Back Soon

If, like me, one’s spiritual foundation was laid down in the Christian tradition, one must reckon with a number of events which are, if one is in a religious mood, plainly miraculous, or, if one is feeling secular and (post?)modern, rather kooky. Among these are, of course, the virgin birth, walking on water, sundry healings, the resurrection, and the second coming. All of these, save the last, are in the past tense, the upshot of which leaves Christianity hanging on a prediction which can be paraphrased in two words: Back soon. Which two words, interestingly enough, are also at the center of a rather amusing passage in The House at Pooh Corner that may help sort out whether Christianity leans over into the abyss or leans back to pull us out of our own.

But, before we get to Pooh, a brief summary. Jesus’ account of the end times and his prophesy of “the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven,” i.e. the prediction of his very own second coming, appears in all three synoptic gospels. The denouement at first seems to find Jesus putting all of his chips in the middle of the table as he tells us exactly when this will all go down: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” But then, one sentence later, it devolves into what can only be described as history’s biggest mixed message: “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” A few verses later, the confusion is compounded: “the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” “Back soon” is scrambled into a garbled mess before the ink of “Truly I tell you…” is even dry; we are seemingly left to make do with “hurry up and wait.”

It is the garbled mess which brings us to Pooh. Twice. Because the key words, “Back soon,” don’t just appear in A.A. Milne’s second volume of Pooh stories, published in 1928. They are back again, one might say with a vengeance, in the 2011 animated film, Winnie the Pooh. And strangely enough, the two different readings of “Back soon” in the Winnie the Pooh universe just might inform our reading of Jesus’ own “Back soon,” which reading, on a grand enough collective scale, just might in turn help make the difference in the direction our material universe makes as we (Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Pagans, Seculars, etc.) stand at the proverbial fork in the road.
On our first pass we turn to the passage in The House at Pooh Corner, in which Christopher Robin leaves his garbled version of Back Soon in a note, happened upon by Rabbit:

“GON OUT
BACKSON
BISY
BACKSON
C. R.”

Rabbit takes the indecipherable Message to Owl, whose modus operandi is to maintain an air of deep wisdom. Since putting on these kind of airs always depends on making things up (see all of western philosophy; not that this is a knock on western philosophy, it’s actually what makes it so damn fun and helpful, therapeutic even, as long as we remember that it’s all made up), Rabbit does exactly this:

“’It is quite clear what has happened, my dear Rabbit,’
he said. ‘Christopher Robin has gone out somewhere with
Backson. He and Backson are busy together. Have you seen a
Backson anywhere about in the Forest lately?’
‘I don't know,’ said Rabbit. ‘That's what I came to ask
you. What are they like?’
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the Spotted or Herbaceous Backson is
just a—‘
‘At least,’ he said, ‘it's really more of a----‘
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it depends on the----‘
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the fact is,’ he said, ‘I don't know
what they're like,’ said Owl frankly.
‘Thank you,’ said Rabbit. And he hurried off to see
Pooh.”

We should note several crucial elements of this passage before moving on to the return of the Backson in 2011. Perhaps most importantly, there is nothing whatsoever at all about the Backson that is threatening. In fact, Owl from the very first imagines the Backson as a friend for Christopher Robin. Completely befuddled by Christopher Robin’s garbled “Back soon,” Owl has filled in the gap with something good. But something that is no less mysterious for its certain goodness. The “Spotted or Herbaceous Backson” is a friend, but beyond that we can say no more. Even Owl must admit “I don’t know what they’re like.” (Happily, Owl isn’t quite as far gone as your standard outfit narcissistic humanities professor.)

Fast forward eighty three years, and the scene in the Hundred Acre Wood has taken an alarming turn. With boss man Disney now calling the shots, both the Backson and his back story have mutated beyond recognition. To begin with, Rabbit has been elbowed to the periphery; with apologies to Piglet, it is Pooh who brings home Disney’s bacon, so it is Pooh who has the honors of discovering Christopher Robin’s note. Apparently Pooh is now the early Michael Jordan, and has to take every big shot, making Rabbit into John Paxson. (Tigger would have to be Dennis Rodman, and I think Eeyore would make a really convincing Bill Cartwright.) This much I could stomach; would that our only problem was the celebrity cult of personality. For a moment it even seems like we’re back in safe, familiar territory, as Pooh consults Owl about Christopher Robin’s mysterious note.

But then we remember that it’s the second decade of the 21st Century and violence is the air we breathe. We should note that it’s not as if A.A. Milne wrote the original version of the Backson story in the Garden of Eden; 16 million had died just a decade before in World War I. But if violence was already the out breath then, it is now also the in breath. Where Tolstoy once wrote of war and peace, we now have war and war, i.e. wars hot and cold and a subsequent peace dividend in the form of the war on terror. And where Owl once pictured Christopher Robin “gone out somewhere with Backson. He and Backson are busy together,” Owl now informs Pooh and friends “of their new enemy. He is a ferocious creature who enjoys torturing others and creating misfortune.” (http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/The_Backson) That the torture is put in Hundred Acre Wood context, the Backson is “responsible for holes in socks, broken teeth, aging, theft, catching colds, etc.,” makes not a lick of difference. Winnie the Pooh now lives in the same world as us, which is where Abu Ghraib and ISIS are. So, not surprisingly, Pooh and friends make their martial preparations for the Backson, preparing to trap it (evoking extreme rendition and Guantamo), or “to battle the beast if necessary” (evoking Iraq and Afghanistan). If this sounds daft or melodramatic, I would but ask if it is really mere coincidence that a 1928 Pooh story rewritten in 2011 includes torture as a central narrative element? (If Phase 1 of the American shift to the techniques of violence without limits was accomplished in the foundational act of the Cold War, i.e. the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima qua shot across Moscow’s bow (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7706-hiroshima-bomb-may-have-carried-hidden-agenda.html#.VASeFaCdCFI), Phase 2 began with the establishment of western democratic state-sponsored torture as the boundary condition for the Global War on Terror; in considering that the US was the first to think both of these unthinkables we should acknowledge that the first is rarely the last, and secondly hope that this week’s revelation of ISIS’ use of the waterboarding they learned from watching us (http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/captives-held-by-islamic-state-were-waterboarded/2014/08/28/2b4e1962-2ec9-11e4-9b98-848790384093_story.html) is not a foreshadowing of a similar symmetry with Phase 1, i.e. ISIS, with its terrifying the-best-defense-is-a-good-offense stratagem, doesn’t seem likely to follow the logic of nuclear weapons as deterrent that we’ve all been clinging to, despite evidence to the contrary from 8/6 and 8/9/45.)

I would suggest that the twinned surges of relativism and fundamentalism (twins explored in the previous post, “Doubt without Doubt,” on this very blog) between 1928 and 2011 go a long way to explaining the link between first Rabbit and then Pooh’s interpretations of Christopher Robin’s “Backson” and the contemporaneous respective interpretations of Jesus’ own “Backson.” In other words, A.A. Milne and Disney were each, without knowing it, doing theology- and doing the kind of theology native to their time and place. In 1928, even after The War to End All Wars, it was still possible to believe without knowing; the Backson could be both Christopher Robin’s friend and, per Owl, something we know absolutely nothing about. And that other Backson, Jesus’ second coming, could still be understood exactly as it was described in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, which is to say our dear friend is on his way, he’s almost here in fact, although he’s altogether the type of fellow who’s likely to get held up at the train station for God knows how long, so we better use this time to get things in as good an order as we can.

By 2011, with relativism and fundamentalism in full bloom, one can either believe that it isn’t possible to know anything at all (relativism), or believe that one knows everything (fundamentalism); and since Christianity has by and large become the purview of the latter, Disney’s Backson is “a ferocious creature who enjoys torturing others and creating misfortune.” Which, natch, sounds a lot like the kind of (fundamentalist) Jesus whose “Back soon” involves the Tribulation, i.e. a “period of time where everyone will experience worldwide hardships, disasters, famine, war, pain, and suffering, which will wipe out more than 75% of all life on earth before the Second Coming takes place.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tribulation) Except, of course, “those who choose to follow God,” i.e. the fundamentalist Christian God, “will be Raptured before the tribulation, and thus escape it.” Lucky them.

