Post-Biblical Christianity

Last night I was doing some research on the internet about liberal Christianity and I came across the most amazing podcast by a fellow by the name of Michael Dowd.
Dowd Espouses what he calls "post-Biblical Christianity" and has written a best-selling book titled "Thank God for Evolution". (I haven't read the book yet, but I did order it from my library.)

From what I can see from his websites, Dowd argues that Christianity needs to drop any sort of pretence that the Bible has any sort of "grip" on ultimate truth. It is a common place amongst Liberals to assume that people's understanding of the natural world has advanced to the point where people know that animals evolved instead of being created by some sort of miraculous event. But Dowd goes one step further and points out that our moral understanding has advanced as well. The old Testament is filled with statements that support genocide, racism, sexism, etc, etc. As Dowd points out, the God of the Bible could be defined as a "terrorist" according the rules laid down by the FBI.

What Dowd suggests is to simply accept the fact that people's understanding changes and that when we figure out something new we just have to accept the new truth and move on. If the Bible contradicts the new truth, so much the worse for the Bible. It's clear that Dowd isn't tossing out religion, because he sees a very important role for it in our society. He just thinks that it needs to be governed by the same sorts of processes that everything else in our society follows.

I find this really refreshing. If I'd met any religious group that followed this formula (and also had some sort of prophetic vision---which, unfortunately, the Unitarians don't seem to have), I'd have joined them in a flash. I think it is pretty indicative of the state of Christianity that Dowd only started teaching this specific vision after he'd been fired as a Protestant Minister for having an affair with one of this parishioners. (I don't blame him for this, I don't know the specifics and who hasn't been tempted?) If he hadn't been bumped out of the pulpit, he might never have had the courage to say what he really thinks about stuff. That's the real problem with Christianity---"the best lack all conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity".

Modern Daoist Stories: Duke

I worked with a fellow I'll call "Duke" for a long time. Since it was the sort of job that had lots of opportunities for long conversations, I got to know him significantly more than I would have liked.

Duke was an auto mechanic who, to hear him talk, had made a great deal of money before he'd gotten polio and ended up with a bad back. As a result, he wound up at the same job that I had, even though to hear him talk it was designed to do not much more than cause him a life of living Hell.

As I got to know Duke, it came out that he had grown up in not much more than a tar paper shack with a father who had come back from WWII with significant physical and emotional problems. At an early age he'd left home and dropped out of school to live in a rooming house and work at a service station pumping gas and changing oil. The owner of the station had taken him under his wing and convinced/forced him to take on an automotice apprenticeship that resulted in his getting a trade.

Duke had a strange blind spot. He would never see contradictions between what he said he believed and the actions that he personally took. So at the same time that he spoke gratefully about this boss who had taken great pains to make sure that he actually finished his apprenticeship, he bragged that later on in life when he was a Master, he was so hard on his apprentices that none of them ever got their papers.

He also used to complain bitterly about nepotism at work, yet when one of his sons needed a job, he and his wife pulled all sorts of strings to get him one. And his son turned out to be a collossal problem to our workplace---one long time employees actually quit rather than have to work with him. Junior was eventually "shown the door".

Another time Duke was pontificating to me about how much money taxpayers waste on the salaries of politicians. I pointed out to him that I knew for a fact that the mayor actually made slightly less money than he did. Within a heart-beat, Duke replied that that was why our politicians were so worthless "You get what you pay for!"

Shortly after I started work I decided to time Duke to see how long he would talk without my offering a single word to the conversation. He talked 40 minutes straight without my saying a peep. Towards the end of this experiment, a voice in the back of my head told me "I hope this guy never gets into a position of authority!"

I got so sick of hearing this fellow pontificate that at one time I simply attempted to avoid him whenever possible. (I literally had a dream once where I strangled Duke. When I woke up my hands were rapped around the pillow and I was squeezing like my life depended on it.) This lasted two weeks and then Duke complained to my boss, who ordered me to socialize with him again.

Duke retired last year, so he is finally out of my hair. But I suspect it will take me years to get him out of my system.

I could go on and on about this fellow, but I think you get the flavour. The reason I'm writing about him is because I never met fellows like him in the spiritual books that I read. I have copies of translations of Zen Flesh and Zen Bones, The Gateless Gate, The Blue Cliff Records, The Record of the Transmission of the Light---even Zen Comics. I've read stories in Zhuangzi, Liezi and other Daoist books. I've also got all the Idris Shah books of Sufi teaching stories. Just once I'd like to read a teaching story where a Master is confronted by an angry, nasty, stupid person who is totally and complete impervious to logic---yet whom he simply cannot avoid because of the circumstances that he finds himself in.

