Big Mac, Large Fries, and an Extra Large Reincarnation


In his excellent Buddhism Without Beliefs, Stephen Batchelor notes the ironic core of the increasing belief in reincarnation among Americans (25% of Americans now believe in reincarnation, per http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,99945,00.html ). In traditional Indian culture reincarnation was viewed as a failure; each reincarnation signaled the individual’s failure to achieve the ultimate goal: liberation from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. This traditional understanding of reincarnation regards earthly existence as, at best, a great place to visit, but by no means the final destination. More to the point, it is a place to work out one’s karma, usually with a great deal of suffering. Earth as a place of suffering is at the heart of the traditional conception of reincarnation. In contrast, as Batchelor explains, contemporary Americans’ belief in reincarnation is fueled by a desire for more, not less, of earthly existence American style (not so sure they’re interested in reincarnating in what we used to call the Third World). Americans who believe in reincarnation want to come back. We are like the two year old for whom you just cranked the jack-in-the box the umpteenth time, only for us to shout “Again!” Reincarnation is the same in name only; somehow, for Americans who believe in reincarnation, the grass is no longer greener on the other side of death.

Before considering why America has reinvented reincarnation, it is important to note that traditional Indian culture is not alone in its stance towards life in this vale of tears. Christianity, natch, wants off the island, too: “Rejoice and be glad, for great is your reward in heaven. (Matthew 5:12)” There are an infinite variety of takes on eternal life in the heavenly kingdom, but it is safe to say that everyday life in 2010 America is not a version. For Christians, the real world is but a prelude for what follows, which of course has implications for the reality we inhabit. Reality is never more than a first step, whether towards reward in heaven, or damnation in hell. This is a nice solution for the problems of evil and suffering, which, as in India, are the definitive aspects of this place we call home. A home from which Christians and Indians, whether by way of heaven or by exiting the cycle of rebirth stage right, just want out.

If the dominant spiritual tradition in America regards earthly incarnation in much the same fashion as the Indians traditionally have, then whence this mutant American strain of reincarnation? There is one seemingly reasonable explanation as to why Americans have transformed reincarnation from a necessary step towards departure into an infinite series of arrivals. The average American enjoys material improvements in living conditions undreamt of for nearly all of human history. The relative ease and comfort enjoyed by Americans has perhaps fundamentally altered the experience of life on Earth such that those who experience this Earth 2.0 are lining up to sign on for another tour of duty. In short, the presence of e.g. Dunkin’ Donuts in our lives empowers us all to echo Nietzsche and say “Yes to life!”

The problem with this explanation is that the joys of shopping at Walmart and/or Saks Fifth Avenue only run so deep; scratch the surface and you will find as much misery in America today as you’d likely find in any other time and place. If suicide is any indicator of net misery then the following from Wikipedia kills the joyful reincarnation theory: “According to 2005 data, suicides in the U.S. outnumber homicides by nearly 2 to 1 and ranks as the 11th leading cause of death in the country, ahead of liver disease and Parkinson's. Worldwide suicide rates have increased by 60% in the past 50 years, mainly in the developing countries.” Material wealth, if anything, seems to have made us more miserable, which makes American reincarnation even stranger. We don’t seem to be jumping for joy, in contrast to what our version of belief in reincarnation would lead one to believe. We just watch TV, surf the web, go shopping, and slurp corn syrup to get through the day (the average American spends 151 hours per month watching TV, or 5 hours per day, 68 hours per month on the internet, just over 2 hours per day, and consumes 37.8 pounds of corn syrup annually; the average American woman takes 301 shopping trips for a total of 399 hours annually). And most of us get to do this a few years longer than our ancestors suffered through e.g. life before corrective eyewear. But we’ve always had wine, women, and song, and not a one of our manufactured consolations can top that. Not to mention that our material wealth giveth and taketh away in equal portions: there is a traffic jam for every luxury car, a sexually transmitted disease for every birth control pill, to mention but two of my favorite inventions.

We are as miserable as ever; you could make a case that we have gotten better at distracting ourselves from the misery, but these distractions weave their own unique web of desolation. And still, Americans want more, as if life were like the bottomless fries at Red Robin. Our many versions of bottomless fries are a good place to start if we wish to understand what may be at the heart of American reincarnation. Americans treat the world like a bottomless basket of fries, when there are only so many spuds to go around. According to a fun game on the web at http://sustainability.publicradio.org/consumerconsequences/, if everyone in the world consumed as much as I do, it would take 4.1 Earths to provide the necessary resources. I am an American, I am eating the world, and I too have been increasingly looking forward to some reincarnation. This is all connected.

