Wearing Your Heart on Your Sleeve

I follow several blogs dealing with the environment, peak oil and other issues of great importance to the future of the earth.  One that I recently found is by a physicist who takes the time to work through all the numbers involved in specific issues.  It's called  (of course) "Do the Math" and I find it a tremendous breath of fresh air.  What I do not find a similar breath, is the way my mind falls into old, worn-out ways of reacting to situations that routinely arise.

I was reading the "comments" section when I came across the following brilliant piece of analysis:

Mass transit is a non-starter until the crime problem is dealt with.  If people are assaulted on the train or bus or thieves use it to spread to new territory, nobody will want it to come near their town.

I responded with an angry comment that the moderator graciously edited somewhat instead of simply deleting:

[edited the fangs out]
[Whoa, there!] Are you suggesting that everyone who currently uses public transit is either a criminal or so “beyond the pale” that they don’t care about all the thugs they ride to work with every day?
I had a half-dozen acquaintances die from auto accidents when I was in secondary school. This is far from an isolated experience for people who live in the country. I haven’t known anyone killed in a robbery. Why is it our society chooses to “swallow camels while choking on gnats”?
One of the great things about this blog is that the author really does try to “do the math” instead of making moronic statements based on emotion.  

I can see that I am well on the path towards what always happens when I enter into a debate.  I get so emotionally engaged with the subject that I can easily be egged into pissing off the moderator/voters/editors/whatever to the point where they eventually bare me from the group.

Emotional engagement is a good thing insofar as it gets people motivated to actually do something.   It has gotten me to run for political office, organize community groups, do very risky things like suing Walmart, and so on.  But it also makes me so angry that I tend to go off like an H-bomb whenever someone says something that I believe is so ignorant and hurtful that it simply could not be an honest mistake.  In the above case, my blood boiled from the obvious assumption that the reader was working from----namely that the sort of people who use public transit consist of an "under-class", many of whom are undesirables that any sane person would want to keep physically outside of their community.  One wonders if skin colour might be part of the equation----.

The problem with my emotions is that because I cannot control them any better than I do, I am always vulnerable to anyone who realizes that they can get me into trouble any time they want simply by making this sort of outrageous statement.  Since most referees and audiences respond to the tone of a discussion more than the content, this means that anyone who can get me angry will almost always win the battle.

This "Achilles Heel" has plagued me all of my life.  It is why I have never developed a career, even though I have gone through periods in my life when I really would have liked to be a "success" in some sort of conventional sense.  (Actually, now I consider myself quite a considerable success, but that doesn't change the fact that I haven't always thought so.)   It has certainly dramatically lowered my influence on society, because it means that a great many folks just dismiss me as some sort of weird person who has anger management problems.

I have some understanding about why it is I act like this.  When I was young every authority figure in my life was either too dumb or too out-of-control for me to every assume that they were acting in my best interest or that their advice was worth following.  I also spent a great deal of my life walking around being completely enraged by the idiocy that I had to put up with in my day-to-day life.  Modern biology teaches that when a child develops in this sort of environment it becomes "hard wired" to be angry most of the time.

That pretty much describes me.

Conventional wisdom would dictate that having understood this point, I should be able to no longer be imprisoned by this behaviour.  But the fact of the matter is that knowing that I am going to act like this is absolutely no preventative from doing it time and time again.  The only real way of avoiding this sort of thing is to totally avoid spending any time in situations where I can meet people like the guy who wrote the original comment on the "Do the Math" blog.  Being so emotionally engaged is why drives me to do things like take a train instead of an airplane to visit my fiance even though she lives 800 miles away (to lessen my carbon footprint.)  But it also is why it is almost impossible for anyone to understand why I do so.  It leaves me totally frustrated as a human being.

I wonder how often this sort of dilemma faced old-time Daoist recluses?   Perhaps many of them were simply passionate people who couldn't control their emotions enough to keep a straight face when confronted by the vile, idiotic things they heard and saw in court.  Some folks are never meant to hide their hearts.

Self-Discipline

One of the concepts that people take for granted, but which I have always had a hard time understanding is that of "discipline".  People tell people who eat too much or smoke that they should "learn to have self-discipline".  The problem is that this concept is based on the idea that people always know the right thing to do, but do the opposite anyway.

My experience trying to stop smoking got me thinking about all of this.  I was able to stop smoking over and over again, but each time I started again, it wasn't a case of my losing any sort of "hold" over myself, but rather a case of my becoming depressed and no longer seeing the reason why I should care if I smoked or not.  There is a subtle issue here.

As I see it, most of the things we do in our life are habits.  The person who exercises regularly doesn't have self-discipline, he just has a healthy habit of exercising regularly.  Where discipline comes into play is when someone consciously chooses to change their habits so they stop, for example, slumping in front of a television all night and instead decide to spend the time exercising instead.  The discipline comes into play for the month or so that it takes to create the habit that results in inertia carrying someone into doing exercise instead of watching "the Simpsons".

A key component of this self-discipline comes from keeping our "eye on the prize" so we don't get depressed and start thinking "what's the use" (as in my example of resuming smoking.)  Another part comes from not allowing ourselves to be distracted to the point where we forget that we wanted to change ourselves and create a new habit.  Even if I want to exercise, I might be halfway through a bag of potato chips and "Family Guy" before I remembered that today was the day I was going to start exercising.

