Global Conferences in 2021...retreading the past, or renewing our shared future?

According to the Council on Foreign Relations’ Council of Councils website, there is a list of 10 upcoming summits in 2021 that will require the undiluted attention of the new Biden administration. From the list which includes NATO Summit, The U.S.--EU Summit, the Summit for Democracy, The WTO, The UN General Assembly, the G20, there are two conferences that leap out for special attention.

The UN Convention of Biological Diversity COP15 will be hosted by the Chinese government. The conference is “billed as a New Deal for Nature and People, to guide their individual and collective efforts to protect biodiversity through 2030. A slew of alarming reports has documented a dramatic decline in species and ecosystem, thanks not only to climate change but also to the degradation of land-and seascapes, unsustainable exploitation, invasive species, and pollution. These assaults on nature undermine the planetary foundations of sustainable development and, indeed of, global capitalism itself. Biden can help bend the curve of biodiversity loss by endorsing the “30 by 30” campaign to protect 30% of Earth’s land and sea from human exploitation.”

The second conference on which we wish to shed light, is another form of alphabet soup: UNFCCC COP 26. This is the twenty-sixth Conference of the Parties (COP26) on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (and) will be the most important summit of 2021. Leaders will meet in Scotland (Glasgow) to review progress in implementing the 2015 Paris Agreement, which commits parties to holding the rise in average global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius, including by ‘ratcheting up’ their initial, nationally determined contributions toward this goal. Unfortunately, reaching the Paris target will require reduce greenhouse gas emissions 7.2 percent per year through 2030, and the world—despite the pandemic-induced recession--is nowhere close to this trajectory….The credibility of (Biden’s) U.S. leadership…will depend on whether he can persuade Congress to fund deep decarbonization at home. (from the CFR/council of councils.org website)

All ten of the scheduled conferences/summits will obviously take place in a geopolitical ethos of considerable turbulence from the COVID-19 pandemic, the continuing attempts globally to vaccinate up to 70% of the world’s population, as well as the pressure of millions of individuals and businesses that have no or highly constricted incomes. Into that political-cultural blender, add the concept that billionaires like Jeff Bezos have topped earnings by billions just since the inception of the virus, underlining inequality, racial discrimination, and social unrest in many locations, likely including the United States.

Pouring the foundation of credibility with Congress, however, will be only a small part of the Biden administration’s agenda. It will also have to build even stronger foundations of credibility and trust among world leaders, their governments, their military leaders and their citizens. Back in 2015, in a report on international co-operation, the Council on Foreign Relations noted that ad-hoc agreements between and among businesses, municipal leadership, all of them seemingly under the radar, were eclipsing those headline-grabbers of national leaders appearing before the international press cameras to sign significant treaties. Former Mayor of New York, Mike Bloomberg, for example, poured millions into the implementation of the Paris climate Agreement, as surrogate for his defaulting, MIA homeland, the U.S.A.

The landscape of international relationships, co-operation, collaboration and the trust and security that would potentially emerge from such summits and their agreements, has been seriously and negatively eroded by the American trump administration. America’s ‘word’ is besmirched with the legacy of a lying autocrat whose need for enemies and the verbal missiles to attack them at home and abroad super-ceded his dedication to fulfilling his constitutional obligations. In short, the world is a far less safe, and a far less trusting place in 2021 than it was in 2016 when he took office.

In that four-year period, too, China has been virtually unfettered in its militarization of the South China sea, its detention of Uighers and the removal of their human rights, its aggressive alignment and marketing of Huawei, (although rebuffed by many developed nations, save and except Canada so far), and its two-year detention of two Canadians, allegedly in reprisal for the arrest in Canada of Huawei’s CFO, under the extradition treaty with the U.S. Tariffs imposed reciprocally by the U.S. and China also clouded the trading environment of international relations. The birth of the COVID-19 virus, allegedly in a fresh-meat market in Wuhan China, at the same time the U.S. had withdrawn observers to the bio-lab in that city, has also left lingering scepticism in some quarters about the trustworthiness of the Chinese government.

Cyber-theft, hacking, and the incursion of foreign agents into the cyber-security systems of the U.S. government and business behemoths, has and will continue to contribute to the process of inevitable erosion of international trust, and the needed stage for negotiations that could lead to enhanced co-operation in this field. The social media landscape now alleged to be filled with rampant evidence, for example, of the forecast violence at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday January 6th, evidence that was apparently either missed or ignored by those charged with protecting the building and the legislators and their staffs, offers little public confidence in the mammoth national security systems that have been constructed and enhanced following the terrorist attack of 9/11.

Ranking the threats to the survival and wellness of liberal democracy, nevertheless, now has to encompass the existential threat posed by our linked invasion of habitats of wild animals and our insouciant pollution of the atmosphere with toxic gas emissions. Millions have already contracted and thousands have died from COVID-19. And while there are some 24 COVID-19 vaccines in development, the persistent ravaging of habitats in favour of developmental projects like mining and resource extraction continues to pose a threat of additional viruses. The WHO for its part, too, has declared that the current pandemic is ‘not the big one’ that it is a warning flag for the “big one” which is still out there on the conceivable horizon. Also, even the current virus is witnessing mutations, (who knows how many?) and the evidence so far indicates that both the UK variant and the South African variant prove to be more infectious, more easily and readily spread, if they are not yet indicating they are more lethal. So far, preliminary evidence suggests that both Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine and Moderna’s vaccine are effective in combatting the variants. Will those conditions continue? No one is or can be certain. So, while the world combats the immediate threat to lives, livelihoods, health care systems including health care workers, as well as the growing concern for pockets of patients in long term care homes, and essential workers in transportation, food processing and harvesting, education and law enforcement and public safety, curfews are like rolling cheers in sports stadia, in both Europe and North America.

Shifting the human demand for meat-generated protein, while evidence of both plant-based substitutes and genetically produced replicas continues to grow, poses a considerable shift in the culture of both east and west. However, there is much to ponder in the insightful remark of a Korean dentist, an immigrant to Canada, who uttered words that warrant repeating: “It would seem that humans have progressed too far and much too quickly and mother nature is not pleased.” Our shared, as well as our individual, relationship to/with/beside/inside/in dominance of nature simply has to change. And while those words are plucked easily on a laptop keyboard, they are far less easily and far less feasibly accomplished in any country. This is a mountain all humans have to embrace as our responsibility to climb. And those blue and green boxes carted to the end of our driveways every week, to better manage our garbage (even though Canadians are told that a mere 10% of that recycled material is diverted from landfill sites, leaving 90% still ending up in those archaic environmental legacies), are but a band-aid in the much larger quest to impede our garbage production and its permanent residues like leeching, air pollution, and the obvious waste. Recent reports indicate that a full 50% of all food purchased in Canada is thrown into the garbage. The cliché “we are all in this together” has no more direct application than in the manner in which we source our food, use and prepare our food, and then discard far too much. And the goal of a “New Deal for people and for Nature” is not only urgent and complex; achieving such an arrangement holds the promise of secure food supplies, and limited virus explosions for future generations. We will be watching the UN Convention on Biological Diversity COP15, to usher in new and stringent, monitored, enforceable and tolerable changes to how each nation feeds its people, and how we reduce the human devastation of animal habitats globally.

Common to the biodiversity new deal is the notion of the human conception and perception and thereby the relationship we enact between ourselves as ‘nature’. That old testament concept of “dominion” over the earth simply has to give way to a very different frame. We have to see ourselves as grateful stewards of both flora and fauna… of oceans, seas, rivers, streams and ocean floors as well as forests, farms, factories and our shared oxygen resource. Following the Paris Agreement, the UNFCCC COP 26 conference in Glasgow could prove to be as instrumental in signalling the future of the planet’s ecosystems as any previously held. All of the benefits and targets that have been reached by various countries will, undoubtedly be trumpeted. So too, one expects, will all of the missed deadlines and the relevant measures to encourage, nudge, incentivize, condition and to threaten with sanctions nations to commit not only to the continuing clean air and water and land for their own people, but, cumulatively and collaboratively, thereby to the continued preservation of the planet’s natural resources. The nay-sayers, those who continue to deny the participation of humans in the degradation of the environment, will hopefully be so reduced in numbers, and/or cast aside from the heart of the debate, that fighting that rear-guard flank will no longer plague the public debate. At this conference too, one hopes that international corporations, many of them complicit in generating much of the industrial effluent that contaminates rivers, oceans and urban smog, will come to their senses, not only as collaborative participants in our shared dilemma, but as leaders in shifting their operations from fossil-fuel-generation to renewable energy generation. This collaborative approach can also achieve the obviously growing need to put millions of people to work in decent, labour and environmentally-protected workplaces so that we stem the growth of the unemployed, the hopeless and the destitute.

