Wednesday, March 10, 2021

Exploring questions of public disclosure and private secrecy...

When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else. (David Brin)

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr. Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes ranks. A family with the wrong members in control—that, perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase. (George Orwell)

The collision of the public and the private is one over which there is not, and likely never will be, an agreed formula for reconciling the two. And, as one might expect, when the details of a private (high visibility) life and marriage and family are shared with some 30 million (17M in the U.S. and 14M in the UK) over two days, that collision reverberates like a trans-Atlantic thunderstorm. Harry and Megan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex (at least for now), engaged in a public pulling back of the veil of secrecy and privacy that has enshrined the royal family for centuries, not with the compliance of the very public, and highly sensational, tabloid media. Specifically, the issue of racism through off-the-record discussion of baby boy, Archie, and the prospective colour of his skin, as well as the allegedly rejected plea for help from Meghan who obviously felt constrained (to put it mildly) in what she was permitted to do and to say, as a newly minted bride of the House of Windsor. She was not only a mixed-race woman, of ‘common class’ marrying a British prince; she was also a divorcee and a professional American actor prior to her engagement to Prince Harry. For those who casually criticize her for not having “googled” what it might be like to attempt such a canyon-like leap, suffice it to say that whatever Harry shared about the prospects of life inside the royal family would have been incomplete, at best, and relatively empty and prettified at worst.

Without adequate ‘orientation’ for such a conjugal union, or for the many expected rituals, rigours and disciplines of royal performance, it is nigh onto impossible for the rest of us to being even to imagine how treacherous her path was, and potentially still is. And, at the intersection of the history of Harry’s life (as Princess Diana’s second son), including the trauma of her death and the protracted and merciless pursuit by the paparazzi and the renewal of such pursuit for Meghan, in a nation that quite literally feeds on gossip, (whatever else Orwell and others might say), the divorce between the young royals and the palace was no surprise to millions. Whether or not private security was to be paid by the palace, or the British government (or for that matter by the Canadian government, should they have remained in Canada), or whether Archie was to have a royal title, as many of his cousins equally removed in the line of succession to the throne were given, seems both irrelevant and dismissible following the furor of “the interview”.

What is not irrelevant, or dismissible, however, is the profound intersection of the interview/divorce, and the global tide ofooverwhelming consciousness of racial discrimination and bias, both explicit and implicit, personal and structural, familial and organizational. Although the U.S. government may have experienced a significant decline in mature governance, including responsibility for many of the factors that comprise “world order,” over the last four years, the penetration of the American reality television show (the narrative of the capital and former president) into the farthest reaches of the minds and hearts of people everywhere has never been deeper or more indelible. Raised in the culture of stardom, Hollywood, klieg lights, tabloid and personality media industries, and having participated in the theatrical culture on both sides of the 49th parallel, Meghan was like that proverbial ‘hire’ from whom high accomplishments can and will be expected, along with the possibility of significant failures. I such a ‘hire’ too risky for the royal family? The answer is most likely. Were both Harry and Meghan fully conscious, or apprised, of the risks and the dangers? Unlikely. Was the royal family, still eager to adopt and embrace a ‘new’ bride, of mixed race, into a family that serves as the Head of the Commonwealth of Nations, of which group of countries more than half the people are black or brown. (of the “54 member countries, 19 African, 13 in the Caribbean and Americas, 8 Asian, 11 Pacific and 3 European…Commonwealth countries are diverse—they are amongst the world’s biggest, smallest, richest and poorest countries” …from thecommonwealth.org)? Undoubtedly…marketing of the royal “brand” translates into the cliché, keeping up with the trends of the world!

While racism gets top public billing in the headlines, right next to it squirms, mental health….an issue in and through which there is not a country, province, state, city or town on the planet is not wrestling to comprehend, to manage, to ameliorate, and to integrate into the public conventional conversation. And some countries are much more sensitive to the needs and the demands and the costs of mental illness, while others, especially the United States, are far behind in their national embrace of the issue. One of the primary arguments raised in opposition to government budgets that incorporate and provide funds for support of mental illnesses, is that one’s privacy is inextricably enmeshed with one’s freedom. To disclose a mental or an emotional distress, for many, especially North American men, is a deplorable indication of weakness, verging on a denial of one’s masculinity, akin to femininity. At the same time, many women, and many “evolved” (we dislike ‘woke!) men take an antiquarian view, that to acknowledged one’s fears, anxieties, depressions, and even suicidal thoughts is not a sign of weakness, but rather an indication of courage, strength, truth-telling and an will to confront whatever ‘demons’ that need to be neutralized (not surgically or pharamacologically removed!)

And while the queen’s public statement expresses sadness that Harry and Meghan have had difficulties over the last few years, and that they will always be loved members of the royal family, the issue of racism will be carefully assessed “privately”. Many pundits point immediately to the discrepancy between the “public” investigation by the palace of Meghan’s alleged “bullying” of staff  while she was still ‘inside’ the royal ambit. So, the monarch has both discerned and segregated the public from the private…something no sentient citizen of the Commonwealth can or will miss or ignore. Workplace conditions warrant public investigation, while scuttlebutt (confirmed and affirmed by both Harry and Meghan) about the colour of Archie’s skin, and the implications of that potential blemish on the reputation of the royal family, will remain behind the velvet crapes of the palace windows and walls.

Whether the public will remain passive, silent, accepting and tolerant of that position, however, will be answered in many quarters, by many figures, including public leaders, royal watchers, social columnists and, in the long run, the historical doctoral theses that shine light on Elizabeth’s reign.

In the meantime, there remains the looming question of how the secular, and the ecclesial cultures will address the issue of both racism and mental health. “Let’s talk,” the well-dispersed cliché promoting Bell Canada’s investment in the cause of improving the mental health of Canadians, is a beginning, and a meagre one at that. Individual athletes have come forward to acknowledge their depression, their anxieties, fears and even thoughts of suicide. LGBTQ individuals, especially, have publicly voiced their victimization in all aspects of public life, giving both volume and clarity to the collective cries for sensitivity between and among human beings, of all races, genders, ethnicities and cultural backgrounds.

However, Asians have experienced a spike in hate crimes, including hate speech in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Blacks have reared up in a cacophonous plea for respect, dignity, honour and trust, in the midst of the multiple injuries and deaths of black men and women, at the hand of white law enforcement officers. The American military has taken to investigating and exposing white supremacists who have already enlisted in their ranks, and presumably will also screen for similar traits among new recruits. Anti-Semitism, too, continues to find voice, weapons and both injuries and deaths in a spirit of contempt, bigotry and a rise of fascism, in North America and in Europe. At the same time, not to be ignored or dismissed, governments, like China, are abusing Uighers in their own country, and repressing activists in their determination to liquidate the 50-year agreement they made with Great Britain in 1997, over the governance of Hong Kong. The dramas, including murder and injury to democratic protesters in Myanmar, also play out on television screens around the world. And the Pope meets with a Shia cleric in Iraq, as a signal that both Christians (whose numbers have evaporated in the Middle East) and Muslims need to respect each other…in a world in which physical sickness, poverty, disease, refugees, and tyrants and their sycophants continue to abuse their power….

The spectre of the British monarchy being involved, regardless of how seriously one considers the issue, in a family investigation of both racism and a refusal to support a human request for mental health support, seems historic and tragic at the same time. It is not that British history books have not recorded appalling behaviour and attitudes from royals; some suggest legitimately and with considerable cause, that the Commonwealth itself was an instrument of racism designed to favour the white people under its umbrella. Similarly, the Queen, as head of the government, the Commonwealth and the Church of England (and all of its many iterations around the globe), carries a heavy burden of a symbol, not only of peace order and good government, (as the Canadian constitution reads), but she is also considered a shining symbol of racial, social, gender and ethic equity to millions around the world. Her ceremonial rituals, including births, weddings, christenings, knightings, funerals, anniversaries are all both calculated and performed as acts of unifying various political, religions, ethnic, and cultural groups, beliefs, perspectives and values.

And while many will consider her 70-word public statement to be a masterpiece of diplomacy, ‘buying time’ in order to gather time to reflect on what next steps might look like, as one commentator put it, nevertheless, this is another bruise on the global good name and reputation of the monarchy. And some, like Barbados, are currently moving toward republic as a preferred state for their nation, rather than to continue to operate inside the British Commonwealth of Nations. New Zealand’s prime minister indicates that such a move is unlikely for her nation. However, questions will continue to swirl around how the private “truth” of such a gold-plated (self-administered) institution can continue to keep its dirty laundry locked in the vault of its diaries, archives and internal discussions.

