Thursday, September 26, 2019

#2 Men, the agents of and path to cultural metanoia


Let’s dig down a little deeper on the notion from yesterday’s piece about the pillars, the foundation, the mind-set, the epistemology, the psychology of the primary academic disciplines on which our “western culture” has been built.

Yesterday, I argued, without supporting proof, that the principles and the orientation on which all of these foundational building blocks are based on masculinity. And there are some recognizable and generally agreed concepts on which masculinity bases its insights, its precepts and its “framing” perspectives.

Power, control, pride, dominance, self-effacement, hierarchy (with males on top) and all of these based on what is evident through the senses, and a virtually exclusive regard to and reliance upon symptoms, and the evidence of debate methodology, peer review and rational, academic discipline prevail throughout history. History has been written primarily by men, based primarily on the exploits, both successes and failures of men, including their male insights, intuitions, observations and conclusions about the nature of the feminine. Giving voice to the muscle, the preponderance of “hands” and of “fixing” whatever it is that magnetizes a male imagination, including words and concepts like “intervention” and “remediation” and “forgiveness” and “winning” and “getting published” and “getting recognition” and “amassing fortunes” and “building empires” and “excluding the unwashed” and “beating an opponent” and even “salvation”….all of these can be attributed to some masculine notion of “the fix”….

These premises are applied to a varying degree in the operating room, the court room, the confessional, the doctoral thesis room, the counselling office, the teacher’s classroom, the mechanic’s shop, the plumber’s shop, the carpenter’s shop, the architect’s design table, and the scientist’s lab. “Fixing” poses the proposition, from the beginning of any project, of the human “fixer” as “function” really a “tool” in the complex and inter-connected “system” of multiple “fixers”. And we then build other complex ladders, medals, awards, stipends, offices, “conditioning stimuli” in a massive classical conditioning project that quite literally, and from this perspective totally expectedly, swallows the human culture and everyone within it.

Occasionally, a profession or a practitioner will argue that in the “interface” between professional and client, it is the “whole” person who is being considered in whatever happens in the exchange. And to be sure, our collective and shared perception of the “whole” person has continued to both expand and to become more complex, as we have built research models that measure, document and analyse “emotional intelligence,” for example and the “right brain” and the “artistic imagination” of both men and women. As we have begun to read the female prophets, like Hildegard von Bingen, Joan of Arc, St. Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich and others, and attempted to integrate their minds and spirits into what is primarily a Christian faith dominated by the hundreds of thousands of “church fathers,” we have had our (male) psyches invaded by some profound and also profoundly disturbing “visions” of the mysteries of the universe, including the relationships between men and women and between humans and the deity. Throughout our literary history, too, we have occasionally “permitted” a female author/poet/prophet to publish the work of their literary imagination, although some have had to seek refuge (and anonymity) under a male pseudonym.

Nevertheless, the “things of importance” and the things that “really matter” in the public discourse, like the economy, the production levels, the employment numbers, the disease “bullets” and the strategic and tactical systems of military intelligence, from specific weapons like the cross-bow, and the sword and the spear, the “walking” soldiers and those “mounted” on horse. We men designed a theology and an intellectual and philosophical edifice and curriculum that was/is built on models of thought indigenous to men, written by men, supported and rewarded by men, documented by men. Our stories of “creation” depend on the imaginations of men as do the executions of rites and rituals of maturation, development and integration into the various communities.

While women were perceived, metaphorically and literally, as Earth Mother, emblematic of the birthing processes that dominate the natural world. Nevertheless, physical prowess, physical stature, size, loudness, and the sheer “power” of the male in early civilizations were traits not restricted merely to the world of domestic life and survival. Of course, men and hunters and women as gathers provided a mutually satisfying role definition and differentiation that enabled as many to survive as was feasible, depending on the various historic and cultural ages. Nurture of children has historically been the primary purview of the mothers of those children while the division of young boys and young girls, following the models of their older men and women, divided the activities, the roles, the expectations and the prospective futures in very distinctive ways.

Young men were encultured into the military, the hunt and the academe, while young women were introduced to the traditional activities, rituals, routines, expectations of being a woman. And in many early cultures, the very natural and verdant menstrual period was deemed to be dirty, as one of the most heinous of male perceptions to have been recorded, and even preserved for centuries by men, at the “expense” and derision of women. “Weakness” and “being dirty” as indicated by the natural process of the female body, not only was unwarranted; the power of this perception and definition was both evil and malicious to women, at least as seen the from the twenty-first century perch. Ascribing such a view to the blindness of men, or their/our innocence/ignorance/fear, however, is not satisfactory. The very perception itself speaks wantonly of the separation, segregation and power differential between men and women and the dominance of the male view on the nature of the feminine on the successive generations of men and women on whose shoulders the “west” continues to walk today.

However, this single cultural “norm,” while heinous and despicable, was not alone in the perceptions and norms of the cultures of the western world. School, military training, the hunt, rites of maturation and acceptance into the adult community were primarily dedicated to the young men in most communities. And as drawing, writing, calculating and “learning” in the widest sense of that word developed, along with the various instruments of the hunt, the garden, the battlefield, and the governance, and the records of those developments were begun, all of the perceptions, world views, attitudes, philosophies and even theologies of those records came from the men of the various cultures.

We read that the perspective of any work of history depends on the “perspective” of the person(s) writing that history. We can all agree that the shelves and archives, as well as the caves, tombs, graveyards of the histories of the western world  (and now the “cloud”) are replete with the “perspectives” attitudes, values, ideologies and theologies of the men who manipulated the various writing/drawing/entombing/burying to which we continue to refer for our own world view.

Archimedes, Newton, Galileo, Michelangelo, Thucydides, Locke, Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides, Aquinas, Smith, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Protagoras, Socrates, Epicurus, Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Anselm, al-Farabi, Machiavelli, Luther, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, More,….and the list could be much longer…documents not merely the preponderance of male “intellectual pillars, but also a culture founded on those insights, intuitions, attitudes and values of men.
Neither to be trumpeted nor defamed, the contributions of many men, noble, honourable and provocative as they are in various degrees dependent on the critique of their scholars, taken together they have painted a western world landscape canvas of masculine virtues and vices. And the school, college and university classrooms of the “west” continue to explore, examine, critique and deconstruct their works and the works of many others, an evolving list of both male and female thinkers, poets, playwrights and historians.

 The explosion of feminine scholarship over the last few decades, however, is founded on the principles, the methods, the disciplines and the criteria that were all poured into both the ground of Greece, Italy, Great Britain, France, Germany and the minds of millions of generations of students. Based primarily on extrinsic evidence, increasingly documented in binary digits, female scholars, doctors, scientists, architects, engineers, lawyers, accountants and even psychologists/psychiatrists have adopted, and minimally amended the premises of their predecessors. While some few definitions, for example of depression, have been based (in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) on the case-based notes from female psychiatric clients. Also the verging toward the inclusion of “loss in death” as a condition requiring psychiatric therapy signals a shift toward a more “sensitive” and compassionate perspective in the work of North American psychiatrists.

