PSYCHOSCAPES

Friday, August 9, 2019

With God on Our Side

A version of this piece was published in the Concord Monitor 8/19/19

https://www.concordmonitor.com/God-on-our-side-27666539

That's me up the Mekong River in Vietnam, February 1967

With God on Our Side

The best argument for gun safety is not political but theological, according to James Atwood in his eye-opening book, America And Its Guns; he argues that the tens of thousands of gun deaths in American each year cannot be understood apart from our national myth that God has appointed America as “the trustee of the civilization of the world.”

I believe his argument provides the missing ingredient to understanding our gun violence problem. In part, Atwood is repeating the refrain from Bob Dylan’s song. “With God on Our Side,” as we see in this representative verse:

Oh, the history books tell it

They tell it so well…

The cavalries charged

The Indians died

Oh, the country was young

With God on its side

I would go one step further and contend that to those, who live by the gun, no longer insist that the gun is an agent of God’s will; they see the gun, in and of itself, as naked power to be used as they want. No longer is there any pretense about appealing to a higher power!

That’s the message of the perpetrator of the recent Gilroy Garlic Festival mass killing, who wrote a post before starting shooting, directing his audience toward an novel, glorified by white supremacists: “Might is Right.”

Laissez-faire capitalism has lead our country down the path toward extreme individualism to the point where morality and ethics no longer seem to count. We are becoming the nation of Trump where everything is a transactional exchange. The goal is to come out on top: to win by any means possible.

If our world is truly a dog-eat-dog world where we must fight those around us just to survive, then having a gun gives us the edge. If the philosopher Thomas Hobbs was correct that life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, the gun would be his god.

Today, we are driving people into Hobbs’ arms, like the mother, who, after surviving the El Passo massacre, has given up hope of justice: she told reporters that she is buying a gun and and will take lessons to learn how to use it.^⁠1

Fear walks the land.

If you are on the road to Jerico, you might encounter a stranger who will rob you, beat you, and leave you as half dead. You might be walking home from the convenience store eating candy and meet George Zimmerman, who shots you dead because he is “standing his ground.” You might be a black teenager who is shot because he knocked on a neighbor’s door asking for help, after his car broke down.

Luckily, for the vast majority of us – especially white, straight Americans – none of these traumatic outcomes will ever happen to us. Instead, the chances are, in our time of need, we will meet a good samaritan who will help us, not the evil other of our over-active imaginations.

For sure, mass killings have increased, in part because of increased bigotry and resurgence of white nationalism. But we must resist shrill voices, seeking to stampede us even further into the cult of the gun.

Crying wolf creates fear which attracts eye balls to mass media and makes money for stockholders, and fear mongering can result in victory for unscrupulous politicians who promise to deport those who allegedly cause all our problems.

Yes, screaming that the sky is falling has been an effective tactic: Surveys consistently show that American voters believe crime is sky-rocketing. In reality, the polling of all reputable organizations, such as the Pew Research Center, show the opposite: Violent crime in the U.S. has plummeted over the past quarter century.

It is heartbreaking to see that ideology has trumped reality in the country I love. We are not – and were not meant to be– isolated individuals thrown into a cage fight with each other. Our evolutionary history is a better guide to who we are.

Throughout our evolution, humans have been – and still are – vulnerable and incomplete as individuals. On the savanna, predators were faster and stronger than we were. Only by trusting each other enough to band together and cooperate could we survive. The strong community we built became, in essence, a greater organism, allowing us to negotiate our way forward, prospering while building great civilizations.

This social consciousness, based on love, compassion, and trust, is the essence of who we are. It is what, I think, some call God.

