No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

A Band of Brothers, a Stream of Sisters

November 2010

I HAVE COME to see male group solidarity as an immensely powerful force in human affairs, more powerful, perhaps, than the feminism of the late twentieth century took into account.

It’s amazing, given their different physiology and complement of hormones, how much alike men and women are in most ways. Still it seems to be the fact that women on the whole have less direct competitive drive and desire to dominate, and therefore, paradoxically, have less need to bond with one another in ranked, exclusive groups.

The power of male group solidarity must come from the control and channeling of male rivalry, the repression and concentration of the hormone-driven will to dominate that so often dominates men themselves. It is a remarkable reversal. The destructive, anarchic energy of individual rivalry and competitive ambition is diverted into loyalty to group and leader and directed to more or less constructive social enterprise.

Such groups are closed, positing “the other” as outsider. They exclude, first, women; then, men of a different age, or kind, or caste, or nation, or level of achievement, etc.—exclusions that reinforce the solidarity and power of the excluders. Perceiving any threat, the “band of brothers” joins together to present an impermeable front.

Male solidarity appears to me to have been the prime shaper of most of the great ancient institutions of society—Government, Army, Priesthood, University, and the new one that may be devouring all the others, Corporation. The existence and dominance of these hierarchic, organized, coherent, durable institutions goes back so far and has been so nearly universal that it’s mostly just called “how things are,” “the world,” “the division of labor,” “history,” “God’s will,” etc.

As for female solidarity, without it human society, I think, would not exist. But it remains all but invisible to men, history, and God.

Female solidarity might better be called fluidity—a stream or river rather than a structure. The only institutions I am fairly sure it has played some part in shaping are the tribe and that very amorphous thing, the family. Wherever the male arrangement of society permits the fellowship of women on their own terms, it tends to be casual, unformulated, unhierarchical; to be ad hoc rather than fixed, flexible rather than rigid, and more collaborative than competitive. That it has mostly operated in the private rather than the public sphere is a function of the male control of society, the male definition and separation of “public” and “private.” It’s hard to know if women’s groups would ever gather into great centers, because the relentless pressure from male institutions against such aggregation has prevented it. It might not happen anyhow. Instead of rising from the rigorous control of aggression in the pursuit of power, the energy of female solidarity comes from the wish and need for mutual aid and, often, the search for freedom from oppression. Elusiveness is the essence of fluidity.

So when the interdependence of women is perceived as a threat to the dependence of women on men and the childbearing, child-rearing, family-serving, man-serving role assigned to women, it’s easy to declare that it simply doesn’t exist. Women have no loyalty, do not understand what friendship is, etc. Denial is an effective weapon in the hands of fear. The idea of female independence and interdependence is met with scoffing hatred by both men and women who see themselves as benefiting from male dominance. Misogyny is by no means limited to men. Living in “a man’s world,” plenty of women distrust and fear themselves as much or more than men do.

Insofar as the feminism of the 1970s played on fear, exalting the independence and interdependence of women, it was playing with fire. We cried “Sisterhood is powerful!”—and they believed us. Terrified misogynists of both sexes were howling that the house was burning down before most feminists found out where the matches were.

The nature of sisterhood is so utterly different from the power of brotherhood that it’s hard to predict how it might change society. In any case, we’ve seen only a glimpse of what its effects might be.

The great ancient male institutions have been increasingly infiltrated by women for the last two centuries, and this is a very great change. But when women manage to join the institutions that excluded them, they mostly end up being co-opted by them, serving male ends, enforcing male values.

Which is why I have a problem with women in combat in the armed services, and why I watch the rise of women in the “great” universities and the corporations—even the government—with an anxious eye.

Can women operate as women in a male institution without becoming imitation men?

If so, will they change the institution so radically that the men are likely to label it second-class, lower the pay, and abandon it? This has happened to some extent in several fields, such as the practice of teaching and medicine, increasingly in the hands of women. But the management of those fields, the power and the definition of their aims, still belongs to men. The question remains open.

As I look back on the feminism of the late twentieth century, I see it as typical of feminine solidarity—all Indians, no chiefs. It was an attempt to create an unhierarchical, inclusive, flexible, collaborative, unstructured, ad hoc body of people to bring the genders together in a better balance.

Women who want to work toward that end need, I think, to recognize and respect their own elusive, invaluable, indestructible kind of solidarity—as do men. And they need to recognize both the great value of male solidarity and the inferiority of gender solidarity to human solidarity—as do men.

I think feminism continues and will continue to exist wherever women work in their own way with one another and with men, and wherever women and men go on questioning male definitions of value, refusing gender exclusivity, affirming interdependence, distrusting aggression, seeking freedom always.

Exorcists

November 2010

THE ROMAN CATHOLIC bishops of the United States are holding a conference on exorcism in Baltimore today and tomorrow. Many bishops and sixty priests are there to learn the symptoms of demonic possession—you may be possessed if you exhibit unusual strength, talk in a language you don’t know, or react violently to anything holy—and the rites of exorcism, which include sprinkling holy water on you, laying hands on you, recitations, invocations, and blowing in your face.

The church updated the rite in 1999, advising that “all must be done to avoid the perception that exorcism is magic or superstition.” This seems rather like issuing directions for driving a car while cautioning that all must be done to avoid the perception that a moving vehicle is being guided.

I’d advise weightlifters and people learning a foreign language to avoid Baltimore this weekend. I don’t know how to advise people who react violently to anything holy. I don’t know who they are, because I don’t know what kind of violent reaction is meant, and because “what is holy” depends entirely on your perception of sacredness. If I am shaken by unutterably strong emotion when I watch a pair of eagles dance with each other on the wind, or when I hear the first notes of the theme of the last movement of the Ninth Symphony, am I possessed by a demon? I don’t know, but I’m staying away from Baltimore.

I think the people who should hurry there are the four male Catholic judges of the United States Supreme Court, all of whom are adherents of the policies of Pope Ratzinger and members of the ultra-reactionary Catholic group Opus Dei. Exorcism lessons should enrich their repertory no end. The fifth Roman Catholic on the Supreme Court is a woman, and thereby excluded from doing the “work of God.”