A similar question has to be asked of other public/private institutions, including the Church of England, as one of many organizations striving for a kind of balance and harmony in its capacity to carry out its spiritual and ethical obligations without selling out to the corporate manifesto of secrecy, privacy, and processes not subject to appeal or even to the right to due process.

Of course, it will be argued that Harry And Meghan have already surrendered their right to appeal and their right to due process, both by leaving and by speaking out. However, their voices, their faces, and their children will continue to shine a light (enhanced and supported by a public appetite on both sides of the Atlantic) into the questions of how individuals relate in and to large organizations, including family and how or even if “truth” will matter to people who do not exhibit attitudes and beliefs displayed by Piers Morgan. There are still armies of his type in positions of responsibility in corporate hierarchies, as well as in church and educational establishments. 

Monday, March 8, 2021

Advocating for an organic, wholistic view of organizations

There are a number of sources exploring the concept that an organization is a lot more than a machine, adjustable and amenable to various tweeks, new ‘plugs’ additional oil and especially high-octane gasoline. Lines like, “Maybe if we change ‘drivers’ we will get more and better results!” are just an example of the kind of thinking, perception and especially conception that linger in the minds of executives, supported by a culture whose archetypal roots were ‘poured’ in the industrial revolution. This specific ‘metaphor’ lurks in and through the minds of many male organizational leaders, dependent on and supportive of a set of management principles that point to raising production, lowering costs, enhancing performance as measured by observable, predictable and reliable data.

As the cultural consciousness about the risks to global warming and climate change rises, there is a predictable and almost inevitable shift among some organizational leaders and theorists, to a different metaphor. No longer a machine (auto), some of these thinkers/executives are revising their notion, into something more organic…a kind of natural system, interacting with its environment, not only on those traditional scales of profit and loss, sales and revenue streams, but even more complex. Some of this thinking details environmental (eco-system, political, economic, labour and even values determinants and goals) as a much more complex, inclusive and even ‘living’ thing that requires detailed attention, nuanced and sensitive observations and judgements and monitoring.

Half a century ago, Charles A. Reich wrote a book entitled, The Greening of America, in which he outlines three levels of consciousness:

1)    The values of rural farmers and small business people that dominated the 19th century

2)    An organizational society that features meritocracy and social improvement through large institutions like the New Deal, the Second War and the 1950’s Silent Generation

3)    The worldview of the 1960’s counterculture, including personal freedom, egalitarianism, and obviously recreational drugs.

Twenty-five years later (1995), Reich penned an even more urgent warning inside the cover: “If there was any doubt about the need for social transformation in 1970, that need is clear and urgent today…I am now more convinced than ever that the conflict and suffering now threatening to engulf us are entirely unnecessary, and a tragic waste of our energy and resources. We can create an economic system that is not at war with human beings or nature, and we can get from here to there by democratic means. Predictably, given the ‘hippy’ characterization of the author, the book and the author received many ‘one-star’ reviews. Words like naïve, idealistic, were amply applied. George Will argued it was the worst book ever written.

However, as the world “turns” and we face some still urgent dynamics over which we (collectively, especially in liberal democracies!) potentially can have an influence, the ‘organic’ notion is finding resonance in our diet, as well as in our glimpses of how we would like our world to be perceived and engaged. Authenticity, that cliché criterion/lens by and through which many assess people and situations, we can hope, may be a glimmer of candle-light in our tunnel to the future.

With respect to organizations, when they are considered “organisms” (rather than machines), they take on a vibrancy, as well as perceptible needs in order to ‘function’ in the most optimum manner. Working conditions from the most basic that include adequate training, effective equipment, personal safety and security, environmental protections, to such human resource benchmarks as ‘worker turn-over,’ employee reviews, even extrinsic evaluations (Top 500 companies, for example) and evidence of social responsibility are all included in many of the profiles of successful business organizations. Some corporate organizations use these indicators in their arguments against the right of workers to unionize. (Not incidentally, the labour movement has suffered serious depletion in both Canada and the United States over the last two or three decades.)

Obviously, many of these metrics, taken individually and together, offer both the potential of increased costs, as well as enhanced worker loyalty. Human Resource departments, at least in the larger firms, keep track of both the company’s and the employee’s relationships as they monitor sick-time, scheduling, holiday time, potentially merit incentives, and also potentially dis-incentive programs, as well as the long-standing pay-distribution, accounting and reconciliations as required.

All of these variables, when considered in the albeit growing portfolio of organizational responsibilities and expectations, continue to be monitored as well as to reflect those social and cultural waves that occur outside the walls and the fences of specific organizations. For example, over the recent months and years, there has been a growing public consciousness of the disparity in employment and unemployment numbers between with and non-white workers, as well as a significant gap in the wages earned by black and brown workers, when compared with white workers. There is also a rising tide of political activism around the disparity between the income earned by men and that earned by women doing the same jobs with the same qualifications. These metrics, too, are having a significant impact on the expectations of both the labour supply, as well as on the management theories and practices especially in larger organizations. Added to this “stew” of organizational ingredients/expectations/perceptions, is also the issue of gender politics, given that women experience abuse from male colleagues at a rate that continues to grow, in the public consciousness.

Race, gender, social and professional guidelines, these are all a matter of growing importance in all organizational settings, whether they are operating as for profit or as not-for-profit.

Serving as one of the driving energy forces in the organization too is the growth in the development and deployment of technology, giving rise to new working conditions, as well as completely new and deeply embedded social media communications among people everywhere in real time. So it is not an exaggeration to note that whatever is happening in the social and political discourse is going to make its way into the deepest recesses of each and every organization. And this dynamic is especially true, if not actually exaggerated, at a time of a pandemic, like the one infecting every nation and organization on the planet.

So far, we have been exploring objective data, even that data that discloses racial and gender conflict inside and outside the organizational boundaries.

Now, it seems a reasonable time and place to stretch our consideration beyond the extrinsic, the objective, empirical and the ‘scientific’…given the considerably high importance in our culture as well as in our organizations, of numerical, algorithmic instruments of manipulating mountains and seas of information.


And here we cross into the realm of what is common termed ‘anthropomorphism’….the attribution of human characteristics or behaviour to a god, an animal or an object. This tendency to attribute traits, emotions and intentions to non-human entities is considered to be an innate tendency of human psychology. The study of religion and theology has included the notion of giving human traits to God, whereby God has eyes, hands, feet, and molds humans out of dust, plants a garden, takes his rest is an area familiar to many. The very notion of ascribing traits of humans to an organization, runs the risk of ridicule, for many reasons.

First, the separation of religion and state has been long advocated especially in the United States. Secondly, the corporate and scientific, including the medical and legal disciplines, rely heavily on the observation, detection, collection and curation of empirical data, in order to conduct their ‘business’ generating a conventional tidal wave of ‘authenticity’ and validity, and reliability and thereby trust, in the pre-eminence of the objective, empirical way of knowing, and assessing and then deciding. Clients, patients, workers, managers, and leaders all gravitate to the conventional vernacular as well as the epistemology that undergirds this way of seeing and of knowing.

It is the artist, the poet, the shaman, the psychotherapist, the dreamer, and the spiritual guide, while clearly aware of and capable of grasping the empirical reality in every organization, is not only open to the connotative, the poetic, the imaginary and the wholeness of the picture, based not only on cognition but also on intuition, imagination and the images the empirical reality generate. Just as there is much “more” to a human being than the list of symptoms and numbers in a diagnosis and prescribed treatment, there is certainly ‘more’ to an organization than those empirical digits that are assigned to the many and varied symptoms of the operation of an organization.

Call it the intuition, the psyche, the spirit, the so9ul…that dimension which, in some way perhaps, integrates the reflections, the data, the symptoms, into what some call the gestalt. There is what we common term a conscious and an unconscious in each of us…following the mapping of both Freud and Jung and their successors. Let’s speculate, for a moment, that it is legitimate to consider that there is a conscious and as unconscious aspect to each organization, each family, team etc. And while the conversation today centres around the word “identity” especially as it regards ‘identity politics’ (under which classification each voter’s identity falls using such categories as race, gender, ethnicity, age, income, education etc.), and we hear every day about how an athletic team needs to find its ‘identity’ in order to be successful, here we are picturing a slightly different, slightly more complicated and complicating aspect of the human being, not to the exclusion of those identity markers, but in addition to them.