All of which is not to say that there weren’t people before 1928 who believed in the Tribulation, or that there aren’t Christians in 2011 or 2014 who believe that God’s infinite and reckless love and mercy extend to every last one of us. But it is to say that the latter has been divorced from what the word Christian symbolizes in the popular imagination, which I’d like to believe as recently as 1928 was (often) an imagining of a close friend who was nevertheless likely to appear to us as a stranger on whichever road we’re traveling. Instead, the symbol of Jesus on the cross has been reduced to a straw man for the relativists to stick their pitch forks in, and the cross itself has been inverted into the fundamentalists’ sword, whose literal reading of “I came not to bring peace, but to bring a sword,” is roughly as nuanced as understanding the “Open joints on bridge” road signs as an invitation to toke up.

As C.S. Lewis once said, “if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer… Going back is the quickest way on.” In this case that means going back to The House on Pooh Corner (this being a discussion of the second coming, it is hoped that the reader will indulge ending with a bit of repetition):

“’It is quite clear what has happened, my dear Rabbit,’
he said. ‘Christopher Robin has gone out somewhere with
Backson. He and Backson are busy together. Have you seen a
Backson anywhere about in the Forest lately?’
‘I don't know,’ said Rabbit. ‘That's what I came to ask
you. What are they like?’
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the Spotted or Herbaceous Backson is
just a—‘
‘At least,’ he said, ‘it's really more of a----‘
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it depends on the----‘
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the fact is,’ he said, ‘I don't know
what they're like,’ said Owl frankly.
‘Thank you,’ said Rabbit. And he hurried off to see
Pooh.”

Doubt without Doubt

With In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions without Becoming a Fanatic, Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld confront the warring but ultimately conspiratorial twin fanaticisms of cynical postmodern relativism and religious fundamentalism. These twins have become something of a contemporary Yin and Yang, comprising all, or at least almost all of the available social space. Relativism and fundamentalism are so entwined that Berger and Zijterveld go so far as to assert that they:

“are two sides of the same coin. Both are profoundly modern phenomena, and both are reactions to the relativizing dynamic of modernity. The relativist embraces the dynamic; the fundamentalist rejects it. But the two have much more in common than either one would have with a genuine traditionalist. Their commonalities explain why we said… that in every fundamentalist there’s a relativist waiting to be liberated, and in every relativist there’s a fundamentalist waiting to be reborn.”

Berger and Zijderveld have more in common with the fundamentalists than the relativists, if only by virtue of the fact that they reject, rather than embrace, both sides of the coin. Their rejection of relativism and fundamentalism relates to the quantity of doubt in play on either side of the coin: “If the danger of relativism is an excess of doubt, the danger of fundamentalism is a deficit of doubt.” Too much doubt, i.e. relativism, “leads to both individual and collective paralysis,” while not enough leads to “fundamentalism, religious or secular, (which) is always an enemy of freedom.” If you’ve been having the feeling that nothing at all seems to be getting done (exhibit 1, the US Congress), even as the foundations of our free society are slowly chipping away, welcome to relativism vs. fundamentalism (or, shall we say, relativism cum fundamentalism).

Berger and Zijderveld propose their solution in the guise of Goldilocks: relativism’s doubt is too much, fundamentalism’s doubt is too little, but somewhere in the “middle ground” is an amount of doubt that is just right. In fact, in a bit of a semantic sleight of hand, Berger and Zijderveld leave off referring to the quantity of doubt, and begin to identify doubt as a place between relativism and fundamentalism:

“The middle ground of all of this is doubt- a basic uncertainty that isn’t prepared to let itself be crushed by belief or unbelief, knowledge or ignorance. Precisely because it occupies this middle ground, genuine doubt can never end up in the many ‘-isms’ that people have invented and propagated. Doubt can’t be relativistic , since relativism, like all ‘-isms,’ stifle doubt.”

But it remains unclear how a plenitude of doubt is any less “genuine” than doubt in moderation. A glutton is precisely someone who eats too much. Just so, a relativist whose doubt goes a bridge too far is in trouble precisely because of the quantity, not the quality, of their doubt.

Ironically, it is differentiating between the quality and the quantity of doubt that just may deliver a cure for the symbiotic growth of relativism and fundamentalism. Berger and Zijderveld’s solution, for all of us to live on the side of the coin in the “middle ground” of moderate doubt, is troubling because of how easy (and tempting) it will be for us to fall off that narrow band back to either side of the toxic coin. On page 108 Berger and Zijderveld note that “doubt is the hallmark of the agnostic,” seemingly having forgotten that on page 6, in a riposte to the notion of advancing global secularism, they note “an enormous explosion of passionate religious movements” and declare that “it cannot be plausibly maintained that modernity necessarily leads to a decline of religion.” Last I checked, agnosticism was the opposite of passionate religious engagement. So we have a globe full of folk looking for passionate religious experiences who are somehow expected to be mollified by the middle ground of agnostic doubt. This sounds like the perfect recipe for more relativism and fundamentalism.

Berger and Zijderveld’s misguided solution asks us to be neither relativists nor fundamentalists. I would suggest that understanding the difference between quantity and quality of doubt will empower us to be both. Where Berger and Zijderveld ask us to live on the side of the coin, I hope to demonstrate that we can live on both sides simultaneously. The demonstration begins by opening the dictionary. Merriam-Webster offers two definitions of the word doubt:

“1: to be uncertain about (something) : to believe that (something) may not be true or is unlikely
2: to have no confidence in (someone or something)” (emphasis added)

Berger and Zijderveld’s error is in restricting their understanding of doubt and its role in our belief systems to the first definition. For Berger and Zijderveld, relativism and fundamentalism are, respectively, the conditions of being either too uncertain or not uncertain enough about the beliefs in question. The solution, then, can only come with the correct formulation of certainty about. But everything I am going to ague can be boiled down to this: we must learn to be pure relativists about our beliefs, while simultaneously being strict fundamentalists re: confidence in our beliefs. In place of Berger and Zijderveld’s “doubt about doubt,” which is intended to save one from relativism, I proffer “doubt without doubt.” In doing so I would note that Jesus said “Oh ye of little faith,” not “Oh ye of the incorrect faith,” while also noting the research which demonstrates that it doesn’t matter what technique your therapist uses, only how confident she is in using that technique.

In essence, I am suggesting a return to Hegelian dialectics, in which the thesis of relativism has given rise to its antithesis in the form of fundamentalism, and that the only possible resolution of the tension between the two takes the form of synthesis. In recognition of the greatest failed dialectics of all time, Marx’s dialectical materialism, and in solidarity with dialectical materialism’s vision of a class free society, but also in recognition of the genesis of a (brutal) failure in a stubborn blindness to the immanence of an immaterial spirit, I would like to humbly make the grand gesture of naming this doubt without doubt. Ladies and gentleman, I give you dialectical (im)materialism, in which a never ending doubt about means that whatever you happen to believe about God is immaterial, and your unwavering belief in an absolute mystery is the only material with which you can ever work.

Perhaps counterintuitively, in this era when faith is conflated with fundamentalism, doubt about is inscribed in the world’s various wisdom traditions. Doubt about is so central to faith that it makes up the first four lines of the Tao Te Ching:

"The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name
The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The named is the mother of myriad things"

It is also etched into God’s self-proclaimed definition, “I am that I am,” which in Christian tradition is understood as “at once a name revealed and something like the refusal of a name, and hence it better expresses God as what he is- infinitely above everything that we can understand or say: he is the ‘hidden God’ , his name is ineffable, and he is the God who makes himself close to men.” (emphasis added) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_that_I_Am) It is only when we accept that our doubts about God should be “infinite” in scope that our belief in God (or the Sacred of one’s chosen tradition) escapes the orbit of relativism and fundamentalism. Thusly untethered, blind faith miraculously avoids all blind alleys, and the blind leading the blind means everyone feeling their way slowly forward in the dark together.