Uniforms

February 2011

THE UNITED STATES went to war with Germany and Japan when I was a kid of eleven. One of the things I remember is how—overnight, it seemed to me—the streets of Berkeley filled up with uniforms. All during the war, men in civvies were in the minority downtown. But the uniforms didn’t bring uniformity into the city. If anything, they were an improvement on the drab, same-old clothing of the end of the Great Depression.

The army and army air force wore khaki in various shades of brown, greenish, and tan: handsome jackets, creased pants, shined black shoes, all very trim. But never quite a match for the navy uniforms, the gobs in their white tunics and pants and little round white hats in summer, and in winter, blue wool tunics with a sailor collar and pants with a thirteen-button, square flap fly, I kid you not. Cute little round butts looked terrific in that uniform. And the officers in their crisp white or navy blue, gold buttons, gold braid, were a breed apart, sharp as tacks. There were no Marine bases near Berkeley that I know of; anyway we didn’t see Marines around much, but they looked quite grand in the newsreels.

My brother Clif’s ship was commissioned in San Francisco Harbor and we went to the ceremony: a fine show, formal, traditional, embellished by those dandy dress uniforms. The men looked terrific lined up there on the deck, all blue and white and gold in the sun. What boy wouldn’t want to look like that, and be seen looking like that by everybody?

A uniform, ever since the eighteenth century, when they first really started inventing them, has been known as a powerful aid to recruitment.

I can’t say that that was true for the uniforms women got handed in WWII. They imitated the men’s, of course, with skirts instead of pants, but were poorly designed, the taut, snappy look becoming tight and stiff on women; even granted the severe rationing of cloth, the uniforms were unnecessarily skimpy, prim, and awkward. I certainly wouldn’t have joined the WAVES or the WAC for the uniform, only in spite of it. Fortunately for the WAVES, the WAC, and me, I was fifteen when the war ended.

During the next several American wars, the whole concept of the uniform evolved away from good fit and good looks toward a kind of aggressively practical informality, or sloppiness, or slobbishness. By now our soldiers are mostly seen in shapeless, muddy-looking spotted pajamas.

This uniform may be useful and comfortable in the jungles of Vietnam or the deserts of Afghanistan. But do men need camouflage when flying from Reno to Cincinnati, or combat boots on Fifth Avenue? I guess soldiers still have dress uniforms—I know the Marines do, they seem to put them on way more often than the other services, maybe because they get so many photo ops in D.C.—but I can’t remember when I last saw an army private on the street looking sharp.

I know that for many boys and men, camo has taken on the glamour that a handsome uniform once had. Grotesque as it appears to me, it looks manly and fine to them. So I guess the uniform still serves as an aid to recruitment, luring the boy who wants to wear it, look like that, be that soldier. And I don’t doubt that young men wear it with pride.

But I wonder very much about the effect of the camo-pajama uniform on most civilians. I find it not only degrading but disturbing that we dress up our soldiers in clothes suitable to jail or the loony bin, setting them apart not by looking good, looking sharp, but by looking like clowns from a broken-down circus.

This whole change in style of uniforms may be part of a change in our style of war, and with it a changed attitude toward service in the military. Possibly it reflects a newly realistic opinion of war, a refusal to glamorize it. If we cease to see war as an inherently noble and ennobling thing, we cease to put the warrior on a pedestal. Handsome uniforms then seem a mere parade, a false front for the senseless brutality of behavior in war. So “fatigues” can be grossly utilitarian, with no thought for the appearance or self-esteem of the wearer. Anyhow, now that most war is waged not between armies but by machines killing civilians, what’s the meaning of a military uniform at all? Didn’t the child dead in the ruins of a bombed village die for her country just as any soldier does?

But I can’t believe the army thinks that way, that it’s making uniforms ugly in order to encourage us to think war is ugly. Perhaps the fatigue uniform reflects an attitude they aren’t conscious of and would never admit, a change less in the nature of war than in our national attitude to it, which is neither glamorizing nor realistic but simply uncaring. We pay very little attention to our wars or to the people fighting them.

Right or wrong, in the 1940s we honored our servicemen. We were in that war with them. Most of them were draftees, some quite unwilling ones, but they were our soldiers and we were proud of them. Right or wrong, since the 1950s and particularly since the 1970s, we began putting whichever war was on at the moment out of sight and out of mind, and with it the men and women fighting it. These days they’re all volunteers. Yet—or therefore?—we disown them. We give them pro forma praise as our brave defenders, send them over to whichever country we’re fighting in now, keep sending them back over, and don’t think about them. They aren’t us. They aren’t people we really want to see. Like the people in jails, the people in loony bins. Like clowns that aren’t funny, from a third-rate circus we wouldn’t think of going to.

Now shall we talk about how much we pay, how we are bankrupting our future, to keep that circus going?

No. That’s not something we talk about. Not in Congress. Not in the White House. Not anywhere.

Clinging Desperately to a Metaphor

September 2011

IT’S AS SILLY for me to write about economics as it would be for most economists to write about the use of enjambment in iambic pentameter. But they don’t live in a library, and I do live in an economy. Their life can be perfectly poetry-free if they like, but my life is controlled by their stuff whether I like it or not.

So: I want to ask how economists can continue to speak of growth as a positive economic goal.

I understand why we’re in a panic when our business or our whole economy goes into a decline or a recession: because the whole system is based on keeping up with/outgrowing the competition, and if we fail to do that, we face hard times, collapse, crash.

But why do we never question the system itself, so as to find ways to get around it or out of it?

Up to a point, growth is a plausible metaphor. Living things need to grow, first to their optimum size, and then to keep replacing what wears out, annually (as with many plants) or continually (as with mammalian skin). A baby grows to adult size, after which growth goes to maintaining stability, homeostasis, balance. Growth much beyond that leads to obesity. For a baby to grow endlessly bigger would be first monstrous, then fatal.

In taking uncontrolled, unlimited, unceasing growth as the only recipe for economic health, we’ve dismissed the ideas of optimum size and keeping the organism in balance.

Maybe there are organisms that have no optimum size, like the enormous fungal network one hears about that underlies the whole Middle West, or is it just Wisconsin? But I wonder if a fungus wandering around thousands of square miles underground is the most promising model for a human economy.

