The Foggy Filter of Ideology

Most of us subscribe to a set of ideals, ideas about the best ways to understand and accomplish things. We need ideas about the world, conceptions that help us map things out and understand the way they relate to each other. At some point, however, ideology often becomes just another way to steer clear of the difficult thinking that's required for understanding a rapidly changing, complex world. In this light, ideology can and often does function like stereotyping and prejudice.

If ideals always did what they said they were going to do, generating no unintended consequences, and no destructive clashes with other ideals, they might be more likely to produce the better world their adherents claim for them. But many if not most idealists just seem to want to rid the world of other people whose ideals conflict with their own. They're going for ideological purity, as they see it. All the world's people must become Chrisitans, atheists, humanists, capitalists, socialists, rationalists, pacifists, militarists--the list could go on indefinitely.

But it's varied human experience that goes on indefinitely, generating myriad ways of seeing the world. Every cultural variation and every historical moment contributes to a distinctiveness of individuals and groups that's really beyond the ability of individuals to comprehend. That kind of variety and its associated complexity seems to alarm a lot of people.

"The meaning of any proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence in our future practical experience, whether passive or active." That's William James's formulation of the "pragmatic maxim," an American contribution to philosophy first articulated by Charles Sanders Peirce. In other words, the meaning of a notion is the effect it produces in the world.

Even when an ideal is clearly just, as in the abolition of slavery in the U. S. during the time of our Civil War, one can see human action begun in a morally clear ideal spilling through the unintended ravages of ideology and into moral ambiguity.

In Civil War poetry, Whitman is widely remembered and still widely read, at least in schools. Melville, who also wrote compelling poems about the war, gets little attention for his contributions to what the experience of that war was like.

Robert Penn Warren, a writer of uncommon insight in the arena of history, edited a collection of Melville's poems (Selected Poems of Herman Melville: A Reader's Edition, NYC, Random House, 1970). In his introduction, Warren notes: "Even if an ethical distinction is to be made at the level of the cause for which war is being waged, at another level such a distinction is irrelevant" and then quotes from Melville's "Conflict of Convictions":

Warred one for Right, and one for Wrong?

So be it; but they both were young--

Each grape to his cluster clung,

All their elegies are sung.

Warren's commentary continues:

Each was doomed to cling to his cluster, and in this fact is implicit the polarity of "ideology" ("Law," "Right," or even "Destiny") against human values, human suffering, human aspiration, and qualities of personality and spirit.

The human bond may be as important as the bond of ideology. . . .

A recognition of the human as distinguished from the ideological makes magnanimity possible . . .

As regards "the polarity of ideology and human values" Warren is careful to point out:

We cannot be too schematic about such polarities as we have been discussing. One pair shades into another. One pole does not cancel out its opposite. All belong to the complex texture of life as lived, to the density and equivocalness of experience. But to live in any full sense demands the effort to comprehend this complexity of texture, this density and equivocalness of experience, and yet not forfeit the ability to act. The man who "sees through it," but who, at the same time, can act, who has a sense of tragedy of the human plight--that is the hero for Melville. . . .

In many poems this idea of the ever-presence of evil--evil, shall we say, as the cost of good?--appears: for instance in [Melville's] "Commemorative of a Naval Victory," a poem which one is tempted to call great:

But seldom the laurel wreath is seen

Unmixed with pensive pansies dark:

There's a light and a shadow on every man

Who at last attains his lifted mark--

Nursing through night the ethereal spark.

Elate he never can be;

He feels that spirits which glad had hailed his worth,

Sleep in oblivion.--The shark

Glides white through the phosphorous sea.

As I read Warren and Melville here, they both recognize a kind of bad faith (or maybe just ignorance) in the sanctimonious, uncomplicated comfort that comes with seeing yourself perfectly aligned with the Right Ideals, no matter who gets killed and maimed (physically, emotionally, or spiritually) in the process. The heroes, as noted, are those who recognize the multivalent flux of reality, and understand that efforts to "fix" things have mixed results, yet act in the world anyway, guarding against the insistent need for facile self-congratulation.

Common humanity is already a fact, and has been since humanity's appearance. Ways of seeing and interpreting the world, however, have never been held in common across groups dispersed in time and space, and they never will, unless humans become automatons. Ways of seeing and interpreting the world are not even common in the same workplace, the same religious group, or the same family.