Nevertheless, the dependence on pharmaceuticals, hospitalization, and a preponderance of the concept of “fixing” that is endemic to and in fact defines the medical profession’s ethical guidance, (Hippocrates Oath starts with “Do No Harm”) can be, and is here deemed to be a “masculine-based” model. The professional method indicates that “doing” as a professional and ethical act precedes and even supercedes another interventional word such as “being”. Doing, by definition and historical evidence, is a “default position” of most men, even in this century. In order to prepare, to investigate, and to diagnose, prior to intervening in the medical “case” (another of the reductions of the person/patient in language) one brings all of those hours of both lectures and observations, discussions, experiments, examinations and instruments that have contributed to the “education” of that medical doctor. Objectivity (case, theatre, triage, chart, prescription, size and location of tumour, sequence of multiple treatments, and the research upon which all of these data points are based) is ethical sacred. Men and women, it is deemed, are simply unable to maintain the necessary detachment from their patients, (or for lawyers, accountants, architects, engineers, their clients)…and they must.

Surrendering this objectivity, however, could just as reasonably be considered as an abdication of some of the really significant potential insights, perspectives and attitudes that could be brought into the consult room when a patient (client) enters that room. And maintaining it with a kind of perfectionistic hygenic standard of cleanliness appropriate to the Operating Room, however, is not only a failure to meet the “person” of the patient. It also renders the medical practitioner so detached as to lose touch with the very “human” qualities, traits, ambitions, and hopes and dreams that prompted many to enrol in medical school in the first place.

Of course, parallel to this iron-clad objectivity in both medical school and in medical practice is the polar opposite of “enmeshment” in the very lives of the patient, as an argument for the hallowedness of the rule of objectivity. Token comments about the weather, the family of the patient, even the research relevant to the “case” while providing a “human side” to the interaction, also provide safety and security for the practitioner. Ethical over-stepping of the objectivity “rule” is considered serious enough to require license removal in many cases.

And then, we have to examine another of the limiting stereotypes that encase our intellectual, cultural, application of medical procedure: the hysterical woman, the seat of human emotions. Coming from the Greek root, hystera, meaning “uterus” hysteria and hysterical symptoms were believed to be caused by a defect in the womb, and thus only women could become hysterical. Here is the historical extension of the “filth” of the menstrual blood into modern language, almost without a whimper of either protest or amendment on the part of contemporary western culture.

A masculine-dominance in language, attitude, perception and debasement of women, something that polite and sophisticated society perhaps deplores, nevertheless, continues to prevail in many streets, clubs, sports facilities and parties, whether in “humour” or in base contempt. This dominance in social interactions and perceptions is, of course, deeply rooted in so many sectors of our thought. God is a male; genius is historically regarded as masculine; cathedrals are built by men; the Sistine Chapel ceiling was painted by a male, as were many of the weapons of war, the scalpels of surgery. Judgements in high courts have been rendered by male judges, until recently when a significant political thrust has seen women appointed and acquitted themselves and their gender admirably.

Nevertheless, in so many of our academic and professional venues, asking women to approximate the “models” of excellence that were male, in order to climb the professional, male-designed, male-built, and male-sustained achievement ladder is like asking my three daughters to scale Killamanjaro in two days, when the average, successful climb requires up to nine days. We are perpetuating a blatantly sabotaging male dominance in definitions, procedures, processes, perceptions, attitudes and values that, while they contain some intellectual tenets worthy of honour, also tend to distort and sustain the distortion that male models are more valueable and must be more valued than a transformation to foundational models that build structures, processes, expectations and integrate the many and profound atttiudes, not merely in style, or in sensibility, or in the accessories of the women.

Their mimicking the men of history by dividing themselves from their professional roles, without challenging themselves to seek and to express their unique perspectives, including, if necessary, a perception of the universe that incorporates and exemplifies a kind of unity and equity of the poetic imagination, the  myths and legends, the arts and the similarities of each human to every other human.

Men, through a full awareness of the hidden mysteries, the intuitions, the spirits and the artistic, subjective imaginations that are integral to all humans, will come to a new awareness or our own identity, as well as an enhanced and more complex and unique presence and being of the women to whom we owe more than responsible respect.

For reference, let’s re-read Emily Bronte’s words (1818-1848)
Stanzas
Often rebuked, yet always back
Returning
To those first feelings that were
born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth
and learning
    For idle dreams of things that
cannot be:
Today I will seek not the shadowy
region;
    Its unsustaining vastness waxes
drear;
And visions rising, legion after
legion,
   Bring the unreal world too
Strangely near.

I’ll walk, but not in old heroic
traces,
  And not in paths of high
morality,
And not among the half-
distinguished faces,
    The clouded forms of long-past
history.

I’ll walk where my own nature
would be leading:
   It vexes me to choose another
guide:
Where the gray flocks in ferny
glens are feeding;
    Where the wild wind blows on
the mountain side.

What have those lonely mountains
worth revealing?
   More glory and more grief than I
can tell:
The earth that wakes one human
heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of
Heaven and Hell

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Men, the agents of and the pathway to cultural metanoia


“Inflection point” is a meme making the rounds these days especially given the passionate, credible and prophetic voice of Greta Thunberg at the United Nations, “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words—and yet I’m one of the lucky ones; people are suffering, people are dying!” The United States president almost mocks the young Swedish co-ed, “a nice girl” while practically skipping the climate session called by the Secretary General who, himself, openly asked the UN Climate Action session,“Is it common sense to reward pollution that kills millions with dirty air and makes it dangerous for people incitie4s around the world to sometimes even venture out of their homes?”

And the intensity and the speed of the drum-beat for action on global warming and climate change grows, perhaps too late, but at least it might be encouraging.
As a contemporary parallel meme in North American culture, the issue of gender equity continues to spawn books, speeches, discussions and even the occasional “men’s rights” non-profits, most pointing legitimately to the mutual benefits to both genders from an evolution of masculinity from a fossilized alpha to a much more sensitive, sensible, mature, evolved and compassionate caring, sharing and listening (really listening) to our female partners, children and colleagues. Worthy, legitimate, over-due and commendable are these various male voices calling for the better angels of our brothers.

Another meme marching to a long-standing and deeply resonating drum is the beat of capitalism, for-profit economics, global economics, and the interface between this dominant driving force and the existential threat of a warming planet. Ms Thunberg referred to the “talk of money” at the heart of the resistance to making the needed changes to address global warming.

