Scary Monsters and Crazy, Dangerous Worlds

It's been a vacation time for me lately. Part of that has been some total sloth binge-watching Netflix. In particular, I've been immersing myself in "Marvel's Agents of Shield". For those of you who don't follow such stuff, "SHIELD" is an enormous, incredibly well-funded, secret police agency who's task is to protect the entire world's population from the dangerous "super people" who keep popping up in the alternative "Marvel universe".

Watching episode 7 of the 3rd season of the series I heard a little speech by Rosalind Price---a US intelligence leader---talking about how scary it is to live in a world with "super people".




This is a really interesting conversation because Rosalind pretty much embodies the naive fear that people routinely express about any number of issues our society has trouble dealing with. I say "naive" because she is completely oblivious to the danger that she represents to the rest of the world. She suggests that Daisy (the younger woman---who has a super power) can "bring down the plane" and "kill Rosalind", without contemplating the fact that Rosalind can kill Daisy and bring down the plane too. After all, she is a trained killer who carries a gun. Moreover, she ignores the fact that she is the head of a secret police agency that routinely kicks in people's doors, drags them out at gun point, puts them into a coma and warehouses them indefinitely, and, has no compunction at all about shooting people who refuse to comply with their orders. (Heck, that dear plane that they are flying in can also shoot rockets and drop bombs, if you really want to get into it.)

As if it isn't loony enough that it appears that something like 20% of the world's Gross Domestic Product in the Marvel universe seems to be devoted to funding secret police agencies, there is plenty of evidence that plain old, garden-variety human nastiness is still around. The big enemy of SHIELD is a group of neo-NAZIs called "Hydra" (it has the cool slogan "cut off one head and another will grow to replace it"), led by some very nasty villains who were obviously based on folks like Josef Mengele. They like to dirty their hands in stuff like recruiting and brainwashing super-villains, but the concept works even without all this "alternative universe" stuff. It's obvious that there's no sense having to invent a new, hypothetical way of being evil when you can draw on the Niagara Falls of horror known as the Holocaust.

For heaven's sake, the world doesn't need "super heroes" and "super villains" to be an insanely dangerous place, science plus politics is more than enough to come up with nuclear war, genocide, climate change, etc. Can Marvel comics come up with a scenario as nightmare-inducing as Donald Trump in control of the nuclear football? I don't think that the writers of this tv show really have thought through how insanely vicious things like hydrogen bombs and nerve gas really are, or else they'd feel a little sheepish about the "devilish devices" dreamed up by the guys at Hydra. A disk that you throw that can turn you into rock? That's really nothing compared to nerve gas---a single drop of which on the skin is deadly.

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The point I'm trying to work towards is that the world is an insanely dangerous place. It always has been. It has always been the case that politics can go bad very fast. The Mongols or Vikings or British Empire can show up, and you end up dead or a slave, and, your entire society being plucked and devoured like the Christmas turkey. You don't even need outsiders. Some bad political events can happen and you end up with a long-term catastrophe like the Wars of the Roses (the real-life inspiration for the Game of Thrones series.)

Plucking the Red and White Roses in the Old Temple Gardens
(1908) by Henry Arthur Payne
Yup, a bunch of toffs pick flowers and hordes of peasants die
Public Domain Image c/o Wiki-Commons

Do I really need to mention religion? If you don't know why I would say that, do some reading on the "Thirty Years War". It killed off half the population of the German nation. It also inspired some very interesting art.

The Hanging by Jacques Callot
More public domain goodness from the Wiki Commons

If you want to talk about crazy behaviour inspired by fear of "the other", nothing really compares to terror of heretics by fundamentalists. (Something to think about in our current political climate.)

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This blog post isn't meant to an attack on "Agents of Shield". I actually really enjoy the show. But the role that Marvel plays in our society is that it allows people to work through the "big issues" that face us as human beings. It is the equivalent of the myths and legends that people used to tell around the hearth when it was too dark to work. As such, it creates a common language and more emotionally neutral way of discussing issues that are terribly important to all of us---but often so fundamentally terrible that people have a hard time talking about them.

