The Paradox at the Base of Freedom
Another way of understanding the problem with the ideals of self-actualization and spontaneity is the fact that both terms are intimately connected to the concept of “freedom”. And that idea is very complex and paradoxical in a way that popular followers of “self-actualization” don't, I believe, understand.
It is relatively easy to think about “freedom” when we contrast public life in a Liberal Democracy with that in a Totalitarian Dictatorship, such as Nazi Germany or Catholic Europe under the counter-reformation. People can point to the greater opportunities for expression, less oppressive police presence, etc. Where the problems begin, however, is when we contemplate exactly what freedom means when we already have freed ourselves from the Gestapo and Inquisition---which is exactly the position that many North American citizens found themselve in during the post-WWII era.
The complexity is that people can find their freedom limited by a lot more than nasty people in uniforms or cassocks.
They can, for example, find themselves addicted to recreational drugs. Walk down just about any street in the world and you will find people who are so addicted to alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines, opiates, etc, that they are worse off than all but the most desperate of chattel slaves. Indeed, the popular parlance admits the fact when they are described as “slaves” to their addictions, or, that they have a “monkey on their back”. Walking by these people who are begging for the means to get high, are many others who have almost as dangerous addictions: smokers, people who eat too much, are in debt up to their eyeballs, who never exercise, etc. These “addicts” are able to live functional lives1, but they still pay a huge price in terms of longevity and/or diminished quality-of-life. The paradox of freedom is that it isn't just the “freedom to do as you please” because that would seem to imply that people can, and often do, “freely choose” to become crack whores or do nothing more than sit on a chesterfield watching television and eating potato chips until they have a heart attack.
It is often argued that these people's freedom is constrained by “private demons” that they aquired during traumatic childhoods. I have no doubt that this is often true. But it doesn't change the fact that these people exist without any significant outside physical contraints upon their freedom, yet it is perfectly reasonable for observers to question just how “free” these people truly were to choose the lives that they find themselves in. Once we accept that people can be “unfree” because of a “monkey on their back”, the realization isn't weakened because we find that in some sense the metaphorical simian was placed there many years ago by an abusive parent. Either way, the idea of “freedom” has been made dramatically hard to understand once this observation has been acknowledged.
Another equally complex wrinkle to consider is the term “discipline”. Who is the freest person: the man who follows whatever momentary idea pops into his head at any given moment? Or, he who is fixated on an idea that popped into his head a while back and which he has developed into a game plan that he follows day after day for a long period of time? A long-term task like writing this essay can often seem like an onerous obligation or a crazed obsession---either way, it seems to be a constraint on the writer's freedom in those given moments that he sets aside to write. Yet if a man is incapable of planning and executing this sort of long-term goal, it seems that he is like a leaf blowing in an autumn wind---totally at the mercy of the moment's fleeting fancies. That too hardly seems to be a life of “freedom”.
Even more to the point, it seems an inescapable fact of human existence that often the most exhilarating freedom can only come as the result of significant drudgery. Musicians---even people who play the wildest improvised jazz---are only able to freely express their fleeting emotions if they are willing to spend years and years grinding away at scales, arpeggios and etudes. Martial artists are in much the same boat: that momentary glimpse of “mushin awareness”2 will only come from years spent grinding away at forms practice. All the ways in which a person can “actualize the self” offer the same lesson: True spontenaity seems to be intrinsically linked to the drudgery of disciplined practice.
This raises the point why I have tried to emphasize that I am responding to the popular understanding of Maslow's theory, not the theory itself. I often meet people in positions of some prominence who espouse some version of it, but when you look at the way they live their lives you see that they too have put in the disciplined years necessary learning the “finger exercises” of their art. Professors, writers, psychologists, etc, who espouse the value of “sponaneity” and “following your bliss” have shown in one way or another that they have large reserves of discipline, or else they would never have been able to learn the skills and credentials needed to follow their avocation. Unfortuantely, they rarely will admit how important discipline has been in their careers, though, because that would force them to back down on the extreme position. 3
I would suggest that the reason why we have a hard time undersanding the paradoxical nature of freedom is because we assume that personal freedom is exactly that: “personal”. Our society bye-and-large assumes that human beings are atomic, isolated entities that find themselves confronted with having to choose between different, universally-understood, options. Our legal system, for example, is based on this assumption. That is why crimes are considered as being the result of a single individual and justice as being exclusively the result of what the state decides to do to the convicted criminal. Liberals believe that this criminal needs to be re-educated. Conservatives believe that he should be punished. But neither sees any role for either the victim or the community at large in the process.
In contrast, certain so-called “restorative justice” models might suggest that whenever a crime is committed it is both the result of complex social forces at work, and, it affects the entire of society. Under this model, when a crime is committed the “balance” of society has gone out of whack, and the entire society needs to come together and reconfigure people's relationships so it will work in the future.
I can remember reading a short book about the Lakota Indian legal system that gave an example of a restorative model in practice. A man had killed another man and had been found guilty by the elders. Under our system of governance, he would be punished and the story would end there. The Lakotas understood, however, that there were other issues at play. For example, without the dead man's work as a hunter, his widow and children would suffer from poverty. The tribal elders decided that the killer would have to marry the widow of the man he killed, which meant that he would be obligated to provide for her and her children.4
The emphasis in this situation was to rebalance the outcomes of the crime, namely the loss in livelihood for the dead man's family. But it is possible to consider a restorative model that would attempt to rebalance the initiating factors that led to the crime in the first place. For example, people who are arrested for certain property crimes sometimes are asked to engage socially with the people that they have stolen from in an attempt to force them to rethink their relationship to society at large. It is one thing to burgle a home with the assumption that no one is hurt because “insurance pays for everything”, another to meet an individual with modest means and a large deductable who suffers real problems as a result of a break and enter. The hope is that once the criminal puts a face on their victims, it becomes harder to justify the crime to one's self.
In a similar vein, people who follow a criminal lifestyle often do so in order to fuel an addiction. In a restorative model, instead of being punished they would be offered treatment for their addiction. A further expansion of the restorative model would include a rethink of our laws against recreational drugs, which dramatically increases their cost---which makes it necessary for addicts to become criminals in order to afford their habit. An even greater expansion of the restorative model would be to examine the informal social network that these criminals inhabit in order to try and foster new associations that would make it easier to re-integrate into mainstream society, which would make it less “normative” for the individual in question to take recreational drugs and pay for them with crime.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Logical Mysticism
One of the ideas that has absolutely obsessed me for decades is the idea of how to integrate science and religion. When I was doing my Master's degree I pretty much destroyed my academic career by trying to write an overly-ambitious thesis on what is called "state specific science" and how it could be used to do so.
State specific science is the attempt to study the laws that govern specific mental states. For example, one could analyse dreams by trying to see what rules govern it. One experiment, for example, would involve the state known as "lucid dreams". These are dreams where one is consciously aware of dreaming (or, as the Daoists would say "holding onto the One") and able to actively control the content of the dream.
Dreams are an easily discussed example for state specific science because they are a form of "altered state of consciousness" that almost everyone has experienced. But there are a great many other ways to experience this sort of thing: sensory deprivation, hallucinogenic drugs, and meditation. My belief at the time was that this would lead to a scientific study of meditation, which would lead to a scientific study of religious experiences, which lead to a science of mysticism.
My thesis imploded, primarily through catastrophic bad judgement in my selection of thesis advisor and reader. After a couple years of extreme frustration, I took a few years off to work and think. (This happened at the time of the 1980s recession, so the best work I could find was running a floor polisher. This was, however, the time I got involved with Daoism.) Eventually, I decided to give the degree one last crack before the deadline passed and I officially failed. I changed from a full thesis to an undefended one.
This time I changed the topic to the role of cultural conditioning in religious experiences". As I explained to my new advisor, I would do anything required to graduate. I remember literally saying "if you want me to roll a peanut up and down the University walkway with my nose, I will do it". Things went blindingly well after that. I'd come in with something written and the advisor and reader would tell me what they liked and what they didn't. Whatever wasn't instantly approved was ripped out and thrown away. When we finished, I had a "B", my piece of paper, and I was out of the academy for good. (I still work there, but in a menial role.)
I learned a great deal when I was researching my second topic, primarily that "recognized experts" in the field of philosophy of mysticism didn't know a lot about the subject. I focused my work on the writings of a fellow by the name of Steven T. Katz. What I found was that this fellow had developed his whole understanding of mysticism based on a very selective reading of literature. Primarily, he restricted himself to Jewish mysticism. Since Judaism is probably the strictest of the monotheist religions, it has very strong injunctions against the two most common types of religious experiences: the "unitive experience" (where one feels to be "one" with God or the universe) and "visionary experiences" (usually where one sees a heavenly being---such as a Daoist immortal, Hindu God or Buddhist Bodhisattva.) Jewish mystics would never report that they are "one with God" because that would be considered blasphemous. Similarly, while they do report visionary experiences sometimes, these usually involve non-personal entities---such as "thrones" or symbols.
If, instead, you look at the broad range of writings by mystics of all religions you can see that there are several different types of religious experience, but most of them can be classified as "visions" or "union" types. The visions tend to be of Gods and Saints. The "unions" are with God or something like "the Dao". By restricting the experiences he wished to study to those that fit into orthodox Judaism, Katz pretty much tossed out over 90% of the literature.
I found it hard to see this as anything but intellectually dishonest.
When I looked at the primary literature of other religions I found that a lot of the experiences people described seemed to be heavily mediated by the culture they inhabited. For example, St. Francis of Assisi is the first person to have ever been reported as exhibiting the stigmata. Yet after he was reported as having them, they started to show up in the historical record. Similarly, the literature of mysticism shows no evidence of women Christian mystics experiencing the "marriage of Christ" vision---until a famous Christian mystic (I think, Teresa of Avila, although it was a long time ago) wrote a manual for nuns that suggested that they use the Song of Songs---which is full of erotic imagery.