To understand why, let’s revisit Freud’s theory of the death instinct. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud explains “that all instincts tend towards the restoration of an earlier state of things.” Following this logic, “inanimate things existed before living ones,” so “the aim of all life is death.” Ergo, the death instinct. Almost no one takes the death instinct seriously, which of course reflects the fact that almost no one takes his or her inevitable deaths seriously. But Freud’s greatest psychoanalytic successor, Jacques Lacan, did, and it is to his understanding of the death instinct and its role in human enjoyment that we must turn to fathom American reincarnation. To understand how Lacan can help us tease out the meaning of American reincarnation we must first introduce his concept of jouissance. Per Wikipedia, jouissance is a form of pleasure that is in opposition to our normal understanding of the term: “The pleasure principle, according to Lacan, functions as a limit to enjoyment: it is the law that commands the subject to 'enjoy as little as possible'. At the same time the subject constantly attempts to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go beyond the pleasure principle. Yet the result of transgressing the pleasure principle, according to Lacan, is not more pleasure but pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear. Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this 'painful principle' is what Lacan calls jouissance. (Dylan Evans). Thus jouissance is suffering.” (for this quote see http://www.answers.com/topic/jouissance ) The precise connection between the death instinct and Lacan’s theory of jouissance is too abstruse for consideration here (for a concise description see http://www.answers.com/topic/death-instinct-thanatos ), but the key insight is that, due to the death instinct, we experience jouissance, that insatiable urge to overdo it. Thus, the bottomless fries.

If we take the death instinct seriously, as I believe we must, then we must be prepared, as Freud was, to follow the logic to its necessary conclusion and see if that conclusion matches the reality we see before us. So, here goes. If Freud is correct and there is “an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things,” by “becom(ing) inorganic once again”, then I see no more efficient means for the Earth as an interconnected organism to achieve this goal then by way of its human components’ consumption of mass quantities. The death instinct is driving us to literally eat the Earth back to an inorganic state. Does this seemingly bizarre formulation agree with the facts on the ground? I would suggest that the potential for an environmental apocalypse of human origins argues in its favor.

From this perspective, reincarnation American style is an expression of jouissance. Not content with doing our part to enjoy the pain of Earth’s annihilation just once, we shout “again!” Americans believe in reincarnation because of the instinctual drive for excess, and what is more excessive than using up four planets’ worth of resources not once, but until the job of killing this one planet is done? America is the ultimate “expression of the conservative nature of living substance,” (emphasis Freud’s) in the sense that we are at the vanguard of achieving the “final goal of all organic striving,” i.e. death. American reincarnation, then, is just reenlisting in the decisive march.

Perhaps the Indians and Christians are onto something when they consider the earth a place of suffering. Treating the earth as a place of excessive pleasure turns out to be in service of a death instinct that is leading us ever closer to the abyss; jouissance makes us lemmings, only we’re taking everybody and everything with us over the cliff. A return to suffering may just save us all. It may seem crazy to suggest that exercising a modicum of restraint at life’s various buffet tables would equate to suffering, but things have gotten so out of whack in late consumerist culture that for us Yanks the suggestion that we curtail our gorging is oddly anathema. But I’d like my children’s children to enjoy some French fries too, so one serving of fries will have to do. Okay, two servings.

Grey Poop-On

I could never own a dog. As a child I loved my dog Riggins, a brown mutt named after the inimitable gridiron star John Riggins (inimitable in the sense that who else would pass out drunk at a State Dinner after telling Justice O’Connor to “loosen up Sandy Baby”). But dog ownership has evolved in the days since I grew up in rural southern Maryland, where dogs roamed free (and were stolen if they were purebred hunting dogs like Freckles, the Brittany Spaniel who preceded Riggins and hopefully enjoyed the rest of her presumed life as a proper bird dog). Dog ownership now requires picking up your dog’s shit with a bag wrapped around your hand like a glove, and then carrying said bag around the ‘hood with you like a Gucci handbag. I am decidedly not down with this, a stance only hardened by my recent stint walking Bo, my friend Jason’s beagle, whose poop I handled, bagged, and gallivanted with down the sidewalk.

The first problem is the handling. The texture of dog doody , combined, of course, with that unique scent, is singularly nauseating: the warm squishiness, or the warm firmness, depending upon the quality of the scat, was never intended for fondling. Holding dog poo in one’s hand is like cleaning cat pee off the floor with the sleeve of one’s shirt. That there is a layer of wafer thin plastic between skin and kaka detracts but little from the effect; remember, sex with condoms still leads to orgasms. Pawing pup’s poo-poo, baggie notwithstanding, still leads to nausea (when Bo pooped on the floor and wifey sent me to clean it up at 7am it led to some serious dry heaves- had I already had my Cap’n Crunch wifey would have had to clean up barf and feces- “Stays crunchy, even in dogshit!”)

