Whatever happened to being generous, truthful, and just?

 

CC Jean Stimmell

Wandering around Portsmouth, Russet and I stumbled upon the ornate tomb of Enoch Parrot in St. John’s churchyard. Parrot was born in Portsmouth and rose to the rank of admiral, playing a noteworthy role in the Civil War.

What struck us was not the homage to this war hero but rather what was engraved prominently on the front of his tomb: a description of the kind of man he was: generous, truthful, and just. Those noble words seem so anachronistic—a flashback to a time when we celebrated ethical values, so different from the dog-eat-dog world we cower in today, a victim of Trump’s mean-spirited transactionalism and the cutthroatness of big business.

It’s obvious we are not the same America we used to be: We’ve regressed from striving to uphold the principles of freedom and equality into a mindless consumer society in complete denial about the existential problems we face.  Sadly, we have become addicted to Amazon, social media, and pie-in-the-sky politics, tuning out the urgent problems of today.

Lost in trivia, we have surrendered to a carnival barker named Donald Trump, anointing him as our savior: An audacious pied piper who promises to set us free by scraping every tradition, principle, and value that America used to hold dear.

This quest for freedom without responsibility is an affront to our destiny and will inevitably lead to our downfall: That’s what an acclaimed critic from the last century claims in a book I’m reading.

 “Freedom and Destiny” is the name of the book: It was written in 1981 by Rollo May, an acclaimed existentialist psychologist, who had a local New Hampshire connection: he summered on Squam Lake, where he often went sailing with his friend Paul Tillich, perhaps the most influential theologian of the 20^th century.

May was prescient: he could see the storm clouds gathering back then, which have intensified into the storm we are experiencing now. He claimed that freedom is in crisis because we have totally ignored our destiny.

As an existentialist, he understood that we are not masters of our destiny, as Trump would have us believe. For most of us, the reverse is true: we are slaves to our destiny. This is because much of our lives is governed by forces beyond our control. These inevitable and unchangeable aspects of existence, shaping and limiting our lives, are what May calls our destiny.

Real freedom comes by accepting the limits that destiny places upon us. At first, that leads to despair, but May argues that’s a good thing, like an alcoholic finally admitting they have a problem. 

But we are still in denial, unable to admit we have a problem.

We distract ourselves from the existential problems that threaten to do us in: extreme inequality, nuclear war, and climate catastrophe, along with our neglect in bearing witness to the abject suffering all around us, proliferating from famine, poverty, and violence.

We should feel despair!  But that’s not what Americans have ever done. It is our most glaring shortcoming. Instead, we bury our heads in the sands of “shopping until we drop.” 

May says that must change: “The function of despair is to wipe away our superficial ideas, our delusionary hopes, our simplistic morality… It is important to remind ourselves of these points since there are a number of signs that we in America may be on the threshold of a period as a nation when we shall no longer be able to camouflage or repress our despair.”

Opening up to despair, according to May, is not only crucial to our survival, it is the key to our happiness: “In this sense despair, when it is directly faced, can lead to joy. After despair, the one thing left is possibility. We all stand on the edge of life, each moment comprising that edge. Before us is only possibility. This means the future is open—as open as it was for Adam and Eve.”^⁠1

 After accepting our destiny, we discover that within these restraints, there is ample space to make choices, which is what gives life its meaning.  However, not all options are equal: To cope with the stark reality of our modern existence, we have no choice but to return to humanity’s perennial values, which have always been our savior when we had nowhere else to turn.. 

We can start by practicing the Golden Rule. Or, living up to the words engraved on Admiral Parrott’s tomb to be “generous, truthful, and just.” 

xxx

¹ May, Rollo. Freedom and Destiny (Norton Paperback) (p. 242).. Kindle Edition.

Confronting the rubbish that clutters our minds

 

Discarded X-mas tree obscuring truth & beauty
An art shot: CC Jean Stimmell

Thomas Merton is a hero of mine, about whom I have written before. I feel close to him not only in a spiritual and intellectual sense, but also personally, as we share a thicket of contradictions about what we have written and how we have conducted our lives – a mixture of cloistered retreat and sensuous adventure. 

Earlier in Merton’s life, Alan Jacob writes, “he was politically active, an eager participant in leftist demonstrations, and he grew increasingly interested in Eastern religions.”^⁠1 Whatever he wrote about was always pertinent, never stale, and, remarkably, more relevant today than it was in his day.

I also like to think we have a psychic connection. In 1968, he published his book that I like best, “Conjectures of the Guilty Bystander” (CGB). That was also the year I returned home from the trauma of Vietnam, and the same year Merton died grotesquely from accidental electrocution.

In this book, Merton was not trying to write a scholarly treatise. Instead, as he says in his preface, “These notes add up to a personal version of the world of the 1960s…They are an implicit dialogue with other minds, a dialogue in which questions are raised.” 