What this suggested to me is that the human mind uses the furniture of our culture to construct the imagery that comes to us in visionary religious experiences. Underlying it there seems to be some sort of trans-cultural archetypes, but they take form based on the symbolic representations that the individual has been exposed to. The archetype of the divine female, for example, takes the form of the Virgin Mary to a Roman Catholic, Guan Yin to a Chinese Buddhist, the Empress of the West to a Daoist, Tara to a Tibetan Buddhist, and Sophia to a Greek Pagan.
I think that this is a demonstrable fact because of the experiences I myself have had. I have had visions that fit very neatly into the category of visionary experiences and which take a hibred form between Daoism and Western secularism. For example, I had a gnomic dream that fits neatly into the Daoist category of the "Ghost King", but which was composed by elements from my own personal history.
Years later when I think about that experience in graduate school, it becomes clear to me how much my thinking on this subject has changed. I no longer believe that religious experiences---as I once understood them---are all that important. I've had religious visions and experiences where I felt "one with the universe", but ultimately I've come to the conclusion that none of them are terribly important when compared to the plodding "here and now" of day-to-day experience.
I understand that this is a common belief amongst mystics. For example, Zen Buddhists of the Soto school say that "sitting itself is enlightenment". I think, in the same vein, that "holding onto the One" is realization.
The "new atheists" Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins maintain that there is no way that one can be a rational, educated human being anymore and support religion. I disagree. I think that the sort of mysticism that I have found is amenable to science. But the gap needs to be met by both sides. I have worked very hard to come up with a version that I believe makes sense. I think that now it is time for rationalists to get rid of their "straw men" religions and look seriously at something that does make sense.
State specific science is the attempt to study the laws that govern specific mental states. For example, one could analyse dreams by trying to see what rules govern it. One experiment, for example, would involve the state known as "lucid dreams". These are dreams where one is consciously aware of dreaming (or, as the Daoists would say "holding onto the One") and able to actively control the content of the dream.
Dreams are an easily discussed example for state specific science because they are a form of "altered state of consciousness" that almost everyone has experienced. But there are a great many other ways to experience this sort of thing: sensory deprivation, hallucinogenic drugs, and meditation. My belief at the time was that this would lead to a scientific study of meditation, which would lead to a scientific study of religious experiences, which lead to a science of mysticism.
My thesis imploded, primarily through catastrophic bad judgement in my selection of thesis advisor and reader. After a couple years of extreme frustration, I took a few years off to work and think. (This happened at the time of the 1980s recession, so the best work I could find was running a floor polisher. This was, however, the time I got involved with Daoism.) Eventually, I decided to give the degree one last crack before the deadline passed and I officially failed. I changed from a full thesis to an undefended one.
This time I changed the topic to the role of cultural conditioning in religious experiences". As I explained to my new advisor, I would do anything required to graduate. I remember literally saying "if you want me to roll a peanut up and down the University walkway with my nose, I will do it". Things went blindingly well after that. I'd come in with something written and the advisor and reader would tell me what they liked and what they didn't. Whatever wasn't instantly approved was ripped out and thrown away. When we finished, I had a "B", my piece of paper, and I was out of the academy for good. (I still work there, but in a menial role.)
I learned a great deal when I was researching my second topic, primarily that "recognized experts" in the field of philosophy of mysticism didn't know a lot about the subject. I focused my work on the writings of a fellow by the name of Steven T. Katz. What I found was that this fellow had developed his whole understanding of mysticism based on a very selective reading of literature. Primarily, he restricted himself to Jewish mysticism. Since Judaism is probably the strictest of the monotheist religions, it has very strong injunctions against the two most common types of religious experiences: the "unitive experience" (where one feels to be "one" with God or the universe) and "visionary experiences" (usually where one sees a heavenly being---such as a Daoist immortal, Hindu God or Buddhist Bodhisattva.) Jewish mystics would never report that they are "one with God" because that would be considered blasphemous. Similarly, while they do report visionary experiences sometimes, these usually involve non-personal entities---such as "thrones" or symbols.
If, instead, you look at the broad range of writings by mystics of all religions you can see that there are several different types of religious experience, but most of them can be classified as "visions" or "union" types. The visions tend to be of Gods and Saints. The "unions" are with God or something like "the Dao". By restricting the experiences he wished to study to those that fit into orthodox Judaism, Katz pretty much tossed out over 90% of the literature.
I found it hard to see this as anything but intellectually dishonest.
When I looked at the primary literature of other religions I found that a lot of the experiences people described seemed to be heavily mediated by the culture they inhabited. For example, St. Francis of Assisi is the first person to have ever been reported as exhibiting the stigmata. Yet after he was reported as having them, they started to show up in the historical record. Similarly, the literature of mysticism shows no evidence of women Christian mystics experiencing the "marriage of Christ" vision---until a famous Christian mystic (I think, Teresa of Avila, although it was a long time ago) wrote a manual for nuns that suggested that they use the Song of Songs---which is full of erotic imagery.
What this suggested to me is that the human mind uses the furniture of our culture to construct the imagery that comes to us in visionary religious experiences. Underlying it there seems to be some sort of trans-cultural archetypes, but they take form based on the symbolic representations that the individual has been exposed to. The archetype of the divine female, for example, takes the form of the Virgin Mary to a Roman Catholic, Guan Yin to a Chinese Buddhist, the Empress of the West to a Daoist, Tara to a Tibetan Buddhist, and Sophia to a Greek Pagan.
I think that this is a demonstrable fact because of the experiences I myself have had. I have had visions that fit very neatly into the category of visionary experiences and which take a hibred form between Daoism and Western secularism. For example, I had a gnomic dream that fits neatly into the Daoist category of the "Ghost King", but which was composed by elements from my own personal history.
Years later when I think about that experience in graduate school, it becomes clear to me how much my thinking on this subject has changed. I no longer believe that religious experiences---as I once understood them---are all that important. I've had religious visions and experiences where I felt "one with the universe", but ultimately I've come to the conclusion that none of them are terribly important when compared to the plodding "here and now" of day-to-day experience.
I understand that this is a common belief amongst mystics. For example, Zen Buddhists of the Soto school say that "sitting itself is enlightenment". I think, in the same vein, that "holding onto the One" is realization.
The "new atheists" Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins maintain that there is no way that one can be a rational, educated human being anymore and support religion. I disagree. I think that the sort of mysticism that I have found is amenable to science. But the gap needs to be met by both sides. I have worked very hard to come up with a version that I believe makes sense. I think that now it is time for rationalists to get rid of their "straw men" religions and look seriously at something that does make sense.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
A Different Type of Faith
One of the things that I've had a really hard time understanding over the years is the idea of "faith". I recently had a little insight, however, that finally gives me a plausible way of accepting the idea.
The Christians that I've met usually use "faith" as a way of evading the logical problems that come from any sort of sceptical analysis of their religion. If you raise the standard arguments about the existence of God, the answer isn't some sort of counter-argument---it is "faith". If you suggest on the basis of scriptural analysis that the Bible is a fallible document written by human beings instead of being a "holy book", the answer is "faith". If you suggest that some of the teachings of the church flow not from God but the internal politics of the organization, the response isn't an attempt to prove you wrong, it's to say that you simply don't have enough "faith".
It came to me pretty early on that "having faith" is what you do when you hold onto a belief even thought you have very good reason not to. Later on---after gaining a little wisdom---I came to other conclusions, ones that diminished the harshness of this judgement.
It is really important to understand that the vast majority of people lack the ability to clearly explain their thoughts and motivations. Most of the time this is the result of two reasons. First of all, most people don't spend a lot of time on introspection. Instead, they get caught up in work and family, and spend the rest of their life following one damn thing after another. Ask them why they believe in God and the truth is that it comes from the same place as the actions of a ten year old when he's ask why he tossed bubble gum in his sister's hair---but for an adult "I dunno" doesn't sound right. In the same way, if you put any of their other beliefs (politics, etc) to the same sort of scrutiny that I put religion under, you ultimately have the same sort of answer. Luckily, religion has developed a word that---at least for some people---sweeps away all the embarrassment.
Secondly, and probably for related reasons, the overwhelming majority of people have a dreadful time expressing their ideas. I learned this during my work life when various higher-ups tried to explain to me what tasks they wanted me to do. Time and time again with very different types of people I've learned that you can't simply say "yes sir, no sir, three bags full, sir". Instead, you have to interrogate them, ask them to explain things that they didn't mention, work through aspects of the job they hadn't considered, etc. (Luckily, most of my bosses over the years have understood the complexities after the fact and thanked me for being thorough instead of being upset with me for being "uppity".) In a similar vein, I now understand that at least some of the time people of faith do have some rationale behind their belief system---but they couldn't explain it to anyone else if their life depended on it. The world "faith" takes away some of the discomfort.
As I began to understand these two points, I also began to understand the wisdom of something that my first meditation teacher and a therapist who was treating my post traumatic stress disorder both said to me. Someone as smart as I am has to learn to be compassionate to the people around me who just aren't as educated, articulate and bright as I am. In effect, I found it really hard to believe that the "faithful" didn't see what I saw in a situation because it is so blindingly obvious to me. The only plausible way to understand it, therefore, was to think that they really did understand the truth, but they were being wilfully obtuse in order to pursue some other objective. In other words, I always secretly believed, for example, that Pat Robinson really knew that God didn't send an earthquake to Haiti because of a "pact with the devil"---but that he was just saying stuff like this to keep the money flowing.
(I remember my therapist getting agitated with my inability to understand this point when referring to our local government. He said to me "Bill, you have to realize that half the people on Council are so stupid that I wouldn't hire them to cut my grass! You can't blame them for the idiotic things they do.")
Now I don't get upset about people when then have this sort of conventional "faith". Most of them are too dumb to really figure out how lame the whole idea is. The others have some sort of good notion that they feel in their guts but can't really explain. And the two groups are so well mixed together that it is a mug's game to try and differentiate the two. The only reasonable thing to do, therefore, is to follow the advice of Matthew 7, verse 16: "You'll know who they are by what they produce" (Scholar's Version.)
This doesn't mean that this insight allowed me to accept any sort of faith, however. It just stopped me from being so angry at conventional believers. It also stopped me from arguing with them in the mistaken notion that I would be able to force them to see how wrong-headed they are. (Although put Pat Robinson in the room and have him spout about how Haitians are to blame for their earthquake and I'd be sorely tempted.)
