#18 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (intuition)

Something that is known or understood without proof or evidence…..the Merriam-Webster definition of intuition. We have all heard ourselves, and possibly others, say things that we dismissed as merely intuitive, only to learn later that the event conformed precisely to the earlier intuitive insight.

We live in a world in which “facts” are under threat, from the highest offices in government, exaggeratedly especially from the Oval Office. “Alternative facts,” a phrase coined by White House advisor, Kelly-Anne Conway, has “fallen” into the ether of political discourse, in her hollow defence of her boss. And we must be very cautious, even scrupulous, in distinguishing intuition from “alternative facts.” We live when every thing, including every word, symbol and every visual image is being weaponized. It may well have been thus for a long time, although most of us  grew up with the notion that only enemies trafficked in the weaponizing of words, ideas, images for the purposes of propaganda, manipulating the views and attitudes of a populace.

The political “messaging adage” that anything repeated often enough results in some or many people believing it to be true is one of the guidance systems for the president’s minions, including but not restricted to Fox News. Bouncing off what has been deemed to be the current left-wing “talking points,” the alt-right adopts the most extreme “facts” in opposition, likely on the premise that the trump cult will swallow the kool-aid. The over 90% support of trump in the Republican Party testifies to their premise. Political discourse, consequently, devolves into a shouting match of opposing pictures of the same “Rorschach” of whatever issue file is under the microscope.

The good-evil, Manichean absolute duality, has so entranced the political discourse, and political system, especially in the U.S. that we are all left potentially drowning in the undertow of innuendo “cananonading”  (thank you, Danny Gallivan) off our ear drums, echoing in our conversations and prompting millions to seek alternative ways of spending time, merely to survive. Nevertheless, our intuition is not euthanized, nor is it temporarily on “pause.” Like the flow of all of the rivers on all of the continents, intuition in each of us continues to “function” as an integral component of our personhood. And the degree to which our intuition has served as an early warning system, or a foreshadowing, or a visionary lightning bolt not only underscores our conscious awareness of something other than the literal, verifiable, empirical facts in our personal universe, it also echoes, resonates and amplifies the “intuitive” movement encircling the planet.

Not susceptible to anatomizing, a strait-jacket into which we attempt to imprison every single element in our contemporary vocabulary, intuition, like imagination, flows outside of, beyond, and around our shared planetary atmosphere. As Viktor Frankl writes, in The Unconscious God, (previously referenced in this space):

“Conscience is essentially intuitive. To anticipate what is not yet, but is to be made real, conscience must be based on intuition. And it is in this sense that conscience may be called irrational. But is not conscience in this respect analogous to love? Is not love just as irrational, just as intuitive? In fact, love does intuit, for it also envisions something that is not yet real. What love anticipates, however, is not an ethical necessity but, rather a personal possibility. Love reveals potentialities dormant in the love person, which he still has to make real. However, concern with mere possibilities rather than actualities is not the only common denominator of love and conscience, It is one reason why both must operate on an intuitive level’ a second reason is to be seen in the fact that both love and conscience have to do with something, or someone, absolutely unique. It is the task to conscience to disclose to man the unum necesse, the one thing that is required. This one thing, however, is absolutely unique inasmuch as it is the unique possibility a concrete person has to actualize in a specific situation. What matters is the unique ‘ought to be’ which cannot be comprehended by any universal law.( Frankl, op., cit., p.34-35)

For many of us reared in the twentieth century, this essential uniqueness, not reducible to any valid law, has been juxtaposed with what in the history of ethics is known as Kant’s categorical imperative: “a moral law that is unconditional or absolute for all agents, the validity or claim of which does not depend on any ulterior motive or end.” (britannica.com) And, we hear every day pontifications about the absolute ethical/moral imperative of specific issues like abortion, for example. The fact that “right-to-life” activists resort to killing pro-choice professional nurses and doctors providing therapeutic abortions to women seeking them seems not to impair their adherence to the categorical imperative.

The church, however, continues to attempt to implement/impose a categorical imperative on its members, clergy and to justify this rigidity as offering a model of hope and new life for the world. Let’s continue rummaging through Frankl’s mind:

“Just as conscience aims at the uniqueness of possibilities dormant in each life situation, so love aims at the equally unique potentialities dormant in a loved person. Even more, love alone enables the loving person to grasp the uniqueness of the lover person. In this sense love has a significant cognitive function, and certainly this was appreciated by the ancient Hebrews when they used the same word for the act of love and the act of knowledge.” (Frankl, op. cit. p. 36-7)

Then capacity/intuition to look/imagine/speculate/envision/and anticipate into the future, as Frankl teaches, is the balancing force, however unconscious, to the force and energy of religious dogma, history, tradition, ethics and morality. A faith, whether personal or institutional, that is fixated “in the rear-view-mirror” as opposed to the prospect of the future, negates or at least minimizes human intuition. It is in the envisioning/anticipation/imagining the possibilities inherent in the unum necesse, and/or in the other person that intuition plays its significant part.

Not surprisingly, it follows that “not only love and moral conscience are root in the emotional and intuitive, nonrational depths of the spiritual unconscious. Thus, ethics and aesthetics as well have their foundation and basis within the spiritual unconscious. In fact, in his creative work, the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious. The nonrational intuition of conscience is paralleled by the inspiration of the artist. Artistic creation emerges out of recesses in a realm that can never be fully illuminated.” (Frankl, op,. cit. p. 37)

Here we can see the potential of the combined energy of the artist and at least one significant twentieth century theologian. Jurgen Moltmann, in The Future of Creation, posits very cogent and penetrating insights:

“The information ‘in the beginning God created’ establishes time together with creation. But if time begins simultaneously with ‘creation in the beginning,’ then creation must be subject to change from the beginning, for time is only perceived from alteration. But if creation is subject to change and is open to time from the beginning, then it cannot be a closed system; it must be an open one. Consequently the time that begins with creation does not have a symmetrical structure either, in which future and past, goal and origin correspond to one another, like the two halves of a circle. Time’s structure is a-symmetrical. It is open for a future which does not have to be the return of what was at the beginning, in the form of restitutio in integrum…      

‘Creation’ as the quintessence of God’s creative activity comprehends creation at the beginning, the creation of history and the creation of the End-times. It embraces the initial creative activity, creative activity in history and the eschatological consummation….Creation is then not a factum but a fieri  ( a becoming)…Having called creation in the beginning a system open for time and potentiality, we can understand sin and slavery as the self-closing of open systems against their own time and their own potentialities. If a person closes himself against his potentialities, then he is fixing himself on his present realilty8 and trying to uphold what is present, and to maintain the present against possible changes. By doing this he turns into homo incurvatus* in se.

