A human community... not just a human race!

 What is it about that a book, a poem, an essay, a person or even a single word will seem to drop into one’s lap, seemingly from out of nowhere, yet so significant ‘it’ cannot be either ignored or discounted?

Is it synchronicity, serendipity, mere chance, fate, or something else that has no name, identity or explanation? And similarly, what is it about that patterns of tragedy, like the litany of human tragedies that have beset the Kennedy family of Boston and Hyannisport, that, once again, have no apparent origin, no explanation no name, no identity and no comprehension?

So much space, time, ink and scholarship, as well as artistic expression, have been motivated by and directed to the stirrings of the human ‘heart’, whether that has included the medical as well as the psychological, spiritual and social. We develop strategies, philosophies, tactics and institutions to “teach” young people, as well as adults, about the mysteries of human existence. We anatomize, categorize, compare, measure, describe, inflate (for e.g. with electron microscopes) and then bounce our findings off the findings of others, in a highly sophisticated, highly disciplined, highly controlled and monitored highly defined professional process to search for whatever truth might emerge.

All the while we are engaged in these processes, we have to be aware that whatever the findings of our work, there will be more questions needing to be followed, with ever more sophisticated equipment and ever more nuanced equations and theories, all of them magnetic stars in search of ‘astronomers’ (researchers) to pursue.

It is the dramatic difference between that kind of rigorous pursuit of truth (scientific, empirical, positivist) and the pursuit of centuries of ramblings deep in, among and through the labyrinths of the human “relationship” with God, that begs many questions. Reading books by church fathers, speculating on the divinity of Christ, the significance of the parables, the stories of parting seas, and tablets from a mountaintop with “rules” to live by…these are all foundational to the pilgrimage of those who “seek God” to borrow a phrase from the founder of the Benedictine Order of monks.

Many stimuli lie at the root of such a motivation ‘to seek God’ including those less honourable, and less heroic and less moral and ethical that one might think. Some of those stimuli are deeply embedded in the proverbial ‘man lying in the ditch’ without hope, without friends, without energy and certainly without love. “When the world has ‘trashed’ me, where can I turn?” runs the phrase that serves as a nexus of thousands of transformations of lives that have ‘gone off the rails’ so to speak. Humans, generally, are highly reactive to stories of failure, unproductivity, meaninglessness and despondency that seem to have taken over a life without apparent cause or purpose. We number the homeless, as a blight on our clean and safe streets; we number the opioid overdoses and deaths, as another sign that ‘something is wrong’ in the lives of those men and women, and while we work diligently to help them ‘recover’ and regain consciousness in many cases, we are not fully able to discern the root of their affliction. Similarly, with the highly successful white-collar professional who extorts millions from clients, without apparent need, without apparent aberration or cause, we deploy complex resources to investigate the ‘crime’ and to bring such a person to ‘justice’ in the firm cultural conviction that such acts of investigation and ‘law enforcement’ will deter others from committing similar infractions of the legitimate rights of others.

We are a culture obsessed with searching and finding deviance, abnormalities, individuals who do not fit into the ‘normal’ definition of how humans are to behave in our safe and secure communities, to demonstrate, at least in part, that ‘we have things under control’. Because having things under control, as in banks that are not robbers, and lives that are not murdered, and women who are not preyed upon and attacked, and houses and businesses that are not destroyed by vandals or terrorists…these are all legitimate protections that we have built into the web of social protections.

And yet, as the weight of how we have structured our way of valuing humans, through hiring and wages commensurate with training, experience, contacts and references, we have abandoned thousands to the multiple ditches of despair. It has not been a conscious, willful and malicious ‘trashing’ of a targeted population (except perhaps in Canada, our indigenous populations and communities). We have not set up structures and institutions deliberately to cause people to stumble into ditches of desperation, or tunnels of torment. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands, and the numbers are growing, seem to be shoved aside, or they perceive that they have been shoved aside, given the statistical data.

To champion the “will” as Leni Reifenstahl entitled her triumphant film on Hitler, (Triumph of the Will) or as Ayn Rand has done in her several books by sacralizing the virtues of selfishness, and to nest that triumph in the most narcissistic, affluent and extravagant bed of luxuries ever available in human history, is inevitably going to generate two very different results…the highest number of billionaires in history, as well as the highest rate of homelessness in history. We too often speak about a bi-polar person, denigratingly, as if to indicate that such a person is ‘sick’ and thereby is rendered unemployable, unworthy of inclusion, and dispensible from the circles in which we engage. And yet, it would seen from this perspective, that we have fallen into the trap of generating a western culture that venerates success and disdains failure, as we define those outcomes.

The human will, while considerably powerful, cunning, creative and resourceful, is also vulnerable. And, if and when one’s will seems to have wilted, bent, or even broken, through any number of tragic traumas, some of them resulting from a commitment to ‘serve’ some cause or institution like the military, the church, or even the corporation, we discover the limits of our capacity to keep on keeping on. Those tragic traumas, war, divorce, death, firing, bankruptcy, corporate politics like out-sourcing, serious medical illness or accident….these are all an integral and potentially life-altering dynamic in an individual life, as well as in the life of a family, school, church, community…and taken together, these traumas are embedded in the cultural norms and perspectives and values we both wear and embody.