Later on, it occurred to me that I do accept a very limited concept of "faith", the sort that comes from society's division of labour. I have to have faith in the skills of a tradesman, doctor or scientist. If I didn't, then I would have to accept the burden of having to figure out every last bit of the very complex world we inhabit. The difference with this sort of faith, however, is that it is at least potentially testable. I could, at least theoretically, do the research myself (you almost have to in order to not get ripped off when you hire a tradesman.) And with regard to practical things, like getting your car fixed, there is the old "proof in the pudding" test of seeing whether things worked the way they said it would.
Recently, however, it has occurred to me that I have had a certain degree of faith all along. This realization came to me while thinking about my understanding of the Zen Buddhist concept of "Buddha mind". As I understand the term, it is the idea that underlying one's day-to-day consciousness there exists a more placid mind that is a sort of "pure consciousness". The process of meditation is one of both stilling the consciousness in order to make this underlying psychological reality more obvious and introspection so one can observe the relationship between one's ordinary mind and this deeper level. As I understand it now, this is almost exactly the same notion as the Daoist practice of "holding onto the One".
Where "faith" comes in, is how I understand the importance of this "Buddha-mind" or "the One". I see it as being the wellspring of my being, the source of my creativity and inner strength. Keeping it pure and calm is the most important thing in my life. When I am calm and seeing with the eyes of "the One", I am in heaven. When I am disturbed and have totally lost any connection with it, I am in Hell.
This isn't totally a leap into the dark, like saying that there is a God up above. Instead it is based on lived human experience----first in the example of teachers and then on the basis of your own life. But it does seem to me to be something that is so personal that it must seem totally incomprehensible to many others. For example, were I to try and explain this experience to Pat Robertson no matter how skill-fully I tried to explain things, I don't think he would understand.
I also personally think that it makes a lot more sense to talk about a direct personal experience than to try and bring in all this extraneous stuff about God in his heaven and so forth. But I think that at this point I occurs to me that maybe the real point is that the Christian idea of "faith" is simply a tremendously inarticulate way of talking about the same sort of thing. After all, there were Saints who spoke of the "Christ within". My arguments with Christians don't end, however, because I believe that the "powers that be" exert such control over Christianity that they will not allow it to get beyond this archaic language that holds the religion prisoner. I'm just glad that Daoism never developed a centralized ecclesiastical structure that would force it to still use the same language and imagery for 2,000 years. If so, then perhaps I would be pursuing some other path.
The Christians that I've met usually use "faith" as a way of evading the logical problems that come from any sort of sceptical analysis of their religion. If you raise the standard arguments about the existence of God, the answer isn't some sort of counter-argument---it is "faith". If you suggest on the basis of scriptural analysis that the Bible is a fallible document written by human beings instead of being a "holy book", the answer is "faith". If you suggest that some of the teachings of the church flow not from God but the internal politics of the organization, the response isn't an attempt to prove you wrong, it's to say that you simply don't have enough "faith".
It came to me pretty early on that "having faith" is what you do when you hold onto a belief even thought you have very good reason not to. Later on---after gaining a little wisdom---I came to other conclusions, ones that diminished the harshness of this judgement.
It is really important to understand that the vast majority of people lack the ability to clearly explain their thoughts and motivations. Most of the time this is the result of two reasons. First of all, most people don't spend a lot of time on introspection. Instead, they get caught up in work and family, and spend the rest of their life following one damn thing after another. Ask them why they believe in God and the truth is that it comes from the same place as the actions of a ten year old when he's ask why he tossed bubble gum in his sister's hair---but for an adult "I dunno" doesn't sound right. In the same way, if you put any of their other beliefs (politics, etc) to the same sort of scrutiny that I put religion under, you ultimately have the same sort of answer. Luckily, religion has developed a word that---at least for some people---sweeps away all the embarrassment.
Secondly, and probably for related reasons, the overwhelming majority of people have a dreadful time expressing their ideas. I learned this during my work life when various higher-ups tried to explain to me what tasks they wanted me to do. Time and time again with very different types of people I've learned that you can't simply say "yes sir, no sir, three bags full, sir". Instead, you have to interrogate them, ask them to explain things that they didn't mention, work through aspects of the job they hadn't considered, etc. (Luckily, most of my bosses over the years have understood the complexities after the fact and thanked me for being thorough instead of being upset with me for being "uppity".) In a similar vein, I now understand that at least some of the time people of faith do have some rationale behind their belief system---but they couldn't explain it to anyone else if their life depended on it. The world "faith" takes away some of the discomfort.
As I began to understand these two points, I also began to understand the wisdom of something that my first meditation teacher and a therapist who was treating my post traumatic stress disorder both said to me. Someone as smart as I am has to learn to be compassionate to the people around me who just aren't as educated, articulate and bright as I am. In effect, I found it really hard to believe that the "faithful" didn't see what I saw in a situation because it is so blindingly obvious to me. The only plausible way to understand it, therefore, was to think that they really did understand the truth, but they were being wilfully obtuse in order to pursue some other objective. In other words, I always secretly believed, for example, that Pat Robinson really knew that God didn't send an earthquake to Haiti because of a "pact with the devil"---but that he was just saying stuff like this to keep the money flowing.
(I remember my therapist getting agitated with my inability to understand this point when referring to our local government. He said to me "Bill, you have to realize that half the people on Council are so stupid that I wouldn't hire them to cut my grass! You can't blame them for the idiotic things they do.")
Now I don't get upset about people when then have this sort of conventional "faith". Most of them are too dumb to really figure out how lame the whole idea is. The others have some sort of good notion that they feel in their guts but can't really explain. And the two groups are so well mixed together that it is a mug's game to try and differentiate the two. The only reasonable thing to do, therefore, is to follow the advice of Matthew 7, verse 16: "You'll know who they are by what they produce" (Scholar's Version.)
This doesn't mean that this insight allowed me to accept any sort of faith, however. It just stopped me from being so angry at conventional believers. It also stopped me from arguing with them in the mistaken notion that I would be able to force them to see how wrong-headed they are. (Although put Pat Robinson in the room and have him spout about how Haitians are to blame for their earthquake and I'd be sorely tempted.)
Later on, it occurred to me that I do accept a very limited concept of "faith", the sort that comes from society's division of labour. I have to have faith in the skills of a tradesman, doctor or scientist. If I didn't, then I would have to accept the burden of having to figure out every last bit of the very complex world we inhabit. The difference with this sort of faith, however, is that it is at least potentially testable. I could, at least theoretically, do the research myself (you almost have to in order to not get ripped off when you hire a tradesman.) And with regard to practical things, like getting your car fixed, there is the old "proof in the pudding" test of seeing whether things worked the way they said it would.
Recently, however, it has occurred to me that I have had a certain degree of faith all along. This realization came to me while thinking about my understanding of the Zen Buddhist concept of "Buddha mind". As I understand the term, it is the idea that underlying one's day-to-day consciousness there exists a more placid mind that is a sort of "pure consciousness". The process of meditation is one of both stilling the consciousness in order to make this underlying psychological reality more obvious and introspection so one can observe the relationship between one's ordinary mind and this deeper level. As I understand it now, this is almost exactly the same notion as the Daoist practice of "holding onto the One".
Where "faith" comes in, is how I understand the importance of this "Buddha-mind" or "the One". I see it as being the wellspring of my being, the source of my creativity and inner strength. Keeping it pure and calm is the most important thing in my life. When I am calm and seeing with the eyes of "the One", I am in heaven. When I am disturbed and have totally lost any connection with it, I am in Hell.
This isn't totally a leap into the dark, like saying that there is a God up above. Instead it is based on lived human experience----first in the example of teachers and then on the basis of your own life. But it does seem to me to be something that is so personal that it must seem totally incomprehensible to many others. For example, were I to try and explain this experience to Pat Robertson no matter how skill-fully I tried to explain things, I don't think he would understand.
I also personally think that it makes a lot more sense to talk about a direct personal experience than to try and bring in all this extraneous stuff about God in his heaven and so forth. But I think that at this point I occurs to me that maybe the real point is that the Christian idea of "faith" is simply a tremendously inarticulate way of talking about the same sort of thing. After all, there were Saints who spoke of the "Christ within". My arguments with Christians don't end, however, because I believe that the "powers that be" exert such control over Christianity that they will not allow it to get beyond this archaic language that holds the religion prisoner. I'm just glad that Daoism never developed a centralized ecclesiastical structure that would force it to still use the same language and imagery for 2,000 years. If so, then perhaps I would be pursuing some other path.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
The Pursuit of Happiness
Yesterday I was going through a pretty severe sense of "desolation" (to use the language of St. Ignatius.) Most people would describe it as being "depressed" or "blue", but I like to use the Jesuit language because it is rooted in a psychological system that suggests that a great deal of our "blue states" are spiritually significant.
More to the point, the Ignatian system gives people a set of suggestions or "rules of thumb" to help you get over the blues. What I've gotten from this is the idea that I should look into myself whenever I have the blues (or, am in a period of "desolation") and try to figure out if my subconscious is working itself through some sort of issue or problem. To be specific, I think last night I was trying to come to terms with the idea that I may have to sell my house and move on in a few years because the woman who owns the other half isn't terribly happy living in this neighbourhood. When I realized this and thought about it, it eventually came to me that I am too attached to my home. As a result of some of the comments that Jim added to my last post, I realized that I haven't really learned very well to "renounce" my attachment to household stability.
I once read a zen story about a teacher who was sitting in meditation all by himself after the other monks had fled because of the Mongol invasion of China. A Mongol high officer burst into the Zendo and confronted the monk who was seated in meditation. When the monk didn't get up or even acknowledge his presence, the officer bellowed "Don't you understand that the man before you could kill you without blinking an eye!". The response by the monk was classic Zen: "And don't you understand that you could kill the man before you and he would not blink an eye?" Since the officer valued bravery, he laughed and left the monk unmolested.