In both of these conferences, however, the question of how to treat the non-compliant, the outliers, the iconoclasts and the rebellious. While we have a rule-based culture on both sides of the world, there are variations in how strict, hard-assed, conservative and militant and even lethal those sanctions are designed and implemented. We know that human nature responds more effectively to deadlines, and yet those already declared, in too many cases, have been either ignored or casually forgotten. So, while deadlines are necessary, and will undoubtedly be included in the final communiques from all conferences, they will not be adequate to accomplish the modest yet minimal targets demanded by people like Greta Thunburg. Policing, whether on the streets of urban centres, in order to secure racial equity and equality in America, for example, or among the world’s leaders in order to accomplish what have been seemingly ethereal and ephemeral targets, which, if missed, will continue to threaten our shared survival on the planet.

Carrots and sticks, those chestnut agents of classical conditioning, however, have proven to have some, if limited, success in achieving human ethical and moral goals. Carrots like the release of impounded cash resulting from sanctions, for example, was part of the successful motivation in bringing Iran to the table to slow it production of fissile nuclear material. The sanctions, themselves, were the sticks. And while it will appear naïve, innocent in the extreme, and potentially dangerous to ask, one is prompted to ask out loud if a Norwegian approach to law enforcement might not be included in the package of options put before these two conferences. With the lowest recidivism rate in the world, currently 20% within 2 years, and one of the lowest crime rates in the world, Norway is lauded, legitimately and universally, for its humane approach to this specific social issue of law enforcement.

What are the appropriate analogies to the limited and humane incarceration used in Norway, for defaulting and denying and ignoring global benchmarks, among global powers? Is there not a better, more effective, safe and feasibly monitored approach to bringing all nations on board at both of these conferences? Can we all look forward to a new and creative, yet more effective and credible, collaborative agreements that perhaps pair nations, like buddies, to encourage each other in the fulfilment of shared targets? Can we demonstrate, through a thorough detailed presentation of not only the threats, but also the significant advantages to accomplishing needed changes in political culture, as pro-active and co-operative agents of internationally shared goals? Can we, through creative planning and execution, recruit the best minds from all countries, to be featured at these conferences, while at the same time, dropping the inveterate and sabotaging self-serving aim of promoting the national experts of the convening nations, as a celebration of that nation’s prowess?

Can we begin to conceive these, and other conferences, from the perspective of “not knowing it all”…as a new approach, without holding the Damaclean Sword of superiority, certainty, dominance, and self-centred anxiety over the head, not only of the conferences, but also over the heads of those charged with convening them? Is the current posture of “humility” now dominant among Americans, one that begs adoption by all of the nations attending these two conferences? Is it possible, even conceivable, that from these two conferences, the people of the world might learn to begin to trust world leaders, that those leaders can hear and incarnate the basic needs of all of humanity, that those leaders can set aside their personal aspirations for glory, in favour of the accomplishment of goals that offer something far more important: a legacy in international relations that inches, like that tortoise, toward a new world order based not on military, economic, cyber or deceit-power, but on learning and championing shared facts, shared research, shared agencies and structures and shared and mutually beneficial outcomes….and what better legacy could any public figure either want or merit than that? 

Perspective...the basis for action desperately needed

 Off the north shore of Newfoundland and Labrador lies a small island, Fogo island, about 25 kilometers long and 14 kilometers wide. The National Geographic describes Fogo Island in these words: “Fogo Island is not so much a place as a state of mind. W clap-board houses, sea-cliff footpaths, lush forest and warm hospitality set against a striking coastline.”* With a long maritime history, the largest offshore island of Newfoundland and Labrador is a gentle world of bright-coloured With the cod and herring fisheries depleted, islanders have taken to creative measures to enhance the sustainability of their community. Through the imaginative design of a Newfie architect, they have built a number of “residences” for artists to come and do their work, while also engaging with the community as a way to support both the artists and the community’s livelihood. These artists, both aspiring and mature, through applications from around the world, seek and are offered what amounts to a three-to-six-month opportunity to create. What a commendable, creative, imaginative and sustaining approach to both economic development and cultural sustainability! We could all learn from the Fogo Islanders. 

Considered by some to be one of the four corners of the earth by those who advocate for the “flat earth” society, Fogo offers a unique yet beautiful landscape, hiking trails some 3000 inhabitants with whom to interact, and an ethos bent and leaning toward creating. One of the advocates of the “flat earth” society, explaining the perspective of her group, on the Smithsonian’s “Canada: Over the Edge,” indicated that we do not see any evidence of a curve from where we are standing, anywhere on the planet, and the “flat earth” group emphasizes the importance of taking in and absorbing the surroundings immediately in front of us. Painters, artists, photographers, writers almost universally subscribe to the mantra “we create from what we know” and so it would appear that there is a high degree of coherence to the “flat earth’s” perspective and that of the artistic community. Peering into a microscope, too, by a scientific researcher in a lab, one observes, analyzes, interprets and learns from the immediate environment. Actors pay diligent and close attention to a script, authored by one whose authenticity springs from his/her connection to a place, to a culture, to an ethos. Similarly, musicians perform the scribblings of a manuscript that was birthed in a highly personal cocoon.

Politicians, too, have memorized and consistently the anthem, “all politics is local” as a core premise for their perspective of the body politic. The take polls, they employ artists to design and produce “messages” including advertisements, PSA’s, editorials and talking points that “address” the perceived needs and aspirations of their constituents. Millions of dollars are regularly raised and spent on matching the strengths of the candidate/party to the perceptions of the voters, as they have been discerned, dissected, curated, interpreted and massaged. NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) is another mantra of municipal politics, especially, for those considering planting a factory, or a sewage disposal plant or a landfill site anywhere within the borders of a municipality. Urban planning is a highly significant aspect of government, attempting to co-ordinate the perceptions of neighbourhoods with any proposed changes in such things as residential density, traffic flow, environmental protection and the desire of the community and the developer to grow and expand, the tax base and his profit, respectively.

Nevertheless, even with the finest attention to the detail of place, time and ethos, including public moods, attitudes and perceptions, in order for any piece of art, or public decision or scientific experiment to have lasting endurance, it has to speak to something eternal, universal, timeless and resonating with something that resonates with people everywhere, regardless of their connection to the original locus of the creation.

There is an enhanced value placed on the immediate, the local, the neighbourly, especially if and when the community is facing any threat. Scarcity, disease, natural disasters, including pandemics all bring about a heightened anxiety and recoiling of one’s safety, security and the boundaries of one’s capacity to relate to the rest of the world. Under threat, we all retreat, in a psychological sense, to our earliest default stance (how we first faced a serious threat) and sociologically, in a manner consistent with the perceived patterns of the community’s history. There is a sociological precept, for leadership, for example, that if one seeks to move a group “forward” to a specific goal, and one presents a vision of that goal that is “too far” ahead of the group’s capacity to envision their community’s capacity to embrace that vision, that community will rather regress than move forward. I once proposed to a group of grade eleven high school students that ‘we’ consider enacting and producing a musical, like for example, “Jesus Christ Superstar”, as an exercise in “growing” both the adolescents and their relation to their community, through fulfilment of their respective talent. “Oh! we couldn’t do that!” shouted one male. “We could only possibly consider a single scene from the play!” We all behave in ways that we consider congruent with the size and the dimensionality, including the depth, of our perception. And that perception arises from our conception of the universe, and the range of risks we are prepared to confront.

What poses as an interesting, provocative and relevant issue facing the people on the planet, might be expressed this way:

How do/can we embrace both our immediate environment/ethos/culture/place/time and our potential, as individuals and as community?

Balancing the past with the future, given the immediacy of the date, the time, the current saturation of immediately threatening date, on so many fronts, seems to be a stretch too far, just like the musical was a ‘stretch too far’ for that teenager. This is a season in which much public discourse, including prayer, political punditry, scientific experimentation and economic data all centre around the concept of hope. And yet, pursuing our conception of hope necessarily entails the cognitive, emotional, psychological, and spiritual embrace of tomorrow as just as, if not actually more, valued than yesterday. Hopelessness, it seems, is another way of expressing “locked-in” to a situation in which there is little or no prospect of change, improvement, or as the cliché has it, finding “light at the end of the tunnel”. Hopelessness is another way of expressing “No options” in a current state of mind. Stagnation, whether from a fiscal, a career, a growth, a developmental perspective is debilitating. And yet, most of our cultural, political, economic and even spiritual perspective is currently embraced in fear, doubt, uncertainty, anxiety and retrenchment.

