Friday, March 13, 2020

#57 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (reflections on power)


Questioning the filing system that relegates gender issues to the sidelines of the political agenda!!!

A few years ago, when discussing  the contemporary state of masculinity, a prominent Canadian lawyer and political figure demurred when I innocently and spontaneously wondered if the “political science” department at the local university might be interested in this subject. An immediate, direct and highly scornful “Not at all likely!” was his response.

Presumably, political theory, political polling, political science and political parties, political leadership, and political ideology either exclude the notion of masculinity and gender as an active agent in the political process. 

 www.managementstudyguide.com defines political science in these words:
Political science is that branch of the social sciences that studies the state, politics, and government. Political Science deals extensively with the analysis of political systems, the theoretical and practical applications to politics, and the examination of political behaviour.

At the end of Nicomachean Ethics, (from Wikipedia) Aristotle wrote:
That the inquiry into ethics necessarily follows into politics, and the two works are frequently considered to be parts of a larger treatise, or perhaps connected lectures, dealing with the ‘philosophy of human affairs.’ The title of the ‘Politics’ literally means the ‘things concerning the polis. (literally means ‘city’ in Greek) . Polis defined the administrative and religious city centre, as distinct from the rest of the city. It can also mean a body of citizens.

Several ideologies are associated with politics: anarchism, colonialism, communism, despotism, distributism, feudalism, socialism, totalitarianism.
On a more cynical level, our vernacular uses the phrase “play politics” to refer to an act for political or personal gain rather than from principle.

George Orwell in his essay on Politics and the English language writes:

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour seems to demand a lifeless imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases---bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free people of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder—one often has the curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

There is a very small “slide” from political conformity, to “political correctness.” And in an article entitled, “Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy, in The Guardian, November 30, 2016, Moira Weigel writes:

Three weeks ago, around a quarter of the American population elected a demagogue with no prior experience in public service to the presidency. In the eyes of many of his supporters, this lack of preparation was not a liability, but a strength….Every demagogue needs an enemy. Trump’s was the ruling elite, and his charge was that they were not only failing to solve the greatest problems facing Americans, they were trying to stop anyone from even talking about those problems.

OpenLearn.com explores the relationship between politics and power. Their website includes these words:

“Some define politics quite simply as the exercise of power. This definition most clearly demonstrates two issues…..the problem of definitions or, in other words the issue of the contestability of concepts; and the limitations of the narrow-broad spectrum.”

Wherever one or more individuals influence one or more other individuals, regardless of the setting, we can observe and comment on the politics of the situation. Writers, for example, deploy all of the many and varied instruments of power to convey a point of view, a “statement” by which they wish to nudge, shove, ‘manipulate’ or ‘seduce’ their reader to a precise or more general point of view. It was Orwell who reminds us that “all literature is political.” In a lecture delivered in Barcelona at the Centre de Cultura Clontemporania de Barcelona on June 6, 2018, in honour of Orwell Day, and abridged in The NewYorker, Masha Gessen writes:

Orwell argues that totalitarianism makes literature impossible…..He imagined two  major traits of totalitarian societies: one is lying, and the other is what he called schizophrenia. He wrote, ‘The Organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as it is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary.’ The lying entailed constantly rewriting the past to accommodate the present. ‘This kind of things happens everywhere,’ he wrote, ‘but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societie4s where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.’….
Orwell was right, (Messen continues). The totalitarian regime rests on lies because they are lies. The subject of the totalitarian regime must accept them not as truth—must not, in fact believe them—but accept them both as lies and as the only available reality. She must believe nothing. Just as Orwell predicted, over time the totalitarian regime destroys the very concept, the very possibility of truth. Hannah Arendt identified this as one of the effects of totalitarian propaganda: it makes everything conceivable because ‘nothing is true.’

We are living when hybrids of formerly separate concepts abound. We are also living when language, especially the language of public discourse, including its use in both political propaganda and advertising, risks the very demise of anything that resembles objective truth. While some, including renowned intellects like Soren Kierkegaarde, posited that the only full truth lies in subjectivity, this view expressed the highest value of personal truth including beliefs, intuition, and imagination not necessarily applied to the public square. 

Northrop Frye, in The Educated Imagination, discerned between what he called the language of practical discourse and the language of the imagination. In the former, we attempt to discern the differences between things, people, ideals etc. In the latter, the creative writer links things, notions, concepts that are not united in the language of metaphor, simile, personification and anthropomorphizing. When we attend a drama in the theatre, or a cinema, we are expected to suspend our disbelief, enter into the scene playing out before us and let it work its ‘magic’ on our sensibilities. Nevertheless, this is a very different, discreet and honourable process, openly dedicated to the process of letting the dramatic intent of the writer, actors, directors and the rest of the crew play out in our imagination. Similarly, our relationship to any and all religious notions, beliefs, practices, while bearing touchstones in objective reality also stretch far beyond what we can observe with our senses and verify in our laboratories or doctoral theses.

Orwell’s Doublethink, on the other hand, is the act of holding simultaneously, two opposite, individually exclusive ideas or opinions and believing in both simultaneously and absolutely. Doublethink requires using logic against logic or suspending disbelief in the contradiction. Clearly, this concept helps those in power who wish to impose its dictates on their ‘polis’ given that they can then use both truth and their own deception as instruments of their own power.

Without veering into clinical practice, it seems clear that only a person so desperate, weak and vulnerable, as well as frightened beyond the capacity of one’s body, mind and spirit to sustain the normal vicissitudes of human existence would even consider venturing into a space that imposes ‘doublethink’ on any ‘polis’.

And yet, here we are, living, supposedly in a western democracy, in a developed quadrant of the world, in nations (the U.S. and Canada) proudly claiming the highest level and spread of education in history, with the most advanced laboratories and the scientists to staff them, and with the most advanced abstract thinkers and philosophers and even theologians and ethicists in history, and yet we as a species are “falling through the cracks” in our own system.