But the larger problem is post poop-scoop. One can not maintain a baseline of human dignity while carrying around a bag of canine crap. One is immediately transformed from the master of a beast to the beast’s nanny. There is something amazing about changing your own child’s diapers; their shit literally doesn’t stink. But as close as I was to Riggins, and as much as Jason dotes on Bo, their shit is still nasty. Women were put on Earth to rule over men, and men are the boss of dogs. A man who carries around dog shit just got bucked down from sergeant to private, and a woman who carries around dog shit is akin to the Queen of England squatting in a port-o-jon; it just shouldn’t happen.

The French are reportedly shocked when they witness Americans walking around carrying bags of doggy-doo. Of course, the French pay minimum wage to immigrant labor to sweep up Parisian poop, but that aside, I am with the French on this one. Say what you want about the French, but those are some dignified folk. Their horror at our oblivious doggy servitude is enlightening. So I say raise a glass of Perrier, and let the shit fall where it may.

Review of Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco:

Eco is, at best, long winded here as he delivers the message that our obsessions come to rule us. In other words, you are what you think, so be careful what you think about. So if you spend your life searching for proof that Bigfoot is real, it really won't matter if Bigfoot is objectively real because your life is all about Bigfoot, which is as real as anything ever gets. I would have enjoyed Eco's take on this if only he had cut about two hundred pages.

Worms, Cells, and the Meaning of Death

There are two prevailing and contrasting theories of how cells die. The first, more comforting theory is that cells simply wear out from the rigors of life, and as wear and tear mounts become less able to fight off predators such as free radicals. Death appears here as an enemy at the gate, to be fought off in valorous combat until achieving the most honorable death possible for the Samurai, death in battle. The second, more troubling theory contends that aging and death are in fact preprogrammed into the cell’s DNA. This perspective essentially states “we have met the enemy and he is us.”

A 2008 Stanford research study, published in the 7/24/08 edition of the journal Cell, lends its weight to the latter perspective. The study looked at the impact of genetic programming in nematode worms, and found that the process of natural selection had resulted in genetic programming that predestined the worms to aging, and, by extension, death. A web article about the research, found at www.supercentarian.com/archive/genetic.html, explains the study’s key insight thusly: “key regulatory pathways optimized for youth have drifted off track in older animals. Natural selection can’t fix problems that arise late in the animals’ life spans, so the genetic pathways for aging become entrenched by mistake.” In essence, death becomes an existential dilemma for us precisely because it is in no way a dilemma for the process of natural selection. It is perhaps the greatest of ironies that our ultimate destiny is the result of nothing but an afterthought. (I have, of course, here made the leap from the death of cells to the death of cell based organisms; with the caveat that I am layman and not a cell biologist, we would appear to be on safe ground in asserting that the death of an individual human is intertwined with the death of his or her cells to a degree that makes this leap meaningful.)

We may proceed, with due caution but also with some degree of confidence based in scientific findings such as the Stanford worm study, in further exploration of the implications of our “planned demise from day one,” as one website’s description of preprogrammed cell death puts it (http://www.howstuffworks.com/). And if we are to proceed in such a fashion, then our first stop might very well be, yet again, at the doorstep of one Sigmund Freud. Because what the Stanford scientists and other theorists of preprogrammed cell death are telling us sounds remarkably like Freud’s most controversial theory, with apologies to penis envy, the death instinct.

Before discussing the particulars of Freud’s death instinct, it is important to pause for a moment in consideration of its singular lack of popularity. For really existing psychoanalysis, the worms at Stanford may be the bearers of bad news. Psychoanalysis would prefer to go about its business as if Freud had never postulated the death instinct. Psychoanlysis, like all the rest of us, is in flight from the specter of death; as David Loy explains, “our primary repression is not sexual desire but death, and that denial returns to consciousness in distorted, symbolic ways which haunt us individually and collectively.” (for this quote and a review of Loy’s Lack and Transcendence, see http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-EPT/padmas.htm) Psychoanalysis has repressed Freud’s death instinct, but, of course, the first commandment of psychoanalysis is the return of the repressed; those worms out at Stanford signal an opportunity for that return to emerge into consciousness from its current status as the unconscious urge towards compulsive repetition found in every form of death terror. Confronted with the science of preprogrammed cell death, psychoanalysis has no choice but to own the half of its legacy it has disowned, and the first murmurings of this reawakening to the death instinct can now be heard. (For an example, see http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=NP.006.0063A)