Questions that have become even more  applicable today.”

Here’s one such nugget: “The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes of all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning we cannot begin to see. Unless we see we cannot think.”^⁠2

 I’m in a constant battle to purge this insiduous, ever-increasing flotsam and jetsam from my brain. Staying focused helps, and physical exercise does too. However, what has aided the most has been opening up to spirituality: not the Catholicism of Thomas Merton, although I greatly respect it, but Eastern religion. In particular, meditation has allowed me to glimpse a deeper reality that is usually obscured by the overflowing clutter of my mind.

I’ve recently discovered that Complexity Theory complements my meditation, as espoused by Neil Theise.^⁠3  He posits, along with other scientists, that consciousness, rather than being an isolated physical component of the brain, is ubiquitous, residing within every atom in the universe, as well as in every cell of the body.

Now, whenever I’m lucky enough to enter a deep state of peace during meditation, I can name the transcendental feeling that comes over me: I’m merging with the universal consciousness of the universe. 

***

Now, back to Merton: Connected to the rubbish that clutters our brains, he points out the pitfalls of overwork. Worse than just becoming discombobulated, overwork is a form of violence:

“The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.”

Merton, in his wisdom, understood how a frenzied lifestyle destroys a person’s inner peace. “It destroys the fruitfulness of his work because it kills the root of inner wisdom that makes work fruitful.” Thanks to his guidance, I have learned to throttle down enough to savor the moment more fully. 

This insidious virus I harbored, hampering my activism and peace of mind, has continued to spread until it's now an epidemic threatening our whole way of life. No one can dispute that overwork is the tyranny of today, not only for activists but also for idealists, artists, and committed, creative folks of every stripe.

In conclusion, I ask: Where are today’s prophets to guide us out of the wilderness, as Merton did for us in the 1960s?

XXX

¹ https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/thomas-merton-the-monk-who-became-a-prophet

² Merton, Thomas. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Image Classic) (p. 72).  Kindle Edition.

³ “Living at the Edge of Chaos." Neil Theise

Tricycle Talk :  “Living at the Edge of Chaos” Episode #88 with Neil Theise May 10, 2023

Is Western civilization an empathy weakling?

Meeting Others Where They Are
Concord Farmer's Market 2019
CC Jean Stimmell

I recently objected in a ‘My Turn’ op-ed to Elon Musk’s bizarre claim that “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” This assertion is yet another example of the Trump Administration engaging in what George Orwell called “doublespeak:” fooling citizens into believing that things are the opposite of what they really are.

Classic examples of Orwellian doublespeak include “war is peace,” and “freedom is slavery.”

Musk’s statement outraged columnists across the nation. Molly Worthen in the NYT was incredulous: How can we not want children to grasp perspectives of people different from themselves?”^⁠1 

Michael Ventura, author of Applied Empathy, wrote that belittling empathy is part of a deliberate strategy. He pointed out that Trump has a long track record of disparaging empathy as naïve: “casting strength as synonymous with domination, suggesting that to care is to lose—and to control is to win.”

It is classic Orwellian doublespeak, Ventura pointed out: “They want to reframe care as weakness, dignity as naïveté and trust as a liability.” He urged us not to take the bait.

Until Trump and his apostles came along, empathy had always been regarded as a moral good that promoted virtuous deeds. No longer. Sadly, these empathy nay-sayers have become an increasingly loud chorus, reaching beyond politics and business to infect even my old profession of psychology.

I was dumbfounded when I read that a psychologist like Paul Bloom would adopt a Trumpian stance, asserting that empathy is a “parochial, narrow-minded” emotion — one that “will have to yield to reason if humanity is to survive.”^⁠2

As a retired psychotherapist, I think he has gone off the deep end. So did Cameron, Inzlicht, and Cunningham in a NYT article:^⁠3   These psychologists consider empathy critical to human survival. They proved, contrary to public perceptions, that empathy is not a fixed personality trait – something you either have or you don’t. Instead, it is a skill that requires practice.  It can be improved upon with effort, like learning to play tennis.

Their research shows that when individuals are made aware that empathy is a skill, they put more effort into understanding groups different from their own. Through this effort to understand, their empathy for others grew. Their conclusion: Empathy for people unlike us can be expanded simply by modifying our views about empathy.  

 

I learned that lesson early in my clinical practice.  I admit that occasionally I wasn’t drawn to a new client who, at first glance, might seem hostile, needy, or narcissistic.  

But after I got to know my clients,  I  was able to connect with every one of them, valuing each as a unique and valuable individual. It was a natural process that required no effort on my part, with one significant caveat: I had to first get out of my head – stop my chattering, judgmental mind – to apprehend what the person before me was really saying.