This is not an argument favouring opening up the economies of North America to commerce, to schooling, to entertainment, to sports competitions. This is, in fact, not merely an economic argument, but rather a much broader nudge toward a culture in which we critically and clearly examine and discuss our penchant to cling to the existing reality, as if it were our security blanket. It is simply not! The cultural, religious and commercial shibboleths (expressed almost as a cardinal rule in business: “We hate unpredictability, uncertainty, change and we demand stability, permanence, security and predictability!”), while demonstrably useful, need not morph into idols. Worshipping at that altar, just like worshipping at the altar of emotional stoicism, is both self-sabotaging, and repressive of both family and community relationships and development.

The culture could well learn from those community initiatives in Fogo Island. For, while the artists may be painting or photographing or writing about their immediate landscape, (topographical, biographical, historical, biological and psychological), they are mining the deepest veins of their imagination, with the full-throated expression of their whole beings, in what can be considered one of the most courageous, defiant, even rebellious acts of “putting it all on the line” of potential public judgement of their most innate perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, values and even ideologies. And they are doing so in both the spirit of and the commitment to a lineage of prophetic voices whose novels, plays, symphonies, poems, dances, canvases and sculptures have lighted the human journey from the beginning. Native elders, too, while embracing the immediate resources of their environment, the trees, the vegetation, the fauna, and their traditions, have one of the most obvious and generous and highly valued cultures, from the perspective of linking the immediate to the eternal.

It is the political and the commercial landscape, from our perspective, that needs a nudge, or perhaps a veritable shove. And shove includes the mass media, dependent as it is on the same foundational precepts of the business community. While the digital data of GDP, GNP, DOW, NASDAC, are all significant; they are not the holy grail. Neither is the myopic and even narcissistic fixation on the roller-coaster of daily news headlines, (for ratings for the networks, and for electoral success for the political class), either necessary or health for the future of our local communities, nor for the protection of our health and our shared environment.

If we cannot, or will not permit ourselves, to see farther ahead than today or tomorrow, we have already surrendered our fate to those who so far have control of the levers of power which have brought us to today. We have to shift our shared cultural attitudes and perceptions of our social dissidents; they are not our enemies; they are our canaries in our own coalmine, offering a singing chorus of both danger and a warning to leave that dangerous situation. We have to change our attitudes and perceptions, and thereby our valuing of our artistic community; they are not our ne’er-do-well’s, but rather our visionaries and our prophets, our voices of hope and inspiration. And just when we are retrenching, in fact cocooning, we are risking pulling back on our capacity to stretch, to change, to adapt and to seed new ways of even doing our businesses.

We have to reconsider our enmeshment, not merely with digital technology, but with the dangers it poses for our own capacity to create, to imagine and to assess critically everything we read, everything we hear, and everything we are told is “important” by those whose voices dominate our airwaves.

Robert Frost reminds us: A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

He also wrote lines that express, far better than this scribe, the meaning and purpose of, not only this piece, but also of our obligation to each other, and to the planet whose air, water and land we need to protect and to pass on in a clean and health condition:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.

And also from Frost we read:

There are two kinds of teachers: The kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can’t move and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.

This “prod” is to take off the jacket of the false security of clinging to the immediate, the known, the traditional and the conventional, as if it were sacred; it is not! And to wander into the plethora of options that open up each and every time someone in our circle says, “How do we know we can’t do that, unless and until we try!

That is the perspective of Diane Hache in Yellowknife who, on noting the significant community need for a shelter for endangered women and children, (based on mounting evidence of abuse) took it upon herself to enlist the support of those local commercial entities whose rejected copper wire, still encased in insulation, was offered without cost. She, on her own, then began the arduous process of “skinning” the copper wire, (in lengths approximating 30 inches), piling it and selling it and turning the proceeds over the establishment of that needed shelter for women and children. CBC News’ Mark Winkler, reports on December 14, as follows: Diane Hache has processed 88,000 pounds of copper wire, donating $94K to women’s society….Working in an unheated tent in an industrial parking lot on the edge of the city, 65-year-old retiree…cuts through plastic insulation to reveal the treasure buried inside. The wire—88,000 pounds of it, so far…was donated by Hache’s former employer, Diavik Diamond Mine…She could seek the wire without stripping away the insulation, but that would only net her half as much money…”Everyone thought I was crazy, I admit. They said, Diane, it’s impossible. But impossible is just an opinion until you try.”

Not burdened either by “quail shot” or the cliché of hopelessness, or the fear of failure of that grade eleven kid, this woman incarnates, better than this piece, precisely what we all need to reflect and then act upon.

Embracing new hope and light for peace this holy season

 Amid the torrent of really sad news of martial law, fraudulent voting, epic cyberhacks, millions facing food scarcity job insecurity or actual loss, the proliferation of food banks, and an overweening endangerment from an uncontrollable virus mutating and then spreading 70% faster, how does anyone find evidence of the original promise of peace, hope, love, and light in all of the many layered metaphors and meanings of those cliché words? 

Hallmark movies are offering dozens of hours of “love-stories” of the romantic, nostalgic and eggnog variety, with festive lights, home baking, re-connections and new beginnings. And while they are soothing, like the warm fuzzies of casseroles, plum puddings, and family dinners, they are little more than formulaic tenderness, when we are all craving something more.

Our hope, this Christmas, is for relief from the threat of being impaled by an imperceptible virus, for the opportunity to visit, to chat and to get to know who we are in our fractured families, and how and if some of the brokenness of our lives might begin to heal. Forced separations and shut-downs, while necessary and prickly restrictions, are also promoting new ways of being together, new ways of seeing each other, and new ways of reaching out in empathy, compassion and hopefully tenderness and even forgiveness. Our hopes, this year especially, do not stop with the passing of the pandemic; they stretch further into a new cultural perspective that embraces a guaranteed annual income, a renewed public education system that itself stretches beyond STEM into an appetite for and an appreciation for the best of human creativity, the integration of the poetic imagination into our cooking, our crafting, our gifting and our communication. Our shared hopes extend further into a deep realization of our collective and sometimes unconscious detachment, coldness, separation and alienation of ‘the other’…without our having taken the time and the patience and the courage to open our hearts to the other’s pain. And through the lens of our own personal and communal (and national and international) sense of privilege, a penny that never really dropped previously, our shared hope embraces a new insight, a new possibility, and a new commitment to peel the scale of superiority off our eye, and especially off our hearts.

Governments are said never to reach an important decision until minutes or even seconds before a monumental deadline. Organizations, similarly find that only really red-line moments bring about significant shifts in values, perspectives, habits, and thereby cultures. Individuals, too, know that, when the night is the darkest, we wake up to the full truth of our situation, and the option of both amendment and tolerance of those things, ideas and persons and other cultures we previously disdained. Christmas 2020 brings with it the dark night of millions of infections and thousands of untimely deaths, through no fault of those individuals so impaled, and yet we all know that we cannot fail to take note of how profoundly and how inescapably we are ONE, regardless of our geography, our language, our religion or our culture. We previously knew, from having been subjected to the drum beat “we all share the air, water and land” on this fragile planet. Now every street, store, school, college, church, hospital and factory is literally or certainly potentially “infected” with an odorless, tasteless, invisible and yet vehement attacking virus that seeks to hook up to our respiratory system and to bring our immune system to heel. And while we humbly and gratefully thank those providing both direct care, and those providing needed supplies, including foot, water, sanitation, transportation, as well as intubations and therapeutics and more recently vaccinations, we also note s shift away from our previous frenetic, grabbing, impatient public interactions.

Out of sheer and indisputable basic human need, we have been forced into a new way of interacting with each other, albeit from behind masks. We not only ‘keep our distance’; we also carry a demeanour of more gentleness, more politeness, more patience and the obvious more ‘space’ in our encounters. And our hope is that, once having adjusted how we treat each other in public spaces, we might continue such sensitivity and sensibility long after this pandemic recedes. In this period of scarcity, anxiety, fear and a far more intimate and immediate realization of the unknown (in the next hour, or day or week, appointment, transaction, or even conversation), we find a new muscle that is exercised, and thereby brought to new life that resists being ignored after the pandemic.

Our hope, then, embraces a new way of being, as the lasting birthright of this holy season on the Christian and the Jewish calendars, not because those faith communities hold exclusive insights into the profound and deeply complex relationship between humans and their god. A new way of being, however, cannot be confined to the private personal encounters among people of the same office, school, community or even nation. A new tolerance, and a deeper consciousness of the uniqueness and the specialness of each person, has the potential to reach even into the bowels of what are commonly known as ‘the situation rooms’ of national and international politics, economics, and even military and cyber-security considerations.

