Saturday, October 12, 2019

#11 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (humility)


Our human story, dominated as it is by the thoughts, actions and implications of a gestalt that emphasizes “how men have perceived themselves and the world,” is facing an existential crisis, it says here, because of our shared complicity in epic self-sabotage. While our shared world view is much more complex and nuanced than can be ascribed to a single epithet, there is considerable evidence that our concept of survival has been, and continues to be, based on a masculine perception of power. If I survive, it is because I am more “fit” and more intelligent and more crafty and more worthy than those who have not survived. We have, through a variety of means, philosophies, religions, psychologies, economics, and conflict of all kinds, constructed an “edifice” of what a majority have come to consider  “normal” that is threatening our survival.

For the infant, and for the young child, parents circumscribe safety boundaries, soft padding around cribs, harnesses around danger, and tonal variance around a perceived capacity to integrate with the child’s world. And for the most part, we are both able and willing to see the child as ‘innocent’ and not programmed into a pattern of attempting to beguile, cheat, or undermine siblings or peers, provided his/her needs are generally met. And, while it is impossible to create a “tent” so filled with the absolute purity and humility and respect that approximates our highest and best angels, given that we all come with fears and anxieties and our own brand of both conscious and unconscious “darkness,” we could begin to consider a shift in attitude, perception, and a starting point from which we “enter” into each human situation, beyond our biological parenting for safety and security of the other.

We need not ascribe such heroic and quixotic proportional perceptions, requirements and discipline on our lives as to justify our existence only if we are dedicated to achieving a utopia of any kind. Neither are we compelled to accept and then to perpetuate a social, cultural, political, and faith-based gestalt that, even to ordinary and moderately intelligent and modestly sentient humans, clearly threatens our shared long-term future. Lots of adages bounce around in our heads, coming from a plethora of real-life narratives which are sprinkled into water-cooler conversations everywhere. If and when we are confronted by a situation in which another poses a threat, even an insult, we instinctively react in a manner of withdrawal or fighting. And while we all know that a “fight/flight” instinct is hard wired into our psyches, we are individually and collectively falling into a pattern in which each situation, no matter how trivial or innocent, without hitting the pause button on our instincts, prompts an exaggerated and often violent response.

It is not only our words, our attitudes and our perceptions that we have weaponized. We have rendered ourselves perpetual warriors in a ancient and unfortunately traditional “war” between good and evil. Remembers George W. Bush’s, “You are either FOR us or you are AGAINST us” reductionism to a world of good guys and bad guys immediately following 9/11. For us, individually and collectively, each person has become either an ally or a foe, and the fundamental and essential core of that belief is a threat to our existence. Rhetoric like this, coming at a time of dire emergency, is not and cannot be normative nor determinative of how we consider ourselves, and all others on the planet. Neither can trump’s exaggerated “evil” in everyone who disagrees with HIM convey or envisage a world in which “all men are created equal and entitled to inalienable rights” is even conceivable, never mind worthy of striving for.

Our shared and hourly seeded notion of an ideal world, just like that “ideal” picture of our newborn as Nobel prize winner, or as peace negotiator, is endearing, highly charged as engaging us in a worthy adventure, and intimately and compulsively committed to its realization. However, just as our euphoria and “high” abate in the middle of daily routines, our sense of what is possible twists and contorts and atrophies as our anxieties, fears and cloudy truths of how hurtful humans are seem to eclipse our highest hopes and dreams.

We have constructed around us, a series of social and political and legal and financial “edifices” called institutions that were designed to enhance our lives, at least in the rhetoric of their fertilization and incubation. Banks, churches, schools, safety nets and the intrinsic and binding concrete that was inserted into the bricks and stones of both the actual buildings and the ethos of their erection comprise a legacy of hope and optimism from our ancestors. Comparatively, it would seem, that they had some vision of a future for their great-grandchildren, so high were their shared hopes in that future, as evidenced by their many gifts. Now, however, it seems that we are deeply immersed in a process of tearing down both the edifices themselves and the hope and promise originally shovelled into the cement mixtures that held those institutions upright.
Our future, it seems, is not measured in decades, not in centuries or “ages. Our perceptions, including our attention spans, our news reports, our horizons themselves vacillate between a dystopia looming in a decade or so, and the nano-second of our most recent attack, interruption, road-rage, rude treatment by a clerk or some other stupidity that has “no justification” and therefore merits no tolerance on our part.

And the basic tenets of a so-called culture of “faith” (not denominations or specific religions) seem to demand a weaponization, a domination and a win/lose event for each encounter in order for us to express our engagement, our commitment and our relevance. Whether we are in the “war” against formal and declared terrorists, drug lords, abusive land-owners, deceitful leaders or corporations, mis-and dis-information campaigns from declared enemies, dishonourable trading partners, or even oligarchies of political and financial power, the ordinary, blue-collar, working ‘stiff’ whether male or female is left crawling around gathering up the crumbs of whatever is left after the rich and the powerful have gobbled their share of the water, the air, the land and the status and influence of the town, the city, the province/state, and the nation. Naturally such a leaning and unsustainable “tower of power” threatens both those inside, and those nearby. And we are all now, nearby.

The histories of nations and empires have been forged and then documented on premises and on methods and strategies and tactics that were deemed useful, appropriate and effective at the time of their deployment. The armed horseman was more dangerous and more “effective” than the infantryman with bow or a musket. The cannons built into the hulls of warships were more effective and deceptive than those mounted on the decks. And the richest warlords, kings, princes and queens were more likely to succeed in battle, and in the recounting of those battles than the less affluent, and less armed and the smaller military forces. Big, however, it was measured, has dominated over small, in a manner and a tradition that is now ensnaring each of us.

Extrapolated from “big” and “small” are such notions as “knowledgeable” and “ignorant” / “ethical” and “immoral, or amoral” / “developed” and “undeveloped” (now more euphemistically, “developing”), “industrialized” and “agricultural”….and these concepts bore an accompanying if silent “value” system. Privilege, especially accompanied one side of the equation, while depravity and alienation seemed more likely to accrue to the other side. And this dichotomy prevailed from the classrooms, to the neighbourhoods, to the towns v cities, and then to the various “professions” as compared with labourers. In what we called democracies, there was supposed to be, at least theoretically, a blend of all peoples, classes, neighbourhoods, races, ethnicities, genders and points of view. And then, of course, those making the rules found that they could easily and secretly make rules that would favour their own interests and ambitions, especially as the flow of information was quietly literally and metaphorically drowning the “populace” given the speed and volume of its dissemination.

With each generation of technology, the over-riding argument in its justification is more equitable distribution of power and wealth, notwithstanding a period of turbulence while adjusting to the new norms. That argument, however, has never really addressed the inequities and the restricted opportunities of the rich when compared with the poor. In fact, it seems to have exacerbated those inequities, whether only in the short term or permanently, only time will tell. What the latest rapidly evolving tide of technological revolutions is doing, however, while positing the potential of instant and global links of each person to all others, including video, audio and text, it is also providing “documentation” of the manner by which power has been exercised behind closed doors, (and all of the other instruments of secrecy preserved for the rich and the powerful), and the need for those instruments and personnel purportedly engaged in the “public interest” to devise detection processes and instruments that can and will keep pace with the new technology and the deviousness with which that technology is put to serve the interests of those forces exclusively and compulsively engaged in their own narcissistic, hedonistic and nefarious pursuits.