Or we could call it perennial wisdom, an ancient pedigree that philosophers, like David Bentley Hart, value above all else: “I tend to believe that goodness, love and moral beauty are substantial and eternal realities that attest to themselves quite immediately to any rational nature.”^⁠2

James Atwood is 100% correct. The solution to America’s problems, including our gun problem, is spiritual, not political.

xxx
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¹From Los Angeles Times, 8/6/19. “Gilroy shooter’s target list prompts domestic terrorism probe by FBI.” By Hannah Fry, Richard Winton

²https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/opinion/quentin-tarantino.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_190807?campaign_id=2&instance_id=11405&segment_id=15936&user_id=273ae8c1ede4fde7d59a2b0627accb92®i_id=307537380807

Friday, July 5, 2019

Jumping Free

Monhegan in the evening golden hour
CC Jean Stimmell 7/3/19

I haven’t written much lately, but it has been of no concern. I’ve been happy to tend the garden, build my waterfall, and take walks in the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of spring.

But spending a week on Monhegan Island, a magnificent little gem 12 miles off the coast of Maine without the distractions of modern life – without TV, Twitter or social media – was a revelation to me.

Without conscious awareness, I had become like the frog in the proverbial pot on the stove who didn’t notice the heat had slowly been ratcheted up until it was too late to jump, and he was cooked.

Luckily, unlike the proverbial frog, I jumped out in time. And landed on Monhegan to join close friends.

Soon after arriving here, my mind cleared, like the sun breaking through morning fog: I felt viscerally alive – I guess like a groundhog waking up from a long winter’s hibernation.

It came to me how much our country is, indeed, a giant roiling pot, a cauldron rife with tribal culture wars and incessant fear mongering , all conspiring to boil away our essence.

On the island, without the restricting leash of conventional society, I found myself becoming disoriented and lost. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: Getting lost can be a liberating experience as Rebecca Solnit illustrated in her classic book, “Field Guide to Getting Lost.”

I identified with the Thoreau quote in her book about how only when we become lost “do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”^⁠1

As I became increasingly lost, I saw how in our culture, our left brain has been worshipped to such an extent, it has become our supreme idol, the new god of modernity. By privileging our left brain, we have become, cognitive, computer-like creatures who can calculate anything that can be commodified for pleasure and gratification – or to gain power over others.

But, in the process, we have forsaken our right brains, the seat of our spiritual souls; we have forgotten, how to inhabit our bodies and be grounded with a sense of place, prerequisites to rest comfortably in the bosom of Mother Earth.

As I was musing, it struck me why my writing has tailed off. It is because words in my life have become optional.

Rebecca Solnit describes having the same epiphany during a desert meditation: she was enveloped in “a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words strange rocks you may or may not turn over.”^⁠2

Day after day, watching the sun rise out of the ocean, reconnected me to what is really real: the mythic powers of the earth and the cosmos beyond: It is the deep intelligence of Mother Earth that regulates the tide, wind, and climate which will determine our future– or if we will even have one.

It is that deep intelligence, beyond the power of any computer, which choreographs the movement of giant flocks of migrating birds, gyrating and whirling in ever-changing patterns, flying millimeters from each other, but never touching:

The same deep intelligence that guides a child’s joy as she leaps with abandon from one rock to another on an island paradise to celebrate the end of a perfect summer day.

xxx

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¹Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost (pp. 14-15). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

²Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost (p. 131). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Sunday, June 2, 2019

A Postmodern Crossing of the River

"Oh Oh, Who Got Wet", 2019, oil on canvas
by Janiva Ellis

I went to the Whitney Biennial in New York City last week. Rather than floors of paintings depicting the western history of white man art, I was bombarded by outsider art: constructions, animations, videos, sculptures, and lots of digital celebrating the diversity and dysfunction of the postmodern world that we really inhabit.

While paintings were in a minority, one was my favorite: A gigantic, 20-foot-wide panoramic, landscape by Janiva Ellis; it was surreal with psychedelic colors and menacing red sky.

An indigenous woman wades toward us through a river, dissolving as she comes closer; she is carrying, a shape-shifting cartoon-like character, perhaps her baby. Awaiting on the shore in front of her is a goddess-like figure, dead or wounded, lying motionless on the ground.

In religious circles, crossing a river represents a major transition. For instance, the Buddha taught that right living and meditation was like building a raft, which if successful, could ferry one across the river of life to enlightenment.