We are being served a menu of stories in the media that point a telescope (backwards) at each of these “themes” respectively. Trained to “focus” on the specifics of the “file,” reporters, like their academic mentors, delve into their “speciality” as do the writers, the scientists, the social-gender-equity voices. As an example, another brigade of reporters, talking heads and some politicians are focussing their energy, their research and their time on the dumpster-full of deplorable, illicit, sinister, deceptive and lying behaviour of the American president.

This space seeks to move the telescope away from the specific, individual, separate and often competing (for public notice and consideration) files. In fact, the telescope of “specialization” needs to be replaced by a set of binoculars that seeks the panorama of the cultural landscape. It is no longer acceptable to keep each of these files segregated, as if our minds are either unable or unwilling to see the fullness of the implications of the historic moment that is a convergence of these forces.

There are some compelling and traditional reasons, causes, and motivations for the segregation of our various mountains of information into piles that individually we might be able and willing to “get our heads around” because, just perhaps, we consider our sense of control to be endangered by a perspective that is open to and receptive of a calculus that permits and engages multiple factors at the same time. How, for example, could we possibly produce policy documents, let alone pieces of legislation that could or would take multiple factors into consideration at the same time? How, too, could we possibly hold public debates that even pretended to permit the discussion of a convergence of factors (issues, files, specialists and public opinion polls and public attention spans that are reported to have shrunk to a mere sixteen seconds)? How would we measure ratings if there were audiences, either in person or on some tech platform, so segregated by “issue” and “file” and “specialist” and authority figure? And therefore, how could we possible pour the fiscal foundations for any platform that attempted a “multi-discipline” approach to the current vortex of cultural and political winds?

That last question, while it has a rhetorical aspect, acknowledges a root cause of the primacy of money, economics and profit at the base of each of these issues. We all know that whether we read history, literature, political theory, theology, or the many faces of journalism, sociology, psychology and science, we are reading the perspectives of the respective writers, researchers, philosophers, and even prophets. 

Contemporary cultural norms focus on the STEM aspects of education of our youth (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), as well as the “entrepreneurship” of individuals and small groups in innovation, primarily in the four areas under STEM. Parents, students, bankers, and certainly politicians are tilted, even bent like those pines genuflecting eastward in Tom Thompson’s canvases, in their own genuflecting at the altar of numerical proof of their value: jobs, lower unemployment numbers, higher public revenues, lower taxes, and the enhancement and fostering of all things espousing the private, corporate, for-profit establishment. Even the churches have fallen prey to this tidal wave of cultural normalization. Witness “spiritual” leaders’ goals such as 15% more people and 10% more revenue!

It is not that empiricism, per se, is either evil of irrelevant. It is not that some organizing principle is not necessary for a modicum of social order and expectation. It is also not that leaders do not have to have goals for their specific particular “enterprise.”

However, as David Suzuki reminded Canadians decades ago, we need an economy that works FOR people, not people working “FOR” the economy. Some nations, outside of North American have actually replaced the GDP, and the GNP with a social-wellness index that attempts to both measure and take account of how humans in those nations are living, the longevity rates, the mortality rates, the crime rates, the education levels, the innovation levels, and the environmental safety levels. Corporate profits, by necessity, do not occupy the top “rung” on the “totem pole” of their society. Human fulfilment, health, well-being and equity replace the idol of North American self-sabotage.

Naturally, there are already readers asking about how the concept of “power” influences this argument. After all, the instruments, the perceptions, the beliefs, the ideology, and the opportunism of those with their hands on the levers of power, whether they are political, economic, academic, religious, philanthropic, military, scientific, environmental, ethical, legal including policy development…are intrinsic to the manner by which a society’s culture operates. Whose hands, in short, cling to those levers of power in our political culture?

It is primarily, if not exclusively, the hands of MEN on the levers of power. Men hold the majority of the executive levers within the top political, corporate, academic, scientific, legal, religious establishments, institutions. And it is the traditional male perspective that holds a prominent, if not absolute, influence on the instruments in the orchestra of the establishment(s).n That perspective is so filled with Swiss Cheese ‘holes’ that it no longer bears relevance or sustainability. Traditional masculinity hates to face vulnerability. Traditional masculinity refuses to acknowledge weakness, smallness, invincibility, or even minor illnesses, and certainly the need for medical attention, unless and until it is too late for remediation and now requires emergency actions. Traditional masculinity needs, actually depends on, armour, defences of both the fortress and the psyche, aggression, systemic patterns of addressing issues, especially unexpected wrinkles and glitches. Traditional masculinity, far from the epitome of strength and bravery, courage and bravado, is essentially a hollow papier-mache of insecurity, and more importantly a ubiquitous denial of insecurity.

Traditional masculinity, sadly, has been, both through the efforts of others and through its own complicity, encased in an image of its own demise. Equity, or some semblance of equity with women, cannot be accomplished through an energetic commitment to changing diapers, to preparing meals, to vacuuming the home, to collecting the garbage, and to taking our daughters to their ballet lessons and their piano lessons. None of these activities, however, are to be discouraged and certainly more men freely engaging in such activities, along with a full commitment to spending the time and the energy to listen to our partners will generate more fulfilling, hopeful and engaged and engaging families and individuals.

It is the male need for power, control, and last man standing, that has to be both of acknowledged and jettisoned. And that, unfortunately, could be the Achilles Heel for all of us. So long as we (collectively, compliantly, and obsequiously) accept the dictates, not merely of male individual writers, academics, researchers, political and corporate leadership models, archetypes, myths and legends, without acquiring freely and energetically and empathically a similar, equal, balanced and prophetic appreciation of the mythology of the women on whose shoulders we all walk, especially those women whose stories have not only shone light on the neurotic and even psychotic mistreatment by men, but on the imaginative, courageous and prophetic actions, visions, prophecies and intuitions that can only come from a female perspective and identity.

Making quasi-heroes of evolving men who walk their dogss and their young children in the park while their partners conduct the most demanding legal cases in the nations’ courtrooms, boardrooms, and graduate classrooms, will be only a beginning of the needed revolution that we have to face. We have to, men especially, adopt an attitude that demonstrates our dependency on each other, our dependency on the finite resources, species, languages, ecosystems of the planet, our dependency on the various mythical cornerstones previously ignored, denied or buried in the history and anthropological theses that have dominated our academic lexicon, our biblical lexicon, our scientific archives, and certainly our literary lexicon.

 It may give us a “good feeling” to champion the writings of the Margaret Atwood’s and the Margaret Laurence’s, and the eyes, ears and perhaps even the hands of some men are slowly opening to the “gold” that can only come from our facing our mostly male-imposed and male-required models and acknowledging the limits of their “mentorship.” It is not that those men were deliberately or even maliciously, misleading future young men, or providing role models of “heroism” and “kingship” and “episcopates” and academic/philosophic/psychological “leadership”. They were operating from a limited and slanted cosmology, identity, and cognitive, emotional, social and even relational epistemology. And the limits of that masculine “identity” have continued to “box” in the cultural imprint and the social development of a more “perfect” society.