Here was a model worth emulation, yet I cower in fear because of the uncertainty that comes from thinking about having to sell my home and move on---something that most people nowadays do several times in their lives.
We are such funny creatures!
I've also been thinking about a statement in the Nei-Yeh that has stuck in my mind and won't seem to leave. Chapter Three states:
Many people would be happy to toss out their "anger, desire and profit-seeking" because they can see how these things lead us astray. But how many are willing to get rid of their "happiness" and "joy" too? I hadn't really thought about how truly alien this Daoist spiritual practice must be to most people.
Indeed, the American Declaration of Independence itself states that people "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." On July 4th the most powerful nation on Earth celebrates the founding of a nation that states that God himself has given everyone the right to pursue their own happiness---and I just quoted a religious text that suggests that happiness is a bad thing because it sucks the life energy out of you!
The only way that I can make sense of this is that the author of the Nei-Yeh didn't value "joy" or "happiness" the way we do. What he thought was more important was the state of calmness or equanimity. Indeed, I think that this state was valued by almost all ancient societies in ways that people nowadays cannot fathom.
Perhaps this comes about because we are so much richer, healthier and secure than the wildest dreams for our ancestors. Travel used to be incredibly dangerous even up until the 19th century. For example, when I read Henry David Thoreau's Cape Cod, which describes a walking tour of the area, I was struck by his description of seeing the locals with hay wagons going down the beach to pick up the drowned sailors and passengers from ships that had foundered in a recent storm. This was not some sort of terrible catastrophe so much as a normal part of living on the sea shore.
Another example came to me when I read Harriet Beacher Stowe's classic Uncle Tom's Cabin. There is a scene in it where a mother is helping an escaping slave mother and child, and she gathers up some clothing for the youngster that once belonged to a child of her own who has recently died. In an aside Stowe says something to the effect that it is a rarely fortune mother who has not similarly had to face the death of one of her little ones. (She lost a son to cholera when he was 18 months old, another drowned at age twenty and yet another was lost at sea as an adult.)
As I think about it, though, it strikes me that people may have just as much reason to be unhappy now as at any time in human history. It certainly seems to me that many of the people I know seem to be pretty unhappy a lot of the time. I've known a few with very significant mental health issues. I know others who have had to really struggle with internal demons that keep them from thriving in relationships and at work. Others simply to have had bad luck. Just about everyone I know has concerns about how they are going to get along in life----will they have enough savings when they retire? will they eventually end up in agony tied to machines keeping them artificially alive?
Maybe we do spend too much time trying to be happy and not enough seeking equanimity.
How does one do it? The Nei-Yeh (as well as other Daoist texts, like the Taiping Jing---or "Classic of Great Peace") suggests that the best way of gaining calmness is through "Holding onto the One". This is a somewhat vague term, but I think that it is a process of finding the centre of your consciousness and not letting momentary experiences divert you from it. Another way of saying this is to constantly remember that you exist so you never get "lost in the moment" or "get caught up in the voices that storm inside your head".
Someone who is able to "Hold onto the One" wouldn't find themselves talking to themselves out loud---or even within their own head. I don't think that they would end up losing their cool because someone else is being emotional with them.
I don't think that this state is something that someone achieves and then never has to worry about. Instead, I think it is an ideal that you have to work at as much as you can for the entirety of your life. The most one can hope for is to being to Hold onto the One when you remember to do so and embrace the moments of clarity that result. Maybe these momentary glimpses of realization will prove more and more frequent as you become more used to doing so---.
And I think that if you are able to Hold onto the One when you are tempted to be very happy, you just might find it much easier to do so when you are tempted to be very unhappy, or scared, or sad. So maybe the reason why we have so many really unhappy people is because they are trying so hard to be happy. Maybe if they sought equanimity instead they might be a little better off.
More to the point, the Ignatian system gives people a set of suggestions or "rules of thumb" to help you get over the blues. What I've gotten from this is the idea that I should look into myself whenever I have the blues (or, am in a period of "desolation") and try to figure out if my subconscious is working itself through some sort of issue or problem. To be specific, I think last night I was trying to come to terms with the idea that I may have to sell my house and move on in a few years because the woman who owns the other half isn't terribly happy living in this neighbourhood. When I realized this and thought about it, it eventually came to me that I am too attached to my home. As a result of some of the comments that Jim added to my last post, I realized that I haven't really learned very well to "renounce" my attachment to household stability.
I once read a zen story about a teacher who was sitting in meditation all by himself after the other monks had fled because of the Mongol invasion of China. A Mongol high officer burst into the Zendo and confronted the monk who was seated in meditation. When the monk didn't get up or even acknowledge his presence, the officer bellowed "Don't you understand that the man before you could kill you without blinking an eye!". The response by the monk was classic Zen: "And don't you understand that you could kill the man before you and he would not blink an eye?" Since the officer valued bravery, he laughed and left the monk unmolested.
Here was a model worth emulation, yet I cower in fear because of the uncertainty that comes from thinking about having to sell my home and move on---something that most people nowadays do several times in their lives.
We are such funny creatures!
I've also been thinking about a statement in the Nei-Yeh that has stuck in my mind and won't seem to leave. Chapter Three states:
All the forms of the mind
Are naturally infused and filled with it [the vital essence],
Are naturally generated and developed [because of] it.
It is lost
Inevitably because of sorrow, happiness, joy, anger, desire, and profit-seeking.
If you are able to cast off sorrow, happiness, joy, anger, desire and profit-seeking,
Your mind will just revert to equanimity.
The true condition of the mind
Is that it finds calmness beneficial and, by it, attains repose.
Do not disturb it, do not disrupt it
And harmony will naturally develop.
Many people would be happy to toss out their "anger, desire and profit-seeking" because they can see how these things lead us astray. But how many are willing to get rid of their "happiness" and "joy" too? I hadn't really thought about how truly alien this Daoist spiritual practice must be to most people.
Indeed, the American Declaration of Independence itself states that people "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." On July 4th the most powerful nation on Earth celebrates the founding of a nation that states that God himself has given everyone the right to pursue their own happiness---and I just quoted a religious text that suggests that happiness is a bad thing because it sucks the life energy out of you!
The only way that I can make sense of this is that the author of the Nei-Yeh didn't value "joy" or "happiness" the way we do. What he thought was more important was the state of calmness or equanimity. Indeed, I think that this state was valued by almost all ancient societies in ways that people nowadays cannot fathom.
Perhaps this comes about because we are so much richer, healthier and secure than the wildest dreams for our ancestors. Travel used to be incredibly dangerous even up until the 19th century. For example, when I read Henry David Thoreau's Cape Cod, which describes a walking tour of the area, I was struck by his description of seeing the locals with hay wagons going down the beach to pick up the drowned sailors and passengers from ships that had foundered in a recent storm. This was not some sort of terrible catastrophe so much as a normal part of living on the sea shore.
Another example came to me when I read Harriet Beacher Stowe's classic Uncle Tom's Cabin. There is a scene in it where a mother is helping an escaping slave mother and child, and she gathers up some clothing for the youngster that once belonged to a child of her own who has recently died. In an aside Stowe says something to the effect that it is a rarely fortune mother who has not similarly had to face the death of one of her little ones. (She lost a son to cholera when he was 18 months old, another drowned at age twenty and yet another was lost at sea as an adult.)
As I think about it, though, it strikes me that people may have just as much reason to be unhappy now as at any time in human history. It certainly seems to me that many of the people I know seem to be pretty unhappy a lot of the time. I've known a few with very significant mental health issues. I know others who have had to really struggle with internal demons that keep them from thriving in relationships and at work. Others simply to have had bad luck. Just about everyone I know has concerns about how they are going to get along in life----will they have enough savings when they retire? will they eventually end up in agony tied to machines keeping them artificially alive?
Maybe we do spend too much time trying to be happy and not enough seeking equanimity.
How does one do it? The Nei-Yeh (as well as other Daoist texts, like the Taiping Jing---or "Classic of Great Peace") suggests that the best way of gaining calmness is through "Holding onto the One". This is a somewhat vague term, but I think that it is a process of finding the centre of your consciousness and not letting momentary experiences divert you from it. Another way of saying this is to constantly remember that you exist so you never get "lost in the moment" or "get caught up in the voices that storm inside your head".
Someone who is able to "Hold onto the One" wouldn't find themselves talking to themselves out loud---or even within their own head. I don't think that they would end up losing their cool because someone else is being emotional with them.
I don't think that this state is something that someone achieves and then never has to worry about. Instead, I think it is an ideal that you have to work at as much as you can for the entirety of your life. The most one can hope for is to being to Hold onto the One when you remember to do so and embrace the moments of clarity that result. Maybe these momentary glimpses of realization will prove more and more frequent as you become more used to doing so---.
And I think that if you are able to Hold onto the One when you are tempted to be very happy, you just might find it much easier to do so when you are tempted to be very unhappy, or scared, or sad. So maybe the reason why we have so many really unhappy people is because they are trying so hard to be happy. Maybe if they sought equanimity instead they might be a little better off.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Environmental Vow: Part Twelve
The Ethic of “Self-Actualization”
The decline of faith and honour as motivating emotions only partially explains why so many people seem incapable of motivating themselves beyond despair in order to deal with environmental collapse. A decline in a previous emotion doesn't explain why nothing better has come along to replace it. We also need to understand the motivation that most people have used to fill the void left when these two older ideals disappeared. The best label that I can think of to describe this replacement is “self-actualization”.
The term itself is most strongly associated with Abraham Maslow (it seems there is some debate about the actual origin of the phrase.) In a nutshell, his overall psychological theory posited that human beings are motivated by what he called the “hierarchy of needs”. These are hierarchical in that one particular need needs to be met before the next one presents itself to the human being. Starving people will take great risks to get food. But once someone has enough food and water, their willingness to take risks declines dramatically. And until someone has a certain sense of security in their life, no one cares about what other people think of them. Finally, until someone feels a certain level of self-confidence about one's place in the commuity, no one is going to invest much effort in following their particular dream. In Maslow's view, therefore, “self-actualization” is the pinnacle of human achievement.