How would a spiritual master deal with having to work with a guy like Duke? Or a crazy sadistic drill seargant after being drafted into the army? Or the mob when it wanted to extort money from you?

I once lived in a building that rumour had it had been built by money made from extortion rackets. I didn't pay much attention to this until one day I had a conversation with one of the elderly owners about some noise complaints. In his gravelly voice he said something like this "Yeah, he wants me to get involved. I don't like this sort of thing. People yell at each other, they get angry, and the next thing you know someone has their kneecaps broken with a baseball bat. I just don't like to get involved---." This guy wasn't a bad landlord, but I suspect I would never have wanted to get on his bad side when he was younger.

This is one aspect of spirituality where Christianity does have some significant insights to offer. Sometimes all we can do is "endure". And the myth of Jesus on his cross crying out "My God why have you forsaken me?" is something that really does resonate with the day-to-day misery that people inflict upon each other. We live our lives the best we can and eventually something happens to end it. And when that does, even though we may personally be gone, the universe continues. The best we can hope for is to really savour the bits and pieces of joy that life does offer us when it can, and not let the bad taste of the ugliness of the other bits leave such a sour taste in our mouths that we waste these scraps of grace.

Environmental Vow: Part Fourteen

I've raised the idea of restorative justice not to solve the problems of our criminal justice system, but instead as a bit of a “thought experiment” to illustrate the different ways in which the concept of “freedom” can be understood. My suggestion is that the ideal encapsulated in the ethic of “self-actualization” and “follow your bliss” (at least as popularly conceived) is based on a flawed definition of freedom, one that is specifically centred on the individual. As I've suggested, as people naively express this ideal in their personal lives, it boils down to “do your own thing”. And, as I've pointed out, the ethic of “doing your own thing” has no real answer to the question “Why not become a crack whore? Couch potato? Greedhead? Sex Maniac? etc.” Adherence to this ideal has not only discredited so-called “progressives” in the eyes of the Right, it means that they have no moral grounds for suggesting that there is an imperative (moral, religious or patriotic) for people mobilize in order to deal with our climate catastrophe.


At this point, I'd like to introduce a more sophisticated definition of “freedom”, one that can go a long way, I believe, in answering the problems that have arisen from the “do your own thing” worldview. Marcus Tullius Cicero, the ancient Roman, once wrote that “Freedom is participation in power.” This definition will probably sound startling to some readers, so it might be helpful to mention that I first heard this quote mentioned by the consumer advocate and community organizer Ralph Nader. What he was saying was that “freedom”, in the political sense, does not flow from the absense of the Gestapo or the Inquisition, but instead from how engaged the citizenry is in the daily life of their society. It is possible to consider an enlightened dictatorship with complete freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, etc. But insofar as the people who live in that state do not have feel that they have any control over who is making the big decisions in their life, they still live in a dictatorship and they are not “free”. As a result of this reasoning, Nader was saying that if you want to be politically free you have to be actively engaged in the political process.

I believe that this new definition also works when we go beyond the realm of politics. “Power” is more than just government. Engineers and scientists, for example, gain power by learning more about the physical world that surrounds us. Even ordinary people who know how to fix a leaking toilet or change the operating system on their computer insofar as they can do so participate in the power of modern technology. It is certainly the case that when people are confronted by something that they don't know how to repair or even operate they feel especially powerless and unfree.

I would further suggest that the fundamental issue is not the specific knowledge that a person gains from learning about the machinery that surrounds them. Just because I can change the operating system on my computer doesn't mean that I know how it works or could even write a very simple program. The “mastery” I feel is ultimately pretty shallow and inconsequential. But the process of learning how to download open source software and install Linux on my laptop has resulted in my becoming personally “engaged” with the technology in a way that cannot happen by going into a store and buying a new computer pre-loaded with a MS Windows package.


In much the same way, the “freedom” that Cicero and Nader are talking about comes not from having all that much real control over the political process (even citizen groups have to have leaders and followers, after all.) Instead, the relevant issue is how much the person has invested their own personal well-being into the group project. This means that when we think about the phrase “freedom comes from participation in power”, the emphasis should be upon participation, not power.