As I see it, a key element of developing enough self-discipline in order to change our habits comes from reminding ourselves that we exist and have volition.  In Daoist terms, I see that this is what various teachers meant when they said we need to "hold onto the One".  My primary source of this comes from the Nei Yeh, but it is also something strongly suggested by the Celestial Master in the Taiping Jing.  This is very similar to the Buddhist idea of "mindfulness", but I think it has a very different resonance in that the Buddhist ideal is that of passive watchfulness.  The Buddhist image reminds me of someone sitting quietly and watching the world around them, whereas the Daoist one seems to me more of someone holding onto the "core" of their being so they can affirm themselves in a world of distractions.  This makes sense to me as I see the goal of Buddhism to be Nirvana, which is a negative concept of letting go of bondage to the earth;  whereas the goal of Daoism is to become a Xian (what I call a "realized man") or a being that is still very much engaged with the world around him, but is able to transcend many of his previous limitations.

The connection between "holding onto the One" and "self-discipline" also makes sense of the importance of "kung fu" in Daoist practice.  It doesn't really matter where one puts their dedicated practice---whether it is writing poems, gardening, cooking, making quilts or doing taijiquan.  The fact that you have to "hold onto the One" in order to achieve any sort of progress in the art means that you are also treading the path towards realization.  

Environmental Vow 19: Politics 101

Politics 101

Pithily stated, politics is the process whereby groups of people make collective decisions.


“Politics” permeates human society.  People tend to fixate on the more obvious examples:  municipal, provincial and federal governments.  But every group of people has political elements.  When a co-worker “sucks up” to the boss in order to get his own way, that is a political act.  In the same way, when a CEO organizes a Christmas party for the staff, he is also performing a political act in that he is trying to score “brownie points” with employees in order to encourage loyalty to the organization.   Of course, many of these sorts of things are totally unconscious.  The boss might be a nice guy who is continuing a tradition and who genuinely wants to “do the right thing”.  In the same way, the staff can just as well do the “extra bit” just because the boss really is a “swell guy”.   People can also do very self-conscious things to each other.  Bosses sometimes steal the credit that belongs to subordinates and workers will sometimes sabotage the efforts of others in order to keep them from getting a promotion in the hope that they will get it instead.  Anyone who has worked in any sort of institution would describe this phenomenon as “office politics”.   It happens just as often with people who jockey for a little better position at a “mac job” as it does with executives in the biggest corporation.


 This is exactly what politics was like in the time of royal courts.  Only instead of fry cooks and account managers trying to climb to the top over their co-workers, it involved courtiers with titles such as “groom of the royal bed chamber” or “Lord Chamberlain”.    Each of these officials would have a staff of “hanger’s on” and “lackeys” who would also have their own individual political intrigues with one another to gain favour and influence with their “great man”.  If the courtier was important enough, each of his hanger’s on would also have his own men, who would also have intrigues amongst themselves in order to gain favour.  In the old monarchies the entire nation was held together by these nested layers of patronage.  It was how all positions in the bureaucracy, the courts, the military, etc were filled.  It was how the countryside was held together by the landed aristocracy and how cities functioned through their Councils.    Smaller people gained help from bigger people by helping them with their big projects, and bigger people gained loyal supporters by helping them secure jobs, contracts, etc.


Political parties still operate in much the same way.   There are specific “big men” in parties who have groups of supporters.   If a big man gets enough supporters, he can become the head of the party.  If the party is big enough and has enough supporters in the general public, then he becomes the head of the government.


Why Politicians are Hypocrites

There are differences, though.  Patronage in royal systems is primarily about supporting individual people directly for help in return.#  In contrast, modern society is a little more about supporting and  promoting  a specific “worldview”.   This is where the “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” stuff bleeds in.   Most politicians are not totally “in the game” for money or power.  Instead, they believe that they are promoting a specific way of looking at the world that they believe is “right”, “true” and “just”.  They will often find themselves acting in what seem to be very duplicitous manners, but usually they see this in terms of “the ends justify the means”.  For example, a conservative politician who personally believes in the right of women to make up their own minds about whether or not to have an abortion  will often make noises about---and even vote for----making abortion illegal, but will justify this by thinking that if he doesn’t add the anti-choice vote to his core constituency he will never be able to win the election----which would be a catastrophe for the nation because it would result in “tax and spent liberals” taking over and destroying the economy.


Successful politicians realize that the only way to gain enough power to put through the changes that they would like to see in a political party, city, province, nation, union, NGO, etc, is by building a coalition to support them.  But usually this involves supporting positions that the political “great man” may not like, but which he finds he can “live with”.  Similarly, his political supporters have to make similar compromises in order to find a great man to work for if they want to have a patron who can help them climb the ladder of power.   This is why politicians seem to “waffle” or “flip flop” on issues.  The ones that want to win realize that they have to build a coalition of using people who have very strong opinions about conflicting issues.  Their job is to seduce enough into supporting them to be able to gain power and hopefully do something.


Power doesn’t only come in the form of personal supporters.  In jurisdictions without significant campaign finance laws, it also comes from the money that is needed to fund an election campaign.  And again, politicians find that to be successful they need to cater to the ideals of people who have a great deal of disposable income.  People often confuse a politician’s desire for money with personal greed because they don’t understand that the “system” usually demands that before a candidate can have any hope of being elected he or she will have to raise huge amounts of money for things like television advertisements.  Again, this put enormous pressure on politicians to at the very least pay “lip service” to positions they don’t agree with, and at worst, vote in support of them.


