Is This the Beginning or the End?

 

Vultures spreading their wings to soak
 up the warmth of early morning sun
CC Jean Stimmell: Santa Cruz, 2/21

I strive for idleness. My best ideas come to me not from hard work but from being unfocused,  just lolling around. My creative life, such as it is, coincides with what Mark Taylor tells us in Idleness Waiting Grace: ”Many of the most important thoughts are unintentional—they can be neither solicited nor cajoled but have a rhythm of their own, creeping up, arriving, and leaving when we least expect them.”^⁠1

Certain seemingly inconsequential events stick in our minds. For me, one such thing is a TV commercial, from fifty years ago, about margarine: In the ad, Mother Nature, dressed in a gown of white and adorned in a crown of flowers, becomes enraged when she discovers that what she is eating is not real butter but margarine.  She bellows, “It’s not nice to fool mother nature,” and proceeds to rain down thunder and lightning upon the evil perpetrators.

That old TV ad came back to mind recently after reading a quote by climate scientist Wally Broecker in Atlantic Magazine: “The climate system is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks.”^⁠2 It made me wonder, why aren’t we paying attention to Wally’s warning,  speaking in Mother Nature’s behalf.

We have no excuse: We all learned in 2006, if not before, that we were in deep trouble. That’s when Al Gore released, “Inconvenient Truth,” educating us about the dangers of global warming. The documentary was a huge hit, winning two Academy Awards and is still one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time. 

Back then, the threat, for some, might have been passed off as conjecture. But now climate change is no longer theoretical but a storm raging all around us, from wildfires to hurricanes to pandemics, of which covid-19 may only be only the first of more deadly plagues to come.^⁠3

Despite overwhelming evidence, now so clear to the naked eye, we have done little to change our ways. Part of the complacency is due to big businesses, like the fossil fuel industry, who have worked tirelessly to discredit the whole concept of climate warming because it adversely affects their bottom line. A good argument can be made, along these lines, that the root cause of this is capitalism itself. 

However, I think a big part of our denial is hard-wired within us. We are not the higher-order rational beings, we think we are, but mere animals. And like all of our kind, we are driven foremost by our short-term emotions and appetites, not what is best for us in the long run.

To some extent, our short and long-term interests coincide. If we do not eat when we are hungry, we will soon die. If we all stop having sex, the human species will die. Craving material possessions, however, is a more complicated question. Perhaps, being well off provides some security, but our current shop-until-you-drop mentality is beyond the pale, driving global warming, polluting the planet, and depleting scarce resources. My theory is that this shopping obsession is a perversion of a primal instinct left over from our hunter-gatherer days when we had to forage every day to survive.

Whatever the reason, our brains are hard-wired to satisfy these short-term desires. We are like a cunning, old buck who usually makes good decisions but loses his head during rutting season: With his nose glued to the ground, following the scent of a doe in heat, the buck gets crushed by a bus crossing the road.

For us, the bus bearing down on us is climate change. 

Many experts say the climate crisis will soon wipe us out. Eminent virologist Frank Fenner^⁠4 predicts human extinction will happen next century. A few say this century. And that’s not considering the deadly consequences of war and pestilence. However, most likely, a few of us will survive, living in small, isolated tribes.

Perhaps Mother Nature is orchestrating this scenario to protect her realm by transplanting our primal animal brain into a natural environment where it can thrive, rebooting us as nomadic hunter-gatherers.  We will no longer have the means or the opportunity to cook the planet from our flagrant consumption or blow each other up with weapons of mass destruction.

A flock of new books suggests that the American way of life isn’t the pinnacle of existence.^⁠5 In his book Affluence without Abundance,  James Suzman points out that contemporary indigenous people, like the Australian Bushmen, work only about 15 hours a week with an equal amount of time spent on domestic chores. The rest of the time, they can relax and focus on family, friends, and hobbies. 