It is not our ideology, per se, that we can point to as our Achilles’ heel; nor is it our capacity to write and enact laws; nor is it our capacity to plan and to assemble different points of view; nor is it whether we worship in a cathedral, synagogue, or mosque that determines our vulnerability; nor is it our capacity to design, invent and produce new machines, new technologies, new pharmacological interventions; nor is it our capacity to discern between right and wrong that brings about our current state of vulnerability.

We are, as a species, so embedded in both intellectual and operational files, that segregate each academic discipline from every other, that silo each “authority” figure from all other “authority” figures in disparate disciplines, and even permit, for  example, only women to speak about the issues facing women (mostly the result of the horrific behaviour and attitudes of men) and only men to speak and write about the issues facing men. If the political science department at one of the most highly valued post-secondary institutions of learning in the western world cannot even conceive of how “male” issues belong in that department, and if the education faculty of that same university cannot conceive of how Archetypal Psychology, for example, does not belong under their academic and structural roof, and if, for example, our pandemics (as well as our surging numbers of cancers, cardiac incidents, pollution indices, poverty indices, homeless indices, and our economic determinants like GDP, GNP, National Debt and Deficit) are not the consequence of both men and women participating in a gigantic game of willful deliberate, highly sophisticated power politics, including political correctness, class warfare, narcissism, short-term planning, and micro-managed conflicts that essentially endorse the issues deemed to be significant to the political class.

And that political class “rules” in each and every institution, and in every legislature, and in every town and city hall, as well as in every secondary school, elementary school, university, college, bank and hospital. And each of us risks “accepting” without protest, the implications of the agendas, including the processes designed to achieve the desired hierarchical agenda in each of the places we engage. Our personal power, as men and women, is never to be surrendered to the language, the whims, the agendas and the protocols of the powerful, simply because those are the expressed “wishes” of those in power.

And, especially in times when the truth is under siege, even so denigrated and rejected by so many millions of people, without bothering to question their own grasp of reality, and those aspects of reality that are being fed through “official” channels, as if they monopolized a shared reality, we must find our voices. And this voice is loudly shouting, even screaming, that men’s voices, both because too many men hold positions of power and influence in respect of our half of the population, and because men, in too many cases, have succumbed to the “compliance” of surrender and sacrifice, in order to ‘fit into” the specific hierarchy of our jobs and our institutions, have been relegated to the penalty box of our cultural memes.

In both political science, and in education, as well as in theology, philosophy, psychology and the arts, the voice of men need to be represented, formally and informally, not merely in the offices of the chief executives, the deans, the bishops and the principals, but in the academic departments, the lecture halls, and certainly in the elementary and secondary schools of North America. Men, for the most part, are providing not merely dysfunctional leadership through this COVID-19 crisis. Men have designed, built and sustained an economic system, and a political power structure and expectation that needs to be challenged, especially by men, Women are already seeing its structural erosion, and are crying out for change. Men, on the other hand, are clinging to the models of their own generation, and their own hold on power.

And given the current administrations in Washington, Toronto, Rome, Beijing, Moscow, London, Indonesia, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, it is long past time when the ways in which we think about how we are going to survive, or not, have to shift so dramatically, as to literally and metaphorically shake the very foundations of our civilization.

Inclusion, collaboration, co-operation, the paradox of the power of vulnerability, and the power of not knowing need to be so easily and readily embraced by men, and so swiftly that we cannot wait another week or another month for that embrace.

There are some male voices chanting hymns of hope, promise, inclusion, reconciliation and respect for all; their choir needs the voluntary inclusion of all males in position of leadership, in families, in town councils, provincial governments, and national administrations. And those males who choose complicity with the thugs calling themselves “heroes” need to be replaced by men and/or women whose vision and promise offer the hope of life for every human on the planet.

It is not only those speaking from public podiums who risk eviscerating their humanity by mouthing hollow words, concepts, beliefs and perceptions. There is an equal danger in raising generations of men whose voices have gone hollow and silent, while their words flow like angry lava over a culture drowning in their insouciant narcissism.

Monday, March 9, 2020

#56 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (transforming 'how we do business')


Mansplaining apparently occurs when a male, in a condescending manner is explaining something to a woman. Femsplaining, as the inverse, occurs when a feminist, also in a condescending manner explains something to a man.

Noa that these concepts have wormed their way into such publications as Daily Kos, there is a genuine danger that all debates between men and women will be categorized as man/fem-splaining, and the integral content of the explaining automatically morphs into another “gender-war-bullet”.

This it what occurred in a recent story in Daily Kos, reporting on an exchange between Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and Madame Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Gorsuch apparently in an attempt to justify a hands-off approach to gerrymandering by the Supreme Court, leaving the matter to the states, cited three or four amendments, in his haughty, arrogant, condescending manner. This manner, according to the report in Daily Kos, has become common and infuriating to others on the court and Madame Justice Ginsburg decided to cut Gorsuch’s argument into shreds.

 "Where did 'one person, one vote' come from?" she asked, rhetorically. Of course the answer is from Supreme Court precedent, where the court did indeed find the authority to weigh in. (quoted from Daily Kos, Community and Classics, March 8, 2020)
Naturally, Gorsuch remained silent for the remainder of the argument.
While I applaud the incisive interjection by Madame Justice Ginsburg, I deplore the reporter’s and the editor’s use of the word, mansplaining, thereby reducing arguments in the Supreme Court of the United States to another inevitable battle between men and women.
Just yesterday, appearing on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS on CNN, Hillary Clinton legitimately bemoaned the continuing disparity between men and women, without once mentioning how men might be brought into the conversation, both to legitimize the demands and aspirations of all women, and to give voice to the contemporary masculine perspective. Gorsuch, while admittedly a male, does not represent me or millions of other men, in his condescension to all members of the Supreme Court, including Madame Justice Ginsburg. His right-wing arguments on behalf of states rights, and the desired exclusion of the Supreme Court from all the various nefarious attempts to restrict voting to minority voters need not, indeed must not be categorized as just another “dumb, arrogant, male” in the proverbial, ubiquitous gender wars. Mansplaining, given the meaning that is attached to its use, as well as femsplaining, do not belong in a report on the words, arguments being deploying in the highest court of the land.
Reporting, and editing that sanctions the use of such derogatory, dismissive and outright weaponizing of the words chosen by the justice, even if the reporter disagrees with the position Gorsuch is articulating, only exacerbates the conflict between men and women, highlighting the female “put-down” at the expense of just another dunder-header, arrogant, supercilious and deeply condescending male.
If we are to accept such reporting as “factual” there is little reason to doubt the president when he screams, “fake news” if and when he senses his own defamation in the media.
The words, mansplaining and femsplaining do not belong in any report on the proceedings of the Supreme Court. In fact, they do not belong in a report on any public issue, safe and except those concerning the direct rights and responsibilities of men and women. Words do matter so much in fact that they undergird and foreshadow the pathways of our thoughts, attitudes, beliefs and eventually the culture in which we live.
Slipping into an “everyday way of going about our business” can be very dangerous. And the above slippage is only one of many we all need to confront.