We men are not, and never should have been in competition either with each other or with our female colleagues. We do not need to prove ourselves to our female partners. We do not have to apologize for our masculinity, without first and fully acknowledging our own limited acceptance of ourselves as men. We are not, never have been and never will be the shield and armour-bearer of God (any God) and never have to attempt to emulate that deity. We are not privy to the mind of God, and our collective failure to acknowledge our own intellectual, spiritual and emotional limits, especially in our relationship with the planet, with the various species and the planet itself.

There are indigenous cultures in which men consider themselves “at one” with Mother Nature, and with each other, unfortunately so isolated and disempowered by our colonial, power-driven, empire-building, and military dreams of slaughtering our enemies (all of whom are fighting their own political and psychic demons). We have built cathedrals, not primarily as our worship of our deity, but primarily as a testament and tombstone to our pride. And we have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the plight of those we consider “inferior” as a simple and “benign” pursuit of our “shared” and nefarious goals of attaining and sustaining our superiority over all “weaker” species, including our women.

It is not merely the psychosis of the American president, by itself, but the culmination of that psychosis grown on the models of millions of frightened and blind/deaf/denying gender of men that threatens the very survival of the children and grandchildren on the planet. The triumph of both the “will” and the culture of functional transaction, based on an inspired-built-and-sustained-masculine edifice of institutions, churches, processes and power-mechanics and ethics that continues to deny vulnerabilities, insecurities, limits and the gifts that a transformative metanoia can only offer. If men continue to regard themselves and all others as “things” to be manipulated, controlled and disempowered, we will continue down a shared path towards our own demise.

The pursuit of our shared and free existence in hope and opportunity requires and even demands a breakdown of the collective, brittle, fragile and ultimately self-sabotaging male psyche and spirit, in order to offer a shared vision of the opportunity for a new and enlightened vulnerable and modest and sustainable androgyny. And our female partners can and will freely and enthusiastically hold our hands through the darkness of our coming out of the tunnel of denial and false superiority.

Monday, September 23, 2019

"Outsider" a seed of hatred and threat


What does it mean to be an “outsider” in the current North American culture?

Rebels, not so long ago, were depicted and “with” or “without” a cause! They challenged authority of the kind that was represented by parents, teachers, bosses, and the institutions of the church and state. They “coloured outside the lines” of what was considered “normal” accepted behaviour. We all knew the rebels in our high school classrooms; they often wore black leather, peeled their hair back with brylcream, and stuck a pack of cigarettes in the sleeve of their tee-shirt. They swore more than the average, or at least they were less inhibited than their “clean-cut” classmates. They expressed a kind of insouciance in their casual attention to passing exams and tests; they detested the “teacher’s pet” “goody-two-shoes” found in every classroom. And they were the “most likely” to be found in the school detention room for some minor deviance, like smoking on school property, or snubbing a teacher, or pulling the pony-tail of the co-ed who sat in front of them.

These “guys” (and it was then an exclusively male club) often dropped out of school, if not immediately after grade twelve, often even before to take some manual labour job, buy a car, grow their wardrobe, and start frequenting the local bars. Occasionally, one of their number would enlist in the Canadian military. A few would gravitate into the local car repair shops; an occasional one would find employment selling some product like insurance. Few, if any, would even consider additional formal education, there being only university or workplace apprenticeships without community colleges as an option.

Adolescent girls were, for the most part, disdaining of these “rebels” with the exception of those who at sixteen saw themselves as wanting to “run with the wolves” of their time. And to the adolescent culture, such pairings were often the seedings of new births “out of wedlock” as the rest of society branded the young girls. The culture seemed to take “for granted” the participation of the young men, without as much as a passing glance of disgust in their direction. Teen pregnancies very often resulted in the removal of the prospective mother to some “home for unwed mothers” in another town to enable the glare of public scorn to be evaded for a time.

Of course, the flower children of the late sixties and early seventies were a band of “outsiders” attempting both to escape from and to satirize the tight-assed formality of their seniors, their parents, their teachers, and their authority figures. Drugs and free-love were the monikers by which they were then, and are still today, proudly known. And then Viet Nam generated draft-dodgers, at first, and war protesters later in a public thumbing of their political and ethical nose at the political establishment in Washington. In Canada, Pierre Trudeau himself, was seen as something of a “novelty” if not a defined “rebel” although his entry into the labour dispute against the intransigent Premier Duplessis, and his vagabond world tour, his celibacy, and his apparent “shrug” commanded much public attention and even adulation. Canadians seemed to be projecting their “rebel” onto his public persona, as a somewhat ghostly imitation of the American flower children, and elected him in 1968 in what has come to be known as “Trudeaumania” similar to the Beatlemania of the four young men from Liverpool.

The intersection of pop culture, political culture, a kind of ribald individualism and decades of stuffy political discourse among old white men in suits generated a kind of cultural gestalt that swung the pendulum of culture in what seemed then like a fresh wind blowing through the corridors of power. “The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation!” was one of the defining inflection points of the Trudeau starring role in Canadian history. His later, Charter of Rights and Freedoms and patriation of the Canadian Constitution from Great Britain, remain among his most honoured and revered accomplishments.

Today, there is a different breed of “outsider” perhaps as a sign that democracy has been virtually and digitally “extended” into the public space so far, and providing such a degree of “anonymity” and the concomitant immunity from retaliation that renders every a potential, if not actual, bully, character assassin, and/or victim of such spurious attacks. Teen suicide, at least in part resulting from such inhumanity and gross indecency, is rising as are childhood anxiety and depression. Helicopter parents, gradations of language (red, blue and other colours for various emotional states), cell phone cameras, and a stampede of wannabe cops of all ages, paralleled with uniformed law enforcement abuse of power especially regarding racial profiling render the new cultural landscape more dangerous than the wild west was in the early part of the twentieth century and before. Guns, as back-up for the contemptible attitudes, perceptions and outbursts proliferate in too many urban arenas, and even cities like Toronto, a formerly relatively peaceful multi-cultural urban city, now strives to contend with a spike in gun murders.

Who is the outsider in such a culture?

Is it the religious fanatic, the wannabe terrorist who sees himself in some apocalyptic struggle to save civilization from the hordes of heretics?

Is it the teenage “nerd” buried among cables and both soft and hardware in an intense pursuit of another universally appealing and richly rewarding “app” to facilitate some human enterprise formerly conducted by humans?

Is it the discharged veteran sleeping under the bridge of the closest overpass near his adopted “home” wondering if or whether legitimate care and help will ever come from the same country for which s/he fought and risked his/her life?

Is it the refugee fleeing Syria, Ethiopia, Mali, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen or the Central Caribbean or even South America from the threats and ravages of political corruption, gang war, starvation, life-threatening disease, or civil war?