Instantly, many will have already shuddered at the thought of considering something that smack of therapeutic language and its inferences and implications when discussion an organization. The last thing most executives seek, want or even will tolerate, (and this tragically includes too many educators and theologians) is to consider the relevance, important and need for ‘help’. The Los Angeles Times reports on royal biographer, Anna Pasternak’s response to the Oprah interview with Harry And Meg last night: It was a very soft-serving, soapy interview in Meghan’s favor…This is a woman who seems to make a habit of falling out with people.” The LA Times reports also includes this quote from Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain, “I expect all this vile destructive self-=service nonsense from Meghan Markle—but for Harry to let her take down his family and the Monarchy like this is shameful.” Also, in the LA Times report, “A column in the Sun tabloid, which alleges that palace staff have dubbed the interview “Moperah” because of all the complaining, called the interview the ‘biggest theatrical performance of Meghan’s life.” In the same report, Clare Foges in the London Times said Harry and Meghan should have their titles removed. ‘The Oprah interview seems like the Sussexes’ own queen sacrifice: a strategic decision to burn bridges with the British in order to build them with the Americans,’ Foges wrote.

Any suggestion that the ‘firm’ (the British Monarchy) can and will tolerate a request for help against the tabloid press, who themselves are regularly entertained at Buckingham Palace, seems to have evoked, “That’s just the way it is; we have all suffered the same treatment and survived,” if Harry is to be believed. And it is precisely the chasm of both reality and perception that separates the “management” view of their organization and the “intrinsic, organic, intuitive, imaginative and (obviously the much more sensitive, compassionate and caring, and wholistic concept which, from their perspective would only lead to a “surrender” to the emotional frailties, akin to what they consider the emotional frailties of the Sussexes.

And yet, if Harry’s perspective has credence, especially his view that he “saw history repeating itself”, following the appalling treatment of his mother at the ‘hands’ of the tabloid press, then it seems some are more willing and ready to take a walk in his ‘mocassins’ than others.

The discarding of an organic perspective, including an organic epistemology, is a risk that too many in positions of power and leadership are not only willing to take. They may even be taking it unconsciously, unaware of the underlying, apparently imperceptible, and therefore unimportant energies that are flowing, potentially erupting and complicating the effective, efficient and ‘successful’ running of the organization.

This organic, intrinsic, wholistic, intuitive, imaginative, psychic and spiritual lens and the many nuanced colours, rhythms, patterns, and pulsations at the heart of the organization are not to be lumped into the category of facial technology that robs individuals of privacy. It is more aligned with a perception and a cognition of “identity” not as a demographic marker, but as a ‘fellow being’…in which those charged with its growth, health, and survival can feel an enhanced sense of comradeship. This organic framing, too, could apply not only to the organizations in our human community, but to the planet itself. We are long past time when we can legitimately continue to grab whatever resources the planet has for our corporate, political, ideological, narcissistic “profit”. And, the same is true of how we treat other humans: if we are nothing more than a productive resource, objectified, replaceable and easily and casually disposed, like trash, we will all have to live with such an attitude and a mind-set, long after the multiple human tragedies will have witnessed, and been complicit it permitting. 

Wednesday, March 3, 2021

The words of the prophet A.R. Ammons

A.R. Ammons, American poet, raised in North Carolina to poor parents, eventually won a National Book Award, and spent his last decades teaching at Cornell.

Here is his poem,

“Project” (1970)

My subject’s

still the wind still

difficult to

present

being invisible:

nevertheless should I

presume it not

I’d be compelled

to say

how the honeysuckle

bushlimbs

wave themselves:

difficult

beyond presumption               

(From The Great American Poet of Daily Chores, Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker, November 27, 2017)

The quixotic pursuit of presenting ‘the wind’ all the while recognizing, acknowledging and confessing to the absolute impossibility of the task, and then to place it beside the even more “beyond presumption” of  ‘saying how the honeysuckle bushlimbs wave themselves’ is to confound the empirical absolutists, to elevate the spiritual through its only possible vehicle, the poem.

In another piece, “Garbage,” Ammons writes:

When we brawl over our

predicaments we merely accuse ourselves…(and)

 

where but in the very asshole of comedown is

redemption: as where but brought low, where

 

but in the grief of failure, loss, error do we

discern the savage afflictions that turn us around:

 

where but in the arrangements love crawls us

through, not a thing left in our self-display

 

unhumiliated, do we find the sweet seed of

new routes: but we are natural: nature, not

 

we, gave rise to us: we are not, though, though

natural, divorced from high finer configurations:

 

These “sprinkles” of word-gems, little pieces of the weeds that grow in all of our gardens, are never to be either over-looked or forgotten, for their capacity to ignite life itself….as in “where but in the arrangements love crawls us through” …not the prosaic and predictable “we crawl through love’s arrangements”…We all must acknowledge, with Ammons, that his truth legitimately over-rides our conventional, conversational, street talk. And it is that plucking truth from the refuse of detritus that comprises some of each of our lives, that ‘seeing into life’s gutters, ditches, sloughs, swamps and mud’ in which we have all spent time there is a halo of beauty, insight, candour and profound and private truth.

From Garbage too:

the new’s an angle of emphasis on the old:

new religions are surfaces, beliefs the shadows

 

of images trying to construe what needs no

belief: only born die, and if something is

 

born or new, then that is not it, that is not

the it: the it is the indifference of all the

 

differences, the nothingness of all the poised

somethings, the finest issue of energy in which

 

boulders and dead stars float;

 

This “indifference”, “the nothingness of all the poised somethings” is that ephemeral, ethereal, magic web that holds all things in some kind of pattern…far beyond the pattern of our rationality, far outside the scope of our micro-and-tele-and-peri-SCOPES, refusing confinement, squirming against all definitive diagnoses, and even definition itself.

And our herculean efforts to pin down our “situation” and our “circumstances” and the “context” of the January 6th insurrection, as our legal and political and accounting and security forces are charged with accomplishing, will likely remain blind and deaf to the indifference, the nothingness, while focusing on the “poised somethings”. It is the poised somethings that fill up our screens and our consciousness, and even our cognition, as our fledgling attempt to feed a hollow hunger of meaninglessness.

If our conscious sensibilities are fixated on the “poised somethings” and we have our own binoculars tethered to our foreheads as we devour enlarged, almost lasered images of destruction, how can and will we ever ‘see’ those indifferences, those inscrutable, imperceptible and ethereal winds that are at the heart of all life and the energy that generates and sustains all of life?

Increasingly we are living in a world determined to inflict accountability, responsibility and blame-and-shame on everyone who exhibits weakness of judgement, of indiscretion, of any abuse of power, defined by those “courageous” enough to come forward to tell their story. And while the victim’s integrity is to be credited, the public square’s capacity and willingness to suspend disbelief, without immediately rushing to judgement, seems imperiled. Big, loud, strong, dominating, winning, alpha, almost always male,….these stereotyped symbols of power, especially of “white” (not as in pure, holy, or sacred) are counter-poised, and given incarnation by such deplorables as trump and his cult, that we are left scouring the human landscape for the garbage we once sought and found in the landfill.

Is our lostness a sign of our having abandoned the “nothingness” of all the poised somethings?

Are we so afraid of our own “nothingness” that we have succumbed to the lie of “alternative facts” as proposed by Kelly Anne Conway?

Are we in danger of entering a burning planet without fire-fighters, water, strategy, water-bombers, and warning sirens, because we have ceased to belief there is even a fire and that all those calls coming into “the fire station” are merely robocalls, without merit, without a human in distress on the other end?

Succumbing to the absence of indifference, and rejecting our own nothingness, have we imposed a binary choice on all of us, one in which a perfectly defined morality is in an epic conflict with another perfectly defined evil?

Is my truth now pre-determined to be the veritable lie of those who disagree with me? And is my enemy’s truth pre-assigned to the garbage heap of all things Satanic?