In a March 5 edition of Slate, Mary Harris interviews Peter Daszak, a zoologist who works in China and runs the EcoHealth Alliance, on organization that studies the connections between human and wildlife health. As an expert on matters including the raging coronavirus, COVID-19, Daszak bluntly tells Harris,
 “I would say we are the cause of almost all  emerging diseases. (And when asked to explain) goes on:
We’re not doing it on purpose, but it’s our everyday way of going about business on the planet that seems to be driving this. The big things that drive these diseases are place on the planet where there’s lots of wildlife diversity, because they carry viruses, some of which can become pandemics in places where the human population is dense and growing. Because our contact with wildlife is higher, there’s more of a chance for viruses to get to us…
It’s the way we bump up against them. I’ve found that things like land use, change, deforestation, road building, mining and agriculture intensification are the reasons we push ourselves into wildlife habitat and get infected.
And when Harris asks why we are not hearing this kind of thinking and perceptions, Daszak’s answer seems to apply to more issues that the coronavirus:
We’ve got used to this idea that we’re in a reductionist strategy to deal with things. We find this virus. We learn everything about the molecules on the surface. WE have high-tech solutions to design vaccines and produce them. Truly, it all doesn’t work quickly enough to actually deal with an outbreak. These outbreaks are now moving in a matter of days. We saw cells emerge after two months and spread globally. This one took two weeks. We haven’t got time to develop vaccines and drugs quickly, But the public demands it and expects it.
Harris then poses a very frightening portrait: There are over a million viruses like the novel coronavirus out there. You’ve found 500 different coronaviruses in bats alone, but it took you 10 years to do that work.
Daszak: We need to do that on this scale so that we discover all the rest of those viruses. We need many more groups in many more regions doing this work. We then need to get those sequences we find into the hands of vaccine designers, because what’s the point in spending billions of dollars designing a vaccine to SARS if the virus that emerges this year is 20 percent different and the vaccine doesn’t work? Let’s have vaccines across the whole group. We’ve heard about the universal flu vaccine. Let’s have a universal coronavirus vaccine. Let’s have a universal Ebola Virus vaccine. I think that’s common sense.
When Harris details government resistance, virologist focus on a single vaccine, and manufacturers resistance because of cost, Daszak responds brilliantly, fundamentally and prophetically:
We need voices out there that advocate for dealing with pandemics as a process, not just individual pathogens. And it’s not just vaccines and drugs. We have the basic public health message of getting to rural communities that are building roads to new mining facilities and asking about building a clinic. As we think about a more sustainable approach to doing business, sustainability regarding our health and the environment should be part of it.

If ever there were a clarion call to human culture to transition from micro-management of the immediate crisis, Daszak’s voice is one worthy of our attention. Whether the crisis be viral, or environmental, or ethical or economic, it is clear that there is really no justification for separate boundaries given the overlap and the inter-dependence of all facets of human existence, in all corners of the planet. The political class, fixated as it is on the latest opinion poll numbers, (e.g. Trudeau’s popularity is down partly because of his response to indigenous blockades of rail lines, in support of the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs’ opposition to the Coastal Gaslink pipeline, while the Dow has languished over coronavirus, interest rates have dipped, oil prices are plunging and recession is looming) is paying attention to those matters they believe determine their own electability.

Just as there is no longer justification for segregation of issues from each other, so too there is no justification for our reporting on public issues to be isolated into those instant headlines that generate ratings. We are all enmeshed in the reductionism Daszak details over coronavirus. Only trouble is that the reductionisms pervade our public discourse. Isolating roads to new mines from the impact on wildlife, and the impact on the spread of viruses from those very animals and birds that are displaced by the new roads, cannot be reported on, analyses or editorialized about in a silo, especially given that the silo itself is constructed, funded and dependent on the investors of that very mine who seek their profit, without having to consider the “collateral damage” that mine will cause.

We can no longer use the word “collateral damage” in reference only to the deaths and injuries caused by bombs or missiles dropped from drones. Our complicity in the shaping of our culture “norms” has to be radically shaken. We can no longer sleep through the headlines, or through the talking heads’ conversations shaped and warped as they are by the corporate, financial, economic and profit-driven frenzy of those with the power of their wallets and their portfolios.

This profit-driven, reductionistic, competitive, and highly short-sighted mentality risks not only the emergence of more viruses, just as lethal or perhaps more lethal than COVIC-19, but also the rise of sea levels, the swamping of coastal cities, the plague of both drought and raging forest fires, not to mention the displacement of millions of human beings and the impact of their legitimate demand for food, water and health care and education.

Given that men have been “leading” the political debates in the west for centuries,  and given that dramatic shifts are not merely necessary, but actually urgently required, there will have to be a significant shift in the collective thinking of what it is to do our daily business. In some ways, the Bernie-Sanders-promised revolution is only a beginning when the longer-term survivability of the planet is considered.