And none of this is an intellectual parlor game. Being human beings, we will still build institutions and craft rituals to buttress our belief in; the hope is that disarmed by doubt about we will refrain from killing on behalf of these institutions, but that our belief in will run so deep that we’d willingly die for it, again and again and again, as in this Lojong slogan: “Practice opening and letting go throughout your life so you will not panic as everything dissolves at death.”

Being a human being, I can’t resist having a go at constructing my own edifice in order to have something to doubt about. Because I am constantly doubting about but always struggling to believe in, my edifice is in perpetual flux but ever present. Sometimes it hovers over me like the giant UFOs suspended above the world’s cities in V, at other times it’s more like a sore throat. This week it is a word, teleology, which is my way of saying that this universe is going somewhere. Outlaw theologian John D. Caputo rightly points out in The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps that “life is not telic because life is cyclical and circles have no end, and it is not teleological because any possible causa finalis is finished off by a final terminal blow. Life is and can only be its own ‘because.’ Life is lived for itself not for an end.” To which I would reply with my own outlaw definition of teleology, taken straight from my Dad’s favorite Joe Ely lyrics: “The road goes on forever, and the party never ends.”

So my current belief about the universe is that it is going somewhere, and that it has extended us an invitation to a timeless party, which we will either accept or decline by virtue of our collective choices, i.e. we can contribute to where this is all headed if we so choose. But my current belief in the universe is that Ely’s lyrics are true, even if, to paraphrase the Grail Knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, we choose… poorly. (i.e. There’s gonna be a party, with or without us.)

Buckle Up, Indeed

Hilton Als’ remarkable genre blending and bending work, White Girls, in which memoir, essay, and fiction seem more like different musical instruments than different forms, includes a discussion of Richard Pryor, by way of a fictionalized first person account from Pryor’s sister, which asserts the following: “Everyone looks for someone to tell them what to do.”

Three pages later, looping back to the kernel of a thought much like Pryor returning to a joke from the first half of his set, Als’ (not Richard) Pryor expands:

“In actual fact, no one can handle vast quantities of power or fame. Richard couldn’t. It nearly burned him alive. He was always looking for something bigger than himself to tell him what to do. We all are. Being an actress is one of the few jobs on earth that tells the truth about this need that exists in humans- to be told what to do.”

If one followed the scientific polling practices of The Family Feud and surveyed 100 people as to what everyone is looking for, it is doubtful that you would get the two necessary responses out of the hundred in order for “Someone to tell them what to do” to appear on the Feud’s board. The number one answer, of course, would be love. Money might be the number two answer, but it would be a far distant second. Just turn on the radio. There is the occasional song about money, one thinks of classics such as Madonna’s “Material Girl”, Liza Manelli singing “Money Makes the World Go Around” in Cabaret, or Snoop Dogg’s refrain- “With my mind on my money and my money on my mind,” but at least ninety percent of popular music is devoted to love and its various leitmotifs: not having it, having it and then losing it, waiting for it, looking for it, looking for it in all the wrong places, etc. The Beatles go so far as to say that “Love is all you need,” which would limit the Feud’s board to two answers (not needing money in no way prevents one from looking for it; no one looks harder for more of it than those who already have an excess of it), leaving no space at all for “Someone to tell them what to do.”

Unless, that is, the need for love and the need for someone to tell you what to do are one and the same. Consider “God is love,” the definition of that final authority, God, which meets the following two criteria: 1) It is announced in scripture (see 1 John 4:8) and it would be the number one answer if the definition of God were queried on The Family Feud, i.e. it has both de jure (legal/scriptural) and de facto (popular) status. “God is love” would outdistance the second most popular definition of God by at least as much as love outdistanced money above. That second most popular definition, “God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent,” is simply, at the last, too fraught for a world with this much suffering. We just can’t bring ourselves to believe in an omnipotent, all powerful God who allows (dare we say, causes) this much suffering, but we just barely can believe in a God of infinite love who never stops loving us even as we suffer (and, we must add, even as we turn our back on that love). Our ability to believe in the latter begins to make sense if we flesh out the definition of love (and thereby God, and thereby authority) with an observation from Marie Luise Knott in her book Unlearning with Hannah Arendt that is equal parts accurate, tragic, and hopeful. To “God is love,” then, we add Knott’s “And although it (love) may fail, it is inexhaustible.” Inexhaustible. Those five syllables contain countless worlds in which to wander through and wonder at this fallible God, in which, to quote John D. Caputo, “religion is risky business, no guarantees.” (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/deconstructing-god/?emc=eta1)

To be clear, I am suggesting that “God is love” be read like a mathematical equation such that Authority=Love and Love=Authority, and that when looking for someone (or something) to love, one is always at the very same time looking for someone (or something) to tell you what to do. Many men meet these twin needs by getting married. Unfortunately for the women, after telling their husbands what to do their own needs for love and authority remain unmet, which helps to explain why 61% of American churchgoers are women. (http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2011-10/why-do-men-stay-away) But the decline of religious beliefs and practices in an increasingly secular age, paired with an American divorce rate that hovers around 50%, has rendered the social institutions of religion and marriage insufficient to meet a need that is as insistent as hunger.

All of which helps explain the road signs in Maryland which, in a sublime formulation of love and authority, say “Buckle Up: We care…and it’s our law.” Because in the absence of God and/or our wives, when we look for something to love us and tell us what to do we increasingly turn to the State. In particular, the secular left has in many ways simply substituted the State for God, e.g. only a left-leaning news outlet could sub-title an article thusly: “I hated government—even as it was the only thing trying to save me. Here’s how, one day, I finally saw the light.” (HTTP://WWW.SALON.COM/2014/07/16/I_WAS_POOR_BUT_A_GOP_DIE_HARD_HOW_I_FINALLY_LEFT_THE_POLITICS_OF_SHAME/)

As we move towards taking “Buckle Up: We care…and it’s our law” to its logical conclusion, we would be wise to recall that in recent history when a modern State has been absolutely identified with God, ironically evidenced by an explicit and official atheism, totalitarianism has never been far behind. This is not to give the religious right and its own logical conclusion of theocracy a free pass; recent history is every bit as emphatic about States that are absolutely identified with God by way of an explicit and official theism.

When we go looking for something to love us and tell us what to do and it seems like we have found a branch in the road between empty secularism and corrupt fundamentalism, we are really just walking in (the same) circles.

If we are ever to meet our need for love and authority in a way that isn’t pathological, i.e. in a way that insists on some degree of autonomy (as when my Dad used to always tell me I was not allowed to move back in after college in order, at least in part, to prevent himself from engineering precisely such a move back in), we must be at the same time radically secular and deeply religious. The failure of contemporary (left secular) multiculturalism originates in its insistence that no one choose a side, leading to what Slavoj Zizek describes in God is in Pain as “the paradox of the tolerant multiculturalist universe of the multitude of lifestyles and other identities: the more it is tolerant, the more it is oppressively homogeneous.”

The future will be radically secular when everyone chooses a side, i.e. when everyone is deeply religious. If, that is, there are enough different religions to make the world safe for religion. (The old line “Ask two Jews, get three opinions” hints at the notion that it is only within an unaccountable, miraculous excess of religions that we are ever safe and secure in the one that we choose, even when the excess and the choosing occurs within one religion.) An authentic multiculturalism, which is the only possible contemporary secularism, requires the deeply committed adherents of multiple faiths to act as checks and balances on one another. It requires these multiple faiths to have clear boundaries even as they are equally clear allies. Allies whose collective action, informed by each faith’s naked self interest, never allows any single group to make the otherwise inevitable thrust towards theocracy. In this future, all faiths will love their enemies, if only because the enemy of their enemy is their friend. Now, if you will excuse me, I’ve got to go ask my lovely wife what she needs me to do.