At this point we can see where the value of restorative justice comes into play. It sees the key issue in criminal activity as being that of an individuals's alienation from society instead of their personal “evil”. The solution, therefore, is to reintegrate the offender into the community instead of merely punishing him. The Lakota elders reintegrated the murderer by making him responsible for supporting the wife and children of the man he killed. The modern example I gave teaches the offender that there really are individual human beings who are harmed by property crimes like burglary, which thereby deflates the comforting illusion that their offenses are only against impersonal, inhuman insurance companies. Insofar as this initiative is successful, it means that if the would-be criminal contemplates committing similar crimes in the future, the crime will have to be understood specifically as an act that is done to specific human beings who will suffer as a result. This makes the crime “real” in a way that it wasn't before, which is to say that the criminal has been brought back into the community of man.


Once we start seeing freedom in this way, we can see how religious people like the Benedictines and soldiers like General Wolf could see themselves as being “free”. Insofar as they felt that they were emotionally “participating” or “engaging” in enterprises much bigger than themselves---the monastery or regiment---they felt “free” in the same sense as understood by Cicero and Nader. Obviously the individual soldier driven into the army by poverty or oblate given to the Benedictines while still a young child, did not initially “participate” very much in the “power” that compelled them. But even so, many of these people no doubt did end up identifying with the community that they found themselves in, accepted its ideals, and ended up finding satisfaction in the life. Proof of this fact exists around us insofar as many people still find enormous personal satisfaction from living in religious communities. Similarly, a great many veterans of the Armed Forces are tenatiously loyal to their branch of the service even many years after being discharged.


The important point to understand in using Cicero's definition is to change the emphasis from that of being free from constraint to that of engagement in something bigger than one's self. The “free” man is not one that is free from coercion---a necessary, but not sufficient state of affairs---but rather one that is engaged with something that fulfills him. The philosopher Jean Paul Sartre pointed out much the same thing when he suggested that there is a difference between what he called “freedom from” and “freedom for”. Many people seek freedom from constraints of one form or another (work, rules, etc), whereas the truly free man seeks freedom to follow some sort of higher idea (art, justice, etc.) This is where the difference lies between the crack whore and a great man like Martin Luther King Jr. comes into play. The former never set out to become enslaved to cocaine, it was just the result of a series of bad choices and/or consistently bad luck. The latter, on the other hand, devoted himself to the ideal of civil rights and did what was necessary to pursue it. Both came to a bad end, but the former is a sad tragedy whereas the latter was heroic martyrdom.

One Dao or Another

I just got finished watching an interview with Gwynne Dyer on Democracy Now. For the last bit of the show, they brought in Vandana Shiva to have a little debate between the two.

Dyer was saying, as part of his Climate Wars thesis, that the human race simply isn't going to get its act together fast enough to prevent significant climate change. As a result, there will be significant starvation in the global South, which will have serious military consequences in terms of mass migrations, failed states and war over dwindling water supplies. He said that as a result of this catastrophic failure to control greenhouse gas emissions the scientific community is now seriously looking at geoengineering solutions to manage the global temperature---such as seeding clouds with sulphur dioxide.

Mr. Gonzales kept trying to suggest to Mr. Dyer that "the corporations" and the military would use this sort of engineering to exploit the poor. He was also trying to suggest that even with global warming there wouldn't be any absolute scarcity of food once inequality was taken from the face of the earth.

When Ms. Shiva came on, she suggested that if people totally changed the food system to one based on organic agriculture and local food supplies, that there would be so much carbon sequestered in the soil that a large part of the problem would disappear.

Dyer agreed with Shiva about the solutions she offered. But he said that there simply wouldn't be enough time to institute all the social changes her prescription would need to actually happen. Her response was to say that the change is already happening and if people didn't live in the mindset of engineers and soldiers they would recognize that it is already happening around them.

I work at a top flight agricultural university and I haven't seen any of the big changes that Shiva seems to be talking about. I do hang with scientists, though, and all of them are deeply worried about the future. I also hang with politicians. Many of them are stupid as a sack of rocks and most of these don't think that climate change is an issue. The others feel their hands are tied because of the stupidity of the other politicians and the general public----and the enormous lethargy and torpor that our incredibly complex economic, legal and political system impose on social change.

What really struck me about the exchange was how totally and completely Shiva and Juan Gonzalez were refusing to listen to what Dyer was saying. They have a vision of why there are problems in the world and any argument or evidence that doesn't fit nicely into that paradigm simply gets trimmed to fit it---like people laying on a Procrustean bed.