Clinging to our immediate neuroses, in our personal "identity", as well as in our family lives, in our education and academic pursuits, and certainly in our public discourse, including the vernacular and the attitudes of our reporters, editorialists and thought-leaders, as Daszak reminds us, will only lead to more myopic, short-sighted, isolated and tragically counter-intuitive attitudes, decisions, policies and the reinforcement of a set of cultural norms that can be defined as “self-sabotaging.”

Having carved this circle with our shared “uroborus snake” mind and body, we are in danger of simply repeating this circle and digging it deeper making it even more difficult to move out of the comfortable and familiar path.

With trump, the whole political class was convinced that first he would not win, and then would not be the disaster he is, and now merely that he is a “character” as the American electorate slept through their own demise-threatening election of 2016. In a similar manner, the whole world risks falling into a similar, if not identical trap, of our own collective mind’s making.

John Milton in Paradise Lost, wrote these words in reference to the fall of Arch-Angel into the netherworld: (Book 1)

Farewell happy Fields
Where Joy forever dwells: Hail horrours hail,
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new possessor: one who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heaven of Hell a Hell of Heaven

Are we in danger of risking the bounty, and the beauty of this globe through our perverted sense of importance, our fixation on our own immediate ‘time-frame’ and our narcissistic addiction to the pursuit of “filthy lucre” as the defining motive of our time?

Editor's Note:
For those thinking that by ascribing most responsibility for re-thinking our approach to mining roads, and our relationship to wild life, to men, I am mistakenly doing precisely what I complained about in the Daily Kos article, that is rendering public issues to another chapter of the gender war, I respectfully submit that, the Ginsburg quote was legitimate as a point of a legal argument, and reported as a put-down of Gorsuch, effectively an ad hominum attack. Ginsburg, I am confident, was not  using an ad hominum attack. Secondly, the issue of resource development etc. is a broad social issue, undertaken primarily by men, in pursuit of profit. And it is this exclusive profit motive that I am urging to be moderated by those men in the forefront of the initiative.

Friday, March 6, 2020

#55 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (Reflections on Warriors and Wanderers)


Yesterday in the food court of the local mall, I saw a mid-thirties man wearing a black t-shirt on which were emblazoned the words:

               “A warrior is an ordinary man with a laser focus”

Mankind, the non-profit offering training in leadership and connection to men around the world, now operating in at least 13 countries according to their website, prominently displays the word “warrior” and markets exciting and transformative weekend retreats for men. Testimonials abound about how the experience has made “me a different man” now able to relate more completely and effectively with family, spouse, co-workers and oneself. Telling the truth, making only promises that can and will be kept, listening actively and empathetically to the loved ones in a man’s life, and offering interventions, suggestions, recommendations and coaching in a respectful, and mutually accepted manner, without over-powering another….these are all very appropriate guideposts for all men.

Similarly, self-confidence, and leadership training to seek and to find the best in everyone, and then working supportively to help others to release their ‘highest self’ is such a highly needed and valued quality among men, especially when masculinity is finding so many opportunities to be ridiculed; the most obvious ridicule of healthy masculinity is the U.S. president.

Full disclosure: I have never attended and Mankind retreat, workshop or leadership training session.

Also, I want to uphold all efforts by men to uphold other men, to embrace healthy masculinity if all of its many forms, and to build a male-bond that embraces the globe. Male leaders especially, are under extreme pressure to hold fast to a vastly outmoded masculinity that values all of the symbols and the mythologies and the weapons of hard power, military might, athletic prowess, male sexuality. Disdaining weakness, sacrifice, self-effacement, modesty, humility and especially emotional sensitivity and sensibility, many men remain locked in the concrete cell of a stereotype that is not sustainable and even life-threatening.

As far back as 1986, Carol Pearson wrote The Hero Within, in which she documented the warrior archetype, for both men and women. Here are some of her words:

What do warriors learn? First, they learn to trust their own truths and act on them with absolute conviction in the face of danger. To do so, moreover, it is necessary for them to take control of, and responsibility for their own lives….To identify oneself as a Warrior is to say, “I am responsible for what happens here,” and “I must do what I can to make this a better world for myself and for others. It also requires Warriors to claim authority, that they have a right to assert what they want for themselves and for others. Warriors learn to trust their own judgement about what is harmful and, perhaps most important, they develop the courage to fight for what they want or believe in, even when doing so requires great risk—the loss of a job, mate, friends, social regard, or even their very lives.
Eventually, if they do not regress to find refuge in dogmatism and become tyrants, they also will develop flexibility and humility. All the liberating truths, by themselves, fail! They fail partly because each is just part of the truth; all of us are like the proverbial blind men, each feeling one part and trying to describe a whole elephant.
The hero ultimately learn not the content per se but a process. The process begins with an awareness of suffering, then moves to telling the story and an acknowledgment to oneself and to others that something is painful. Then comes the identification of the cause of that pain and taking appropriate action to stop it. The hero replaces the absolutist belief that in slaying one dragon we solve all problems for all time with a belief that we continue slaying dragons our entire lives. He or she learns that the more we slay, the more confident we become, and therefore the less violent we have to be….The stronger and more confident Warriors become, the less they must use violence, the more gentle they can be—with themselves and others. Finally, they need not define the other as villain, opponent, or potential convert, but as another hero like themselves. (Carol Pearson, The Hero Within, Harper San Francisco, 1986, p. 84-5)

A little later, Pearson writes cautionary words for men:

When agency is separated from care, it becomes will, domination. This is the primary danger of warrioring for men…..(M)any men move into warrioring prematurely when they really still are at the narcissistic Orphan stage and only later begin to see the importance of caring for others….(Men) who have integrated care and sacrifice into their lives can fight for their country, their company or their family but sometimes not truly for themselves. Indeed, that the hero traditionally has been cast as male and the victim as female holds dangers for both men and women. While women may fear the presumption of stepping into the heroic role, men may identify their heroism solely in terms if protecting and rescuing others—especially women and children—while they neglect the captive victim in themselves: men, they believe, are not supposed to need rescue. Neither men noir women can fight intelligently for themselves unless they have taken the  time, as Wanderers, to find out who they are and what they want. (Pearson, op. cit, p 86-7)

Without in any way wishing to cast doubt on programs for men by groups like Mankind, I have a couple of observations of caution. First, in the most broad and un-nuanced language of public discourse, including that of marketing, public relations, political debate and even public consciousness seeping into our collective unconscious, the very word “warrior” is radioactive. Thinking that public figures are elevating public debate into a zero-sum game, in which there can only be winners and losers, and then applying that template to everything they (we) do, severely limits our options. First, whatever “war” it is we are engaged in demands a full-out life-death commitment, given that losing is socially humiliating, demeaning and worthless, rendering the loser almost worthless in today’s parlance.