Building a Better Bonfire

It’s just over two weeks now since the conclusion of my favorite sporting event of the year, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, which has long since been branded “March Madness.” Although “March Madness” is used as a marketing gimmick, I like its echo of the connection between the calendar and behavior. The connection is not insignificant, and would perhaps be more noticeable if we followed a cyclical lunar calendar rather than a linear Gregorian one; see the rise in E.R. admissions on nights with a full moon. And even with the marking of time as we know it, don’t all of us in the northern hemisphere, at least those of us where it’s cold enough to wear hats, go a little mad by the time the tournament starts? Channeling our seasonal affective madness into the obsessive completion of tournament brackets, a therapy redoubled by the completion of equally fantastic tax documents due to Uncle Sam right as the tournament is ending, keeps many of us functioning until mid-April, when, in most years, the sun takes over for sports entertainment life support. This year, it snowed in Baltimore a week after March Madness had crowned its champion, which felt rather like finding out that one is actually a robot.

Each March, the college basketball aristocracy are paired off with their plebeian counterparts for all of the first round games via a politically charged, pseudo-objective seeding process; when CBS is paying billions in rights fees to broadcast the tournament, the “brackets” are about as objective as the Immunity Challenges on that other CBS franchise, Survivor. The seeding arrangements make the tournament the most reliable opportunity for witnessing one of the most interesting sports fan behaviors: we always root for the underdog, unless they are playing our team.

Let’s begin with the first part of the equation, the fact that we (almost) always root for the underdog. There is, admittedly, a little of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” involved in this. As a Tar Heel fan, I always cheer for whichever team in the tournament is playing Duke. I want the Tar Heels to go as far in the tournament as possible, and, just as importantly, this needs to be at least one game further than the Blue Devils. I was just talking to my (96 year-old) grandmother, Bucky, today, and chatting about the Tar Heels’ relatively disappointing 2nd round loss in the tournament. Without missing a beat, and without any prompting from me, Bucky pointed out that while the Heels hadn’t gone far, at least Duke had done even worse, losing in the first round, sparing her from having to hear any gate mouth from the Dukies in her retirement community. Which retirement community is inconveniently located in Durham, i.e. Bucky lives on their turf. Good thing Bucky is tough as nails, in the best possible way.

But, I would venture, rooting for the underdog runs deeper than the whole “enemy of my enemy” thing. With Carolina and Duke both out by the end of the second round, I was still pulling for the 11th-seeded Dayton Flyers to win their Elite Eight matchup with the #1 overall seed and two-time national champion Florida Gators, and not just because Dayton is home to rock and roll goddess Kim Deal. (Our names either make us, or we make ourselves in their images. Just so, her shit is so legit that if she were a boxer, she would definitely be Kim “The Real” Deal. Whereas, if I were a professional wrestler, I would wear a mask and my submission move would be “The Cough Drop.”) With no dogs left in the race, I was backing Dayton primarily because they were the last best underdog left standing. And because, like Darth Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi, and like everyone else in the world who roots for underdogs, there is still good in me after all.

College basketball, like the rest of America, is a landscape of haves and have-nots. The advantages held by college hoops blue bloods, the Carolinas, Dukes, and Kentuckies of the world, are legion: outsized athletic department budgets, deep pocketed boosters, constant television exposure, broad and deep fan bases, and home court cathedrals, just to name a few. In short, elite college basketball programs have a surfeit of power, and it is the responsibility of the head coach, with the full support of his athletic director and university president, to wield this power effectively enough to continually dominate the opposition. In other words, power is deployed in college basketball as it always has been in almost every chapter of human history. Cheering for the underdog, then, is an outlet for our collective instinct that this neverending story of power and its application is plain wrong. Carolina, Duke, and Kentucky aren’t evil (though we Carolina fans have fun pretending Duke is), but, in harnessing every resource to shock and awe their overwhelmed opponents, they are perfect stand-ins. (Evil = 500,000 dead in the Iraq War, all in the name of a lie. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/15/iraq-death-toll_n_4102855.html) Lest I be accused of “anti-Americanism,” I would ask America “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your eye?”) In always cheering for the underdog, we are constantly reimagining the world as a place where the last are, finally, first.

Except when we don’t cheer for the underdog, which is whenever they stand in the way of us finishing first. You may object that of course we root for our favorite teams against the opposition, including underdogs, because, duh, they’re our favorites. Suggesting that one refrain from cheering for one’s favorite team sounds like utter nonsense. But the fact that it sounds so nonsensical is, indeed, the crux of the problem. We so take for granted favoring our favorites (which I suppose is the very meaning of the word favorite) that we can’t even imagine doing otherwise. Which is all well and good in a basketball tournament, but which takes on new meaning when we realize that our absolute favorites, of course, are our very selves. So go ahead and cheer for whomever you please in March Madness; I would have turned on Dayton in a second if they had encountered the Tar Heels in their half of the bracket, Kim Deal notwithstanding. But understand that cheering for the underdog unless they are playing one’s favorite team is a reminder that we instinctively crave justice and equality right up to the point that it costs us something. With humans, the universal is (almost) always trumped by the particular, and “as above, so below” is replaced by “not in my back yard.” When we say “all politics is local,” we are really asking “What’s in it for me?”

We find the perfect exemplar of the tension between our intuition of the good and our instinct for self aggrandizement ready at hand in American history in the person of Thomas Jefferson, who famously wrote the following in our nation’s Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And who just as famously proved unable to give up his slaves and the wealth and sexual access they provided. Self interest blinds us to the self evident truth. The very same dynamic is in play re: climate change, where the two possible responses in play for American power brokers are 1) denial or 2) hand wringing, neither of which costs anyone anything.

Organized religion has been something of a mixed bag down through the ages, though, from where I’m standing, we are, on balance, better for it. Exactly how much better is a more interesting question. The persistence of religious belief combined with the failure of the world’s great religious traditions to collectively bring about what my faith tradition would call the coming of the Kingdom (feel welcome to substitute your own tradition’s terminology for the happily-ever-after) tells us two important things. First, that our intuition of basic universal goodness is, like the State of the Union, strong. Strong enough that the world boasts 5.8 billion religious adherents, an amazing fidelity to the good given everything we know about suffering. (Though all brands of religion miss the mark, each to a varying degree in different historical moments, they also each always aim for goodness. I take this as an article of faith, which, somewhat ironically, decreases my own faith, i.e. I no longer feel about my own religion the way I feel about my children, who I know are the best. Short of feeling this way about one’s children I don’t know how it could be possible to do everything that needs to be done for them, and, just so, short of feeling just that way about one’s religion I don’t know how one is supposed to get one’s self to church, temple, mosque, meditation center, etc. Religion that loves its neighbor’s religion as devoutly as it loves itself cannot, seemingly, survive.) And second, that however strong our sense of the good may be, our sense of self, and all of the attendant self interest, is yet far stronger. We always cheer for our favorite team. Religion may be good enough and true enough, which explains why we all believe in the good, but it just isn’t strong enough. As in strong enough to make us do the right thing when it costs us something. Because if 5.8 billion people were doing the right thing, at whatever price, the Kingdom (or whatever you want to call it) would assuredly have already come. (I use the word assuredly because almost everyone almost always doing the right thing is, to my ears, the actual definition of “the Kingdom”; it is the only conceivable “best of all possible worlds.”)

The great tragedy of religion is that it has lost its great gamble that it could, indeed, prove strong enough. Religion would remake us, one by one, as individuals and communities willing to pay the price of righteousness (funny how tainted that word sounds, as if the idea of doing the right thing has gone rancid in the sun), or, as the Quakers put it on the banners above their meeting houses, willing to take the risks of peace. A significant chunk of religious life is practice for just these risks and sacrifices, e.g. fasting on Ramadan or Yom Kippur, observing Lent, or giving away one’s good fortune to others with the out breath in the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Tonglen meditation. Each of these is rehearsal for craving justice and equality deeply enough to break on through to the other side of self interest. But instead, like Jim Morrison himself overdosing on heroin, we continually hit a wall. And, we should note, we hit the very same wall, perhaps even harder, under the auspices of that religion for seculars, Marxism, the central tenet of which, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” requires at least as much selflessness as any of the aforementioned religions.