There is much sinew in the notion of a human pursuit of purpose, meaning and the concomitant goals and objectives that attempt to define that identity. However, when that laser-nuclear-personal identity life goal is so flaming hot that it literally and metaphorically incinerates all other personal life goals, as if a pre-determined, pre-destined assignment of “religious determinism” holds sway over the body politic, that flame has not only obliterated others, it threatens to obliterate the playing field on which we are trying to seek and pursue a respectful and respected life.

Trying to construe, in a new and different way, language, rhetoric and stage-acting, what each of us “knows” deeply that some of the most important aspects of being alive are far beyond the scope of our cognition, and of our epistemology is a death march over a cliff of our own sentient embrace. And attempting to “fit” those unknowables into either a political or a ‘religious’ or a moral or ethical strait-jacket, to fit our narrow, narcissistic, and inevitably narcissistic emptiness is a collective act of self-sabotage.

We hear much talk about herd immunity as a term deployed to suggest boundaries around a ubiquitous, lethal, mutating, global pandemic, if and when a sufficient percentage of people have received a vaccination, then the spread of the virus will be slowed. It will, however, not necessarily be stopped or eliminated. Efficacious vaccines, effective vaccines, measured by their strength and capacity to mediate the sickness, reduce hospitalizations, and curtail mortality, while needed, are nevertheless, not going to crack the indifference about one’s potential allegiance to the public trust, to the community, to the nothingness that millions already fell in their bones and muscles, in the brains and hearts, and in their spirits and wills.

How we each “see” the nothingness, the indifference, the capacity and willingness to even consider such res horribilis (horrible things), is and will continue to be a “temperature” of the body politic for which we have no thermometer, no MRI, no CAT-SCAN, and certainly no vaccination. We all know that nature abhors a vacuum. (horror vacui), another of Aristotle’s legacy gifts, meaning that every space in nature needs to be filled with something. Over against this, we also know that “negative space” in art is the space around the between the subjects of an image. “Negative spaces are very important for creating compositions that are balanced and unified. Negative space in a composition can help identify toe focal point. Without enough negative space, a composition can look busy, with too many distracting elements (from liveabout.com) And from medium.com, ‘the power of a negative space is in its capacity to disrupt your normal expectations of reality….Dismantle a whole room and the event is spectral. It is hard not to use the word ghostly to describe it, as the family itself appears to revise the very ambience of the space. With the furniture gone, a series of personal memories begins to overlay one another—nostalgia glimmering with a hundred facets—as the past life of the room is somehow amassed and dissolved in the same instant.

There is a case to be made that we are collectively, (and perhaps individually as well) committed to the notion, like nature, that all space must be filled: every nook and cranny in every room, and certainly every brain cell in every brain with the most momentous, sensational and ‘news-worthy’ information, as well as the garages, offices, desks, and trophy cases of our “academy award-winning performances.

We fear our own abyss; we are terrorized by any glimpse of nothingness, indifference, and collectively have mutated such notions into signs of lassitude, purposelessness, ‘driftiness’, shiftlessness, and untrustworthiness. And in doing so, whether consciously or not, we have effectively colonized all others who do not share that perspective.

We have so objectivized ourselves, our accomplishments, our enemies, and our work and our planet, that we have reached a tipping point (Gladwell) whereby, should we persist in denial of the indifference and the nothingness that surrounds us, (including the indifference of nature) we risk falling into a trap of our own design: these are just some of the many sine qua non(s) that North American culture has (allegedly) scorned, dismissed and effectively obliterated.

Just as there can be little to no balance in a painter’s canvas, without negative space, so too there can be little to no balance in the life of a culture (or an individual) without the beauty and the gift of noticing the energy and the life-giving impetus from indifference, nothingness and the quixotic purpose of “presenting the wind”….that blows in, around and through each of our universes.

Let’s abandon the vacuity of ideology, of zero-sum games, of the absolutes of war (of all sorts and varieties with all forms of weaponry) and accept the larger truth that each of us lives ‘in the wind’ surrounded by and infused by our own and others’ nothingness, indifference, and the pursuit of the quixotic.

In that light, perhaps, we might shed some of our finally acknowledged hubris, and the accompanying feint of “perfect control”. 

Friday, February 26, 2021

"You are the change you want to see!"

On a sunny mid-week morning in a crowded cafeteria in the former Widdifield Secondary School in northern Ontario back in the late sixties, the then leader of the Ontario New Democrats, Stephen Lewis, uttered a sentence about what was then happening to the education system in the province. The sentence, ‘that debates about education had been reduced to numbers of students (in a class) and to numbers of dollars being spent on the file’ continues to reverberate in my head.

A rifle-shot, perhaps on the surface considered a reductionism, nevertheless, carried an impact at least on this attendee.

Class size was a significant negotiating point for teachers’ federations in their search for contracts that would enable effective teaching and learning. Numbers of dollars in cost to the provincial budget were significant to the provincial “Treasurer” and the government, because that was a ‘target’ for the opposition and the public to focus on, as a minimal path to assess how important schools and teaching and learning was to the government.

Of course, there are and were other benchmark ‘numbers’ by which to evaluate a school’s performance, such as the number of grade thirteen graduates, and before that, the number of students awarded provincial bursaries for further education and the number of “Ontario Scholars” (graduates who achieved an average grade of 80%). Considered anything but a “drain” on the provincial budget, education back then was “booming” in terms of rising enrolments, teacher hires, new schools opening and new generations of students going off to university as well as to the then new community colleges.

Nevertheless, Lewis’s rifle shot highlighted something about how public discourse focuses on those empirical details, those benchmarks, and the potential implications of each depending on the perspective of the assessor(s). Public discourse depends on numbers, partly as a way to frame, (and to contain) the discussion, and also to be able to compare one jurisdiction with another. Provincial departmental examinations, another relic of the education system, were designed to provide objective evaluators from across the province, who had no knowledge about the name or location of the students’ papers they were grading. Objectivity, standardization, a level playing field…these were the objectives of the system. (Ironically, and paradoxically, one provincial examiner tells the story of a single essay from a grade thirteen student being passed between several examiners, (as a test case) that received grades ranging from A+ to F, casting considerable doubt on the depth of objectivity being achieved.)

There is so much more to the full assessment of a situation, including the process of education children, that escapes ‘inclusion’ in the numbers as measures of value. And, naturally, with the explosion of technology, we are now gathering numbers of postal codes, family incomes, racial and ethnic backgrounds, projected labour needs, literacy and numeracy rates and skill levels, and proceeding to collate and to curate, to compare and to apply both inductive and deductive approaches to the various gestalts of those numbers. So, on one level, we have many mountains of data on which to base our comparisons, assessments, and projected policy and curricular changes. Of course, curricular changes that creep from the desks and offices of the provincial bureaucrats/educationists, will quickly garner headlines especially if they attempt to ‘touch’ a hot-button’ social issue like sex education and rising numbers of LGBTQ students in the system. The intersection of such matters into the public debate seems to ignite passions like those that erupted yesterday in the corridors of the U.S. House of Representatives. One member, a mother of a transgender, installed a proud flag outside her office, only to be challenged by the QAnon-loyal representative from Georgia, who glued a sign outside her office reading “There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE…Trust the Science!”

Debates and discussion of public education, vacillating between numbers and nuclear ‘epithets’, however, does not provide either a useful and creative process for adjusting social change (in both substance and speed) nor does it encourage moderate, thoughtful, and engaged parents and citizens to enter into such a ‘fray’. However, it would seem that such an oscillation (numbers to epithets) is a vernacular process that both epitomizes the ‘war-like’ culture and the paralysis that seems to have much of the political class ensnared. The media swims in pools of numerical data, especially around the pandemic, and the politicians try to navigate between mortality and hospitalization rates and vaccine production, distribution and injection rates, in a kind of public square Kabuki theatre, characterized more by showmanship than by content. Elaborate costumes and dramatic gestures, however, do not a coherent, functioning, creative and generative society and culture. Reductionisms, in numbers, dollars, quantity and demographic reach, while useful in attempting to put a frame around the worst health crisis in a century, and assert some public pressure on the ‘actors’ on the stage to address gaps in service and recovery, as well as honourable moments of “memory and honour” to the far too many deceased, put public attention on those aspects of our angst on which the public actors can and will focus.