And yeah, the basic fragility of life and human society is one of those things that people fool themselves into ignoring because they find the idea too scary to contemplate. We are all somewhat like Rosalind Price---up to our eyeballs in a vicious, dangerous, nasty world yet somehow deluded into thinking that in some way it is safe and stable. It is one of those key, important truths of Daoism that this is just a fantasy. The only thing that is constant is change. The Dao is totally indifferent to the suffering of humans, it treats us like "straw dogs".

This isn't to say that we need to become indifferent to suffering, just that any kindness or compassion that exists comes about because we choose to show it to others---not because it is intrinsic to the way things are. It also should teach us that we need to savour every moment (ie: hold onto the One), because it really may be our last chance to do so.

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Yeah. More blue type. Just remember that "creatives" need to eat too. We're happy to share with folks that can't afford to toss something in the tip jar. But if you can, think about doing so. If not for this blog, maybe someone else's. If you think that you gained some insight or even wisdom from my words, how about tossing me a buck? 

The Dao is Not Sentimental

The first part of Chapter Five of the Dao De Jing is like vinegar to many people. But I think that contains a deep truth that everyone should understand.

Heaven and Earth are not humane (jen),

They treat the ten thousand beings as straw dogs (ch'u kou).

The sage is not humane (jen), 

He treats the hundred families as straw dogs (ch'u kou).  

Ellen Chen trans.

I thought about this after I saw yet another weepy news story about the recent bombings in Brussels. Society is flailing and the news media is sending story after story over the airwaves. But let's think about this. According to Wikipedia, there were thirty-five deaths and three hundred injuries. Lets compare that death toll to a real catastrophe, like World War II. That war lasted a little under six years (Sept 1/39 to Aug 14/45). The total deaths due to the war in that period---including soldiers killed due to battle, civilians due to war crimes, disease, and, starvation---are estimated at between 70 and 85 million. This means that at the most conservative estimate of casualty estimates, 70 million, about 32,000 people died every day during WWII. If we want to get a little closer to home, let's consider the number of people who've died in Iraq and Syria.  According to the website "Iraq Body Count", 242,000 people have died there since the American invasion. And in Syria, according to Wikipedia, 147,000 people have died in the Civil war.

Seen from this perspective, it strikes me that our society's collective reaction to a few minor terrorist attacks is wildly, crazily, insanely, over the top.

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In contrast. I've been watching the way our political classes have been responding to the prospect of runaway climate change. Various celebrities and elected officials, for example, have been going on about how unfair and "over the top" it is to expect Alberta to not be allowed any way of shipping their tar sands oil to market. In contrast to the minor casualties predicted from the terrorist attacks, there are serious climate scientists who are arguing that climate change will do things like flood all the coastal cities of the world, disrupt seasonal rains in many areas, and cause the deaths of millions---if not billions---due to drought, starvation, and disease.

Look at these two YouTube videos to explain the two points of view.

It seems so crazy that so many people go berzerk about a few people losing their jobs in Alberta or a tiny number of commuters getting blown up by bombs, yet seem so totally blase about millions of people dying nasty horrible deaths due to climate change. What makes it even worse is that the majority of these other people will admit that climate change is real, they just don't want to do anything about it. The person in the second YouTube video is bang on, if you won't do anything about preventing climate change, no matter what you say, you are still a denier.

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What's going on here? It seems to me that the big problem is sentimentality. By that, I mean an emotional reaction that is un-tempered  by rational thought. Take a look at the following poster that I see on the my local bus.