The meaning of self-actualization is encompassed in the title. The idea is that each individual (i.e. “self”) has a certain potential to achieve a variety of things. Once the lower-order essential needs of that individual have already been met, then a drive manifests itself to work on and realize this potential (i.e. “actualize”.) Maslow summed this up by saying “What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.” According to this theory, people who have achieved this goal, tend to manifest the following personality traits:
Maslow's theory makes a lot of sense if you understand the time at which it was written. The Great Depression had ended, the Second World War had been won, and modern technology was promising limitless material wealth. For the first time absolute want was gone for the vast majority of people in Western nations. Secondly, the great totalitarian threat posed by the Axis dictatorships had been removed which meant that many people felt safe and secure for the first time in decades. Finally, the postwar growth of the welfare state and the spread of democracy to the whole of the “Western world” implied a great “leveling out” of the old class structures that had once placed the majority of citizens in a precarious social position (think, for example, of the great strides we have made in civil rights.) And indeed, during the 1960s it seemed that huge numbers of people were following the dictim of “What a man can be, he must be.”
I'm prepared to give Abraham Maslow the benefit of the doubt as to what exactly he intended with this theory. He was attempting to offer a descriptive definition of the sort of life that he thought the very best of humanity pursued. Unfortunately, this viewpoint inevitably morphed into a prescriptive ideal that was offered to individuals who were perplexed about how to live their lives. Probably the most famous prescriptive statement in this vein was by Joseph Campbell: “My general formula for my students is 'Follow your bliss.' Find where it is, and don't be afraid to follow it.”
Unfortunately, this ideal became debased to the popular “do your own thing”, which often ended-up being bastardized into not much more than simple ego gratification. And, if we think about the implications of what his theory says, the spread of this “dumbed-down” version shouldn't come as any great shock. First of all, the ideal of “self-actualization” makes no mention whatsoever of anything outside of the “self”. The traditional virtues of faith and honour were not inward directed towards the individual, but outwards directed to either God or society. To replace this outward focus, the most that Maslo could come up with to replace this was the concept of “peak experiences”.
“Peak experience” was the label that Maslow used to identify what had previously been described as a “religious” or “mystical” experience. It is very clear from his little book, Religion, Values and Peak Experiences, that he was consciously trying to come up with a way of describing the experiences of religious people in terms that excluded all reference to “God” or any other sort of supernatural reality. In effect, he was trying to pull out what he considered the “core” of spirituality from the incidental cultural and historical effluent (e.g. “religion”) that had built up around it.
This may or may not be a valid thing to do, but the practical result of his particular formulation (and all its subsequent popular incarnations) makes the entirety of the “peak” experience revolve around the ego of the individual experiencing it. This completely inverts the traditional relationship that exists between religious mystics and their conception of the Divine. If you read the literature of mysticism you will find time and again that mystics humble their ego to embrace the “God within”, “Buddha Mind”, “Brahman, “Dao” and so on. Ultimately this puts the religious mystic into the headspace where their prayers boil down to not much more than “Thy will be done, Lord”. Because Maslow decided to pull out all the---what he thought “extraneous”--- religious stuff out of mysticism, the casual reader cannot help but think that the only option left is to understand “Peak Experience” as being not much more than “My will be done.” As a result, mysticism ceases to be about shrinking the ego in order to embrace the universe and becomes instead a glorification of the ego.
This becomes obvious if you think about how one of the supreme virtues under the Maslow viewpoint, “spontaneity”, can very easily slide into being an out-and-out vice. As I have pointed out above, the ritual and routine of monastery and regiment have proved essential to inculcating the willingness of individuals to place the needs of the many before the desires of the individual. The ideal of spontaneity turns this totally on its head and suggests that it is a very bad thing to think of the greater good and the long-term instead of the here and now.
If the Benedictines had viewed spontaneity as an ultimate virtue, they would never have submitted to the routine of the monastery---which involved things like rising in the middle of the night to chant the divine service. It is also very hard to believe that they would have drained the swamps and built the abbeys that were necessary to tame the howling wilderness that Europe had become after the barbarian invasions. And if soldiers in the Allied armies of WWII had valued spontaneity very highly, it is doubtful if they would have submitted to the tyranny of drill seargants and “official regs”. And the end result of that would probably that we would all be currently living under some form of totalitarian nightmare.
It is understandable that a psychologist living in Maslow's time and place would suggest that spontaneity is a virtue and that the highest good is to “self actualize”. He was writing when the USA was going through a post WWII boom that had brought prosperity beyond the wildest dreams of any other human civilization. Moreover, he was addressing a population that had suffered regimentation and external discipline that was also unparalleled in human history. Millions of self-employed farmers had been forced to migrate to the cities and learn to follow the dictates of the clock and foreman on an assembly line. Moreover, because of conscription, almost all adult males had been forced to submit to military discipline while in the armed forces. Given the extreme regimentation of personal life in the 1940's, 1950's and early 1960's, it was almost inevitable that some sort of backlash would present itself. And once prosperity and peace took away the fear of poverty and invasion, people were ready to accept any notion that suggested that submitting to authority was not only annoying, but wrong.
But if an entire civilization gives itself over to “doing its own thing” it becomes fundamentally incapable of dealing with any sort of existential problem. I would argue that one of the reasons why our society seems incapable of dealing with the environment is because far too many people have bought into a watered-down and bastardized version of Maslow's philosophy of life. As a result, they think that any idea that they should “do without” and “suck it up” for the greater good is not so much unnecessary as it is existentially wrong or even immoral. The ordinary members of the public who are simply casting about for an excuse to do nothing can latch onto this ideal and use it to ignore any calls for sacrifice. And the people who are in a leadership position in the environmental cause refuse to use the language of morality, civic responsibility and self-sacrifice because they buy into the Maslovian “ur-philosophy” of the West to the point where they feel it would be “wrong” to use such language.
Of course anti-environmental politicians and religious groups have no such scruples. They routinely mobilize their followers using the language of morality and sacrifice. The fact that liberals refuse to engage in this sort of discussion reinforces their belief that the Left is a danger to society specifically because it is “amoral”. In their description, liberals are proponents of “situational ethics” who do not understand the difference between right and wrong. Unfortunately, these right wing people who do have an ethical bedrock have chosen a bizarre set of fundamental issues to ground it upon. Most seem to believe that denying the right of women to have an abortion is far more important than preventing wars that kill and maim innocents through “collateral damage”. Many also seem to believe that preventing the use of contraceptives is more important than preventing the spread of terrible diseases like AIDS. For almost all, the right to use private property trumps all attempts to deal with poverty and structural inequality, or any other calamity such as environmental collapse.
The ethical choices that the Right grounds its politics upon have convinced Liberals that it is fundamentally wrong-headed to even use the language of morality. This discredits appeals to morality of all sorts---which in turn reinforces their commitment to the Maslovian worldview.
Society seems to be stuck in the self-reinforcing situation that Yeats described all so well: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”. People of good will who might get involved in saving the planet if there were any sort of leadership find themselves adrift, which leads to despair. And people of good will who might be able to be leaders in the fight for Mother Nature find themselves intellectually incapable of actually pursuing this goal in an effective manner because their commitment to the self actualization ethic makes it impossible to articulate the environmental crisis in terms of moral faith and/or patriotic duty.
The decline of faith and honour as motivating emotions only partially explains why so many people seem incapable of motivating themselves beyond despair in order to deal with environmental collapse. A decline in a previous emotion doesn't explain why nothing better has come along to replace it. We also need to understand the motivation that most people have used to fill the void left when these two older ideals disappeared. The best label that I can think of to describe this replacement is “self-actualization”.
The term itself is most strongly associated with Abraham Maslow (it seems there is some debate about the actual origin of the phrase.) In a nutshell, his overall psychological theory posited that human beings are motivated by what he called the “hierarchy of needs”. These are hierarchical in that one particular need needs to be met before the next one presents itself to the human being. Starving people will take great risks to get food. But once someone has enough food and water, their willingness to take risks declines dramatically. And until someone has a certain sense of security in their life, no one cares about what other people think of them. Finally, until someone feels a certain level of self-confidence about one's place in the commuity, no one is going to invest much effort in following their particular dream. In Maslow's view, therefore, “self-actualization” is the pinnacle of human achievement.
The meaning of self-actualization is encompassed in the title. The idea is that each individual (i.e. “self”) has a certain potential to achieve a variety of things. Once the lower-order essential needs of that individual have already been met, then a drive manifests itself to work on and realize this potential (i.e. “actualize”.) Maslow summed this up by saying “What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.” According to this theory, people who have achieved this goal, tend to manifest the following personality traits:
- They tend to have a realistic appraisal of both themselves and the world around them.
- They tend to be interested in solving the problems that they see in the world around them.
- They tend to be spontaneous and can at times be unconventional in behaviour.
- While capable of being gregarious, at times they embrace solitude as an opportunity to focus on developing their skills and potential.
- Self-actualized people do not become jaded with the world. Instead they continue to experience a sense of wonder all through their life.
- They also often experience what Maslow termed “peak experiences” of seemingly profound emotional importance.
Maslow's theory makes a lot of sense if you understand the time at which it was written. The Great Depression had ended, the Second World War had been won, and modern technology was promising limitless material wealth. For the first time absolute want was gone for the vast majority of people in Western nations. Secondly, the great totalitarian threat posed by the Axis dictatorships had been removed which meant that many people felt safe and secure for the first time in decades. Finally, the postwar growth of the welfare state and the spread of democracy to the whole of the “Western world” implied a great “leveling out” of the old class structures that had once placed the majority of citizens in a precarious social position (think, for example, of the great strides we have made in civil rights.) And indeed, during the 1960s it seemed that huge numbers of people were following the dictim of “What a man can be, he must be.”
I'm prepared to give Abraham Maslow the benefit of the doubt as to what exactly he intended with this theory. He was attempting to offer a descriptive definition of the sort of life that he thought the very best of humanity pursued. Unfortunately, this viewpoint inevitably morphed into a prescriptive ideal that was offered to individuals who were perplexed about how to live their lives. Probably the most famous prescriptive statement in this vein was by Joseph Campbell: “My general formula for my students is 'Follow your bliss.' Find where it is, and don't be afraid to follow it.”