Such desperation poured like white-hot lave from the mouth of Brett Cavanagh in his confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court, when he, under orders from the Supreme Leader, burst forth in a barrage of invective against Democrats, including the Clintons, and those questioning his account of that night in high school. The evidence from Dr. Blasey-Ford, while compelling and riveting, nevertheless, was insufficient to block his confirmation.

To sew the seed of “warrior” into the minds and heart of especially young people of both genders, is to risk pushing them to an totally unnecessary brink in their own lives, if “loser” is the single perceived option to any conflict.

Another observation about the “warrior” goal, regardless of how ambitious, ethical, and heroic it may be, concerns the step of “wandering” or even being lost, or in confusion, or abandoned or even outcast, in a culture that quite literally demands instant gratification as a needed step to the healthy warrior. Wanderers, as epitomized by the Gethsemane experience remembered and re-enacted in this Lenten period, are not nearly as idolized or idealized in our culture, except in serious dramas in which serious issues begging life choices take hold of an individual. Given that the Wanderer archetype is both difficult and highly demanding as a challenge to everyone, and given the culture’s tilting toward almost instant “success,” it might be relevant to review the Wanderer’s dilemma and the potential gift of taking this path, especially for men who eschew long-term solutions and processes, in our preference for “action, now”!

Pearson’s words might be helpful to each of us here:

Jean Auel’s bestselling novel, Clan of the Cave Bear, portrays and Wanderer’s dilemma, Ayla, one of the first home sapiens, is swimming one day when an earthquake kills her whole tribe. She is only five. Wandering alone for days, she finally is picked up by Iza, the Medicine Woman of the Clan. The Clan, we learn, are humans, but of a different species. They have phenomenal memories but are not very good at abstract thinking or problem solving. They also have absolutely rigid, patriarchal sex role patterns. Deviation on critical points is punishable by death but the patterns by now are so genetically encode4d that no one in the Clan even thinks of deviation anymore.
The tension between the desire for growth, for mastery, for pushing the limits of one’s capacity to achieve versus pone’s desire to please and fit in is a quintessential Wanderer’s dilemma. Ayla’s story is illustrative of it. She is strikingly different from the people around her and they fear her difference. So does she, because it threatens her survival, which is dependent—when she is a child—upon pleasing the Clan. To find herself, she must leave the people she most loves so that she can stop compromising to please them.
The most important difference Ayla feels is her capacity for androgyny. She is capable of performing both male and female tasks, and she is curious enough to want to learn everything she can. She resolves her dilemma by conforming when with the Clan, but when she is alone she secretly teachers herself to hunt.
When Ayla’s ability to hunt inevitably is discovered, her punishment is to be declared dead. Usually, Clan who are pronounced dead actually die, so strong is their belief in the declaration. But there is a provision in Clan mythology that, if a person comes back from the dead after a certain number of “moons,” he or she can be accepted into the tribe. That means Ayla has to survive on her own for a long time—and in winter. On her own means dealing with not only physical survival but also the emotional crisis of learning to trust her own sense of the Clan’s reality: They said she would be dead; she thinks (but us not sure) she is alive….
When she comes back, she is accepted. She very much want to be part of the Clan again, for she has been dreadfully lonely, yet the experience of making it on her own has made her even more confident and therefore less malleable and more independent of Clan mores…..(M)aking an absolute choice for ourselves and our own integrity even if it means being along and unloved is the prerequisite for heroism and ultimately for being able to love other people while remaining autonomous. It is essential for creating the proper boundaries so that we can see the difference between ourselves and another person—so that we will not have to objectify them to know ourselves and what we want….When we find work…that expresses our souls, we find ourselves by what we bring into being. The Wanderer’s quest, then, also is about agency, productivity, creativity. (Pearson, op. cit. pps. 68-69-70-71)

What is going on for your scribe here is the tension between the public vocabulary of such words as “warrior” and “wanderer” in a culture in which the denotative meaning of words almost erases the connotative meanings. We are living at a time when layers of meaning, especially of words that are heavily freighted with being ‘hot-buttons’ tend to lose much of their intonation, their overtones, and their complexity. And in a culture in which reading and writing are being supplanted by 240-character-tweets, (or less) the dangers of reductivity into mere headlines of concepts that demand their being written and inscribed into the psyches (and the minds and hearts, and then into the value systems and operational impulses) of millions, especially men to whom these pieces are intended, I trust these cautions are read and accepted in the spirit in which they are proferred.

A culture which relegates complexity in human beings and especially in human relations to “experts” risks abandoning the very hard and potentially highly productive inner work of “getting to know who I am” and the even more subtle and imaginative work of discerning if and when to interject, to speak or listen, to smile or frown, to walk away or to stay and let in those thoughts, words, attitudes and perceptions that come to us a “strangers” in the night. Reducing to shibboleths, or more seriously to “bullets” in a list to learn, repeat and discuss with others, such notions as the warrior, the wanderer, androgyny, and the pain of not knowing, while paradoxically attempting to find one’s singular path, could be the most destructive approach one might find and take.

For a few “irritants” and discomforts, there are a few chemical relievers. For the process of becoming a healthy, hearty, full-throated and fully engaged male, no such pills will suffice, Thankfully! Naturally, the rewards of a more comprehensive and complex journey also far outweigh the immediate relief of those pain-killers, the need for which will inevitably return.