This atmosphere creates a very different sense of time, as ecologist David Abram tells us. For us, nature is merely a passive backdrop to our lives. But, for indigenous people, the present is all-encompassing: an alive, vibrating “field of intelligence in which our actions participate.”⁠6 While we take yoga or mindfulness classes to live in the present briefly, indigenous people live that way all the time. That’s why some have called hunter-gatherers the happiest humans ever inhabit the earth.⁠^⁠6

What a fantastic feeling, being totally alive in the moment without any craving to do or to have!  That’s what “idleness”, means to me, not the derogative, modern meaning suggesting sloth.  This spaciousness allows us to travel to places we have never been, as expressed so elegantly by Taylor: “Idleness allows time for the mind to wander to places never before imagined and to return transformed.”^⁠7

Maybe, with that in mind, going back to our roots is not all bad.

xxx

¹ https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/idleness-waiting-grace/

² https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/03/extreme-climate-change-history/617793/

³ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/06/fareed-zakaria-lessons-post-pandemic-world/?arc404=true

⁴ https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/how-human-extinction-would-change-the-earth/amp/

⁵ https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/551018759/are-hunter-gatherers-the-happiest-humans-to-inhabit-earth

⁶ https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/551018759/are-hunter-gatherers-the-happiest-humans-to-inhabit-earth

⁷ Ibid.

We have a Choice

Turning toward the light or darkness...
CC Jean Stimmell: San Jose 2/21

Our lives seem to be fragmenting in the face of spiraling polarization and civil unrest. How do we find what’s authentic in this splintered world of wildly different truths? And what if authenticity, in the traditional sense, no longer exists?

I muse on this question as I meditate on an exquisite, little waterfall near my house. The countless, disparate rivulets within it, rushing pell-mell in every direction, remind me of the incessant deluge of information pelting down on us each day – and the multiple realities they imply.

In Mother Nature’s world, none of these individual rivulets represent the truth: it is only when they are incorporated into a whole that they become what they really are: A waterfall.  

It occurs to me that it is the same with us: We can either define our lives like a single rivulet, blocking out and opposing all who are different; or stay flexible, accessing and acknowledging all the rivulets, and then construct them into a coherent whole, as nature has done with her waterfall.

My friend and mentor, Peter Baldwin, psychologist and retired Antioch professor, likes my comparison of my waterfall with the human personality. As he asserts in his book “Four and Twenty Blackbirds,”^⁠1 the notion of a single, unchanging personality is a myth. Instead each of us have multiple personalities, some conscious, some not, each behaving much like a rivulet in the waterfall. 

These sub-personalities come to life in various guises in response to particular situations. We can see these contrasting personas play out in everyday life by observing how a person acts differently interacting with her child than her lover or differently with his big boss than with his drinking buddies.

Another example is how the holier-than-thou preacher, who by denying the existence of his sexual persona, ends up acting out his erotic urges by sleeping with members of his congregation.

Just as the waterfall integrates countless, disparate parts into a unitary whole, Professor Baldwin’s book does the same for the human personality: It is a primer on how to identify our various parts, negative as well as positive, and then integrate them into a smoothly functioning whole, a prerequisite for becoming self-actualized and fully conscious. 

Society, like the individual, is composed of ever-changing components that must work together to be successful. Robert Lifton, a psychiatrist and big-thinker, wrote a prescient book, back in 1993, on this subject: The Protean Self: Human Resilience In An Age Of Fragmentation.

In it, he writes, “we are becoming fluid and many sided. Without quite realizing it, we have been evolving a sense of self appropriate to the restlessness and flux of our time. This mode of being differs radically from that of he past, and enables us to engage in continuous exploration and personal experiment. I have named it the 'protean self' after Proteus, the Greek sea god of many forms".^⁠2

Lifton believes that the protean self's flexibility and buoyancy are essential qualities to cope with the stress of ever-quickening social change, the media revolution, and the looming threat of human extinction. He sees our protean ability to evolve as a positive development, allowing us to find meaning and form in this tumultuous age we find ourselves in.

The opposite of the protean self, according to Lifton, is the fundamental self, who, as a result of his rigid and hidebound personality, dismisses ideas or facts that might challenge his worldview.  

The fundamentalist wants to keep things the way they’ve always been: “he avoids psychological fragmentation by defending the world against evil.”^⁠3  This description brings to mind Trump and his war against immigrants, Muslims, Black-Lives- Matter, women– almost every constituency but white males who have, at least up to now,  ruled this country.