Unfortunately, this ideal became debased to the popular “do your own thing”, which often ended-up being bastardized into not much more than simple ego gratification. And, if we think about the implications of what his theory says, the spread of this “dumbed-down” version shouldn't come as any great shock. First of all, the ideal of “self-actualization” makes no mention whatsoever of anything outside of the “self”. The traditional virtues of faith and honour were not inward directed towards the individual, but outwards directed to either God or society. To replace this outward focus, the most that Maslo could come up with to replace this was the concept of “peak experiences”.
“Peak experience” was the label that Maslow used to identify what had previously been described as a “religious” or “mystical” experience. It is very clear from his little book, Religion, Values and Peak Experiences, that he was consciously trying to come up with a way of describing the experiences of religious people in terms that excluded all reference to “God” or any other sort of supernatural reality. In effect, he was trying to pull out what he considered the “core” of spirituality from the incidental cultural and historical effluent (e.g. “religion”) that had built up around it.
This may or may not be a valid thing to do, but the practical result of his particular formulation (and all its subsequent popular incarnations) makes the entirety of the “peak” experience revolve around the ego of the individual experiencing it. This completely inverts the traditional relationship that exists between religious mystics and their conception of the Divine. If you read the literature of mysticism you will find time and again that mystics humble their ego to embrace the “God within”, “Buddha Mind”, “Brahman, “Dao” and so on. Ultimately this puts the religious mystic into the headspace where their prayers boil down to not much more than “Thy will be done, Lord”. Because Maslow decided to pull out all the---what he thought “extraneous”--- religious stuff out of mysticism, the casual reader cannot help but think that the only option left is to understand “Peak Experience” as being not much more than “My will be done.” As a result, mysticism ceases to be about shrinking the ego in order to embrace the universe and becomes instead a glorification of the ego.
This becomes obvious if you think about how one of the supreme virtues under the Maslow viewpoint, “spontaneity”, can very easily slide into being an out-and-out vice. As I have pointed out above, the ritual and routine of monastery and regiment have proved essential to inculcating the willingness of individuals to place the needs of the many before the desires of the individual. The ideal of spontaneity turns this totally on its head and suggests that it is a very bad thing to think of the greater good and the long-term instead of the here and now.
If the Benedictines had viewed spontaneity as an ultimate virtue, they would never have submitted to the routine of the monastery---which involved things like rising in the middle of the night to chant the divine service. It is also very hard to believe that they would have drained the swamps and built the abbeys that were necessary to tame the howling wilderness that Europe had become after the barbarian invasions. And if soldiers in the Allied armies of WWII had valued spontaneity very highly, it is doubtful if they would have submitted to the tyranny of drill seargants and “official regs”. And the end result of that would probably that we would all be currently living under some form of totalitarian nightmare.
It is understandable that a psychologist living in Maslow's time and place would suggest that spontaneity is a virtue and that the highest good is to “self actualize”. He was writing when the USA was going through a post WWII boom that had brought prosperity beyond the wildest dreams of any other human civilization. Moreover, he was addressing a population that had suffered regimentation and external discipline that was also unparalleled in human history. Millions of self-employed farmers had been forced to migrate to the cities and learn to follow the dictates of the clock and foreman on an assembly line. Moreover, because of conscription, almost all adult males had been forced to submit to military discipline while in the armed forces. Given the extreme regimentation of personal life in the 1940's, 1950's and early 1960's, it was almost inevitable that some sort of backlash would present itself. And once prosperity and peace took away the fear of poverty and invasion, people were ready to accept any notion that suggested that submitting to authority was not only annoying, but wrong.
But if an entire civilization gives itself over to “doing its own thing” it becomes fundamentally incapable of dealing with any sort of existential problem. I would argue that one of the reasons why our society seems incapable of dealing with the environment is because far too many people have bought into a watered-down and bastardized version of Maslow's philosophy of life. As a result, they think that any idea that they should “do without” and “suck it up” for the greater good is not so much unnecessary as it is existentially wrong or even immoral. The ordinary members of the public who are simply casting about for an excuse to do nothing can latch onto this ideal and use it to ignore any calls for sacrifice. And the people who are in a leadership position in the environmental cause refuse to use the language of morality, civic responsibility and self-sacrifice because they buy into the Maslovian “ur-philosophy” of the West to the point where they feel it would be “wrong” to use such language.
Of course anti-environmental politicians and religious groups have no such scruples. They routinely mobilize their followers using the language of morality and sacrifice. The fact that liberals refuse to engage in this sort of discussion reinforces their belief that the Left is a danger to society specifically because it is “amoral”. In their description, liberals are proponents of “situational ethics” who do not understand the difference between right and wrong. Unfortunately, these right wing people who do have an ethical bedrock have chosen a bizarre set of fundamental issues to ground it upon. Most seem to believe that denying the right of women to have an abortion is far more important than preventing wars that kill and maim innocents through “collateral damage”. Many also seem to believe that preventing the use of contraceptives is more important than preventing the spread of terrible diseases like AIDS. For almost all, the right to use private property trumps all attempts to deal with poverty and structural inequality, or any other calamity such as environmental collapse.
The ethical choices that the Right grounds its politics upon have convinced Liberals that it is fundamentally wrong-headed to even use the language of morality. This discredits appeals to morality of all sorts---which in turn reinforces their commitment to the Maslovian worldview.
Society seems to be stuck in the self-reinforcing situation that Yeats described all so well: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”. People of good will who might get involved in saving the planet if there were any sort of leadership find themselves adrift, which leads to despair. And people of good will who might be able to be leaders in the fight for Mother Nature find themselves intellectually incapable of actually pursuing this goal in an effective manner because their commitment to the self actualization ethic makes it impossible to articulate the environmental crisis in terms of moral faith and/or patriotic duty.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Living Without a Car
In my last post I mentioned that I've taken a vow to never own an automobile. A fellow asked me to write a few words about this, so I'm making the time to do so now.
I tell people that I decided to never own an automobile or fly in an airplane again as part of a pledge to limit my footprint on the earth. It was relatively easy to do both of these things because my interest in travel pretty much died-out at an early age. Moreover, I grew up in a family of traditional peasants from Southern Ontario. People in that class never did travel much because they needed to be present twice a day to take care of their livestock. (Farmer's called it "being tied to their cow's or pig's tail".) In a couple decades of marriage my parents went on one two week vacation to Chatham Ontario, and only because my father had won the trip by selling seed corn and my brother and I were old enough to take care of the chores while they were gone.
Of course, times change. And it is essential for country people to drive cars. I got my driver's license at 16 like everyone else, and did things like drive to movies. But one thing I did do from a much earlier age was drive tractor. And sitting in a tractor seat for 10 hours a day taught me to hate sitting on my butt bored out of my skull. Long distance driving ultimately seemed to be more of the same, so I never really thought that "road trips" were all that cool. That was reinforced by a job that I had one summer for the Ministry of Agriculture---it involved spending 10 hours a day driving down dusty back-roads auditing crops.
What this did for me was dramatically lower any interest I might have had in acquiring a car. Everyone else in my family moved heaven and earth to get their first one, whereas I just built my life around doing without. This meant I tended to live in the older parts of town, which were built before most people bought cars and where it is still possible to live without one. Once in a while I would rent a car, but eventually so many years had gone by without doing this I let my license lapse and can no longer legally drive.
A lot of people find it hard to believe that anyone can live without a car, but this is easily refuted by the fact that many people do. The issue is one of adaptation. Without a car large areas of the community are simply off limits for living, working or shopping. If might be that there is public transit, but unless it is very good---and in many places it isn't---it just isn't worth the hassle. This needn't be quite the problem you might think if you just build your life around it.
I live close enough to work that I walk there every day. I also live close to the down-town, the farmer's market and transit hub. In a world without autos, this would be a "desirable" place to live. It once was, as you can tell by all the once very nice homes that have been converted into cheap apartments and rooming houses. I bought one with another person, which we have converted back into the top/down duplex it once was. We paid a very low price for it, but it needed a lot of work. My friend the Mayor tells me that as the price of energy increases and the city intensifies, our neighbourhood will only improve in value while the more remote suburbs will collapse in value. Paradoxically, in my town the cheapest place to live is the one where it is easiest to live without an auto.
I say "paradoxically" because you save a pant load of money not having a car. The average middle-class person in Canada spends about $8,000 annually on their transportation. Since a bus pass in our town only costs about $72/month, or $864/year, the pass costs a little under one tenth of a car. I don't use a pass because I rarely take the bus and either walk or bike. For larger purchases, I have a bike trailer that I got for $100 (I got a heck of deal by buying a prototype from a person who owns a company that builds them.) For even bigger purchases, I will take a bus and hire a cab to bring home what I've bought. I also bike over to lumber yards and have things delivered. I also have friends with pickup trucks who are usually more than willing to do barter deals where I help them with stuff in exchange for the odd dump run or trip to the building supply store. If worst comes to worst, if you look at the classified advertisements on things like Kiiji or Craig's List, there are always people you can hire with pickups who are willing to do your small jobs for a modest fee.
Needless to say, if you are saving $8,000 a year on not having a car, this gives you a lot of flexibility with regard to other things. This raises an important point, however. Some people see not having a car as a way of avoiding the necessity of making that extra $8,000 per year. In a sense this is true, but people have to remember that it is much, much, much easier to live a modest lifestyle on a middle-class income than on a poverty one. Really poor people can't buy homes in areas where it is easy to live without a car. They can rent, but one of the things that comes from low rent is instability. Land lords that only ask for cheap rent are usually "land banking" the building until they can tear it down and build something new. This means that people on reduced income often find that they have to pack up and move over and over again.
This is not only wearisome and potentially expensive (there are always moving costs---even if it is just goodwill amongst friends), but it stresses the lifestyle you've built up. People who live without cars exist in an ecosystem in the same way that hunter/gathers do. If you move a culture from one area to another, there are problems in that people lose some of the cultural knowledge about where the best hunting, fishing, plant gathering areas, etc are. In the same way, if people have to pack up and move on a regular basis they have a hard time building relationships with neighbours and don't learn important survival skills like where the cheapest necessities are to be had locally.
