambitions, desires, expectations. (If you think about, life is a science fiction story.)

I haven’t attended to philosophy as such for some time now. It would be fun to get together a group (again) for regular discussions. The last several years have in so many ways challenged common agreements on causality, truth, and commonality itself, and it seems the only sane responses are either to yield to the impossibility of ordering the conceptions of the world (insanity) or work at better understanding in order to create conceptions that reduce the chaos. Ultimately we can only control our own reactions. 

Some of this, for me, comes from having reached a strange place in relation to those past ambitions. I am in many ways more comfortable in my own skin than I have ever been, but at the same time I recognize the world around me as a place I do not know how I found. I’m reading older books, my indulgence in history has increased, and yet I still revel in the new voices I encounter, even while the names on the spines fail to spark the kind of thrill I once had regularly seeing a new work by an author with whom I was familiar. I can see clearly how nostalgia can become a trap, one we may not wish to escape. The familiar has such gravity, increasing year by year, distorting our path.

It’s Christmas weekend. The landscape is punctured by rabbit holes. The people you surround yourself with (and who are likewise surrounded by you) are the only guidons to keep you on the solid plane of vital connections. The deep structures of reality (of perceptions) are anchors to a world navigable to the betterment of the soul. The hypotheses of conspiracy wonks are less than the shadows on Socrates’ cave wall. (I will not call them conspiracy theories—that elevates them above their utility and lends credibility where none exists—but at best hypotheses, at worst con games designed to distract from actual living.) I am still with my partner of over 42 years. Snow fell yesterday. The sun is bright today. I’m listening to some very good music (late period Herb Alpert, if you care to know—he seems to have left behind the heavy reliance on “catchy” tunes and clever hooks that made him so popular in the 60s but he is still one of the cleanest horn players around) and I have the capacity to speculate on matters of moment. The trick is to identify what matters.

Wittgenstein, as I noted, asserted that we need find the clearest way to express ourselves in order to “solve” the problems of philosophy. I have no real quarrel with that idea—after all, I’m a writer, story aside my work consists of trying to find clearer ways to say things that might lead to truth—but I would only add that life does not have A Solution. Living is a process, an evolving set of realignments, relocations, and above all recognitions (re-cognitions). There is no single answer, only the ongoing encounter and construction of an imagination that renders chaos meaningful.

Starting on that path can be as simple a thing as cleaning up one’s office. 

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Blame

So Trump said (more or less) that if the midterms go well, he should get all the credit and if they go badly, he should get none of the blame. This is politics. He then noted that what would likely happen is the reverse—that a Republican victory would garner him no credit and a defeat will give him all the blame. Again, this is politics. This kind of thing is standard. We see this at the presidential level all the time, if only in the rather shallow fact that a newly-elected president inevitably gets the blame for what his predecessor did when the new guy fails to magically fix everything in the first hundred days. More seriously, presidents get blame for things that are out of their hands—currently, that would include inflation.

The predicted Red Wave did not happen (except in Florida, but that state currently seems to inhabit an alternate universe) and the Republicans are scurrying about trying explain how it’s not their fault. My take is somewhat different—I’m amazed they did as well as they did. I realize people vote their wallets, but I keep wondering at people so divorced from how things work that they would happily vote away their rights for anticipated solutions which the people they vote for have little to do with. The institution that deals with things like inflation is the Federal Reserve and it is doing its job and as the Fed has a firewall between itself and Congress, there is no value in voting out the party that had nothing to do with the situation in the assumption that the other party, which have virtually no meaningful say in any solution, will magically fix the problem. I look upon the citizenry of my country in bafflement that this simple reality is so hard to grasp.

Oh, funding bills? Like for infrastructure? It is largely accepted by both parties that America’s infrastructure is in sore need of attention, so exactly where is the issue? Inflation or not, roads need repair, as do bridges, and we need a high-speed rail system and high-speed internet, regardless. Not funding these things would make the economy worse. But monetary policy—which is where we find things like inflation—is out of Congress’s hands. Do people really not know this or do they just vote the way they do to be arbitrary?

Let’s assume they do not. Then that means a great many people have no problem with the social fascism extant in the GOP. That voting away civil liberties is somehow worth it to keep a book about LGBTQ+ issues out of the hands of kids, that this is a reasonable trade-off.

Likewise, crippling the healthcare system for women and criminalizing gender-specific treatments is worth reducing half the population to conditions wherein they have much harder times to fight poverty and establish equity, things they have been and are still fighting to obtain for over—well, pick your date: half a century, over a century, since the Founding. Mind you, I am not referring only to abortion, but to a whole host of gynecological needs which even now we see examples of women being denied treatment because healthcare workers are afraid that such treatment might land them in jail, depending on the state. This is not theory but practice.

So the GOP is now making statements about who to blame as if their problems are simply a matter of selecting the wrong candidates. They cannot find it in themselves to look at their policies and recognize that they are out of step with actual people. (Because I can predict with a certain amount of certainty that on any of the above issues, many of them while being quite happy to deny Other People those rights, will expect to retain them as privileges, under the table or otherwise, for themselves.)

I’ve been hearing a handful of Republicans broach the possibility that they have failed on social issues. A few voices, here and there, identifying the problem in their alienation of certain voting blocs with unpopular or tone-deaf stances.

And yet, the over-half-century long propaganda train that has labeled Democrats as, originally, Tax-and-Spend Liberals and more recently as Socialists disturbs enough people that they will blink when given the opportunity to categorically repudiate a party that serves an idea of the free market that doesn’t actually reflect reality and assumes isolationism and defense spending are the only things that matter and that to stay in power is willing to strip people of their civil liberties and their ability to act on conscience and backs censorship and has perfected gerrymandering to the point now that elections are imperiled, too many people seem willing to put their actual rights at risk rather than face a future with the boldness America is supposed to be filled with.

It is heartening that damn near every election-denier across the country has lost their election race, but that leaves us with a party that seems to think this is just a temporary set-back, a matter of popularity rather than policy, too close to securing unassailable positions. Our own Senator Hawley (Missouri) has stated that it is time to bury the old GOP and create a new party, and as far as it goes, I agree. But such a new party, in order to be viable—philosophically, morally, politically—and be something identifiably in step with American principles, would necessarily have no place for people like him.

We cannot rest on this election. It will take a few more election cycles to re-establish the confidence the GOP has damaged in our democracy. And we need a federal election law to prevent states from arbitrarily rejecting fair elections.

Fair elections. It’s amazing how the fraud being claimed by the deniers, when you get right down to it, always ends up demeaning traditionally minority voters and impairing their ability to cast ballots. If you don’t want to be labeled racist, stop tilting the scales to white (usually male) voters. After the 2016 election, when evidence of foreign involvement was demonstrated, commissions worked heroically to close loopholes, plug gaps, and establish the next elections as the safest and most secure in our history. There may still be work to be done, but after all that, to claim that the 2020 election could be stolen is purest fantasy. All that really means is, your candidate lost, and you can’t deal with that. Apparently, a lot of Americans, of both parties, agree. The deniers lost.

Don’t go looking to blame the candidates as such. The problem is in the policies. The shift we may be seeing is a clear statement that those are in need of fixing.

This time, at least, I am somewhat relieved. I’m not holding my breath today. Next time, we need to oust the reactionaries.