While psychoanalysis as a whole has repressed the theory of the death instinct, it is striking that the two most important psychoanalysts since Freud, Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein (Jung’s and Adler’s respective breaks with Freud led them to found significant branches of psychology, but neither can properly be referred to as psychoanalysts), both embraced the death instinct. In an article on the web about the death instinct (http://www.answers.com/topic/death-instinct-thanatos), Pierre Delion explains that “For Melanie Klein, a firm advocate of the existence of the death drive, psychic conflict is never a conflict between the ego and the drives but always between the life drive and the death drive. Anxiety is the immediate response to the endopsychic perception of the death drive. For Jacques Lacan, the death drive as something beyond the pleasure principle forms the best starting-point for introducing his concept of the ‘Real,’ in connection with the Imaginary and the Symbolic. He links to this the lethal dimension inherent in desire and jouissance.” It is my contention that Klein and Lacan achieved their theoretical insights precisely because they owned all of psychoanalysis, including the death instinct. It is my further contention that psychoanalysis has become marginalized as both a therapeutic practice and as a philosophical construct because it has only ever been, Lacan and Klein notwithstanding, half of psychoanalysis. As a mental health professional a week does not pass in which I do not hear psychoanalysis mocked by the phrase “So, tell me about your mother.” And rightly so, because psychoanalysis without the death instinct is a joke. Forget about your mother; tell me about your life in the context of your inevitable death.

To survive in any meaningful way, psychoanalysis must get real. Freud is, as ever, ready at hand with his reality principle, but we must be sure that our understanding of reality is shaped not only by our appreciation of life instincts such as libido, nor only by the demands of civilization as enforced by the superego, but also by their equal partner, the death instinct. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud notes that “two kinds of pressures are constantly at work in living substance, operating in contrary directions, one constructive or assimilatory and the other destructive or dissimilatory.” For Freud, these dual processes are less than harmonious, as he sees “an opposition whose importance was long ago recognized by the theory of the neuroses.” Our neurotic inability to reconcile what Freud calls the “Vacillating rhythm” of life and death instincts is inscribed in the worst of human history, especially war. In a letter to Freud on the origins of war, Albert Einstein described our inability to cope with the death instinct succinctly: “Because man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction.” (for the full text of the letter, see http://www.braungardt.com/Physics/Einstein-Freud.htm)

Zeroing in on exactly what Freud meant by the death instinct helps us see to exactly what degree the theory of the death instinct foreshadowed the theory of preprogrammed cell death. Per Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons- becomes inorganic once again- then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death.’” (emphasis is Freud’s) Freud’s assertion here that death occurs due to “internal reasons” is shocking in its prescience in relation to theories of preprogrammed cell death. However, his assertion that “the aim of all life is death” contrasts with the discovery that death is a mere afterthought to processes of natural selection. We are stuck with death not because it is the aim of all life, but because life only cares for the life of the species and cares nothing for the death of the individual. To correct Freud, the aim of all individuals is death, but, inevitably, life goes on.

But if we recall that the life instinct protects the cell up until the point that it has performed natural selection’s task, only then to succumb to the death instinct preprogrammed into its DNA , then the following passage just a few paragraphs later in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, indicates that Freud’s death instinct may account for natural selection after all: “The hypothesis of self-preservative instincts, such as we attribute to all beings, stands in marked opposition to the idea that instinctual life as a whole serves to bring about death. Seen in this light, the theoretical importance of the instincts of self-preservation, of self-assertion and of mastery greatly diminishes. They are component instincts whose function it is to assure that the organic shall follow its own path to death, and to ward off any possible ways of returning to organic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself. We have no longer to reckon with the organism’s puzzling determination (so hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own existence in the face of every obstacle. What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.” In short, Freud’s insight here is that the life instinct and natural selection are ultimately subservient to the death instinct’s agenda, in that a healthy organism will ward off external dangers in the name of natural selection, but ultimately in the service of allowing the death preprogrammed into the organism’s DNA to obtain. The death instinct has but one card to play; it must play it last and if it does it trumps all.

We continue to repress the death instinct at our collective peril. In the most literal sense possible, the only way forward for each and every one of us is though death. As Pema Chodron writes in her commentary on the Tibetan Buddhist Lojong slogans, “ Be aware of the reality that life ends; death comes for everyone.” And if Freud and the scientists at Stanford are right, it not only comes for us at the end, but is there with us every step of the journey; death is a part of who we are. In the same commentary, Pema Chodron counsels us to become familiar with death throughout life: “Practice opening and letting go throughout your life so you will not panic as everything dissolves at death.” It is only by doing so that the death instinct can emerge from repression. It is only by doing so that we can remain sane in the face of our preprogrammed eath. The leap of faith here, to be watered by practice, is that underneath all that death terror is what Pema Chodron calls “the innate ability to let go and feel compassion for others.” I’d like to die trying.

The Dukolina Blue Heels

In the afterglow of Duke’s narrow national title victory over valiant Butler, whose talented and fresh-faced thirty year old coach Brad Stevens makes me feel ancient at just thirty-five, one fact has become unavoidable: while UNC and Duke may field two men’s basketball teams, they share one basketball program. UNC and Duke stand head and shoulders above every other college basketball program only because of each other. You may wish to cue up Grover Washington Jr.’s “Just the Two of Us” as we proceed.