Laws, and the people who write the laws, have not kept pace with the capabilities of the new technology. Conflicts have emerged whose underlying premises may not have shifted much from the history of “empire” building and “defeating” enemies in that process. Borders that once “protected” nations are now mere Swiss cheese to the penetration of the new digital technologies. The flow of money is now like one river that reaches every urban and rural area on the planet instantly. Intelligence gathering, from “ground” observance, to “aerial” observance to “satellite” gathering continues to portray both needed patterns in weather and climate and the routine transactions of trade, commerce and diplomacy.

Technologically, and scientifically, we are riding a hurricane of innovation. Legislatively, and ethically, we are locked in the wagon trains that barely surmounted the mud-bogs of the prairies of those seeking their fortunes in an opening and “promising” and “inspiring” western manifest destiny across North America. And the divides that emerge from this archetypal inflection of tectonic plates, cultural rock formations, are literally and metaphorically engulfing both our perceptions and our attitudes to each other, about the potential for a shared, equitable and dignified and honourable future,  and the perceived pathways for not merely survival but renewal into a more equitable and more sustaining future for our great-grandchildren.

And the patriarchy, including power-over, domination, competition, and winner-take-all concepts, notions, epistemologies and cosmologies, including the prevailing ethic of the rule of the powerful, like those old wagon trains, must be replaced not merely by new high-powered electric-fuelled, flying vehicles, but a new androgynous and humble and sustainable ethic. That ethic has to do more than write a few meagre cheques from the developed world to the developing world to counteract the decades of air and water pollution. It must also address the centuries of political, cultural and colonial malfeasance of the abuse of power, based on a narrow, male-driven cultural way of knowing, perceiving, valuing, competing, and valuing the other.

Superiority, no matter how it is measured, especially when it is so subtly and seemingly innocently and pervasively embedded like a silent cancer cell in the pancreas of the planet, has to give way to a way of perceiving and then acknowledging the “light” in the soul of each and every human on the planet. And that seemingly revolutionary principle has to become the guiding planetary beacon for the ships of state, and for the new treaties, and the new institutions, in both their dimensionality and in their design and function. Indigenous peoples of every continent have more to teach the “developed” world than we are willing to acknowledge. Poor people, too, in every ghetto, have more to teach us about the realities of surviving than all the research papers in all of the grad schools across the planet. Homeless men and women, in every town and city, in every country, whose numbers are growing exponentially cannot be seen as the new “colony” of the “developed” people in our culture. Good Samaritans, while appropriate, are merely short-term, band-aids. They often swoop into a “blight” like another application of mascara to a zit, in our obsessive, compulsive pattern of the massive “cover-up” to “solve” the problem of our own guilt and shame, both traits endemic to masculinity (and possibly also to women).

We have to re-think and to re-conceptualize our notion of how good people do things we consider worthy of punishment, for their criminality. How did those mostly men arrive at the point in their lives where their only or at least their “best” option was some act of crime? Let’s begin by acknowledging that, in their cribs and in their nurseries, (if they had one) and in their classrooms, they did not necessarily envisage a life of crime, nor even a detour into crime as their chosen path. Let’s begin too by acknowledging that the manner by which our governments perceive the poor and the under-educated, and the under-employed is pivotal in the manner in which these millions adapt to their perceived universe, whether they are living in the developed world or not. (Restricting these thoughts from the sociopath and the psychopath, about whom we continue to learn!)

Let’s us begin to recognize those implicit ways by which we incarnate, and unconsciously express, superiority (couched in the euphemistically polite word, “bias”) rendering the object of those perceptions, beliefs and attitudes as “less than” ourselves. And while both genders are participating in superiority/inferiority judgement, it says here that men, especially, are more deeply ingrained in the process of denial of silent, personal and bigoted perceptions/feelings/attitudes, even when confronted by their exposure. And the process of coming to ownership, acknowledgement and then re-appraising the impact of those silent and superior and condemning “profiling” approaches will take both time and a degree of tenderness, compassion and support that men do not seek and culturally resist, even when in originates from a loved and loving spouse or partner.

It is not merely individual men who have to confront our guilt and shame about those failings in our own lives. As a western, masculine-dominated culture that denies guilt, responsibility and the accompanying shame, we have much for which to atone. And we have not begun the process of taking clear and disciplined, collective, corporate and especially political steps that make it more likely our grandchildren will be able to honour our legacy by their documenting of our significant shift in both attitude and approach to our public discourse.

Individual shame and guilt, while enervating and disabling in their denial, can also be liberating in their exposure, in a safe, supportive and compassionate and sacred space. Collective shame and guilt, however, also needs a similar space in which to be aired, owned and atoned. In the pursuit of immediate and pressing “problems” that confront the planet, it is very conceivable that a shared perception and acknowledgement of the sabotage of historic attitudes, perceptions, norms and processes will get lost in the turbulence of reducing carbon and methane pollution.

And so long as we seem consumed and compelled by the “immediate” problems on our agenda, addressing fundamental attitudes, approaches and beliefs that have significantly contributed to those problems will go unaddressed, just as the health emergencies of millions of men go unaddressed until they cannot be denied or ignored any longer. "Prevention" is not a word or a process exclusive to women, or to the weak. In fact, it can be a perceptual gift to the world.

Thursday, October 10, 2019

#10 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (anima)


If we know that western men and women are out of touch with, or worse, deny that humans have an inner, unconscious life, imagine how much of a stretch it is for western men to come to a place where the concept of an unconscious “anima” the inner feminine is even feasible.

We grow up with a first “imprint” of the feminine comes from our mother, or our first nurturing female. Her voice, her eyes, her very breathing, sighing, baking, cleaning, washing, and interacting with others paint and record a video-recording that leaves in indelible set of imprints on our psyche. Somehow and somewhere there is another partner, a man, in that woman’s life, prompting responses of various pitches, volumes, intensities, sensibilities that pry open our perceptions and then conceptions of how men and women respond to each other. Depending on the quality of the harmony, rhythm, cacophony, resonance and resilience of the relationship between the two first nurturers, we begin to construct an image and the impact of that image on how we experience that dynamic. Do our encounters with “mother” help us feel accepted, tolerated, alienated, rejected? Do our responses generate smiles, frowns, shouts, screams, turned-backs, silences? Do we feel welcome where we live, or, even before we have the words, unloved, unwanted, and barely tolerated?

“You’re just like your father!” could be one of the chants that penetrate our ear drums and our psyche. Perhaps, normal embraces of warmth and tenderness are sparingly dispersed among the taunts. Perhaps even over-sized helpings of food seem to be an attempt to compensate for the emotional turbulence of exaggerated anger, impatience, and intolerance. Naturally, like the universal puppy, we simply want to please. Nevertheless, all of our vigorous efforts to “please” this adult authority figure, as well as the tone, mood atmosphere and ethos in our “four walls” continue to rumble along on emotional corduroy roads in a vehicle with no gas in the shock-absorbers.