Even in societies with strict campaign finance laws based on regulating funding sources, such as Canada where it is illegal for corporations to make donations and all money must be raised in the form of relatively small donations by individual citizens, the system still exerts enormous pressure on candidates who need money to win elections.  When money is raised in small amounts from a large number of donors, whomever has control of the lists and can organize the “boiler rooms” needed to bring the money in will end up having enormous control over the careers of anyone who seeks public office.  It might be an improvement to have candidates “beholding” to the party fundraisers than wealthy individuals or corporations, but either way it means that the representatives who are supposed to look after the public welfare will inevitably find themselves forced to service specific interests instead of the public good.


I’m not aware of any society where strict campaign finance laws significantly limit the amount of money that a candidate may spend, but if such a system were in place candidates would then find themselves beholding to whatever institutions or individuals are able to provide enough volunteers to build a viable campaign.#


The result of having to balance all these different and often conflicting points of view in order to build a coalition of supporters while at the same time appeasing large donors is that hypocrisy is pretty much essential to the political enterprise.  It might be that if people were sufficiently deferential to their political leadership that they would elect governments imply on an assessment of the politician’s character and let them make all the decisions “as they think best”.  But unfortunately, the trend in politics has been for a long time to increasingly expect our politicians to enunciate a specific program and stick to it once in office.  Unfortunately, this sort of process would only work if there was a clear and coherent vision of where society should be going amongst the body politic.   The fact of the matter, however, is that voters believe a great many things, many of which contradict each other and many are based on total ignorance of the true state of affairs.  This situation means that the only politicians who have a hope of being elected to high office are those ones that have developed the ability to become convincing hypocrites who have learned to tell people what they want to hear instead of what they believe to be the truth.

Environmental Vow 18: Radical Politics and Activism

Radical Politics and Activism

I suggested previously that there was a second motivating factor besides religious faith, namely patriotism.  As I pointed out, however, the calamities of the 20th century pretty much debased that coin in the minds of most thoughtful people.  It is possible to stretch the definition of “patriotism” to embrace more than just “king and country”, though.   What if people build their lives around support for some set of noble ideals, such as “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”?


 Over the last three hundred years or so millions have built their lives around this sort of thing.  Indeed, there are a great many people today who are involved in this form of politics that is specifically focused on environmental issues, namely small and large “g” greens.  Surely something like a form of “eco-patriotism” offers some sort of locus for changing people's behaviour in order to deal with the coming eco-catastrophe.  Unfortunately, I would argue that any sort of patriotism, not matter what its foundation, has found its coin just as debased as that of the old “king and country” type.  Moreover, any attempt to deal with this legacy have made it particularly vulnerable to the “do your own thing” poison that has damaged so many other elements of our society.


The first issue that people have to wrestle with is the impact that Marxism and Fascism have had on the popular imagination and how they still profoundly affect the thoughts of people who aspire to a radical form of environmental politics.  Radical politics was the primary guiding force for a great deal of social transformation during the 20th century. People find it hard to believe right now, but up until the Second World War, there were very active Communist parties throughout the Western world----even in the United States and Canada.  There were also various flavours of Nationalist, Fascist, Socialist parties with vast followings that had huge impact on the day-to-day life of many people.  Since the demise of the Fascist powers and the collapse of the Soviet Union, all this activity seems to be passe, if not down right incomprehensible.


The problem is that these grand experiments in using politics to reconfigure society all ended very badly.  Fascism in Germany, Italy and Japan, and Communism in Russia all culminated in dictatorships that either left their nations as occupied piles of rubble despised by the rest of the world, or couldn't even guarantee that their citizens would be able to find any soap when they went shopping.   All of them created police states and committed crimes against humanity.   These terrible past examples have created a “brand” so poisoned that anyone involved in any sort of radical or activist politics immediately risks being labeled a “Communist” or “Nazi”.


At first glance, this would strike most greens as being profoundly unfair.#  I would suggest, however, that there is a grain of truth to these accusations.  The point is that once one steps outside of “social convention” in politics, the unconscious popular sentiment is that we risk opening a Pandora’s box or stepping onto the slippery slope.  This is because what holds society together is the fact that the overwhelming majority of citizens hold onto pretty much the same worldview and honour a set of conventions about what issues are and are not “on the table”, and, what does or does not represent a “reasonable” demand for change.  Once one leaps over these unspoken boundaries to suggest, for example, things like an end to economic growth, the radical redistribution of wealth, or, mandatory birth control, this fragile consensus risks being shredded.

       Policy planks like these three, if they seriously have any hope of being implemented, would radicalize opposition to the point of violence between different factions of society.  At this point, political differences cease to be settled through stylized political activity (i.e. voting) and instead get worked out with guns.  That is politics the way the Nazis and Bolsheviks did it.  So while it is unfair to call the pacifist Green candidate a “Nazi” or “Communist”, the “kook” heckler does actually have something of a legitimate point.   If political goals become radical for large numbers of people, the citizenry will become polarized, and if taken far enough,  it is inevitable that the means of politics will become violent.


