On experiencing the fullness of existence

My husband and I and a friend of ours have been in conversation lately about life. We’ve discussed nihilism, faith, spiritual deserts, the importance of story, bearing a cross, and so much else. One question that came up this week was, how can we experience the fullness of existence? It was such a good question that I spent an entire day thinking about it and came up with the following response.

For one thing, I don’t think there’s any way for us to actually experience every aspect of existence fully— there’s just too much raw data; we need some sort of filter to make that data useful and relevant to us. I think our filter is our set of values: we must first know what we value, which we aren’t always as conscious of as we assume, and then we must make what we value a priority.

Our values will be probably found less by looking to or reading others and more by reflecting on and observing ourselves: what sorts of things did I gravitate towards as a child/young adult that made me fall into a flow state when engaged in them? In my best moments at any point in my life, what was I doing— was it the place that was important, the people I was with, the activity itself? What gets me excited? When I feel most alive, at peace, engaged, etc., what are the circumstances I’m in— am I with others or alone, am I actively doing something or not doing anything outward at all? What do I most long for? If everything in life were perfect, what would I be doing? I think our answers to those questions and questions like that should start bringing up some patterns, and the patterns should reveal what we value, both in the idealized version of our values and the ones we actually live out.

The prefatory question of “What are my values?” should be answered with the broader question of how to experience the fullness of existence in mind. Otherwise, the answers will be something like, “work, church, and family.” Everyone would say pretty much the same thing, and there’s no useful information in that. Without using the broader question as a lens through which to answer the values question, our answers would be too general, and they might even be ways of avoiding the broader question rather than engaging with it. So keeping that in mind, we can list out our values, ask ourselves why we value what we have on our list, and rearrange that list until it feels like the most accurate delineation of what we hold dear and what we aim for. That list of values (and even the order of priority of those values) are then the basis—the lens— of the steps we take in life to either move closer to experiencing the fullness of existence or moving away from it.

There are people who value sensory-based experience over anything else and will jump off cliffs or push themselves in intense and dangerous sports because that is where they feel they are extracting the fullness of life. On the other end of the spectrum, there are the ascetic types who believe the fullness of life can be reached by going further and further internally— they will become monks or nuns, live as quietly and inwardly as possible. Their lives externally look nothing like the first type of person I described, but both may feel they are getting at the core of existence. I think this leads me less to prescribing what exactly experiencing the fullness of existence is and more to asking a couple of questions that might help each person determine what it would look like for them in all their particularly to experience the fullness of existence. (I think it’s best not to have too long a list of criteria so that it can be more easily internalized and utilized in our everyday lives; hence, my list of questions is limited to two.)

The first important question we need to ask ourselves as we consider engaging in something: Does this align with the my purported values? It’s very odd when the answer to that is no. For example, my husband watches some guys stream sometimes, and one of them will occasionally rail against the harms of tap water or the contaminants in some supplements, but, all the while he’s talking, he’s vaping and drinking a beer. Presumably, he’s railing against those things because he values health, but the vaping and alcohol consumption would undermine that in a more obvious and immediate way than contaminated tap water or supplements. Either I’m confused by his message, or he’s confused about what he values.

The second important question to ask oneself, in my opinion, is, “Am I doing this thing— or not doing this thing— out of fear?” If the answer is “yes,” that’s a good indicator right there that we’re probably not experiencing the fullness of existence. Monks should not join monasteries because they fear lust; they should join them because they so value (so love) the pursuit of truth as they believe can best be found by joining the monastery. Sensory seekers should not jump off cliffs because they’re afraid of feeling anything less than a dopamine dump; they should do it because they believe that is the closest they can get to true, raw existence.

This second question can have some corollaries or iterations, if these alternatives are more pertinent to the situation: Am I doing this out of avoidance? Out of the desire for distraction? Because the better thing would just take too much work? Even the question of whether we’re doing/not doing something out of fear can be made more specific: Am I doing this out of the fear of missing out? Of being alone? Of feeling strong emotions? The list could go on.

So I think that, once we understand our values and understand what order our values are in for ourselves based on the question of experiencing the fullness of existence, the two most important questions to continually ask ourselves are:

– Does this align with my purported values?

and

– Am I doing this (or not doing it) out of fear?

There are variations of those questions, and they can be made as specific as you want. But if we can answer with a “yes” to the first and a “no” to the second, we probably won’t be far off the path on our journey.

On self-annihilation and redemption

Three years ago, I watched a movie called Another Earth that struck me deeper than any other movie has. I tried writing about it at the time, but I just couldn’t express how much it resonated. Then last week, my husband and I watched another movie called Oslo, August 31st. Set in Norway, based on the novel Will O’ the Wisp by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, and with a male protagonist rather than a female one, it is not an obvious comparison to Another Earth. But it, too, struck me deeply, and I found myself thinking about the different ways to deal with the harm we cause others.

In Another Earth, Rhoda starts as a 17-year-old who goes out to celebrate her acceptance into MIT and then hits another car with her own, killing the pregnant mother and five-year-old son inside and leaving the husband in a coma. Four years later, she is released from prison. She lives with her parents and brother and works as janitor of a local high school, where she befriends another janitor, an older blind man named Purdeep. 

Rhoda learns where the man she hit with her car lives composing music, so she claims to be a house cleaner and offers to clean his house. They develop a relationship that, of course, ends heatedly when it’s revealed who she is. Nevertheless, she takes an opportunity to give him hope by relinquishing her own seat to him in a once-in-a-lifetime event, and this seems to release her to start living her life after that. She still works as a janitor, and she still lives with her parents. But she puts flowers on her nightstand, and she relishes the sun on her walk home from work. 

In Oslo, August 31st, Anders is in his last phase of a drug rehabilitation program. He is allowed out of the facility into the city to go to a job interview, and while in the city, he visits some of his friends and family. The spiritual void is apparent from the beginning of the movie: during a group therapy session, each patient who shares talks about how black their life is without drugs, how much better they felt about living when they at least had drugs to live for. Anders reveals the same when he visits his friend in Oslo: he’s 34 years old with no wife and no children, but he’s too intelligent to settle for the menial jobs and mediocre relationships that the other drug rehab patients will inevitably have. He warns his friend not to be surprised if he ends up overdosing.

The rest of the movie follows Anders over the remainder of that day. His interview ends poorly when the interviewer asks why there is a gap in his resume; his meeting with his sister doesn’t happen because she sends her wife in her stead. All of his old friends are living their own lives, but none of them seems content. They, too, have voids; they have no path to salvation to offer him. When he runs into one of his ex-girlfriend’s lovers at a bar and realizes just how poisonous he was to her (and, by extension, to so many others in his life), his decision is finalized. After dawn breaks, and he departs from the group he had been partying with, he walks to his parents’ empty house, plays a piece of classical music on their piano, and then kills himself in a bedroom with the entire stash of drugs he bought earlier in the night.

One of the most affecting things about Oslo, August 31st is the beginning: when he is talking with his friend or walking away from the failed interview, he is holding back tears, the kind of tears that are always right below the surface when you’re depressed, when you’re swimming in darkness and just know that that’s all there is, that there’s no way out. He doesn’t blame anyone–certainly not his parents or his ex-girlfriend or his friends. He knows his life is his responsibility and that his destruction of it is his own fault. But knowing it doesn’t make it any less sad. It makes sense why he does what he does– he even says to his friend that no one needs him, that it doesn’t matter if he stays or goes. 

The thing is, even if no one needs him, it does matter if he stays or goes. It matters so much, not that anyone tells him that. For one thing, we aren’t connected to each other simply out of need. To lose someone you love but don’t need– at least not in a utilitarian way– can still feel like having the skin on the entire front part of your body brutally ripped off and torn to shreds. You can feel exposed, bloody, incomplete. Something is missing. It hurts.

But also, and maybe more importantly, it doesn’t matter if anyone needs him. He’s been a drug addict for the past few years; his life has been experienced only as a taker. Suicide is a final, emphatic act of taking. A shift in perspective may be in order. He may find that, by no longer focusing on what he can get out of life but rather what he can give to it, he is no longer falling into an abyss. (And perhaps, by that point, someone will need him and want him to stick around.)

