Hoping for Luck and Working for Wisdom
Attending the Pendent Trend to Rend Humanity to a Brutal Bend of the River of Life
SENDING ESSENTIAL MENDING TO LEND OUR HAPPY TENDENCY FOR FRIENDSHIP A PENCHANT TREND, INSTEAD OF DESCENDING INTO THE PIT OF HELL ASCENDANT
A fundamental tenet of Koranic code is that God creates men as friends to each other. Thus, a Muslim may question the moral goodness of another without calling into question his worthiness as a fellow human. This formulation is roughly the same as the Christian notion that we should love the sinner but hate the sin. This forms the premise for this communique, in that a colleague of mine, Mo, chided me when I termed George Bush an “enemy” the other day.
“Jim, why do you say he is your enemy? He is a man, isn’t he?” He went on to explain that he abhorred Bush’s policies but insisted on loving him as a human being.
The topic had not arisen between us before, or he would have realized I was in complete agreeement with him. I have frequently said that I feel primarily compassion and pity for George Bush, for a variety of reasons, and that, as I told Mo, “if the President were to hold a people’s party, a hoedown, across the street, I’d be more likely than anyone else to bond with ‘Dubya,’ mano-y-mano.” I had heard that Bush was an inveterate partier; “I’d listen to all his stories.”
“Then why do you call him your enemy?” he repeated.
The word is entirely impersonal, a result of my observation that “objectively, the man acts and elicits others to act completely contrary to the interests of my children and me.” Personal rancor for the leader of the U.S. has nothing to do with the label, nor for any but a handful of similarly situated scions, the exceptions demonstrating in one way or other that they deliberately---meaning consciously and purposely and with malice aforethought---deal death and duplicity to Gaia’s guests, with some quality of arrogant impunity attached, as well. Sanctimony is also a quality that I find undendurable. I then acknowledged that these instances, in which I felt vindictiveness, were as likely a result of my own inclinations as any actual wrongdoing by the likes of a Cheney or an Ashcroft.
I would have continued to follow this path of dissecting the subjective and objective aspects to my political consciousness and inclinations, but Mo cut off this possibility with another question. “So, you Wild Irishman! Who do you consider a friend?” At my quizzical smile and hesitation, he laughed quietly and stated with a measure of triumph, “That’s not such an easy one to answer, is it?”
I laughed too. “It’s ‘whom’, you!” I explained the objective use of the relative pronoun and added that, “the problem isn’t identifying friends, it’s about figuring out who’s not.” The gigantic majority of Earth’s inhabitants are, on the basis of who they are and what they do and where they sit in the overall scheme of things, “my natural allies, organically friends, whether they realize it or not.”
Mo found this take on the situation interesting and asked me to write an essay for my next BLOG about it. Thus this posting. It consists of four parts---an assessment of the notion of community and forgiveness that the world’s major religions share in common; what the objective prerequisites are that cause the likes of me to see someone in the raimant of a friend; how the subjective rejection of that objective ‘garb’ can make another’s demeanor and attitude very unfriendly, in spite of the natural potential for affinity and mutuality; and a brief mention of important possibilities for increasing friendship among those who should appreciate each other more than generally they currently do.
AN ASPECT OF MORAL CODIFICATION
When a group of compadres last August walked much of the way between Atlanta and Aiken, in South Carolina and adjacent to one of the H-bomb breadbaskets in the region, in order to commemorate Hiroshima and Nagasaki, religious groups were our only obvious well-wishers. One of our crew was a practicing Pentacostal preacher, a wild, hyper-storied human about whom legends are already being written. He took to the pulpit on several occasions to speak of our work.
In a small, Black, storefront church in Augusta, just across the Savannah River from our destination, he intoned one evening as I ran camera and recorder and nursed my bloody feet. “These men---they don’t even call themselves Christian. Nobody’s paying them to do this walk. No. They’re doing this walk because our lives depend on it. MY ETERNAL LIFE DEPENDS ON IT.” He raised his hands in the classic pose, palms outward, to receive the spirit of God. “Perfect religion---and why practice any other kind?---my Bible tells me, the same Bible you read, that our job is to ‘help the widows and orphans in their necessity’---to reach out and provide for the members of our community who need our help the most. All there is to perfect religion, according to my God, is this witness and love and forgiveness.”