Is it the national intelligence whistleblower like Edward Snowden who risks both freedom and personal security by exposing state secrets that demonstrate culpability of his own country in violence and military conflict for spurious and contemptible ends?

Is it the humanitarian “warrior” like Samantha Nutt who heads a philanthropic such as “War Child” established to published the plight of children caught up in war?

Is it still the courageous, determined and stubborn Swedish school girl, Greta Thunberg, who has first defied her parents, teachers, and community, by “skipping” school on Friday’s to bring attention to the global planetary crisis? Or has she flipped from “outcast” to heroine, leading a global movement, speaking at the United Nations, and challenging world leaders to take the cries of young people seriously and take action through changes in policies, practices and attitudes to save the planet for future generations?

Is her example, first outcast and later prophet, the pattern that can be dug from the history of all prophetic voices? Is public disdain and contempt, like public fame and hero-worship, so ephemeral, so fickle, so unstable and so untrustworthy that whatever the public “opinion” of anyone at a given moment in time depends on the size, the speed, the heat of the gossip-tide against him or her as well as the maturity, responsibility, patience, and the willingness and ability to trust others of the public?

In public school, I recall one classmate who was an outcast simply because of his awkward, gangly seemingly uncontrolled and uncontrollable body. I recall feeling like an “outsider” when I first entered a U.S. small, provincial, angry and alienated town on the west side of the Continental Divide. I felt like an outsider when a supervisor in evaluation commented, “You are too intense for me!” after which she communicated to her superiors her “failing” recommendation. I was definitely an outsider when a prominent long-standing donor and member of a parish dubbed homilies I had delivered “heretical” and then demanded my removal. I was considered an outsider when another supervisor reported on me, “He can see right through me in three minutes!” to a supervisor of mine. I was an outsider when another long-standing member of a small parish retaliated when I refused to appoint her to a position of pastoral leadership. Another “outsider” incident came from narrow and closed judgement that my reading works by Scott Peck and Matthew Fox was considered heretical, as were those works. After having conversation with a female colleague over breakfast at a professional convention, I learned through group gossip that I was “in a relationship” with that woman, a complete and utter lie and alienation, stemming again from the kind of false superiority of the moralist religious community.

In fact, a case can and has often been made, that the most fervent religious fanatics are, themselves, the most vehement agents of alienation, ostracism, and gate-keeping of whomever they consider “an outsider”. Name-calling, character assassination, bullying and deliberate poisoning of the reputation of those they consider “heretical” (whether to a political, religious, or ideological cause). Social terrorism, of the kind currently on display from the Oval Office, from which there are no provable “bullets” being fired, manages to escape the purview of the legal system, especially if and when a compliant, complicit and obsequious Attorney General dances to the beat of the national and international bully.

Pokohontas, “Sleepy Joe, “Alfred Neuman Buttigieg,” are among the current “outsider” appellations from the White House directed at Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg respectively. Attempting to paint an opponent as an outsider, among a cult of sycophants, has risen to a level of hate previously untried and unworthy of the political process. Contempt cannot and will not be contained in economic sanctions, illicit trawling for “opponent dirt” from international leaders, encaged children, pitching paper towels to destitute Puerto Ricans after hurricane Maria. It spills out of the larynx, and even the body language of the current occupant of the Oval Office, seemingly to the delight, or at least the silence acceptance/resignation of the Republican “outsiders” from the perspective of this scribe.

As in our attitude and perceptions of any single thing, person, action, an “outsider” is our way of disposing of, distancing from, trashing and demeaning the other.

Commonly applied to persons, it would seem that for the current administration in Washington, and sadly also from political leaders like Sheer in Canada, the dangers and the science of global warming and climate change in “outside” the purview, the embrace, and even the responsibility of such leaders. For decades, the scientists who were studying the impact of carbon and methane emissions were considered “outsiders” by the establishment. Their evidence, and the implications of that evidence for the very people who elected the political class was consider inconsequential, even deceiving, and certainly not worthy of consideration by public policy makers. Similar to the lies told by the tobacco companies, about their cigarettes not being carcinogens, and the pharmaceutical companies that they opioids were not lethal, and the Volkswagen executives that their cars met emission standards of the EPA, and the litany of lies from the current U.S. president, it is long past time for these “outliers” to be considered part of the establishment.

They have become the most recent iteration of the “outsider” in the minds, eyes and attitudes of the millions of climate protesters who took to the streets on Friday last week and to the millions who will participate in “Extinction Rebellion” on October 7.

Dubbing the other as “outsider” is too often merely a sloppy, lazy and seemingly innocent way of expressing contempt, and thereby of promoting the tidal wave of hatred, white supremacy, religious terrorism (in evidence among all world faith communities), and threats to personal safety and security that threaten our urban streets, our synagogues, mosques and cathedrals, and our schools, theatres as well as our planetary survival. Let’s not be afraid to connect those looming “dots”!

Tuesday, September 17, 2019

Holograms, eye-candy and candy floss, the political answers to an existential crisis


Neil MacDonald, in today’s column (September 17, 2019) on CBC’s website, argues that the Canadian election campaign is a “hologram”…”make-believe tensions over miniscule differences”…

Later in the piece, he writes these words:

The campaign is a hologram, the result of an agreement  between political parties, the news media, corporate entities, the chattering classes and, to a certain extent, the voters themselves, although the voters are often the l east important participants—they remain an abstract entity, variously patronized, cited and ignored by the big players, until the one day every four years when they get to be very important indeed. For a set period, we agree to pretend that old is new, vapid is substantive, and make-believe is reality. Out journalistic institutions’ definition of “news”—a dodgy notion even in normal times—warps into something undefinable….
But the campaign is a totem. Democracy itself. It provides the news media an opportunity to pose as referee and watchdog, and voters, most of whom are already decided, a moment to imagine they are thoughtfully considering the leaders’ pitches and closing arguments.

And to reflect on MacDonald’s thoughtful piece, one wonders if we are not living in a hall of holograms, where images flash before our eyes and ears, loud, phosphorescent, metallic and overwhelming, essentially much sound and fury signifying nothing. We recall the prophetic words of Shakespeare’s Mac Beth:

“Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, fully of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Shakespeare’s imagination needed no technological device, like a hologram, in order to paint the picture of his central character’s interiority. And there are so many lenses through which to bear witness to the essence of both MacDonald’s and MacBeth’s perspective. We all participate in the fascination that is the theatre of the public square, whether that theatre sinks into the “weeds” of the miniscule differences between the political parties and leaders (in both the U.S. and Canada), or into the fog of verbally armed warfare of ideology, or into the slipping and sliding into and out of various positions by the politicians depending on the mood, the perspicacity and the venom of the audience, or into the braggadocio of a trump’s “thousands waiting outside, because we could not find a bigger arena,” or into the sweeping and seductive ideological propaganda of the “populist- supremacists” or the “egalitarian-socialists”.