The New York Times review of Lifton’s book praises him for “not attempting to wrap up the truth in a simple package.” Instead, it says, the protean self “honors plurality and multiplicity, delighting in the partial and inconsistent meanings revealed by disparate forms and alternative ways of life.”⁠4

Looked at this way, especially after Trump, what’s not to like about having more empathy and compassion for those different from ourselves, whether they are our fellow humans or Mother Earth herself.

xxx

–––––––––––––––––––––––––

¹ Four and Twenty Blackbirds: Personae Theory and the Understanding of Our Multiple Selves by Peter Baldwin, Ph.D : 1997

² The Protean Self: Human Resilience  in an Age of Fragmentation by Robert Jay Lifton. Basic Books, New York, NY, page1

³ https://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/20/books/keep-your-mind-open.html

⁴  iibid

Covid shows once more, who’s excluded from the American Dream

Homeless Person in San Francisco

CC Jean Stimmell: 1/7/2017

The media and disease experts tell us we must take personal responsibility to avoid Covid-19!  Gov. Sununu, to no one’s surprise, has taken the same hands-off approach, choosing to treat the pandemic like we do other social ills, like poverty or homelessness, exemplifying our state motto: “Live Free or Die.”

Indeed, some individual behavior is unconscionable, like folks refusing to wear masks and kids flocking to large parties. Yet disease experts stress that responsible leadership is essential because controlling this plague is beyond individual capabilities. That’s why it is so disheartening that after almost a full year, the federal government has yet  to provide a coordinated response to establish clear guidelines to protect public health and establish policies like a national infrastructure for testing and tracing – and now, to efficiently distribute the vaccine.

Meanwhile, essential workers and lower-income folks  have no choice but to work to put food on the table and a roof over their heads.  That makes it impossible for them to comply with social distancing prodigals without financial assistance.  The federal government provided such help early on but now have scaled it back when needed most. 

Epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves proposes that the government “pay Americans to stay home if they feel sick, test positive or work for a business that should close for public  health reasons to avoid choosing between their health and their bills.”^⁠1

Looking at the big picture in our country, it is clear we have over-emphasized the role of individual responsibility. It is morally indefensible to harangue people to lift themselves up by their bootstraps when they have no boots.  How do you lift yourself up without a livable wage, adequate healthcare, and sufficient education to compete for a good job.

Nicholas Kristof nailed it when he wrote: “When an infant in three counties in the United States has a shorter life expectancy than an infant in Bangladesh, that’s not because the American newborn is making “bad choices”; it’s because we as a country are.”^⁠2

Many people make ‘bad choices” because of hardships and trauma, resulting from being excluded from the American Dream. Isabel Wilkerson’s highly-acclaimed, new  book, “Caste: The Origins of Our discontents,” does a masterful job of illuminating how racism has been one such major exclusionary factor baked into our national identity. 

Less talked about is how social class is an exclusionary factor. Treating people differently, depending on their status in society, is written into our original Constitution of 1789; it delegated to the states the power to set voting requirements, which, generally, limited this right only to property-owning, white males. 

Low-income folks need not apply!

Since then, we’ve passed a lot of amendments to make things more equal. While women and non-white citizens now can vote, they still face discrimination. But those who fail to support themselves remain untouchables, shunned because, it is said, they don’t try hard enough.

As a result, in an unwelcome twist of fate, we now treat our dogs better than our fellow human beings. It wasn’t always so.

Back in our more macho past, dogs were card-carrying members of the untouchable caste: if they were “bad dogs” who growled at their master or disobeyed him, they were often beat or put down –  just as blacks were in the days of slavery. Poverty-afflicted humans weren’t treated much better: they were often thrown into prison for being unable to pay their debts, and subject to a precarious lifestyle, putting them at an ever-present risk of dying from malnutrition or exposure to the elements. 

But, at least for dogs, we have seen the light. We have discovered that bad character is not baked into “bad dogs:” Rather, it is a function of a bad environment. Consequently, we now rescue tens of thousands of dogs from the south, many of whom were neglected, malnourished, abandoned, abused, or all-of-the-above.

To our surprise, we have found that giving these dogs compassionate care in a safe environment transforms formerly unruly curs into loving, loyal best friends.