Wednesday, March 4, 2020

#54 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (Men in tribes)


Humans have been clustering around fire, water, earth and the sky from the beginning. And our observations, not only of those shared universal elements, but also of ourselves, have contributed to mountains of theories, speculations, religious ideas and practices, as well as social and familial traditions and the moral and ethical cornerstones on which each “tribe’s” values rest.

Languages that emulate the sounds of nature, as “we” heard them, as well as hunting and gathering strategies and tactics “indigenous” to specific surroundings, have become rooted not only in the history of each tribe, but have been conveyed to the “outside” world, often researched and written by outsiders, with barely a glimpse of the fullness of the reality of their subjects. Cultural anthropology, as one pillar of how people come to behave, to think, to pray/prey, and to relate competes with, among others, academic theories of sociobiology, advocated by the renown biologist Edmund Wilson. Nature versus nurture debates have abounded for generations in the halls of academe.

Abstractions, however, readily file themselves into rather ‘neat and tidy’ pictures, graphs, theories, theses and lectures, not to mention books and documentaries. The Samoan culture, for which Margaret Mead’s early picture as a romantic, loving and peaceful tribe has served as an early window on a western perception of an indigenous tribe. Her intellectual opponent, Freeman of Australia, refuted her view, after allegedly interviewing Samoan men as well as Samoan women, and depicted Samoan culture as much less idyllic, romantic and peaceful and Mead’s earlier portrait. It is now conceivable that neither name, Mead or Freeman, is even mentioned in contemporary anthropology classes in western academic centres, in a denigration (denial? or avoidance?) similar to the one imposed on Carl Jung by many academic institutions.

So any venture through the doors of academic research into the values and troubles of tribes, as is the approach to so many disciplines, needs a disciplined openness, scepticism and receptivity to doubt, to further digging, and to enhanced integration, not rejection, of opposing perspectives. Given that “cultural” studies is among the latest vogue in “interdisciplinary” studies at modern universities, one wonders about the “tilt” in academic faculties’ balancing of opposing, yet vigorously and reliably reasoned and argued, views.

Here, from a more detached perch, the question of the relative importance of “tribe” and belonging to a tribe over one’s global citizenship is at issue. We have all personal history, stories, events, doctors, teachers, mentors, perhaps clergy and peers from our respective tribal roots. Not only have the individual people shaped  us, but so too has the compendium of each of their attitudes, values, beliefs, and notions of what constitutes the way one “ought” to live. Integrated deeply and inextricable into the minds and hearts of each of our personal totems (mentors, teachers and role models) are the institutions whose larger life spans more of the history of each respective “tribe” and culture than those individuals.

Laws, rules, social expectations, based on some a priori “insemination” of ideas, beliefs, practices and collective “consciousness” and “unconsciousness” (tipping our hat to Jung) have been passed along, across the kitchen tables, across the space between pulpit and pew, over the desk in the doctor’s office, and through our willing and eager attendance at movies, entertainment and athletic events and visits to our local libraries and museums. The question of whether our “education” is more a “conservation” of the stabilizing forces/factors of our tribe, or a “revolution” to those forces/factors is another of the dynamics to which we have been exposed. In ‘conservative’ tribes, for example, banning Margaret Laurence’s novels, because they contained scenes of human sexuality, generated street protests by those whose social, political and religious views were more open, receptive and encouraging of ‘exposing’ adolescents to reality.


Similarly, in today’s river of news, public friction has arisen in some tribes (towns, cities, newspapers, board rooms and lawyers’ offices) over the question of whether palliative care institutions such as hospices advocate for, support and counsel their  patients on the nuances of assisted dying. Naturally, those communities in which the Roman Catholic church has a substantial base, oppose any support for the new laws. Known in Ontario as (MAiD), Medical Assistance in Dying. In one Ontario town (the diminutive as opposed to city), North Bay, the fact that fund raising has occurred based on a public assumption that MAiD would be supported, advocated and enshrined in the Serenity Hospice, and the board of that hospice has voted to reject MAiD and all it stands for, has generated considerable public debate. Some are asking that their funding donations be returned, generating the spectre that the hospice might close for lack of funding.

Religious convictions regularly conflict with what others consider the larger public good, given that a principle of perfection (opposition to all forms of human induced death like abortion, assisted dying) takes precedence over the question of what is appropriate, and thereby considered ethical and moral, in the life of a specific, unique, and autonomous human being. Voicing those religious convictions, by parish clergy, their presiding bishops, and eventually the Pontiff himself, provides a microphone for the institution behind which there are multiple human faces, giving voice to what the institution considers the ‘voice and will of God’ on this issue. Such religious (and they are understood to be holy, ethical, moral and spiritual) views, comprise the identifying glue, and the rallying totem around which adherents to that institution/view can and do rally. The Right to Life movement is alive and well in most if not all towns and cities in Ontario and while a woman’s right to choose has become an integral part of Canadian law, as well as in the United States, (Roe v. Wade) there are growing voices raising dollars, and appointing judges (especially in the U.S.) dedicated to removing a woman’s right to choose from the tribe’s culture.

From the beginning, questions around human sexuality have been the vortex of debate, laws, expectations and definitions of what comprises human morality, in the tribe. And a woman’s reputation for centuries has been intimately linked to her “virginity” (or its disappearance), given the long-standing view that the highest “example” of human morality was a woman’s virginity, while at the same time, a man’s ‘conquest’ was considered a sign of his maturation. At the convergence of the masculine and the feminine, not only in procreation, but in the rhythms and drives of nature, tribes have struggled with how to “tame the wildness” of human sexuality. And religious institutions have been no more successful in their attempts to dominate and control its expression than have “tribes” of monks, nuns, ascetics, philosophers and prophets.

Love, the highest of human aspirations, is also at the centre of all ‘visions’ of sexuality, regardless of the specific sexual preference of any individual. Family, too, is another of the highly respected and valued totems in most tribes. So individual humans grow up in a petrie dish of family values, encompassed by those proximate influences of local institutions and rituals. Slowly, yet relentlessly, we all encounter people from cultures, tribes, religions and political ideologies that differ from our own, with each of these tribes also supported by the forces that have birthed and nurtured each of these tribes.