There is an old idea making the rounds again which holds that “it's institutions -- not people -- that are evil.” (http://www.salon.com/2014/04/23/noam_chomsky_was_right_why_the_koch_brothers_are_obscuring_the_real_enemy/) This observation is just slightly wide of the mark. I would say instead that 1) institutions aren’t selfish, people are, but 2) institutions leverage self interest so efficiently that they perform something of an anti-miracle, the transformation of water into wine replaced by the mutation of garden variety selfishness into evil. This distinction is critical because it informs another set of solutions. Because attempting to construct or reconstruct institutions which aren’t evil is nearly as hopeless as trying to raise entire generations of selfless individuals. We must recognize the intractable difficulty of both, grounding this insight in an understanding that the inevitability of selfish humans makes the existence of institutions that feed off of that selfishness, i.e. evil institutions, incredibly likely. But note that while human selfishness is, for the foreseeable future, inevitable, we are merely at incredibly high risk of evil institutions. We are, effectively, Jim Carey being told by the girl of his dreams in Dumb & Dumber that his odds with her are “like one out of a million.” Carey sublimely responds “So you’re telling me there’s a chance…YEAH!” So must we. Even if it makes us look dumb. The only alternatives are despair or Rhett Butler’s “I’ve always had a weakness for lost causes once they’re really lost,” though it is unclear whether the lost cause is us, religion, or both.

Our last, best, slim chance is building institutions that are neither good nor evil. Because all of the good institutions, which have tried to carry us past the threshold of self interest, tend to fail, and all of the evil institutions, which simply harness that self interest, tend to succeed. It is said that Buddhism’s First Noble Truth, which holds that life is suffering, is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but realistic. We need institutions that are realistic in just this way. Realistic about both the limits of human selflessness, and the tendencies of institutions to exploit these very limits. There is at least one such human institution, namely the Potlatch:

'“In the potlatch, the host in effect challenged a guest chieftain to exceed him in his 'power' to give away or to destroy goods. If the guest did not return 100 percent on the gifts received and destroy even more wealth in a bigger and better bonfire, he and his people lost face and so his 'power' was diminished" Hierarchical relations within and between clans, villages, and nations, were observed and reinforced through the distribution or sometimes destruction of wealth, dance performances, and other ceremonies. The status of any given family is raised not by who has the most resources, but by who distributes the most resources. The hosts demonstrate their wealth and prominence through giving away goods.'(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch)

The Potlatch, of course, is no miracle cure. But in bending self interest to the good, in stark contrast to the doomed effort to transcend self interest in the name of the good, it gives us a place to start. If we can build just such realistic human institutions, I’d say our odds are at least two out of a million.

So I’m telling you there’s a chance… YEAH!!!

The Truth (About Religion's Future) is Out There

In her 2010 book, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, journalist Leslie Kean makes, amongst others, the following two assertions:

• “There exists in our skies, worldwide, a solid, physical phenomenon that appears to be under intelligent control and is capable of speeds, maneuverability, and luminosity beyond current known technology.”

• “The hypothesis that UFOs are of extraterrestrial or interdimensional origin is a rational one and must be taken into account, given the data we have. However, the actual origin and nature of UFOs have not yet been determined by scientists, and remain unknown.”

Having recently happened onto the topic of UFOs due to the interest of a friend who mentioned it in passing, I don’t have a particular horse in this race. In fact, I come to the subject with the skepticism typical of my (middle class, college educated, faith in science) demographic. Nevertheless, I find Kean’s arguments in favor of her assertions convincing, to the point where I have shifted from my default skepticism to what I would describe as a welcoming agnosticism; if there are indeed ETs about, mi casa, su casa. (Kean and her co-authors - her book includes several – endorse a “miltant agnosticism” re: UFOs, i.e. “no position on whether UFOs are extraterrestrial should be taken until they have been systematically studied” in a “public and strategic” fashion, the latter piece accounting for the “militant” element. I suppose writing about UFOs on this blog makes me a contributor, however small, to this militant agnosticism, but as an Episcopalian- official slogan: “The Episcopal Church welcomes you,”- and a pacifist, “welcoming agnosticism” is more my style.)

If you have even a sliver of an open mind about UFOs, Kean’s book is highly recommended. She presents reams of firsthand accounts, frequently supported by objective, tangible evidence (e.g. radar records, radiation readings, multiple credible witnesses, and, occasionally, non-doctored photographs) which support her assertion that roughly 5% of all (reported) UFO sightings cannot be explained by known earthly phenomena. Kean has put all of the pertinent information into one lucid source, and I leave it to you to consider the evidence and place yourself along the continuum from skepticism to agnosticism to true belief.

If you place yourself anywhere on the continuum outside of absolute, unbending skepticism, two further questions are starving for attention. The first question has to do with the origins of the UFO taboo that underwrites my demographic’s default skepticism, and is addressed directly in Kean’s book. Kean’s co-authors Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, both mainstream American academics at Big 10 Universities, describe the taboo thusly:

“There is a tabbo on this book- the UFO taboo. Not in popular culture, of course, where interest in UFOs abounds and websites proliferate, but in elite culture- the structure of authoritative belief and practice that determines what ‘reality’ officially is. With respect to UFO phenomena this structure is dominated globally by three groups: governments, the scientific community, and the mainstream media. Although their individual members may have varying private beliefs about UFOs, in public these groups share the official view that UFOs are not ‘real’ and should not be taken seriously- or at least no more seriously than any other cultural belief.”

It is tempting to stop there, with the insight that anyone who wishes to be taken seriously has more than sufficient reason to never question their officially sanctioned default skepticism. But Wendt and Duvall take their analysis deeper, answering the question that always cries out for an answer: who benefits from the official reality? Their answer is far from surprising:

“Our thesis is that the origins of this taboo are political. As political scientists, we are concerned with a possible connection between the need to dismiss the UFO and the way in which modern peoples organize and govern their societies. The inability to see clearly and talk rationally about UFOs seems to be a symptom of authoritative anxiety, a socially subconscious fear of what the reality of the UFO might mean for modern government.”

Wendt and Duvall argue that it might mean three very specific things. First, it would establish the existence of a vastly superior Other, unmasking the State as impotent in the face of a potentially overwhelming threat. Secondly, it would likely foment a demand for a world government best equipped to face the threat, dissolving the sovereign territorial states that are currently doing their very best to maintain the taboo. Finally, and most interestingly, Wendt and Duvall maintain that “the extraterrestrial possibility calls into question what we call the anthropocentric nature of modern sovereignty. By this we mean that, in the modern world, political organization everywhere is based on the assumption that only human beings have the ability and authority to govern and determine our collective fate.” Once this assumption is undermined, as certainly the vastly superior intelligence and technology of extraterrestrial “visitors” (had to throw in a V reference, natch) makes them more qualified to govern than Jesse Helms ever was, Wendt and Duvall hold that the following question would become unavoidable: “To whom would people give their loyalty in such a situation, and could states in their present form survive were such a question politically salient?” (As to conspiracy theories, Wendt and Duvall go on to say that “far from hiding the truth about aliens the state is more likely hiding its ignorance.” Being the nation state with the most power to lose per the three scenarios above, the United States, of course, has the greatest incentive to maintain its ignorance via enforcing the taboo, and Kean highlights several such instances over the course of the book.)

As an undergraduate poli sci major, I find all of this fascinating. (Spok reference: check.) But as a human being, Wendt and Duvall’s third existential political threat directs us toward a similar question I find even more intriguing. If extraterrestrials were openly acknowledged and/or plain for everyone to see, would people continue to maintain their religious loyalty in such a situation, and could religions in their present form survive? Kean points out that the authentication of UFOs puts science, which currently sits at the right hand of the government, at equal risk with its political godfather: “UFOs demonstrate characteristics appearing to contradict the fundamental laws of physics on which our understanding of the universe is based.” In such a scenario, science would match government’s impotence with its own ignorance. Wouldn’t religion, whose stock in trade is every bit as much declaring fundamental laws on which our understanding of the universe is based, look just as ignorant, its dogmas and received truths crumbling in precisely the same fashion as our physicists’ most elegant equations?