I attempt to understand the world around me. I look at the flow of complex interactions and give it a name: "the Dao". And that name is how I identify myself as a religious person to the people I meet. When I watched that interchange between Dyer, Gonzalez and Shiva, I couldn't help but feel like Gonzalez and Shiva had become totally unglued from the Dao and were following some sort of delusion or mirage. It underscores what is probably one of the most important virtues that I honour: the ability to look the truth full on and without bias. I don't suppose this would be considered a Christian virtue, I'm not even sure that it is a traditional Daoist one. But it seems very important to me.

The Daily Grind

One of the things that I don't think many people understand about the spiritual life is how incredibly busy it can be.

This came home to me the other day. I got a phone call early Sunday morning from my neighbour, whom I have given free internet service in exchange for helping with some work on my house. She found that her email wasn't working anymore. I went upstairs and fixed the problem fairly quickly.

She didn't just call me, though. She got all flustered and phoned my internet provider, who then got involved and started harassing me about upgrading my service. So I agreed to the upgrade. So I got the new router. Of course, it didn't just work "out of the box". So I had to go through a bit of a "snipe hunt" to figure out how to make it work on my laptop. About 15 minutes after I got my laptop going, my neighbour phoned me to tell me her computer wasn't connecting to the internet. A couple days later and a lot of research, and I still haven't got her computer to work for her.

I've gotten a bit grumpy about this, because the experience has shown me how incredibly time poor I have become. I work at a full time job and try to meditate and do taijiquan every day. I also walk back and forth to work, which comes down to an hour and a half commute every day. Add in trying to cook at least one meal a day, dealing with the demands of being a fairly involved member of a political party, writing a book, this blog plus the normal stuff---laundry, etc, and I am really busy. The fact that my neighbour is getting upset because of a few days without internet---but has no interest in actually learning anything about computers---isn't helping with my equanimity.

I was reading the autobiography of a zen master, Sheng-yen, a couple days ago and something struck me. He describes his life as the disciple of another master:

My stay with him turned out to be one of the most difficult periods of my life. He constantly harassed me. It reminded me of the treatment that Milarepa received from his guru Marpa. For example, after telling me to move my things into one room, he would later tell me to move to another room. Then he would tell me to move back in again. Once, he told me to seal off a door and to open a new one in another wall. I had to haul the bricks by foot from a distant kiln up to the monastery. We normally used a gas stove, but my master often sent me to the mountains to gather a special kind of firewood that he liked to brew his tea over. I would constantly be scolded for cutting the wood too small or too large. I had many experiences of this kind.

In my practice it was much the same. When I asked him how to practice, he would tell me to meditate. But after a few days he would quote a famous master, saying, "You can't make a mirror by polishing a brick, and you can't become a Buddha by sitting." So he ordered me to do prostrations. Then, after several days, he would say "This is nothing but a dog eating shit off the ground. Read the sutras!" After I read for a couple of weeks, he would scold me again, saying that the patriarchs thought the sutras good only for cleaning sores. He would say, "You're smart. Write an essay." When I showed him an essay he would tear it up saying, "These are all stolen ideas." Then he would challenge me to use my own wisdom and say original things.

When I lived with him he forbade me to keep a blanket, because monks were supposed to meditate at night. When tired, we could nap, but were not to rely on the comfort of a bed or blanket. All these arbitrary things were actually his way of training me. Whatever I did was wrong even if he had just told me to do it. Although it was hard to think of this treatment as compassionate, it really was. If I hadn't been trained with this kind of discipline, I would not have accomplished much. I also realized from him that learning the Buddha Dharma was a very vigorous activity, and that one should be self-reliant in practice.

I can understand how Sheng must have felt when he was studying under the master who harassed him. I feel like that a great deal of the time. The thing is, however, I suspect that the only way to gain the great equanimity that I seek, is to be able to survive in the wild maelstrom that my life has become. When I do get those moments of quiet, like writing this blog during my lunch hour, I find that peace of mind returns. Hopefully some day I will "graduate" and be able to live up the Zen ideal of being able to sit peacefully even though a mountain collapses right next to me.

I hope that this doesn't arrive about 15 minutes before I drop dead, though.

Treading the Razor's Edge

In the Katha Upanishad, the following statement occurs: "The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path (to the Self) is hard" (pt 3, verse 14.) The image is of walking on the edge of a razor the way a circus performer walks on a tight-rope.