Books, classroom practices, movies, newspapers, television and radio dissemination inculcate the tribe’s ethos, values and principles. Teachers, lawyers, doctors, accountants and social workers all work to embody and to fit into the parameters of the tribe, most of them basing their existence on the support, both financial and moral they derive from their tribe. One personal anecdote from a well-known tribal social worker when I had contravened a tribal expectation: “Why were you so stupid as to cross that line here?” His critique was more about my stupidity than my infraction, disclosing his contempt for the moral boundary and his willing, yet very private and previously undisclosed, counsel for my innocent “stupidity.” One can assume that crossing a line, for him, was acceptable so long as one was not “found out” by the tribe.

And, to his credit, the tribal “lines” and expectations are rigid and rigidly enforced, not merely by the “justice” system, in the literal. The parenting structures, obligations and practices in any community are enacted by the authority “symbols” regardless of their specific titles and contractual obligations. So, one’s safety and security, one presumes in early life, is “protected” by the tribe, so long as one adheres to the strict dictates of the tribe.

Ironically and paradoxically, those tribal “expectations” are also constricting, limiting, and reductionistic, given the propensity for the tribe’s hubris to impose what amount to character assassination to the “outsider” who refuses to conform.  Protection always comes at a cost, and the cost can be extremely high. Whether one refuses to conform to the tribe of  the church, or the corporation, or the team, or the regiment/battalion, or even the family (literally, or metaphorically) one can expect reprisals far in excess of the deviance.

It is the tribe, certainly in my experience, that turns on its “outsider” even if that outsider is desperately in need of support, especially if and when that outsider needs support. The man in rags in the church pew can count on contemptuous, if clandestine, looks from many of the eyes in the sanctuary. The young woman who is struggling with a pregnancy, or who is struggling with her biological identity knows better than to seek support and wise counsel, including an appreciation of the range of options, from a religious authority in the tribe, whether Roman Catholic or evangelical. (Members of Jewish or Muslim faiths will know better about their tribes’ effective access to rabbi or imam.)

And so, as men inculcated in a tribe’s values, principles, institutions and practices, we know deeply how we are expected to perform. Earn a good income from work with dignity, marry a wonderful young woman, have a stable family of responsible children, protect and respect our parents and grandparents, and “colour inside the lines” in everything we do….these are just some of the guidelines. Of course, we can and are encouraged to be competitive, rising to the highest echelons of accomplishment and respect of our peers, enjoying global vacations and adventures, associating with the elites in our profession/community/tribe…as a way of not merely vetting the values of the tribe, but as a way of preserving and enhancing its future.

And so, the life of the tribe, as far as it is incorporated into our personal lives, is a high value in our life. Not only that, adherence to its people, principles, values and education of our children in its values consumes most of our energy. What is good for our tribe (family within the tribe, school, competitions inside the tribe, and success in engagements with other tribes) is highly valued.

And then there is the overarching cloud on the horizon, wondering more vehemently and loudly every hour:

How does my tribe integrate into the wider world of multiple tribes, multiple faiths, multiple ethnicities, and multiple histories…especially when each of those tribes need the same air, water, land, food, and opportunity as my family and tribe need?

Aphorisms like the one propagated not that long ago, “Think globally, act locally” attempt to bridge the gap between the tribe and the planet. Are they effective? One has to judge minimally. Travel, and Babbel, as well as digital technology have opened doors and windows into the lives of people everywhere in real time, and in real distress.

So overwhelmed are we with the tidal wave of information, most of it curated in the same cultural, social and racial and religious vessels and programming packages in which we (and the reporters, talking heads, and even film makers) were raised, that we are really been fed a diet and menu of repeated archetypes, that do not even attempt to scratch the surface of the totems of tribes who could open our eyes to new perspectives, new options and new ways of co-habiting.

We have become so ensconced in our “colonial” mindset, without even peering out of the rabbit holes in which we seek comfort and refuge, that we face the quite legitimate prospect that our tribe’s future no longer depends on the “protection” we thought it offered.

In fact, our tribe’s survival depends on the survival of every other tribe on the planet and our predisposition to rape and pillage the natural resources of those locations where tribes still living outside the “western” consciousness, without their consent, threatens not only the very existence of those tribes, but in the longer run, the survival of our own tribe.

Making peace is not a slogan for the signboard in front of a public school reading: Kindness always. Making peace stretches far beyond that. It involves telling ourselves those truths to which we have become blind, and to which we give unquestioned loyalty, adherence and even worship, without recognizing their short-term, minimal and unsustainable impact. Tribalism easily morphs into nationalism, without a fist or a shout raised in protest. And underlying those control motives of the tribal “elders” who imposed their will on the sons and daughters of their tribe, as demonstrated in many local churches, local pubs and local hospitals and court rooms was a profound and under-recognized fear of loss of that control.

And our penchant for complying with the elders’s espousal of excessive mechanisms of control, as our default position that offers “a good-guy” reputation, and a potential promotion, risks our capacity to stretch our imaginations into the potential of collaborative, collegial and even planetary processes, structures, relationships and strategies that are dedicated to the healthy survival of multiple generations of our children and grandchildren.

As men, we have a lot of learning, adopting and revising our perceptions of our important place and effective roles in playing a significant part in the evolution of our human drama, so that it continues to evolve from tribalism and the concomitant narcissism and selfishness, to a more sustainable empathy, altruism and sacrifice of our highly inflated “power” dependence.

Monday, March 2, 2020

#53 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (Letter to Bill, my mentor)


Letter to W.H.G. (mentor)
Dear Bill:

I have so many moments to say thanks to you for that this meagre attempt will fall far short of what you deserve!

Your demeanour, that of the happy camper, the happy observer, the understated and under-appreciated intellect, trained in both philosophy and law, will always be stored in my moving pictures of mentors, heroes and friends. Your immediate openness to my request to join you in your office, as a mere undergraduate before I had even graduated and enrolled in law school never ceases to amaze me.