Religion’s best hope for sustained relevance in its current form might well be if the ETs were at least a little bit aggressive (too aggressive, of course, and there’d be none of us left to pray), a threatening Other being, perhaps, the sine qua non for religion’s relevance. But UFOs have been as remarkable for their non-aggression, even when being threatened or even fired upon by military warcraft, as they have for their remarkable capabilities. (Alien abduction stories, which tales often seem anything but non-aggressive, are a horse of a different color, and would seem to fail to meet any of the criteria which support UFO sightings as an actual objective phenomena. Kean doesn’t even mention them.) Unless the old story about the chickens who trusted absolutely in the farmer who reliably fed them each and every morning right up until the day the farmer came out with a hatchet instead of a feed bag applies here, it appears that religion would be confronting an Other who is at the very least neutral and could very well turn out to be benevolent. My optimistic (non-chicken farmer) interpretation is that civilizations are unable to survive to the advanced stage of intergalactic travel unless and until they first mature beyond the aggressive tendencies that would doom them well before advancing far enough to master e.g. warp drive. And, if I may be indulged in some even more wildly optimistic speculation, perhaps we are at just such a turning point where we either shed our martial skin and take to the stars or spend a final miserable few centuries confined to our little galactic backwater. And, also perhaps, the UFOs are here, Gene Rodenberry and his Prime Directive be damned, to help us make the great pacific leap in whatever way they can.

Another of Kean’s co-authors and one who actually encountered a UFO in his job as a commercial pilot in Great Britain, Captain Ray Bower, takes the following perspective about what he considers the inevitable public acknowledgment of UFO reality: “I suspect this might turn out to be the time when the human race will grow up. Forced to confront their own smallness in relation to Earth’s place in the universe, humans may at last face up to a future as a tiny fish in a big sea.” Confronted with an advanced benevolent civilization, could religion, at long last, grow up too?
Before attempting to answer this question I would be remiss if I did not point out that my hope for timely and effective extraterrestrial intervention may simply be a secular messianic fantasy, rooted in the fertile soil of the Judeo-Christian tradition in much the same way that Marx’s dialectical materialism was just a coming of the kingdom for the un-churched (or un-templed). But while, to take a Christian angle, we “do not know the day nor the hour,” we certainly know that climate change is accelerating towards the point of no return. (http://qz.com/154196/the-only-way-to-stop-climate-change-now-may-be-revolution/) Leaving us Christians looking more and more like the cop in LL Cool J’s “I’m Bad,” who, in response to Cool J’s overwhelming sheer Badness, panics and says “I think I’m gonna need backup!” Confronted by the existential threat of climate change, we’re calling in the Son of God’s backup quarterback in the form of ET. Which, objective radar data notwithstanding, makes my hope for imminent contact with extraterrestrials as potentially ridiculous as the billboards that touted the end of the world on May 21, 2011.

But, with our shared blogging pleasure in mind, let’s set aside the question of whether I am the one who needs to grow up out of my own childish alien messianic fantasy, and return to the question of whether the data collected and reported by Kean hints at a turning point for religion. This question, surprise, surprise, takes us back yet again to early twentieth century Vienna and one Sigmund Freud. Because if we are to make the case that religion is stuck in a kind of prolonged adolescence, then it is Freud who, still to this day, has done the very best job of diagnosing that arrested development.

In the first blow of a one-two punch achieved across the span of two major works, Freud, in Totem and Tabboo, pulls back the curtain on just how much of really existing religion is sheer projection:

“The psycho-analysis of individual human beings… teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.”

Here Freud holds a mirror up to Genesis’ “God created man in His own image,” broadcasting it in reverse for all of us to consider. Taken on its own, Freud’s declaration might simply be dismissed as a projection of his own troubled relationship with his father onto everyone else’s spirituality; Paul C. Vitz suggests precisely this in Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism. But Freud completes his combination several years later in The Future of an Illusion, a work in which he finally gets around to explaining exactly how God ends up being “nothing other than an exalted father”:

“When the growing individual finds that he is destined to remain a child forever, that he can never do without protection against strange superior powers, he lends those powers the features belonging to the figure of his father; he creates for himself the gods whom he dreads, whom he seeks to propitiate, and whom he nevertheless entrusts with his own protection. Thus his longing for a father is a motive identical with his need for protection against the consequences of his human weakness.”

If we are to believe Freud, religion as we know it is intrinsically bound up in fear. Those who would doubt him should be reminded of religion’s track record in regards to aggression, “fight” being one of the three possible responses to fear (“flight”, i.e. “run away,” and “freeze,” i.e. surrender/submission being the other two). A quick Google search finds that an “estimated 809 million people have died in religious wars throughout the ages.” (http://www.ask.com/question/how-many-people-have-died-in-religious-conflicts) Reading this staggering number it is difficult to come away with any other conclusion but that religion is the most effective instrument ever devised for channeling fear into aggression. Freud’s real genius, then, is in connecting the dots between “human weakness” and the erection of human (religious) institutions that manage the resulting terror by projecting it outward, first bouncing it off God the Father and then, on the rebound, directing it via violence conducted in the Name of the Father, very much like a TV signal bouncing off of a satellite before arriving at its mind-control target. (The use of Christian religious terms here signifies my familiarity with them, as well as the unspoken rule that one can criticize one’s own brand but no one else’s, but should not be taken as a suggestion that Christians have any kind of monopoly or “privileged status” in regards to religious war.)

The problem with this analysis, of course, is that religion isn’t just an outlet for aggression; one need look no further than the two towering religious leaders of the twentieth century, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, to know that religion, when done right, brings out the very best in humankind. Religious greatness, nevertheless, cannot undo the legacy of religious crimes. We are blessed with the former and cursed with the latter. Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities could just as easily be a tale of one religion: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness , it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”

It says here that religion obtains to greatness, spawns its Desmond Tutus, Thich Nhat Hanhs and Dorothy Days in spite, and precisely not because, of the fact that if a police sketch artist sat down with our collective descriptions of God he or she would produce an image of the archetypal father figure. It is the best of times because God is great, the worst of times because the archetypal father is a misplaced idol. The Freudian gamble, if you will, is that we can heal religion’s Dickensian schizophrenia, that the best of times can finally be divorced from the worst of times, if enough of the light of insight can be shone upon the pathological projection of our broken, wounded fathers onto the godhead. (A conclusion reached well within the limits of my rights, being a broken, wounded father myself, if one struggling to be a wounded healer.)

Which is where the aliens come in. (I saw Aliens when it was released with my mom in a movie theater in Orlando, Florida, and it remains superior to 99.44% of all other movies.) If, per Freud, we have essentially made God in our image, then the extraterrestrials, if they accomplished nothing else, would unmake the anthropocentric God. Because why would God want anything to do with our image when She could just as easily select the image of our (vastly more advanced) guests? The great hope is that a God liberated from Her role as an exalted father would no longer function as a container for our fears, nor as an enabler of the unleashing of those fears on the Other. And that worshipping a non-anthropocentric God would be the first step towards realizing a non-anything-centric God, our ticket into a universe where the center holds precisely because there is no center, no fear, and where love spreads. The latter of which happens to be the title of a Stone Roses track, from their sophomore effort The Second Coming, which included these seminal lyrics:

“The messiah is my sister
Ain’t no king man, she’s my queen”

This is a fancy way of saying God is nobody’s father. She belongs to all of us, which, given the uncertain reproductive practices of UFO pilots, may well include citizens of the universe for whom the question “Who’s your daddy?” makes as much sense as the question “What does a five sided square look like?” does to us. I should note that if, in exchange for knowledge of what existence is like in the fifth dimension, we taught the extraterrestrials how to have sex with each other, this would probably be a fair trade. And maybe that’s why they’re here, but they’re shy and when one of us gets close enough for them to ask they chicken out and zoom off, making them a lot like me in high school.