A society of this kind will project its own present into the future and will merely repeat the form it has already acquired. For this society the future ceases to offer scope for possible change; and in this way the society also surrenders its freedom…Natural history demonstrates from other living things as well that closing up against the future, self-immunization against change, and the breaking off of communication with other living things leads to self-destruction and death….Closed systems bar themselves against suffering and self-transformation. They grow rigid and condemn themselves to death. The opening of closed systems and the breaking down of their isolation and immunization will have to come about through the acceptance of suffering. But the only living beings that are capable of doing this are the ones which display a high degree of vulnerability an capacity for change. They are not merely alive; they make other things live as well.” (Jurgen Moltmann, The Future of Creation, SCM, London, 1979, p.118-123)

Intuition, in ethics, love, aesthetics and eschatology** can be considered integral to the healthy individual life, as well as to the ultimate destiny of the people inhabiting the planet. It is not confined to an ideology, a gender, a geography, an ethnicity, a language, or a religion. Nor can it be encapsulated by a single or even multiple laws. Nor can it be examined by a graduate course in philosophy. It, like the fog that lies in the valleys in autumn, not only gauzes over the pine and the oak trees on the surrounding hill but also enhances the mystery and the majesty, the artistry and the eternity of the landscape itself. Our attempts to dissipate, to dissolve, and to fight the ubiquitous ethereal nature of our inherent intuition only belie our very existence, making us self-sabotaging victims of our own blindness.

And men, placed in front of their computer screen, or their fork-lift, or their semi-trailer, or their scalpel, or their case law books, or their classrooms, focused on the immediate, literal, practical, empirical information at hand, are likely to let our energies, talents, imaginations and universes become imprisoned in that cell.

Opening to a less constricted view and attitude of his own potential and the potential of the universe can and will only enliven not only his literal breathing and the potential for freedom for all of his ancestors and his legacy.

 *(Latin for turned/curved inward on oneself, a life lived inward for oneself rather than outward for God and others.

**The part of theology concerned with death, judgement, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind.

#17 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (faith, hope, love)

On Friday, President Barack Obama was applauded for this statement in his eulogy for The Honourable Elijah E. Cummings:

It has been remarked that Elijah was a kind man. I tell my daughters—and I have to say, listening to Elijah’s daughters speak, that got me choked up. I am sure those of you who have sons feel the same way, but there is something about daughters and their fathers. And I was thinking, I would want my daughters to know how much I love them, but I would also want them to know that being a strong man includes being kind. That there is nothing weak about kindness and compassion. There is nothing weak about looking out for others. There is nothing weak about being honourable. You are not a sucker to have integrity and to treat others with respect. (from theatlantic.com)

Shining his personal, political, historic kleg light on the features of kindness, compassion, looking out for others, and respect for others, in celebration of the life of the passionate, courageous, dramatic congressman from Baltimore, Obama, on  one hand, (for critics) promulgated what some consider the obvious; for others, he reminded the world of a trait of masculinity that has been closeted for decades if not centuries. That we all needed his reminder is a testament to the depravity of our contemporary culture. That the congregation responded in applause signified their concurrence with the heroic contribution of the Congressman to the life of his people, city and country.

Conflict in pursuit of justice, as opposed to conflict for personal ambition, is, in the public “mind” a fine distinction, apparently lost on many men and women. Bullying abounds, inflicted on the weak and the “different” among school students on both side of the 49^th parallel. In the corporate and political world, competition, even to the degree of debasing one’s opponents, seems to reign. Children see and are compelled to emulate a theory and psychology that runs something like this:

“Don’t take any shit from that ________!” (fill in the blank, from your own experience) Parents, coaches, want their “children” to develop a muscle that serves to protect them from future dangers and threats. And if and when a conflict emerges, a reflex response is to seek revenge as a matter of honour, respect, reputation and dignity. Instant, impulsive responses in anger, seeking vengeance blurts out of many hockey games, as players who have suffered an “unfair” blow turn on their opponent if they are able, or look to their team-mates for surrogate revenge. Young men and young women both have a vindictive instinct, if they exercise that instinct differently. Young men and women are both engaged in defaming and even destroying peers with whom they have a dispute. A billboard on Interstate 81 in upstate New York reminds against the savagery of bullying and the shared need to counteract its vengeance. CBC The National, in Canada, has dedicated a full week to exploring the bullying issue in Canadian schools, bringing the attention of their audience to what they call a “kind” school, as an alternative approach to the epidemic.

Let’s pause and consider the source of the vast majority of human conflicts: pride at an insult, pain at a defamation of character, a background of abuse that generated anger, resentment, bitterness and the proverbial “chip on the shoulder,”…and each of these can be clustered under the umbrella of fear, weakness, insecurity and even neurosis. However, such word magnets are often, if not always, accompanied by the perception/belief/reality that violent revenge is the  only option. And here is the place at which young men demonstrate a difference between young women. Physical size, strength of young men, compared to young women, predicate different starting points at the emergence of conflict; young men are not in the habit of “talking” whereas young women, more familiar and comfortable with speaking, perhaps given their conscious awareness that a physical fight, especially with a young man, is at a distinct disadvantage. The cultural norm of young women “circling” in support of their peers differs from the “fight your own fights” epithet among young men, except when a “team” concept is involved.

In a public policy debate, however, the organized protest of large numbers of individuals who, both individually and collectively, believe they have suffered injustice, band together to seek what they deem to be justice. Now, the ‘victims’ have legitimacy, some degree of protection, a common cause, and usually a common purpose and method. Whether their actions veer into the violent, as the research indicates, bears directly on the prospect of their success: if violent, they have a reduced likelihood of achieving their goals. And as individuals form larger groups, or even organizations, like labour unions, churches, social-justice non-profits, pursue their stated goals, the public ranges from spectator to activist and all of the intermediate stages in between.

It is in the interface between the ideal of justice and the instinct to seek revenge that a significant personal, as well as cultural dilemma emerges. Each personal “drama” of such a conflict does two distinct things: it mirrors its incubating culture and foreshadows the future of that culture as mirror and lamp. However, in the middle of the drama, few of us are capable or perhaps willing of acknowledging the need for “support” in our dilemma. We could well be ashamed that the conflict exists, at least in part because of our “failure” either of commission or omission, and therefore dig an emotional hole in which to hide. We could believe firmly that only through our personal engagement, physically and/or verbally, to confront our enemy will our legitimate pursuit of justice be satisfied. We may also live in a universe which has already demonstrated its unwillingness and/or inability to provide support, counsel and advocacy, thereby leaving us “to sleep in the bed we have made” as the phrase of “tough love” goes.