Those of you who prefer to see many of these traumas as avoidable, preventable and resulting primarily from personal weakness, rather than from forces beyond the scope of the individual, will already have conjured up your ‘nanny state’ argument against this ‘bleeding-heart’ rendition of human pain and tragedy. However, it is in the manner in which we establish our conventional norms, including institutional expectations of perfect loyalty, perfect compliance with the rules and regulations, the norms and the politically correct dictums that we all contribute to the unravelling of human hope and creativity and joyful participation.

Of course, there are now corporations and app’s that are dedicated to training and coaching how to “treat” workers in a humane and compassionate and empathic manner, in order to retain their loyalty and their compliance. More classical conditioning, the only human resource menu that warrants inclusion in too many budgets, is not going to generate the kind of ‘inclusion’ and ‘loyalty’ and engagement that all organizations need and desperately want. Transactional engagements, by definition are a guarantee of self-sabotage.

As we scurry about chasing after whatever problems we generate, individuals continue to be facing multiple conundrums about where, when, why and how to integrate into a culture that ironically champions the virtues of the rugged individual and watches millions fall out of the nest. However, these ‘birds’ are not mere babies, just learning to fly. These birds that fall out of the nest are grown adults facing a world in which political causes seem to have taken over the playing field in the public square. Those patterns of synchronicity and serendipity, as well as those of tragedy and trauma, both continue to have the force of underground rivers of social energy, similar to the underground floes of lava that rumble throughout time. Natural ebbs and floes, too, have their way of contributing to the gestalt of the ‘conditions’ humans absorb and attempt to cope with.

We seem to have developed zillions of ‘aids’ to address the conditions of nature, and the common cold, the sore back and the opaque eye lens, as well as the fractured femur, and the rusted car. And we have contributed human and financial resources to the issue of “protection” against emergent forces like terrorism, polio, the pandemic, and road rage.

What we have not done as well at is identifying those underground lava floes of the collective consciousness that comprise what we all know are compelling conditions that demand our shared, collaborative, consistent and formidable attention and creativity and taking shared steps to face them in the only manner that makes sense.

We cannot mediate, moderate or even slow the traumatic and existential force behind our own emissions of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere at the individual level. Nor can we face the crisis of individuals who have floundered in inhospitable ‘seas’ of despair from medicating their pain with opioids on an individual basis. We cannot resolve the human proclivity for combat solely or even primarily at the individual level. And we cannot and will not resolve the questions of racism, sexism, ageism, dogmatic and fundamentalist, literalist and exclusionist belief, faith, or ideology, solely or primarily on the individual level.

Skimming the surface of our hardwiring as ‘social animals’ through networking, nepotism, character references, schmoozing, joining the ‘right’ clubs, living in and gating the ‘upper-class’ communities, attending and volunteering in our church community, or even writing cheques to the United Nations International Childrens’ Fund (UNICEF)….none of these serve as adequate surrogates for actually embracing the far more commanding and demanding, challenging and rewarding view of the blind spot in our culture: that we really are part of a single species that cannot escape some basic needs. This is not a political ideology in search of a political party. Nor is it an incipient religion seeking worshippers. It is not another corporation seeking sales and marketing. It is not a laboratory seeking research dollars, although God knows it needs far more attention including research, dissemination, pedagogy, as well as integration into what we call conventional truth and blessing. It is not an impediment, nor can it be glossed over because it is so obvious it needs no articulation, and no underlining. We are mutually inter-dependent, as well as intra-dependent, that we all need to live in some kind of moderate, modest and safe space, that we all have talents, skills, wisdom and compassion that, when shared, open doors of insight and invention, and when closed, leave millions abandoned to any of our various ‘crimes against humanity’…

That last phrase cannot be restricted to the legal definition any longer. It has to embrace how, for example:

§  the former U.S. administration pooh-poohed the pandemic, and

§  the current lethal, cold-blooded, inhumane invasion of Ukraine,

§  the breakdown of our acceptance, tolerance and embrace of a common set of facts, itself another weapon in what have become civil ‘wars’ of reality/truth/and shared hope

§  the tolerance of excessive greed, wild-west applications of corporate and personal behaviour that trample on all of the minimal protections we all need from each other

§  the massive sycophancy to military might, the alpha male, the institutions of green-broke hierarchies of management and supervision, and the theories and strategies and tactics that uphold these anti-deluvian dogmas

§  the submission of people too frightened to confront the abuse of power when we see it

§  the denial of shared, complicated data that not only illustrates but proves to any reasonable person, our complicit responsibility for the incubator, the greenhouse, and the battlefield that we all share.

We cannot and must not be seduced by the serendipities, nor eunuched by the traumas. We are not only the ‘victims’ of others; we are intimately related to all of those currently imprisoned, those suffering from the pandemic, those who have died from the pandemic, and those millions now scrambling literally to stay alive in the face of missiles and rockets and kalesnikoffs. Our fates, and our serendipities, our immediate gas bills and our food bills, are all tied directly and indirectly to the fates of those Ukrainians.

All of the tyrants, the unleashed varmints who believe that, “because I can do whatever they want I must,” need to be reined in. And nothing short of a global effort will even begin to tackle that file.