The popular imagination understands this on some sort of inarticulate level, which is why most people have a horror of radical solutions.   Instead, most ordinary folks want to see change that comes in incremental or evolutionary steps instead of being through radical or revolutionary programs.  This inclination flows from two springs.  First, there is the idea that “revolutions devour their own children”.  That is to say, that once society gets turned upside down the social forces that sweep away the old order sooner or later get turned on the revolutionaries themselves.  The examples of the terror of the French revolution and the purge of the old revolutionaries from the Soviet Union and China come to mind.  Secondly, there is a feeling that when the revolutions devour their children, the people who end up on top seem to be the same sorts of people who were in power before.  The cliche for this process comes from the 1960’s rock band the Who, who coined the phrase “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.   Absolutist monarchs in France, Russia and China all ended up being replaced by absolutist dictators, namely Napoleon, Stalin and Mao.  Ordinary folks might have some sympathy of the ideals espoused by radical activists, but they generally have grave suspicions about what would happen if these particular people ever got any real power.


A lot of people who are attracted to one type of green politics or another will find my position hard to accept.  But I think, however, that if they really work at trying to understand what politics really is, they will find the above assertions make a great deal of sense because one situation follows from the other almost like a geometric deduction.

Fear, or, Entitlement?

I try not to follow politics all that much, but there's been a lot of weird stuff happening in politics land lately, and it can't help but get me thinking.  For one thing, there's been a lot of strange stuff coming down the pipeline about gay bullying at schools.  There's been a rash of teenage suicides by gay teens at Ontario schools, so a lot of authority figures have been making "It gets better" videos for YouTube.  Here's one from the Premier of Ontario.

This is actually more than just a platitude.  The Premier is passing new rules that force all Ontario schools to agree to support "gay straight alliance" groups if students want to start them up.  This has many religious people up in arms, because they say that it infringes on their rights.

Liberals have been tap-dancing around this issue, but the overwhelming fact of the matter is that this really does infringe on people's religious rights.  If you look at a lot of religious groups, they do teach that we should hate gays and lesbians.  Indeed, there are individual quotes in the Bible that suggest we should kill them.

 "If a man lies with a male as with a women, both of them shall be put to death for their abominable deed; they have forfeited their lives."  (Leviticus 20:13 NAB)

Of course, it also says in the same place that we should kill anyone who hits or curses their father, commits adultery, atheists, people who believe in other religions, etc.  But the main thing is that the current, oral tradition of very large religious congregations teaches that we should ostracize, bully and abuse homosexuals and lesbians.


Is it any wonder that naive children act on these teachings of the church?


The question is, therefore, whether or not politicians should be going after church teachings and outlawing the ones that are causing real suffering to children?

This is not a straight forward question.  Enlightened politicians, like the Premier, have an obligation to avoid letting the baser elements of society whip the public into a frenzy of hate.   It isn't enough to be right, it's important to do the most you can to avoid harm.   This means that when a politico is faced by an evil, manipulative scumbag that just might be able to mobilize the public if they throw around enough lies, falsehoods and innuendos,

they should be willing to consider bending a little in order to avoid a greater catastrophe.


The problem is, however, that if we pander too much to the religious bigots in order to deflate their attempts to mobilize the public, we run the risk of letting said bigots win half a loaf through just threatening to go for the whole one.   And that in turn, raises the issue of whether the forces of darkness can eventually take over by forcing one compromise after another compromise out of the other side.


There are a lot issues raised by this 'cultural warfare', but two come to my mind which I think are both very important and very rarely raised.


The first one is the way liberals almost invariably let the bigots wrap themselves in the mantle of "morality".  I personally don't think that it is moral to preach hatred and intolerance towards people because of their sexual orientation.  I don't think hatred of any form is moral.  I also think that it is very important to understand people who are different, even if we do not approve.  I also believe that if people who are intolerant did try to understand the people that they don't approve of, they might find that their intolerance is totally unjustified.  It may not be true that "to know all is to forgive all", but I do believe that "to know all is to forgive a great more than you would have before".

Not only do I think that intolerance is immoral, I also think that will-full ignorance is too.  Indeed, I think that there is a great deal of will-full ignorance in our society.  People who refuse to really look into important issues---such as global warming---and instead simply believe what is tremendously convenient to their worldview are being will-fully ignorant.

I understand that traditional religion doesn't consider hatred, intolerance or will-full ignorance as being immoral.  But I think that if people of good will pushed ordinary folks on the issue, we'd find a great many citizens do think of them that way.  The problem is, that most liberals are so committed to the language of moral relativism that they refuse to use this, the strongest weapon in their arsenal.


The second issue that comes to mind in this debate is the way bigoted people seem to be manifesting some sort of outrage against their loss of a certain type of privilege.   The problem is that if you were a white, middle-class, heterosexual, Christian, male, you used to be "on top of the heap".   This meant that you were the last laid off, the first hired, people laughed at your jokes even if they weren't funny, and you could force other people to adhere to a code of behaviour that you believed in even if it made no sense to them.  Now things are a lot more egalitarian.  And you know what?  A lot of people don't particularly want there to be prayer in school because they are either atheist or non-Christians.  People like Perry (or the Republican primary voters he is trying to suck up to in the above advertisement) don't like losing this privilege.  Most of them are too insensitive to understand that there are people out their that don't want prayer in schools or discrimination against gays, others just don't care because they are right and those other people are wrong.


I think we need to understand how tremendously awful the world must seem to these people.    Younger people often forget this stuff, but at the advanced age of 52, I can remember when blacks were still getting routinely lynched in the American South for being "uppity", the police in Toronto were still arresting gays for being "found ins" at bath houses, my sister was flat out told that she couldn't enroll in a horticultural schools "because they don't allow women to take any of the courses", abortion was illegal,  etc.  For the older, tea-party types that are so important to the Republican and Conservative parties, it must seem like the world has been taken over by Martians.