The UNC-Duke merger occurred in 1980 when Duke hired Mike Krzyzewski, a budding coaching genius who could go toe to toe with UNC’s resident basketball demigod, Dean Smith. While Smith had ruled basketball’s best conference, the ACC, with an iron fist for much of the late sixties and then the seventies, he had remained unable to capture his elusive first national championship. It is no coincidence that within two years of Coach K’s arrival at Duke, Dean finally got the monkey off of his back, with a little help from a freshman named Michael Jordan, in 1982. With the encampment of Smith and Krzyzewski within a few miles of one another, the epicenter of college basketball, which had been floating in the ether after departing Wooden’s UCLA and landing briefly in Knight’s Indiana only to discover that the company wasn’t so great, planted itself firmly on Tobacco Road. It hasn’t left yet.

By 1986, fueled by competition with the very best, i.e. Smith, Coach K came into his own and led Duke to its first of what would become almost perennial Final Four appearances. It was as if Duke and Coach K had drafted behind Smith and UNC for a few years and then slungshot past them at the mid-point of the decade, with the pendulum reaching the outer point of its Duke-ward arc in 1991 and ’92, as Coach K claimed back-to-back national titles. Duke had pulled ahead.

But the pendulum swung quickly back the other way. And this time it was Smith and UNC benefitting from the thrill of the chase. Smith knew he had just about one lap left in which to catch Coach K, and this sense of urgency propelled Smith to make the final act of his legendary career perhaps its finest, with a second national title in 1993 and two more trips to the Final Four in ’95 and ’97 before calling it a day and leaving a program fully loaded for his ever loyal assistant Bill Guthridge to make his own Final Four run in 1998. And it was almost as if Coach K exited the stage in order to let Smith have his well deserved spotlight to himself, as Coach K endured his brief wilderness period, missing half the ’95 season with what was politely referred to as “exhaustion”, and which landed him in the hospital.

Needless to say, Coach K’s dark night of the soul was short lived, and by the time Smith had officially hung up his coaching whistle, Coach K was ready to take back what he saw as rightfully his. And as Carolina struggled to find its way in the post-Smith era, Guthridge went to two Final Fours in three years but nevertheless realized it’s no fun replacing God and promptly joined Smith in retirement, Coach K reasserted his will. A narrow Duke loss in the 1999 national final was followed up by Coach K’s third national crown in 2001.

Which point brings us to the most fascinating juncture of the UNC-Duke merger. When Guthridge up and quit Dean summoned another loyal assistant, and a bona fide coaching genius in his own right, Roy Williams. But Williams did the unthinkable and said no to the Godfather, preferring to stay in a house he had built for himself, so to speak, in Kansas. In the chaos that ensued Carolina hired a man in way over his head, Matt Doherty, and Carolina entered its own wilderness period.

Under Doherty Carolina was no longer able to function as UNC in the UNC-Duke rivalry; the Tarheels were too busy imploding. A surrogate was required in order to maintain the symbolic order that had come to govern the college basketball universe. Enter Gary Williams and his Maryland Terrapins. For one shining moment Maryland was elevated to the college basketball stratosphere, like a passenger getting bumped from coach to first class. A heartbreaking Final Four loss to sudden archrival Duke in 2001 was followed by Maryland’s triumph as the 2002 national champions. Believe it or not, Maryland –Duke was now the game in town, while UNC was busy simply trying to keep its dirty Doherty laundry out of the media.

Perhaps Maryland could have joined UNC-Duke and transformed the rivalry into a “trivalry”, but something strange and sad happened instead. Maryland, and especially its fans, became consumed by the rivalry with Duke rather than fueled by it. For a rivalry to thrive, beneath the pleasure taken in mutual animosity there must exist a foundation of tacitly acknowledged mutual respect. Respect and animosity are the yin and the yang of rivalry, and in this case Maryland had way too much yang. Maryland’s fans truly hated Duke, resenting Duke in a fashion that was toxic to the emerging rivalry. Perhaps Maryland had developed too large a chip on its shoulder from all those years trucking down to Greensboro for the ACC Tournament, which should have been called the State of North Carolina Invitational Tournament. Whatever the genesis of Maryland’s vitriol, they hurled it in heaping proportions at Duke; the profanity became so obscene that Gary Williams himself had to verbally reprimand the denizens of “Garyland” for their poor sportsmanship and unseemly behavior. The breaking point was perhaps when Maryland fans threw objects at Duke players’ parents seated in the Maryland bleachers. There is nothing left to say but that Maryland’s fans, and college basketball rivalries are ultimately about the fans, did not live up to the promise of the fledgling Duke-Maryland rivalry.