The numbers of suicides, both successful and attempted, however, are down-played, given the perceived public danger/threat of the copy-cat syndrome. Similarly, family violence, hunger, and untreated illness, while garnering some public attention especially among “essential health and social workers,” are depicted in much smaller fonts (both literally and metaphorically). And while there is little room for the public actors to dispute numbers of cases, etc. there is a canyon of rhetorical ‘space’ in which to prevaricate, distort, dissemble, and outright lie, in order to perform the absolutely most base (and dysfunctional) attitude in many organizations, CYA (Cover Your Ass), or PYR (Pad Your Resume), or GPH (Generate Positive Headlines)….essentially self-serving words and actions that demonstrate how reductionistic our shared perceptions and attitudes are to our own well-being.

In the half-century since that address to the OSSTF (Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation), Stephen Lewis served the historic voice of the prophet, from the Old Testament. Whether they were ‘prophesying’ the end of an empire, the plagues of a people, an invasion of an enemy, the coming of the kingdom….voices of prophecy redound in that piece of holy writ. In a sense, Lewis was decrying the reductionism of public debate, over an issue central to the public consciousness, while the “file” remained relegated to the ‘family pages’ in the national dailies. Not only was the treatment of the anatomy, the chemistry, the sociology, the history and the philosophy of education reduced to numbers of students and dollars in the budget, but the whole public “value” of the role and purpose of education the province’s youth was considered analogous to entertainment, meal menus, theatre listings, horoscopes and the like. Pricking the consciousness of the culture, whetherd,- Lewis actually intended to or not, along with the pandemic’s devastating impact on the process of education children, and the accompanying rates of depression, anxiety and mental health issues, formerly closeted from public disclosure, has at least generated some minimal public discussion about both the importance of the educational process and system, and the need for legitimate public health measures if our culture is to retain both sustainability and vitality.

A similar case can and needs to be made about the cultural and historical uroborus* snake of the corporate and business world…the fixation on and addiction to numbers for all measurements of “issues” to be confronted, wrestled, untangled and potentially resolved. Now that public consciousness of ‘essential workers’ to provide food, mail, vaccines, hospital (and especially ICU) care and police and fire workers who provide protection and sanitation workers keeping our garbage collected, has been awakened, not only ought we all to share in a collective pain of shame, for having neglected and even decried millions of ‘servant’ workers, we are beginning to hear and see signs of an awakened consciousness among both citizens and the political class, for our negligence, our indifference, and our insouciance. Unfortunately, that same negligence, indifference and insouciance characterizes our collected attitude to the “planet” as if it were an inexhaustible reservoir of plenty, of food, water, beauty, clean air and the capacity to restore and renew itself, no matter how abusive (to the point of actual rape) we are, applies.

We are and have been gobbling up what we ‘deemed’ essential resources to fire our manufacturing plants, to fire our combustion engines, to fly our planes and our ships and buses, and to mine ‘precious’ minerals, both for commerce and for vanity, our own. Tragically and ironically, the planet has been just as, if not even more, taken for granted, abused, defaced, scoured, deforested, and even defecated in and on for centuries as our essential workers. Our for-profit business model, the core model for the operation of our public political debates, for the assessment and policy design of both our for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, relies on the same kind of reductionism that Lewis was so articulately debunking in the late 60’s. In 1989, Ed. Broadent proposed and secured unanimous consent in the House of Commons for a bill to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000. How many acts of parliament have been dedicated to provide clean drinking water to First Nations communities…from all political parties, representing all points on the political continuum?

We are all complicit in our appetite for the simple, easily contained speeches, including the idealistic words of potentially lawful bills, based on a recitation of numbers. We are all, also complicit, in our swiss-cheese memory, as well as our flabby commitment to hold our public figures accountable, whether for the small details or for the humungous calamities. And our oscillation between indifference and the occasional peak of anger, rebelliousness and even public engagement, is one of those social, cultural and obviously political memes in our political history, on which our political class both depends and continues to foist on us as a “guaranteed” menu to ensure their own re-election.

It is not to expect each citizen in a democracy to become ‘expert’ in all of the government files. Not even the elected official can or should even try for that benchmark. Nor is it necessary for the media to use their air time and digital/paper space to provide all the details of each and every potentially explosive story. However, it is past time for both the political class and the reporting/editorializing professionals to make significant changes to their perceptions of our (the people’s) capacity to read ‘into’ the headline, to have an active appetite for the whole truth, including those stories, (far beyond the personal indiscretions of highly placed individuals) that offer insight into how our province, town, city, nation is not merely operating, but actually serving. And the who is being served also needs to shift from the “political class” to a much wider and far more educated bell curve that is both bored and discriminating of the cliché, the repetitive archetype (hard work, innocent victim, over-budget, under-planned) like the fast-food menus, never really nourish, but offer instant superficial gratification.

And then there is the inevitable cultural “whaling” about how we are all “going to hell in a hand-basket’ when that process is one over which we each, both individually and collectively, share responsibility.

As an astute young businessman commented recently, when envisioning how the business community (including each executive and entrepreneur) might re-invision his/her own operation, “You are the change you want to see!”

That message is a minimal move to making operative, fully incarnated and potentially planet-saving, the responsibility not only for assuring the bottom line of the enterprise, but for accomplishing that goal, while respecting the planet, the workers and the community engaged in each enterprise, and hopefully, eventually, the message will drift, like a welcome balloon of needed oxygen, creativity, courage and vision to the political class, and even to the executive board rooms. Some in those elevated suites, like Ford, Volvo, have grasped the significance of taking their carbon footprint seriously. We can only hope that taking the health of the planet seriously will also include taking the well-being of each person employed in every enterprise on the planet, will accompany that trajectory. 

Thursday, February 18, 2021

Some Lenten Reflections, 2021

There has been a process, both internal and external, going on in and throughout the several pieces that have been recorded in this space over the decade of its existence. One of the most recent read-out’s came from a close friend, actually an usher at a wedding in 1965, who, upon surfing the site, commented, ‘you have been saying the same thing from the beginning to the end’…My first ‘take’ on his observation, was, ‘gulp’ and then, the reflexive ‘yes’ and then a protracted period of reflection as to how the ‘single sentence’ that seemed to sum these pages might be formed. What have I been trying to say, if there actually is a core utterance, from the beginning.

There have been tips of the hat to several others whose insights have prompted some entries. And there have been repeated ‘bows’ to a few, like James Hillman, Martin Buber, Lionel Tiger, Karen Armstrong, David Brooks, Tom Friedman, Malcolm Gladwell, and others.

Nevertheless, while wandering among the flowers, the birdsong, the morning dew and the grey clouds of the views of others, without actually a conscious focus on his work, the underlying thought, belief, perception, attitude and even basic theology, has originated in the work of Jurgen Moltmann. Now nearly 90, a former conscript to the Nazi regime, a prisoner in Scotland, and a professor of theology at Tubingen, Germany, Moltmann wrote a book that grabbed me in the throat, when I first read it, and continues to express far more eloquently, and definitely more scholarly, and, for me, prophetically, about the nature of the Christian faith.

Impatient, confused, somewhat overwhelmed by events, statements, incidents and memories, and always ‘moving’ as if to stop and to remain calm was antithetical to safety, security, and trust, I somewhat unconsciously rendered myself an automaton, volunteering, exploring, attempting to accomplish what I had absolutely no training, formation or mentoring in the skills necessary. I threw my name into a hat for the student council at the university residence, and then into another hat to represent my graduating year on students’ council, decorated homecoming floats, helped to ‘stage a campus formal, joined a fraternity…all of it in a frenetic race to demonstrate that I had some worth, although the drumbeat of the inverse of that never left pounding in my head and, more importantly in my heart. Having separated from the bigotry of anti-Roman Catholicism, and having wandered in search of a faith community in and through the scholarship and the charisma of various homilists, and seemingly wandered even farther from the discipline of rigor and concentration needed for undergraduate success, I buried myself in action.

Over the years, I continued to search for something/one/place/the indefinable that would become present, perhaps more clear, or not, commonly spoken and written of as God. Something kept saying, there was a lot more to this life than the chores, responsibilities, the duties and the applause that had often ensued from the performances. It was Moltmann’s book, the Future of Creation, that really said what I either wanted or perhaps needed to read, to consider, to reflect upon and now, many decades later, to share.