Some economists prefer to use mechanical terms, but I believe machines have an optimum size much as living organisms do. A big machine can do more work than a small one, up to a point, beyond which things like weight and friction begin to ruin its efficiency. The metaphor comes up against the same limit.

Then there’s social Darwinism—bankers red in tooth and claw, surviving fitly, while small vermin live on the blood that trickles down… This metaphor, based on a vast misunderstanding of evolutionary process, hits its limit almost at once. In predatory competition, bigness is useful, but there are endless ways to get your dinner besides being bigger than it is. You can be smaller but smarter, smaller but faster, tiny but poisonous, winged… you can live inside it while you eat it… As for getting a mate, if combat were the only way to score, large size would help, but (despite our battle fixation) most competition doesn’t involve combat. You can win the reproductive race by dancing gracefully, by having a blue-green tail decorated with eyes, by building a lovely bower for your bride, by knowing how to tell a joke… As for living space, you can crowd out your neighbors by outgrowing them, but it’s cheaper and just as effective to corner all the water in the vicinity, like a juniper tree, or to be toxic to sea anemones who aren’t closely related to you… The competitive techniques of plants and animals are endless in variety and ingenuity. So why are we, clever we, stuck on one and one only?

An organism that settles on a single survival stratagem and ceases to seek and find others—ceases to adapt—is at high risk. And adaptability is our principle and most reliable gift. As a species we are almost endlessly, almost appallingly adaptable. Capitalism thinks it’s adaptable, but if it only has one stratagem, endless growth, the limit of its adaptability is irrevocably set. And we have reached that limit. We are therefore at very high risk.

Capitalist growth, probably for at least a century and certainly from the turn of the millennium on, has been growth in the wrong sense. Not only endless but uncontrolled—random. Growth as in tumor. Growth as in cancer.

Our economy isn’t just in a recession. It is sick. As a result of uncontrolled economic (and population) growth, our ecology is sick, and getting sicker every day. We have disturbed the homeostasis of the earth, the ocean, and the atmosphere—not fatally to life on the planet; the bacteria will survive the corporation. But perhaps fatally to ourselves.

We have been in denial about this for decades. By now the denials are hysterical in every sense of the word—What do you mean, climate instability? What do you mean, overpopulation? What do you mean, reactors are toxic? What do you mean, you can’t live on corn syrup?

We go on mechanically repeating the behaviors that caused the sickness: we bail out the bankers, we resume offshore drilling, we pay polluters to pollute, because without them how is our economy to grow? Yet increasingly, all economic growth benefits only the rich, while most people grow poorer. The Economic Policy Institute reports:

At this rate, by the time we admit that cancer is not health, that we’re sick, any cure must be so radical as almost certainly to require dictatorial rule, and to destroy more—physically and morally—than it can save.

Nobody in any government seems able even to imagine alternatives, and people who talk about them get little attention. Some of the alternatives that existed in the past had promise; I think socialism did, and still does, but it was run off the rails by ambitious men using it as a means to power, and by the infection of capitalism—the obsession with growing bigger at all cost in order to defeat rivals and dominate the world. The example of the larger socialist states is about as heartening as that of the giant underground fungus.

So what is our new metaphor to be? It might be the difference between life and death to find the right one.

Lying It All Away

October 2012

I’M FASCINATED BY this historical snippet from the New York Times’s “On This Day” feature:

The first televised White House address—that’s interesting. Imagine a world in which a president speaks to the people on the radio, or can speak only to a physically present audience, like Lincoln at Gettysburg. How quaint, how primitive, how different from us, were those simple folk of olden days!

But that’s not what fascinates me in this item. What I’m working hard to imagine or remember is a country whose president asked his people not to eat beef on Tuesdays or chicken on Thursdays because there were people starving in Europe. The Second World War had left the European economy as well as its cities pretty much in ruins, and this president thought Americans would a) see the connection between meat and grain, and b) be willing to forgo a luxury element of their diet in order to give away a more essential food to hungry foreigners on another continent, some of whom we’d been killing, and some of whom had been killing us, two years earlier.

At the time, the request was laughed or sneered at by some and ignored by most. But still: can you imagine any president, now, asking the American people to deprive themselves of meat once or twice a week in order to stockpile grain to ship to hungry foreigners on another continent, some of them no doubt terrorists?

Or asking us to refrain from meat now and then to provide more grain to programs and food banks for the 20,000,000 Americans living in “extreme poverty” (which means malnutrition and hunger) right now?

Or, actually, asking us to do without anything for any reason?

Something has changed.

Since our betrayed public schools can no longer teach much history or reading, people may find everyone and everything before about twenty-five years ago unimaginably remote and incomprehensibly different from themselves. They defend their discomfort by dismissing people before their time as simple, quaint, naive, etc. I know Americans sixty-five years ago were nothing of the sort. Still, that speech of Harry Truman’s tells me something has indeed changed.

Being very old, I remember a little about the Depression, and a lot about the Second World War and its aftermath, and some things about Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty,” and so on. This experience doesn’t allow me to ever take prosperity for all as a fact—only an ideal. But the success of the New Deal and the socioeconomic network set in place after 1945 allowed a lot of people to assume almost unthinkingly that the American Dream had come to pass and would go on forever. Only now is a whole generation maturing that didn’t grow up in the alluring stability of steady inflation, but has seen growth capitalism return to its origins, providing security for none but the strongest profiteers. In this respect, the experience of my grandchildren is and will be very different from that of their parents, or mine. I wish I could live to see what they’re going to do about it.

But this still doesn’t quite take me to whatever it is about that request of old Harry’s that intrigues me so, and that, when I think about it, makes me feel as if the America I’m living in is somebody else’s country.

An education that gave me a sense of the continuity of human life and thought keeps me from dividing time into Now (Us—the last few years) and Then (Them—history). A glimmer of the anthropological outlook keeps me from believing that life was ever simple for anybody, anywhere, at any time. All old people are nostalgic for certain things they knew that are gone, but I live in the past very little. So why am I feeling like an exile?