Understanding where these people are coming from is not the same thing as accepting their behaviour, though.  We simply cannot allow these people to damage our society the way that they have been doing. What needs to be done, therefore, is the creation of a public discussion that changes the "terms of discussion" so they no longer get to wrap themselves in the mantle of "morality".   People need to stand up to these folks and use their own language.

The above Youtube parody is a step in the right direction.  Unfortunately, it can easily be dismissed as being "sacrilegious" by anyone who refuses to listen to what the actor is really saying.  I do think, though, that people like Rick Perry and his supporters need to be "carpet bombed" by people who tell them that they don't think that picking one specific quote from the Old Testament then using it to preach hatred and discrimination really fits in with the over-all message of Christ as expressed in the New Testament.

"War and Peace" and the Dao

I just got finished reading Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace for something like the tenth time (I've lost track.) As before, I found more to it than I had gained from previous readings. Since I know that for the overwhelming number of people it is considered an impossibly long, abstruse book, I thought that I'd share a little of why I love the book so much, and why I would suggest that the themes that Tolstoy discusses should interest Daoists.

 Most of my readers probably don't know much about Leo Tolstoy, but he was an absolutely amazing person. He was born into one of the richest and most powerful aristocratic families in Russia. As a young man, he gambled and whored away most of his family fortune. Bored with this life, he decided to join the army and ended up fighting in Chechnya. Returning from the war, he took up writing and was recognized as an "up and coming" writer at the age of 24. He produced an astounding amount of work: 24 novels and novellas, many short stories, 6 plays and 9 non-fiction books. As if this wasn't enough, he did this while being a very successful farm manager and while working at various projects to improve the life of his peasants and humanity in general. (The Doukhobors who live in the West of Canada had half of their passage fare from Russia paid by Tolstoy.)

Tolstoy also emerged as a major thinker in how to change society through peaceful means. His writings so impressed Mohandas Gandhi that he wrote directly to Tolstoy to ask if he could reprint A Letter to a Hindu that he had written to another member of the independence movement. His ideas on Christian anarchism have influenced people up to this day, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. (Mandela's autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, he mentions that he had a copy when he was in prison at Robben Island, which he read many times.)

The book itself deals both with the private lives of various people, primarily Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Count Pierre Bezukov, and, Napoleon's wars with Russia.   Tolstoy attempts with his novel to create a grand theory of history and explain how people's private lives fit into it. One theme that he illustrates over and over again is how even though people naively believe that specific decisions are made by "great" individuals, what really happens is that web all get swept along by circumstances.

One early simple example comes from a battle.  A group of soldiers is attacked by some French cavalry.  A sergeant yells out to the men to run into some trees or else the horsemen will slaughter them.  Later on,  a colonel gets a medal for ordering his men to go into the woods, thereby saving them.   The officer is loath to turn down a medal, so he lets everyone believe that he is a hero.

Tolstoy believed that not only does fate (or, as I would say, the Dao) control history, what little control we have over our lives diminishes as we become more and more important in the grand scheme of things.  A sergeant may be able to yell out to his men to run into the trees, but a leader like Napoleon is hemmed-in by the forces beyond his control.

 Tolstoy illustrates this point by pointing out that Napoleon seemed incapable of controlling his men once then entered Moscow.  He couldn't stop the looting that destroyed all the supplies that the army needed to survive the winter. When the retreat started, he couldn't stop the army from bunching up from fear of Russian partisans, which destroyed its ability to forage for supplies.  He couldn't stop the army from trying to carry back all the loot it had gotten from Moscow, which encumbered its supply train and killed all its horses.  And he couldn't slow the column down.  (Tolstoy writes that most of the soldiers were so terrified of the Russians that they marched at the astounding pace of 25 miles per day all the way from Moscow to the border.  He maintains that this pace is what killed most of the Grand Army of Europe and many of the Russian troops who chased them attempting to do battle.)

In contrast, Pierre, who was travelling as a prisoner in the Napoleon's column for part of the trip found himself "free" for the first time in his life.  He was barefoot and living on horse meat, at the beck and call of is guards, but he found for the first time in his life that he was master of his own thoughts.  He got up when the guards told him to, slept as soon as he laid himself down, and, when something unpleasant came to his mind, learned he could just divert his attention and be free as a bird.  A man who has control over his mind is free, whereas a man who is "in charge" is imprisoned by the illusion of his own importance.  Pierre's experience is that of a Daoist who frees himself from the "land of dust".

While Pierre is a captive of the French he becomes friends with private who the French pulled from an army hospital (he was sick with a fever):  Platon Krataev.  Krataev is a representative of the "good peasant" that Tolstoy held so dear.  Krataev is filled with pithy sayings that Pierre finds apropos to the issues he faces as a captive.  He is also fatalistic and humble.  He "takes life as it comes" and adapts to the circumstances without complaint.  Eventually Krataev is too sick to keep up with the column, so the French murder him.  But Pierre is so impressed by his example that long after the war is over, and Pierre is a happily married wealthy aristocrat, his wife can draw him short on a scheme of his by simply asking him "What would Platon Krataev think of this idea?"  I believe that Platon Krataev is a pretty good example of what Daoists would call an "uncarved block".