To my eye, this painting depicts the abortive nature of the type of transition that technology – our new god – promotes today. It is a betrayal of what is really real. Rather than an indigenous spiritual quest grounded in our own flesh and blood, sense of place, and Nature, this digital transition connects us only to empty pixels.

Technology is like a siren, luring us to cross the river to a digital heaven that dissolves before our eyes like the person in the painting. Digital paradise turns out to be a chimera, an illusion, a world without substance.

In another vein, perhaps this figure represents a black American slave escaping to freedom; in that case, then today she represents all of us in our fruitless quest for transcendence in the illusionary age of technology.

Technology is no longer a benign force but a frontal assault on Mother Nature who has taken all the abuse that She can stomach and is now ready to fight back. Perhaps that goddess-like figure laying dead or wounded in the foreground represents Mother Nature!

It’s not a pretty picture: I think the painting is telling us the future is as grim as the prophecy James Baldwin recreated from the Bible in a song of a slave:

“God gave Noah the rainbow sign,

No more water, the fire next time!”

Finding Sanity

A version of this essay was published in the Concord Monitor, May 30, 2019

https://www.concordmonitor.com/Finding-sanity-25699055

A Work In Pogress: The Waterfall and Me

Finding myself increasingly lost in the wilderness during these dystopian times, dominated by clashing views on what is the truth, I’ve been urgently searching for familiar landmarks to help guide my way home.

One landmark came into view from reading the Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset, who lived through the chaos of the first half of the 20^th century: The whole world was in armed turmoil and his government in transition – as I fear ours might be now – from democracy to dictatorship.

His solution was to take time out to turn inward to find the truth:

Few are the people who in these latter days still enjoy that tranquility which permits one to choose the truth…. Almost all the world is in tumult, is beside itself, and when man is beside himself he loses his most essential attribute: the possibility of… withdrawing into himself to… define what it is that he believes…

Without such respite, Ortega continues, a person becomes “beside himself,” a zombie, “forced to act mechanically in a frenetic somnambulism.”

That describes my psychological state, especially since the advent of the present administration: somewhere between zombie and frenetic sleepwalker.

How do I withdraw inward to regain my tranquility? That became the question. As I looked back over my long life, I came across another landmark: One other time when I felt as I do now.

The first time was during the 1960s. After a euphoric beginning when my generation idealistically – but naively –believed that we were the leading edge of a wave that was going to going to sweep in a new era of peace and justice, simplicity and sustainability.

Tragically, the wave stalled as the Vietnam war dragged on endlessly, killing tens of thousands of us and hundreds of thousands of peasants; meanwhile our heroes were assassinated, one after another, including JFK, MLK, and RFK; our out-of-control, imperial president then enlarged the war, invading Cambodia and students were gunned down by the national guard.

Metastasizing polarization turned peaceful protest into armed mayhem.

The feeling I had then was what I feel today – and what Ortega y Gasset was feeling in his time and place. A breaking point comes when it all becomes too much and one must withdraw into oneself.

I dropped out of my sociology graduate program where I felt like a faceless cog in an academic machine and joined the back to the land movement, along with many of my compatriots.

While still advocating for peace and justice, my personal peace came from being nurtured by nature and the land. We grew what we needed: vegetables, chickens, pigs, and children while I earned my living as a dried-laid stone mason.

That was my tranquility, away from the hustle and bustle of a world gone mad.

Without forethought or planning, that is what I find myself slipping back into today.

This realization has become the third landmark back to myself as I find myself rededicated to my gardens and tree farm, even buying a new tractor. But the final element was a big surprise, even to me.

The germ of the idea materialized when Russet and I were put in an altered state by the patter of a waterfall at a Buddhist retreat two winter’s ago.

The vision gained momentum when an old friend recently gave me an eight foot long pane of frosted glass from the door of an old bank. Indestructible, almost one inch thick, it had the makings of a momentous waterfall.

To incorporate the majestic glass into a worthy water feature required some serious stonework. Lucky I have my new tractor.

A final gift came after starting my waterfall: how becoming reacquainted with the rhythm of working with stone in the web of nature erased time back to a blissful era long past.

xxx