I have watched my country accept, mostly quite complacently, along with a lower living standard for more and more people, a lower moral standard. A moral standard based on advertising. That hard-minded man Saul Bellow wrote that democracy is propaganda. It gets harder to deny that when, for instance, during a campaign, not only aspirants to the presidency but the president himself hides or misrepresents known facts, lies deliberately and repeatedly. And only the opposition objects.

Sure, politicians always lied, but Adolf Hitler was the first one who made it into a policy. American politicians didn’t use to lie as if they knew that nobody cared whether they lied or not, though Nixon and Reagan began testing those waters of moral indifference. Now we’re deep in them. What was appalling to me about Obama’s false figures and false promises in the first debate was that they were unnecessary. If he’d told the truth, he would have supported his candidacy better, as well as putting Romney’s faked figures and evasive vagueness to shame. He would have given us a moral choice instead of a fudge-throwing match.

Can America go on living on spin and illusion, hot air and hogwash, and still be my country? I don’t know.

I guess it’s become improbable even to me that a president should ever have asked Americans not to eat chicken on Thursdays. Maybe it is quaint, after all. “My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Yeah, uh-huh. Oh boy! That one did some fancy lying too. Still, he talked to us as adults, citizens capable of asking difficult questions and deciding what to do about them—not as mere consumers capable of hearing only what we want to hear, incapable of judgment, indifferent to fact.

What if some president asked those of us who can afford to eat chicken not to eat chicken on Thursdays so the government could distribute more food to those 20,000,000 hungry members of our community? Come off it. Goody-goody stuff. Anyhow, no president could get that past the corporations of which Congress is an almost wholly owned subsidiary.

What if some president asked us (one did, once) to accept a 55 mph speed limit in order to save fuel, roads, and lives? Chorus of derisive laughter.

When did it become impossible for our government to ask its citizens to refrain from short-term gratification in order to serve a greater good? Was it around the time we first began hearing about how no red-blooded freedom-loving American should have to pay taxes?

I was certainly never in love with the mere idea of “doing without,” as Puritans are. But I admit I’m depressed by the idea that we can’t even be asked to consider doing without in order to give or leave enough for people who need it or will need it, including, possibly, ourselves. Is the red-blooded freedom-loving American so infantile that he has to be promised whatever he wants right now this moment? Or, to put it less fancifully, if citizens can’t be asked to refrain from steak on Tuesdays, how can industries and corporations be asked to refrain from the vast and immediate profits they make from destabilizing the climate and destroying the environment?

It appears that we’ve given up on the long-range view. That we’ve decided not to think about consequences—about cause and effect. Maybe that’s why I feel that I live in exile. I used to live in a country that had a future.

If and when we finish degrading the environment till we run out of meat and the rest of the luxury foods, we’ll learn to do without them. People do. The president won’t even need to ask. But if and when we run out of things that are not a luxury, like water, will we be able to use less, to do without, to ration, to share?

I wish we were getting a little practice in such things. I wish our president would respect us enough to give us a chance to practice at least thinking about them.

I wish the ideals of respecting truth and sharing the goods hadn’t become so foreign to my country that my country begins to seem foreign to me.

The Inner Child and the Nude Politician

October 2014

LAST SUMMER A COMPANY that makes literary T-shirts asked me for permission to use a quote:

I looked at the sentence and thought, Did I write that sentence? I think I wrote something like it. But I hope not that sentence. Creative is not a word I use much since it was taken over by corporationthink. And isn’t any adult a child who survived?

So I Googled the sentence. I got lots of hits, and boy were some of them weird. In many of them the sentence is ascribed to me, but no reference to a source is ever given.

The weirdest one is at a site called quotes-clothing.com:

The oddest part of this little orgy of self-pity is “Falsely yours,” which I take to be a coy semiconfession of forgery by whoever actually wrote the rant.

I’ve looked through my own essays for the sentence that could have been used or misused for the quote, because I still have a feeling there is one. So far I haven’t found it. I asked my friends in an sf chat group if it rang any bell with them—some of them being scholars, with a keen nose for provenience—but none of them could help. If anybody reading this has a theory about the origin of the pseudo-quote, or better yet a Eureka! with volume and page citation, would you please post it as a response at BVC? Because it’s been bothering me ever since June.[4]

The sentence itself, its use and popularity, bothers me even more. Indifference to what words actually say; willingness to accept a vapid truism as a useful, even revelatory concept; carelessness about where a supposed quotation comes from—that’s all part of what I like least about the Internet. A “blah blah blah, who cares, information is what I want it to be” attitude—a lazy-mindedness that degrades both language and thought.

But deeper than that lies my aversion to what the sentence says to me: that only the child is alive and creative—so that to grow up is to die.

To respect and cherish the freshness of perception and the vast, polymorphous potentialities of childhood is one thing. But to say that we experience true being only in childhood and that creativity is an infantile function—that’s something else.

I keep meeting this devaluation of growing up in fiction, and also in the cult of the Inner Child.

There’s no end of books for children whose hero is a rebellious misfit—the boy or girl (usually described as plain, and almost predictably red-haired) who gets into trouble by questioning or resisting or ignoring The Rules. Every young reader identifies with this kid, and rightly. In some respects, to some extent, children are victims of society: they have little or no power; they aren’t given the chance to show what’s in them.

And they know it. They love reading about taking power, getting back at bullies, showing their stuff, getting justice. They want to do so so that they can grow up, claim independence in order to take responsibility.

But there’s a literature written for both kids and adults in which human society is reduced to the opposition Kids Good/Creative, Adults Bad/Dead Inside. Here the child heroes are not only rebellious but are in all ways superior to their hidebound, coercive society and the stupid, insensitive, mean-minded adults that surround them. They may find friendship with other children, and understanding from a wise, grandparently type of another skin color or from people marginal to or outside their society. But they have nothing to learn from adults of their own people, and those elders have nothing to teach them. Such a child is always right, and wiser than the adults who repress and misunderstand him. Yet the super-perceptive, wise child is helpless to escape. He is a victim. Holden Caulfield is a model of this child. Peter Pan is his direct ancestor.