Perhaps some of the previous guides in this journey included Wordsworth and Keats who looked in the ‘life of things’ as if there really is a deep and indestructible unity between and among all things. All literature, all music, all artistic expression taken together as a gestalt, seemed to say something akin to the vision of those romantic poets. Not only are we not alone, but we are far from comprehending, and even appreciating even some of the seemingly simplest of realities. Not only are there many layers to language; there are also many layers to our individual and our shared perceptions. Awe, and the humility that dances with awe, were always part of my conception of the universe. And that awe shoved against the boundaries of definitions that claimed cognitive and intellectual validity. Time, too, seemed outside the boundaries of the clock, the calendar, and the centuries, and even the rock and plant and animal histories.

And then, Moltmann’s line, based on an integration of the eschaton as an integral component of the imagination: “Creation is then not a factum, but a fieri. (Not simply a frozen fact, but a becoming, an unfolding, as a still open creative process of realtiy. (p.119, The Future of Creation)

Another cogent and penetrating quote from Moltmann:

Having called creation in the beginning a system open for time and potentiality, we can understand sin and slavery as the self-closing of open systems against their own time and their own potentialities. (reference: W. Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom of God, in Moltmann, op. cit. p122) (Moltmann continues) If a person closes himself against his potentialities, then he is fixing himself on his present reality and trying to uphold what is present, and to maintain the present against possible changes. By doing this he turns into homo incurvatus in se. (turned inward on oneself). If a human society settles down as a closed system, seeking to be self-sufficient, then something similar happens: a society of this kind will project its own present into the future and will merely repeat the form it has already acquired. For this society the future ceases to offer scope for possible change; and in this way the society also surrenders its freedom. A society of this kind becomes societas incurvatus in se. Natural history demonstrates from other living things as well that closing up against the future, self-immunization against change, and the breaking off of communication with other living things leads to self-destruction and death….We can therefore call salvation in history the divine opening of ‘closed systems’….Closed systems bar themselves against suffering and self-transformation. They grow rigid and condemn themselves to death. The opening of closed systems and the breaking down of their isolation and immunization will have to come about through their acceptance of suffering. But the only living beings that are capable of doing this are the ones which display a high degree of vulnerability and capacity for change. They are not merely alive; they can make other things live as well. Moltmann, op. cit. pp.122-123)…

Moltmann again: When we pas from atomic structures to more complex systems, we discover greater openness to time and a growing wealth of potentiality. With the evolution of more complex systems the indefinability of behaviour grows, because possibilities increase. The human person and man’s social systems are the most complex systems that we know. They show the highest degree of time and the future. Every realization of potentiality through open systems creates new openness for potentiality; it is by no means the case that potentiality is merely realized and that the future is transformed into the past. Consequently it is impossible to imagine the kingdom of glory (which perfects the process of creation through the indwelling of God) as a system that has finally been brough to a close, i.e. a closed system. We must conceive of it as the openness of all finite life systems for infinity. This of course, means among other things that the being of God must no longer be thought of as the highest reality of all realized potentialities, but as the transcendent making-possible of all possible realities.

Quoting the Bucharest Consultation of the World Council of Churches on ‘Science and Technology for Human Development, held in June 1974, Moltmann includes this passage:

Independence, in the sense of liberation from oppression of others is a requirement of justice. But independence in the sense of isolation from the human community is neither possible nor just.  We-human persons- need each other within the community of mankind. We-the creation- need God, our Creator., and Recreator. Mankind faces the urgent task of devising social mechanisms and political structures that encourage genuine interdependence, in order to replace mechanisms and structures that sustain domination and subservience. (Moltmann, op. cit. p. 130)

The intersection of current reality with what is known to theologians as ‘transcendence’ (immanence v transcendence), for Christians is often said to be directly emanating from the humanity/deity of Christ. Man/God in one, succinctly attempts to bring the attention of the reader, listener, reflector, praying one, into a bifocal vision, in order to preserve and to protect one of the cardinal tenets of the faith.

However, the human capacity, and indeed the willingness to stretch one’s consciousness, one’s imagination, and one’s belief system, and thereby the foundational precepts upon which one actually lives one’s daily existence, into the infinite, open, perhaps even beyond belief seems constricted by/in/through a detailed, intense focus on immediate reality. A fully authentic and also fully open system, or situation, in which all humans, with and through God, share not only interdependence and justice, both also ‘new life’ is, in the language (and the cultural perception and convention) beyond hope and beyond achievement, and thereby, in a world addicted to the acquisition of real value in this moment (grades, trophies, sales, profits, votes, houses, cars, yachts, and all symbols of power and status) relegated to the “mystics” and the “poets” and those who chose a life of ‘no consequence’ or perhaps even more sinister, of dangerous and threatening value.

However, challenging the very notion of what is valuable, powerful, at one and the same time hierarchical and authoritarian, existence that embraces the transcendent, is no longer represented by the historic hierarchy and the authoritarian patterns of rule. “It is represented by the sovereign irreplaceability of every individual. That is why in modern times religion is no longer understood as the hallowing of authority in church, state and society, but as the inner self-transcendence of every individual. As a result the democracy of free individuals, directly related to God without any mediation, becomes the new way of representing transcendence.  The divine crown no longer rests on the head of the ruler; it belongs to the constitution of the free. Transcendence can no longer be represented on earth ‘from above’; its 0only possible earthly representation is now the web of free relationships of free individuals. The relationship to God or to transcendence is no longer reflected in the relationship to hallowed authority; we find it in the free recognition of , and respect for, our neighbour, in whom transcendence is present. (p. 13)…and then

It is only if the conflicts which cause us to experience present reality as history are abolished that the future has anything to do with transcendence. It is only where, in history, these conflicts are transcended in the direction of their abolition or reconciliation that something of this qualitatively new future is to be found..(p. 15

And:  For a long time the Christian faith interpreted the transcendence it believed it had found in Christ metaphysically; later it understood transcendence existentially; today the important thing is that faith is present where the ‘boundary’ of transcendence is experienced in suffering and is transcended in active hope. The more faith interprets Christian transcendence eschatologically, the more it will understand the boundary of immanence historically and give itself up to the movement of transcending. But the more it interprets this eschatological* transcendence in Christian terms-that is- with its eyes on the crucified Jesus—the more it will become conscious that the qualitatively new future of God has allied itself with those who are dispossessed, denied and downtrodden at the present day; so that the future does not begin up at the spearheads of progress in a ‘progressive society,’ but down below, among society’s victims. It will have to link hope for the eschatological future with a  loving solidarity with the dispossessed. (p.17)

More than a guiding set of ethical principles, Moltmann has articulated a resounding, challenging, exacting, disciplined and ultimately infinitely hope-filled Christian theology, to which the contemporary church could well dedicate both study, prayer, discussion, and formal education, not only among seminarians, but especially among those laity seeking discipleship inside the sanctuary, the choir loft and the annual meetings of each parish. And such a theology if it were to become incarnate would reject the social conventions of “importance” of the wealthy, and the power of the hierarchy, including the capacity to regulate nature and morality, as if it were inside the mind of God.

Another beacon in Christian thought and practice as systematized by the Enlightenment, William Blake, has a few cogent nuggets to add to Moltmann:

“Blake has rebelled against the vision of the Enlightenment, which had attempted to systematize truth. He also rebelled against the God of Christianity, who had been used to alienate men and women from their humanity. This God had been made to promulgate unnatural laws to repress sexuality. Liberty, and spontaneous joy. Blake railed against the ‘fearful symmetry’ of this inhumane God in ‘The Tyger,’ seeking him as remote from the world in unutterably ‘distant deeps and skies’. Yet the wholly other God, Creator of the World, undergoes mutation in the poems. God himself has to fall into the world and die in the person of Jesus….Blake envisaged a ‘kenosis,’ a self-emptying in the Godhead, who falls from his solitary heaven and becomes incarnate in the world. There is no longer autonomous deity in a world of his own, who demands that men and women submit to an external heteronymous law. There is no human activity which is alien to God; even the sexuality repressed by the Church is manifest in the passion of Jesus himself. God has died voluntarily in Jesus and the transcendent alienating God is no more.” Karen Armstrong, A History of God, p.349-350)

Would the churches (without COVID-19) still be empty, struggling for tactics and strategies to “become more welcoming” need such approaches if it were do dive deeply into the death, resurrection and eschatology of the Moltmann heart and mind and the Blake vision?