The question we have to ask is, when are we going to start treating our fellow humans as well as our dogs?

xxx

¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/opinion/new-york-covid-economy.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20201230&instance_id=25495&nl=todaysheadlines®i_id=30753738&segment_id=48030&user_id=273ae8c1ede4fde7d59a2b0627accb92

² https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/30/opinion/2020-pandemic-election-comments.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20201231&instance_id=25531&nl=todaysheadlines®i_id=30753738&segment_id=48093&user_id=273ae8c1ede4fde7d59a2b0627accb92

Happy Holidays to my Friends and Followers

 

Finding Clarity and Catharsis through Writing Essays

Rising sun cutting through smoke from Bow Power Plant
CC Jean Stimmell: 12/15/15

I wish to expand the conversation about writing, started by Nancy Steenson in her Concord Monitor column (12/16/20), warning us about how today’s students can’t express themselves in writing because they haven’t been taught how.  

It doesn’t surprise me. I’d go further and hazard a guess that all of us, no  matter what our age, have seen our writing skills deteriorate with the advent of computers., smartphones, and the whole digital age.

 

Ms. Steenson advocates returning to the old days when students learned what good writing was and practiced doing it. Indeed, back in the 1950s and 1960s, when I went to school, we wrote a lot and were drilled in grammar and punctuation, but it was an arduous task. While the practice that came from composing term papers and book reports helped organize my swirling thoughts, putting down words on the page was always an ordeal, like going to my childhood dentist who didn’t use novocaine.

That changed after I got back from Vietnam. It turned out that many of us returning veterans had problems with anger and acting out. More of us were dying from suicide than had from combat. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was not yet a diagnosis, opening the door for a crescendo of news reports, labeling us as “crazy Vietnam vets.”

 I stewed for days about this media feeding frenzy until finally, after a hard day of building stonewalls, I sat down at the kitchen table and started to write and write; I wrote all night. The result ended up becoming the cover story in the old New Hampshire Times. 

That was my real introduction to writing. The subject matter commanded me to write because it was so personal and close to my heart. Writing has never been easy for me. I still need to be inspired by an idea and then, after much procrastination, force myself to sit down and write disjointed crap. Finally, if I’m blessed, I  find a rhythm that overcomes my internal censor, allowing me to spit out what –although I wasn’t aware of it beforehand – I wanted to say. 

Of course, in a real sense, it is not true that we no longer know how to write: We have all become experts with texts and Twitter.

The rub comes when we have to address complex issues. Essays can be an excellent tool but fell out of favor, as a consequence of what sociologists call modernity (or the modern age), which crested in the middle of last century: Modernity downplayed our subjective feelings and our ethical concerns, in favor of glorifying impersonal, objective reality. 

During that time, science was next to godliness; we wholeheartedly supporting its quest to unravel the mystery of life while making life a breeze for all of us. A senate committee in the 1960s projected that as a result of improved technology, the American workweek would be reduced to 14 hours by 2000. And scientists predicted we would soon have unlimited atomic power “too cheap to meter.” 

Democracy was so ascendant by the time the Berlin Wall fell that Francis Fukuyama, a prominent theorist, confidently predicted we had reached the end of history: “the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy.”^⁠1 

Under these circumstances, the influence of personal essays withered, blinded by the allure of a single, dispassionate, all-knowing truth. Essayists were replaced by experts who pontificated about ultimate reality in grand treatises and scientific equations. 

However, as we now know, the experts were wrong.

 Rather than the whole world sailing off into the sunset in a single, blissful ark of shared reality, the opposite happened: a splintering of reality into multiple truths, depending on who you are and where you stand in society.

As a result, essays are regaining their clout. Rather than claiming objective truth – which is an illusion, according to many – they present individual perspectives, based on available evidence, specific to time and place. 

They erase walls between subject and object, making no attempt to separate our inner feelings from the outside world. As Robert Musil observed: “Man and the world are together like the snail to its shell: the world is part of man.”^⁠2

As such, an essay is not a formal proclamation but reflections based on personal experience. Fundamental to the essay, Alan Wall tells us, is “the notion of uncertainty, the endless seesawing possibilities of proof and disproof. An essay is a testing”^⁠3

The “my turn” columns in this newspaper are an excellent example of such works in progress. Each column is a valuable thread, in and of itself.  But when woven together over time, they transform into a rich tapestry, illuminating the soul of our community.

Writing a column for the Monitor is a way to get back in the fray. It can help us discover our voices. It’s hard work, like going to the gym. But if we persevere, we can find clarity and catharsis. 