It's common for people to read this sort of thing and think it only refers to fairly mundane types of temptation. It is true that people with religious vocations routinely do "fall by the wayside" because they cannot control their desires for wealth, power, etc. (Certainly the scandals that routinely come from the Catholic Church and evangelical clergy give us lots of examples.) But I think that a much, much more common problem is the way religious people fall prey to a sort of willful blindness that keeps them from seeing the inherent limitations of their tradition.

I was struck by this point while reading an essay by Michael Parenti, titled Friendly Feudalism, that deconstructs Western assumptions about what Tibet was like before the Chinese invasion. In a nutshell, it points out that idyllic image that we have of a happy Buddhist Tibet overseen by a benevolent Dalai Lama is about as real as Hinton's Shangri-La from Lost Horizon.

One of the more trenchant historical nuggets that Parenti offers include the fact that the office of Dalai Lama itself is a Chinese invention---one that was imposed upon the Tibetans by an invading Chinese army in order to unify the different schools of Buddhism. He also mentions how incredibly brutal and exploitative the feudal economy was to those who were born on the lower rungs of the social ladder.

I don't think it would be fair to blame Buddhism for the problems that beset old Tibet. But then again, I don't think that Buddhism did very much to try and change the social order either. Indeed, as Parenti points out the idea of "karma" was used to justify the status quo. In effect the rich and powerful were so because of good deeds done in a past life. Similarly, the poor and oppressed must have done bad in lives past.

And this is an important point that almost all religious people miss. If we are not going to blame religion for all the iniquities of the society that purports to be informed by it, by the same token we shouldn't be able to suggest that religion is some sort of panacea that can solve all of these iniquities either. Using the information that Parenti has provided, I can argue that whatever insight Buddhism can offer, it simply hasn't proved sufficient to deal with all the problems that Tibetan society faced. This isn't to suggest that the invasion by Maoist China was the treatment that Tibet needed, but if nothing else, the decrepit state of feudal Tibet certainly didn't do much to fend it off, either.

So what is it that Buddhism lacked that Tibet needs? A great many things, I would suggest.

Perhaps something that could be called "the dharma of Socrates", or, a culture that respects rational analysis and critical thinking. This way of looking at the world has several beneficial effects. First, it sweeps away the considerable damage that is caused in a society by superstition. Secondly, it's spirit of free and open inquiry invariably leads to the critical thinking about absolutely every element of society. (Indeed, according to Plato's Apology, this is why Socrates seems to have been executed by the Athenian state.)

Beyond that, Tibet probably could have used the idea of human progress, which would encourage its citizens to want to go out and make the world a better place for their children. The idea that there are inalienable human "rights" that can only be trampled upon by committing profound moral sin could be another. It could probably also benefit from the idea that rulers shouldn't have any arbitrary power but instead should rule through a legal code. (I understand that China's rulers understand their lack in that regard and have been trying to create a legal system pretty much from scratch.) A cultural infrastructure of scientific inquiry might also be useful. As would a "civil society" of activists and charities to help the poor and oppressed. Even a fringe of radicals---like Michael Parenti---would provide a counter-balance to whatever passed as "common sense" during feudal times.

I'm no expert on Tibetan history or culture. So all the suggestions that I have made above have pretty much been "shots in the dark". But I do know that each and every one of them---and quite a few more---were ideas that people had to fight for in Europe in order to make them part of our collective world-view. Moreover, I also know for a fact that none of them are either intrinsic to any religion's message nor were they propagated by any ecclesiastic power structure. They came from the secular society and not only were never supported by religion, they very often had to fight against it in order to become established parts of the way people think. (Think of the current fights with religious authorities over gender and sexual orientation as the latest in a long history of battles.)

The over-arching point I am trying to make is that while many people, myself included, believe that a spiritual or religious element is essential to the well-lived life, I do not believe that it is, or ever has been, sufficient. Religion is not enough, people of good will also need to be engaged in the development of secular society. And I think that if there is a "sin" that religious believers fall prey to more than any other, it is shirking their responsibilities as citizens. For every priest who gets caught abusing children or Evangelical preacher stealing from the poor box, there are thousands, if not millions, who fail to live up their their secular responsibilities as citizens in the greater human community.

Walking the razor's edge would be a picnic if the only pitfalls were sex and money!

Environmental Vow: Part Thirteen

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.