Just this weekend, Senator Mitt Romney, appearing on State of the Union with Jake Tapper on CNN, when asked to comment about the latest reports of extensive cyber-hacking into multiple government and private corporation security systems. Many observers point to the Russian hackers, clearly connected to the Russian government, as agents of this latest breach of security. On the question of Putin, Romney said, “The president has a blind spot when it comes to Russia.” This morning, on Morning Joe on MSNBC, Mika Brezinski took issue with the gentility of Romney’s comment, based on what she considers multiple instances of giving Putin and Russia a pass by trump, indicating a much more serious issue than a mere “blind spot”. And while I concur with Brezinski’s more concerned take on the phrase, I also note that diplomatic language often defers to phrases similar to that used by Romney in the Tapper interview. Also on Moring Joe, Richard Haas, Chairmen of the Council on Foreign Relations, commented that it is important to discern between espionage and system control as the motive and the result of the wide-spread hacking. The former, apparently is more familiar, and differs only in the methods used by the hackers; the latter, system control, is a far more dangerous and potential lethal act, should whoever is benefitting from the hacking be able to, and then actually engage in the sabotage of significant national systems. And this hacking was apparently not restricted to one nation, but has been taking place in multiple locations.

In a highly complex universe, in which technology, on top of highly complex traditions of diplomacy, trade, and the raging of all of the levers of international power-politics, a phrase like the one Romney used “blind spot” tends to minimize the irresponsibility of one trump, in his failure to attend to the duties and responsibilities to which he committed following the election of 2016. We are not, all of us, going to become experts in the field of cyber-espionage, nor of international diplomacy, and perhaps even of the highly nuanced and often conflicting pin-ball guideposts of a legal constitution. However, in this festive, holy, hopeful and compassionate season of 2020, our hopes can and might legitimately embrace a commitment to our own truth-telling, as well as a growing “chia-pet” social commitment to holding our elected officials to the truth, as best they know it. Cowering under a euphemistic aphorism such as “blind spot” only demeans the graciousness to which Romney was aspiring. Enemies, chicanery, deception, betrayal, sabotage, including especially the capacity of self-sabotage, are all lurking viruses in the social, cultural consciousness, and especially in the collective unconscious.

And, in this season of new light and new birthing, although we tend toward more celebration than confession and penitential, we might, through our new hopes, embrace those moments in our recent past when we broke through that veil of propriety, superficial niceness, and political correctness, and shone the light of our authentic truth, albeit in the most kindly manner we could muster. New life and new light can and will only emerge from the darknesses to which we have become so familiar and even perhaps unrecognized. It is the new life that comes from the courage to acknowledge that we can, that we have, and that we can expand on our new mode of truth-telling, as a way of giving birth, not merely to a new year’s resolution, almost all of which come to naught in a brief few days or weeks.

Now that the universe has imposed a regime in which our basic survival needs have become so prominent that scales of pride and shame, once preventing many of us from seeking help, whether that help was food, or medicine, or friends or even a shelter, our hope this year can extend to embracing the opportunity of letting go of all of those pretenses that we formerly thought and believed were protecting us from being “exposed” to others who might not like us and might not accept us, if they knew our truth. There is a new day, and a new sunrise and new hope in the promise of risking our own truth, not only in our private and most intimate conversations, but in the rooms where big decisions are being considered.

And this year, we have multiple examples of voices previously undetected, unheard and un-respected that have brought new light and new hope to many of the plights facing the people on the planet. Whether they are young people, or ordinary people doing extraordinary things with very little, they are the lights of new life and new hope, from whom we can all garner courage, confidence, clarity and opportunity.

While sitting with friends and family, we might consider telling those life stories that have been locked away in the vaults of our personal, secret memory. And when that process begins, like a small creek peeking out of a rock outcropping, others, too, can and will be stimulated to bring to engage in the process. Our truth is, after all, all we have, and our attempt to protect ourselves from the dangers of being known, and then potentially being dismissed, has only given way to chasms of speculation, spasms of politically correct repressions and worse, to historic chapters of deception, subterfuge, sabotage, and the inevitable armouring of individuals, families…and the inordinate cost of security systems that, no matter how monstrous and sleek and costly, nevertheless, have the inherent risk of operating like swiss cheese. We simply cannot either know or plug all of the potential holes in our armour, on the international stage, nor at our family kitchen tables. And our health, in the short and medium and long term depends on our fundamental acceptance of our warts and the warts and gaps of others in our circles.

And the sooner those warts are transformed into celebrations, rather than shameful inadequacies, the sooner we can and will embrace the fulfilment of those hopes we previously considered beyond reach.

It is our foreclosure on what we might actually bring about, if we re-consider what it is we really want and need and then summon the courage and the imagination to bring those truths into the light of day that impedes the new 2020 lighting of that Star in the East, at Bethlehem. There is a Christ-child within, and that spirit will only thrive on the whole truth! And we have it within us to summon that truth and light!

Assertively and Unapologetically Resisting Rand's Objectivism

It may be a lingering thought, feeling, perception that I inherited from George Woodcock, Canadian Literary Critic, who once observed, in detecting a long-held Canadian search for ‘the Canadian Identity’ that Canadians do not assert what and who we are so much as we assert who and what we are not. 

Seemingly analogous to the Irish method of delivering “directions” to a lost wayfarer, “You don’t go down the road to the right, nor the one to the left, but rather straight ahead at the forks!” There is an ironic profundity in searching for, and in identifying and then selecting which path(s), especially if and when there are several available, you should NOT take. As Canadians ensconced on the North American continent, ‘in bed’ with the behemoth, The United States of America, it is inevitable and inescapable for us to think and imagine ourselves ‘in relation’ to our southern neighbours. And while we boast proudly on the world stage that we are the northern partner in the longest undefended, peaceful national border with another country in the world, inside our borders we are intensely un-American. We abolished capital punishment in 1978, removed suicide from the criminal code around the same time (without media fanfare), and under Pierre Trudeau as Prime Minister, learned equivocally ‘the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation’ while other states debated mostly the demerits of same-sex relationships. We are proud of our national universal health care system, which although overwhelmed with too much need in search of too few resources, nevertheless, has become a bedrock of our county’s perception and value of the ‘brothers’ keeper’ notion of the Good Samaritan. Our police and law enforcement, while armed, rarely use those weapons, and we have never dipped into the ‘three-strikes-you’re-out’ policy on illicit drug use, as the U.S. did in the mid-nineties. We have no private-for-profit prisons, and feel very comfortable with both a for-profit rail (CPR) and national broadcast system(s) (CTV and Global) and a government owned and operated CBC and a government owned and operated rail system (CNR). According to the Canadian Legal Resource Centre, “it would appear that the USA incarcerates 6 times more citizens that Canada. The risk of re-offending also appears to eb twice the rate in the USA than in Canada.”

Our record on race relations, between English and French, as well as between both English and French and indigenous, is certainly not spectacular, or even one of which we can be proud. Separatism, spawned by the FLQ in the seventies, revealed and opened further crevices of superiority/inferiority as many “English-operated” corporations moved their headquarters from Montreal to Toronto and other English-speaking jurisdictions. And with respect to the country’s colonial past, there are still multiple First Nations’ communities without adequate clean water, necessary health care, and access to quality education and opportunities for decent work and incomes. It is only our feigned superiority (unjustified) that continues to permit and to tolerate too many Canadians who consider our nation more ‘compassionate and empathic’ and thus also more ethical on this file, than are the Americans, in their history and legacy of accepting, welcoming and ennobling Americans of brown and black and Asian and indigenous backgrounds.

Another significant difference between our two nations is this: We Canadians clearly do not cringe or resort to the primal scream when we hear the word ‘socialism’ as is the current cultural meme in the U.S. Not only was ‘rugged individualism” championed by president Teddy Roosevelt; it was also made nearly sacred by former Russian emigrant, Any Rand, whose works continue to find readers on both sides of the 49th parallel. In Canada, however, her objectivist ‘philosophy’ has not garnered nearly as significant a foothold as it has in the U.S. And now with the first, and as far as we know, only devotee to Ayn Rand to be president of the U.S., about to exit the Oval Office, having cherry-picked apparently only the most insidious ‘cherries’ from the Ayn Rand tree of selfishness, we are and have been ‘treated’ to one of the more ironic and paradoxical confluences of mutual enmeshment in history: so-called Christian evangelism (and presumed altruism) and trumpist narcissism.