 

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

Monday, February 15, 2021

Are the alveoli in our lungs the new canaries in our planetary coal mine?

 This space continues to be focused on the various levels and methods, structural, physical, environmental, intellectual, and spiritual in which and by which there is a unity of everyone/thing/nature in the universe. Romantic poets were writing about a unity long before quantum physics was exploring the notion of atoms around a nucleus. Much of this space has urged the development of enabled international political structures, patterns, systems and especially a significant enhancement of the full United Nations orbit.

We have noted the biological inter-connectedness as well as the interdependence of all living flora and fauna on the many other systems that comprise our planet’s undergirding and sustaining flow of the energy on which we all depend. Peter G. Brown and Geoffrey Garver, in an essay entitled
Humans and Nature: The Right Relationship, is quoted in an essay entitled Interdependence as a defining feature of all life, on freshvicta.com, write this:

“The fundamental wealth on the earth, on which all else depends, is the ability to maintain life itself, which is made possible by the ability of green plants to convert sunlight into sugars. Plant-based sugars are wealth. They are used by the plants themselves and by virtually all other organisms top sustain themselves and to reproduce. Without this simple activity, all then manufactured capital, all the human capital, all the credit cards on the earth -the totality of these not only would be worthless, they would not exist. An economy in right relationship with real wealth is built on the simple fact that the integrity, resilience, and beauty of natural and social communities depends on the earth’s vibrant but finite life-supporting capacity.”

In a piece in The New Yorker, January 25, 2021, by Brooke Jarvis, entitled, The Air in Here, quotes pulmonologist Michael J. Stephen, (from his book, ‘Breath Taking: The Power, Fragility, and Future of Our Extraordinary Lungs: The atmosphere is a communal space and lungs are an extension of it…(Stephens writes): (The lung) is an organ alive with immunology and chemistry, one that does an extraordinary amount of work under extreme stress from the moment we enter this world.

Ms Jarvis also writes in the above noted piece:

We’re still learning all that air pollution can do to our bodies. It can cause not just lung diseases and impaired lung development …but also, indirectly, heart attacks and osteoporosis. For first responders who breathed in clouds of dusty air following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, m many of them without wearing protective masks, health problems often camp in three waves. First there were persistent coughs, and then, a few years later, asthma, sinus inflammation acid-reflux disease, C.O.P.D. and pneumonia. Finally came cancer, heart disease and stroke.

Another Jarvis quote:

We tend to think of a lung as a simple pump: one gas is pulled in, another is pushed out. In fact Stephens writes…With each of the roughly twenty thousand breaths we take in a day, air travels through convoluted passages that can stretch for fifteen hundred miles, to one of approximately five hundred million alveoli-tiny clustered sacs-that each of our lungs holds. Oxygen moves from the lungs to the blood-stream, as carbon dioxide flows back to the lungs. The Brain stem controls the balance, which must be just right….

Lungs are a paradox. They are so fragile that an accumulation of the tiniest scars can rob them of their elasticity and function, so delicate that one of the pioneers of pulmonology solved a long-standing mystery about a deadly neonatal lung disease in part by reading a book about the physics of soap bubbles. Yet, unlike our other internal organs, nestled away in side us, they are open, like a wound, to the outside world….Our lungs are both protection and portal, the nexus of our relationship with an environment that can heal us as well as harm us. In their deepest recesses, a wall as thin as a single cell is all that separates us from the world.

It is not only the timeliness of the Jarvis piece, given the global pandemic whose multiple variants are swooping across seemingly all continents, at a pace that far exceeds the capacity of scientists and laboratories to study and to design and produce vaccines that can and will reduce both the spread and the lethality of the virus. It is also timely given the “I can’t breath!” statement by George Floyd, while he was being suffocated under the knee of a law enforcement officer, a chant echoed across North America throughout the protests under the banner of Black Lives Matter. And while this month is deemed one to celebrate Black Lives, and the media is sprinkled with personal stories of highly courageous, creative and compelling black men and women, we are beginning to take more active note of the complicated inter-relationships in which we are all engaged: racism, air pollution, food production, food available, virus protection, health care, environmental protections….And amid the confluence of these many issues, we repeatedly hear the phrase, “we are all in this together” as if, by repeating it, we will all come to the place where we will all wear masks, where we will all social distance, where we will all welcome a safe and effective vaccine, where we will all take steps in our personal and private lives, to re-cycle, to compost, to purchase fewer plastic bags and packages, where we will all drive electric cars and where we will all surrender to the notion that this chant, “we are all in this together” really means something crucial for each person on the planet.

There is something very hollow about the chant, “We are all in this together!”  On one hand, there are millions of people, in too many countries, who do not wish to be part of an establishment majority. There is a disdain for the political voices and actors whose seek a kind of unity, especially in the face of both violence and openly weaponized attitudes and language. Homegrown terrorism, fertilized by the lies of an ex-president in the U.S. and by similar lies in other right-wing autocratic regimes like those in Brazil, Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, North Korea and Moscow, along with the rise in authoritarianism, and the concomitant decline of international co-operation, the direct competition between the private, for-profit sector and the public sector funded by ordinary people who pay their taxes, (while mega-corporations pay little to none), the competition for vaccines between and among nations, even with COFAX, potentially relegating poverty-stricken nations to the end of the line, and the potential for a rapidly mutating virus to continue to outstrip both vaccines and public compliance with protection and prevention measures….these are just some of the competing forces, still not fully contended with, either by elected officials or certainly by many ordinary citizens who (wrongly and detestably) consider compliance to be an invasion of their personal freedom.

There is clear evidence, for example, of a hierarchy of funding of public health issues. Ms Jarvis points out:

Lung cancer is by far the deadliest cancer in America, but other cancers receive significantly more funding. Even death from traditional killers such as heart disease and cancer are largely in decline, in the United States. Mortality from respiratory diseases is rising. (And this was true before we lost hundreds of thousands of Americans to COVID-19 which kills most of its victims through acute respiratory failure.) Cases of asthma increase every year, and, globally, so do cases of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which is associated with smoking but also afflicts, people who have never smoked. Lung cancer, too, is becoming more common among non-smokers: in the United States, someone is diagnosed roughly every two and a half minutes. Worldwide, respiratory problems are the second most common cause of death, and the No. 1 killer of children under five.

Whether we are reading about rising temperatures, spikes in forest fires and draughts, the rapid extinction of hundreds of thousands of species, both animal and plant, the rising clouds of carbon dioxide from China and India, or the biology and fragility of the human lung, we are living at a time when we are being flooded with relevant, cogent, and disturbing information that demands urgent and immediate action. And while there are new words coming from the mouths of people like John Kerry, the U.S. President’s envoy on global climate change, and shifts in U.S. policy around such projects as the Keystone pipeline, and while major auto producers are finally getting on board through announced commitments to electric vehicles, the convergence of the exhaustion and depression and anxiety over COVID-19, and the shuttering of thousands of businesses, the staggered opening and closing of public and secondary schools, and the intermittent access to needed internet access, as well as a deficit in number of families and children without the technology to facilitate in-home learning many continue either hopeless or apathetic about positive change.

The apparent and proven insouciance among world leaders to commit jointly to a globally evident and planetary threatening scourge, and the mounting evidence of serious cyber invasions of multiple systems, including the water system near Tampa Florida, on the weekend of the Superbowl. Reports indicate that hackers injected excessive amounts of tar into the public drinking water. The international political climate and culture clearly foreshadows a threatening collision between the forces of greed and narcissism (the gas and oil companies, the financial services sector, the corruption of autocrats, the complicity of too many elected officials clinging to their own personal political power) with the complex dangers from the speed, complexity and penetrability of new technologies, and the apparent unwillingness of world leaders to ‘wake up and smell the coffee’.

The mid-twentieth century American tragedy, Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller saw Willy Loman utter words repeated here several times, “The woods are burning!” Never, in all the many years during which I attempted to introduce that play to senior high school students did I ever envision a global situation that saw the Amazon Rain Forest on fire, the redwood forests in California burning millions of acres, homes, and people’s lives, the rising number of hurricanes, tropical storms, and the multiple health crises, along with COVID-19, that have been plaguing individual and family lives for decades, without a significant public response to counter the threat of our own human self-sabotage.

Could our lungs be another of the many needed canaries in the growing coal mine that we are about to call the planet?

Please don’t hold your breath!