Your generosity of mind, heart and spirit was never an abstraction; it always took physical form! It always meant something authentic and concrete to another. Your adoption of children without a home, not always of your race or creed, shone like a beacon, a lighthouse on a shore of cold unforgiving granite, the town where you practiced law and where I attempted to grow up. Your hiring of First Nation individuals ripped apart the veil of separation and segregation that hung over the history of the town. It provided hope for the more dispossessed and the most ostracized. Your capacity to work with a variety of personalities, not all of them easily suited to accommodation with each other, including my own, and to accept them for their unique and positive contributions, at times when they were not always on an even keel, demonstrated an understanding, a compassion and a confidence that speaks volumes to those whose birthplace was your chosen home.

Your absorption of the beauty of Georgian Bay, with its winds, sunrises and sunsets, its changing seasons and magnetic power to attract others from across the globe served as a barometer of your largesse of spirit, imagination, intellect and of your connectedness to God and the universe. While you never knew where the files were, as soon as someone found them, you knew intimately all the details within their documents, including the dates significant for their processing in court or registry office, or the labour hearings, or the council or board meetings to which you were expected to speak on behalf of a client. Your easy command of the most  minute, but significant, details and your ability to separate those significant from those less relevant left me, and I am sure others, in awe of your grasp, partly because it seemed to effortless so graceful and so natural.

You always asked the right questions, whenever you prepared to meet a client, or whenever you prepared me to enter into any file. You always set me up for success and celebrated with me when, to my surprise, I found it, no matter how small. You always appreciated where God had made it possible for you to live, and always were amazed that others, even if they numbered in the millions, would choose Toronto as their residence. While driving across the 401on the way to your appearance at the Ontario Supreme Court, you exclaimed, “Why would all these people live here?” as your new scarlet, push-button drive Plymouth moved among the morning traffic.

Your confidence in me, and in my capacity to become a lawyer, never satisfactorily demonstrated in grades to those admission gate-keepers in law faculties, always surprised me. I am not sure if you were the most generous person alive, of if there were some aspect of my being to which I had not been introduced, that you were able to see and to celebrate. Perhaps, it was a little of both. Nevertheless, I am humbled and grateful for the opportunity to know you and to work with you and to learn from you and to celebrate your hope and confidence in the Liberal Party of Canada, an institution that has seen both high’s and low’s over the last half century plus.

Your political life included, not only active membership in the Liberal Party, but also the “chair” of the “yes” vote on serving alcohol with meals in one of the last such plebescites in Ontario  in 1961. Your leadership of the movement was another act of compassion, moderation and good judgement, dedicated as it was, not to the immoderate consumption of the ‘demon rum,’ as the prohibitionists would have it, but rather to the proposition of moderation itself, in that while enjoying the dining offerings of the various local outlets, one might also share a drink of wine prior to or with the meal. This custom, a global expression of an evolved civilization, was not a common visitor to our town, like other symbols of an evolved culture. I am confident that without your leadership, characterized as it was by integrity, modesty vision and deep understanding of both the potential for abuse and the potential for moderate implementation, the vote would not have succeeded.

You were not only bringing access to alcohol to the tables of the dining rooms where people went out to eat; you were also introducing a new perspective to the people of the town, in your characteristic understated manner.

It was your capacity for understatement, for subtle appreciation of the nuances that found expression in the lives of your peers that illustrated your subtle and sensitive perception along with the refinement of your capacity to find meaning and motive. Your observation that “at that house when we are invited to dinner, we are always expected to bring a dish, whereas when any of the others invite us to dinner, we are never expected to bring anything” calmly details the lack of generosity of that host, without rancor or bitterness, but with your usual clarity. Travelling in the social company of professionals, all of whom could well afford to feed their guests, you were making a significant observation about that “society”.

Lawyers in our town, in the late fifties and early sixties, were not usually members of a service club, except for you as a member of Lions. Here also your iconoclastic understated approach to the affairs of the town kept you in touch with men and women of various vocations, lifestyles and points of view.

Your wry observations about anyone who demonstrated pretensions in any way, including some in your own profession, never lacked the humour of the satirist nor the edge of the social critic.  Your confidence in your own credentials and qualifications likely enabled your willingness never to let their pretensions go unnoticed or unchallenged, although never to the detriment or debasement of another person, including especially your clients. Your subtle observations, those of the literate, intellectual, detached, ironic observer came from a well of experiences with murderers, thieves, other offenders mostly petty, and mostly I would believe, whose lives emerged from circumstances that defied credulity,  compassion and empathy.

You took their cases long before the existence of legal aid, for fees often never paid, because you knew that they needed representation and yet could not afford to pay. It is not surprising that the Ontario Conservative government selected you to inaugurate the legal aid office in our town. Who else could have been their choice? It is also not surprising that the same Conservative government selected you as one of the recipients of the then lauded stature of Queen’s Counsel (Q.C.). And later in your career, you were also honoured to be considered, if you would agree, to be appointed to a judgeship. But since you would have had to leave your home on the shore of Georgian Bay, you respectfully declined.

You even graciously asked my opinion about that offer. Naturally, I spoke in favour of your acceptance, because I believed then, and still do today, long after you are deceased, that you would have provided a level of balance, sound judgement and the critical ingredient of  challenging the existing boundaries fo the law by pushing the envelop to the limits of its possibilities, leaving us with a more humane, more ethical, more tolerate and sustainable justice system. But you declined. And I, for one, can attest to the warp such an appointment would have placed on your lifestyle.

My gratitude for your allowing me to accompany you along your way for a few years knows no bounds. I am thankful that you entered fully into dialogue with me about anything and everything that a twenty-something curious mind might seek to explore. 

It has been those many conversations, debates, including your “presence” that have so shaped my life affirming my openness to new experiences that can only bring new awareness, new perspectives and thereby “new life” in the real sense of those words.
And the unmistakable scent of your Wakefield tobacco rising from one of your many pipes will always bring back your kind face and even kinder smile, as I pay frequent visits to our time together. Thank you for being my adopted uncle, father, and friend.

With love,
jta