This portrait may sound to some like a melodramatic “pity party. However, it is intended to establish an excessive even compulsive feeling of emptiness, inadequacy, unwantedness, rejection and alienation and separation from which many young boys spend much of the rest of our lives trying to “heal.” Whether from a “mother wound” or from a “father wound,” many young men struggle even to acknowledge their/our woundedness. Trying to fill the emptiness of a parent who considers him or herself inadequate, fearful, less-than-worthy is not only impossible; it also robs the young person from the needed energies that could be expended in more worthy and creative activities. So, the spectre of a mountain of recovery faces many young men, whether or not they are conscious of the depth of their emotional starvation. Lacking a vocabulary on which to “hang” these deep feelings, young men will often try to medicate their amorphous and ethereal and insubstantial discomfort and pain.

Filing the discomfort into another of the chores needing to be addressed, (isn’t everything about life needing to be qualified as a “task” to be accomplished?) young men then proceed most likely to first deny and then to minimize their discomfort. Perhaps they/we bury ourselves in so many activities/tasks/goals/objectives/strategies/tactics that our lives become literally and metaphorically a pursuit of one or multiple trophies. Early in our adolescence, we notice the attention of the co-eds in our class paid to those athletes who win championships, score touchdowns, slam-dunk the basketball, score the winning goal in the overtime of the league championship hockey tournament. We objectify our very persons as agents of our own acceptance through the expressed applause  of our peers. And, generally we become quite adept at this strategic/tactical process.

Of course, we are not aware cognitively nor are we able to integrate the concept that our parents/care-givers have their own inadequacies, unworthiness, neurosis, for which they are compensating, over-compensating, and projecting onto their children. Vicarious living through the achievements of one’s child, even if it is unconscious, nevertheless, imposes a subtle and lingering burden on the psyche/shoulders of the child, while leaving the parent in complete impunity for the responsibility. Neither participant in the dynamic is conscious of its existenceor its impact. Resentment, especially based on what are essentially unconscious dynamics, shoves its tentacles deep into our psyche and will only shove their barbs into the light of day at moments when we least expect them, often when we are experiencing some ‘trigger’ event that re-awakens the buried emotion.

“The unconscious of a man contains a complementary feminine element, that of a woman a male element. IT may seem paradoxical to suggest man is not wholly man or women wholly woman, yet it is a fairly common experience to find feminine and masculine traits in one person. The most masculine of men will often show surprising gentleness with children, or with anyone weak or ill; strong men give way to uncontrolled emotion in private, and can be both sentimental and irrational; brave men are sometimes terrified by quite harmless situations and some men have surprising intuition or a gift for sensing pother people’s feelings. All of these are supposedly feminine traits, as well as more obvious ‘effeminacy’ in a man. This latent femininity in a man is. However, only one aspect of his feminine soul, his anima. ‘An inherited collective image of woman exists in a man’s unconscious, says Jung, ‘with the help of which he apprehends the nature of woman.” (Frieda Fordham, An Introduction to Jung’s Psychology, Middlesex, England, Penguin, 1953, p.52)

As an archetype, the anima is an image of “woman” not an image of a particular woman. So long as that image remains as archetype, it has a timeless quality.
“She is often connected with the earth, or with water, and she may be endowed with great power. She is also two-sided or has two aspects, a light and a dark,  corresponding to the different qualities and types of women: on the one hand the pure, the good, the noble goddess-like figure, on the other the prostitute, the seductress, or the witch. It is when a man has repressed his feminine nature, when he under-values feminine qualities or treats women with contempt or neglect, that this dark aspect is most likely to present itself.” (Fordham, op. cit., p. 54)

Nevertheless, failing to grasp and to acknowledge the “feminine” aspect of male personality, as is the case for millions of men, especially it would seem among many of the most contemptible world leaders, men attempt “to make “her” into an external, physical woman. We do this by projection. This is our ego’s way of trying to possess anima, to imprison her in mortal flesh, to experience on a personal, external, physical level. One specific thing is required ion order to return anima to her psychological role as Queen of the inner world: a man must be wiling to withdraw the projection of anima from the women in his life. This alone makes it possible for anima to perform her correct role within his psyche. This alone  makes is possible for him to see his woman as she is, unburdened by his projections.” (Johnson, op, cit., p 93-4)

“This effort to withdraw his projection of anima is very problematic for modern western man. “He is so accustomed to his pattern of trying to life out his unlived self through other people that the prospect of giving up seems a disaster. He feels that all the joy and the intensity of life is contained in the hope that one day a women will come along who will make him whole and make life perfect. It is hard for him to see that he could live with a woman and be close to her and yet not try to live his life through her.” (Johnson, op. cit., p. 109)

It is not only the man who is potentially caught up in the projection of anima onto a female. “Our culture trains women that their role is not to be human beings but to be mirrors who reflect back to a man his ideal or his fantasy. She much struggle to resemble the current Hollywood starlets; she must dress and groom herself and  behave in such away as to make herself into the collective image of anima. She must not be an individual so much as the incarnation of men’s fantasy. Many women are so accustomed to this role that they resist any change in the arrangement. They want to go on playing the goddess to a man rather than be a mortal woman: There is something appealing about being worshipped and adored as a divinity. But there is a heavy price attached to this role. The man who sees her as a goddess is not related to her as a woman; he is only related to his own projection. His own inner divinity, that he has placed on her. And when his projection lifts, when it migrates away from her so some other woman then his adoration and his worship will go with it. If he has no relationship to her as one human being to another, then there is nothing left when the projections evaporate.” (Johnson, op. cit., p. 109-110)

Having failed to withdraw projections of the anima from a specific woman, and having imposed a shared and inevitable pain from the withdrawal of that projection, this scribe can attest to a dearth of mentoring, coaching, learning and appropriate development that likely has been, is now, and will be in the future the fate of many men and women. I can also attest to the narrowness and exclusive “extrinsic” training and apprenticeship of those about to enter the professions of teaching, social work, clergy and parenting. As a culture drowning in the empirical, scientific, objective, conscious and sensate, as if these are the only qualities of human existence that matter, we are collectively and individually immersed in a shared shame of ignorance, denial and avoidance of transmitting other more important dynamics of human personality and the dynamics of their interaction.

Universities, in the west at least, are failing their undergraduates if they refuse to acknowledge and to teach the insights embedded in the writings of Jung, and in the dynamics that pervade a culture blind to the unconscious. Such blindness can no longer be tolerated as willful, deliberate, or even the recipient of lip service. Churches, too, as well as their seminaries, are being challenged to reflect on the conflicts within their congregations, between laity and between clergy and laity, when the unconscious projections are rampantly playing out before their eyes. Of course, in order to accept the truth of these dynamics, both individuals and organizations would have to adopt new perceptions of their responsibilities and their opportunities.

Schools, and faculties of education too, could open the eyes, ears and minds of their aspiring educators to their own deep gifts of personality, and the potential embedded in the personalities of their students and colleagues, as well as the processes that might be deployed in professional discussion of many of the more turbulent and stressful situations that emerge daily. Principals, especially, both men and women, need to comprehend and to acknowledge the mysteries of the unconscious and its potential role in interjecting “sand” into the “gears” of the class, and the school.

In order for such a world view to become operative and instrumental among our various organizations, individual men, too, could become much more conscious of their potential to deny their own biographies, especially the unconscious anima, in order to more readily and successfully engage in relationships with women.

It is my own failure in relationships that prompts these scribblings. And the impact of these failings will confront each of my days, memories and reflections as long as I continue to breath.