Daniel proceeded to label the plutonium plutocrats the murderers they are, and then to forgive them with the simple advice, “go and sin no more.” Thus, despite the fact that this brilliant madman and I agreed on almost nothing social and little of a political nature, though history and faith divided us, his embodiment of this fundamental tenet of human spirituality---of helping those in trouble and loving and forgiving even the most eggregiously offensive others---makes him my friend for life. Even the most ancient faiths, at least as ‘reformed’ congregations, have at their centers these notions, of mutual humanity and the presence of godliness in all of us.
Another associate of mine, a mega-empath-therapist, predictably as ‘cracked’ as that estimable healing profession requires, states the propositions like this: “I don’t know whether God exists or not, to tell the truth; but the human psyche works better with God in it. Of that I’m certain.” Not only have I come to agree with her as an abstract or hypothetical matter, I have personally put an incarnation of God, or the creator, at the heart of my daily routine. And I am at the same exact moment the absolute epitome of the agnostic, nerdy scientist and researcher.
The cosmos will constantly occur to me as a fantastic mystery; the fundamentalist atheist and the fundamentalist ANYTHING will always make me a little nervous, will always strike me as more than slightly nonsensical. I have prayer partners, and sing praise again and again each day because, as my counselor-friend said, my “psyche works better with God in it.” This all spills out onto the page, simply because it suggests that at the heart of any tradition worthy of the title ‘humanist’ or ‘spiritual’ is the notion that all humans have some element in them of what is life-affirming and necessary for all of us to affirm in ourselves.
Hence, even if it were Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, and Jack-the-Ripper rolled into one who sat down opposite me to spill his story, I would listen. I would strive to find the redemption and relationship and responsibility at the core of the hurt and madness. In this sense, and the idea strikes me as critically important to argue powerfully now---if only as a counterpoint to the opportunistic butchery that daily passes for policy and planning---all human beings are friends, who merely await the recognition inside themselves of this indisputable idea, which may also be a fact on which depends our capacity to avoid mutual self extinction.
“We’re all cousins after all.”
ASCERTAINING ‘FRIENDS’ BY THEIR WORK AND PLACE
The overall conjunction of the human condition---no matter the particular skin-bag that experiences this uniquely contemporary phenomenon---to some extent establishes the material basis for the spiritual similitude of humanity noted above. But there are still plenty of evident and underlying divergences in the way that different folks, distinct families, encounter current reality. Matters of class, color, gender are just so obvious, except perhaps to those too willfully ignorant to allow themselves to notice.
The characteristics of this diversity---skin tone, money, property, privilege, education, the list of possible differentiation is lengthy---may nonetheless be capable of placement in much larger categories. The Bible mentions the ‘widows and orphan,’ what many preachers of my acquaintance term “God’s preferential option for the poor and oppressed.” Those who experience poverty, disempowerment, and lack of access to property and process are, objectively, the “FRIENDS” to whom I referred Mo, George W. Bush and his family thus excluded from this circle by their elevated place and different relations with each other and the rest of the universe.
Most American analysts see pluralism predominant in the context I describe. The world occurs to me quite differently, as much more polarized---in fact, if not in feeling. Even the vast majority of residents of the United States, where this sense of diversity and individuation is most powerfully noticeable, are a paycheck---or a 401K disaster, or what have you---removed from a rapid spiral down the tubes of the social toilet. My personal guess is that one to five per cent of folks worldwide---a bit more here, maybe up to ten per cent---have the wealth and relations and choices to consider themselves political actors as individuals and families, and hence, as rulers rather than ruled, as oppressor-enabled instead of oppression-depleted. These sorts, not saying anything about our personal feelings for each other, are the objective ENEMIES with whom I grouped the President.