This last speculation includes the anthropocentric assumption that I have been making throughout, which is that the UFOs are here because of us. But perhaps we are completely tangential to their visits. Maybe they’ve recently taken up oil painting and find our CO2-enhanced sunsets the best subjects in the galaxy. Or maybe, if the Gaia principle is correct and the earth is a being with its own advanced intelligence, the aliens are here to talk to her, it being highly unlikely that they’ve traveled this far to hear about our fantasy football teams.

But I hope I’m wrong and they are here to talk to us. Which makes me simultaneously opposed to and in favor of anthropocentrism. “The king is dead; long live the king.” I never did like that second Stone Roses album.

Chilly is a Nervous Stuffed Snowman

My wife Jen has a friend who explained that should a nuclear attack ever come, and should she happen to survive the initial onslaught, she would immediately take to the outdoors and, along with her spouse and children, breathe in the radioactive fumes as deeply as possible, the better to assure a speedy and timely demise designed to preempt any prolonged exposure to the rigors of post-apocalyptic earth. My wife, on the other hand, is such a force of nature that it is all too easy to imagine her as the matriarch of Thunderdome, taking Tina Turner’s ruthless Aunty Entity in a kinder, gentler, and even sexier direction. All too easy but for, to borrow a line from Miss Piggy, moi.

Behavioral scientists have deduced that there are essentially two kinds of people: dandelions, who will thrive at the same basic rate no matter where you put them, and orchids, who are quite lovely under ideal conditions given their finely tuned sensitivity, but whose sensitivity turns out to be very much like Damocles’ Sword, placing the orchid at the mercy of social and material conditions which have proven rather less than ideal for the “unwashed masses” who make up the great majority of earthlings, past and present. Just try growing an orchid in your living room, much less planting one in a crack in a sidewalk where it can be trampled by people and peed on by dogs, and you will get a sense of the gulf between the world’s orchids and dandelions, a divide which, in comparison, makes the gap between the sexes about as consequential as mods vs. rockers.

Jen is the quintessential dandelion for whom radioactive sludge makes like Miracle-Gro. If anything, she would react to radiation like the X-Men, and develop even greater powers; her finger and toenails are already nearly as strong and sharp as Wolverine’s, and we don’t even have a microwave oven. But, as a card carrying orchid, I am as unfit for the post-apocalyptic landscape as Princess Diana, Emily Dickinson, or Vincent Van Gogh, three famous people on the list of Highly Sensitive People, i.e. orchids (http://www.genconnect.com/health/albert-einstein-nicole-kidman-jim-hallowes-list-of-famous-highly-sensitive-people/), and a trio whose respective biographies make life as a famous orchid sound only slightly more attractive than the post-apocalypse. (Here’s to obscure blogging!) So, if the nukes come, Jen and the kids will be joining me on the surface breathing in the fumes, Jen breathing the deepest , because if you keep spraying a plant with Miracle-Gro its gotta croak eventually. Unless she wants to have a go at single parenting while running Thunderdome, which possibility I refuse to contemplate, preferring to think of her as Juliet to my Romeo, our lives without one another unthinkable. (The Shakespearean fantasy, of course, is much easier to indulge for the orchid, who is almost certain to die first; would-be dandelion Juliets should think twice before marrying their orchid Romeos.)

The trouble with the orchid’s sensitivity is that we are sensitive to everything. Unlike Wolverine’s claws, which can be retracted, the orchid’s radar can never be turned off; we are, always and everywhere, taking it all in, which is why this orchid is always nagging his dandelion wife to leave parties once we have stayed long enough such that leaving wouldn’t be impolite, so that I can go home and recover in a dark, quiet room. My nagging is as ineffectual as everyone else’s (nagging is, by definition, barking up the wrong tree), and my darling dandelion has invariably sunk her roots deep into the party by the time I begin to give her my pathetic looks from the other side of the cheese platter, at which point I cope by retreating to a far corner of the inevitable toy-strewn playroom under the auspices of “minding the children,” none of whom are ever bothered by my self-sufficient parallel play.

One of the things to which orchids are exquisitely sensitive is the constant potential for disaster. At least, I hope other orchids share in this and it’s not just me constantly echoing C-3PO’s “We’re doomed.” This tendency of mine is exemplified by the role I played in a college party planning ritual. Prior to each party we hosted, my friends and I sat down to draft the official “Party Scorecard,” on which potential points were allotted for various celebratory hijinks. Maximum points were typically assigned to behaviors involving the various group totem objects, e.g. if, at the party’s climax, someone became so enthused that they spiked the oversized can of Bruce’s Yams (Bruce being the name of both the yam canning company and our group’s Gladwellian Connector) in the manner of a fullback spiking the football after a touchdown , or if the number of people we convinced to drink National Beer communally out of the National Bear was greater than 7 (in his first life the National Bear was a clear plastic cookie container in the shape of a teddy bear). My main contribution to the scorecard, beyond once suggesting that we see how many total ex-girlfriends we could convince to attend the party, a number I could barely influence given that there was at the time but one such extant ex-girlfriend (as a monogamist I don’t even rate the prefix “serial”), was in always insisting that the first item on the scorecard was “No tragedy.” On my watch there were to be no deaths by alcohol poisoning, gunfight, or drunk driving, nor any unwanted pregnancies. I can’t remember how many points we allotted for “No tragedy,” probably because it was, in truth, a placeholder for “Tragedy,” for which we would never have been able to accurately estimate the negative points. “No Tragedy” was the dot of yin in the party scorecard’s predominate yang.

It’s going on twenty years now since we held the last of our parties at the double-wide Baltimore row house we rented senior year, parties from which, tragedy-wise, we got away scot-free. But the potential for disaster still looms. Each time I leave my house I head back in for a quick check that the oven is well and truly off, lest my house literally explode in my absence. And each time my wife tarries at one of her evening social engagements without texting, I am convinced that she is dead. By the time she arrives home I have made my first pass through the five stages of grief and begun the contingency planning for single parenting. It is tempting to paint my ongoing fear of disaster as life’s constant background noise: death terror. About which death terror, more in a moment. But the interesting thing is that my fear of disaster isn’t limited to the fear that, in the words of Jim Morrison, “This is the end.” See above re: unwanted pregnancies, which are, of course, a beginning. See also my meltdown earlier this week, staged in the presence of all three of my children just to remove any lingering doubts they may have had that Daddy is wound a little tight, when the bag of Chipotle foodstuffs began leaking its juices on the interior of Jen’s brand new Toyota Highlander, a vehicle in which she has outlawed food consumption for just this very reason, leaving me if not in violation of the letter of the law, at least in violation of its spirit. The communicative intent of my meltdown boiled down, of course, to “We’re doomed.” Leaving me wondering whether I am actually afraid of death or, in punishment for violating the law, afraid of being cut off from love. Or, quite possibly, that the two are one and the same thing.

It was with the first of these possibilities, death terror proper, in mind that I recently encountered my cartoon double, and the implicit suggestion of a Buddhist solution to my hypervigilant death watch. Chilly is the stuffed toy snowman magically brought to life by Doc McStuffins, the lead character on the eponymously titled Disney cartoon. Chilly is described thusly on the inside flap of each Doc McStuffins book: “Chilly is a nervous stuffed snowman. He’s constantly worried that he will melt. But Doc always reminds him that he’s not a real snowman.” This is easily translatable into the following: “Chris is a nervous human being. He’s constantly worried that he will die. But Thich Nhat Hanh always reminds him that he’s not a real self.”

Buddhist sage Thich Nhat Hahn’s No Death, No Fear, is one of the most important books I’ve ever read in that it simply and straightforwardly outlines how the Buddhist experience of no-self means that the concepts of birth and death are just that, mere concepts, leaving death terror to dissipate like so much steam. Given that my death terror remains intact, my grasp of the book’s message clearly hasn’t translated into any meaningful progress on the actual eight-fold path, but Thich Nhat Hahn’s explication of the Buddhist encounter with death remains the most seductive of the approaches to death and its aftermath on offer in the three religions I know absolutely anything about. Full disclosure: I am not sure my wife would agree that I know absolutely anything about Judaism but for a few vocabulary words, and I’m not sure I would disagree with her, which we are attempting to remedy with reading assignments, an approach that, thankfully, spares me from actually having to talk with anyone other than my better half. That said, take anything I say below about Judaism with a grain of salt.