Wednesday, October 9, 2019

#9 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (patriarchy)


The relationship between the individual and “the system” (whatever system that might mean) is useful as a cultural context. The deep and profound reality that all of our cultural “systems” have a “patriarchal” foundation.

And the dynamic of this cultural foundation means that “feminine value of feeling, relatedness, and soul consciousness have been virtually driven out of our culture by our patriarchal mentality….Women..have been taught to idealize masculine values at the expense of the feminine side of life. Many women have spent their lives in a constant feeling of inferiority because they felt that to be feminine was ‘second best.’ Women have been trained that only masculine activities, thinking power, and achieving have any real value. Thus Western woman finds herself in the same psychological dilemma as Western man: developing one-sided, competitive mastery of the masculine qualities at the expense of her feminine side….(M)en unconsciously search for their lost feminine side, for the feminine values in life, and attempt to find their unlived feminine side through woman. (Robert A. Johnson, WE, Understanding the psychology of Romantic Love, Harper Collins, New York, 1983, p.ix)

This social, cultural, psychological analysis by Johnson, although it was penned three-plus decades ago, continues to resonate into the twenty-first century, although many men have made considerable strides to search for, to find and then to celebrate their feminine side. Listening, advocating, empathizing with their female partners and colleagues, as well as developing an active participatory interest in the details of their children’s daily lives are some of the visible signs that western men are indeed evolving.

Johnson’s book analyses the myth of Tristan and Iseult and parses the monumental forces at work in the process of experiencing romantic love. Positing that romantic love has “supplanted religion as the arena in which men and women seek meaning, transcendence, wholeness and ecstacy,” (Johnson op. cit. p. xi), Johnson poses a serious and significant challenge for the Christian church, given the church’s having commandeered the question of sexuality into its exclusive domain. Whether romantic love has supplanted religion at least in part because of the church’s unrealistic, perfectionistic, idealized notion of exclusion of divorcees, ostracising of extra-marital sexual relationships, banning LGBTQ individuals first from full fellowship and then from ordination, and/or because the church has fallen hook-line-and-sinker into the masculine, corporate, power-driven activities syndrome remains an open question.
Male spirituality, in recent years, has been written about as processes including healing the “father” and the “mother” wound and the accompanying issues of loss, grief, and “rites of passage” sessions including male initiation into age old traditions guiding men into manhood. Johnson, a Jungian disciple, takes time to detail the dramatic difference between “romantic” notion of being “in love”:

“When we believe we have found the ultimate meaning of life, revealed in another human being. We feel we are finally completed, that we have found the missing parts of ourselves. Life suddenly seems to have a wholeness, a superhuman intensity that lifts us high above the ordinary plain of existence…The psychological package includes an unconscious demand that our lover or spouse always provide us with this feeling of ecstasy and intensity. Despite our ecstasy when we are “in love” we spend much of our time with a deep sense of loneliness, alienation, and frustration over our inability to make genuinely loving and committed relationships. Usually we blame other people for failing us; it doesn’t occur to us that perhaps it is we who  need to change our own unconscious attitudes—the expectations and demands we impose on our relationships and on other people.
This is the great wound in the Western Psyche. (Johnson, op.cit., p.xii)

In a culture that denies the unconscious, the inner life, especially under the umbrella of the patriarchy, it may seem a “bridge too far” to speculate on Jung’s teaching that the unconscious is indeed the “source: the primal matter from which our conscious minds and ego personalities have evolved” (Ibid, p.3)

The myth of Tristan and Iseult explores romantic love, as the first such story in western literature, the source of our romantic literature including Romeo and Juliet and many love-story movies. A “man’s myth,” it shows symbolically the “development of an individual male consciousness as he struggles to win his masculinity, to become conscious of his feminine side and to deal with love and relatedness. It shows a man torn among the conflicting forces and loyalties that rage within the male psyche when he is consumed by the joys, the passions ad the sufferings of romance.” (Ibid, p. xiv)
Johnson pictures western people as “children of sadness,” similar to the young man Tristan of the myth. “(T)hough outwardly we have everything, probably no other people in history have been so lonely, so alienated, so confused over values, so neurotic. We have dominated our environment with sledge-hammer force and electronic precision. We amass riches on an unpre3cedented scale. Bur few of us, very few indeed, are at peace with ourselves, secure in our relationships, content in our loves, or at home in the world. Most of us cry out for meaning in life, for values we can live by, for love and relationship. (Ibid, p.21)

Blaming our sadness on the loss of our feminine side, the Johnson’s exegesis of the myth points to Blanchfleur, Tristan’s mother, who brings him into a world of “constant war; men think only of empire building, accumulation of territory and wealth, and domination of the environment at any cost. We still call it progress. But this lopsided mentality kills Rivalen, husband of Blanchfleur and father of Tristan and Blanchfleur and leaves Tristan an orphan.

Tristan’s mother had been traded off to Rivalen by King Mark, Tristan’s uncle, for help in defending his territory. “She is a piece of property, to be used as the masculine ego sees fit in the service of its power drive. If we are awake, we see this in our own society. When a man uses a woman’s feeling to get power over her, when a man starts a friendship only so he can sell something to his friend, when the advertiser on television tells that that we will buy his product if we “really love our children” each of them is cynically putting love and feeling in the service of power and profit. (p. 22) Although written in the mid-eighties, Johnson’s insight proves both cogent and prescient in 2019 and the process of “servicing power and profit continues unabated, if not surging on patriarchal steroids.

Another of Johnson’s insights about the threat of the patriarchal foundations of western culture is evident in these words, the import of which continues to be ignored, denied or outside the purview of the Christian church:

If a man or woman clings to the dominant patriarchal attitude and refuses to make peace with the inner feminine, then she will demand a tribute: When we refuse to integrate a powerful new potentiality from the unconscious, the unconscious will exact a tribute, one way or another. The “tribute” may take the form of a neurosis, a compulsive mood, hypochondria, obsessions, imaginary illnesses or a paralyzing depression. In his writings Carl Jung gives un a vivid example. His patient was a brilliant intellectual, a scientist. The man tried to exist without feelings, without emotional relationships, without a religious life. He suddenly developed on obsessive belief in a stomach cancer. The cancer did not exist, physically, yet he suffered all the terrors of hell. The obsession paralyzed him and his professional life. His orderly, rational mind could not solve the problem. He found relief from this obsession only when he consented to reintegrate the feminine side of his psyche, the human values and spiritual values he had discarded many years before. (p. 27)

A professional career of some forty-plus years in Canada and the United States can and does attest to the entrapment of most of the men in positions of responsibility in school, municipal politics, and the church. And my own life, as well as, although to a lesser degree my father’s, can and does attest to a “drivenness” to be heroic, in a pursuit of career goals fueled by the neurosis of inadequacy that generated an application per month for many of those years. Courses in basketball coaching, executive leadership, supplemented by a “walter-mitty” imitation of  hunting and fishing both the issues and the personalities of politics, through a free-lance, untrained adventure in print, television and radio journalism as well as a stint in selling suits taken together comprise a gestalt of both neurosis and isolation, alienation from friendships, as well as a metaphorical iron wall between my consciousness and my unconsciousness, the inner life.