Yet the story has been written: we know that, to deal with his disappointed life– to deal with what he considers an existence that has only harmed others– he removes himself from the equation. He believes, understandably, that if he were no longer here, other people’s lives would be better. And maybe that’s true; I don’t know. But I doubt it. What he doesn’t see– what none of us can see– is how our lives change. I want him to read Saint Augustine’s Confessions, G. K. Chesterton, the writings of Paul; I want him to see that he’s not the first one in history to have done wrong and to learn from those who have sought Truth despite their flaws. I want him to use his formidable intelligence and abilities not just to change himself but to look beyond himself to better, higher things.

There is a character in Another Earth– Purdeep, the janitor Rhoda works with– who, rather than removing himself from the world to repent of his past sins, he punishes himself for them. One day, Rhoda comes in to work and sees a different coworker other than Purdeep. When she asks where Purdeep is, the new guy tells her he’s in the hospital because he poured bleach in his ears. “Why did he pour bleach in his ears?” she asks. “Why did he pour bleach in his eyes?” he responds. In his hospital room, she lightly touches his chest. “Rhoda,” he says sweetly. She sits down next to him and takes his hand before curling up next to him. “You are wondering why,” he says. “No… no… no… You know why.” In response, she opens his palm and writes FORGIVE on it with her finger. Tears just roll down his face.

This deep self-disgust should not be confused with self-pity. The hatred is turned inward, and the punishment is far worse than anyone else can do to the person. In fact, the punishment is in being the person; everything else is simply substantiation. Although both Anders and Purdeep take a centripetal perspective– one that turns inward– neither pities themselves nor looks to others to pity them. They know what they’ve done, and they take it on themselves to pass judgment. And oh, how damning that judgment is.

But we still have Rhoda, the main character of Another Earth. This girl has killed someone, spent time in prison, and is now in the humiliating position of cleaning up other people’s vomit, but she doesn’t kill herself nor perpetually punish herself. Hers is a more centrifugal perspective: she forgets about herself and looks outward. When she is offered the opportunity to leave her seemingly miserable life for another, potentially better one, she instead gives it up to the man she hurt and remains where she is. From there, she builds a life– a simple, humble life. There is no self-pity in her either, but neither is there self-judgment. The life of glory she once could have had is no longer an option; she accepts that. And who knows? Perhaps in this acceptance, this humble self-sacrifice, does she actually develop into the better version of herself, something she may not have become if she had stayed on her original path. We don’t know what the best version of ourselves looks like. The unfortunate thing is that so few of us allow ourselves to find out.

I wish I could tell Anders to hold out just a little longer to see with new eyes, to catch a glimpse of something that makes him put aside what he was doing and investigate what he glimpsed until he forgets what he was doing entirely and finds himself on a new, more hopeful path. And I wish I could open Purdeep’s hand and trace FORGIVE over and over in it. If only they, like Rhoda, could awaken from their depths of despair and disgust and experience the undeserving grace that comes out of abject humility, they may find that life is richer and more ineffable than they ever would have thought.

The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. (Is this not the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have been unable to say what constituted that sense?)

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractates Logico-Philosophicus

The best books I read in 2021

This has been quite a year. I started a graduate program, I got married, I moved, I started a new job, and I now live in the same town as my grandparents, parents, two sisters (and brother-in-law), and 2-year-old niece. I have had very little free time to do anything, but I have still managed to squeeze some books in (thanks in large part to audiobooks). Below are the ones I liked best, listed in the order I read them. There are some honorable mentions at the end, simply because I read so many books that are worth sharing that others might find interesting but that just didn’t make the cut for ‘the best’ (in my very biased opinion). So here they all are, for your reading enjoyment.

For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio by W. H. Auden

This is a long poem about the birth of Christ, told with many voices and perspectives. It is so profound and relevant to our age, challenging our mindset (materialism, science, distraction, etc.) and always bringing it back to what matters: Christ. I love poetry for what it can say without explaining or qualifying it, and this poem says so much. It has lines I could meditate on for days— I will need to re-read them to let them sink in. Beautiful.

“If we were never alone or always too busy,
Perhaps we might even believe what we know is not true:
But no one is taken in, at least not all of the time;
In our bath, or on the subway, or the middle of the night,
We know very well we are not unlucky but evil,
That the dream of a Perfect State or No State at all,
To which we fly for refuge, is a part of our punishment.
Let us therefore be contrite but without anxiety,
For Powers and Times are not gods but mortal gifts from God;
Let us acknowledge our defeats but without despair,
For all societies and epochs are transient details,
Transmitting an everlasting opportunity
That the Kingdom of Heaven may come, not in our present
And not in our future, but in the Fullness of Time.
Let us pray.”

My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth that Led to an American Tragedy by Nora Titone

This was a powerful, well-researched, well-written book on history, a genre I don’t typically gravitate towards. But the Booth family is fascinating—from the elder Junius Brutus, the brilliant polymathic actor who succumbed to debilitating alcoholism, to his ten illegitimate children of Mary Ann Holmes, the young flower-seller he took with him from England to America to escape the knowledge of his wife and child he left behind. Edwin, the only of Junius’s children who inherited his intelligence and unrivaled acting ability, grew the Booth name above the shame of its origins (and that of the acting vocation at the time) to meteoric wealth and fame while his brothers struggled to get by in acting, despite their lack of talent or ability. The resentment caused by the difference in personal life histories and subsequent incomes led to differing political stances and, eventually, the assassination of President Lincoln. I learned so much about the Civil War from this book and saw so many parallels to our own time– the extents to which people will go in the name of a ‘righteous’ ideology; the Draft Riots in New York City that became less about the draft and more about looting local businesses; the slant of journalism and the power of mob mentality– that it is shocking. This was an amazing book; I can’t believe I didn’t know so much of what was in it before now.

“The elder Booth had invested his villainous characters, one reviewer claimed, with appealing qualities like ‘heroic courage, sublime defiance and strong affection.’ It was the Booth genius to present Shakespeare’s evil protagonists as ‘fallen angels,’ men who were admirable and gifted in some ways, yet fatally misguided and flawed.”

“In his conclusion, John’s anger at the political situation seems to merge with his feelings of being disregarded by his family. The dishonorable conduct of Northern men, John cried, ‘makes me hate my brothers in the north. It severs all our bonds of friendship. It induces our brothers in the north to deny us our rights, to plunder us, to rob us! . . . It misrepresents me to the whole world.’”

“The truth, an anonymous reviewer explained in the Boston Daily Advertiser on May 19, 1862, was that John Wilkes Booth was no actor. Aside from good looks and an athletic ability, he had little to recommend him to audiences. It was evident this Booth had never been trained to breathe, to project his voice, or to speak in a way that conveyed emotion. Shakespeare was a foreign language to him.”

The Queen of Air and Darkness and The Ill-Made Knight by T. H. White

These two are the middle of the four books that comprise The Once and Future King, White’s chronicle of King Arthur and his knights. They are my favorite because they are the most psychological. The Queen of Air and Darkness introduces Queen Morgause– Arthur’s half-sister who is also half-witch– and her four boys, particularly their relationship to their narcissistic mother. They are so lost and so long for her love, and, as a result, they can be so cruel as an outlet for their confusion. In perhaps the most terrible and heartbreaking scene, the boys kill a unicorn to impress Morgause, but she does not notice when they try to show her and then has them whipped. 

The Ill-Made Knight follows Sir Lancelot and his adventures, sadnesses, love triangle with Guenever and Arthur, and final miracle. Lancelot, who is described as ugly, is so lovable and good, yet he believes himself to be so bad and carries so much shame. This book is also the story of the ups and downs of King Arthur’s Round Table of knights. It was well-written and emotionally complex. I was honestly surprised by how involved in this entire series of books I got.

“Indeed, they did love her. Perhaps we all give the best of our hearts uncritically—to those who hardly think about us in return.”

“In the secret parts of his peculiar brain, those unhappy and inextricable tangles which he felt at the roots, the boy was disabled by something which we cannot explain. He could not have explained either, and for us it is all too long ago. He loved Arthur and he loved Guenever and he hated himself. The best knight of the world: everybody envied the self-esteem which must surely be his. But Lancelot never believed he was good or nice. Under the grotesque, magnificent shell with a face like Quasimodo’s, there was shame and self-loathing which had been planted there when he was tiny, by something which it is now too late to trace. It is so fatally easy to make young children believe they are horrible.”