Jamil Zaki has written an excellent book, “The War for Kindness,” reinforcing the notion that empathy is a skill, a skill that requires making a conscious choice to show empathy. Her conclusion is that with practice“over time, empathic choices add up—building empathic habits and, eventually, empathic people.”^⁠4 

***

The empathy research I conducted revealed a very distressing aspect: studies have shown that powerful individuals exhibit less empathy than any other group. This happens because they have little incentive to interact with other people.

 It is a sad commentary on our times that two such powerful billionaires have been able to buy their way to the top of our government—they exemplify how wealthy and influential individuals often exhibit negligible empathy for the downtrodden, the poor, and those who are different from themselves.

xxx

¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/opinion/sunday/empathy-school-college.html

² https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/opinion/sunday/empathy-is-actually-a-choice.html

³ https://www.nytimes.com/2015//12/opinion/sunday/empathy-is-actually-a-choice.html

⁴ https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/in_a_divided_world_we_need_to_choose_empathy

My memories of Vietnam 50 years later

 

1966: Passing civilian ships as we prepared our maiden voyage up the My Tho River

The Vietnam War was a collective trauma that became a double-edged sword, representing both an unforgettable nightmare and the bloody spur that drove the transformational change that defined the 1960s. Alongside the Civil Rights movement, this war propelled social justice and sustainability to the forefront of our generation’s consciousness.

The conflict killed over 58000 Americans and 3 million Vietnamese, including appalling massacres at places like My Lai, where American soldiers slaughtered more than 500 women, children, and old men.^⁠1 

We dropped over 5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam—the most extensive bombardment of any country in history—and more than twice as much tonnage as was dropped in all of World War II.^⁠2

The Vietnam War, in tandem with Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’, drove home the horrific dangers of pesticides, awakening the environmental movement. Vietnam stands front and center because it is an epicenter of wild species diversity, with many unique species. That was especially true before we flattened rural areas with 4 million tons of bombs, 400,000 tons of napalm, and 19 million gallons of Agent Orange^⁠3 – a curse for which I receive a VA disability.

Those of us in our generation who experienced our country running amok in the Vietnam era yearned for a simpler, more authentic, and more sustainable lifestyle. 

Here’s the background to my writing this: I was sitting around, feeling sorry for myself while recuperating from an operation, when I stumbled across a mesmerizing NYT photo essay commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.^⁠4 

The Vietnam photographs propelled me off the couch, overwhelmed by vivid memories of those years. As Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Vietnamese American author, wrote: “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”^⁠5 Here are a few of mine:

I served in the Navy on an LST that delivered troops and equipment along the coast and into the rivers of Vietnam. I didn’t encounter much combat, but in 1968, the year I returned home, my ship, Westchester County LST 1167, was mined by Viet Cong sappers, resulting in the loss of 23 men, some of whom I knew.

The Vietnam War was personal to every American because of the sheer number of casualties and the fact that no one could feel safe because of the draft. Country Joe’s popular song expressed everyone’s worst fear: “Don’t be the first on your block to get sent home in a box.”

I grew up in Northwood but attended Pittfield High School. Among my circle of friends, two were killed in action, three returned with disabling wounds, and one committed suicide.

My personal memories wouldn’t make it onto a John Wayne highlight reel. We were relatively safe, battling only the stress and exhaustion of shuttling soldiers and armaments around, sometimes for months at a time without setting foot on land; there was no respite: 4 hours on duty and 4 hours off in the tropical heat that burned our feet through the soles of our shoes while our garbage piled up on the deck like a blossoming tent city.

 I remember the suicides in our squadron: a boy found hanging in the paint locker; the boy on the midnight stern watch who disappeared into the shimmering wake sometime between 12 and 4 a.m. There were others as well. It was always the youngest and the newest: it’s quite a shock to go from your Midwestern high school basketball games to float aimlessly around in the South China Sea, halfway around the world.

I also remember with gratitude both the goodness and diversity of the men I served alongside. It still amazes me that one can assemble a crew made up of individuals from every conceivable background who, under trying circumstances, become a tight-knit clan of brothers able to overlook each other’s shortcomings and come together in camaraderie to accomplish what had to be done.

In closing, I want to remind younger generations who resent us baby boomers – sometimes for good reason – that not all of us have spurned our obligations to our fellow citizens and the natural world to live high off the hog, greedily making money at the expense of others.

Many of us shaped by the blast furnace of Vietnam have rejected America’s wasteful, consumer society and have instead worked to create a more sustainable society based on social and environmental justice.

xxx

¹ https://www.history.com/articles/my-lai-massacre

² https://renewvn.org/the-most-bombed-place-on-earth/

³ Ibid.

⁴ https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/world/asia/vietnam-war-photography-impact.html

⁵ Ibid