It was in a class in seminary that I first heard about the cognitive difference between the words “extrinsic” religion and “intrinsic” faith. I bolted upright in my chair, in the winter of 87-88, and have been sniffing out the implications of that little nugget ever since. I had stepped off the career “hamster-wheel” for the identified reason that while I recognized I could pursue additional academic qualifications, my need was to dig into whatever it was that was driving me to work up to eighteen hours per day, and to reflect on what I was coming to perceive as a singular need and appetite for “applause” in whatever form that might take. Something “inside” me needed to be confronted, although at that time I had absolutely no idea what or who that “something” was. Thinking and even believing, ironically and tragically as it now seems, that a deeper look into what I then considered my own “faith” and “spiritual” life might turn up some new insights along with the hope they might unveil. Perhaps I was, at the time, summoning the strength to protect myself against the raw power plays of the inter feminine.

I knew too much about the raw and even abusive “raw feminine” in my early life, likely, in retrospect, even transferring my deep-seated anger and resentment that I felt toward my mother onto an unsuspecting and undeserving spouse, over twenty-plus years. What I did not “know” or appreciate or even anticipate about the “inner feminine” could then have filled a library, a hard drive or even a “cloud” in today’s world. I did not even contemplate the notion of an “intrinsic” religion or faith. Clearly a deep and, at least to my ‘eyes’ an arrogance persisted that I could conquer whatever it was that had been driving me to ever more challenges, and ever more desperation with each attempt. Cognition, reading, rehearsing, challenging myself in ways I had never imagined was clearly not meeting some deep and profound need.

And the irony is, from the perspective of an additional three decades, that the real role and evolution of the heroic masculine ego is to let go, to give up ego control, to stop trying to control the people and the situation and to turn the situation over to fate and to wait on the natural flow of the universe. “To give up the oar and the sail means to stop personal control, to stop trying to force things. To leave the sword means to stop trying to understand by intelle3ct or logic, to stop trying to force things. To take up the harp means to wait patiently, listening to a soft voice within, for the wisdom that comes not from logic or action but from feeling, intuition, the irrational and the lyrical.” (Johnson, op. cit, p.33)

And, along with this identified process of “letting go” came a corresponding and enhancing process of coming to grasp more deeply and personally the important differences between various iterations of male-female relationships.

From Johnson we derive the notion that romantic love is not love but a complex or attitudes about love—involuntary feeling ideals, and reactions….finding ourselves possessed: caught in automatic reactions and intense feelings a near-visionary state. (op. cit. p. 45) Developed around the twelfth century, “courtly love” idealized the feminine, and under its laws, “each knight agreed to obey his lady in all things having to do with love, relationship, manners and taste. Within her realm she was his mistress, his queen. There were three characteristics of courtly love that will help us to understand it. First the knight and his lady were never to be involved sexually with each other. Theirs was an idealized, spiritualized relationship designed to lift them above the level of physical grossness, to cultivate refined feeling and spirituality. The second requirement of courtly love was that they not be married to each other. In fact, the lady was usually married to another nobleman. The knight-errant adored her, served her, and made her the focus of his spiritual aspiration and idealism, but he could not have an intimate relationship with her….The third requirement was that the courtly lovers keep themselves aflame with passion, that they suffer intense desire for each other, yet strive to spiritualize their desire by seeing each other as symbols of the divine archetypal world and by never reducing their passion to the ordinariness of sex or marriage. (op.cit., p.45-6)

Johnson continues:

We seek romantic love to be possessed by our love, to soar to the heights, to find ultimate meaning and fulfillment in our beloved. We seek the feeling of wholeness.
If we ask where else we have looked for these things, there is a startling and troubling answer: religious experience. When we look for something greater than our egos, when we seek a vision of perfection, a sense of inner wholeness and unity, when we strive to rise above the smallness and partialness of personal life to something extraordinary and limitless, this is spiritual aspiration….In the symbolism of the love potion (romantic love) we are face to face suddenly with the greatest paradox and the deepest mystery in our modern Western lives: What we seek constantly in romantic love is not human love or human relationship alone: we also seek a religious experience, a vision of wholeness. Here is the meaning of the magic, the sorcery, the supernatural in the love potion. There is another world that is outside the vision of our ego-minds: It is the realm of psyche, the realm of the unconscious. It is there that our souls and our spirits live, for unknown our conscious western minds, our souls and spirits are psychological realities and they live in our psyches without our knowledge. And it is there, in the unconscious, that God lives, whoever God may be for us and individuals. Everything that resides on the other side, in the realm of the unconscious, appears to the ego as being outside the natural human realm; thus it is magical, it is supernatural. To the ego, the experience of that other world is no different from religious experience the religious urge, the aspiration, means a seeking after the totality of one’s life, the totality of self, that which lives outside the ego’s worlds in the unconscious in the unseen vastness of psyche and symbol. (op.cit., p. 52-53)

Here is the great “nub” of attempting to posit, and then to convince modern western man (in the masculine sense of that word) that there is even an unconscious, inner life, of another world that there is another “side” to our ego, extrinsic consciousness. From all of our human experiences with other people, dealing as they are, have been and will be for the rest of our lives, we have been discussing, dissecting, deconstructing what we call “reality” of the empirical, sensate and manipulatable world of our senses. We generally leave to the poets and the philosophers, the mystics and the shamans matters of the inner, unconscious mystery. Nevertheless, through the reading of church history, dogmatic development, and contemporary operation of ecclesial institutions the words used, and the concepts noted, the dates determined and documented, the processes valued and applied generally if not exclusively apply to an extrinsic, sensate world. Even the definition of empathy, agape love (to use the church’s words) is expressed in physical, sensate terms, without even acknowledging the other side. Numbers of dollars, numbers of adherents, numbers of disciplinary offenses, excommunications, dismissals, and even the definitions of what constitutes “sin” is considered, taught and enforced as sensate. And it says here that the patriarchy is patently, and perhaps even permanently and eternally committed to the preservation of this reality, as if it were the substance and purpose of the institution’s existence.

From Johnson’s perspective:

It is the out of control quality in romantic love that gives us the deepest clue to its real nature. The over-whelming, ecstatic “falling in love” with someone is an event, deep in the unconscious psyche, that happens to one< One does not “do” it, one does not control it, one does not understand it: It just happens to one. This is why Western male ego has such trouble coping with romantic love: It is, by definition, “out of control.” It is out of control because that is what we secretly and unconsciously want from it—to be ecstatic, lifted out of the sterile confines of out tight little ego worlds. That bursting of bonds, that transcending of the ego-mind, is “religious experience,” and that I what we seek. Western men are taught that the male ego must have control over everything within and everything around it. The one power left in life that destroys our illusion of “control,” that forces a man to see that there is something beyond his understanding and his control, is romantic love. Formal religion and the church have long since ceased to threaten Western man’s illusion of control. He either reduces his religion to platitudes or ignores it altogether. He seeks his souls neither in religion nor in spiritual experience nor in his inner life; but he looks for that transcendence, that mystery, that revelation, in woman. He will fall in love. (op.cit.p.57-58)

To be continued….

Wednesday, October 2, 2019

#8 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (spirituality)


In this (spirituality) realm, there is a new kind of freedom, where it is more rewarding to explore than to reach conclusions, more satisfying to wonder than to know, and more exciting to search than to stay put. (Margaret J. Wheatley, in Diarmuid O. Murchu, Reclaiming Spirituality, New /York, Crossroads, p. 1)

Far from pasting an ethical and electrical-stimulating patch onto our hearts, in order to neutralize all sinister motives, attitudes, perceptions and self-destructive tendencies, we are left to wrestle with the seemingly surreal benchmarks detailed in the Christian ethics summary from the last segment in this series.