A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by George Saunders 

Bringing his graduate class to book form, Saunders goes through seven 19th-century Russian stories by Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Gogol to discuss the art of the short story: what it does, how to do it, variations of it, and the uniqueness/shortcomings of each of the writers (and how those only enhance their stories and their meanings). I loved that the stories were included in full so that I could read them all, and I loved Saunders’s openness and enthusiasm for writing, for fiction, for these stories in particular, and for short stories in general. This was such a fun book to read (even though I don’t aspire to write short stories!).

“To write a story that works, that moves the reader, is difficult, and most of us can’t do it. Even among those who have done it, it mostly can’t be done. And it can’t be done from a position of total control, of flawless mastery, of simply having an intention and then knowingly executing it. There’s intuition involved, and stretching—trying things that are at the limit of our abilities, that may cause mistakes. Like Yashka, the writer has to risk a cracking voice and surrender to his actual power, his doubts notwithstanding.

[…]

It’s hard to get any beauty at all into a story. If and when we do, it might not be the type of beauty we’ve always dreamed of making. But we have to take whatever beauty we can get, however we can get it.

I teach ‘The Singers’ to suggest to my students how little choice we have about what kind of writer we’ll turn out to be. . . . (‘The writer can choose what he writes about,’ said Flannery O’Connor, ‘but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.’)”

Dusk, Night, Dawn by Anne Lamott

What would a best-of list be without Anne Lamott? This is another of her books that touches on themes of grace, repentance, forgiveness, and faith (and, of course, love). It includes stories of her marriage (she got married in 2019 in her mid-60s), of her friends and Sunday school class (as usual), and of her parents. While she repeats lines and themes, and I feel like I know so much about her life, her books are always somehow refreshing, as if I didn’t know I could use a reminder to be less judgmental and more open. 

“What is nature sharing with us? If something is allowed to grow the way it was designed to, it works. When we try to get it to conform to the supposedly more efficient image we have of it, we get grotesqueries, imbalances. When we try to get difficulties to conform to our way of thinking, we often push them toward being fancier, and thus absurd. We strip away the grace of what is real, and true, and maybe even lovely.”

Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris

Norris is a copyeditor at The New Yorker and wrote this book as part grammar manual/part memoir. I loved it. I am fascinated by both grammar/words and people’s personal stories, so this book was right up my alley. I loved learning more than I knew, re-learning what I already know, and getting different perspectives on things I think about (like the role of profanity in publications). I am glad I stumbled upon this one.

“But good writers have a reason for doing things the way they do them, and if you tinker with their work, taking it upon yourself to neutralize a slightly eccentric usage or zap a comma or sharpen the emphasis of something that the writer was deliberately keeping obscure, you are not helping. In my experience, the really great writers enjoy the editorial process. They weigh queries, and they accept or reject them for good reasons. They are not defensive. The whole point of having things read before publication is to test their effect on a general reader. You want to make sure when you go out there that the tag on the back of your collar isn’t poking up—unless, of course, you are deliberately wearing your clothes inside out.”

A Carnival of Snackery by David Sedaris

Ok, what would a best-of list be without David Sedaris? This is his collection of diary entries from 2002-2020, picking up where Theft by Finding left off, and it was so fun and easy to read. It made me wish I had kept a diary of bizarre things people say and do over the years because people are so weird. And Sedaris finds them. I also love how honest his thoughts are when people annoy or frustrate him– it makes me feel less bad for having those thoughts, too. I just want to read his books forever.

“After an hour at the leisure center, I went to the butcher shop and confused the guy behind the counter. ‘No one understands me when I talk,’ I said to Hugh when I returned home. ‘It’s really no different here than it was in France.’

‘That’s because you speak in non sequiturs,’ he said. And of course he’s right. Yesterday afternoon, when the butcher asked how my day had been so far, I held up my hands, which were scratched and bleeding from reaching into blackberry bushes for stray bits of trash, and said, ‘Don’t I look like I own a cheetah?’

I later said the same thing to my cashier at the grocery store but changed it to tiger. Not that it altered the reaction any. I just can’t for the life of me figure out what to say to people. I never have been able to, no matter what the language.”

The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher

I realize that not everyone will like or appreciate this book, but I found so much to think about and digest in this. I was really drawn to Dreher’s ideas about practicing asceticism, of reclaiming the Western civilization through literature and reading the early church fathers and great thinkers, of pulling our children out of public schools, of practicing liturgy and orthodoxy, of preparing for the downfall of the West and even of Christianity– I agreed with so much of it and was challenged by so much of it. It has me wondering (even more than I already do) about the best way to live, especially as a Christian in a world that is becoming increasingly hostile to true Christianity.

“In the Benedict Option, we are not trying to repeal seven hundred years of history, as if that were possible. Nor are we trying to save the West. We are only trying to build a Christian way of life that stands as an island of sanctity and stability amid the high tide of liquid modernity. We are not looking to create heaven on earth; we are simply looking for a way to be strong in faith through a time of great testing. The Rule, with its vision of an ordered life centered around Christ and the practices it prescribes to deepen our conversion, can help us achieve that goal.”

“In other words, ordering one’s actions is really about training one’s heart to love and to desire the right things, the things that are real, without having to think about it. It is acquiring virtue as a habit.”

“Rather, they must keep their balance and stay focused on, in Havel’s words, ‘the everyday, thankless, and never-ending struggle of human beings to live more freely, truthfully, and in quiet dignity.’”

Honorable Mentions:

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

Human Diversity by Charles Murray

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again by Andy Warhol by Andy Warhol

The timeliness of Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard speech

For months, I have inwardly debated writing something about the times we are living in and have— until now— come out on the side of keeping my thoughts to myself. But I just read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address to Harvard in 1978, and the prescience and relevance to our own era are too uncanny not to comment on. He could give the same speech today, and we would have no idea it was written over thirty years ago.

Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago from his experience in the prison camps under Communist Russia. It is a scathing critique of Communism, and Solzhenitsyn pulls no punches. Even in his speech at Harvard, he states unequivocally, 

“I hope that no one present will suspect me of expressing my partial criticism of the Western system in order to suggest socialism as an alternative. No; with the experience of a country where socialism has been realized, I shall not speak for such an alternative. The mathematician Igor Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliantly argued book entitled Socialism; this is a penetrating historical analysis demonstrating that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.” [emphasis mine]

However, this Harvard speech is targeted at the West rather than the East (his book does plenty of the latter). He is disgusted by the West’s materialism and reliance on freedom without any sense of responsibility or accountability. His main argument is that, by embracing the humanism put forth during the Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment (“…the pro-claimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of all.”), the West has neglected the spiritual self for the purely physical, and this has had dire consequences for us. 

“Everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtle and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any higher meaning. Thus gaps were left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today. Mere freedom per se does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and even adds a number of new ones.”

Because we have emphasized freedom, we have become confused about what that word means. It is not uncommon to hear demands for free things– like education and healthcare– out of the same mouths that are demanding lesser or no penalties for crimes. Freedom does not guarantee that we will be given anything; we are responsible for acting morally when given freedom. But that concept has been bulldozed for one demanding more more more while demanding that even less be asked of us.

“And yet in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted on the ground that man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding one thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims.

[. . .]

It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

On the other hand, destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom and to be counterbalanced, in theory, by the young people’s right not to look and not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.”

Evil has been given free rein for the very reason we have refused to acknowledge it. If we were to bring it up in everyday conversation, it would be dismissed as superstitious residue from an obsolete religion, one with no relevance to our modern-day lives. The truth is much more serious, and we ignore our spiritual selves at our peril: “But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive. You can feel their pressure, yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?”

It is easy to avoid the spiritual side of existence. We have plenty of distractions, plenty of other people’s lives to obsess over. But though we may feel entitled to these distractions and even to the details of other people’s lives, Solzhenitsyn believes that we would do far better to exercise our self-restraint and our right not to look, “not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life has no need for this excessive and burdening flow of information.”

The sad thing is, I can think of very few who have no need for the “excessive and burdening flow of information.” It is incessant, and it is very often wrong. Yet this is what we base our opinions and sensibilities on– this misleading, unreliable, factually-confused barrage of information that we have insufficient filters for and an inability to entirely contain. Then policies are made in alignment with these unverified ideas, and the domino effect has begun.

“Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block dangerous herd development.”