In a 2017 piece in theguardian.com, Jonathan Freedland writes, linking both sides of the Atlantic in devotion to Rand: So the devotion of Toryboys in both their UK and US incarnations, is not new. But Rand’s philosophy of rugged uncompromising individualism—on contempt for both the state and the lazy, conformist world of the corporate boardroom—now has a follower in the White House. What is more, there is a new legion of devotees, one whose influence over our daily lives dwarfs that of most politicians. They are the titans of tech….Objectivism, she called it, distilled by her as the belief that ‘man exists fort his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice other to himself’….an avowed atheist, she was dismissive of any knowledge that was not rooted in what you could see in front of your eyes. She had no patienbce for ‘instinct’ or ‘intuition’..or any form of ‘just knowing’….Perhaps her most significant early follower was Alan Greenspan, later to serve as chairman of the US Federal Reserve for 19 years. …Greenspan in the link between the original Rand cult and what we might think of as the second age of Rand: the Thatcher-Reagan years, when the laissez-faire, free-market philosophy went from the crankish obsession of rightwing economists to the governing credo of Anglo-American capitalism….the third age of Rans came with the financial crash and the presidency of Barack Obama that followed. Spooked by the fear that Obama was bent on expanding the state, the Tea Party and others returned to the old-time religion of rolling back government. As Rand biographer Jennifer Burns told Quartz: ‘In moments of liberal dominance, people turn to her because they see Atlas Shrugged as a prophecy as to what’s going to happen if the government is given too much power.’…(O)ne of the success stories of the 2012 presidential campaign was a bid for the Republican nomination by theo ultra-libertartian and Rand-admiring Texas congressman Ron Paul, father of Senator Rand Paul…Paul offered a radical downsizing of the federal government. Like Ayn Rand, he believed the state’s role should be limited to providing an army, a police force, a court system—and not much else. But Rand presented a problem for US Republicans otherwise keen to embrace her legacy. She was a devout atheist, withering in her disdain for the nonobjectivist mysticism of religion.. Yet inside the Republican party,. Whose with libertarian leanings have only been able to make headway by riding pillion with social conservatives and specifically, white evangelical Christians….Paul Ryan, named as Mitt Romney’s running mate, (another Ayn Rand devotee) played down the Rand influence, preferring to say his philosophy was inspired by St. Thomas Aquinas…(former) Secretary of State Rex Tillerson named Atlas Shrugged as his favourite book…CIA director Mike Pompeo…says Atlas Shrugged ‘really had an impact on me….So why does Trump claim to be inspired by Any Rand? The answer, surely, is that Rand lionises the alpha male capitalist entrepreneur, the man of action who towers over the little people and the pettifogging bureaucrats—and gets things done. As Jennifer Burns puts it: ‘For a long time, she (Any Rand) has been beloved by disruptors, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, people who see themselves as shaping the future, taking risky bets, moving out in front of everyone else, relying on their own instincts, intuition and knowledge and going against the grain….(the new wave of Randians) are the princes of Silicon Valley, the masters of the start-up…driven by their own genius to remake the world and damn the consequences….Steve Jobs is said by his Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak, to have regarded Atlas Shrugged as one of his ‘guides in life’….No wonder the tech companies don’t mind destroying, say, the taxi business or the traditional news media. Such concerns are beneath the young, powerful men at the top: even to listen to such concerns would be to betray the singularity of their own pure vision. It would be to break Rand’s golden rule, by which the visionary must never sacrifice himself to others….(Rand’s) is an ideology that denounces altruism, elevates individualism into a faith and gives a spurious moral licence to raw selfishness. That it is having a moment no is no shock. Such an ideology will find a ready audience for as long as there are human beings who feel the rush of greed and the lure of unchecked power, longing to succumb to both without guilt. Which is to say: for ever.

Now, what if, just supposing, those 74 million voters for trump were even exposed to such a dominating, eviscerating and life-destroying thought process, predicated on the jungle-version of the survival of the fittest, and based on an inordinate and tragic seizure of her father’s business in Soviet Russia as her worst nightmare, and then transplanted into the Hollywood movie business, the Valhalla of her dreams? What if, just perchance, those 74 million have already been seduced by the wildest tentacles of Rand’s selfishness, including the pursuit of greed and power without guilt, and also without responsibility, and that is the prospect facing the Biden administration in January? Amid all of the crises designed and imposed by the trump cabal and left hanging like a thunder-cloud over the immediate and medium-term future, Biden’s honourable and worthy vision, and even attempts to enact an American vision that include and embraces even the most minimal expression of altruism, (like universal health care, access to quality education, a clean environment, and the desperately needed millions of jobs) can easily and feasibly be seen through a lens (and gavel) held sacred by McConnell, Graham, Rand Paul, and others and potentially doomed to atrophy in the political wasteland seeded by people like Ayn Rand.

And it is not only the specific “idolatries” to which Rand submits, and then promulgates onto her unsuspecting ‘sycophants,’ it is also the attitudes, and the careening arrogance, hubris and elimination of all responsibility for the ‘road-kill’ that is left in the wake of the Rand tidal wave that so obviates a civilization. Business plans, necessarily, have to paint pictures of short-and-medium-term goals and strategies to achieve stability, profitability and sustainability. However, those plans, and the people designing and executing those plans, will last longer, in personal terms, as well as in business survival terms, through an approach that blends the pursuit of profit with an authentic care and responsibility for both those in their employ, and in their communities. Profit and social conscience, including altruism are not antithetical. And the social conscious/altruism factor in the equation can no longer be merely tokenism, a one-off, a grand theatrical gesture. It must be a sustained, committed, honourable and humble acknowledgment of real need. It must never patronize, and never objectify those in need. It must also listen to the authentic depiction of need that carries dignity and respect, if and when it is met. It must recognize that a social conscience/altruism is not merely a passing fad to glue a halo around the corporate brand, or logo or advertisement. And it must never ‘use’ and then ‘toss’ off a single person.

The crisis posed, not only by trump, but also by the millions of objectivist devotees and insurgents, cannot and will not be mediated only by the power and levers of government. In Canada, talk and policies and budgets that include support in the short and medium term for individuals, families and businesses, depend on the continuing critical scrutiny of each of us. Golf courses that pocket millions of COVID relief for their investors do not grow confidence in the best intentions of any government. Neither do corporations that grab public relief, while ignoring basic safety and security and health standards for long-term care facilities. We are living through a period when the “who” of our person, our neighbourhood, town and village, and our corporation or business enterprise will be determined by our commitment to a balanced, equitable, sustainable and yes, profitable, vision. Our people are not our pawns in our personal chess game, subservient to our personal/business goals. Our communities are not merely the ‘bank accounts’ from which we seek to vacuum dollars for our goods or our services. And, the patients in our hospitals, long-term care facilities, and the students in our classrooms are not merely digits on our spread-sheets, detailing our projected revenues, profits, graduations and tuition fees.

Indeed, the perspectives of our institutions must never be squeezed into an equation that would fit into the Rand formula for success. Universities, colleges and school systems, for example, have to think, vision and operate on parameters that stretch beyond “career-skills” (STEM) and extend into the imponderables, for every student, for each generation. It is indeed the mysticism and the pondering of all of those wonderful mysteries that provides each of us, and through us, our culture and civilization with its most valuable and indispensable asset: its capacity and commitment to dream. And that dream is not exclusive to those making the highest profits. It is directly dependent on the reservoir of prophets on whose imagination we all depend.

As Canadians might say, "This (objectivism from Any Rand) is not who we are or who we want to be!"

Resisting dogmatic tyrannies...a rebellious path

 (Men) need myths, and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself. Man repressed the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed—he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship… ( Erich Fromm…from brain pickings, quoted in blog yesterday, entitled Tyrants, gods and US…) 

It is not a stretch to bring historic, and foundational thinkers in western culture into a “frame” that renders such thinkers and their writing as tyrannical. One of the best examples, writ large in the history and theology of the Christian church, is Augustine. That any single writer could, would and does continue to have such a stranglehold on the mind-set, the teachings and the traditions of the Christian church and the culture it has spawned, is nothing short of tyrannical, despotic and categorically, inhuman, not to mention inhumane. Is Augustine’s belief evil? That is the question!

In our first-year class in theology at Huron College, we were assigned this topic for an essay in Christian Ethics: “Augustine and the problem of Evil”. Like busy Canadian beavers eager to comply with what we considered the purpose and the design of the assignment, we all burrowed into books that were translations of the original Latin of this ‘giant’ in church history. Narrowly focused and task-committed, I proceeded using a premise that Augustine was “good” for the faith, and thereby his teachings must fit into the conventional teachings of the church. Attempting to relate the ancient teachings to the contemporary world, I argued, somewhat unsuccessfully, obviously superficially and without an adequate array of quotes from the original text, I proferred the notion that Augustine could have written the ’12-step’ program, depicting one ‘fallen’ from grace yet still redeemable through grace.

Sent back by the Dean, then also the Ethics instructor, to re-write with the requisite supporting quotations needed for a graduate-degree paper, I complied and was given a passing grade. However, in the ensuing thirty-two years, the influence of Augustine on the Christian church and the millions of people whose lives have been seriously, and preponderantly negatively influenced by his herculean impact, has haunted my life, my prayers, my reflections and reading and finds me re-reading Augustine’s thoughts, this time with a view to attempt to join those in a chorus of dissent.