Another thing to consider when doing without a car is what sort of impact it is going to have on your personal relationships. In North America many family members have adopted lifestyles that are totally car dependent. This means that if you opt out of owning a car you could end up being frozen out of family events like Thanksgiving and Christmas because it is impossible to get to the homes of people hosting these events without an auto. Also, just because you decide to not own a car doesn't mean that any significant others you may have in your life want to do so. This means you run the risk of either "bailing" on these connections or ending up forcing people into becoming your chauffeur. If you do end up relying on others to drive, it is imperative that you make big efforts to show how much you appreciate this by doing things like offering to buy gas, take people out to supper, etc. You are saving a lot of money buy not owning a car, show that you appreciate the help with some of that money saved.
One other thing that you should remember is that it changes your consciousness dramatically when you stop driving. It means that you no longer can do things as spontaneously. You have to plan out your itinerary around transport so you don't end up wasting time on extra trips. It also means that you have to be careful to only buy as much as you can carry on your back or on your bike in one trip. My ex and I really noticed this fact when we got involved. She ran around in her car from place to place and would make plans on the fly. I would carefully think out what I needed and how I was going to organize my trip to get it. The car enabled her to do what she did whereas not having one forced me to do what I do.
Another thing thing people probably won't think about unless they try it, is how not owning a car changes your understanding of velocity. If you drive a lot you get used to several ton objects flying around at very high speeds. This is a very odd and dangerous state of affairs, as our annual accident reports will bear out. If you don't drive or even ride in cars much, you being to start experiencing how very odd this state of affairs is in a visceral fashion.
This means that I am literally afraid of cars. I see them roaring down the street, controlled by people who have precious little control over their emotions and who are not terribly bright or self-conscious. This makes me very careful when I do things like cross the street or ride a bicycle. It also absolutely terrifies me when I ride in a car. I usually try to hide in the back seat and recite mantras in order to avoid freaking out. Unfortunately, people often force me to ride "shot gun" because of their misguided attempt to show me "respect". This makes things even worse. If I don't watch myself, I end up flinching or even crying out at various situations---which bugs the hell out of drivers. Lately, I've developed a strategy that helps by envisioning Daoist immortals flying around the car and defending it. This at least keeps me from freaking, which helps. (I doubt the driver would be helped much though if he knew what I was doing.)
One last point. Part of living without a car has to mean living where it is possible to do so. I read somewhere that during the last big hike in gasoline prices that poor Americans suffered much more than poor Canadians. Poor Canadians tend to live in urban areas and are serviced by public transit. Poor Americans tend to live in rural areas and drive everywhere. I suppose it is possible to live in rural areas without a vehicle, but it would be a lot harder than it is for me to live in the middle of a Canadian city that has done a lot more than most to keep its downtown viable. But then again, choosing where you live is part and parcel of the whole livestyle.
I tell people that I decided to never own an automobile or fly in an airplane again as part of a pledge to limit my footprint on the earth. It was relatively easy to do both of these things because my interest in travel pretty much died-out at an early age. Moreover, I grew up in a family of traditional peasants from Southern Ontario. People in that class never did travel much because they needed to be present twice a day to take care of their livestock. (Farmer's called it "being tied to their cow's or pig's tail".) In a couple decades of marriage my parents went on one two week vacation to Chatham Ontario, and only because my father had won the trip by selling seed corn and my brother and I were old enough to take care of the chores while they were gone.
Of course, times change. And it is essential for country people to drive cars. I got my driver's license at 16 like everyone else, and did things like drive to movies. But one thing I did do from a much earlier age was drive tractor. And sitting in a tractor seat for 10 hours a day taught me to hate sitting on my butt bored out of my skull. Long distance driving ultimately seemed to be more of the same, so I never really thought that "road trips" were all that cool. That was reinforced by a job that I had one summer for the Ministry of Agriculture---it involved spending 10 hours a day driving down dusty back-roads auditing crops.
What this did for me was dramatically lower any interest I might have had in acquiring a car. Everyone else in my family moved heaven and earth to get their first one, whereas I just built my life around doing without. This meant I tended to live in the older parts of town, which were built before most people bought cars and where it is still possible to live without one. Once in a while I would rent a car, but eventually so many years had gone by without doing this I let my license lapse and can no longer legally drive.
A lot of people find it hard to believe that anyone can live without a car, but this is easily refuted by the fact that many people do. The issue is one of adaptation. Without a car large areas of the community are simply off limits for living, working or shopping. If might be that there is public transit, but unless it is very good---and in many places it isn't---it just isn't worth the hassle. This needn't be quite the problem you might think if you just build your life around it.
I live close enough to work that I walk there every day. I also live close to the down-town, the farmer's market and transit hub. In a world without autos, this would be a "desirable" place to live. It once was, as you can tell by all the once very nice homes that have been converted into cheap apartments and rooming houses. I bought one with another person, which we have converted back into the top/down duplex it once was. We paid a very low price for it, but it needed a lot of work. My friend the Mayor tells me that as the price of energy increases and the city intensifies, our neighbourhood will only improve in value while the more remote suburbs will collapse in value. Paradoxically, in my town the cheapest place to live is the one where it is easiest to live without an auto.
I say "paradoxically" because you save a pant load of money not having a car. The average middle-class person in Canada spends about $8,000 annually on their transportation. Since a bus pass in our town only costs about $72/month, or $864/year, the pass costs a little under one tenth of a car. I don't use a pass because I rarely take the bus and either walk or bike. For larger purchases, I have a bike trailer that I got for $100 (I got a heck of deal by buying a prototype from a person who owns a company that builds them.) For even bigger purchases, I will take a bus and hire a cab to bring home what I've bought. I also bike over to lumber yards and have things delivered. I also have friends with pickup trucks who are usually more than willing to do barter deals where I help them with stuff in exchange for the odd dump run or trip to the building supply store. If worst comes to worst, if you look at the classified advertisements on things like Kiiji or Craig's List, there are always people you can hire with pickups who are willing to do your small jobs for a modest fee.
Needless to say, if you are saving $8,000 a year on not having a car, this gives you a lot of flexibility with regard to other things. This raises an important point, however. Some people see not having a car as a way of avoiding the necessity of making that extra $8,000 per year. In a sense this is true, but people have to remember that it is much, much, much easier to live a modest lifestyle on a middle-class income than on a poverty one. Really poor people can't buy homes in areas where it is easy to live without a car. They can rent, but one of the things that comes from low rent is instability. Land lords that only ask for cheap rent are usually "land banking" the building until they can tear it down and build something new. This means that people on reduced income often find that they have to pack up and move over and over again.
This is not only wearisome and potentially expensive (there are always moving costs---even if it is just goodwill amongst friends), but it stresses the lifestyle you've built up. People who live without cars exist in an ecosystem in the same way that hunter/gathers do. If you move a culture from one area to another, there are problems in that people lose some of the cultural knowledge about where the best hunting, fishing, plant gathering areas, etc are. In the same way, if people have to pack up and move on a regular basis they have a hard time building relationships with neighbours and don't learn important survival skills like where the cheapest necessities are to be had locally.
Another thing to consider when doing without a car is what sort of impact it is going to have on your personal relationships. In North America many family members have adopted lifestyles that are totally car dependent. This means that if you opt out of owning a car you could end up being frozen out of family events like Thanksgiving and Christmas because it is impossible to get to the homes of people hosting these events without an auto. Also, just because you decide to not own a car doesn't mean that any significant others you may have in your life want to do so. This means you run the risk of either "bailing" on these connections or ending up forcing people into becoming your chauffeur. If you do end up relying on others to drive, it is imperative that you make big efforts to show how much you appreciate this by doing things like offering to buy gas, take people out to supper, etc. You are saving a lot of money buy not owning a car, show that you appreciate the help with some of that money saved.
One other thing that you should remember is that it changes your consciousness dramatically when you stop driving. It means that you no longer can do things as spontaneously. You have to plan out your itinerary around transport so you don't end up wasting time on extra trips. It also means that you have to be careful to only buy as much as you can carry on your back or on your bike in one trip. My ex and I really noticed this fact when we got involved. She ran around in her car from place to place and would make plans on the fly. I would carefully think out what I needed and how I was going to organize my trip to get it. The car enabled her to do what she did whereas not having one forced me to do what I do.
Another thing thing people probably won't think about unless they try it, is how not owning a car changes your understanding of velocity. If you drive a lot you get used to several ton objects flying around at very high speeds. This is a very odd and dangerous state of affairs, as our annual accident reports will bear out. If you don't drive or even ride in cars much, you being to start experiencing how very odd this state of affairs is in a visceral fashion.
This means that I am literally afraid of cars. I see them roaring down the street, controlled by people who have precious little control over their emotions and who are not terribly bright or self-conscious. This makes me very careful when I do things like cross the street or ride a bicycle. It also absolutely terrifies me when I ride in a car. I usually try to hide in the back seat and recite mantras in order to avoid freaking out. Unfortunately, people often force me to ride "shot gun" because of their misguided attempt to show me "respect". This makes things even worse. If I don't watch myself, I end up flinching or even crying out at various situations---which bugs the hell out of drivers. Lately, I've developed a strategy that helps by envisioning Daoist immortals flying around the car and defending it. This at least keeps me from freaking, which helps. (I doubt the driver would be helped much though if he knew what I was doing.)
One last point. Part of living without a car has to mean living where it is possible to do so. I read somewhere that during the last big hike in gasoline prices that poor Americans suffered much more than poor Canadians. Poor Canadians tend to live in urban areas and are serviced by public transit. Poor Americans tend to live in rural areas and drive everywhere. I suppose it is possible to live in rural areas without a vehicle, but it would be a lot harder than it is for me to live in the middle of a Canadian city that has done a lot more than most to keep its downtown viable. But then again, choosing where you live is part and parcel of the whole livestyle.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Dealing With Ruffians
A few nights ago I was walking home from work and I noticed a young man across the street leading a dog down the side walk. He was obviously very drunk and was yelling out the lyrics to some stupid pop song. He decided to come over to my side of the street and started walking a little in front of me. (I could smell the alcohol from several paces.) He started yelling/singing again and then decided to address me by calling me "homey" (whatever the Hell that means.) I made some sort of non-committal response that seemed to not be good enough, so I just tuned him out like I do every other drunk I meet.