Maybe this failure of agreement is so hard for people to accept because our belief systems are so integral to our identities. We need to recognize this, but we also need to understand that it's all right to adjust belief systems when their actual effects on the world (see the pragmatic maxim above) are not what our ideals lead us to think they will be.

The claims of human dignity and compassion are simply not always served by what so many people regard as "high ideals." It's time to evaluate claims to truth not by the abstractions of ideologues, but by what happens when the ideas are forced on the world.

Getting government "off the backs" of businesses in the U.S. has not led to a stronger, more stable economy through miraculous innovations like derivatives and credit default swaps. The U. S. healthcare system costs more per capita or as a percentage of GDP than any system in the world, and by a large margin. Yet life expectancies are lower here, and infant mortality higher, than in nations that are our economic peers. Where does the "best healthcare system in the world" mentality come from? It can only come from ideology, since it doesn't conform to what happens in the world. The forces of the U.S. military were not "welcomed as liberators" in Iraq, as the panglossian silliness of the neocons predicted. They were welcomed with IEDs.

Such examples of ideas failing in application are certainly not confined to any spot on the ideological spectrum. The years of planned economies did not create a worker's paradise in the Soviet Union or Maoist China. Instead, the "people" on the ideological pedestal got widespread famine and mass murder. Court-ordered busing to achieve racial integration in U.S. schools is highly correlated with the resegregation of those schools, and that effect is not confined to the South. The War on Poverty, as it was known in the 60s, has turned out to be a little more complicated than its proponents in those days believed.

It may be that our ideas often fail us, or at least fall far short of our expectations, because our ability to control the flow of events in the world is more limited than we like to think. Our actions often produce effects, but we don't like to admit how mixed those effects can be.

"I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one. . . . And from what I can see it bends toward justice." This observation is from the 19th century Unitarian minister and fervent abolitionist Theodore Parker, though it was made known in the late 20th century by Martin Luther King, Jr. It may be a true observation, and certainly has been true of improvements in racial justice in the past 150 years, though the work of justice, of course, goes on.

But human history is indeed a long arc, and in its long course things have sometimes improved for hundreds of years at a time, then decayed. We don't know what's coming. But whatever it is, we can do better at addressing universally shared human values. One value we might consider more seriously is the notion that relationships are more important that propositions. Most people, I believe, prefer to be treated like they themselves are more important than ideas.

Raking the Leaves

It's the first Saturday in November, and this afternoon I've enjoyed the sunshine, shade, air, and physical work all associated with the late-fall-to-early-winter task of getting fallen leaves off the lawn. I stroked a kind of rhythm with the swoosh of the rake getting the leaves into piles, as I listened to the shrill sounds of the leaf blower my neighbor across the street applied to the same task.

Invention is the mother of necessity: Historian Melvin Kranzberg's second law of technology. I've never actually wanted a leaf blower, though my sales resistance has certainly failed in a lot of other areas where I've taken on one "necessity" after another.

I do admire the holdouts, the resisters of the never-ending parade of Next Big Things. Thoreau, a lover of walking and a despiser of the railroad, said he could make a twenty-mile trip as fast by walking as another might by train, reasoning that the rail traveler had to devote a half-day earning the wages for the train ticket, then another half day to the trip. Henry would simply devote the entire day to walking, and enjoy the trip more for being able to appreciatively take in the country through which he traveled.

My afternoon of raking was physically demanding enough to cause me to break a sweat under my flannel shirt. I suppose I could have done the work faster with a leaf-blower, then I would have had time to drive to the gym and exercise there. That course of action would have been more consistent with the zeitgeist. Apply all possible aids to the cause of efficiency in your tasks, so you can do more tasks.

Another approach to fall lawn care involves just waiting until all the leaves are off all the trees, then cleaning them up in a single campaign against the clutter of dry fallen foliage. But it seems to me that I have to move most, if not all, of the leaves anyway. Why not go outside on several sunny afternoons and enjoy using my body? We tune our lives too much to the pace of machines, and natural rhythms, those biological realities we share with other forms of life, get forgotten.

Leaves don't fall all at once anyway. Today, only a few oak leaves were on the ground. Oak-strength holds the leaf to the limb the way their sturdy trunks hold the limbs. There will be brown leaves left on the red oaks in March, making it hard to get everything perfectly neat, even in time for spring.

I confess I don't much care about perfection. As Carl Jung observes in his interesting essay "Answer to Job," perfection only exists where completeness is absent. You have to leave out a lot of reality to sustain the illusion of perfection.