Tom Sawyer has something in common with this kid, and so does Huck Finn, but Tom and Huck are not sentimentalized or morally oversimplified, nor do they consent to be victims. They are described with, and have, a powerful sense of ironic humor, which affects the crucial issue of self-pity. The coddled Tom loves to see himself as cruelly oppressed by meaningless laws and obligations, but Huck, a real victim of personal and social abuse, has no self-pity at all. Both of them, however, fully intend to grow up, to take charge of their own lives. And they will—Tom no doubt as a successful pillar of his society, Huck a freer man, out there in the Territories.

It seems to me the Super-Perceptive Child Victim of Self-Pity has something in common with the Inner Child: they’re lazy. It’s so much easier to blame the grownups than to be one.

The idea that we all contain an Inner Child who has been suppressed by our society, the belief that we should cultivate this Inner Child as our true self and that we can depend upon it to release our creativity, seems an overreductive statement of an insight expressed by many wise and thoughtful people—among them Jesus: “Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Some mystics and many great artists, aware of drawing on their childhood as a deep source of inspiration, have spoken of the need to maintain an unbroken inner connection between the child and the adult in one’s own inward life.

But to reduce this to the idea that we can open a mental door from which our imprisoned Inner Child will pop out and teach us how to sing, dance, paint, think, pray, cook, love, etc. …?

A very wonderful statement of the necessity, and the difficulty, of maintaining a connection to one’s own child-self is Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality.” The poem offers a profoundly felt, profoundly thoughtful, radical argument:

Instead of seeing birth as an awakening from blank non­being and fetal incompletion into the child’s fullness of being, and seeing maturity as a narrowing, impoverishing journey toward blank death, the ode proposes that a soul enters life forgetting its eternal being, can remember it throughout life only in intimations and moments of revelation, and will recall and rejoin it fully only in death.

Nature, says Wordsworth, offers us endless reminders of the eternal, and we are most open to them in our childhood. Though we lose that openness in adult life, when “custom” lies upon us “with a weight/heavy as frost, and deep almost as life,” still we can keep faith with

I cherish this testimony particularly because it need not be seen as rising from the belief system of any religion. Believer and freethinker can share this vision of human existence passing from light through darkness into light, from mystery to endless mystery.

In this sense, the innocence, the unjudging, unqualified openness to experience of the young child, can be seen as a spiritual quality attainable or reattainable by the adult. And I think this is what the idea of the Inner Child originally, or optimally, is all about.

But Wordsworth makes no sentimental plea to us to nourish the child we were by denying the value of maturity or by trying to be a child again. However conscious we are of the freedom and awareness and joyfulness we lose as we age, we live a full human life not by stopping at any stage, but by becoming all that is in us to become.

(If, like me, you look at that word soothing in surprise, wondering how thoughts of human suffering can be soothing, perhaps you will feel as I do that such wonder is a key—a sign that the poet’s direct language contains immensely more than its apparent clarity reveals at first, that nothing he says in this poem is simple, and that though it’s easily understood, any understanding of it may lead on, if followed, to further understanding.)

The cult of the Inner Child tends to oversimplify what Wordsworth leaves complex, close off what he leaves open, and make oppositions where there are none. The child is good—therefore the adult is bad. Being a kid is great—so growing up is the pits.

Sure enough, growing up isn’t easy. As soon as they can toddle, babies are bound to toddle into trouble. Wordsworth had no illusions about that: “Shades of the prison-house begin to close/upon the growing Boy…” The transition to adulthood, adolescence, is difficult and dangerous, recognized as such by many cultures—all too often in punitive ways such as cruel male initiation rites, or the brutal eradication of adolescence in girls by marrying them off as soon as they menstruate.

I see children as unfinished beings who have been given a very large job to do. Their job is to become complete, to fulfill their potential: to grow up. Most of them want to do this job and try their level best to do it. All of them need adult help in doing it. This help is called “teaching.”

Teaching can of course go wrong, be restrictive not educative, be stultifying, cruel. Everything we do can be done wrong. But to dismiss teaching as a mere repression of childish spontaneity is a monstrous injustice to every patient parent and teacher in the world since the Old Stone Age, and denies both children’s right to grow up and their elders’ responsibility to help them do so.

Children are by nature, by necessity, irresponsible, and irresponsibility in them, as in puppies or kittens, is part of their charm. Carried into adulthood it becomes a dire practical and ethical failing. Uncontrolled spontaneity wastes itself. Ignorance isn’t wisdom. Innocence is wisdom only of the spirit. We can and do all learn from children, all through our life; but “become as little children” is a spiritual counsel, not an intellectual, practical, or ethical one.

In order to see that our emperors have no clothes on, do we really have to wait for a child to say so? Or even worse, wait for somebody’s Inner Brat to pipe up? If so, we’re in for a lot of nude politicians.

A Modest Proposal: Vegempathy

June 2012

IT IS TIME for humanity to ascend from our primitive condition as omnivores, carnivores, vegetarians, and vegans. We must take the inevitable next step to Oganism—the Way of the Aerovore—leading away from obesity, allergy, and cruelty toward blameless purity. Our motto must be All we need is O.

Many people troubled by the suffering of animals—animals who would scarcely exist outside zoos if we did not breed them for their meat, milk, and eggs—remain strangely indifferent to the endless, enormous ordeal of the vegetables we keep in captivity or capture wild. Consider, for one moment, what plants undergo at our hands. We breed them with ruthless selectivity, harass, torment, and poison them, crowd them into vast monocultures, caring for their well-being only as it affects our desires, raising many merely for their byproducts such as seed, flower, or fruit. And we slaughter them without a thought of their suffering when “harvested,” uprooted, torn living from their earth or branch, slashed, chopped, mown, ripped to pieces—or when “cooked,” dropped to die in boiling water or oil or an oven—or, worst of all, eaten raw, stuffed into a human mouth and masticated by human teeth and swallowed, often while alive.

Do you think a bean is dead because you bought it at the store in a plastic bag? That a carrot is dead because it’s been in the refrigerator for a while? Have you ever planted a few of those beans in damp earth and waited a week or two, put the carrot top in a saucer of fresh water and waited a week or two?