And, shucks, all together we may change the world.

xxx

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man

² https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/essayistic-novel-and-mode-life-robert-musils-man-without-qualities

³ https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2014/05/wall-essayism-modernity/^⁠1

Each going her own way

 Our sunflowers after the first snow,

each heading off on her own path

We are the first de-indigenized culture on earth – and the last

Indigenous rock art along the Columbia River
CC Jean Stimmell 2013

 We are the first de-indigenized culture on earth – and  the last

 We take pride in our modern civilization for being advanced and forward-thinking while judging indigenous people as primitive and backward. According to Anthropologist Wade Davis, what we have accomplished is a “stunning innovation in human affairs, the sociological equivalent of the splitting of the atom^⁠1.” 

For the first time is history, we have created  “a new and original culture” that celebrates personal freedom over community and consumption as a way of life over sustainability. Our stunning innovation is an illusion compatible to looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope.

As the world’s first de-indigenized culture, we have broken with all human history, according to this 2013 article in Yes Magazine. But it has come at an exceptional cost. Utilizing the external muscle of fossil fuels while extolling selfish individualism, we are the first society on earth not to be “enmeshed within networks of communities and relations with the land.” 

Unfortunately, the consequences of our ground-breaking experiment are now coming due. Radical individualism has now reached the point where it has paralyzed our government and endangered our citizens; we can see this in our deadlocked Congress that is unable to agree upon a desperately needed Covid rescue package while, at the same time, in the name of freedom, hoards of demonstrators are protesting government mandates to wear masks, one of the few proven methods to slow down the corona carnage until a vaccine arrives.

Our roads and bridges and public transportation have decayed until they resemble that of a third world country. Of course, the 800-pound gorilla in the room is catastrophic climate change, which our president, a fitting one for a de-indigenized nation, calls fake news.

Human greed and selfishness has corrupted our democracy and plundered our planet of its precious living resources.  We are becoming a huge blazing meteorite, lighting up the sky in technicolor, still puffed up with how great we are, until, in one last colossal blast of fireworks, we will plummet through the atmosphere to our death and that of our beloved spaceship Earth.

What can be done? In  my grief, I turn to Joan Halifax, born in Hanover, NH in 1942. She is a wise women who has earned her spurs in celebrated careers as an anthropologist specializing in indigenous cultures, hospice caregiver, ecologist, and Zen Buddhist teacher.^⁠2 

She offers an antidote to our de-indigenous culture, which has stolen our soul, replacing it with a computer algorithm on a chip, programming us with a single task: shopping until we drop. Our only hope, she says, is to regain our  indigenous wisdom. 

Indigenous people, along with Buddhists, reject the notion that we are separate, isolated atoms. Instead, they assert we are all connected souls, immersed in a great, flowing river going back to the beginning of time: “Just as our mother and father live inside us, so do generations upon generations of mothers and fathers before them. “

The root of the problem we face today is that we have lost touch with the souls of our ancestors and, in the process, lost our own.   Our survival and our sanity depend on learning to honor where we came from, not only venerating our human ancestors but all life forms.  As Halifax poetically describes it:

“We are connected to the dead in ways not commonly remembered. The bones of the ancestors lie in the body of Earth and are transformed into the bodies of plants and creatures, including ourselves.”  

“The great trees of tropical and temperate forests, by feeding on the decaying remains of countless plant and animal species, literally translate the past into our atmosphere…[supplying us] the very air we breathe.”   

Indigenous people venerate their ancestors because they understand  all beings are integral parts of our existence – past, present, and future –  interconnecting and interpenetrating in the great river of life.

Halifax says that until we get out of our heads and give birth to our ancestors, Earth cannot be redeemed from its suffering. “To exclude, consciously or unconsciously, any species from the continuum of existence is to deny a part of ourselves.” And spell our doom.

Benjamin Franklin expressed this wisdom with a different metaphor during our American revolution: “We must, indeed, hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

xxx

¹ https://www.academia.edu/6558250/Non_Indigenous_Culture_Implications_of_a_Historical_Anomaly_Yes_Magazine_July_11_2013_?email_work_card=view-paper

² https://tricycle.org/magazine/giving-birth-ancestors/?utm_source=Tricycle&utm_campaign=146a54aa67Daily_Dharma_2019_5_27_Subs&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1641abe55e-146a54aa67-307712649