That evil is parasitic on the good, the corruption or rejection of the good, that there is something called the just war, based on just authority and cause, the right intention and only as a last resort, all of this from Augustine, fails to meet the bar that all war is evil. Call that an absolute, and therefore totally unacceptable premise for any faith position, if you like. Philosophers, it seems, defer from absolutes, writing often in contortions to bring opposites into alignment…(e.g. Jesus is both holy/divine, and also human in Nicene Creed). The notion that Adam and Eve were not punished for having sexual relations, but for the hubristic act of disobedience of eating the forbidden fruit, and thereby ‘sentenced’ all of humanity to a punishment that dictates ‘we have lost our natural ability of self-determination (the control of our natural sexual urges) which ability can be restored only by divine grace through the sacrifice of Christ, again from Augustine, may have had relevance and cogency when it was originally penned, by a man with a hyperactive sexual appetite prior to his conversion to Christianity, not only begs scepticism but also rejection. Fitting tightly into Augustine’s notion that since The Fall, humankind is nothing but a “lump of sin” that God might justly have damned as a whole but from which he has chosen to save some individuals and to transform them into vessels of mercy. From Augustine we we find another highly contentious, yet deeply revered as sacred, uncontestable, yet inherent to the Christian doctrine and congruent with the mind of God is this notion: that original sin is closely associated with sexual concupiscence. Augustine uses the word “akratic” to describe the human condition characterized by weakness of will that leads to actions against one’s better judgement.

Rather than politely and demurely positing that notion of the possible agreement with the 12-step program, (which on reflection may or may not be appropriate) I might rather have written: Augustine is a theological, spiritual, ethical and destructive agent of the human life and spirit, in the name of God. Of course, such a premise would have resulted in my eviction from any seminary program operated by the Christian church. Nevertheless, it represents the core of my personal beliefs and convictions, as I approach the end of my time on the planet.

Just because Augustine struggled with what he came to consider an inordinate testosterone drive, and then, after his conversion, condemned his previous existence, seems to indicate that his divorce from Manicheanism (the treatise of his early life) was only partial. His attempt to posit evil as a corruption of the good, like so many of the dogmatic positions of the church, in its pursuit of unity, expansion, purity, and the elimination of what was considered ‘evil’ (too contentious to be embraced) has justified so many brutal, lethal, unjustified and unconscionable acts in the name of God as to be exhaustive in number and beyond comprehension in degree.

As the agent, self appointed, purposed with the goal of theorizing, speculating, and then authoritatively deciding about what constitutes evil, among and between humans, individually and collectively, (enabled by many other pieces of prophetic writing such as the Decalogue, and original legal scholars among the Greeks, the Jews, the Romans, and the Arabs), the church has honoured Augustine’s contribution at the expense of others.

In this space, the words of Lionel Tiger, from his book, The Manufacture of Evil, have been quoted frequently. His purpose of linking morality to biology, the prime source of much of twentieth and twenty-first-century scientific investigation, bypasses Augustine’s focus on hubris, disobedience, rather than the sexual relationship between Adam and Eve. Much of contemporary western culture has, similarly, adopted the view that “sex” outside church-directed and sanctioned parameters is evil, and punishable in some manner that enforces the tenet. However, given that even within the church itself, the proposition that ‘sex-outside-marriage-between-a-man-and-a-woman” is evil, is unsustainable, insupportable, ungovernable, and even illegitimate, this formerly concrete wall of morality is crumbling, long past its due date.

What constitutes “nature” and whether or not that composition is within what can and ought to be considered as holy, godly, ethic and moral, is a cornerstone of arguments within the church, as hence also in the secular culture. Managing the human capacity for rebellion, for hubris, for disobedience, both within the church and the culture generally, has occupied thinkers, scholars, and legal and political operatives since the beginning. However, based on the Augustinian precepts of human humility, obedience, and what he considered our tendency to stray from our “goodness” western (and so-called Christian) culture has found itself twisting in the wind to implement sanctions, punishments, wars and political campaigns all based on the notion that the ‘wild’ of nature demands taming, controlling and submission.

Except, that is, when it comes to war!

How is it that the disobedience, after sexual relations in the Garden, is considered sinful, and that sexual concupiscence is conjoined with this original sin, yet war (and all of the attendant requisites like bombs, chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, cyber-invasions etc.) can ever be justified? The starting point “a lump of sin” as a foundation on which to conceive, birth and develop a human being, is fraught with sabotage. The akartic weakness as even a tentative diagnosis for actions that are not in one’s best interests, offers the prelude of rationalization that, without the intervention of God, renders one emasculated. The enmeshment of individuals into a tent whose dogmatic walls, while merely the canvas of human speculation, have taken on the rigidity of ecclesial perfection, protocols, hierarchical enforcement and political genuflection, robs those individuals of the active, searching, intuitive and even speculative energy of their whole beings. The result can only be a repetitive arthritic even coagulated congealing of not only the pathway to a relationship with God, but a life that incarnates the full flowering of the spirit of that life.

There is an inescapable and, to the human mind, cognition and intellect, an indecipherable mystery to the energy that redounds throughout the universe. Some of that is depicted as climate/weather, some of it is depicted as biological/anatomical/physiological, some of it is depicted as social/educational/supportive/protective and some of it is depicted as imaginative/creative/poetic/dramatic/theatrical. And then there is the monumental conundrum of the human proclivity and seemingly desperate search for power…in whatever form seems most appropriate for each of us.

As beings seeking to honour our identity, our spirit, our intellect and our place in the universe, it seems only ‘natural’ to bring questions, speculations, searchings, inquiries, and doubts to the table, not only as individuals and families, but as institutions. Our doubts, after all, are far more instructive, and life-giving than our certitudes. In fact, our certainties, whether they are religious, cultural, political or ethical serve to constrict our potential. The predominance of pain, especially the pain inflicted by others, that has been revealed to emerge from previously inflicted and suffered pain, also imposed by others, seems to point to our coming to conscious awareness, not only that the original pain needs our attention (not out of pity but out of courage and hope), in order not only to accept and receive its new insights, but also to let go of its constricting shackles, so that we do not continue to feed that negative flow of social, political and moral sludge. Deferring to silence, avoidance, denial and the inevitable numbness that accompanies the ‘strong-upper-lip’ stoicism of many of our Christian teachings (highly alpha-man-based, and misogynistic) is a personal path that leads to emotional and spiritual cryogenics.

The institutional responsibility for acceding to the teachings of any man, including Augustine, and to perpetuating teachings that fail to acknowledge the divinity within each human is not only clear to many, while seemingly denied by most ecclesial hierarchies.

Do I submit to a theology that elevates war as justified, regardless of whether it is considered just, based on proper authority, with a right cause and intention and only as a last resort? NO!

Do I subscribe to a theology that relegates all of human to a “lump of sin” following The Fall?NO!

DO I subscribe to a theology that separates humans from the animal and excommunicates, ostracises, banishes and even murders to preserve and protect some purity of dogma? No!

Do I subscribe to a spirituality, endorsed by any church, that has become a special flavour of morality, and that ceased being fun, in the widest definition and meaning of that word? NO!

Do I subscribe to the ecclesial genuflection to the rich and the powerful, both as requisite funding sources and as social role models for our children? NO!

Do I vehemently push back against all ecclesial, dogmatic, theological and ethical principles that elevate one person over another in any culture, regardless of the role played in that culture? YES! 

Do I vehemently reject any diplomatic posturing that argues for a “just war” and the spending of public monies to enhance the capability of engaging in such war? YES!

Do I belong to any religious, ecclesial community? NO! and likely will not ever.

Tyrants, gods and US...we really are 'IN' this together

 I would like to tell you a brief story about a conversation I had, many lives ago, with a female clergy of the United Church of Canada. The prompting issue was a rambling question in my mind about whether or not to remain in the “clergy stream” in the Anglican church or consider switching to the United Church. The woman was then a supervisor of mine at the Toronto Institute of Human Relations, a non-denominational, non-profit counselling-training institute. She knew about my family of origin, including a history of child abuse, a history her own biography shared. 

We were, if you like, ‘coming from a similar, if different, place. And it was her reflection that has stuck over the ensuing decades. “John, one of the primary differences between the two institutions is that, in an episcopate, one always knows where the power resides and from where the decisions come. In our church, on the other hand, based as it is on the extensive reliance on committees, one is never sure where the power resides and who is taking responsibility for the decisions made. As abused, we might have a need to know and to identify the power locus. I would recommend you stay where you are.”