In contrast to Napoleon's false "heroic" style of leadership, Tolstoy's real hero is Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov .  Whereas Napoleon is shown as an arrogant, pompous fool in love with grand gestures and who makes big plans about battles.  Kutuzov is shown as an old man who does as little as he possibly can to "get in the way" of his soldiers.  His genius consists in what he doesn't do, not in what he does do.  He understands that once the French invade Russia, his job is to control the enthusiasm of his men, who want nothing more than to tear the Grande Armee to pieces.   Battle between the French and Russians finally came about at Borodino, where even though the Russians left the field Kutuzov considered his men to have won a huge victory.

This is an important point for Tolstoy.  Kutuzov saw it as a victory because even though the troops were not deployed ideally, they refused to break and run like all the other armies of Europe had done in the face of Napoleon.  Instead, they simply fought off the French and if driven from a part of the field regrouped and retook it.  Eventually, simply because of lack of supplies the Russians had to leave.  But they didn't run away in a route, they simply retreated back down the road towards Moscow.  The Russians not only proved that they were as good or better than the French, the French knew it too.  That was why they retreated so quickly and in a disorganized mass instead of an organized army.

The secret as Tolstoy writes is that Kutuzov understood that he was fighting a "people's war" where every single member of Russian society was totally mobilized to resist the French.  The aristocrats refused to stay behind in occupied territory and "make nice" with the French.  The storekeepers handed out all their goods to Russian soldiers for free and burnt what was left, rather than sell to the French.  The peasants left their land and refused to sell food.  The Tsar himself in one passage says that he will retreat to Siberia and grow his own potatoes before he will sign a peace treaty with Napoleon.

The point that Kutuzov and Tolstoy understand is that people can only be oppressed if they agree to participate in their own oppression.  Men who will not make any accommodation to the people who occupy their nation will not be occupied long.   (This is exactly the point that Gandhi understood about the British occupation of India.)  Kutuzov's behaviour as described in War and Peace is a perfect example of Wu Wei.

Pierre is oppressed from having married an terrible woman, Helene, early after he inherited his title and enormous wealth.  She is very beautiful and uses sex to create a fashionable "salon" in St. Petersburg society.  She is portayed as vain, ambitious, takes lovers, and very clearly only marries the naive Pierre for his money and title.  Eventually she dies from what is implied to be a botched abortion.  Yet before he finds out that she has died, which sets him free to marry a woman he clearly loves, Pierre gains the realization that he loves Helene as he loves everyone.  He says "why should I blame her for wanting to live the life that she wants?"

This insight comes from a dream that Pierre experiences while in French captivity.  He finds himself in a study with his Swiss tutor from his student days.  He is looking at a globe.  It appears to be somewhat "fuzzy" in that it's edges seems to be moving.  On closer inspection, he realizes that the globe is composed of billions of living things----the people, plants and animals that inhabit the earth.  He hear's his tutors voice in his ears "God doesn't live up the sky.  God is Everything."   Pierre realizes that God loves everything and he should love everything else, because we are all God.  The realization about his wife is just putting this grand vision into practical effect.

It is easy for modern people who are badly poisoned by the modern versions of religion that we have had inflicted upon us to grind our teeth and shudder at any mention of the word "God".  Which might turn a lot of people off of Tolstoy.  But he is meaning the term in a very specific way, one that is a lot more like the "DAO" than Jimmy Swaggard or Pat Roberston.  Indeed, Tolstoy was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox church.  (I don't really think I like the DAO type of Daoism, myself.  I'm more likely to see the Dao is "that's just the way it is" rather than build some sort of giant theology around the concept, but I still really like Tolstoy and think that this is more of a quibble than anything else.)

I could go on and on about this book.  But I've already had my software erase this blog once and have to rebuild it.  I do hope that I will encourage some people to make the effort to read War and Peace .  I think someone interested in learning about Daoism would be better off doing this than trying to find some hidden gems of wisdom in their one hundred reading of the Dao De Jing.

Environmental Vow 17: Liberal Christianity

Liberal Christianity

Many people who have problems with the “Olde Tyme Religion” of fundamentalism yet still see value in the life of faith have attempted to create liberal forms of religion.  Indeed, it could be argued that these formulations are the latest manifestation of gradual reform that has taken place within religious denominations since the reformation.   As I see it, however, there is an inescapable dilemma that faces liberal religion, namely, “How does one deal with the ancient formulations of the faith?”   That is, how do you reconcile the modern worldview with the scriptures and traditions that predate the enlightenment?  How does Christianity, Judaism and Islam “work” in a world where no sensible person, for example, can believe in the literal existence of the old sky-God of the Torah?


The Liberal Christian answer has been to create something which, for lack of a better term, could be called a “humanist” Christianity.   In general terms, this is an attempt to take away the problematic elements of the Christian tradition (e.g. God, miracles, parts of the scripture that support genocide, etc) and replace them with terms and beliefs more acceptable to modern sensibilities.  Theologians such as Paul Tillich have replaced the “old man in the clouds” with the “God of the philosophers”.  That is, he gives up on any idea of God as being a human-like entity that has volition, makes choices, gets angry with sinners, etc, and replaces him with vague, philosophical formulations such as God is “the ground of all being”.   In the same way, Biblical scholars such as Rudolf Bultmann used the methods of literary analysis to point out that our “holy” scriptures are mythological documents, not historical records.  The “God” of liberal Christians is a short-hand for for a complex, philosophical understanding of human existence and the stories about Moses and Jesus exist alongside those of Heracles and Hiawatha as culture-building myths instead of historically accurate records.