We cling even tighter to these ideas because we believe they are legitimized by society’s acting on them. But we are just part of the herd, being pushed along with no idea of where we are going. We believe there is safety in numbers, and we don’t want to know what it’s like to be alone by ourselves.

Therein lies the danger. We need to stop eating the lies we are fed; we need to start fighting for something deeper than material happiness and more eternal than this finite life. There is a lot wrong with the world right now, but it is not what we are being told is wrong. Solzhenitsyn saw clearly what our weaknesses are. If we haven’t gotten better in the thirty years since he showed them to us, what will it take for us to finally understand?

Silence (a poem)

Silence is not the same as absence.

 

I thought truth could be spoken, 

but it turns out it can’t. 

It hides in words, 

can only be approached by 

metaphor, paradox, 

what can’t be explained. 

 

‘What is truth?’ Pilate asked Jesus, 

but Jesus said nothing. 

 

Even Pilate was surprised.

Land of Unknowing

“In fact, there is no way to ‘return to the faith of your childhood,’ not really, not unless you’ve just woken from a decades-long and absolutely literal coma. Faith is not some half-remembered country into which you come like a long-exiled king, dispensing the old wisdom, casting out the radical, insurrectionist aspects of yourself by which you’d been betrayed. No. Life is not an error, even when it is. That is to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life— which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived— or have denied the reality of your life.”

Life is not an error, even when it is. How painful it is for me to read that, yet how hopeful. I live with the error that I’ve made of my life, a life I think I’ve botched for good and forever by choosing at one point several years ago to turn away from the faith of my childhood and pursue a different path, one guided by a moral compass I believed could be constructed through experience and self-observation. And though Carl Jung understood this impulse to find out for oneself how to live one’s life (“It is no reckless adventure, but an effort inspired by deep spiritual distress to bring meaning once more into life on the basis of fresh and unprejudiced experience”), it ushered in a period of gray meaninglessness and hopelessness for me. A period of several years. A period that I’m not sure has ended.

Yet upon reading Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss after a good friend recommended it to me, I felt something light up with recognition, “as if I had happened upon some rare flower deep in the desert and had known, though I was just then discovering it, that it had been blooming impossibly year after parched year in me, surviving all the seasons of my unbelief.” I know it’s there; my years of belief were not for naught, surely. But what is this flower? What is it made of? Will I learn to water the ground in which it is rooted to quench the thirst of my parched soul? Or will I continue walking through the desert, grateful for such an encounter but in denial of its significance?

The years that I was fully and willingly ‘in the faith,’ I had a structure upon which to build my life. I knew what was right and what was wrong, and I felt a purpose in the forward motion of my life. I followed it because I believed there to be meaning in it, that any effort I put in now would lead to something better (not comfortable or material, but important) later. My life was not mine; I was an instrument to do the work of God. That made it easy to deny myself ‘things of this world.’ I had to keep myself pure if I wanted to be a holy instrument.

Then I decided that I wanted a break from that. Not necessarily from doing what I thought was important, but from following something that had been handed to me rather than discovered by me. There is obvious egoism in that, I know. There is also something disrespectful and ungrateful about that: the deep and vast history of individuals struggling with a faith that never comes easily, that is always present and always just out of reach, has so much to teach me about wrestling and acceptance, and I brushed it away. Just like that. Thousands of years of experience in the face of unknowing? No, thanks. I’ll do it the hard way and learn for myself.

Well, learn, I did. Achingly. Disastrously. Unforgivably. I pay the price even now, after I decided that what had been passed down to me was something of value and have been trying to reclaim it. But I’ve been trying to reclaim it without reclaiming its core, the kernel inside the package I’m trying to take bits and pieces from. Is that possible? Given that I haven’t been successful yet, the answer might be no. Wiman writes:

“We do not need definite beliefs because their objects are necessarily true. We need them because they enable us to stand on steady spots from which the truth may be glimpsed. . . . And more crucially: definite beliefs enable us to withstand the storms of suffering that come into every life, and that tend to destroy any spiritual disposition that does not have deep roots.”

The kernel is made up of those definite beliefs, and the rest stem from those (or, if those beliefs all stem from Christ, then the rest stem from Him). My experiment years ago in trying to separate the moral from the Christian eventually proved to me that a life rooted in a tentatively moral yet decidedly un-Christian ground is easily uprooted. I don’t mean Christian in terms of one who chooses to wear that title, but Christian in terms of one who follows Christ, who seeks something as definite and indefinite as a dead-then-resurrected God, who sets strict boundaries on their life based on that seeking and yet who is open to what that seeking might ask of them. I have not yet come across a life capable of withstanding “the storms of suffering” that was not rooted in a strong spiritual disposition. But I’ve looked. Lord knows I’ve tried.

And yet. And yet, faith is not belief. It is not the set of beliefs that make up such a spiritual disposition, a spiritual discipline. It is inarticulable, ungraspable.

“Faith is nothing more— but how much this is— than a motion of the soul toward God. It is not belief. Belief has objects— Christ was resurrected, God created the earth— faith does not. Even the motion of faith is mysterious and inexplicable: I say the soul moves “toward” God, but that is only the limitation of language. It may be God who moves, the soul that opens for him. Faith is faith in the soul. Faith is the word “faith” decaying into pure meaning.”

This is where I find myself: pre-belief, encountering faith in the desert of my soul as it takes the form of a rare flower one moment, a catch of breath another, an empty space yet another. I cannot hold it, as it cannot be separated from my soul, and I cannot understand it, as after all this time, it should have died, closed up, suffocated. But there it is nonetheless: a mystery, transcending reason, allowing me to build up my negative capability, “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” There is movement there, but is it I who is moving?

“Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may take new forms.”

Wiman has answers, but just as soon as he sets them down, he pulls them away. This is what I needed, as paradoxical as it sounds. I needed a reminder that there is a YES, that there is a Definite, but that I may never find it– or rather, that I may have a moment, maybe a few moments, where I find it, sense the realness of it, but that that moment will pass, will always pass, will never stick around for me to be able to turn it over and look at it and show it off to others. I needed a reminder to listen again for the whisper of the soul, to hear the music it is always making but can easily be mistaken for white noise.

“Some modern philosophers (Heidegger, Kierkegaard) have argued that existential anxiety proceeds from being unconscious of, or inadequately conscious of, death. True, I think, but I wonder if the emphasis might be placed differently, shifted from unconscious reaction to unrealized action: that is, our anxiety is less the mind shielding itself from death than the spirit’s need to be. It is as if each of us were always hearing some strange, complicated music in the background of our lives, music that, so long as it remains in the background, is not simply distracting but manifestly unpleasant, because it demands the attention we are giving to other things. It is not hard to hear this music, but it is very difficult to learn to hear it as music.”

I don’t have any answers. I don’t even know what I am exploring, where I am in this territory of the spirit, where God is just as much as He is not. I am tired, and I am thirsty. And I just don’t know. But there is a small, rare flower, and there is strange, distant music. And maybe, after all these years, I’m finding my way back home.

Fashionable madmen

“Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.” -Joan Didion, On Morality, as quoted here

I have spent the past year or so observing and absorbing current events, not so much to stay up to date– I’ve never really cared about that– but more so to understand something I had willfully ignored and completely misunderstood up until now, namely the misguided ideology and narrative of the Left. While I mostly refer to what is more commonly called the ‘progressive Left’ and is less commonly– but perhaps more accurately– called the ‘regressive’ or ‘illiberal Left,’ the ideology of the regressive Left is gaining traction and infiltrating both common politics (see AOC) and arenas where politics shouldn’t even be (see quotas in the tech industry, publishing, and air traffic control, for examples). So for brevity, I will simply write the Left. Understandably, the question has been posited to me and to others who write about the Left, why focus on the Left? In other words: What bone to I have to pick with them? How can I just overlook the wrongs done by the Right? At first, I thought that maybe I did hold a grudge, that maybe, because I made it a big deal that I no longer considered myself a feminist, I had to justify that action and calm any cognitive dissonance I may have felt by searching out incidents that supported my newfound belief system. But I don’t think so. I’ve tried to observe with open eyes what is happening– what I wouldn’t let myself see before– and it’s been deeply troubling. If what has been increasingly upsetting to me was done by the Right or any non-Leftists, I would write about that. It’s just that the triggering moments have been due those on the Left.