So in reviewing my affinity for each of these three religions’ potential as therapy for death terror, I may as well start with Judaism’s take on what happens after death, which, as best I can tell, is to not have a take on what happens after death. Judaism’s approach to the big questions about death’s end result appears synchronous with Wittgenstein’s “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,” a synchronicity amplified by Wittgentstein’s “pass over” and Judaism’s Passover, as well as the fact that Wittgenstein was of ¾ Jewish descent. Judaism’s silence on questions of life after death has one significant advantage over that of Christianity and Buddhism, in that it is far and away the most intellectually honest of the three, Buddhism’s claims to direct experiential knowledge of no-self notwithstanding, because unless one has awakened to the insight of no-self for one’s self (Ha-ha!), no-self must be taken on faith every bit as much as Christianity’s promise of eternal life. Reading between the lines of Judaism’s silence on the matter, Judaism’s commentary about life after death appears to echo Socrates’ famous “I know that I know nothing.” As such it is not only honest, but accurate, and of little obvious value in the face of death terror. Because if there is anything we fear, it is the unknown. Judaism’s silence is, if anything, a call for courage. Meaning I’ll come back to that if I can’t find anything easier.

At first blush, Christianity appears to speak about what Judaism has passed over in silence, with its promise of eternal life. The first step of understanding eternal life is to set aside the idea of an eventual bodily resurrection for all true believers, marking it off as inaccessible, at least to those of us disinclined to fundamentalist readings of scripture. ( In the words of Jon Stewart, “That’s Episcopalian for ‘Shut the fuck up,’” i.e. a literal interpretation of the Rapture, with its bodily resurrection of those saved by Christ, necessarily also involves the Great Tribulation’s “worldwide hardships, disasters, famine, war, pain, and suffering, which will wipe out more than 75% of all life on earth,” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tribulation) for the billions who don’t happen to be Christian, making the celebration of such a Rapture indecipherable from celebrating Hiroshima or Auschwitz.) Thusly understood, eternal life has as little to do with the Rapture as it does with the fantastic old Woody Allen line that “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.” We can only define eternal life by what it is not, which is anything but immortality through not dying. Even God, it seems, can’t undo death and taxes. So eternal life involves death. After that, it’s pure mystery. So, is the difference between Christianity’s de facto definition of eternal life as mystery and Judaism’s silence in the face of life after death, at the last, stylistic?

If, then, death is a problem for which Judaism offers no solution, and for which Christianity offers no solution in the packaging of a solution, then perhaps neither is really all that different from Buddhism, which responds with something of an Alfred E. Newman’s “What, me worry?” in its assertion that there is, per Thich Nhat Hanh’s No Death, No Fear, no problem to solve. Which religion you prefer, at least as far as death goes, becomes a matter of taste: do you like your lack of information straight up (Judaism’s “Socratic” silence), on the rocks (St. Peter, the rock upon which Jesus built his church, is also the one who meets you at the pearly gates, which legend is another fancy way for Christians to say they have no idea about what happens after death), or with a twist (the Buddhist twist, of course, is that you can’t say anything about nothing). But whichever of the three you choose, if you want answers you still have to wait until you die. Which leaves me and Chilly still feeling a little unsettled.

My first reading assignment to expand my general fund of Jewish knowledge beyond its current meager mish-mosh is James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, a history of “the profoundly troubling two-thousand-year course of the Church’s battle against Judaism.” In his reckoning with the legacy of the Holocaust and its implications for Christianity, Carroll writes the following about death:

“The alternative to thinking of God as a ‘cosmic sadist…an eternal vivisector,’ … is to stand before the unfathomable mystery of death- the death of Jesus, the death of one’s own son, the deaths of the six million- without attempting to understand it, and also without attempting to deny its character as a terrible outbreak of evil. It is here that these questions break out of any narrow reference to religion, Christian or Jewish, to press against the awful anxiety that every human must feel in the face of death.”

Carroll clearly hasn’t been reading his Thich Nhat Hanh. But if we momentarily set aside the possibility that one can overcome death terror via awakening (making enlightenment something of an Odd Couple with the previously tabled Rapture; I see Jerry Falwell as Felix Unger and Thich Nhat Hanh in the role of Oscar Madison), then we can locate my constant Chilly-an fear of death in the understanding of death as “a terrible outbreak of evil.”

Humans seem incapable of perceiving the presence of evil as anything other than the absence of God; see the failure of every attempted theodicy as well as Jesus’ own “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” Death as understood by Carroll, death as evil, then, is death as abandonment. Bringing us right back to my earlier question of whether the fear of death and the fear of being cut off from love are the very same thing.

Wait for it…wait for it… Enter, stage left, Sigmund Freud, by way of his signature “Tell me about your childhood.” Because it is in early childhood and its inevitable encounter with all too human parenting that we first experience the withholding of love, that we get our very first taste of death. Becky Bailey, in her brilliant manual for managing children’s difficult behaviors, Conscious Discipline, captures this process succinctly (just substitute “parent” for “teacher”):

“Most teachers accept the premise that when a child makes a decision an adult likes, the child has earned encouragement. This is demonstrated by teachers praising children for ‘good’ behavior. The underlying message is, ‘When you do what I want, you earn my love. When you ignore what I want you to do, I will withhold my love.’ Many adults have internalized this kind of thinking. Many of us desperately seek approval and try so hard to please for this reason. We act appropriately not because we love others, but because we fear they won’t love us.”

By this same logic, I would argue that we desperately seek God’s approval in the hopes that we will never die, even as we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that abandonment, and the concurrent outbreak of unfathomable evil, is inevitable. Even as we earn God’s love, “We’re doomed.”

Which combination of aspirational worthiness and inevitable abandonment is perhaps an even deeper source of Chilly-an anxiety in its collision with an obscenely reliable God. David Foster Wallace describes the latter in his novel, The Pale King, problematizing “the religious confidence that one is ‘loved unconditionally’ by God- as the God in question is defined as something that loves this way automatically and universally, it doesn’t seem to really have anything to do with you, so it’s hard to see why religious people claim to feel such reassurance in being loved this way by God.” It would seem that you can either have a personal relationship with a God whose love must be earned before She inevitably abandons you, or receive unconditional love from a God who doesn’t love you in particular, or even enough to abandon you. The latter God, whose unconditional love has nothing to do with you, may even explain the popularity of Western Buddhism; how can God have nothing to do with a self that isn’t even there. Seen from this angle, Western Buddhism can be defined as “You can’t fire me, I already quit!”

If it is better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all, then I would argue that it is better to have been a self and died than never to have been a self at all. This may just be my way of saying I prefer my religion on the rocks, and not with a twist. Given my particular bias, the best antidote I’ve yet encountered for death terror may at first seem exceedingly facile. It is the observation that if we are terrified by the prospect of death, why aren’t we equally horrified by the retroactive annihilation of our absence from the universe prior to our birth? Hidden in this question is the insight that death itself is the much lauded “ground of all being,” is, therefore, hardly evil, and, assuredly, nothing new; if we fear the unknown then death is nothing to fear. “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shall return.” Moby, of all people, implies the very same thing: “We are all made of stars.”

As for the fear of withheld love, I can only say, as I did when a then 2-year-old Jessie Pearl spilled root beer on herself in our booth at the deli, there’s nothing to be done. (There’s always something to be done- Bubby sorted Jessie Pearl out with a single, well placed paper napkin. It’s just that, in the case of fearing withheld love, I don’t know what’s to be done.) And as for God, I would argue that Her unconditional love is a lot like Meatloaf’s “I’d do anything for love, but I won’t do that.” “That,” of course, is allowing you to live on in your apartment.