Obviously divided by “platform” and ideology, we seem to be able to “unite” around some of the more creative and insightful metaphors…perhaps shining a light into the darkness of the political process, out from which those politicians worthy of our votes and our serious consideration. Tony Blair made famous the political phrase: “politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose.”

And it is reasonable to posit that the divide between the poetry and the prose, exploding the “mountains of hope and promise” into the iron filings of legislation, a process in which no sentient human finds fulfilling, that leaves the voters terminally exhausted and disinherited. Any magnetism that previously lived in the mountains of hope is dissipated into the filings of laws. Further, the process of the pursuit of the votes needed even for the most minimal legislative improvements, including the wall-to-wall campaigns, the talking heads, the intrusive, vacuous and too-often insulting political advertising and public relations “sound bytes” from the archives of the digital “cloud” flows like a cloud of “weed” over the consciousness of the masses.

If Marx considered religion the opiate of the masses, perhaps today it is the politics of the current iteration of western democracy that serves as another of the many opiates of the masses. Drugged into fatigue, detachment, disillusionment, hopelessness and distrust, the “people” are marching to a different “drum” than those in the political class. And the chase for boxcars of cash, both with and without “strings” of manipulation, continues to provide the fuel burning through the corporate trust accounts and the investor dividend packages of the advertising and media moguls…and on into the lobbyists, the “political puppets” and the chattering classes where “the public” is congealed as a barely understood “public opinion” barely noticed and valued in the political decisions of the legislators.

Looking into the “sky” of the planet as if it were our “crystal ball”, we can all see the multiple landings of torrential winds, rains, droughts, fires, hunger, disease and displacement…all of these sirens pleading for attention, for address and for survival.
And yet, the drum-beat of “tradition” and “convention” and “mediocrity” and “small-mindedness” and the processes and models of at least one or perhaps even two centuries past continue to be revered by the political class, while they all know they are implicated in a sabotage of existential dimensions.

It is their apparent self-serving narcissism, and their embeddedness in long-ago atrophied and exhausted processes and language in service of themselves, that plagues both their futures and ours.

Like candy floss, holograms cannot provide nourishment, except as eye-candy. And we have all noticed the epidemic of undernourished, starved and vacuous eyes from decades of eye-candy, not to mention the hollowed-out expectations of the people, projected onto the political class, both entwined in a gordion knot needing both forces to untie the knot and disentangle the enmeshment of this hologram.

And the zero-sum approach, not having served either politician or voter, it has to be burned on the funeral pyre of ideas, processes and ideologies that serve as components of the political opiates we consume at our peril.

Monday, September 9, 2019

A hymn to feminine courage, imagination and heroism


“What of your works are you most proud of?” asked the CBS Sunday Morning correspondent, Martha Teichner, of Canadian writer, Margaret Atwood.
“I’m Canadian and we don’t DO PRIDE, we only do ‘what has embarrassed me less’!” came the instantaneous, satiric, ironic repost, from the laser-witted author.
Her most recent work of fiction, The Testaments, comes out this week, another offering nominated for the eminent Man Booker Prize and the Scotiabank Giller.
Other Canadian cultural nuggets from the fertile, courageous and irrepressible imagination include:

·        “The dialogue of the deaf,” in reference to the threatened separation from Canada of the sovereignist movement in Quebec, decades ago.

·        “Survival,” the central theme of Canadian Literature, from a book she wrote in the early stages of her long and honourable life as imaginative ‘guru’ of the nation

·        “People who think that progress is a one-way street and only ever goes in one direction have no read a lot of history. You cannot count on the yellow brick road leading to the City of Oz!” in a CBC interview with Laura Lynch on CBC’s The Current. (An obvious and unsheathed barb at American cultural credo of the road to the perfect union.)

·        “The servitude of fertile women required to bear children for powerful men and their barren wives,” the central theme of The Handmaid’s Tale, her novel that has provoked so much conversation including television and movie reproductions.

However, it was her penetrating and unforgettable moment in a small coffee shop in northern Ontario before she was an internationally renowned writer, after perusing a sheef of yellow rumpled pages on which some fragments of “poems” were typed, that is etched indelibly in my memory: “When are you going to leap off the cliff?” she inquired.

I was reminded of that moment when I learned that she had kept notes from the early nineties for a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, without disclosing them to her publisher until 2017. In the same “Current” interview, Atwood indicates the nervousness of her publisher, as well as her own, at her intention to write a follow-up:
         
 “It’s high-wire act, and would I fall off?” she is quoted as saying.

High-wire acts, of verbal utterances, penetrating the veil of secrecy, of  denial, of profound honesty and through ironic and frequently acerbic phrases that simply cannot be erased from the memories, and  the imaginations of her millions of readers, have been both the menu of her “literary feasts” and the nutrition of much of the more authentic conversation of what it really means to be a Canadian.

Her most recent, “we don’t DO PRIDE” but only reference “what embarrasses us less” on an American network is another in a long line of cogent, and microscopically magnified observations that depict some of the significant differences between Canada and the United States. Parsing the phrase, one glimpses an eye and an attitude that is both a echo of hymnody and a scathing insult, given how Canadians are portrayed as “hiding” our pride, and in false modesty deferring to “what embarrasses us less”….so deeply has the protestant credo of modesty, humility and self-effacing inverse snobbery (especially in reference to the “bravado” of a significant component of American consciousness) penetrated the Canadian psyche.*

That “fiction” is defined as a piece of writing that is not “true” in the narrow sense of the factual, empirical, court-room evidence frame of that word, becomes so hilariously ironic and limited from the perspective of the more penetrating and profound truth that fiction actually discloses. Like the best and most revered writers of the ages who disclose, both through their own “courageous leaping off the cliff,” those truths to which many are either unprepared, or willing or unable to let loose into their public discourse, and even into their private acknowledgements of the confessional Atwood risks it all each and every time she sits at whatever is the instrument of her “pen and ink” currently and throughout her life.

Giving permission, based only on those pieces of evidence that have already been documented in history, if not necessarily from the specific period of history with which the current “work of fiction” is concerned, is only one of the dictums to which she, and other writers worthy of the appellation, are committed.

To Ms Lynch, Atwood says unequivocally, under the rubric of her own “high-wire act” sanction, “I made a rule for myself, which was  nothing goes in for which there is not a historical precedent.”

And it is her penetrating wisdom, imagination, and courageous “leaping off the cliff (or the high-wire)” not only of what might be “embarrassing” politically or culturally, but also of what might even be potentially personally dangerous, preparing the “safety net” of historic evidence, into which to embed her “fiction” that provides a new “take” on some themes to which human nature has apparently clung for centuries.