Still, I have been checking myself over and over these past few months, wondering if I am being unfairly biased, if I am falling for the algorithmic trap that all social media platforms have in which they direct you to more and more extreme content until your views are so drastic they seem absurd and dismissible to the opposing side. I am hesitant to answer that, as I could be wrong, but the more I see and read, the more I think that the answer is no, I’m not being unfair. I’m just a witness to a baffling and even frightening moment in history and feel the need to express what I see.

So what have I observed? As Joan Didion wrote in the quote above, it is fashionable to be on board with certain ideas right now– fashionable to the point of hysteria, where those who are not on board are punished. This is not an exaggeration: people have lost their jobs and been beaten up simply for not believing the ideology of the Left. I say ‘simply,’ but it is often actually a messy formula that has roots in mob mentality and laziness: someone who does not believe the Leftist ideology is mischaracterized as something horrible, like alt-right, far-right, neo-fascist, racist, homophobic, or sexist; anything that person says or does is from that point dismissed or held up as an example of what’s wrong with the world; when that person or supporters of that person are seen in public or publicly state some contrarian view online, they are ridiculed or worse; and thanks to social media– Twitter in particular– news of the presence of the individual or their supposed misdemeanor spreads like wildfire, and the mob takes to the streets and/or the Twittersphere to lambast the person for their perceived sins. The laziness at play here is in the trust in the members of the team for others on the team to do the homework for them: if so-and-so says this person is a neo-Nazi, he must be; therefore, it’s totally ok and even justified that we attack. But they haven’t actually gone to the source themselves. They haven’t listened to or read anything directly by the accused person. They don’t really know if they’re a neo-Nazi. Yet, having passed off the responsibility to do the homework to someone else, they harm others, whether it is their reputation, their livelihoods, or their lives.

Sometimes, one of the tribe gets caught in the cross-fire. For some perceived infraction, they are punished by those whose side they were on just moments before. This is often far more painful to witness because, more often than not, the accused lays him/herself down before the mob-jury and offers an apology, one usually filled with promises to do better and ‘listen harder.’ But, just as often, the apology is not enough. The mob doesn’t accept it. The accused is either ex-communicated indefinitely or starts working on ingratiating themselves with their tribe again with head bowed and tail between the legs.

Ah, but how can a person sin without a religion? That’s just it: the Left is a religion, one that has been described here, here, here, and here.  This religion is marked by the identity first and foremost: white = bad; male = bad; black/latino/trans/women = victims; victims = sacred and must be protected, believed, and defended at all costs (even at the cost of truth and, sometimes, the safety of others).

The resulting culture of victimhood has all kinds of repercussions, from the expected to the bizarre:

• Censorship— the requisite strict adherence to the dogma results in self-censorship and censoring each other to stay in line with the dogma;
• Concept inflation— for example, words like ‘safety’ and ‘harm’ are stretched to describe effects of words, not just physicality, which devalues their meaning;
• Deplatforming— to protect the ‘safety’ of those ‘harmed’ by opposing views, it is imperative not to let those with those opposing views express them ever, either in person or online;
• Virtue signaling— to let others in the tribe know they are toeing the line, they post their support on social media, in conversation, or in action (such as protests, ‘punching a Nazi,’ or calling out racist, sexist bigots);
• Anger— anger is lauded as overdue and justified after so many years of oppression and ignoring the lives of the victim groups listed above;
• Violence— those outside of the religion of the Left represent abhorrent views, are undeserving of empathy, and therefore must be fought by whatever means so that the good side wins (this is one of the least bizarre and more expected ones);
• Blatant lies— this can be seen in the lie of false statistics or statistics misinterpreted being pushed to further a cause (like feminism or police racism), in the lie about a racist attack that won support in the religion of the Left by preying on the victim ideology for selfish motives, and in the lie about being racially profiled for bringing a homemade clock rather than a bomb, which resulted in an outpouring of sympathy so strong that the White House issued an invitation, Microsoft donated $10,000 worth of technology, and Qatar provided a sponsorship, all because the victim ideology was exploited for personal gain;
• Emotions over context and reason— it doesn’t matter the actual story or the complications of the details that would require thought to work through because if it feels bad (like children crying or people not being able to live in whatever country they choose), then it must be bad;
• Narrative over nuance— whether it’s passing judgment before all the facts are known because an image is easier to latch onto than the actual event, or ignoring the facts even once they are out because a narrative is simpler and brings out a bigger, more desired reaction, narrative trumps nuance when the nuance would require rethinking one’s beliefs; and
• Avoidance of cognitive dissonance— when confronted with thoughts and opinions that do not fit into the ideology, deny them, attack the character of the person spewing them (or at the very least, of those the person quotes), become angry, and, if all that fails, walk away.

I am a heretic. I no longer belong to this religion, though I once did; it is not mine, yet I live in a world where it dominates. I’ve seen what happens when people stand up against it, but I also see where it’s taking us. For the sake of my as-yet-unborn niece or nephew, for the sake of those of us who would like to have fulfilling and self-directed futures, I want to prevent that from happening. I just hope– despite my fears– that it doesn’t get too much worse before it gets better.

Uber-cum-meditation

I can’t watch or read much of anything online these days because I find almost everything I come across to be annoying in some way: mainstream media’s take on, well, pretty much everything; the same topics repeatedly covered by the publications I actually like; the distance and hostility between the political parties. Even things that people turn to for distraction and entertainment annoy me. I just can’t seem to stand anything, and I try to ignore it to be able to be minimally nice to people during the day.

This has made it difficult to write about anything, as annoyance is not one of the better known muses and has, in fact, been known to scare the creative and inspirational muses away, leaving one with an ugly feeling and no productive outlet for it.

I noticed this week, however, that annoyance is not a far step from anger, and I’ve actually felt angry by things. When, after waiting for ten minutes after work for an Uber to take me to the place I volunteer, I got a notification that a different driver, this one now another ten minutes away, had replaced the first one, I got mad. Luckily, the driver came, he took me where I needed to go, and there were no more mishaps with the ride. It was only when I arrived that the anger really started to solidify: the meeting I do childcare for had been canceled, so I wasn’t needed. There was nothing for me to do except go home.

I didn’t blow up, but the young woman who had informed me of the cancellation was wringing her hands and shaking in her shoes so much that you would think steam was coming from my ears. So I let her go, poor thing, and went to stewing on my own as I waited for one Uber after another (more replacements, more minutes to wait, etc.).

I was ready to pounce on someone.

Little did I know, I was being sent a teacher in the guise of an Uber driver. Bharpoor pulled up to the building with a long, impeccably trimmed white beard and a big turban on his head. He mentioned when I got in that I was going far, and I said, ‘Yeah, kinda far.’ He responded, ‘That’s okay. That is why I am here– to take you where you need to go.’ He said it so genuinely, so kindly, that I felt my anger melt a little. He’s taking care of me, I thought. I told myself to be more like him.

Unfortunately, my resolve was tested just a few minutes later when we had to pick up another rider who was nowhere near the pickup point, and we had to wait several minutes for her. Bharpoor called her twice, and though she said she was close, we continued to wait with no rider in sight. I wasn’t happy, as I’ve explained, and I started wishing Bharpoor would just cancel her ride and abandon her to the night. Take me home! I just want to be home! But after being told that she was close– again– Bharpoor said, ‘That’s okay. We have patience.’

We. We have patience. We have patience. Right. We have patience. If Bharpoor says it, then that’s what it is. So I told myself that I had patience.

And just like that, the girl showed up, she got in the car, and Bharpoor took me home.

It wasn’t a miracle, not in the biblical sense, at least, but it was profound. Things happen that I think are objectively bad: I don’t like this; I have in my mind a better alternative that I’ve missed; and now my emotions are all in a bunch. But I have a choice, every time. Feelings and reactions are not objective; things are only as bad as I make them. I can try being more equanimous, even if I don’t feel like being equanimous. My annoyance so often stems from wanting life to go where I tell it even as it is doing just the opposite. I have to loosen the reins a bit (a lot.) I have to learn to take things in stride better. To slow down. Look up. Read a poem, maybe write one. Chill out. To have patience.

That’s what I’m here for– to take you where you need to go.