So my leaves will be gathered into piles for removal a little at a time, and when I finish (or more accurately, when I just stop raking them) there will be a few here and there to carry on their slow movement into the earth. I can live with that.

Old Music

I recently saw a production of the biographical play Hank Williams: Lost Highway at the Circuit Playhouse in Memphis. It's a compelling story, with Tim Greer as Hank, who presents the songs in authentic style.

Some works of art--plays, songs, poems, novels, paintings, photographs--linger with me in ways that go beyond the skill and craft of their making and presentation. They linger because they connect some of the widely diffused dots that outline my life, or they revive or recast a memory that had lost some of its potency. I suspect Hank's songs have done that for a lot of people.

The set and the staging of the play were especially effective. Stage right, there's a Sinclair sign, the suggestion of the old-style service station, complete with a few bald tires that, maybe like ol' Hank himself, had seen too much of the highway. The service station area also provides a hangout for a black street singer from Williams' home town, a man known locally as "Teetot." In Hank's early years, Teetot teaches him to sing from his own heart, sing his own pain and sing it with conviction. It doesn't come instantly to the young and callow white boy, but it does get there, with a rare intensity.

At stage left, a waitress who dreams of Cadillacs and better places works behind the counter of a truck stop diner. She hears the news of Williams's death on the radio there, and we learn later of a brief encounter she shared with a very drunk Hank, whose appearance is enhanced by the presence on the parking lot of his new '52 baby blue Caddy convertible.

The diner is a little garish, too much chrome and neon, but offers a spot on the road brightly lit by electricity and the waitress's smile. The service station is dingy, dusty and greasy in a friendly sort of way.

The center stage area is an elevated platform, used mostly for Hank's performances, from the Grand Ole Opry to the seedy honky-tonks he played in, from crowds that loved him to those he was too drunk to perform for.

When I was a boy in the middle-to-late 1950s, I liked being in a car going down a highway, and my highway trips were mostly in the rural South. Sometimes, I think, Hank's songs were on the radio. Sometimes the windows were down. There were Sinclair stations along with Essos and Lions, and diners and other local cafes, it being a little to early for fast food franchises to have gotten pervasive enough to homogenize the American landscape as thoroughly as they now have. Oil companies were big business, but restaurants were still mom-and-pop. A landscape in transition, like all landscapes. You just have to wait until a later moment in time to see where a particular landscape is in a transition process.

I live in a world now that I would describe as wider and less provincial. But my ancestry in the rural South is close to my time, with my generation being the first in my family to be born in hospitals. My parents were both born in West Tennessee farmhouses where plumbing and electricity were things of the future. When my mother was born, my grandfather was a tenant farmer, and would remain one until he got a job as a carpenter building one of those hastily-constructed U. S. Army camps where World War II recruits were trained for subsequent adventures in Europe and the South Pacific. I remember my grandfather in most of the time our lives overlapped as a finisher of hardwood floors.

In childhood, I listened to the voices, the stories, the convictions, the delights and the dreads of my extended family. I suppose a lot of what I heard was similar to what Hank Williams heard. I learned to play the guitar when I was 14, but I was a rocker, at least in those days. Later, as an adult, I learned to play and sing some of Hank's songs, along with some of the old-time music he listened to and must have played at some time himself.

Hank was lost at an early age. He was lost for good at 29, but got on the highway that led him to that early death several years earlier. His brief adult life created an enduring body of work--the songs he wrote, his performances--that a lot of people find powerful, even beautiful. He poured his life into it. The pain in his back, the pain of his marriage, the pain of just not knowing what to do with his own life but sing it. Some artists burn themselves to ashes singing the timeless and classless pain of the human animal.

As for me, I'm sophisticated now. I went to university and graduate school. I've traveled a highway from a conservative Southern Baptist boyhood to what's getting to be a late adulthood as a progressive Unitarian whose mind and spirit flows freely across another phase of a changing landscape.

But the child who is father to this man won't die before the man.

Write, Pray, Live

"Well, is writing more like prayer, or more like life itself, or a little like both? I am not sure. They all seem remarkably akin to me. They all exact something from us, but it is hard--maybe impossible--to know in advance what that something is."

--Harvey Cox, from the Introduction to The Best American

Spiritual Writing 2007, edited by Phillip Zaleski

This quote from the well-known Harvard Divinity School professor and theologian seemed an apt epigraph to get me started on this little essay, given that I want to have that unknown something exacted from me. So, writing, prayer (Cox uses the term in a broad sense), and life, these three. Has Cox spent too much time contemplating the Trinity, or is he onto something?