And perhaps that is for the best, as three is inevitably a crowd. Maryland faded into the background, courtesy largely of the recruits Gary Williams did and did not land, and fate reasserted itself, as always, to restore the symbolic order. After Doherty was mercifully canned, Dean swallowed his considerable pride and reached out again to his unexpectedly prodigal son, Roy Williams. As Williams later put it, he couldn’t say no to Dean Smith twice, leaving unsaid the fact that the Godfather’s house was now in rank disorder. Williams must also have been able to sense that Smith was on Alzheimer’s doorstep, and that this was his last chance to make things right with his mentor. Williams was basically the son who had refused to come home and run the thriving family business, only to see the business subsequently run into the ground by his inept cousin. Of course he came home.

Like Smith before him, Williams was great before locking horns with Coach K in the UNC-Duke rivalry, but like Smith he had never won his coveted national title before doing so. And while Coach K’s focus blurred just slightly as he spent summers coaching Kobe and Lebron on the US national team, Williams never had more to prove than he did to all those who thought he looked foolish in leaving Kansas the second time that Dean asked him. And in a blink the pendulum had swung again, as Williams led the the Tarheels to a national title in 2005, and again in 2009, while Duke was uncharacteristically mediocre by Coach K standards, and unable to get past the Sweet 16 several years running. Carolina had pulled ahead.

The pendulum swings quickest whenever one school seems to have obtained marked superiority in the rivalry. To wit, UNC, a popular pre-season Final Four pick on magazine covers for 2010, unaccountably fell flat on its face, finished close to the bottom of the ACC and failed to qualify for the NCAA tournament. The effect was so shocking that Roy Williams temporarily lost his mind and compared the Tarheels’ losing streak to the deaths of thousands of earthquake ravaged Haitians. Meanwhile, all Coach K did was guide Duke to its fourth national title while simultaneously ruining the end of the movie Hoosiers (Butler became less like Hoosiers and more like the first Rocky in which Rocky Balboa wins the day despite losing the boxing match to Apollo Creed). Consider the symbolic order intact, and the UNC-Duke merger stronger than ever (with yet another assist from Maryland, who stepped up in place of this year’s lowly Heels and upset Duke in the regular season’s final week to share the regular season title with the Blue Devils; if Maryland were to win an Oscar it would inevitably be as best supporting actor).

For now, what is good for UNC is good for Duke, and vice versa. No single team can be great every year, but the UNC-Duke program can. The rivalry cum merger has made Duke and Carolina greater than they could ever be alone, which is orders of magnitude beyond what any other monistic college basketball program can achieve. This is unlikely to change as long as Coach K and Ol’ Roy steer the ship. Don’t think for a second that Carolina won’t be back with full force next year, as their service to the symbolic order was fulfilled this year. The rivalry’s real test will come when either Coach K or Coach Williams departs. This will likely be harder for Duke, as UNC has already endured the trauma of Dean Smith’s retirement and come out the other side. I’d hate to be the man attempting to fill Coach K’s shoes. But, eventually, the symbolic order will assure that those shoes are capably filled. UNC will probably win a national title or two while things shake out, and, who knows, maybe Maryland will get invited to the prom one more time.

There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (and the Price of Lunch is Your Free Will)

An old sign, commonly posted in public indoor spaces in the days when all men wore hats, read “Gentlemen may remove their hats, all others must.” This sign captures the reality of what we like to call free will. Like it or not, Freud’s breakthrough conception of the superego impinges significantly on free will, that notion that human beings are free at all times to choose. What Freud realized is that rather than roaming the range of existence freely like wild buffalo we are much more like cattle, free to graze as we choose within the given confines of our surrounding fences. Given the superego, the notion of free will must be replaced by what I would call zones of autonomy. And it is only because free will is shrunk down to zones of autonomy that we are collectively able to enjoy the fruits and protections of civilization. In essence, to participate in civilization is to be not free. This cost of doing business for the venture, civilization, which makes human existence possible is a steep price indeed. As always, you get what you pay for. The message at the core of Freud’s lasting philosophical statement, Civilization and Its Discontents, can be boiled down thusly: In order for civilization to function, it’s participants must sacrifice free will; this sacrifice makes us all neurotic.

One may sacrifice one’s free will to civilization in one of two ways. Minus the superego, whose emergence in the individual is never certain and is the result of what is best described as a moral education, the individual’s free will is almost inevitably curtailed by the state, whose “justice system’s” true function is to assure the ongoing viability of civilization in the form of the state. Those who exercise free will in opposition to the will of the state soon find this free will demarcated by prison walls (or, it is important to note, in the case of defiance of the state’s economic necessities via failure to manifest marketable skills, banishment to the varieties of Siberia that include urban slums). Paraphrasing Alcoholics Anonymous, stomping grounds of many a soul who has chosen free will over the law, the path walked without the superego will lead you to one of three places: jail or other institutions, hospitals, or your grave.

