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| CC Jean Stimmell– August 2nd, 2024 |
Like deja vu all over again, today’s burning issues are the same as those two generations ago. That much became apparent to me from reading a 1995 interview with Allen Ginsberg, a well-known poet and 1960s guru who highlighted a nagging paradox: “How can you maintain your civilized world when everybody else is starving?1 “
Since he wrote that, things have only gotten worse: the disconnection between our aspirations and our actions has become ever more extreme.
Take immigration for example. Ginsberg, back in 1995, declared that our root problem is how we demonize immigration: “There are civil wars in foreign countries, in Latin America, Africa, which are taking place on the streets of America too. Demagoguery about homogeneity and immigration are taking place… How much immigration can you stand?… All these arguments about how much we restrain hoards from countries we wrecked from taking refuge here.”
He says the biggest thing about immigration that we miss – the elephant in the room – is our lack of compassion for the plight of refugees. Today, the problem has expanded to include the ever-increasing homelessness in our midst.
Record income inequality has hollowed out the middle class, causing more and more of us not to be able to make the mortgage payment or the rent, and consequently, adding to the rising tide of the dispossessed.
Worse yet, the recent Supreme Court decision has made it illegal to sleep in public. Manchester and Concord have already passed laws to punish this behavior with fines of several hundred dollars for the first offense. If the homeless had that kind of cash sitting around, they probably wouldn’t be homeless in the first place.
Indeed, where is our compassion for our neighbors? For Ginsberg, compassion requires a spiritual orientation, something increasingly absent in our dog-eat-dog world, which praises “survival of the fittest” millionaires like Elon Musk most often.
David Brooks recently addressed this crippling dysfunction through the lens of James Davison’s new book Democracy and Solidarity, addressing the cultural roots of this disconnection,2
Davison points out that a fundamental tension has broken down that has long defined America: It is between the Founding Father’s rational Enlightenment ideas about liberty and the divine ideals of Christianity. He writes that throughout our history, we have prospered living with one ear attuned to each tradition:
“If you want to see these two traditions within one person, look at Martin Luther King Jr. He used a Christian metaphysics to show how American democracy could live up to both Enlightenment and divine ideals.”
Tragically, he writes this fruitful cultural tension died with King. As a result, since the 1960s, America has grown less religious, which explains America’s increasing polarization: We have lost our former set of moral foundations to settle disputes.”In other words, Americans lost faith in both sides of the great historical tension and, with it, the culture that had long held a diverse nation together.”
According to Brooks, the solution to this unraveling is to renew our spiritual foundations: “My guess, and it is only a guess, is that this work of cultural repair will be done by religious progressives, by a new generation of leaders who will build a modern social gospel around love of neighbor and hospitality for the marginalized.”
I agree with Brooks that societies absolutely require a coherent moral foundation. From my studies in sociology, I’m aware that every society, going back into the mists of time, has had at least five essential institutions: religion, education, family, economy, and government(political). Human beings are social animals and can’t live without these institutions.
Even science has even gotten on board, touting the centrality of spirituality in our lives!
Theorists like Neil Theise assert that consciousness is the fundamental element in the universe, not material things. He is following the lead of Max Planck, the famous quantum physicist from the early 20th century who said this directly: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.”3
According to Theise’s poetic description, “Our brains aren't fleshy computers that create consciousness but, instead, act like transducers that connect us to a single, all-encompassing consciousness in the same way my tiny transistor radio could link up to a rock and roll radio station when I was a teenager.4”
I’d say that’s a pretty powerful endorsement of spirituality. We are all one, embodying the ever-present consciousness of the universe, an entity that many would call God.
xxx
2 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/opinion/trump-biden-authoritarianism.html
3 –Theise, Neil. Notes on Complexity Spiegel & Grau. Kindle Edition. P. 89
4 Theise, Neil. Notes on Complexity (p. 153). Spiegel & Grau. Kindle Edition.
1 comment:
the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained.
"the world of science and technology"
Science does not tout, people do. Prevailing models of the nature of consciousness are many and varied.
For a opinion on consciousness consistent with Plank, from the point of view of a noted Professor of cognitive psychology. "the Embodied Mind" cognitive science and human experience
revised edition MIT press, Cambridge/London.
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