Options, and the need for time, prior to impulsive acts of vengeance, is one of the variables that often appear to be missing from our consciousness, especially when we feel we are “under fire”. Especially if we have been raised in a climate and culture of crisis, we are most familiar with that the “crisis” of conflict and its implications. We even have “skills” and experience in knowing “how” we need to move, transferring our experience from our family to a totally new and different situation, without taking reconnaissance of those differences, and the options that might be available. Immediacy, in terms of immediate gratification of our deep and profound feelings of injustice, whether directly dependent on the specific situation of the moment, or equally likely dependent on our history of being unfairly treated in previous situations or more likely dependent on both (if unconsciously) nevertheless very often takes over.

In literally millions of instances of perceived injustice, individuals and organizations will adopt a “silence” and a waiting period, until a “convenient” time in the future in which to seek and wreak the revenge against their offender, without, in the meantime, “wasting” time and energy reflecting on their own contribution to the conflict. Immediate gratification, on most superficial perceived needs, contributes significantly to a mind-set, especially in young men and women, that “the moment” is paramount in satisfying a perceived need, as well as in inflicting the most immediate and proportionate “punishment” on the enemy. “Waiting for my revenge will only exacerbate my emotional upset and contribute to my own unease, or even illness,” sounds like a reasonable, contemporary rationalization for many young men and young women. “Justice delayed is justice denied” is a phrase deeply embedded in the culture of North America of the twenty-first century. Instant gratification has become a demand regardless of whether the “justice” evinced instantly is either appropriate or satisfactory, to either the enemy or the justice-seeker.

This instant gratification is linked deeply to a wider cultural meme: a literalism, devoid of context, background, investigation, and the most critical component for ensuring justice, objectivity, detachment and a degree of maturity. If everyone, including law enforcement, has a public “chip” on the shoulder, feeling “under assault” or believing in the absence of public trust, or feeling under-appreciated and under-valued seeks instant vengeful justice, including the state, as an over-riding model of how “institutions” preserve their own safety and security, then a culture will be hoisted on its own petard. Is the current North American culture is that position? I leave it to readers to reflect on the question!

Now, back to the question of invoking “kindness,” and “compassion” and “respect” for one’s enemies, as an equally important, relevant and operative principle of ethics and morality in the lives of individuals and organizations, not to mention cultures, including schools, colleges, universities and churches. We all desire a reduction in the incidence of vindictive justice, if indeed that phrase, “vindictive justice,” is not an oxymoron, on which much of our pursuit of justice is impaled. We want to transform our enemies into our friends, at least as an ideal to which we give lip service. And yet, what if that ideal were more important than warranting mere lip service?

For the state, we have elected and appointed “professional experts” who are charged with adjudicating the prosecution of justice. And we have to hope and trust (“while verifying,” tipping our hat to President Reagan) that those professionals will serve our better angels, not or most base instincts. White police officers shooting young unarmed black men in the back, is not indicative of a  justice system in which we can or will entrust our loyalty and confidence, regardless of our race. A dominant white majority that shamefully, or worse carelessly and blindly, imprisons a vast majority of indigenous and racially profiled young men, as happens in Canada, is also not a justice system in which Canadians can or do have trust and confidence.

And so, while we can and do dispute how our justice system operates to carry out the law, we have a residual question about how justice, and especially faux justice through revenge, floats through the atmosphere/ethos of our shared culture. And that means how each of us confront our own experiences of injustice, oppression, racial profiling, alienation, and potentially injury and death. Only recently, a fourteen-year-old was murdered outside his school in Hamilton, after a social and educational system failed him according to his mother. Other teens have taken their lives following repeated bullying on social media. These incidents are not results based exclusively on the new digital technology. They are the work of human beings, themselves over-wrought, suffering and perhaps even lost long before they inflicted their violence. Our North American culture, however, is loath to pay more than lip-service to the problems of those who inflict vengeance and violence. In part, we are all enmeshed in a culture of ‘instant gratification’ and a kind of literalism that, while insatiably devouring the gory details of each and every violent act, turns a blind eye, a deaf ear, and an denying mind and concentration to the plight of the obviously guilty offender.

At some risk, I put candles on the altar for Harris and Klebold, immediately following the massacre at Columbine, in Denver in 1999, for a service of remembrance, reflection and prayer at the horror of the bloodshed and death. They were the perpetrators of that heinous killing. Evidence of their anger, resentment, alienation, ostracism only trickled out long after the massacre. Of course, the victims and their families were under extreme distress and trauma and were

inconsolable. And so were the parents of those young men. All of those families will never be the same as they were when the morning of that day broke on the horizon.

However, similar massacres, mass killings, have only been increasing in both number and severity since that horrific day. Guns, as the literal means of such killings, have become the focus of the public debate, since public policy seems loath to face the conundrum of the underlying root causes of such vengeance, resentment, anger and poverty of the spirit, if not the body and the mind of the perpetrators. There are some, however few in number and modest in voice, who consider the deeper issues of our individual and our shared search and pursuit of things like meaning, purpose and ultimate destiny.

If it is true, as a compendium of personal anecdotes would suggest, that in our darkest moments, one finds a kind of insight, a glimmer of a light in that tunnel of darkness, perhaps a gift of insight of meaning, purpose embedded in what can only be considered unexpected “compassion” that escapes understanding, cognition and even sensate perception, then could such a moment not also be available to a culture willing and vulnerable enough to be receptive to such a gift.

Viktor E. Frankl, in his work, The Unconscious God, writes about “a religious sense deeply rooted in each and every man’s unconscious depths” (Frankl, op. cit, p.10) While discerning the difference between conscious and unconscious religion, Frankl also asserts:

I have learned and taught, that the difference between them is no more nor less than a difference between various dimensions..that these dimensions are by no means mutually exclusive. A higher dimension, by definition, is a more inclusive one. The lower dimension is included in the higher one: it is subsumed in it and encompassed by it. Thus biology is overarched by psychology, psychology by noology,* and noology by theology. (Frankl, op.cit, p.12-13)