Conversely, if one is the recipient of a modicum of moral education, the thoughts and behaviors necessary for the smooth functioning of civilization are encoded in one’s psyche as the superego. The particulars of the superego will vary by individual depending upon the vagaries of his or her moral education. But you will always know if the superego is present and functioning effectively in the individual if he or she is generally managing to stay out of trouble. Those individuals who get into trouble due to the dictates of conscience, see Martin Luther King Jr. or the Berrigan brothers as examples of those jailed for acts of civil disobedience, have the most advanced superegos of all, and as such pose no true threat to the ability of civilization to function. In fact, those burdened with outsized superegos are perhaps the most important contributors to society of all, for by imbuing civilization with a semblance of justice they tamp down the collective neuroses resulting from the loss of free will. Just as in Animal Farm where all animals are equals, and some are more equal than others, in civilization, where none of us are free, some of us are less free than others. And they are irrefutably the best of us.

One of the superego’s craftiest maneuvers is in allowing us the appearance of free will in everyday life. As long as our thoughts and behaviors remain within the boundaries set for us by our respective superegos, we are free to think and do just as we please. I am free to go to the movies with my free time on Sunday mornings, or play tennis in the park. Countless little decisions are made by the individual from the seat of agency, the ego, each day. The sheer mass of choosing that accumulates from these unnumbered choices feeds the illusion of free will; if I am free to choose in this infinite variety of everyday moments I begin to have the emotional satisfaction as if it were the case that I am free to choose at all times. This effect likely keeps us all sane.

But what I am really experiencing are life choices made within the boundaries of my zones of autonomy. If one had an exceptionally rigorous moral education, the ferocity with which one’s superego wields the only weapon it needs, guilt, may discipline one well enough such that the great majority of one’s time is spent in the zones of autonomy, thereby amplifying the illusion of free will for the most moral among us. But while not all of us give in to the temptation to put our foot up the ass of our obnoxious neighbor, we all at least think of putting a well deserved foot up this neighbor’s ass. And because the superego monitors thoughts, and not just actions, we are all inevitably subject to its recriminations in the form of guilt.

And if you doubt the power of guilt to shape behavior, then it is time to take a long hard look at what is keeping you out of trouble. I have a close friend who I have known since childhood. I can vouch for the comprehensive nature of her moral education, which was of the progressive social justice Christian variety. She shared with me that what shapes her behavior is embarrassment. For example, she was recently embarrassed by a server at a local restaurant, and emphatically stated to me that she will never set foot back in the establishment, even though they have an amazing wine selection, because of this incident. Understanding embarrassment as simply being made to feel guilty for one’s behavior, it is clear that the feeling of guilt was so powerful for my friend that she will likely never again engage in the behavior that, rightly or wrongly, led to the feelings of embarrassment/guilt. But an even greater witness to guilt’s potency is the fact that she can’t even return to the scene of the “crime.” The restaurant will always be the site where she drowned in guilt. It is submerged forever.

I am certainly not immune to this. At work recently I was “embarrassed” by a colleague who happened to be coming down the stairs in the stairwell when I exited the stairwell via the door on the landing. I was in a funk that morning and didn’t notice that she was headed for the door in my wake, so I failed to hold the door for her. When we made it to the office she announced to anyone who would listen how “some people” were so rude that they couldn’t hold the door for those behind them (and yes, I did gently confront her- I am getting better at this kind of thing). Whether or not I deserved this rebuke or not, and for what it’s worth my wife gives me a free pass after hearing my version of events, my superego certainly took notice. I now wait approximately forty-seven seconds after opening any door before passing through, on the off chance that someone else might appear out of the ether and need me to hold the door for them. I am tempted to start wearing a doorman’s uniform to work. All that to say that when the superego talks, people listen.

Wittgenstein said “You can mistrust your senses, but you can’t mistrust your beliefs.” If you are blessed with a superego (and I do mean blessed; remember the alternatives), it functions as the ultimate belief which can’t be mistrusted. The superego bounds one’s choices in the same way that death bounds life. You can ignore the superego just as we often ignore death. But, like death, the superego inevitably comes knocking. Inevitably because the last time I checked nobody was perfect. And the superego demands nothing less than perfection.

So what does it mean for us that “Gentlemen may remove their hats, all others must,” i.e. those of you with superegos may choose to follow civilization’s dictates, and we’ll lock the rest of you up? The first step forward is always to get real about just where you actually are. As long as we cling to illusory notions of free will we shall remain lost in a fantasyland made out of the denial of our most profound existential dilemma. The dilemma common to every human being, male, female, etc., is that to enter through the gates of civilization, as we all must (language acquisition alone guarantees this entry), is to irrevocably forego free will in exchange for that shabby impostor I call the zone of autonomy. Every one of us is Meatloaf singing “I’d do anything for love, but I won’t do that.” And then we all do precisely that. What else is there to do?