Morals and politics

Somewhere toward the end of 2017, I came across an interview on On Being of Jonathan Haidt. I had never heard of him, but because the wheels of my mind had already been put into motion on the concept of ideological thinking, the description of the interview caught my attention: ‘He explains “liberal” and “conservative” not narrowly or necessarily as political affiliations, but as personality types — ways of moving through the world.’ I wanted to know what that meant– I needed guidance for navigating this no-man’s-land I had found myself in, politically speaking. And what he explained fascinated me.

The basic tenets of the theory Haidt has culled from his research (more of which is described in his book A Righteous Mind) are that moral judgment is based mostly on intuitions, rather than conscious reasoning; there’s more to morality than harm and fairness; and morality ‘binds and blinds.’ Those who identify as liberal tend to have a two-fold idea of morality, one that revolves around the ideas of fairness and care. But those who identify as conservative tend to have a five-fold idea of morality, one based on the ideas of fairness, care, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. (This does not mean that conservatives are more moral because their definition of morality includes more factors— it just means that the various factors involved are weighted differently by each group.) Moreover, we do not consciously reason our way to moral judgment; rather, ‘When it comes to moral judgments, we think we are scientists discovering the truth, but actually we are lawyers arguing for positions we arrived at by other means.’ Lastly, our morals allow us to be part of groups outside of our kin groups; sharing values allows us to find a cohesiveness with others that we might otherwise have little connection with. But they also blind us to values outside of our own moral matrix and to the defects of that matrix.

“…[I]n one study that I did with my former graduate student, Jesse Graham, we asked liberals and conservatives to fill out our main surveys, pretending to be the other, and also as themselves, for different people. What we found is that conservatives and moderates were very accurate at filling it out as though they were liberals. But liberals were not accurate filling it out as though they were conservatives, because they just couldn’t get their mind into the idea that authority is somehow related to morality; they think it’s just oppression. So that’s one reason why there’s a difficulty, an asymmetric difficulty.”

Reading this made me think of all the times I have vehemently stated the case for something to or around my parents– how they must have rolled their eyes! Yes, yes, we can see your point, I imagine them thinking. You just don’t see ours. And they would be right– I didn’t see theirs. Not only was I afraid to try, but my moral matrix had been whittled down to two legs, while theirs stood on five. I no longer thought the world needed to include more than what I saw. I thought I understood the Truth, and everyone else was blind.

Haidt goes on to explain how different moral matrices can complement each other:

“…[I]n doing this research and coming to see that liberals and conservatives each have a piece of the puzzle — each are really perceptive about certain moral values, about the needs of what it takes to have a humane society, and if you let liberals run everything, they tend to burn up social capital, but conservatives tend to focus more on building up social structures that actually do allow us to flourish in some ways. You do need order. You do need some restrictions. You do need some boundaries.”

So the truth is not confined to two pillars, it would seem. It’s hard for me to admit how eye-opening this was. I shouldn’t have been surprised– I grew up with a conservative moral matrix, after all. Unlike Haidt, who had never encountered conservative ideas until he was an adult, I was surrounded by them for most of my life. And yet I was just as taken aback as he was to find out that there was some value to them. (It hurts me even to write that. The absolute egoism, ignorance, and ingratitude of that statement is shameful.) It was freeing, though. I was now allowed to think outside of the narrow liberal framework I had been working within for so many years. I could appreciate other ideas without having to claim anything. I was given permission to listen to people and hear what they had to say.

I know where my liberal leanings came from, and Haidt explains it in his interview (‘…about the terrible things that happen — I mean we’re talking about polarization here — what happens when the academy itself becomes polarized, so that all the liberals are in the academy, all the conservatives are in think tanks in Washington.’) just as Jordan Peterson warns repeatedly in his own videos and interviews (for example): universities, particularly their social sciences, are often places of ideological indoctrination. I may have been primed through personal experiences and encounters with liberal-minded people, but I was baptized by my college curriculum and sent out from there as a disciple of the religion of the Left. And where did I go? To where other disciples were: grad school, the Peace Corps, nonprofits, none of which are bad in and of themselves. It’s just that the polarization happens with everything: with our online habits, with our choice of city in which to live, with our friend group. We start living in an echo chamber without even realizing it.

What I’ve found from my own experience is that breaking out of our echo chambers is not an easy thing to do. It took a long time for me to accept that some things I didn’t want to hear nevertheless made sense and that I couldn’t just ignore them. Even now, there are things that are uncomfortable (like the effects of diversity or admitting how idealistic and ignorant I have been about certain historical events, like so many people on the Left were/are regarding socialism). Ultimately, though, it’s worth it, however long it takes and however uncomfortable it is. Haidt describes his own experience:

“…[I]in doing this research over many years, and in forcing myself to watch FOX News as an anthropologist who just — ‘I’ve got to understand this stuff’ — over time I realized, ‘Well, they’re not crazy. These ideas make sense. They see things I didn’t see.’

The feeling of losing my anger was thrilling. It was really freeing. When you get people to actually understand each other, and they let down their guard, and they learn something new, and they see humanity in someone that they disliked or hated or demonized before, that’s really thrilling. And that, I think, is one of the most important emotional tools we have to foster civility. Because once you get it started, it’s kind of addictive.”

This has led me even deeper into what I now realize is the Intellectual Dark Web (of which Jonathan Haidt is part): a collection of thinkers all along the political spectrum who are devoted to discussing meaningful subjects– however much they may disagree on them– while maintaining civility and without obeying the laws of political correctness, often to the detriment of their own careers in academia or elsewhere. What has shocked me the most since discovering this ‘third way,’ so to speak, is the realization that people rarely go to the source for information. Blatant and imprecise accusations are thrown around, mostly online (and often by the Left), with as little prompting as a Tweet. ‘Alt-right,’ ‘neo-Nazi,’ and ‘white supremacist’ are slapped on people without regard to the person or group’s statements and alignments to the contrary. It frightens me to see that, rather than actually valuing other people, we are wanting to see an obliteration of any thought that differs from our own. How did that happen? And what good will that do?

I think that part of the answer– at least to how this happened– lies in the different moral matrices: if one side cannot even fathom another side’s moral framework, if theirs is the more restricted matrix, then anything beyond that will appear irrelevant at best and immoral (possibly even evil) at worst. So when someone from the more restricted matrix comes upon something written by someone outside of that, or witnesses a group gathering with values different from theirs, it is more difficult for them to see morality there. If mislabeling happens, so be it– their concerns are misplaced (or downright wrong) anyway. Right?

Something I fell prey to myself as I went from Christian conservative teen to agnostic liberal young adult was the idea that religion (and therefore, religious conservatism) was useless and in many ways oppressive. It’s clear to me now that I was in the throes of quite a different religion and that it was much more dangerous, but it didn’t hit me until I came upon Haidt’s interview just how far off I was, just how much I had benefited in my life from growing up in a religious family with a religious community. It turns out  that there actually is something to religion (again, the ingratitude!): 

“…[A] wonderful book, American Grace, by Putnam and Campbell, is the ultimate authority on this. What they find is that it doesn’t matter what religion you are, and it doesn’t matter what you believe: If you are part of a religious community, then on average, you’re a better citizen. You give more to charity. Religion does bring out the good in people. Now, secular people can be perfectly good too, but on average, they give less, and they give less of their time.”

I am grateful to have been taught in my formative years: giving matters. And what I’ve been grateful for is the model of my parents in their more rural town, continuing to find ways to give of themselves to their neighbors, their church, the people in their community, my grandparents. My blinders are falling off inch by inch: I can now see just a tad bit more than I once could, and I am humbled by what I find.  

“… one of the clearest differences between left and right, psychologically, is that the left is generally universalist, almost to a fault, and the right is parochial, often to a fault. And what I mean by parochial isn’t just ‘narrow-minded and dumb.’ What I mean is — so we have a survey at yourmorals.org where we ask, ‘How much do you care about or think about or value people in your community, people in your country, people in the world at large?’ And OK, so conservatives value people in their nation and in their community much more than people in the world at large. And you might say, OK, well, that’s parochial. But what do liberals do? Liberals on our survey actually say they value people in the world at large more than people in their own country, more than people in their community. So liberals are so universalist, they often don’t really pay much attention to their own groups. As my mother said about my grandfather, who was a labor organizer, ‘He loved humanity so much that he didn’t really have much time to care for his family.'”