Referencing Albert Einstein, Frankl notes it was the great man…

“who once contended that to be religious is to have found an answer to the question, What is the meaning of life? If we subscribe to this statement we may then define belief and faith as trust in ultimate meaning….The concept of religion in its widest possible sense, as it is here espouses, certainly goes far beyond the narrow concepts o God promulgated by many representatives of denominational and institutional religion. They often depict, not to say denigrate, God as a being who is primarily concerned with being believed in by the greatest possible number of believers…  ‘Just believe’ we are told, ‘and everything will be okay. But alas, not only is this order based on a distortion of any sound concept of deity, but even more important, it is doomed to failure: obviously there are certain activities that simply cannot be commanded, demanded or ordered and as it happens, the triad “faith, hope and love” belongs to this class of activities that elude an approach with, so to speak, “command characteristics.” Faith hope and love cannot be established by command simply because they cannot be established at will. I cannot “will” to believe, I: cannot “will” to hope, I cannot “will” to love---and least of all can I “will” to will….To the extent that one makes intentional acts into objects, he loses sight of their objects. Nowhere, to my knowledge, is this brought home to us more strikingly than with the uniquely human phenomenon laughter: you cannot order anyone to laugh, if you want him to laugh, you must tell him a joke…If you want people to have faith and belief in God, you cannot rely on preaching along the lines of a particular church but must, in the first place, portray your God believably—and you must act credibly yourself. I:n other words you have to do the very opposite of what so often is done by the representatives of organized religion, when they build up an image of God as someone who is primarily interested in being believe in, and who rigorously insists that those who believe in him be affiliated with a particular church. (Frankl, op. cit. p.12-15)

In a culture dependent to a dangerous degree on instant gratification, literalism, vengeance and will, (ultimately individual will, as the agent for all thoughts actions, beliefs and attitudes), and especially are men dependent on the dangers of these reductionisms, give our complicity in conforming, and in “going along to get along” even if those tendencies are unconscious, we men might begin to reflect on how we might rely less on our will for order, for compliance, for simple justice and for the imposition of our ideology as THE way out of our shared circumstances.

Our shared fixation on the “power” of command, of the will, in the important areas of faith, hope and love, central concepts in a healthy existence is conversely a trap of sabotage, individually and certainly culturally. Perhaps, recognition of the implausibility of its resolving our most dark moments, both personally and culturally, through our “will” can only help to loosen the grip of such a premise.

*Noology: a systematic study and organization of thought, knowledge and the mind.

#16 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (existential threats)

How can any man who has lived through the last half of the twentieth century and into the first quarter of the twenty-first avoid reflection about the stresses posed by the plethora of existential threats facing humanity?

Growing up in a town, the bedroom of workers in a arms-production facility in war, and then transformed into a nitroglycerin production facility, later morphed into a development laboratory for the futuristic, if fatally terminated by Diefenbaker, Avro Arrow, the notion of militarized conflict was never far from home. How can one born in the middle of WWII not wonder how the confluence of birth and war might have shaped a psyche? Stocking up on flour and sugar and coal and garden preserves in preparation for and resistance to another “depression” whose cloud still hung over my parents’ generation, our family shared the spectre of engagement in events and affairs that far exceeded the local culture and mind-set. Into this mix of geography, history, economics and family, inject a disciplined “religious” participation that proferred a link to the eternal, the beyond, the supernatural and how one might relate to that dimension.

In the spirit and context of that small-town mid-century culture and ethos, this piece purports to look at the several studied prospective “apocalyptic” and existential threats facing humanity, through the lens of Arnold Toynbee’s clinical diagnosis of the demise of civilizations. A second filter will include the masculine perspective on how to adapt to such threats.

From the website, WIRED, a piece based on the work of a team of highly educated academics, lawyers, scholars and philosophers, working under the title, The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk ( CESR, commonly referred to as ‘caesar’) and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence here is their list of ten existential threats and the probability and prospective date of their occurrence:

1.     Artificial Intelligence takes over the world…likely date: 2075

                                                                        X-risk priority: very high

2.     Pandemic diseases threaten humanity….likely date: today

                                                                         Priority: very high

3.     AI-powered weapons seize control and form a militia…likely date: any time

                                                                                         Priority: low

4.     Nuclear conflict brings about the end of civilization…likely date: any time

                                                                                   Priority: low to medium

5.     Extreme climate change triggers collapse in

 infrastructure..                                                              likely date: Any time

                                                                                Priority: Low to medium

6.     An asteroid impact destroys all traces of life…

                                                                  likely date: 50 to 100 million years

                                                                  Priority (in 2017): Low

7.     Life as we know it proves a complex simulation….likely date: unknowable

                                                                                  Priority: very low

8.     Food shortages cause mass starvation……..likely date: 2050

                                                                      Priority: High

9.     A true vacuum sucks up the universe at the speed of light…

                                                                       Likely date: technically now

                                                                       Priority: Very low

10. A tyrannical leader undermines global stability:…likely date: Now

                                                                                 Priority: Medium

British historian Arnold Toynbee…

‘argues that the breakdown of civilizations is not caused by loss of control over the environment, over the human environment, or attacks from the outside. Rather, societies that develop at expertise in problem solving become incapable of solving new problems by overdeveloping their structures for solving old ones. The fixation of the old methods of the “creative minority leads it eventually to cease to be creative and degenerates into merely a dominant minority. He argues that creative minorities deteriorate due to a worship of their “former self” by which they become prideful and fail adequately to address the next challenge they face…The final breakdown results in ‘positive acts of creation,’ whereby the dominant minority seeks to create a Universal state to preserve its power and influence, and the internal proletariat seeks to create a Universal church to preserve its spiritual values and cultural norms. He argues that the ultimate sign a civilization has broken down is when the dominant minority forms a ‘Universal state’ which stifles political creativity within the existing social order….As this process of decay proceeds, Toynbee argues there is a ‘schism’ within. In this environment of discord, people resort to archaism (idealization of the past), futurism (idealization of the future) detachment (removal of oneself from the realities of a decaying world) and transcendence (meeting the challenges of the decaying civilization with new insight, e.g. by following a new religion) (Wikipedia)

First, the difference between the list of existential threats, as studied contemporarily, and the Toynbee analysis of the contextual process of a coherent dynamic is dramatic. More like a literary critical analysis of the plot of a civilization’s biography, Toynbee’s analysis incarnates a perspective that details the cognitive and existential dissonance between old solutions to old problems and old solutions to new problems and the resulting divide between what we would today call the “elite” or the “establishment” and the mass, Toynbee’s proletariat (another dated word, evocative of the communist state). We are left with a basic question: Does a civilization fall as a result of an external “impact” or more likely from an internal collapse?

Of course, none of the listed “causes” are or could be exclusive of internal elements. Disease, weapons, Artificial Intelligence, food shortages, asteroids, climate change, and a tyrannical leader all emerge from a human petrie dish. Only a true vacuum seems to remain outside of human “prevention” and “influence.”  The concept of “power” and its control and manipulation, as the single informing imperative of the Toynbee analysis, seen through the lens of the ‘historian’ poses a central question for each of us students of both history and the history of power.