I would argue that aside from the relative intrinsic merits of this sort of religious formulation, there are tremendous practical problems that result from this sort of theology.   First of all, this sort of faith requires an enormous amount of effort to sustain.  Secondly, because it cannot engage the entire congregation of believers, it inevitably becomes “hidden” behind the traditional signs and symbols of the past.  This allows a sort of “ur-conservatism”# to take hold of the religious membership, which eventually holds the priesthood hostage.   Finally, because the “god of the philosophers” doesn't have the same sort of hold over people's consciousness as the “old man in the clouds” does, even if the liberal church avoids being held hostage by internal fundamentalists, it will inevitably find itself drawn towards a sort of extreme humanism that results in a theology of “being nice”.  This effectively neuters the institution and its leadership by removing any ability to develop “prophetic” moral reactions to the great problems of the day, such as the death of Nature.
 

Perhaps the biggest problem with liberal Christian exegesis is that it is so intellectually difficult.  If people really do want to understand the “god of the philosophers” and “Bible as myth”, they will need to undertake a daunting ordeal that involves reading very large books composed of academic prose.  Oddly enough, however, there exists a very large segment of the religious population who eagerly devour this sort of thing. #   But the plain and simple fact of the matter is that this sort of theological orientation simply cannot ever be anything other than elitist.  Ordinary parishioners, most of who have neither the education, nor the leisure, let alone inclination, will never put in the hours necessary to understand all of this stuff.


In a sense, liberal Christianity is a bit like what Indians would call Jnana Yoga.  That is, the path to salvation that comes from certain sort of intellectual knowledge about the universe.   This form of Yoga is not conceived as something that can be followed by anything more than an intellectual elite and as such is usually discouraged for most people.  The problem with liberal Christianity is that it doesn't exist within a structure that offers other clearly-defined options, such as Bhakti Yoga (the path of “love”) or Karma Yoga (the path of “works”.)   Nor does he inhabit a rigidly hierarchical society where people simply accept that there are mysteries that only the educated Brahmins can be expected to understand.  Instead, the Christian in a liberal congregation who cannot figure out what is going on will often try to find some other sort of way to accommodate him or herself to the congregation.


One of the things about religious symbols and rituals is that they allow people to function together on a shallow level while holding very different worldviews.   This is practically feasible because symbols and rituals function on a symbolic rather than explicit level.  This allows people to share an experience without realizing how radically different their understanding can be.


Take, for example, the symbol of the cross.  Some people see it specifically through the frame of “suffering”.  That is, they believe that it shows that in some sense suffering makes a person a better human being.  This view supports the sort of people who flagellate themselves (either literally or figuratively.)  Others see it as a symbol of Jesus as the scape-goat for the sins of humanity.  The cross reminds them that ultimately the only thing that really matters is whether or not one is “born again”.  Others see it as an execution device that was used to kill someone who rebelled against unjust authority.

If you see the cross in terms of suggesting that suffering is “noble”, then it will support a position that suggests that the best response to social ills such as poverty is to learn to endure them with grace and serenity.  The more we suffer on earth, the more we are rewarded after death.   In contrast, if you see the cross in terms of Christ as the scape-goat for humanity's sins, you will tend to believe that the core of “salvation” comes from accepting that scape-goat story.  Trying to be a good person or developing some sort of serenity, according to this worldview, is at best irrelevant and at worst the sin of pride.#    Finally, if you see the cross as an execution device for rebels, then Christ's message becomes one of the necessity of being fearless in one's opposition to injustice and support for the oppressed.   Seeking serenity and belief in a scape-goat, in this view, would be mere self-indulgence that hinders the creation of the God's imperial domain.


As long as the cross exists just as a symbol without any attempt to explain it's meaning in any detail, it can unify a congregation.  The various people sitting in a pew can all have different views on its significance yet be unified by their veneration for it as a symbol.  But once anyone attempts to “unpack” the symbol's meaning, then it becomes obvious to one and all that the “unity” of the congregation isn't quite as deep as once thought.   I once read, for example, of an attempt by an artist to create a new crucifix for a congregation that involved a sculpture of Christ as an obvious black man sitting on an electric chair.#   His reasoning was that modern American Christians fail to understand that in the context of Roman Palestine, Christ was a member of an oppressed minority (a poor Jew in the Pagan Roman Empire) who had been executed by the state in a specifically humiliating manner for breaking the law against rebellion.   The statue was absolutely vilified by some members of the congregation that had commissioned his work.  As memory serves me, it was never used.   The reason why is because his attempt to unpack one particular set of meaning made it cease to be an agent of unity for the congregation and instead become one of division.


The stories of the New Testament operate in a similar fashion.  Take, for example, the story of the trial of Christ.  The anti-Semite can read the account of the trial before the Sanhedrin as an example of the evil in the Jewish soul.  In contrast, the radical can read this group as not a Jewish group, but as instead an Ecclesiastic Hierarchy.   In this case, then the story becomes one of how the religious institution subverts and perverts the values it purports to support.  It all depends on whether the readers chooses to see in the Sanhedrin the Jewish pawnbroker down the street, or, the Papal court in Rome.   As long as the congregation just refers to the story in the Good Friday service there is no source of dissension.  But once one tries to unpack the meaning and explain what the story “is all about”, then all Hell risks breaking out.