It is not only ironic and tragic that a writer of fiction, like Atwood, is both supported and encouraged to utter truths to which millions take exception if the same stories were to appear in the daily headlines, under the cloke of fiction, while, the current Minister of Climate Change and the Environment, Catherine McKenna, faces physical, verbal and emotional violence while walking on the street in her home city of Ottawa, with her children, and now needs personal private security. McKenna’s defect is to fight openly, courageously and even somewhat imaginatively for the preservation of the environment when faced with climate change and global warming, thereby threatening the jobs and income of some workers whose foresight extends to the next pay day, excluding the potential demise of the global environment as we know it.

Fortunately, both for Atwood, and for the rest of us, fiction, even the most ugly and most demeaning pictures of both what “has been” and “is” in the pages of her novels, does not preclude either Atwood or her also courageous, and liberating publisher. The dangers of Atwood’s dystopia, in her own word, “a warning,” nevertheless, merit deep and open and conscious deliberation from as many thoughtful readers, leaders and prophets.

It is the voice of prophecy, so long ago abandoned by the ecclesial establishment in the west, that continues to provide the needed “CPR” for a culture that is suffering what can only be considered analogous to the unconscious patient on the gurney in the emergency room. And while, at first glance, there appears to be little or no direct connection between the dystopia of “female enslavement” and the climate crisis, both depend on a deep and profound disassociation even insouciance about “the other” first from a male perspective on women, and then from the perspective of primarily a male perspective of denial of responsibility for pollution and gassing future generations.

It is not an accident, nor is it to be discredited, that researchers, again highly courageous and creative, at Cambridge, were reported to have studied “male testosterone” as one of the primary influences on the economic collapse in 2008, through the generation and production of credit defaults. It is a similar bravado, not exclusive to the male gender, but predominantly dependent on male insecurity, even neurosis, on which both female enslavement and climate paralysis are legitimately hung.

The world needs to be and to express deep and profound gratitude to both Atwood and McKenna for their respective, although applied in different and separate theatres, courage, imagination and indisputable care and concern for the long-term future of the human species.

*Her partner Graeme Gibson, when asked during a poetry day, about his view on dissecting a poem, by a grade twelve co-ed, responded without skipping a breath, “You have to murder to dissect!” another penetrating critical observation that has stayed freshly embedded in memory for the past half century.

Thursday, September 5, 2019

Reflections on psychic innocence/denial/avoidance...and the promise of the imagination


When I first read Thomas Hardy’s perception, “happiness is a brief relief in the general drama of pain,” from the Mayor of Casterbridge, I had a moment of clarity and awakening. I wanted immediately to challenge such a negative view of the human condition. Surely, this portrait of the human condition was not either complete or even worthy of credence.

Somehow, somewhere there must be a more optimistic, more uplifting and more inspiring pallet of colours to depict our shared ethos, even though Hardy was writing from the southern moors of England. Surely, what I was experiencing in my family of origin, then seen as turbulent and troubling, was not the general condition of the rest of the town, or the wider world. In 1958, the world was basking in the relief and promise of the aftermath of the second war, and the vision of the political discourse was focused on Sputnik, and the potential of the space frontier. Popular music featured ultra-simplistic love songs, whether composed with a ‘rock’n’roll’ beat of Elvis and Chuck Berry, or the more ‘sophisticated’ rhythm and melody of a ballad, sung by men like Perry Como and Pat Boone.

The trajectory of the human spirit was pointing straight ‘up’ into the heavens, both literally and metaphorically. Riding the tidal wave of such heady hope and optimism, John F. Kennedy eclipsed Richard Nixon in the first televised political debate in the presidential campaign in the U.S. Nixon’s five’o’clock shadow seemed to have betrayed his rejection of basic make-up, possibly a hold-over from his Quaker heritage. The ‘hollywood’ heroic image of Kennedy captured the hopes and dreams of a new generation of Americans “to whom the torch is being passed,” apparently oblivious to or unworried about Kennedy’s Roman Catholic faith.

It was not long, however, before the tension between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. boiled over in the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis, taking the world to the cliff of nuclear war. Averted, however, through the tenacity and courage of the Kennedy brothers, Bobby and John, (as reports coming out of Washington made it appear, heroism in the diplomatic world of geopolitics was not only restored but actually enhanced by this new generation of young and vibrant, hopeful and courageous leaders. We all lost a sliver of our innocence in those dark hours and days, but certainly not all of it.

And then, in November 1963, a knock at the classroom door in which I was teaching a grade-five class of boys, interrupted not only that lesson, but also the calm and optimistic and hopeful and youthful world landscape with the tragic news that the same young vibrant (and happily married, so far as we all knew) young president had been slain by an assassin in Dallas. Portrayed as an isolated incident perpetrated by a loner, mysterious “Russian” agent, and then followed by a lengthy and still controversial Warren Commission into the assassination, America and the world grieved, in a shared empathy with his widow and their two young children. Still contained as an “isolated” incident, analogous to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the transition enabled many to continue to uphold a world view of hope, promise and courage, as if the landscape was precisely the inverse of that old Hardy view, that pain was only a brief interruption in a general drama of hope and optimism.

And then there was Bobby, and Martin Luther King Jr., both cut down in their prime, and then there was Viet Nam, and napalm, agent orange, street protests of flower children and their Woodstock and hallucinogens. Still, we were a generation raised on the wave of hope and promise of the aftermath of that deadly war, and while there were increasingly complex and powerful weapons being designed and tested, we were generally bubbled by a protective layer of public hope. The most penetrating question that I faced as a now grade ten history teacher, to another class of young men went like this: “Sir, would you go to fight in Viet Nam?” The young man, Ed Kotke, who posed that question remains a fixture in my mind as both courageous, somewhat brash, yet nevertheless eminently worthy of a legitimate and honest reply: “Only if I could serve as a teacher,” I blurted.

To be sure, there were disappointments in my singular lack of academic prowess at Western, almost exclusively the result of my own obstinence, defiance, rejection of the politically correct and familial “duties” and expectations of family psychic barnacles. There were also many parallel experiences of achievement and community outside the classroom and the library, confirming the ancient trope that undergraduate years really are the best years of a young life.

Births of three children, new career opportunities, new colleagues, and additional coaching challenges coalesced into a gestalt of at least a decade of hope, optimism and personal frontiers magnetically challenging and life-giving. While there were sounds of storm clouds rising on the horizon about oil prices, environmental dangers of acid rain, and rising alienation threatening political division in Canada, personal lives were unlikely to be threatened by the shifting of political tectonic plates.

Innocence, of the kind that sustains a smiling public face, belied a growing consciousness that work, and the rewards of good performance especially in the public eye, were somehow very hollow, fickle and very emptying of both energy and creativity, and yet somehow, continued to demand and provoke excessive effort, in what was beginning to appear to be an obsessive pursuit of applause.