The notion of “power” however, cannot be contained within a political process. It arises inevitably and irrefutably from the nature of “power” that attends every individual person whether s/he is a overt, participating actor in the political process or a mere spectator/student of that official process.  Like a wave pool, power is a wave generated by some in pursuit of their particular value system and ideology, only to be followed by another wave of energy in response to the original wave. Time, as the linear arbiter of how these respective waves behave, dictates the length and to some degree the strength of each wave of political thrust. If the waves proceed in sequence, people generally watch, are somewhat entertained, and to a degree determined by each, engaged or detached in a single wave.

If the waves collide, one in regression another in forward movement, there is a crisis. And whether or not such a crisis is mediated, or refereed, monitored and controlled or not will signal a dystopic prospect.

History shows that men, especially as the generals, the historians, the judges, the politicians and the philosophers setting the “frameworks” of civilizations, pay more than a perfunctory notice to “ideals” as their benchmarks for leadership, and for the administration of “power”. Through their ideals, naturally they have been attempting to pay homage to a deity of their conception, belief and imagination. Gothic cathedrals, symphonies, oratorios, masterpieces, historic pieces of  rhetoric…these are some of the devices by which power is conceptualized and delivered and even worshipped. And, whether by nature or by habit, through official or unofficial and more casual discipline, in order to incarnate the deployment of power, human  nature is and has been historically enmeshed in its own paradox: observing and paying homage to titular and official power, and preferring a more private, silent, inconspicuous and more personal integral exercise of one’s identity and person. While they are not exclusive, the public “power” symbols become cultural heroes, whereas the private persons who ‘hold their own counsel’ are less visible, far less influential and far less idolized.

Men, throughout history, have attempted to navigate this public/private energy, and have been perceived by their contemporaries primarily by their public images, and much less by their private lives. Not surprisingly, men have also enforced this “appearance” and definition, by our own hard-wired resistance to publicly emoting and seeking attention, except for those few whose lives depend on their public adulation. And within this dichotomy, men have also attempted to balance their private pursuits with their capacity for the care of others.

It is this latter division, between the private “profession” and “income-earner” and the “public conscience” of empathy and compassion that divides many men in the past, as well as into the future. We are, or seem to be, hard wired, as world citizens, more resistant to the domestic duties and rigors of house cleaning, meal prep. and child wardrobes than to the latest stock ratings, the latest sports scores, and the office politics of promotions and demotions. As a consequence, at least partially, of this gender identity, our political issues have tended to exclude issues of shared classrooms. So long as there were no criminal or dangerous rumours puffing from the school smokestacks, men who were not official board members, paid little or no attention to the school system.

Whether we can now attribute “neglect” or “irresponsibility” to the vast majority of men for abandoning their education systems, the teachers of their children, and the ethos, including costs, of those systems, remains mute. Women, however, do not warrant either the notion of “neglect” or “irresponsibility” given their much more intense observance of the daily stories of their/our children about their “day at school”.

In both the list of existential threats, and in the Toynbee analysis of civilization’s demise, the question of the origins, and the developmental process of the children of those cultures that have atrophied is omitted. It says here that such an omission, both in fact and in scholarship and political action and policy development, has paid and will continue to pay negative dividends on whatever threats impact the future of humankind.

In the immediate scan of North American culture, with the unprecedented explosion of social media and the anonymous bullying it fosters and exposes, linked to the existential threats of cyber-crime-and-war, global warming and climate change, ebola outbreaks, and the entropy of agreed facts, men and women around the globe share both the immediacy of new “threats” without appropriate and concomitant answers and solutions and the original “patriarchial” attitudes and philosophies that undergird our public discourse, political processes and structures and a neurotic pursuit of perceived emasculation. It is this emasculation, inflicted on men by both men and women, through both an incomplete understanding and repressed expression of masculinity, rendering each man in North America  a mere symbol, an image, and a kind of cultural ghost.

Through claiming responsibility and the promise of a new and confident, an engaged and sensitive, an emotional and imaginative, as well as a warrior/wanderer identity, so long forgotten or denied, men can and will take their honoured place in the way our culture confronts its many existential threats. Women, as the current dominant cultural warriors, leaving men to their “fighting fields and boxing rings,” whether they acknowledge it or not, need and want a healthy masculinity to dance with, especially when storm clouds are forming on the horizon.       

#15 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia ("mighty men")

EDITOR”S NOTE:

This space has presented several arguments advocating enhanced conscious sensitivity on the part of corporations for the individuals working in their employ. This piece details Lionel Tiger’s scathing attack from the 1980’s on the “individualized” economy and culture, from the perspective of an anthropologist. On the surface, this might appear as a fundamental contraction, or at least a paradox. Individual corporations, based on considerable evidence, have reduced “employees” to functions like “enhanced profits” and/or “reduced costs,” perhaps  as an “unforced error” under the cultural rubric of the “gig” economy in which millions now operate their own enterprise, without the benefits and loyalties and implicit respect that once attended corporate deployment. The relationship of the individual both to the organization for which they work and secure their income, livelihood and a sizeable portion of their “identity” as professionals, is a dynamic  river flowing through the turbulence of “white water” and then the quiet eddies of a calm distance. As James Hillman reminds us, in organizations, individuals are perceived and treated as ‘components’ and symbols of a larger archetype. Similarly, from a political policy perspective, individuals are “categorized” and “classified” in numerous “clusters” as if such “demographic identity” is adequate for the calculations underlying the design of public policy. It is far too easy for water-cooler conversations and the culture generally slides back and forth between perspectives of “archetypes” and individual biographies.

Seemingly, without formal research, we appear to be intensely interested in the “background” of an individual when a “crisis” emerges while retaining a disciplined detachment, in other times, so as not to “interfere with the privacy” of the other. Even getting to know our neighbours, or church pew cohorts, or social club members frequently, if not exclusively, gives way to a privacy, and a detachment that renders millions to a reiterated form of “isolation” and “alienation” whose collective costs are rarely, if ever, considered in calculating the “health care” budgets of contemporary North America.

Based on the emergence of physical, emotional and/or psychological symptoms, in individual lives, as they appear in consults with family physicians, or in emergency room triage, our “health” conversely includes the culmination and summation of multiple factors. And prevention, in all of the ways that concept could be applied to our public and political debate, remains another of the silent denied forces, so obsessed are we with fixing immediate crises.

It is the irony and paradox of the application of a similar “diagnosis” and “remediation” to our cars, our furnaces, our refrigerators and washers and dryers to our “bodies, minds and spirits” that confounds both logic and even the collective, conscious debate and resolution of personal health issues. And the relationship of the individual to the organization(s) in which they/we work that plays a significant role in the spike in illicit medications including alcohol, drugs, gambling and obesity. Just as the costs of “pollution” of carbon gases need to be borne by those who pollute, a similar equation is equally applicable (if politically radioactive) to those corporations who decimate the very persons for whom they share responsibility.