Writing, whatever else it is, is a kind of thinking, an approach to learning. It draws things forth from the writer, helps him understand them better. It can be an approach to making sense of one's life, putting one's experience in some kind of order. It's a special form of attention, as is prayer in the way I would conceive it. The link to life from writing and prayer is in the ongoing human process of constructing the self by attending to one's experience, examining it, and integrating it.

The ongoing assembly of who we are comes from our assessment of what we already are, in creative tension with who we might wish to become. Most of us who hold this tension are somewhat restless spirits. We may even be very accepting of who we are, but there is still something else we want to incorporate into ourselves--mastery of a skill, the satisfaction of a curiosity, or some psychological or spiritual movement.

Writing an essay is also an exercise that allows work toward mastery, first and foremost through more clarity of expression, which follows from more clarity of thought. If the writer confronts himself in his writing (which is often as difficult to avoid as it is to do) there's an opportunity for clarity about his life.

I recently had an online discussion with a old friend, one from the town of my high school days in the mid-sixties. We found each other, as people often do these days, on Facebook. A message from him recalled concerns across the decades about people in our families, people among our friends, people entwined in our lives who'd had particularly troubling times. Both of us could recall times of regret for failures of simple kindness.

I like to think of myself as a kind person, but I can think back on times I just wanted to do what I wanted to do, and withdrew or withheld my time and attention from someone who may have needed it. At other times, I just didn't notice the often modest needs of people around me. I don't believe I'm particularly unusual where such lapses are concerned, and I don't judge myself too harshly. But I do want to be more conscious of my actions, so I have to pay attention, both to myself and to others.

The act of paying attention to people around you is, I think, the beginning of kindness. We start towards kindness by a kind of openness in which we notice, then allow ourselves to be moved by the needs of others. This openness is also a quality of attention, the kind that may come out in writing, prayer, and life. It's helpful to practice it in everyday things.

I had a co-worker a few years ago who had migraines and suffered them stoically. One day I asked him if he had one, pointing out that the smile he wore was just on his mouth and not in his eyes. He said, "Oh, you notice that!" And it was clear he was just glad someone did notice.

But that's one of the times I did it right. I don't know about all the times I did it wrong, because I wasn't paying attention, and so I didn't form memories of them.

The Jewish scholar and social activist Abraham Joshua Heschel said: “When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.” I think often of that, how one's perspective on what's important changes, and what might point to such a direction of change. I suspect reflection on one's life, which could come through writing, and the kind of concentrated effort to touch something sacred that some call prayer, could move such a change of emphasis.

Heschel wrote scholarly works on the Hebrew Prophets, and saw them as insistent articulators of the need for justice in the world. Some of his academic colleagues thought his scholarship was enough, and wondered why he took the trouble to march with King at Selma. Later, he wrote, "when I marched at Selma, my feet were praying."

Spirituality and the Self

Yesterday I got an email from a longtime member of the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS), an organization that holds week-long yearly meetings to ponder questions on connections between these two areas--science and religion--that have been and continue to be the focus of so much human preoccupation. They're both about knowing the world, and our place in it.

The writer of the email, sent to a long list of people with an interest in these areas, wanted to gather ideas on what spirituality means to people who perhaps have a religious bent, but are less conventional, and more naturalistic, in approach than those usually thought of as "religious." So I took it as an opportunity to muse on where I am in my life just now with respect to my spiritual journey. In my life, what I have thought of as spiritual moments have been characterized by feeling larger connections that expanded my perspective, feeling a sense of awe at the core of reality, and a having a sense of timelessness. 

Spirituality is really a way of experiencing the world, a way that contributes to the sense of who we are--our sense of self. For me, it's a mode of experience that is uncommonly open and receptive to something outside ourselves, yet connected to us. It isn't just a feeling of connection, it's also a sense of belonging--of having a place among everything else. I often find these experiences, as do many people, in links with nature.

A few years ago my wife and I visited Isle Royale in Lake Superior. It's a place that's pretty remote by any current standard—to get there, we took a five or six hour boat ride from a little town on the northwest shore of Lake Superior seven miles south of the Canadian border. One afternoon we were canoeing in an inlet called Tobin Harbor, where there were nesting loons. Loons have several calls, and one call is reserved for telling other creatures to get away from their nesting areas. On the water, we saw a pair of loons near the shoreline and paddled towards them. The male swam out to meet us. We stopped the canoe. The loon stood off about 20 or 30 feet, sounding and repeating his warning call. We stopped for just a moment and took a couple of photographs. Then we turned the canoe around and paddled away. The loon who'd been telling us to leave immediately swam back to his mate near the shoreline, and the business between us was finished.