What exactly is the argument here? Did a video tape slap this crying child on the side of her head? Was she strapped to a chair and forced to watch it? Was she forced to take part in the creation of a pornographic movie? Was her mommy neglecting her because she wanted to watch or make pornography? What is it? Frankly, I don't know. I suspect people are just expected to see a crying child and come up with their own ideas. This is the problem with sentimentality, it isn't based on evidence, reason or much of anything at all. But a lot of people build their lives around it.

And the thing to remember about the anti-pornography laws is that they were used to do things like prevent birth control information. Margaret Sanger, for example, found that her pamphlets written to spread information about birth control methods were considered "pornographic" and banned under the "Comstock Laws". In addition, any attempt to portray non-"traditional" sexual orientation was also considered "pornographic", which is why the gay friendly bookstore "Little Sister's" found it's gay-friendly materials being seized at the border by Canada Customs and Revenue agents.  Since women who don't know about birth control often die due to self-induced abortions and gays of both sexes often commit suicide because they cannot find a place in society, anti-pornography laws are of life-and-death importance.

Margaret Sanger, Icky Pornographer

The thing to recognize about the anti-pornography poster that I put up above is that the "hurt" that it is referring to is the sense of "icky fear" that people feel when they are confronted by emotions and urges that people don't know how to understand. For a lot of people who haven't come to terms with their "animal nature", lust is something that is profoundly scary. It puts the lie to the idea that people are somehow different than all the other animals in the world.

In fact, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. wrote a short story about this issue, titled "Welcome to the Monkey House". The title refers to the discomfort that many people feel when they visit the monkey house at the zoo. It is clear to everyone---not matter how much they might deny it---that there is a profound resemblance between human beings and monkeys. (We are all primates, after all.) But monkeys have none of the inhibitions surrounding their bodies that human beings do. In

Kurt Vonnegut, Supporter of Icky Pornography

Vonnegut's story, this discomfort leads a druggist to develop a drug that inhibits human sexual desire and the government promotes it as a means of population control. But a rebel underground fights against this program and instead encourages a different type of birth control that leaves people's instincts whole. When a woman makes the transition from supporting the establishment and instead becomes a rebel (called a "nothing-head"), her first batch of birth control pills comes with the label "Welcome to the Monkey House".

In other words, going into the "Monkey House" is admitting that some aspects of being a human being---such as lust---should be admitted and accepted instead of ignored and denied. Women do want to have sex, so just preaching abstinence is not going to prevent unwanted pregnancies. (Not to mention the women in abusive relationships who have no choice in the matter.) Homosexuality is an innate condition, not a chosen lifestyle. So not allowing anyone to discuss it openly will not prevent it, but it will make it almost impossible for many young people to understand what they are going through. Wanting to keep on having good paying jobs in the oil patch is not going to change the horrendous consequences of runaway climate change. And refusing to put a few deaths from terrorist attacks in a larger context is bound to severely damage a free society.

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Sentimentality is defined by Google as "excessive tenderness, sadness, or nostalgia". And the sentimental response to terrorism, job layoffs, and, pornography is dangerous. As human beings our sentiments need to be tempered by our reason and experience. If we don't, we thrash around like wounded bears, creating pain all around us.

That's why as Daoists we need to always remember to not be excessively sentimental. And this is part of the point that the famous "vinegar tasters" painting is meant to express. The rational way of looking at the world needs to temper our feelings. One of the traditional ways that Daoists used to teach this idea is through this image. A Confucian, a Buddhist and a Daoist are depicted surrounding a vat of vinegar, which all three are tasting. From the expressions on the faces of the Confucian and the Buddhist, you can see that both consider this a bad-tasting element of life that must be fought against or endured. But the Daoist smiles, because he sees it as just another part of existence and something that must be accepted on its own terms and even enjoyed if possible. Pornography doesn't really "hurt", it is just our inhibitions that cause the pain. A transition to a carbon-free economy is essential to avoiding disaster. And whether we like it or not, we are all going to die, so freaking out about a very small number of terrorist killings is not really necessary.

Wisdom of the Ages---May We All Absorb It!