This issue is ripe for union leadership. It is ripe for politicians with the spine, the vision and the respect of their electorate to introduce into the public debate. And while denticare, pharmacare and visioncare are all legitimate and worthy of inclusion in public budget calculations. So too is the virtue, morally and ethically, as well as economically, of elevating the need to address the concept of prevention, in some many of our social and economic policies, not to mention our global address of global warming and climate change.

A cultural mind-set that feeds on an obsessive and insatiable appetite for “crisis” in our movies and television dramas, in our obsession with weapons, in our obsession with hot “news” stories that generate ratings and readings, in our obsession with athletic violence and the concomitant life-threatening injuries (e.g. concussions in football, hockey, soccer, and the interminable injuries and deaths from excessive speed in a variety of motor sports)

The "driver" archetype, as the Type A executive, is not only a threat to his own well-being; he is also a threat to millions of those who consider his "model" one to emulate. And he is closely aligned to the "risk-takers" who underscore and reinforce the stereotypical definition of masculinity as "macho" and intense, and intensely in the moment, at the price of the long-range, more reflective and yet sill male model whose sensibilities moderate their own "king" dreams to include and to revere a closer connection to the ground, the earth, nature and vulnerability, as opposed to invincibility. And in their decision-making process, the underlying premises that those who are risk-resistant are weak, effeminate, and less worthy than those men who will throw themselves into the "melee" that is the current organizational crisis.
Unfortunately, Winston Churchill is a war hero, whose leadership, and incarnation of masculinity, while relevant and appropriate to war, and serious emergencies, is not a model to be emulated in the flow of the  ordinary rhythms of markets, and organizational peaks and valleys, as well as family tensions in which they insert themselves inappropriately.

#14 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (Mephistopheles redux)

One of the most cogent and penetrating books on the shelves in our home is entitled,  The Manufacture of Evil, ( Ethics , Evolution and the Industrial System, Harper & Row, 1987) by Lionel Tiger. The Rutgers anthropologist is focused in this work on the implications of an industrial system which has generated a remarkable range of products and services, while also generating outcomes no one wanted.

The industrial system, primarily one of manufacturing, has generated processes, methods, and especially perceptions of right and wrong.

“(T)he industrial age has yielded no commanding ethical scheme with which to operate our social lives…We struggle to adapt the new efficiency of laboratories and factories to the eternal verities of shepherds. Not without results….Is there clear-cut enjoyment of the moral and aesthetic quality of (workers’) lives outside their immediate circles or even within them. Complaints abound about impersonality, alienation, the coldness of the iron law of bureaucracy, the4 strangely willful impact of large-scale structure on small-scale needs and wants, a host of complaints, while they echo some similar ones in the past, are currently identified as pathologies of our way of life, as problems for our solution, as dilemmas of our creation.” (Tiger, op. cit. p.2)

Written in 1987, this assessment offers a template for some questions about how we might diagnose, analyse, and mediate another technological revolution, following the dismemberment of the manufacturing sector, insofar as North America is concerned. And, once again, without adequate preparation, education, and even clinical study of the many implications of the digital revolution, we find ourselves without a road map to address, and then hopefully to cope with the enhanced virtual abandonment of millions of people who were once gainfully engaged in factory jobs.

Tiger’s warning back in 1987 still stands the test of time, even when viewed from three decades later. He writes: “Operating an industrial community without such monitors is like creating a swift strong tank without steering. The newness of the effort to monitor it reflects a characteristic of the system itself worth exploring in depth.” (Ibid, p. 3)

Reflecting on the sources of evil, Tiger continues:

“Exposes are principally about evil, not goodness. We remain fascinated b y malefactor5s and malfeasance, outraged at the incidence of evil in the world, surprised and shocked when it touches us. Perhaps this has always been so. But once upon a time, evil was personified. Evil was Mephistopheles or the Devil. Colourfully costumed. Almost flavorful, altogether identifiable, a clarified being from another world. But in the industrial system evil has become systematized. The production has become technologized, internationalized, multinationalized, and especially in times of war and high zealotry, officially rhapsodized. Just as industrialism has radically altered the ways and means of making and distributing, it has also altered the moral structure within which we live. Yet malefactors are hard to spot. They no longer boast horns and wear suits with tails, but rather three-piece suits and sometimes turtleneck sweaters of cashmere wool or magenta blouses of tailored silk….I want to learn more about how a particular species of primate coexists with a particular system of economy which it made but which is different from the kind of economy which in the past made it. How does the creature respond to industrial food, industrial space, industrial smells, industrial groups, the industrial model of existence?....The whole situation is at the poetic extreme of any possible consciousness of evil. (Ibid, p. 3-4)

Postulating that we have grafted the capacity to “manufacture” evil onto our social consciousness, Tiger’s work begs some very powerful and extant questions about how we incubate our culture and our collective consciousness, not to mention the connections between that and our collective unconscious.

First, why is that whatever “technological” device/system/hardware/software is discovered and developed has an automatic halo of sanctity, and an immediate “gold rush” of investors climbing over each other to secure the rewards of their prescient, if risky, investment as venture capitalists?

Why is it not only possible but even encouraged, for the developers of new technology (including weapons, drugs, and devices for new methods of communication, entertainment, and thereby of generating additional revenue) to act without oversight, without social constraint, without clinical trials, and without the kind of research that limits the negative (evil) impacts of the new designs?

Why is it that we remain oblivious to the potential negative (evil) impact of any new discovery/design/device/process/algorithm both personally and collectively, defaulting instead to the “profit-generating” “corporate-template” of how to think about the future, the present and the past?

Tiger, later in his work, writes an explosive observation whose veracity and prophetic vision are hard to refute:

I suggest that even social life is viewed as a product, that an important theme of contemporary popular writing and adult education has to do with equipping people to better manage their social activity, to maximize its effectiveness, as if an individual life were a business enterprise….The John Locke theory, tabula rasa, (the infant blank slate on which all of life’s tutorial experiences are written) fit neatly with the Pavlovian to support a system committed to significant change and to optimizing human capacities. Another version of Adam Smith’s conception of ,economic rationality, this one with the idea of maximizing human capital or resources rather than economic, but nevertheless based on a similar view of life-as-enterprise. The dominance of economic individualism has been accompanied by a seemingly inexorable movement toward psychological individualism. This is not restricted to the education of the 3young. The principle is lately extended throughout the life cycle. The “human potential movement” celebrates the self-enhancing value of miserable and punishing situations—even for those who die, if one is to treat seriously Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s extreme perspective. Pan-gloss psychobabbling in California. The idea of the individual as a psychological entity is in close accord with the requirements of an emerging industrial system that needed people to be mobile both physically and emotionally and that could benefit as a community from both increased consumption and production by people, one supported the other. And the individual supported himself or herself. (Tiger, op. cit. p.135-136)