The life in a plant may be less visible but far more intense and durable than the life in an animal. If you put an oyster in a saucer of fresh water and keep it for a week, the result will be quite different.

Why then, if it is immoral to subject an oyster to the degradation of becoming food, is it blameless, even virtuous, to do the same thing to a carrot or a piece of tofu?

“Because the carrot doesn’t suffer,” says the vegan. “Soybeans have no nervous system. They don’t feel pain. Plants have no feelings.”

That is exactly what many people said about animals for millennia, and what many still say about fish. As science has brought us—some of us—back to an awareness of our animality, we have been forced to acknowledge that all higher animals suffer pain and fear at least as intensely as we do. But just as we once misused science to support the claim that animals are mindless machines, so now we misuse science to support the claim of knowing that nonanimal living things—plants—have no feelings.

We know nothing of the sort.

Science has only just begun to investigate plant sensitivity and plant communication. The results are still meager, but positive, fascinating, and strange. The mechanisms and processes, being so very different from the senses and nervous systems of animals, are barely understood,. But so far what science has to say on the subject fails to justify the convenient belief that plants are insensate. We don’t know what the carrot feels.

In fact, we don’t know what the oyster feels. We can’t ask the cow’s opinion on being milked, although we can hypothesize that if her udder was full she might feel relief. The assumptions we make about all other living creatures are mostly self-serving. And perhaps the most deeply entrenched of them is that plants are insensate, irrational, and dumb: thus “inferior to” animals, “here for our use.” This snap judgment allows even the most tender­hearted of us to disrespect plants, to kill vegetables without mercy, to congratulate ourselves on the purity of our conscience while in the very act of callously devouring a young kale stalk or a tender, delicate, curling, living, infant pea tendril.

I believe the only way to avoid such cruel hypocrisy and achieve true clarity of conscience is by becoming an Ogan.

It is a pity that the Ogan movement by its nature and principles is fated to be, in each individual case, rather short-lived. But surely the first martyrs of the cause will inspire multitudes to follow them in forswearing the grossly unnatural practice of supporting life by eating other living beings or their byproducts. Ogans, ingesting only the unsullied purity of the O in the atmosphere and in H₂O, will live in true amity with all animals and all vegetables, and will proudly preach their creed for as long as they possibly can. It could be for several weeks, sometimes.

Belief in Belief

February 2014

YOU CAN BUY rocks in which are carved words intended to be inspiring—LOVE, HOPE, DREAM, etc. Some have the word BELIEVE. They puzzle me. Is belief a virtue? Is it desirable in itself? Does it not matter what you believe so long as you believe something? If I believed that horses turned into artichokes on Tuesdays, would that be better than doubting it?

Charles Blow had a fine editorial in the New York Times on January 3, 2014, “Indoctrinating Religious Warriors,” indicting the radical Republicans’ use of religion to confuse opinion on matters of fact and their success in doing so. He used a Pew report from December 30, 2013, to provide this disheartening statistic:

Now, greatly as I respect Charles Blow’s keen intelligence and reliable compassion, his choice of words here worries me. Four times in this paragraph he uses the verb believe in a way that implies that the credibility of a scientific theory and the credibility of a religious scripture are comparable.

I don’t think they are. And I want to write about it because I agree with him that issues of factual plausibility and spiritual belief or faith are being—cynically or innocently—confused, and need to be disentangled.

I wasn’t able to find the exact wording of the questions asked in the Pew survey.

Their report uses the word think more often than believe—people “think” that human and other beings have evolved over time, or “reject the idea.”

This language reassures me somewhat. For if a poll-taker asked me, “Do you believe in evolution?” my answer would have to be “No.”

I ought to refuse to answer at all, of course, because a meaningless question has only meaningless answers. Asking me if I believe in evolution, in change, makes about as much sense as asking if I believe in Tuesdays, or artichokes. The word evolution means change, something turning into something else. It happens all the time.

The problem here is our use of the word evolution to signify the theory of evolution. This shorthand causes a mental short circuit: it sets up a false parallel between a hypothesis (concerning observed fact) and a revelation (from God, as recorded in the Hebrew Bible)—which is then reinforced by our loose use of the word believe.

I don’t believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution. I accept it. It isn’t a matter of faith, but of evidence.

The whole undertaking of science is to deal, as well as it can, with reality. The reality of actual things and events in time is subject to doubt, to hypothesis, to proof and disproof, to acceptance and rejection—not to belief or disbelief.

Belief has its proper and powerful existence in the domains of magic, religion, fear, and hope.

I see no opposition between accepting the theory of evolution and believing in God. The intellectual acceptance of a scientific theory and the belief in a transcendent deity have little or no overlap: neither can support or contradict the other. They rise from profoundly different ways of looking at the same world—different ways of coming at reality: the material and the spiritual. They can and often do coexist in perfect harmony.

Extreme literalism in reading religious texts makes any kind of thinking hard. Still, even if one believes that God created the universe in six days a few thousand years ago, one can take that as a spiritual truth unaffected by the material evidence that the universe is billions of years old. And vice versa: as Galileo knew, though the Inquisitors didn’t, whether the earth goes round the sun or the sun goes round the earth doesn’t affect one way or the other the belief that God is the spiritual center of all.

The idea that only belief sees the world as wonderful, and the “cold hard facts” of science take all the color and wonder out of it, the idea that scientific understanding automatically threatens and weakens religious or spiritual insight, is just hokum.

Some of the hokum arises from professional jealousy, rivalry, and fear—priest and scientist competing for power and control of human minds. Atheist rant and fundamentalist rant ring alike: passionate, partial, false. My impression is that most working scientists, whether they practice a religion or not, accept the coexistence of religion, its primacy in its own sphere, and go on with what they’re doing. But some scientists hate religion, fear it, and rail against it. And some priests and preachers, wanting their sphere of influence to include everything and everyone, claim the absolute primacy of biblical revelation over material fact.

Thus they both set a fatal trap for the believer: if you believe in God you can’t believe in evolution, and vice versa.

But this is rather like saying if you believe in Tuesday you can’t believe in artichokes.

Maybe the problem is that believers can’t believe that science doesn’t involve belief. And so, confusing knowledge with hypothesis, they fatally misunderstand what scientific knowledge is and isn’t.