Imagining that around three per cent of our cousins have acquired or inherited the collection of qualities to qualify them as royalty instead of peasantry, as proletariat instead of bourgeois, or whatever: That still represents an astounding two hundred million people---every one of them a gatekeeper, highly accomplished, savvy, skilled, and, most importantly, intersected with others of their ilk to reenforce each other and enable their continued hegemony. Most of these spectacular specimens have worked hard, of course, to maintain the life to which they’ve become accustomed, and they believe they deserve their perquisites and prevalent privilege. They organize themselves to stay in power, and in place, at the “top of the food chain,” so to speak.
Six billion or so others, me among them, generally just try to keep body and soul together on the other side of the social tracks. The social history of my academic past led me to stories and to writing; the premise precedent to such study is that all people are capable of being actors on the stage of life. As a result, no matter the pessimism which seems reasonable, I see the vast panoply of cousins similarly situated as am I and my closer kin, and I imagine how quickly life would change if we hooked up with even a fraction of the conscious intention of the ones who rule us.
CONTRARINESS, CONTRADICTION, AND ATTITUDINAL CONNIPTIONS
Instead of any cohesive movement toward the sorts of relationships that will empower us, however, we whine and kvetch and practice meaningless cycles of victimization and revenge, to a greater or lesser extent on any given day. To be sure, as well, a few of the hyper-privileged elite achieve a semblance of “Eureka!” and social democracy flashes forth for them as the basis for human life to emerge. These pariahs of monopoly capital, however, do not begin to match the hundreds of millions of hopeful hucksters who envision “making it” as some combination of luck and diligence that will, magically or materially, enter them into the halls of power and effectiveness and jet-set joy-rides.
In addition to these entrepreneurial optimists, class traitors, routine opportunists, and other normally ambitious folks, there accompany them---in fleeing from the convivial potential of a united front of the ‘salt-of-the-earth’---all the passive, depleted, defeated, and otherwise too-damaged-to-act fellows who cringe and cower on the sidelines of life. The remaining cohort of
cousins still may constitute a plurality of the collective nephews and nieces of our extended family. Unfortunately, as noted above, with the exception of parts of Europe and Asia, and among isolated pockets of people elsewhere, little in the nature of analysis, planning, or strategy has taken place among the friends left over from desertion and depletion.
In fact, the inhabitants of this millieu are as likely to bicker with and label and blame each other as they are even to begin serious conversations about relating to each other to achieve social transformation. HOW IN HELL DO I CONTINUE TO HOLD ON TO AN OPTIMISTIC NATURE, IN THE MIDST OF THIS CARNAGE AND CHAOS AND DIVISION AND DISINCLINATION TO DELVE THE NECESSARY DEPTHS?
My position is simple. Either we will find a way to relate more like Binobo Chimps, who are after all our closest non-sapien cousins, or nature will fill the many niches we have weedily invaded with a variety of replacements less grand than we are but also less grandiose and self-destructive. I’m an optimist because the only other choice is to prepare for Armageddon. As I said to start, I’m agnostic. I believe we have choices other than some preordained slaughter that a benevolent murderer at the head of the cosmos has calculated in advance.
STORIES AND GLORIES AND PORING LABORIOUSLY FOR THE NEXT NEW WAVE
I have lots of work, millions of words of stories and essays and notes and nonsense, ready to publish, in addition to the hundred thousand words I’ve sold or given away. These are the contributions I have to make to this dialogically mystical uprising that I believe is not just possible and necessary but inevitable. I’ve also begun several many-part series of what we might call ‘Science Fiction,’ or ‘Science Fantasy.’
This last group of tales includes a three volume set about a clan network which leaves Asia and walks to America. No edenic garden grew at their feet, but they moved away from one way and traversed the globe to find another. In my tryptich, always the leading forces for movement are the legends and routines---the one-man-shows and stand-up comedians and performance artists of the neolithic period---of those who transmit the culture’s old yarns in the new forms that allow people to walk with light hearts and hopeful loins into uncertainty and travail.
We may see ourselves as standing at a similar social and ecological crossroads as that which our initial American cousins transcended. Perhaps we need the same sorts of yarnspinners and visionaries as led the way then. At the least, THAT’S MY STORY AND I’M STICKING TO IT!!