While sniping at the self-help movement originating with the Victorian Samuel Smiles,* Tiger himself writes:

(The) mechanism of individualism remains, the mechanism of a questing creature seeking more and better experience, not content with the great china of being, not intimidated by the possible hubris of challenging the self and its limits and options. This is colourful and surely often fun, and may indeed yield real increments of competence and enriched existence. It results in a quite striking, perhaps novel form of society, in which there is hardly a full-throated society at   rather what I called in Optimism, a ‘psychiety.’ This is a system of life in which the principal unit of action is the individual not the social group itself—the final atomization of Gesselschaft. And not only the economic system was committed to an Adam Smithian model of individual rational decision making. Now even the social system, too, has been predicted on individual endeavor. Not only endeavor. In an analogue of capital investment, the individual is seen as a sui generis enterprise, the value of which is improvable by investment of money and time as education, or therapy, or the books…which are frequently tax-deductible as business costs. Everyman is an independent contractor. The educational system is central to all this, Once principally an agent for mobility up the social loader for the poor and maintaining the status of the affluent, now the schooling system is partially adapted to a form of inner mobility. (Ibid, p. 137)

Surely, we can all see how exponentially has this dynamic evolved, amid a flurry of political, corporate public and regulation-based-secret decisions, actions and failures. The labour movement has been decimated; the manufacturing sector has sought and found the lowest labour and environmental costs off-shore; the political class has been lobotomized and emasculated by the fat-cat cheque-writers in the financial services sector and the waves of disempowerment, based on a premise of the “sanctity” of “individual freedom” and “personal liberty” at the expense of any notion of a public good. And all of this has proceeded right under our eyes, and right outside our ears, and in the presence of an increasingly melodramatic reality-television-entertainment drama of distraction.

Is it at least in part because of a fundamental cornerstone of the inherited economic structure of imposed “standards” and rules and regulations that render each and every person a submissive agent serving some hollow goals like GDP, GNP, zero unemployment, and Consumer Price Index, in economies some 75% dependent on consumer consumption?

Have we, and our parents slept through a deliberate erosion of the notion of “society” of “community” even to the point at which anything even remotely reflective of a “social safety net” is considered “the Nanny state” or worse, socialism and even communism?

And is our sedated compliance partially at least dependent on our addiction to burrowing, like beavers, in some activity like the part-time job, the university graduation, the office desk and the bulging portfolio of blue-chip investments? Have we, men and women alike, so abandoned ourselves, our basic needs for relationships, for connections, for hanging-out without the driving force of “networking” and “resume-padding” and evolving our identity? Is our identity now so siamesed to our entrepreneurship-vocation that we no longer even know who we are as individual persons? Is our identity now enmeshed, whether consciously or unconsciously, with our professional job status, our income, our address, our unique “brand”…just another of the many signs of “arriving” and succeeding as determined by the opinion of others?

Let me reference a quote that seems pertinent and appropriate to the page:

If experience be consulted, it will be found there is no action, however abominable, that has not received the applause of some people. Parricide—the sacrifice of children—robbery,-usurpation, cruelty-intolerance-prostitution, have all int heir turn been licensed actions, and have been deemed laudable and meritorious deeds with some nations of the earth. (Baron d’Holbach)

Have we all been, and do we continue to be seduced by the conventional, cultural, politically correct and corporately sanctified mass mind-set?

*A railway executive in Britain, Smiles wrote: National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy and uprightness as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness and vice.” (Smiles, Self-help, p. 125, quoted in Tiger, op, cit., p. 136)

#13 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (Shadow)

If men venture into reading any of these pieces, they will be growing increasingly frustrated, irritated and potentially angry at the persistence here on a focus on what Jung calls the unconscious. Ever the hands-on, fix-it specialists, eager to learn the template that explains how anything works, and even more animated if whatever is not working seems to defy the template, most men begin their day in complete and utter unawareness of their/our unconscious. And if and when anyone attempts to parse some attitude or behaviour that evokes puzzlement, many men find an excuse to depart the conversation while also closing their ears, minds and bodies even to remaining as a silent observer of the speculation. Increasingly, in a digital age, we are surrendering our “public identities” to a complex system of algorithms, the bases of which are undoubtedly based on mountains of evidence of what is considered normal, normative and predictive in human behaviour.

Even if these pieces merely prompt some few men, or even just one man, to pause, look in the mirror, especially when he is experiencing an unsettling conflict within himself, and wonder if there are some aspects of the fullness of his “self” that he does not and apparently cannot understand. Such moments frequently, if not always, emerge from a statement, or an action that seemed to be completely “out of left field”, unexpected, unwanted, often embarrassing and occasionally dangerous. And, although western culture bases virtually all of our shared “conventional, normal, normative and acceptable” behaviour on what is empirically evident and verified, a legitimate case can and needs to be made that opens the door of the cultural ‘mind-set’ to the unconscious. Individual denial, avoidance, repression of many memories, traumas and conflicts, parallels a cultural tendency to “leave sleeping dogs lie”…in the words of many who found themselves engaged in conversations about shared trauma.

It is in acceptance and endorsement of the Jungian proposition that only through the “unpacking” of what lies hidden in our individual unconscious (and also in our collective unconscious) will we find the surprising gift of the new insights peeping out of our unpacking that these words are appearing. Referencing John Sanford’s Evil, The Shadow Side of Reality, New York, 1989, we find a quote from Edward C. Whitmont, The Symbolic Quest, Princeton, 1978, p. 160 in Sanford, p.49:

“The term shadow refers to that part of the personality which has been repressed for the sake of the ego ideal.”