A scientific hypothesis is a tentative assertion of knowledge based on the observation of reality and the collection of factual evidence supporting it. Assertions without factual content (beliefs) are simply irrelevant to it. But it’s always subject to refutation. The only way to refute it is to come up with observed facts that disprove it.

So far, evidence fully supports the hypothesis that Creation has been changing since its origin, that on earth living creatures, adapting to change, have evolved through eons from single-cell organisms through a vast profusion of species, and that they’re still adapting and evolving right now (as can be seen in the evolution of finch species in the Galápagos, or moth coloration, or barred/spotted owl interbreeding, or a hundred other examples).

Yet to the strict scientific mind, the theory of evolution is not absolute knowledge. Exhaustively tested and supported by evidence as it is, it’s a theory: further observation can always alter, improve, refine, or enlarge it. It’s not dogma, it’s not an article of faith, but a tool. Scientists use it, act on it, even defend it as if they believed in it, but they’re not doing so because they take it on faith. They accept it and use it and defend it against irrelevant attack because it has so far withstood massive attempts at disproof, and because it works. It does a necessary job. It explains things that needed explaining. It leads the mind on into new realms of factual discovery and theoretical imagination.

Darwin’s theory vastly enlarges our perception of reality—our always tentative knowledge. As far as we have tested it and can test it, and always subject to modification as we learn more, we can accept it as true knowledge—a great, rich, beautiful insight. Not a revealed truth, but an earned one.

In the realm of the spirit, it appears that we can’t earn knowledge. We can only accept it as a gift: the gift of belief. Belief is a great word, and a believed truth too can be great and beautiful. It matters very greatly what one believes in.

I wish we could stop using the word belief in matters of fact, leaving it where it belongs, in matters of religious faith and secular hope. I believe we’d avoid a lot of unnecessary pain if we did so.

About Anger

October 2014

In the consciousness-raising days of the second wave of feminism, we made a big deal out of anger, the anger of women. We praised it and cultivated it as a virtue. We learned to boast of being angry, to swagger our rage, to play the Fury.

We were right to do so. We were telling women who believed they should patiently endure insults, injuries, and abuse that they had every reason to be angry. We were rousing people to feel and see injustice, the methodical mistreatment to which women were subjected, the almost universal disrespect of the human rights of women, and to resent and refuse it for themselves and for others. Indignation, forcibly expressed, is an appropriate response to injustice. Indignation draws strength from outrage, and outrage draws strength from rage. There is a time for anger, and that was such a time.

Anger is a useful, perhaps indispensable tool in motivating resistance to injustice. But I think it is a weapon—a tool useful only in combat and self-defense.

People to whom male dominance is important or essential fear women’s resistance, therefore women’s anger—they know a weapon when they see one. The backlash from them was immediate and predictable. Those who see human rights as consisting of men’s rights labeled every woman who spoke up for justice as a man-hating, bra-burning, intolerant shrew. With much of the media supporting their view, they successfully degraded the meaning of the words feminism and feminist, identifying them with intolerance to the point of making them almost useless, even now.

The far right likes to see everything in terms of warfare. If you look at the feminism of 1960–1990 that way, you might say it worked out rather like the Second World War: the people who lost it gained a good deal, in the end. These days, overt male dominance is less taken for granted; the gender gap in take-home pay is somewhat narrower; there are more women in certain kinds of high positions, particularly in higher education; within certain limits and in certain circumstances, girls can act uppity and women can assume equality with men without risk. As the old ad with the cocky bimbo smoking a cigarette said, You’ve come a long way, baby.

Oh gee, thanks, boss. Thanks for the lung cancer too.

Perhaps—to follow the nursery metaphor instead of the battlefield one—if feminism was the baby, she’s now grown past the stage where her only way to get attention to her needs and wrongs was anger, tantrums, acting out, kicking ass. In the cause of gender rights, mere anger now seldom proves a useful tool. Indignation is still the right response to indignity, to disrespect, but in the present moral climate it seems to be most effective expressed through steady, resolute, morally committed behavior and action.

This is clearly visible in the issue of abortion rights, where the steadfast nonviolence of rights defenders faces the rants, threats, and violence of rights opponents. The opponents would welcome nothing so much as violence in return. If NARAL vented rage as Tea Party spokesmen do, if the clinics brandished guns to defend themselves from the armed demonstrators, the opponents of abortion rights on the Supreme Court would hardly have to bother dismantling Roe vs. Wade by degrees, as they’re doing. The cause would be already lost.

As it is, it may suffer a defeat, but if we who support it hold firm it will never be lost.

Anger points powerfully to the denial of rights, but the exercise of rights can’t live and thrive on anger. It lives and thrives on the dogged pursuit of justice.

If women who value freedom are dragged back into open conflict with oppression, forced to defend ourselves against the reimposition of unjust laws, we will have to call on anger as a weapon again: but we’re not at that point yet, and I hope nothing we do now brings us closer to it.

Anger continued on past its usefulness becomes unjust, then dangerous. Nursed for its own sake, valued as an end in itself, it loses its goal. It fuels not positive activism but regression, obsession, vengeance, self-righteousness. Corrosive, it feeds off itself, destroying its host in the process. The racism, misogyny, and counter-rationality of the reactionary right in American politics for the last several years is a frightening exhibition of the destructive force of anger deliberately nourished by hate, encouraged to rule thought, invited to control behavior. I hope our republic survives this orgy of self-indulgent rage.

I’ve been talking about what might be called public anger, political anger. But I went on thinking about the subject as a personal experience: getting mad. Being angry. And I find the subject very troubling, because though I want to see myself as a woman of strong feeling but peaceable instincts, I have to realize how often anger fuels my acts and thoughts, how very often I indulge in anger.

I know that anger can’t be suppressed indefinitely without crippling or corroding the soul. But I don’t know how useful anger is in the long run. Is private anger to be encouraged?

Considered a virtue, given free expression at all times, as we wanted women’s anger against injustice to be, what would it do?