Clearly the public mantra of climbing a ladder of achievement, income, status and prominence was a form of entrapment ensnaring many including this now mid-forty ‘innocent’ who perhaps was beginning to grow up into a new consciousness, less innocent, less arrogant, less overtly ambitious, yet nevertheless, still requiring heroic address through personal action.

I had heard words like ambiguity, uncertainty, paradox and irony, as intellectual notions prevalent in literature inside an English classroom; yet somehow they remained detached from personal experience, except as they interacted with “teaching moments” to support students. Teachers, educators, by definition, are “expected” to have answers, in the face of students’ confusions.

And then, attending a workshop in “creating” near Boston, conducted by Robert Fritz, I heard him say, “It is of course OK to know that you do not know and to acknowledge that you do not know!” This kind of moment etched itself in memory, as the kind of peeling of the mask of blind ignorance (literally, not knowing) that had not previously confronted my consciousness, illuminating a long-standing darkness, a blindness, a studied innocence as the mask I had been wearing, and behind which I had been  performing vigorously and vainly for the previous nearly five decades.

There had been a similar moment, in a class on Frye’s “The Code,” in which the professor had noted the “divided mind” of Paul’s writing in Romans, (I do what I would not do and do not do those things I would do.) However, keeping such moments encased in some cognitive capsule enabled a prolonged detachment from the full implications of these “nuggets” of wisdom.

It was only after a complete collapse in both career and personal terms, that I was introduced to the fullness of the human condition, reflective of, and even incarnating the much deeper and so long resisted wisdom and truth originally visited in Hardy’s novel and the core truth of many other shamans, poets, prophets and spiritual pilgrims.
Writing his report of the Fifth Danish Thule Expedition 1921-24, across ac tic North America from Greenland to Cape Prince of Wales, Alaska, by the explorer Knud Rasmussen, Dr. H. Ostermann quotes a scalawag in Nome, Najagneq, who had faced seemingly indomitable forces and powers that threatened his survival in the Arctic, when asked if he believed in all of the powers he spoke of, responded:

“Yes, a power that we call Sila, one that cannot be explained in so many words. A strong spirit, the upholder of the universe, of the weather, in fact of all life on earth—so mighty that his speech to man comes not through ordinary words, but through storms, snowfall, rain showers, the tempests of the sea, through all the forces that man fears, or through sunshine, calm seas of small, innocent, playing children who understand nothing. When times are good, Sila has nothing to say to mankind. He has disappeared into his infinite nothingness and remains away as long as people do not abuse life but have respect for their daily food. No one has ever seen Sila. His place of sojourn is so mysterious that he is with us and infinitely far away at the same time.
Echoing this wisdom from  Najagneq, Ostermann also quotes his countryman, a primitive Eskimo, Igjugarjuk:

The only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and it can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone can open the mind of a man to all that is hidden to others. (Both quotes from, Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology, The Masks of God, Penguin Compass, 1959, p.51 and 52.)

The “sophisticated” and “educated” and mostly “urban” (and clearly urbane) society, unfortunately, has considered much primitive wisdom to be just that, both primitive and savage. Archives shelves are lined with the stories of colonization of the Najagneq’s and the Igjugarjuk’s of our culture, including the dismissal, denial and the avoidance of their prophetic insights. Writing about how “cultured” humans “know” their personal and private truths and realities, James Hillman writes these words:

Our souls in private to ourselves, in close communion with another, and even in public exhibit psychopathologies. Each soul at some time of another demonstrates illusions and depressions, overvalued ideas, manic flights and rages, anxieties, compulsions, and perversions. Perhaps our psychopathology has an intimate connection with our individuality, so that our fear of being what we really are is partly because we fear the psychopathological aspect of individuality. For we are each peculiar; we have symptoms; we fail, and cannot see why we go wrong or even where, despite high hopes and good intentions. We are unable to set matters right, to understand what is taking place of be understood by those who would try.
Our minds, feelings, wills and behaviours deviate from normal ways. Out insights are impotent, or none come at all. Our feelings disappear in apathy; we worry and also don‘t care. Destruction seeps out of us autonomously and we cannot redeem the broken trusts, hopes loves.

The study of lives and the care of souls means above all a prolonged encounter with what destroys and is destroyed, with what is broken and hurts—that is with psychopathology. Between the lines of each biography and in the liners of each face we may read a struggle with alcohol, with suicidal despair, with dreadful anxiety, with lascivious sexual obsessions, cruelties at close quarters, secret hallucinations, or paranoid spiritualisms. Ageing brings loneliness of soul, moments of acute psychic pain, and haunting remembrances as memory disintegrates.

The night world in which we dream shows the soul split into antagonisms; night after night we are fearful, aggressive, guilty and failed. (James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, Harper, 1976, p.55-6)

It is our historic and eminently human and limited capacity to render our psychic pain into one of two conceptual baskets, that of science or that of religion. In the case of the former, our pain is an “illness” while in the case of the latter, our pain is “evil”. And whether considered from either perspective, so far, our pain has “needed” and even “demanded” an intervention. We need to change, and to get well, or to get right with God, or perhaps even both.

Both religion and science have adopted a language that is dominated by what can be categorized as literalism. In religious history, many of the original images or icons have been trashed as idols and the literal features of human behaviour have been rendered “judged” in the aberrancy. In science, only the literal, the empirical and the specifically “denotative” features of each and every symptom are the focus of the attention of both researchers and practitioners.

Hillman argues persuasively, that through such reductionism which may have empowered both the medical and the theological communities, we have lost sight of, and certainly the gifts of the imagination, of the poetry and the truths that underly each of our lives, and more importantly each of our encounters. We have effectively dehumanized each human, and reduced each to a functioning thing.

 Hillman posits three ways by which we deny the imagination in our perceptions of human psychic pain:

We put empty names on our psychic complaints: alcoholics, suicidals, schizophrenics (nominalism).

We reduce patients to “cases” only persons in situations. (nihilism)

We idealize humans in our attempt to restore our dignity, promoting a one-sided sentimentalism with words like health. Hope courage love maturity, warmth wholeness…and in goals like freedom, faith, fairness responsibility, commitment. (transcendence) (Hillman, p.58-67)

Perhaps, just perhaps, through a re-visiting some of our language, and the depths of the images, the myths, the gods and the poetry, all of them the free expression of our imagination, we might join a human race in touch with our complexities, and the gifts of our darknesses, without having to resort to the kind of scathing and judgemental interventions both in language and in action that refuse to acknowledge the depths of our fullness.

Would that the current existential crisis facing the planet and each person living on it might bring about a new consciousness that is not nearly as dependent on an external saviour or judge, dependent itself on a depth of fear and neurosis of those extremes of both feeling and action that are innate to each of us.