Men, from my experience, have as much aversion to conversation about their own spirituality as they do about their emotions. Even within the narrow confines of the institutional church, men generally focus on the balance sheet, revenues, costs and then they adjudge the spectre of whether or not to remain open on the basis of those criteria. When confronting the most conflicted questions and tensions that emerge between and among parishioners and between laity and clergy, they frequently revert to the mediation/reconciliation/social justice guidelines of the secular culture in their best approach, or more likely, defer to their personal favourite in their more narrow and constricted manner. And while these processes have some potential to shift the dialogue into new and more hopeful territory, the fundamental attitudes of each individual remain paramount regardless of the chosen process.

An anecdote from Ruth White’s A Spiritual Diary for Saints and Not-so-Saintly, might open this reflection:
                           Rest in Peace
A stubborn old man plastered the outside walls of his hotel with signs. He was declaring war on the city fathers. Today as I passed down his street, I observed a freshly painted message hanging there. It read:
“Rest in Peace.”
I wondered who was resting. Did the old man give up in his long running battle for survival? Did he win, or did je just give up?
Perhaps I will never know. There is one thing I am very sure about—someone lost! It is even possible, as with most arguments, that no one is resting in peace.Peace is not the child of bitterness and hate. When one person sets out to destroy another, regardless of the cause, it always results in someone being injured. In order for one to win, the other must lose. (Op.Cit., p. 95)

Today, our vernacular terms this idea a zero-sum game.

The point at which any ethical principle becomes operative is the point at which a precipitating and offensive event, statement, action prompts and provokes a response. Victims, especially, are prone to lash out, almost involuntarily responding to that “fight/flight” response, in a culture that literally and metaphorically holds wimps (those who do not retaliate) in contempt. There is a corollary to this truth: the most likely person to inflict an offensive blow, especially one designed to “destroy” another, is the person who is most frightened and unable or unwilling to restrain his vengeance. This paradox, however, remains one of the over-riding and often hidden mysteries operating in a culture dominated by masculinity, in its most neurotic model.

Ours is a culture that celebrates conflict that “wipes out” an opponent, and then cheers the destroyer/terminator as a role model for others who are or will experience injustice themselves. In Canada, professional hockey has the most prominent, visible and recognized stage for this meme. The dockets in the civil courts, too, are filled with cases documenting offenses based on an injustice unaddressed, and needing a outside authority to settle the dispute. Employers, too, are increasingly deploying a strategy that is best summed up in the words of a former supervisor: “Do you think we can get him to resign, if we overload his workload?” Implicit in that rhetorical question is the notion that “firing” that individual would require both time and serious financial costs, but having him/her withdraw silently is clean and simple and cost-free. It is not incidental to note that there is no “requirement” to provide “cause” for the elimination, for the simple reason that the resignation is uncontested.

Other equally sinister and too often secret and thereby anonymous “exclusions” or destructions or character assassinations are happening while these keys are being tapped, with the target of the attack unsuspecting both its emergence and its author.

The political culture has become so violent, virulent and saturated with radioactive words like treason, spy, killing, spilling out of the poisoned fountain of the Oval Office, that ordinary people have and will continue to take violent actions motivated by and “given cover” by the bile flowing from that very fountain.

So, attempting to inculcate, teach, model, apply and ‘garden’ and ‘greenhouse’ even a modest ethic is one of the most, complex and trying and predicated-on-failure of the social, cultural, educational, and political enterprises in any culture.

Hourly, we read and listen to stories of individuals who cross ethical, legal/criminal and constitutional lines, only to be followed by those courageous voices in the wilderness that has become our raging climatic and political ethos. Whistleblower protection could prove to be the single “linchpin” protecting the U.S. political institutions from permanent erosion. Nevertheless, in the prevailing public dialogue, the word “systems” plays such a prominent part in our mostly failed and failing attempts to deal with “miscreancy” (villainy) at all levels.

Just this morning, David Ignatius, appearing on Morning Joe on MSNBC, outlined his country’s and his paper’s requirement that the Saudi prince, ben Salman, provide assurances that “systems are in place” that will prevent any recurrence of  murder of his colleague, Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul one year ago today. And we have evolved to a point where we expect “systems” to ensure our safety, our security, and the enforcement of the ethical, legal principles on which our culture has been established. Every time a “system” operates, carrying out a task, a responsibility, a professional process, in an encounter with other systems, the purpose of that encounter is most likely to be an attempt either to prevent some future injustice, or to impose a sanction for a previous crossing of some boundaries.

Within the bowels of each system, however, both the knowledge of and the sanctions for not executing the details of a “system” of rules, regulations, mandates reside within the “person” of those working within the system. Compounding the dissemination of those regulations, and a commitment to their execution, are so many factors as to render the process of the dissemination, assimilation and prosecution of the system’s rules fraught with not merely synapses but volcanic obstruction. And the size and virulence of the obstruction are highly dependent on the level of trust and respect for the very system that has brought the rules and regulations into existence.

And the level of trust in every system is highly reflective of the level of trust each individual on the shop floor has for the individuals and the teams at the top of the hierarchy running the system. And there is a legitimate argument that posits the notion that each system, per se, is a refuge for both the hierarchy and the underlings to use as a cloud, an obfuscation, a literal and metaphorical cover to escape full responsibility. Start with the notion that no “law” that is itself unjust does not merit either compliance or enforcement. And whether any rule, or regulation is just or unjust depends both on the ethical principles on which it is based, and on whether those principles have a deep and profound resonance among the “unwashed.”

Laws, rules, regulations, codes and systems, by definition, are tools to bring about what in Canada our constitution calls “peace order and good government”…sufficiently abstract and open to interpretation, as to ensure continuing reflection and debate, and thereby to continue to nurture the democratic foundation’s growing strength and health. Control of others, at the root of the smooth operation of any social enterprise, (schools libraries, churches, and corporations, as well as political entities) and the levers of power to both write and to administer those rules and regulations, rest primarily in the hands and the basic beliefs, perceptions, attitudes, and the personal ethics of  those in charge. And there are any number of political influences preying upon the minds, thoughts, feelings and perceptions of those individuals at the top of the “system.”

A well-known adage of political life, (and every “system” operates as, and considers itself a political entity) is, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” Whether or not the “squeaky wheel” is itself an expression of the most ethical and moral principle often succumbs to the immediacy of “pleasing” and silencing those “protesting” voices. No executive wants to have “turbulence” identity his/her “watch” if that turbulence can be squashed, or silenced by some promulgation of a rule, a regulation a policy or an edict. Often the length of time, and the perception of various options available impinge the decision-making process of any executive faced with the demand for change. Short-term resolution, based on the most simple and direct rule and regulation, disseminated as a matter of “normal” executive leadership, often betrays those seeking change, those who are expected to change, and especially the authority of the executive originating change.