What matters? What is really important? What morals do I consider real, do I believe are valuable? And which ones do I think are ridiculous? How many things have I not noticed simply because I couldn’t even acknowledge their presence? All these months later, I’m still left mulling over so many questions. But what I do know is that Haidt’s research has deeply affected how I see the world. And I don’t imagine I’ll stop thinking about it for quite a while.

On 12 Rules for Life by Dr. Jordan Peterson

Life has had me thinking about rules lately and their application in my life, how there is a place for them and a wisdom to them, yet how they can also be suffocating and soul-crushing.

I’ve also been thinking about memory, how distorted it is and how disorienting it is to realize after being confronted with hard evidence just how wrong you were about something you ‘remembered.’

When life requires a stepping back, a reevaluation of what we thought we knew, when it shows us our flaws in a way we can neither escape nor deny, what do we do? How do we proceed? Where can we go from the rubble of the destruction of what we were, and what rules do we use, when the rules we had been using are no longer useful?

Dr. Jordan Peterson has written a book that may be a good starting point. His 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is more than just a self-help book full of platitudes for living ‘your best life yet!’ It is an exploration into meaning, tradition, suffering, and our place in life. Dr. Peterson covers so much ground, from the relevance of the Old Testament and Disney movies to the dangers of ideologies, that a simple summary does not do it justice. And because I want everyone to read this book and internalize its lessons, I am sharing excerpts here to give a taste of the richness that is 12 Rules for Life.

In the introduction, Dr. Peterson explains the most elemental rule:

“[T]he foremost rule is that you must take responsibility for your own life. Period.”

This rule underlies every other rule in the rest of the book (and as such is not actually one of the twelve rules). For example, in this first chapter, “Stand up straight with your shoulders back,” it shows up in a physical way: literally standing up straight. But as Dr. Peterson explains, doing so also has a metaphorical importance: that of seeing ourselves for who we truly are, in all of our sometimes-ugly complexity, and discarding our naive belief that we (as well as others) are inherently good creatures.

“When the wakening occurs—when once-naïve people recognize in themselves the seeds of evil and monstrosity, and see themselves as dangerous (at least potentially) their fear decreases. They develop more self-respect. Then, perhaps, they begin to resist oppression. They see that they have the ability to withstand, because they are terrible too. They see they can and must stand up, because they begin to understand how genuinely monstrous they will become, otherwise, feeding on their resentment, transforming it into the most destructive of wishes. To say it again: There is very little difference between the capacity for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character. This is one of the most difficult lessons of life.

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Standing up means voluntarily accepting the burden of Being. Your nervous system responds in an entirely different manner when you face the demands of life voluntarily. You respond to a challenge, instead of bracing for a catastrophe.

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To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).”

Accepting responsibility for our lives can be daunting, especially when we begin to look inside ourselves and find the parts of humanity we want to distance ourselves from. Tying in the biblical metaphor of the snake and its temptations and associations with all that is evil, Dr. Peterson writes:

“The worst of all possible snakes is the eternal human proclivity for evil. The worst of all possible snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal, internal. No walls, however tall, will keep that out. Even if the fortress were thick enough, in principle, to keep everything bad whatsoever outside, it would immediately appear again within. As the great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn insisted, the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

We must move forward clear-eyed, no longer naive to the world or ourselves. But as Dr. Peterson explains, our vision is itself a tricky thing, ignoring most of the stimuli hitting it and focusing only on what we believe matters. What we see can tell us a lot about what we value. As a result, it is important to figure out what you’re looking at to determine where you might be off in what you’re placing value in.

“But here’s the rub: sometimes, when things are not going well, it’s not the world that’s the cause. The cause is instead that which is currently most valued, subjectively and personally. Why? Because the world is revealed, to an indeterminate degree, through the template of your values. . . . If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, therefore, it’s time to examine your values. It’s time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions. It’s time to let go. It might even be time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you can become who you might become, instead of staying who you are.”

Often we look to people we admire or envy to judge how we are doing in life. We narrow our vision to value what we don’t have, what we wish we had, what we aren’t. The dangers of that should be obvious, yet not only do we all know what that experience is like, we also know how difficult it is not to do. Dr. Peterson poses the following questions to bring our attention on where it should be, on what we can do with what we have where we are:

“Five hundred small decisions, five hundred tiny actions, compose your day, today, and every day. Could you aim one or two of these at a better result? Better, in your own private opinion, by your own individual standards? Could you compare your specific personal tomorrow with your specific personal yesterday? Could you use your own judgment, and ask yourself what that better tomorrow might be?”

Again, he brings in a biblical allusion–  that of the Sermon on the Mount– to illustrate the importance of focusing on things that matter:

“The Sermon on the Mount outlines the true nature of man, and the proper aim of mankind: concentrate on the day, so that you can live in the present, and attend completely and properly to what is right in front of you—but do that only after you have decided to let what is within shine forth, so that it can justify Being and illuminate the world. Do that only after you have determined to sacrifice whatever it is that must be sacrificed so that you can pursue the highest good.”

Where do we learn this? How do we know what is right from wrong, what is out of bounds and what is proper? It begins in childhood, when our parents first give us boundaries and clear instructions on what to do and how to be. We internalize what they teach us to become more independent and more responsible for ourselves. Dr. Peterson writes in no uncertain terms just how important good parenting is:

“Parents who refuse to adopt the responsibility for disciplining their children think they can just opt out of the conflict necessary for proper child-rearing. They avoid being the bad guy (in the short term). But they do not at all rescue or protect their children from fear and pain. Quite the contrary: the judgmental and uncaring broader social world will mete out conflict and punishment far greater than that which would have been delivered by an awake parent. You can discipline your children, or you can turn that responsibility over to the harsh, uncaring judgmental world—and the motivation for the latter decision should never be confused with love.

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Clear rules make for secure children and calm, rational parents. Clear principles of discipline and punishment balance mercy and justice so that social development and psychological maturity can be optimally promoted. Clear rules and proper discipline help the child, and the family, and society, establish, maintain and expand the order that is all that protects us from chaos and the terrors of the underworld, where everything is uncertain, anxiety-provoking, hopeless and depressing. There are no greater gifts that a committed and courageous parent can bestow.”

Contrary to the idea that no boundaries allows for freer expressions of who we truly are, Dr. Peterson argues that it is precisely the limits on us that ultimately provide freedom:

“A long period of unfreedom—adherence to a singular interpretive structure—is necessary for the development of a free mind.

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A superhero who can do anything turns out to be no hero at all. He’s nothing specific, so he’s nothing. He has nothing to strive against, so he can’t be admirable. Being of any reasonable sort appears to require limitation. Perhaps this is because Being requires Becoming, as well as mere static existence—and to become is to become something more, or at least something different. That is only possible for something limited.”

Learning– or rather, being taught by those who care for us– how to regulate our impulses and emotions is not only important for being successful in a conventional sense but also for finding meaning in a deeper sense, for Becoming with a capital B.

“Meaning emerges when impulses are regulated, organized and unified. Meaning emerges from the interplay between the possibilities of the world and the value structure operating within that world. If the value structure is aimed at the betterment of Being, the meaning revealed will be life-sustaining. It will provide the antidote for chaos and suffering. It will make everything matter. It will make everything better.

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You may find that if you attend to these moral obligations, once you have placed ‘make the world better’ at the top of your value hierarchy, you experience ever-deepening meaning. It’s not bliss. It’s not happiness. It is something more like atonement for the criminal fact of your fractured and damaged Being. It’s payment of the debt you owe for the insane and horrible miracle of your existence. It’s how you remember the Holocaust. It’s how you make amends for the pathology of history. It’s adoption of the responsibility for being a potential denizen of Hell. It is willingness to serve as an angel of Paradise.

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To have meaning in your life is better than to have what you want, because you may neither know what you want, nor what you truly need. Meaning is something that comes upon you, of its own accord. You can set up the preconditions, you can follow meaning, when it manifests itself, but you cannot simply produce it, as an act of will. Meaning signifies that you are in the right place, at the right time, properly balanced between order and chaos, where everything lines up as best it can at that moment.”

We must experiment, put ourselves to the test in a way, to discover who we are and what we value. We must try and fail and try again if we are to grow in any way. Meaning is hard-won, and so is our sense of self.