At one point he stopped and let me pass him, then he started walking behind me. (This is not a position I like to be in with someone like this.) I tried to distance him with a fast step, but he kept up. He also started yelling at me and saying that I was "anti-social". At this point I was watching my shadow like a hawk so he couldn't sneak up on me. Ordinarily, I wouldn't have been too terribly concerned, but he had a dog with him. This meant that if he attacked me I would not have to just fight him, but the dog also. This dramatically changed the dynamics of the situation.
Luckily, before things got too out of hand I made it to a little strip mall where a lot of people were outside a bar smoking. When I walked into view all eyes turned on this little freak and I knew that I was safe from an attack. He went into a corner store and I continued on home.
I did a lot of thinking about this over the last few days and even considered purchasing some sort of weapon to defend myself. In Canada, your options are few. Guns are out of the question. Mace is supposed to be illegal, but you can buy bear spray in an outdoors store. I looked into it, but it didn't look like it would work in the situations I sometimes find myself in walking home at night from work. It would also be hard to explain to a policeman. I also looked into a spring baton of the sort the police carry. It too is illegal in Canada. A cane would be ideal, but I'm still young enough that there really isn't any need and it would look odd too.
Eventually, I found something called a kubotan that is legal to carry. At work, I found a pocket flashlight in our toolroom that is a very good approximation that I can keep in a pocket of my work trousers where it is very easy to access and is convenient to carry. I think my decades of taijiquan will allow me to use the thing with some dexterity if need be. My plan is to carry this thing on me every night.
Some readers might find this thought process and final decision an odd thing for a religious person to follow. I would suggest, though, that it is quite logical.
Religious like me are marginal people who live in the edges of society. Many hermits, monks and nuns live in the wilderness where land is cheap, distractions few, and the police a long way away. Urban hermits and religious communities on the other hand, tend to live in rough neighbourhoods and often deal with "unsavoury" characters. Part of this comes from not devoting your life to career and making money, which means that many religious simply cannot afford to live in the "nice" (and safe) part of town and avoid unsavoury characters. It can involve making a commitment to work with the poor and disenfranchised. As a result of these choices, religious people often have to make some sort of compromise when it comes to personal safety.
There are several ways in which religious people can deal with this problem. Probably the most important is by embracing poverty. If you own nothing worth stealing, then people will not bother you. Unfortunately, this will not work if people are so desperately poor that even minimal possessions are worth stealing. I once met a Buddhist monk who told me about being on a pilgrimage in India where he was set upon by bandits. He was travelling by foot, which meant he didn't have the safety afforded by riding in a bus or train. He had nothing but the clothes on his back and his begging bowl, but that didn't save him. The thieves stole his saffron robe and his sandals---which left him nothing but his underwear. At that point they proceeded to beat the crap out of him. (Being a good Buddhist, he dealt with the ordeal by reciting his order's version of a Metta teaching.)
Nor will it work if people have spread crazy rumours about you. A community of Buddhist Monks in Arizona found this out after local youths got it into their heads that they were funding their temple by smuggling heroin into the country, that they had a safe full of money and a solid gold Buddha statue. (They were slaughtered.) It also doesn't help if you offend powerful people in the process of trying to help the poor, like these Jesuits.
In my case, because I live in a rich society and have made a commitment to be an example to others that you can live in harmony with nature without being materially deprived, and, because I am specifically not part of a greater religious community, I have to have an income and savings. This means that the vow of poverty cannot be a line of defence. Moreover, it would not have helped with this drunken fool any more than it did for those Theravada monks in Arizona or the martyred Jesuits I linked to above. And because I live as a hermit and have to work for a living, I cannot even use special religious clothing as a way of defending myself, either. (I doubt if anyone in my town would even know what a Daoist robe is anyway.)
What this leaves me is another strategy that has been developed by religious people to survive at the margins of society: the martial arts. It doesn't really come out much in kung fu movies, but I suspect the real reason why Shaolin and Wu-Dang (I tried to come up with a link for Wu-Dang Shan, but all the links I could find were so "Disneyfied" that they made me gag) kungfu came about is simply so monks and nuns---as hermits, in abbeys or as cloud-walkers---could defend themselves from ruffians.
This doesn't mean that every person who came out of a temple was some sort of superman (or woman), but it did mean that a lot of folks did have some sort of training. And training makes a huge difference when you are in a fight with someone who has never had any at all (which includes a lot of ruffians.) Moreover, it doesn't matter if most religious never really got any training. If you never knew whether or not that monk or nun you attack might be someone who can kick your ass in a fight, you might give all the ones you meet a wide birth. Why bother running the risk when you know that none of them is going to have a lot of money anyway?
Anyway, that's the calculation that I follow. I work nights because this allows me to have the sort of "slacker" job that means I can follow my religious vocation. I also walk because of my vow to never own an automobile. If the walk gets too dangerous, maybe I'll go back to riding a bicycle or start carrying a cane.
At one point he stopped and let me pass him, then he started walking behind me. (This is not a position I like to be in with someone like this.) I tried to distance him with a fast step, but he kept up. He also started yelling at me and saying that I was "anti-social". At this point I was watching my shadow like a hawk so he couldn't sneak up on me. Ordinarily, I wouldn't have been too terribly concerned, but he had a dog with him. This meant that if he attacked me I would not have to just fight him, but the dog also. This dramatically changed the dynamics of the situation.
Luckily, before things got too out of hand I made it to a little strip mall where a lot of people were outside a bar smoking. When I walked into view all eyes turned on this little freak and I knew that I was safe from an attack. He went into a corner store and I continued on home.
I did a lot of thinking about this over the last few days and even considered purchasing some sort of weapon to defend myself. In Canada, your options are few. Guns are out of the question. Mace is supposed to be illegal, but you can buy bear spray in an outdoors store. I looked into it, but it didn't look like it would work in the situations I sometimes find myself in walking home at night from work. It would also be hard to explain to a policeman. I also looked into a spring baton of the sort the police carry. It too is illegal in Canada. A cane would be ideal, but I'm still young enough that there really isn't any need and it would look odd too.
Eventually, I found something called a kubotan that is legal to carry. At work, I found a pocket flashlight in our toolroom that is a very good approximation that I can keep in a pocket of my work trousers where it is very easy to access and is convenient to carry. I think my decades of taijiquan will allow me to use the thing with some dexterity if need be. My plan is to carry this thing on me every night.
Some readers might find this thought process and final decision an odd thing for a religious person to follow. I would suggest, though, that it is quite logical.
Religious like me are marginal people who live in the edges of society. Many hermits, monks and nuns live in the wilderness where land is cheap, distractions few, and the police a long way away. Urban hermits and religious communities on the other hand, tend to live in rough neighbourhoods and often deal with "unsavoury" characters. Part of this comes from not devoting your life to career and making money, which means that many religious simply cannot afford to live in the "nice" (and safe) part of town and avoid unsavoury characters. It can involve making a commitment to work with the poor and disenfranchised. As a result of these choices, religious people often have to make some sort of compromise when it comes to personal safety.
There are several ways in which religious people can deal with this problem. Probably the most important is by embracing poverty. If you own nothing worth stealing, then people will not bother you. Unfortunately, this will not work if people are so desperately poor that even minimal possessions are worth stealing. I once met a Buddhist monk who told me about being on a pilgrimage in India where he was set upon by bandits. He was travelling by foot, which meant he didn't have the safety afforded by riding in a bus or train. He had nothing but the clothes on his back and his begging bowl, but that didn't save him. The thieves stole his saffron robe and his sandals---which left him nothing but his underwear. At that point they proceeded to beat the crap out of him. (Being a good Buddhist, he dealt with the ordeal by reciting his order's version of a Metta teaching.)
Nor will it work if people have spread crazy rumours about you. A community of Buddhist Monks in Arizona found this out after local youths got it into their heads that they were funding their temple by smuggling heroin into the country, that they had a safe full of money and a solid gold Buddha statue. (They were slaughtered.) It also doesn't help if you offend powerful people in the process of trying to help the poor, like these Jesuits.
In my case, because I live in a rich society and have made a commitment to be an example to others that you can live in harmony with nature without being materially deprived, and, because I am specifically not part of a greater religious community, I have to have an income and savings. This means that the vow of poverty cannot be a line of defence. Moreover, it would not have helped with this drunken fool any more than it did for those Theravada monks in Arizona or the martyred Jesuits I linked to above. And because I live as a hermit and have to work for a living, I cannot even use special religious clothing as a way of defending myself, either. (I doubt if anyone in my town would even know what a Daoist robe is anyway.)
What this leaves me is another strategy that has been developed by religious people to survive at the margins of society: the martial arts. It doesn't really come out much in kung fu movies, but I suspect the real reason why Shaolin and Wu-Dang (I tried to come up with a link for Wu-Dang Shan, but all the links I could find were so "Disneyfied" that they made me gag) kungfu came about is simply so monks and nuns---as hermits, in abbeys or as cloud-walkers---could defend themselves from ruffians.
This doesn't mean that every person who came out of a temple was some sort of superman (or woman), but it did mean that a lot of folks did have some sort of training. And training makes a huge difference when you are in a fight with someone who has never had any at all (which includes a lot of ruffians.) Moreover, it doesn't matter if most religious never really got any training. If you never knew whether or not that monk or nun you attack might be someone who can kick your ass in a fight, you might give all the ones you meet a wide birth. Why bother running the risk when you know that none of them is going to have a lot of money anyway?
Anyway, that's the calculation that I follow. I work nights because this allows me to have the sort of "slacker" job that means I can follow my religious vocation. I also walk because of my vow to never own an automobile. If the walk gets too dangerous, maybe I'll go back to riding a bicycle or start carrying a cane.
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