For centuries, for example, the church has banned women from ordination, and relegated women to duties considered expressive of the perceived and historically fossilized exclusion or women from the highest echelons of ecclesial power and decision making. More recently, a cry for both inclusion in all levels of clergy, as well as a zero tolerance policy and rule about preventing relationships between clergy and laity (similar to those previously iron-clad in corporations, yet being relaxed based upon a more tolerant perspective). Similarly, LGBTQ persons have been historically excluded from both church membership and ordination, as the church continues to enforce a perspective that renders the church the arbiter of legitimate sexual relations among both straight and gay individuals. In an attempt to face the need to restrict what it considers “unethical” and “evil” from the perspective of some interpretations of scripture, as well as to attempt to integrate the prevailing political winds of the growing #MeToo movement, ecclesial decision-making forums have and continue to struggle with this vortex of influences. And to take a zero-tolerance position on clergy-laity relationships, for example, regardless inof whether the clergy or lay person is male or female, or straight or gay, is to render any member of the laity, by definition for the purpose of the policy and the regulations, incapable of the maturity and the personal integrity to make such a choice openly, voluntarily and freely. “Power over” is considered to be the predominant principle that is being used to “protect” the “vulnerable” from being abused. This principle, too, is highly operative and even dominant in the secular, corporate world, including all western military institutions.

Nevertheless, both in the “systems” designed to participate in education and in the process of inculcating spirituality, it is both obvious and irrefutable that any conversations, dialogues and encounters between the two participants (student/teacher, clergy/laity) have the potential of entering into highly personal and intimate regions of experience. Any responsible and non-neurotic policy established to “regulate” human sexual relations that bans the existence and the development of such relations from the institution is not merely unnatural, but is also based on the fear and insecurity of those attempting to lead those institutions. There is a legitimate argument that men, in positions of executive power, have over-compensated to attend to the view of the legitimately angry numbers of women who, themselves, have been abused by men in positions of power. A professor in another life memorable for his dramatic rhetoric and personal lecture style once told a class in Comparative Education, “The Russian method of solving a problem is to eliminate it!” Such a problem-solving approach has no place in contemporary institutions.

Perhaps, an enlightened and enlightening approach would be to open the door to a full discussion of the details of each “case” in which the traditional “rules” are being or about to be crossed. Getting to know the personal side of each situation, based on a starting place of “trust” as opposed to a starting place of fear, and ever more despicable, the starting place of protecting the public image of the church or the school board.

And this opens the door to how the culture addresses what it consider all incidents of offense between and among the people. Starting with a premise that human beings are primarily and incontrovertibly “evil” and “have short of the glory of God” (St. Paul) has resulted in highly elaborate, and ever more highly sophisticated body of law, law enforcement, codification, prosecution and enforcement of so many laws, many of them incarcerating millions on one hand for minor, non-violent offences, while failing to investigate, document and prosecute other crimes, especially among the rich and powerful, in all social and cultural institutions.  The basic premises, themselves, are providing a mountain of evidence of how the system cannot be sustained, either by the numbers and the costs, let alone based on the fallacy that punishment acts as an effective deterrent for others.

Let’s continue to explore, to stretch our own comfort levels, in all of our institutions, to contribute to the legitimate evolution of reasonable, and reasonably based standards of comportment and conformity, without every losing sight of the uniqueness and the potential for good that lies within each of us.

Constricting the spirits of both the hierarchies and those for whom they are responsible is neither necessary nor life-giving for either demographic in the "system. In fact, when the system constricts the full life of the individual, it has to be confronted as an act of responsible discipleship and citizenship.

Tuesday, October 1, 2019

#7 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (ethics)


While words do not by themselves define our identity; it is by words that we attempt to grapple with notions of who we are. Biological nature, for example, may be one place to start. Traits of contentment, cholic, intemperate, patient, loving and even angry and punitive arise usually from the mouths/observations of others, usually beginning with our parents. However, embedded in those attributions and certainly less “visible” and “known” are the intimate and essential attitudes, beliefs, world views, and moods of the person “framing” the behaviour of the baby.

Naming “mama” and “dada” and “spoon” and “dog” and “up” and down” begin to flow from the babies’ mouths and as the process of language development ensues, “body language” becomes integrated into the full “communication process” of the young child, as does the capacity of parents/custodians to “read” the needs, moods, wishes and pains of the baby.

While there is always a question of the precision, accuracy and verification of the “truth” of both of these symbols of communication, there is usually some degree of agreement between baby and parent, allowing for amendment and adjustment if first responses do not seem to satisfy. In each of these exchanges, a pattern of relationship norms and expectations between the two parties takes shape, inevitably revisited, adjusted, amended and deepened in their character with each moment of encounter. Similarly, each of the participants is adjusting his/her perceptions, attitudes and expectations based on the integration and assimilation of the new impressions of the encounter.

It is such a dynamic that attends to each of the encounters between humans of all ages, genders, belief systems, ideologies and the purposes attached to each encounter. Care givers, like mothers, for starters, provide immediate models and messages of the nature of the universe for the child, as do fathers, however at variance the two models may be. Lessons about how to drink from a sippy and then a real cup, toilet training, the impact of crying, and extending to the skills of tying shoes, table manners, and later, the many complex skills surrounding the “socializing” in nursery schools, kindergartens and school classrooms.

Not only is guidance about how to interact with things and others embedded in these exchanges, but also more abstract “principles,” “beliefs,” “attitudes,” “rules,” and “expectations of the adult are being conveyed to the young child, most of these being transferred from a virtual unconscious perspective. We do not normally actively consider questions of “political philosophy” or “dogma” of faith, or “career expectations” in these very early “exchanges with our children. Nevertheless, with or without our conscious awareness, these basic seeds are being implanted in the mind, body, spirit and soul of the young child. So to the extent that we are conscious of and committed to any specifically articulated nugget of belief, social and cultural norm such as our attitude to money, food, cleanliness, tidiness, reading, music, dance, laughter and compromise, these coded messages are being formulated, and then transmitted to the child by the adult.

Typically, fathers’ identification with their sons, and mothers’ identification with their daughters shape many of these early exchanges, as do parental tones, smiles, eye contacts, and auras, most of these latter, without a conscious recognition and acknowledgement by either parent or child. Some typical cultural memes, or norms, also find themselves Even the atmosphere inside the home and the conversations between parents provide additional “cultural” evidence of the ethos of this “world” of the child.

No doubt many readers, if they are still here, are rolling their eyes about the patently obvious and irrefutable platitudes above. However, while perhaps obvious, the early development of the child, and not merely the special needs child, is a critical piece of the business of the society and the culture. It is not another of the many “domestic” files like cleaning, laundry, cooking and meal preparation. These issues can no longer be relegated to the “family” or “life” sections of the dailies, nor to the TVO or other public television outlets. How parents raise their children, feed them, read to them, discipline them and even dress them are significant to the evolving development of the culture. And the political “hands-off” of public institutions, especially provincial legislatures, (in Canada, family issues, education and language are the purview of the provinces) can no longer be justified. We can no longer tolerate a political discussion and debate about the nature of our classrooms that reduces the issues in the debate to numbers of teachers and number of students in classrooms, and the occasional “sex-ed” controversy about which specific pieces of information and issues of judgement are appropriate to which age group.