Certainly an outburst of anger can cleanse the soul and clear the air. But anger nursed and nourished begins to act like anger suppressed: it begins to poison the air with vengefulness, spitefulness, distrust, breeding grudge and resentment, brooding endlessly over the causes of the grudge, the righteousness of the resentment. A brief, open expression of anger in the right moment, aimed at its true target, is effective—anger is a good weapon. But a weapon is appropriate to, justified only by, a situation of danger. Nothing justifies cowing the family every night with rage at the dinner table, or using a tantrum to settle the argument about what TV channel to watch, or expressing frustration by tailgating and then passing on the right at 80 mph yelling FUCK YOU!

Perhaps the problem is this: when threatened, we pull out our weapon, anger. Then the threat passes or evaporates. But the weapon is still in our hand. And weapons are seductive, even addictive; they promise to give us strength, security, dominance…

Looking for positive sources or aspects of my own anger, I recognized one: self-respect. When slighted or patronized, I flare up in fury and attack, right then, right there. I have no guilt about that.

But then so often it turns out to have been a misunderstanding—the disrespect was not intended, or was mere clumsiness perceived as a slight. And even if it was intended, so what?

As my great-aunt Betsy said of a woman who snubbed her, “I pity her poor taste.”

Mostly my anger is connected less with self-respect than with negatives: jealousy, hatred, fear.

Fear, in a person of my temperament, is endemic and inevitable, and I can’t do much about it except recognize it for what it is and try not to let it rule me entirely. If I’m in an angry mood and aware of it, I can ask myself, So what is it you’re afraid of? That gives me a place to look at my anger from. Sometimes it helps get me into clearer air.

Jealousy sticks its nasty yellow-green snout mostly into my life as a writer. I’m jealous of other writers who soar to success on wings of praise, I’m contemptuously angry at them, at the people who praise them—if I don’t like their writing. I’d like to kick Ernest Hemingway for faking and posturing when he had the talent to succeed without faking. I snarl at what I see as the unending overestimation of James Joyce. The enshrinement of Philip Roth infuriates me. But all this jealous anger happens only if I don’t like what they write. If I like a writer’s writing, praise of that writer makes me happy. I can read endless appreciations of Virginia Woolf. A good article about José Saramago makes my day. So evidently the cause of my anger isn’t so much jealousy or envy as, once again, fear. Fear that if Hemingway, Joyce, and Roth really are The Greatest, there’s no way I can ever be very good or very highly considered as a writer—because there’s no way I am ever going to write anything like what they write or please the readers and critics they please.

The circular silliness of this is self-evident; but my insecurity is incurable. Fortunately, it operates only when I read about writers I dislike, never when I’m actually writing. When I’m at work on a story, nothing could be farther from my mind than anybody else’s stories, or status, or success.

Anger’s connection with hatred is surely very complicated, and I don’t understand it at all, but again fear seems to be involved. If you aren’t afraid of someone or something threatening or unpleasant, you can as a rule despise it, ignore it, or even forget it. If you fear it, you have to hate it. I guess hatred uses anger as fuel. I don’t know. I don’t really like going to this place.

What I am coming away from it with, though, seems to be a pervasive idea that anger is connected with fear.

My fears come down to fear of not being safe (as if anyone is ever safe) and of not being in control (as if I ever was in control). Does the fear of being unsafe and not in control express itself as anger, or does it use anger as a kind of denial of the fear?

One view of clinical depression explains it as sourced in suppressed anger. Anger turned, perhaps, against the self, because fear—fear of being harmed, and fear of doing harm—prevents the anger from turning against the people or circumstances causing it.

If so, no wonder a lot of people are depressed, and no wonder so many of them are women. They are living with an unexploded bomb.

So how do you defuse the bomb, or when and how can you explode it safely, even usefully?

A psychologist once informed my mother that a child should not be punished in anger. To be useful, he said, punishment must be administered calmly, with a clear and rational explanation to the child of the cause of punishment. Never strike a child in anger, he said.

“It sounded so right,” my mother said to me. “But then I thought—was he telling me to hit a kid when I’m not angry?”

This was shortly after my daughter Caroline, a sweet-natured, affectionate two-year-old, came up to me while the family was sitting around on the terrace outside my parents’ house; she smiled up at me rather uncertainly and bit me hard on the leg.

My left arm swung out in full backhand and knocked her away like a fly. She was unhurt, but enormously surprised.

There were then, of course, many tears, many hugs, many consolations. There were no apologies on either side. I only got guilty about hitting her later. “That was terrible,” I said to my mother. “I didn’t think! I just whacked her!”

My mother then told me about what the psychologist had told her. And she said, “When your brother Clifton was two, he bit me. And he kept doing it. I didn’t know what to do. I thought I shouldn’t punish him. Finally I just blew up, I slapped him. He was so surprised, like Caroline. I don’t think he even cried. And he stopped biting.”

If there is a moral to this tale, I don’t know what it is.

I see in the lives of people I know how crippling a deep and deeply suppressed anger is. It comes from pain, and it causes pain.

Maybe the prolonged “festival of cruelty” going on in our literature and movies is an attempt to get rid of repressed anger by expressing it, acting it out symbolically. Kick everybody’s ass all the time! Torture the torturer! Describe every agony! Blow up everything over and over!

Does this orgy of simulated or “virtual” violence relieve anger, or increase the leaden inward load of fear and pain that causes it? For me, the latter; it makes me sick and scares me. Anger that targets everything and everybody indiscriminately is the futile, infantile, psychotic rage of the man with an automatic rifle shooting preschoolers. I can’t see it as a way of life, even pretended life.

You hear the anger in my tone? Anger indulged rouses anger.

Yet anger suppressed breeds anger.

What is the way to use anger to fuel something other than hurt, to direct it away from hatred, vengefulness, self-righteousness, and make it serve creation and compassion?

THE ANNALS OF PARD

Doggerel for My Cat

His paws are white, his ears are black.

When he isn’t around I feel the lack.

His purr is loud, his fur is soft.

He always carries his tail aloft.

His gait is easy, his gaze intense.

He wears a tuxedo to all events.

His toes are prickly, his nose is pink.

I like to watch him sit and think.

His breed is Alley, his name is Pard.

Life without him would be hard.