The story evokes a moment of new insight for me, coming as it did originally, from a trusted, reflective, detached, professional source. She had nothing to gain or lose in her honest response. She cared not a whit whether I stayed in the ‘Anglican’ path or switched to United. Underlying her response, although not identified or discussed at the time, could have been some experience of hers that provoked her response. The mere fact that she ‘identified’ with my experience however, that moment of indelible imprinting on our memory, underlined the experience as unforgettable for me.

I recount that story as a way of opening the door to my own reflection on one aspect of the current political ethos, primarily in the U.S. but also in other nations, where the enmeshment of a large segment of the population with what can only be regarded as a tyrant begs many questions. Why do ordinary, so-called normal people, of all backgrounds, educations, careers, social and political status, religious affiliations and ethnicities “fall” into the orbit/ambit/sway/arms/charisma of a magnetic person/leader?

Having observed, and reported on highly intelligent, highly articulate, and obviously courageous political operatives, none of whom sought or required obsequiousness, sycophancy, a cult of popularity or even adulation from their electorate, and also having sat in pews in front of at least one clergy so obsessed with his own “religiosity/piety/sanctimony” and his lure of ordinary men into his

‘ken’, I have pondered this question for decades. Clearly, there is no single answer, no ideological, psychological, spiritual or ethical explanation for the dynamic of the human search for power.

History has taken note of a long list of powerful (mostly) men, whose feats and falls comprise much of the western narrative. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, (September, 2004), Michael Maccoby writes:

(I)n 30 years of experience as a psychoanalyst, anthropologist, and management consultant, I have found that followers are as powerfully driven to follow as leaders are to lead. Followers’ motivations fall into two categories—rational and irrational. The rational ones are conscious and therefore well known. They have to do with our hopes of gaining money, status power, or entry into a meaningful enterprise by following a great leader—and our fears that we will miss out if we don’t. More influential, much of the time, are the irrational motivations that lie outside the realm of our awareness and, therefore beyond our ability to control them. For the most part, these motivations arise from the powerful images and emotions in our unconscious that we project onto our relationships with leaders. (hbr.org)

Whether we ‘project’ our highest aspirations or our deepest fears and anxieties onto a leader, many of these projections emerge from our early lives. A father that could never be satisfied or pleased, a mother who continually berated a child, or worse, they all leave deep emotional markings of which we become familiar only if and when the “wound” is once again ‘triggered’ by some person, event, statement or picture that ‘brings the unconscious memory/experience back to consciousness.

Maccoby continues:

At its best, transference if the emotional glue that binds people to a leader. Employees in the grip of positive transference see their leader as better than she really is—smarter, nicer, more charismatic. They tend to give that person the benefit fo the doubt and take on more risk at her request than they otherwise would….But without a strong grounding in reality, leaders can very easily become undone by their followers’ positive transferential projections. At the extreme, such followers will create a myth that bears no relation to fact….The transference dynamic is most likely to get out of control, during periods of organizational stress. In such situations, followers tend to be more dominated by irrational feelings—in particular the need for praise and protection from all-powerful parents. (hbr.org, op. cit.)

Supplementing what can be categorized as a psychoanalytical perspective, originating from Freud, there is also another more recent perspective from Erich Fromm, a German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher and democratic socialist. A German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the U.S., Fromm ‘criticized Freud’s dualistic thinking, the struggles between two poles, as narrow and limiting.’ (Wikipedia). Nevertheless, Fromm himself deploys an ‘either-or’ concept in his diagnosis of freedom as a “‘diamagnetic force’—by one pole, it compels us to escape to it, which Fromm calls positive freedom; by the other, it drives us to escape from it, a manifestation of negative freedom. While modern civilization has liberated human beings in a number of practical ways and has furnished us with various positive freedoms, its psychological impacts has given rise to an epidemic of negative freedom. (Maria Popova, brainpickings.org/2018)

Popova elicits Fromm’s words from Escape from Freedom:

Modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of realization of his individual self; that is, the expression of his intellectual, emotional and sensuous potentialities. Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby anxious and powerless. This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of his freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man…..and this in a forward written half a century after publication of the book:

Modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton….The crucial difficulty with which we are confronted lies in the fact that the development of man’s (including both genders) intellectual capacities has far outstripped the development of his emotions. Man’s brain lives in the twentieth century; the heart of most men lives still in the Stone Age. The majority of men have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective. They need myths, and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself. Man repressed the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed—he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship…

To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death. This relatedness to others is not identical with physical contact. An individual may be alone in a physical sense for many years and yet he may be related to ideas, values or at least social patterns that give him a feeling of communion and ‘belonging. On the other hand, he may live among people and yet be overcome with an utter feeling of isolation, the outcome of which, if it transcends a certain limit, is the state of insanity which schizophrenic disturbances represent. This lack of relatedness to values, symbols, patterns, we may call moral aloneness and state that moral aloneness is a intolerable as the physical aloneness, or rather than physical aloneness becomes unbearable only if it implies also moral aloneness….Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation.

While much ink has been spilled on the question of how the digital technology, while appearing to ‘connect’ us to each other, everywhere and all the time, has disclosed a a deep and persistent consciousness of isolation, prior to, yet certainly exaggerated and inflated by, this pandemic.

Projection/transference, compounded by severe isolation could well be cornerstones of our current wave of insurgent crowds fawning over the image of a ‘hero’, whether that hero is a human being (as in political leader suctioned to, and seduced by a false narrative, and also suctioning and seducing his ‘cult’ to that same false narrative) or a form of deity. And here we have to wade into the waters of theology and the comparison between a ‘personal god’ or an impersonal god.

Karen Armstrong, in her brilliant work, A History of God, The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Random House, New York, 1993, posits the dilemma this way:

The problem of predestination and free will…indicates a central difficulty in the idea of a personal God. An impersonal God, such as Brahman (Hindu) can more easily be said to exist beyond ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ which are regarded as masks of the inscrutable divinity. But a God who is in some mysterious way a person and who takes an active part in human history lays himself open to criticism. It is all too easy to make this ‘God’ a larger-than-life tyrant of judge and make ‘him’ fulfill our expectations. We can turn ‘God’ into a Republican or a socialist, a racist or a revolutionary according to our personal views. The danger of this has led some to see a personal God as an unreligious idea, because it simply embeds us in our own prejudice and makes our human ideas absolute. (p. 164)

Religious fundamentalism depends on a personal god, whether or not those espousing such a faith are fully conscious of their choice and their participation in that choice. And most clerics who themselves rely on the continuing dedication of their parish are unlikely to confront such a faith given that its exposure could have a serious emotional impact on the ‘believer’. The convergence of both religious fundamentalism and political tyranny and dictatorships, is a potentially explosive, especially if undiagnosed and acknowledged, cannister of political and cultural conflict.

Those charged with the responsibility to preserve social and political peace, likely unaware of the complexities and implications of both psychology and religion, are left virtually disarmed in their efforts to evolve policies and practices that take into account the depth of despair (too often diagnosed as hunger, poverty, disease and hopelessness) which includes something called loneliness and isolation that seems to fail to be identified as real, authentic and thereby demanding attention.

So long as we cling to a sociological, demographic and statistical depiction of the cultural imperatives to which we must attend, we will continue to fail to address the most basic and most insidious of our personal, social, political and spiritual needs. Even the mere discovery and potential treatment of transference, while necessary, will not attend to the deeper historical vein of alienation, isolation, separation and aloneness.

And while individuals each have a responsibility to attend to a portion of this isolation, the society, the collective, the public square must neither ignore nor deny its collective responsibility. Throwing money at isolation, however, as we do to most of our “problems” is no solution. Band-aids, as social policy, are merely stop-gap, impermanent fixes that merely ameliorate the situation, until the next election.

We not only share a common human biology, ecosphere, and globalism; we also share a common and inescapable human spirituality which demands nurture.

Are we ready even to acknowledge our need?

Where is the poetry?

 We are drowning in a tidal wave of lethal numbers. They are lethal in that they take account of the thousands of human beings whose lives have been cut short by a mysterious, imperceptible, undetectable, ubiquitous, senseless, odorless, tasteless virus. This submicroscopic infectious agent that replicates only inside the cells of a living organism has become the most powerful, inhuman and inhumane force on the planet raging through the bodies of millions. It is completely ignorant of the colour of one’s skin, the religion of one’s faith, the ideology of one’s homeland, the economic or educational or political status and title of one’s achievements. Kings, dictators, princes, priests, shamans, electricians, doctors, lawyers, street cleaners, sanitary workers, sewage plant workers, professors and poets are all targets of its potency.