But in that brief moment, we--humans and loons--were at the border of each other's worlds. We could have paddled closer to where the nest probably was, but then we would have violated the natural order of that place. As it was, we were the visitors, and we were also potential intruders. We were at a boundary we ourselves did not set, and we could not linger there without disrupting something of ancient importance. But we were there, nonetheless, actors in the natural order of things, compliant with that order, and thus in harmony with it. 

A sense of awe also attended the experience, awe at the beauty and the otherness of these creatures who were here long before us. Our experience also, brief as it was, offered what felt like a moment out of time, supporting my suspicion that eternity is not endless time, but the absence of time. 

I don't have to travel such distances to encounter these feelings. I can sometimes feel the sacred character of the life in this world along the frequently dry creek that runs at the border of my backyard. Perhaps most often, I feel it in conversations, deep encounters, with other people, in those moments that Martin Buber characterized in his I and Thou as governed by the primary word I-Thou instead of the more common I-It. 

Buber says we really only know ourselves through our relations to others, and when we utter the primary word I-Thou in the context of relating, we are guileless and open to whatever and whomever the Other before us is. We consciously abandon the I-It position of our own agendas and ideas and prejudices in favor of genuine openness. You can spend a lifetime working on this, and it's a way of approaching spiritual growth. 

Along these lines, some of us believe that Biblical religion is at its core about relationship, as in the importance of covenantal bonds, and not so much about the propositional, systematic theology that has through the centuries been layered over the original stories. The traditions in sacred literature have spoken to us over the ages, and the ones that speak with the greatest ring of truth and authority continue to speak to us. In that way they are not bound by time. 

In Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal, an interesting little book just published in 2008, Rob Rieman writes of

. . . values that are universal because they are the same for all people, and timeless because they are of all time. Culture is the knowledge and shaping of these intangible spiritual qualities, collected in the cultural heritage. Only those works that are themselves timeless are significant; they continue to speak to us from generation to generation because they are the only works that express a timeless reality, an idea. . . . The only correct attitude toward timelessness is a receptive, answerable, and disinterested one. (58)

I find in these notions expressed by Rieman the suggestion of a possibility of the transcendent: something not limited to what is within one person or place at one time, but in some sense "alive" across time and place. Rieman also argues that timeless values and ideas won't be found in the search for what has some immediate utilitarian purpose: their value is inherent, and demands an openness not unlike the attitude of I-Thou. 

And what are these inherently valuable things? Traditions, texts, ideas. They may be old, the wisdom literature of Job and Ecclesiastes, or new, but they have the quality of timelessness and perspective-growing insight. Here's an example from "A Brief for the Defense," a poem by Jack Gilbert from his recent collection Refusing Heaven:

There is laughter

every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,

and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

we lessen the importance of their deprivation.

We must risk delight. Not enjoyment. We must have

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world. . . .

We must admit there will be music despite everything.

Gilbert is paying a special kind of attention here, I think. He's affirming the "what is" of the reality we live in, being open, being present. Montaigne, in his essay "On Experience" affirms the essential connection with what is immediate, right here with us:

It is an absolute perfection, and as it were divine, for a man to know how to rightfully enjoy his being. We seek other conditions because we don't understand the use of our own, and go out of ourselves because we don't know what it is like within. Yet it is no use for us to mount on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk with our own legs. (Excerpted in Stephen Mitchell's The Enlightened Mind: An Anthology of Sacred Prose.)

So being "spiritual," at least in my view, need not take us into supernatural regions--the holy is here within and among us, and is our legacy as people in search of what is most real. We just have to pay attention. Mary Oliver says it so well in her poem "The Summer Day":

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

What, indeed? Maybe paying attention is a state from which you can enter, at any point, the noble enterprise of addressing the question of  "what it is you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?"

"Much of a self derives from recollected events, their weight and outcome, and the personal iconography they create," writes Diane Ackerman in An Alchemy of Mind. The focus of one's spiritual life is on the inner life, which itself grows out of encounters with the world. In being more observant, more deliberate, more open, we enlarge that inner life, and grow our selves, our spirits.