Saturday, February 13, 2021

Buber's injunction to drop down to the 'mud and filth'

One of the central images, archetypes, in western culture, is the story of the Good Samaritan. Hated by and hating also Jews, the Samaritan is considered, by both conventional biblical interpretation, and by extension, conventional cultural perceptions, the “good guy” in the narrative, and the Jew, taken for granted as dead, in the ditch, is the rescuer. He purportedly lifts the Jew from the ditch, finds a room for him, pays for the room, and goes on his way. And all this happens after the priest and the Levite have passed by without so much as a glance or a helping hand.

While the is much merit to the bridging of the gap between Jew and Samaritan, and historic value in the gzillion acts of kindness that have been both performed and received, through a transcending of traditional barriers to mutually respectful relationships, and the lifting up of people in need by those who can, there is another perspective on this story, that, if brought to consciousness, and then lifted to a different and higher bar could have an even greater impact on the world than the original version has had.

And that view is encapsulated in Buber’s seemingly innocuous quote from yesterday’s blog: If you want to raise a man from mud and filth, do not think it is enough to stay on top and reach a helping hand down to him. You must go all the way down yourself, down into the mud and filth. Then take hold of him with strong hands and pull him and you out into the light….

The seemingly radical-‘ness’ of this insight is in the submission, first, to the state of the plight of the individual in the ‘mud and filth’ and then to ‘enter’ into that space, physically, metaphorically, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually, before putting out a hand to then pull both rescuer and rescued up to the light.

Historically, the world can be perceptually, cognitively, statistically, politically and in every other conceivable dimension, between those in the ‘mud and filth’ and those ‘up’ on the ‘high ground’ peering ‘down’ into that ‘mud and filth’. And, from a sociological, political, and even cultural perspective, those ‘up’ are now deemed ‘have’s’ while those in the ‘mud and filth’ are deemed ‘have-not’s’.

The categorization, for the purposes of academic study, has some merit, in that it attempts to ‘investigate’ segments of populations, and then compare those populations from a variety of perspectives. Does a specific culture and historical and geographic region ‘treat’ those in the ‘mud and filth’ better or worse than another period or region? Does the size of that segment of the population rise or fall dependent upon and/or resulting from certain steps in an agenda adopted by a regime? Demographics, stratification, and the concomitant contextual colourations, both positive and negative, have been built into the cake of all human cultures and civilizations, as it were, just like those stratifications based on skin colour, relationship to god or Gods, or gods and the rituals, demons and spirits that have accompanied those various differences.

Power, whether measured by physical strength, fiscal resources, academic achievements, spiritual and religious piety, or scientific investigations and potential ‘cures and/or healings’ has been a prominent part of the gold that is both burned into and painted onto the ‘ring’ that attests to the most, and the most relevant power in the kingdom, at any moment in time.

Implicit in the assumption of power, status, influence, and the degree to which that power is sustained and sustainable, of course, is also the relationship of those ‘with’ power to those ‘without’ power.

And implicit to power and those holding it has been the ‘right’ or the ‘freedom’ to decide how far to reach down into the ‘mud and filth’ in order to help those permanently assigned to or resigned to that state. The decision even as to whether it is worth their while to consider whether or not there is any obligation, duty, responsibility or ‘benefit’ to such reaching down is also reserved to, by and for those with power and influence. The social, political and cultural notion that ‘this is how things work’ as an accepted, concrete, immutable fact both of history and of the nature of human beings, however, could well merit re-visiting. This current epoch, especially, could benefit from a profound reconsideration of the meaning and the impact of that conventional norm.

Occasionally, we will hear of an individual, like Mother Theresa, for example, who chooses to live among lepers, as a model of deep, profound and exemplary faith. And there have been others, throughout history whose lives have been ‘dedicated’ to climbing down into the ‘mud and filth’ in order to become one (atonement) with those in need. Another historic aspect of this “divide” between those ‘up’ and those ‘down’ is, from the beginning and continues throughout history, is that those ‘down’ have grown a deep and seemingly permanent resentment, detachment and hopelessness about the potential for those ‘above’ both to reach out a hand, and even more profoundly, to consider the option of ‘coming down’ into the ‘mud and filth’.

Political parties, in the west, trumpet those policies and practices that mete out dollars in and through programs to “alleviate” the suffering of those, whose votes they need in order to retain power and, in possible, to enhance their own ‘power position’. Barnacled to those policies and the cheques that drop into mailboxes, is an implicit attitude that can legitimately be considered, and is so deemed, as patronizing, condescending, marginalizing and even colonizing of those in the ‘mud and filth’. Of course, those designing and voting for such policies and programs either do not consider that aspect of their ‘honourable’ work, or if they acknowledge its darker features, choose to phrase their approach, ‘we are not letting the perfect impede the good and we are doing good’ in this approach.

Nevertheless, one is prompted to ask, what kind of policy and approach would result if and when a political party, leader, group were to “enter” fully and completely into the space, the mind-set, the implicit and explicit roughness of those in the ‘mud and the filth’ and then imagine, conceptualize and actually design and write approaches that would incarnate that fully-realized experience?

We do not, as privileged, mostly white, highly educated, above-average affluent men and women whose lives have spanned the last half of the twentieth century, and the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the depth of the plight of the Jews rounded up, herded onto trains, and then gassed in concentration camps, in spite of the many worthy efforts of their ancestors to continue to bring their stories to light. We do not, as white privileged, educated, modestly affluent mostly men, fully appreciate how our attitudes and beliefs in the relevant definitions of masculinity have impacted those great-grandmothers and grandmothers, wives, sisters, daughters over the last century-plus. We do not, as white, healthy, educated, affluent men and women, most of us brought up in something called a Christian home and church, have any more than a superficial, and often dismissed conception of the depth of the pain our approach to indigenous tribes, all of whom preceded us on the North American continent, has had and continues to have, on the health, education, access to opportunity and weight of hopelessness that we have, unconsciously and perhaps ever innocently, imposed on those indigenous peoples and their descendants.

We also have little to no consciousness of the feelings of both explicit and implicit racism that we continue to struggle to maintain, for the simple reason that ‘that is how things are supposed to be’ when that “supposed to be” concept is our own design and imposition.

Recently, I read a comic’s depiction of the last century-plus has evolved, primarily, as he put it, through nothing other than mansplaining. The informal definition of that new word is ‘the explanation of something by a man, typically to a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing.’

If men have been writing the philosophy, the theology, the scientific papers, the academic standards and processes, most of the literature, and the political philosophy from the beginning, there has been little attention paid to the Buber notion of ‘climbing down’ into the ‘mud and filth’ in order to fully comprehend and to identify, and to resolve to confront all of the plight of those doomed to such conditions. And as a corollary to that blindness, hubris, innocence, denial and resistance, there is also much about “reality’ that we have refused to acknowledge, that can only be discovered and potentially learned from those conditioned by the ‘mud and filth’.

And to relegate those people to ‘a problem, a nuisance, and a blight on an otherwise proud, accomplished, resilient, brass, gold and glass symbolic architecture, or another gilded age “achievement” or a tech-wave of superiority or a medical miracle of any of the many procedures and pharmaceuticals is merely to perpetuate a cultural, societal, personal and sabotage.

Buber’s profound, if highly idealistic, yet worthy injunction to all of us, while rarely applied, offers an inexhaustible reservoir of experience not only for the artists among us, or for the philosophers, or the theologians, or the political class. If and when we encounter another in the ‘mud and filth’ and we are in a position to ‘drop down’ to the ‘mud and filth’ we will invariably and inevitably discover, mostly to our shock and surprise, both a deeper experience of our own human spirit of empathy and agape, but even more importantly, the gift of insight of what really matters.

There is no time or energy in the‘mud and filth’ for idle wondering about what to do next, or how to interpret whether or not someone ‘likes’ us or not, or whether to eat out or order in, or whether to tout a specific faith as “right” and all others as “evil”…

James Hillman’s injunction for each of us ‘to get down’ into the earth of our own existence can and will be enabled and enhanced by this Buber injunction, which exceeds the boundaries and beliefs of all faiths.

 "Tikkun Olam," Hebrew words typically translated as 'repair the world' or 'mend the world' or 'heal the world' can and will be more fully and effectively accomplished, or even aspired to, if we really listen, digest, absorb and apply Buber's insight.