Drowning may actually be a metaphor that is altogether too swift; perhaps suffocating slowly is more appropriate as our eyes glaze and our ears close protecting us from the enormity of it all. Every so often, perhaps once a day, we permit a particularly frightening and tragic comparison or personal/familial story to cross the boundary of our awareness. Nurses, doctors, respiratory technicians drive to work in tears, return home to shower in their own tears, bent seemingly permanently by the weight of death interminably declaring its fatal blow to patients cut-off from loved ones, leaving the final parting to be shared by care-givers.

We count the fatalities; we compare the numbers for age groups, racial groupings, geographic regions, and of course, for level of compliance with preventive steps. We debate the comparisons of political decisions, those endorsing social compliance with prevention to those endorsing market freedoms, as if each were ethically equivalent. The false equivalence, however, is lost on too many.

Our social and political and scientific vocabularies are replete with what are commonly called “reasonable” statements, based largely on the “responsible group’s” assimilation and assessment of the latest trends in cases, and their impact on human and facility resources. Vaccines to be released for public injection must pass specific clinical hurdles, hopefully free of political interference, and then must be submitted to rigorous storage and transit criteria, prior to the needle piercing the skin on the shoulder of those deemed ‘first in line’…also determined by an oversight body assessing greatest need and most significant impact.

Those considered “essential services” (often previously ignored or taken for granted, outside of health care workers) suffer some of the highest rates of infection, for example in meat-packing plants, the transportation sector, the public service sector. And those living in poverty, often without access to adequate health care, confront not only the direct threat of infection, but also the additional burden of having their children attempting to acquire an education, too often at home and without access to either the hardware or the broadband to make that process work.

The human spirit, witnessed in applause at 7 p.m., for example, in New York for health care workers on the frontline, in the early stages of the pandemic, and for hundreds at Dairy Queen’s paying it forward by purchasing meals for those behind them in line, and for unexpected acts of charity that share a smile, a friendly greeting or even an occasional conversation from behind masks, with complete strangers, now liberated by anonymity and the shared threat, to speak, often while in one of the many lines separated by six-foot-floor-stickers.

One pundit observed, insightfully, that across North America where formerly public institutions like churches were once able and willing to challenge false utterances often by irresponsible spokespersons, that leavening is no longer available, in the flood of lies to which narcissistic opportunists have taken to skew public opinion and confidence in basic facts. Offering “rugged individualism” and the liberty of personal choice, as if it were a holy rite, when actually social compliance with protective and preventive measures are far closer to qualifying as sacred, and life-preserving, these charlatans (including and highlighting the current occupant of the Oval Office, and many of his sycophantic state governors, Senators, and legislators) not only poison the public consciousness, and its unconscious, but have spawned a spate of hate-filled, spurious, truth-denying websites as propaganda machines, infectious of the public mind.

And while exaggeration of fears lies at the core of the motive and method of the propagandists, the conventional thought leaders, the social activists, the opinion-writers, themselves attached to a public, for profit organization dependent on revenues, ratings and share-holder underwriting, submit highly researched, sophisticated prose in their analysis of ‘where we are’ at any given moment.

While it may seem incongruous at first, the observation and assessment this scribe made during and subsequently to a fifteen-year stint in ministry on both side of the 49^th parallel, especially about the public’s receptivity to, familiarity with, and delight in language that can only be termed “poetic” or “imaginative” or “emotive” or “dramatic” or “visionary” was and remains depressing. The strength of the imagination, expressed in poetic language, is especially relevant when the crisis is at its peak. And just at this moment, there is a gaping desert of poetic imagination and language coming from the talking heads and the political and scientific leaders.

The level of language on social media, now so sparing, so literal and so uninspiring is only one element in the diagnosis of the mental attitudes and the emotional depth of contemporary North American culture. Quick transactional interactions, a nicety offered, or an act of revenge enacted, to achieve a specific and targeted goal, may offer some slick moments of humour on a sit-com, but they also engender a homogenization of what is considered ‘normal’ in how people relate to each other. Obviously, the coarseness of the language and the attitudes of the trump presidency (and the chorus of sycophants) further erodes the expectation of not only decency, but the lifting of eyes, ears, imaginations and aspirations from the gutter minimal to a more lofty height. As John F. Kennedy proclaimed, poetically, in announcing his “moon-shot” project, “We do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard.” It was JFK, too, upon accepting the democratic nomination for the presidency in July 1960, injected a note of poetry that continues to reverberate even six decades later, in a totally different, but equally challenging moment:

But I think the American people expect more from us that cries of indignation and attack. The times are too grave, the challenge too urgent, and the stakes too high—to permit the customary passion of political debate. We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future. As Winston Churchill said on taking office some twenty years ago: if we open a quarrel between the present and the past, we shall be in danger of losing the future. Today our concern must be with that future. For the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do. (jfklibrary.org/archives)

Even such a minimalist image as “lighting a candle” in comparison with ‘cursing the darkness’ offers a rhetorical shift in perception that today would fall like melodies of hope from the screens and the microphones of public figures. The willingness to face the depths of authentic emotion, the essence of poetry, is never to be regarded as dainty lace on the doilies of the upper class. It cannot be reduced and thereby dismissed as the effete language of the elite, especially at a time when elites are under fire for their arrogance, their insufferable insensitivity and their alleged lack of empathy and compassion.

Leonardo da Vinci is reported to have left us this epithet about the value and meaning of poetry:

“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”

Robert Frost writes: A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

Kahlil Gibran: Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky,

We fell them down and turn them into paper

That we may record our emptiness.

On another note, we read this from T.S Eliot:

Do I dare disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a

Minutes will reverse.

W.H. Auden: Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

Novalis: Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Poetry is the eternal graffiti written in the heart of        everyone.

Emily Dickinson:

I’m nobody! Who are You?

Are you nobody too?

Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog!

Rappers do it! Songsters do it! Even reporters do it occasionally!

And yet, if that graffiti that is written in each of our hearts were to be given the light and air of daylight, it would find the one(s) who are the most courageous among us eager and willing to explore that deeply personal and authentic tunnel of meaning. We are all living with a lump in our throat, a sense of wrong, a homelessness, a homesickness, and, if the truth be told, we are all nobodies not because we are worthless, but because we are precisely the inverse. It is in our surrender to the unavoidable, inescapable, inevitable and even perverse truth that all of our ‘reasonableness’ and all of our dedication to reason, to objectivity, and to detachment, we each know, in our heart of hearts, that we are alone, that we are subject to the whims and the winds of the universe, and that, in the face of all of that uncertainty, we also know that at the bottom of the mine, when our world has completely collapsed, there is something stronger than our worst fears, more immutable than our most debilitating expectations, that, while it may not leave us unscarred or unwounded, will continue to sustain us in that plight.

We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that will guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future…

And it will take a commitment from each of us to light our own candle, to encourage our friends, families and neighbours to light their own candle (many not even convinced that they have (or are) a candle to light. We see so few candles being lit in the hopes and aspirations of our current crop of political leaders, so deeply engrossed in the minutiae of process, including the necessary process of methods of delivery and injection of a vaccine are they. Yet, even they, perhaps especially they, need both time and discipline to light their own candle of hope and new life.

Dependent on the adulation of their people, political leaders could pause to reflect on the old cliché that imitation is the greatest form of flattery…And by offering candles of hope, poetic images of new ideas, and even the deepest fears wrapped in language everyone ‘gets’, they would find both attention and support. There is no intrinsic separation of poetry from effective leadership. There is no shame in telling hard truths in images that everyone uses (perhaps unconsciously) in the poetry of the kitchen table, the market, the court and emergency rooms, and hopefully the sanctuary.

Personification, like metaphor and simile, convey what Frye termed the “unity” of human experience, slightly different from the language of practical sense, daily routine and responsibilities. Addressing even abstractions in anxiety, can serve as a clarifying and thereby freeing experience, not by offering solutions, but merely by bringing each of us into the “picture”…As Paul Simon, the “poet-laureat” of the last century wrote in Sounds of Silence:

Hello darkness, my old friend

I’ve come to talk with you again

Because a vision softly creeping

Left its seeds while I was sleeping

And the vision that was planted in my brain

Sill remains

Within the sound of silence

 

In restless dreams I walked alone

Narrow streets of cobblestone

‘Neath the halo of a street lamp

I turned my collar to the cold and damp

When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light

That split the night

And touched the sound of silence

 

And in the naked light I saw

Ten thousand people, maybe more

People talking without speaking

People hearing without listening

People writing songs that voices never share

And no one dared

Disturb the sound of silence.

 

“Fools’, said I, “You do not know

Silence like a cancer grows

Hear my words that I might teach you

Take my arms that I might reach you”

But my words, like silent raindrops fell

And echoed

In the wells of silence

 

And the people bowed and prayed

To the neon god they made

And the sign flashed out its warning

In the words that it was forming

And the sign said, “The words of the prophets are

Written on the subway walls

And tenement halls”

And whispered in the sound of silence.