Sanford continues:

The “ego ideal” consists of the ideals or standards that shape the development of the ego or conscious personality. These ego ideals may come from society, parents, a peer group, or religious mores. We may consciously and deliberately select them, or they may operate more or less unconsciously to mould ego development…Generally speaking these ideal standards of being and behaving are related in our culture to the requirements of society and to the Judaeo-Christian moral standards. So society tells us that we cannot steal, murder, or engage in other socially destructive behaviour without incurring punishment. Most of us conform more or less to this requirement and, consequently, deny and repress the thief and murderer within us. The Judeo-Christian moral code goes further and urges us to be loving, forgiving, sexually chaste, etc. In trying to conform to this ideal we reject the part of us that gets angry, is vindictive, and has uncontrolled sexual urges. (Sanford, op. cit., p.49)

And a little later, Sanford writes:

In our dreams the shadow personality appears as a figure of the same sex as ourselves whom we fear or dislike or react to as an inferior being…A man for instance, has certain feminine qualities that comprise his anima, but his Shadow embodies rejected masculine qualities that act like an alter ego….The Shadow may also be a passive figure, the personification of a weakness we would rather not notice…The shadow personality can also be thought of as the unlived life. A good example of this is found in Goethe’s famous poem, Faust. Professor Faust, 50 years old, an eminently successful scholar and renowned teacher, has reached the end of his rope. His life has dried up, his soul has become like a desert, and he even contemplates suicide. Enter Mephistopheles on the scene, and the two fo them make a bargain: If Mephistopheles will do Faust’s bidding in this life and see to it that Faust experiences all of the deep emotions and experiences of human life, when Faust dies he will give his soul to the devil. The bargain is sealed in blood and the story goes on to tell how Faust casts off his role as a professor and intellectual and lives out his unlived life of feeling, eros, power and sex. This story also points up the valuable qualities of the Shadow. For while we have largely described the shadow personality in negative terms, in fact the Shadow contains many vital qualities that can add to our life and strength if we are related to them in the correct way. In Faust’s case, for instance the unused energies of his shadow personality brought him back to life and gave him renewed vitality…At other times, too, the shadow personality may be a boon top our personality if we can relate to it in the correct way. It may be, for instance, that a man who has tried to be kind and “Christian” in his relations with people has repressed his anger, and it now appears as part of his shadow personality. Yet if he is able to integrate some of that capacity for anger, it may help him become a stronger, more resolute person, for anger can be, as James Hillman once said, a healthy reaction to an intolerable situation.

 Without our Shadow, then, we may lack the capacity for a healthy reaction to life situations that are becoming intolerable to our spirit….Another important help we get from the Shadow is a sense of humor. An analysis of humor shows that it us usually the shadow personality who laughs. This is because humour expresses so many of our hidden, inferior, or feared emotions. For this reason another way to get at a knowledge of our Shadow is to observe what it is that strikes our sense of humour, for in our laughter we can often see our Shadow being harmlessly released…People in whom the Shadow is too repressed  are apt to lack a sense of humour. They are also likely to be judging and unforgiving of other people, like the Pharisee who looked down on the woman with the unsavory reputation (Luke 7:36-50) However, Jesus respected this woman and said that, having been forgiven a great deal in her life, she also has a great capacity for love which the Pharisee lacked because he had never made any mistakes in life, and so had never been confronted by his Shadow. (Sanford, op. cit, pps. 50-1-2-3)

“The usual way that people try to deal with the problem of the Shadow is simply to deny its existence. This is because awareness of one’s Shadow brings guilt and tension and forces upon us a difficult psychological and spiritual task. On the other hand, denial of the Shadow does not solve the problem but simply makes it worse, Not only do we then lose contact with the positive aspects of this darks side of ourselves, but we will also very likely project thus dark side onto  other people.” (Ibid, p.58-9)

As a guiding, if paradoxical, principle, Sanford writes:

If we strive to be too good we only engender the opposite reaction in the unconscious. If we try to live too much in the light, a corresponding amount of darkness accumulates within. If we go beyond the bounds of our natural capacity for love and kindness, we build up an opposing amount of anger and cruelty within us. Psychology warns us against trying to be better than we are, and urges us to strive not so much for a forced “goodness” but for consciousness, and to live, not out of ideals we cannot keep, but from an inner Center which alone can keep the balance. The grounds for the moral life are thus shifted from a striving for the highest moral ideals (though moral ideals are also important) to a striving for self-knowledge, in the belief that man’s moral values and ideals are only effective within the scope of his consciousness. To try to be good, and disregard one’s darkness, is to fall victim to the evil in ourselves whose existence we have denied. (Ibid, p. 23)

While these excerpts do not attempt a full explication of the Shadow, they do point to a process of self-consciousness that defies what has become the moral code codified, imposed and enforced by the Christian church. Obsessed with specific forbidden, “evil” actions, and the need to both punish and more significantly to expunge all those who commit such forbidden acts, church hierarchies tend to make pronouncements about the gestalt of evil in war, famine, injustice and especially sexuality, while at the same time, embodying a form of authority and power that, in the convex of its own administration in the lives of individuals, demonstrates a denial of both the individual and the collective Shadow. How insulting, how demeaning and how unsustainable as a theology!

If the Christian church is legitimately in the business of seeking God and attempting to enrich and ennoble that process, then it seems obvious that such a process integrates the whole spiritual existence of the organization and the individuals who share responsibility for its healing and for the potential it offers in the spiritual healing of those who don its doors, its narthex and its sanctuary. And such a process seems only to enhance its own capacity to enrich the lives of the people in the pews, and especially in the committees and in the councils of the ecclesial structure by opening the door of its prayer, reflection, teaching, preaching and counsel to admit the relevance of the Shadow, both in its individual and collective capacity.

Many church hierarchies are still filled by men who, themselves, have failed themselves, their God and more importantly their parishoners, by drinking the  cultural mandate of fixation on the empirical. To be sure, one can notice hints of poetry and of story-telling, and even hints of “symbols” as expressions of the broad strokes of a theology of death, resurrection and forgiveness, as outlined in the New Testament. It is the challenge of confronting the concept of the Shadow, as both an organizational principle, opening the private, confidential conversations, prayers, and decisions to an integration of the Shadow, and thereby of extending that opening as a model for the people sitting in the pews and choir lofts, the church schools and the church administrative staff.

Recently, I had the opportunity to verbalize the need for integrating what I called “indigenous foundations” (the history, perspective, attitudes, beliefs and practices of Canada’s indigenous peoples) into the strategic planning of a local John Howard Society planning day. Three times I made the point, based especially on the empirical data that a significant majority of incarcerated males are, in fact, indigenous young men, and any agency, like John Howard, tasked with facilitating the integration of such men back into the culture, following their incarceration, would be well advised to know, and to integrate the foundational perspectives of this indigenous culture, to enhance the relationship between the agency and the clients. Additionally, Indigenous Foundations, if incorporated into the culture of the agency could/would offer an enhanced prospect of prevention of rising numbers of incarcerated indigenous young men. However, my proposals were literally and summarily dismissed!

It is in a similar and parallel spirit and intent that these words are offered, as stimulation to a new and prophetic, if unconventional, approach to how the Christian church begins the process of incarnating its mandate. Denial, avoidance, repression and especially an ethic that promotes “the highest moral standards” at the expense of the inherent Shadow in each of us, not only achieves precisely the inverse of what the church purports to seek to attain. It also does so in a manner that specifically and tragically trashes individuals for their alleged transgressions, without so much as a tip of the bishop’s mitre in acknowledgement of the Shadow.