When a congregation or denomination does try to explain what these symbols mean, the results can be dire.  For example, when the United and Anglican Churches of Canada decided to not only officiate at same-sex weddings but to also allow accept  homosexual clergy many members of the church decided that this was a “deal breaker” and left.  Sometimes this even happened en-mass with the congregations either becoming independent or joining some other denomination.   For the liberals, the question about homosexuals was one of discrimination and revolved around Matthew 25:40's “Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me”.   For conservatives, the issue was that of following the divinely revealed morality of God and focused on Leviticus 18:22's "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination".#


The liberals in these congregations understand from their study of modern scholarship that the Bible is a human creation which needs to be reinterpreted by each generation as its collective knowledge increases.  But for those who have not gone through the laborious effort of studying the ponderous, academic texts on the subject this willingness to jettison old moral “verities” is scandalous.  In many congregations those clergy who have developed a liberal interpretation feel themselves to be prisoners of their more conservative members of the congregation who watch them with an “eagle eye” for evidence of dangerous “back sliding”. #    Many clergy realize find that if they say what they really think on a wide variety of issues they risk being removed from their position.  Even non-clergy liberals routinely “bite their tongue” because they do not want to risk ostracism from the congregation and the fellowship they seek.


To give conservatives their due, I think that they do have something of a point.


The problem with formulations of Christianity that give a primacy to philosophical concepts (i.e. God as “the ground of all being”) and which see the scripture as a human creation, is that it takes the “old man in the clouds” out of the religion.  That really is the point of liberal religion.  As I've pointed out previously, the old formulations not only no longer seem viable to modern ears, they have positively driven the best and brightest people out of the church.  But the “old man in the clouds” is a real, palpable sort of vision that engages people and motivates them in a way that vague, philosophical musings never seem to be able.  The Benedictine Abbeys were not built by people trying to serve “the ground of all being” or who were inspired by a man-made record of ancient myths.   They believed literally in God, the afterlife and that the Bible was absolutely true.


It is difficult to objectively quantify the level of a person's commitment to a religious vision, but one plausible way of doing so is to track the amount of money individuals with a specific type of religious orientation give to their religious establishment of choice.   The clear tendency seems to be that the more liberal a person is, the less they give to charity.  One study, for example, showed that when people were separated into different categories of “conservative”, “moderate” and “liberal”, they each donated, on average, $3255, $2,926 and $1,879 respectively to secular charities.  In addition, they also donated, on average, $1,841, $1,115 and $499 to their place of worship.#


There are a great many possible explanations for this difference in financial support.  I am not a statistician and this is not a book about that sort of analysis.  But it certainly seems obvious that if someone literally believes that there is a sky-god looking down on her from “on high” who can and will punish her directly for her behaviour, then she will modify her behaviour accordingly.  In contrast, someone who instead believes in some sort of vague philosophical principle will not feel a similar sort of need to act.

This is not to say, however, that conservatives are better people than liberals.  Human behaviour is extremely complex.  Our behaviour is driven by compulsions and drives that have very little to do with what we consciously believe about the universe.  The conservative who feels that the eye of God is always on him may still end up getting drunk on Saturday night and beat up his wife.  Similarly, the Liberal who doesn't believe in God or an afterlife can still live a life of calm sobriety.  The Gospel of Matthew expresses this point well:  “the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”#   But having said that, the fact of the matter is that our behaviour is driven not by calm reason, but rather by emotions.  And “the old man in the clouds” is a much more powerful emotional driver than “the ground of all being”.  Moreover, it is a lot easier to get emotionally engaged in the stories of the Bible when we see them as being directly handed to us by God instead of as a collection of myths written by ancient people living in a long-dead world.


If the liberal no longer believes in the old man sky god, then what, ultimately, is the basis of her faith?  If we talk about God as “the ground of all being” we are really talking about “how the human mind works”.  And if we see the Bible as a collection of ancient myths written by fallible human beings, then we are really talking about “how the human mind has seen things in the past”.  Ultimately, liberal religion is a form of humanism.


And with humanism, we come back to the same problems I identified with Abraham Maslow's ethic of self-actualization.   The problem with this type of religion is that it no longer has any room for what Christians call the “prophetic spirit”.   That is, if one's religion does include some element of the “old man in the clouds”, then it is possible to believe that one is following his commandments and that you have the authority to demand a great deal from people.  You can say that they should turn from their sinful ways and that God wants them to build an abbey in what is now not much more than a swamp.  In contrast, if God is “the ground of all being” and an idea that was inherited from our ignorant ancestors, it is going to be a lot harder to generate the necessary enthusiasm to get much of anything off the ground.


And once you remove any sort of appeal to divine authority, you get left with Protagoras' saying that “Man is the measure of all things”.  At that point, it's pretty hard to push Christianity much farther than Douglas Adams'# characterization of Jesus' message:  “Why can't we all be nice to one another?”  Prophets are not “nice” people.  They offend when they point out where people fail to live up to some sort of ethical ideal.  And they also sometimes suggest that there are social goals that are more important than the comfort of the population.    Old Testament prophets could argue that God wants people to eat locally-grown, organic food and take the train instead of flying.   Humanists are left with “wouldn't it be nice if people thought about the consequences of their actions?”   Neither appeal is going to change the behaviour of the majority, but I would argue that a larger minority of Conservatives is going to effect a greater change than that of Humanists, simply because their appeal is based on more basic, emotional drivers.