“If you will not reveal yourself to others, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself. That does not only mean that you suppress who you are, although it also means that. It means that so much of what you could be will never be forced by necessity to come forward. This is a biological truth, as well as a conceptual truth. When you explore boldly, when you voluntarily confront the unknown, you gather information and build your renewed self out of that information. That is the conceptual element. However, researchers have recently discovered that new genes in the central nervous system turn themselves on when an organism is placed (or places itself) in a new situation. These genes code for new proteins. These proteins are the building blocks for new structures in the brain. This means that a lot of you is still nascent, in the most physical of senses, and will not be called forth by stasis. You have to say something, go somewhere and do things to get turned on. And, if not…you remain incomplete, and life is too hard for anyone incomplete.

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What is going to save you? The totalitarian says, in essence, “You must rely on faith in what you already know.” But that is not what saves. What saves is the willingness to learn from what you don’t know. That is faith in the possibility of human transformation. That is faith in the sacrifice of the current self for the self that could be.

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Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us. In such cases, we might never recover or, if we do, we change a lot.”

However, there may not be any outward, physical markers for the changes we undergo. They are often internal, affecting more how we see the world than how the world sees us. This requires a shift in our thinking, and thinking is demanding.

“Sometimes you have to change the way you understand everything to properly understand a single something.”

To explain how deep listening affects our thinking and therefore our perspective, Dr. Peterson offers the advice of Carl Rogers:

“Carl Rogers, one of the twentieth century’s great psychotherapists, knew something about listening. He wrote, ‘The great majority of us cannot listen; we find ourselves compelled to evaluate, because listening is too dangerous. The first requirement is courage, and we do not always have it.’ He knew that listening could transform people. On that, Rogers commented, ‘Some of you may be feeling that you listen well to people, and that you have never seen such results. The chances are very great indeed that your listening has not been of the type I have described.’ He suggested that his readers conduct a short experiment when they next found themselves in a dispute: ‘Stop the discussion for a moment, and institute this rule: “Each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately, and to that speaker’s satisfaction.”’

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Of this, Rogers notes, ‘Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But if you try it you will discover it is one of the most difficult things you have ever tried to do. If you really understand a person in this way, if you are willing to enter his private world and see the way life appears to him, you run the risk of being changed yourself. You might see it his way, you might find yourself influenced in your attitudes or personality. This risk of being changed is one of the most frightening prospects most of us can face.’”

Listening and talking– in essence, having a conversation– help us process our thoughts. They are essential to thinking, so it is essential that we practice them.

“The fact is important enough to bear repeating: people organize their brains with conversation. If they don’t have anyone to tell their story to, they lose their minds. Like hoarders, they cannot unclutter themselves. The input of the community is required for the integrity of the individual psyche. To put it another way: It takes a village to organize a mind.”

Speaking to the importance of talking things through, Dr. Peterson uses the example of a marriage:

“There is little, in a marriage, that is so little that it is not worth fighting about. You’re stuck in a marriage like the two proverbial cats in a barrel, bound by the oath that lasts in theory until one or both of you die. That oath is there to make you take the damn situation seriously. Do you really want the same petty annoyance tormenting you every single day of your marriage, for the decades of its existence?

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Life is indistinguishable from effortful maintenance.

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Here’s the terrible truth about such matters: every single voluntarily unprocessed and uncomprehended and ignored reason for marital failure will compound and conspire and will then plague that betrayed and self-betrayed woman for the rest of her life. The same goes for her husband. All she—he—they—or we—must do to ensure such an outcome is nothing: don’t notice, don’t react, don’t attend, don’t discuss, don’t consider, don’t work for peace, don’t take responsibility. Don’t confront the chaos and turn it into order—just wait, anything but naïve and innocent, for the chaos to rise up and engulf you instead.

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When things fall apart, and chaos re-emerges, we can give structure to it, and re-establish order, through our speech. If we speak carefully and precisely, we can sort things out, and put them in their proper place, and set a new goal, and navigate to it—often communally, if we negotiate; if we reach consensus. If we speak carelessly and imprecisely, however, things remain vague. The destination remains unproclaimed. The fog of uncertainty does not lift, and there is no negotiating through the world.”

The same goes for non-marital situations, that we must be precise in our confronting difficult situations regardless of whom they are with:

“You must also know clearly what you want out of the situation, and be prepared to clearly articulate your desire. It’s a good idea to tell the person you are confronting exactly what you would like them to do instead of what they have done or currently are doing. You might think, “if they loved me, they would know what to do.” That’s the voice of resentment. Assume ignorance before malevolence. No one has a direct pipeline to your wants and needs—not even you. If you try to determine exactly what you want, you might find that it is more difficult than you think. The person oppressing you is likely no wiser than you, especially about you. Tell them directly what would be preferable, instead, after you have sorted it out. Make your request as small and reasonable as possible—but ensure that its fulfillment would satisfy you. In that manner, you come to the discussion with a solution, instead of just a problem.”

In regard to heated situations, where talking has escalated to spewing at each other, Dr. Peterson shares the anecdote of what he and his wife do when they are in blow-out fights: they stop in the middle of it, go into separate rooms to calm down, and think about how they themselves were wrong. After sufficient time has passed, they come back and share their insights.

“Alone, trying to calm down, we would each ask ourselves the same single question: What had we each done to contribute to the situation we were arguing about? However small, however distant…we had each made some error. Then we would reunite, and share the results of our questioning: Here’s how I was wrong…. The problem with asking yourself such a question is that you must truly want the answer. And the problem with doing that is that you won’t like the answer.

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When you are arguing with someone, you want to be right, and you want the other person to be wrong. Then it’s them that has to sacrifice something and change, not you, and that’s much preferable. If it’s you that’s wrong and you that must change, then you have to reconsider yourself—your memories of the past, your manner of being in the present, and your plans for the future. Then you must resolve to improve and figure out how to do that. Then you actually have to do it. That’s exhausting. It takes repeated practice, to instantiate the new perceptions and make the new actions habitual. It’s much easier just not to realize, admit and engage. It’s much easier to turn your attention away from the truth and remain wilfully blind.”

Drawing an interesting parallel, Dr. Peterson applies this mindset to prayer:

“Perhaps that is true prayer: the question, ‘What have I done wrong, and what can I do now to set things at least a little bit more right?’ But your heart must be open to the terrible truth. You must be receptive to that which you do not want to hear. When you decide to learn about your faults, so that they can be rectified, you open a line of communication with the source of all revelatory thought. Maybe that’s the same thing as consulting your conscience. Maybe that’s the same thing, in some manner, as a discussion with God.”

Asking this, having this discussion with ourselves, with God, cracks open the door from our suffocating room of stunted, albeit certain, stagnancy to the exhilarating, albeit dangerous and uncertain, world of growth. So much is required to grow, so much is demanded of us. We must prepare ourselves well. Dr. Peterson summarizes it best himself:

“Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix. Don’t be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression, torture and death. Become aware of your own insufficiency—your cowardice, malevolence, resentment and hatred. Consider the murderousness of your own spirit before you dare accuse others, and before you attempt to repair the fabric of the world. Maybe it’s not the world that’s at fault. Maybe it’s you. You’ve failed to make the mark. You’ve missed the target. You’ve fallen short of the glory of God. You’ve sinned. And all of that is your contribution to the insufficiency and evil of the world. And, above all, don’t lie. Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell. It was the great and the small lies of the Nazi and Communist states that produced the deaths of millions of people.

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Christ enjoins His followers to place faith in God’s Heavenly Kingdom, and the truth. That’s a conscious decision to presume the primary goodness of Being. That’s an act of courage. Aim high, like Pinocchio’s Geppetto. Wish upon a star, and then act properly, in accordance with that aim. Once you are aligned with the heavens, you can concentrate on the day. Be careful. Put the things you can control in order. Repair what is in disorder, and make what is already good better. It is possible that you can manage, if you are careful. People are very tough. People can survive through much pain and loss. But to persevere they must see the good in Being. If they lose that, they are truly lost.

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What does all that mean? Orient yourself properly. Then—and only then—concentrate on the day. Set your sights at the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, and then focus pointedly and carefully on the concerns of each moment. Aim continually at Heaven while you work diligently on Earth. Attend fully to the future, in that manner, while attending fully to the present. Then you have the best chance of perfecting both.”

For even more insight and wisdom— as I couldn’t include everything I highlighted from the book here in this one post; there is so much more to share and think about and discuss— be sure to read 12 Rules for Life.