Questions about tolerance of and access to cell phones in classrooms, for example, should not need to be mandated by a provincial regulation. And while corporal punishment deserves legitimate relegation to the educational museums, there are other “social and cultural norms” about how to monitor, regulate and development comportment of children to agreed principles, behaviours, attitudes and rules. And the issue of ethics as it is applied to both parenting and public education needs to be revisited and reconsidered from a far more elevated and demanding perspective in the public arena. Men have, traditionally, withdrawn from any discussion of family or classroom ethics, leaving the “field” primarily to female parents, members of school councils, coaches, principals and teachers in their respective classrooms. A over the last two or three decades, school boards in Ontario have veered nearly over a cliff in their hiring practices in the elementary panel, by hiring and preponderance of female instructors and principals. There is no argument about the effectiveness or the professionalism of women teachers or principals. However, the “ethics” of basing the proportion of authority figures on the proportion of gender representation inside the school would impose a rough 50-50 assignment of both men and women to these positions.

Young boys, regardless of their preferences for the arts, athletics, science, math or technology, need male models in the front of their classrooms as urgently as young girls need women role models. The fact that the public debate has virtually ignored this slide into “normality” (perhaps as an over-compensation for a history in which most principals were men), illustrates the abandonment of the fathers, uncles, grandfathers from the issues of the classrooms and the spending of public monies in the complex and highly determinative process of learning, education and child development.

We need men to contribute ideas like a very old one that sought the preparation of all classroom teachers as “researchers” in the formal academic sense of that word, so that all classrooms would thereby incorporate the opportunity to become learning labs. Such a shift in teacher training, prompted, nurtured and fostered by both mothers and fathers, of all political stripes, would dramatically and permanently shift the ethos in many classrooms, the motivation and excitement of many teachers and principals, the deeper and more sustaining relationship between public classrooms and the faculties of education, psychology, leadership, and ethics. This initiative would not, or at least should not, offend the many female teachers and principals already working in public classrooms. In fact, conversely, it would shift an emphasis on “proper, politically correct” expectations to a more relevant and operative perspective that examines how children learn, what new teaching/learning research applies to each classroom, and how new approaches might flow from the classrooms in both urban and rural communities.

An “educational culture” dominated by one gender will, naturally and inevitably veer toward the norms and the expectations of that gender. Football in secondary schools, for example, is one case in point. A school and board culture dominated by men will be more likely to perpetuate a football agenda, while one representing an equal proportion of men and women are more likely to be critical of such an approach, given the mounting evidence of concussion and long-term CTE (Chronic traumatic encephalopathy) the term used to describe brain degeneration likely cause by repeated head traumas. Similarly, yet conversely, a faculty balancing numbers of men and women in a school is less likely to adopt a norm of communication that ranks language and rhetoric by colour. Designed primarily as a device to “minimize” or actually eliminate the verbal expression of male rage, such a process, by definition, objectifies and stigmatizes young boys.

Alternatively, various processes that coach children into becoming peer monitors, mediators and friends in the broadest sense of that word, and that focus on the isolation, alienation, ostracism and abandonment of “different” children (the extreme poor, the racialized, the challenged, the over-weight, the fragile and shy young boy, the bully, whether male or female, the uber-rich, or the member of an unfamiliar faith or ethnicity) and the many options open to all students to participate in the process of authentic integration of those children, both short and long term, merit serious consideration and implementation, monitoring and realigning.

Education, as an authentic extension of the family, demands the active, willing and creative contribution of both mothers and fathers, both in the specific curricular implementation and importantly in the establishment of a respectful culture, based on both masculine and feminine perspectives, attitudes, beliefs and processes. And men can and will only grow to appreciate both their own children and the kind of school and classroom they inhabit, on an intimate, and not necessarily interfering manner.

Another ethical tenet to which we all pay lip-service in many of our communities in North America is the fundamental tenet of most faith communities:

                     always treat others as you would like them to treat you

In part number 5, we noted the conflict between men and women regarding sexual activity, and the need for more men to respect the “NO” of their female partners. Similarly, we also mentioned the too many cases of women who, having willingly and eagerly entered into a relationship, then revert to vengeance when that relationship terminates. The premise, “it takes two” too often becomes part of the detritus of the marriage. “No Fault” divorce, obviously may cover the distribution of matrimonial assets, and the potential for an agreement on “shared” custody; it clearly does not account for the private, silence, secreted vengeance of offended and victimized women who perpetuate their version of “pay-back” on their former spouse often for the rest of their lives, and certainly for the length of their children’s education and development.
Perhaps the Christian faith has a potential, if ignored, guidepost that could serve to mediate both of the male and female attitudes of disrespect and blame and judgement above. In Ronald Preston’s chapter “Christian Ethics,” in “A Companion to Ethics” edited by Peter Singer, he writes these words:

…the distinctive feature of Jesus’ ethical teaching is the way it radicalizes common morality. For instance, there is to be no limit to the forgiveness for injuries, not only the ground that it will win over the offender but because it corresponds to God’s forgiveness for us. Similarly love of enemies is enjoined not because it will win over the enemy (although of course it might) but because God loves his enemies. There is to be no restriction on neighbour love. Anxiety is the surest sign of lack of trust in God especially anxiety over possessions. So far from motive not being important provided the right action is done. Jesus was penetratingly critical of the self-love of ‘good’ people and it is clear from many passages in the gospels that he thought bed people to be not nearly so bad as the “good” thought them. Underlying all this teaching lies the fact that Jesus was a man of faith (trust). Faced with the ambiguities of existence he looked at the weather, the sun shining and rain falling alike on good and bad, and saw it as a sign of the unconditional goodness of the creative power of God. A sceptic would have drawn from the same evidence the conclusion that the universe is quite indifferent to moral worth, Ion this respect Jesus is an archetype for his followers….
His ethics is very different from an everyday ethic of doing good turns to those who do good turn to you: that is to say an ethic of reciprocity. This is invaluable as far as it goes. Social life requires a level of mutuality on which we can normally rely. One of the perils of international relations is that governments have not sufficient confidence in their relations with one another for mutuality to be relied upon. However, in our lives as citizens we do usually count on it. Some people behave better than the rule of reciprocity requires. Some keep it exactly on a fifty-fifty basis. Some get by with a minimum of co-operation. Some who do not even do that are likely to end up in prison. Jesus goes much deeper, explicitly warning against loving only those who love you, ad saying that there is nothing extra-ordinary in that…He goes beyond the world of claims and counter-claims, of rights and duties or something owed to others…. Jesus calls for a certain flair in life, a certain creative recklessness at critical points….The thrust (of the teaching of the Beatitudes) is towards a self-forgetfulness which results in an unselfconscious goodness. Writers on spirituality often call it disinterestedness. Jesus spoke severely against self-conscious goodness…In the allegory of the sheep and the goals the sheep are unconscious of either their goodness or of rewards. The rewards Jesus spoke of cannot follow form the direct pursuit of them. Indeed consciously to pursue disinterestedness is self-defeating. One cannot pursue self-forgetfulness. (p. 95-6)

The complexity of Christian ethics, the state which paradoxically follows a “non-pursuit” premised on an unconscious disinterestedness, seems so far removed from the STEM, male dominated, profit-and-extrinsic-rewards-driven, job-relevant, human-reductionistic, instant gratification culture in which we are currently impaled. And contemporary masculinity is, if permitted and recognized by the millions of men on the planet, regardless of our faith community, might like to be reminded of his “creation” in the image of God. And even the churches themselves, have either forgotten or lost sight of the complexity and the magnetic appeal of such an ethic.