Freud is a hero because he refused to flinch in the face of this defining existential dilemma. He saw no way out, and so he took none. His philosophy, and Freud was first and foremost our greatest psychological philosopher, owned this central problem of being human. He showed us exactly where we actually are, and he died a pessimist.

Unlike genius brother Freud, I am just folks. But like Freud, I too will someday die. And while I have begun to face the need to own where we humans actually are, I hope not to die a pessimist. There is a popular Buddhist book titled The Wisdom of No Escape. Freud showed us that there can be no escape from our shared dilemma. I turn to Buddhism to learn the wisdom inherent to this place we can not leave. I told my wife tonight that I believe that Buddhism is the “religion of last resort”, which is English for “the wisdom of no escape.” Pardon me while I remove my hat.

Whose On Third?

It is an axiom of organized competitive sports that the more difficult a feat, the more it is rewarded. In football a touchdown is more difficult to score than a field goal, and earns six points as compared to the field goal’s three. After a touchdown, a PAT kicked through the uprights nets one point, while the more difficult two-point conversion, in which a team must “punch it in” from the two-and-a-half yard line, is rewarded with twice what you get for the PAT. In basketball, a typical bucket gets you two points, while one from beyond the arc, or “downtown” if you are Brent Mustburger, is worth three. In figure skating a quadruple jump is judged superior to the triple. In darts you get more points for hitting the bullseye. We are drawn to sports because they are an island of logic in an otherwise irrational world, and that logic is precisely that the winning player or team is the one who is best at achieving what is most difficult within the given rules of a sport, i.e. would you rather be a birdie or an eagle?

And then there is baseball. Baseball is largely incoherent. Baseball starts off okay, as the easiest offensive feat, the single, is rewarded the least; it, of course, only gets you to first base. But the rewards for the other three possible base hits in baseball, the double, triple, and home run, make no sense at all, when judged based on their comparative difficulty. The best doubles hitters hit doubles at about the same rate that the best home run hitters “go yard.” From 1989 to 2009, the MLB league leaders in doubles hit anywhere from 40 to 59 doubles. These numbers are comparable to the range found for home run leaders during the same era, 35 to 73 (the somewhat broader range for home runs is explained by the “steroids era”; things seem to have gotten back to normal, as last year the MLB home run leader tallied a more human total of 47). In essence, a double is roughly as difficult to achieve as a home run. But the home run is rewarded with a tangible run, while a double only gets a player half way home, and merely affords a player an opportunity to score a run. Why should a double be so poorly rewarded if it is just as hard to hit as a home run?

Things come into even starker relief when we look at triples. From 1989 to 2009 the annual MLB league leaders in triples compiled anywhere from 9 to 23 triples, with most league leaders compiling triples in the low to mid teens. Triples are clearly more difficult to hit than home runs and doubles. But while you get closer to a run with a triple than a double, you still get less than a home run for your more significant accomplishment of hitting a triple. This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

When I shared this insight with my friend Jason he looked at me as if I had suggested that humans regress to walking on all fours, i.e. he thought I was batshit crazy. Jason is both a baseball fanatic, (he is a near-genius practitioner of fantasy baseball, which empowers him to make and win fantasy baseball bets requiring the loser to engage in public acts of humiliation usually involving a combination of nudity and food) and a traditionalist. Like most traditionalists, a category which encompasses approximately 99.9% of baseball fans, he is blind to the irrational elements of baseball, a blindness resulting from acculturation to the baseball mythos, which for almost 150 years has regarded business as usual as perfectly normal. Which of course it isn’t. Baseball traditionalists freak out over obvious, yet relatively minor corrections to the game. Because it is boring to watch someone attempt to do something that they can’t, which is why the WNBA dunk contest doesn’t exist, some reasonable baseball folks came up with the designated hitter. Traditionalists acted as if this was the baseball equivalent of the Pope marrying Liberace. So imagine the traditionalist reaction to the suggestion that baseball’s entire scoring system is irredeemably flawed. To paraphrase baseball’s great Yogi Berra, Jason was 90% appalled, and the other half of him thought I must be joking.

Yet I am perfectly serious; we must fix baseball. But first, to Jason’s critique of my basic argument that the triple is more difficult to accomplish than the home run, and should be rewarded with an outcome commensurate with its degree of difficulty (it was only later through a painstaking 5 minute process of Google research when I learned that the double is just as hard to accomplish as the home run, so Jason’s critique focused on the triple). Jason’s primary argument is that the triple is a byproduct of luck or chance, that skill is not involved. Were this the case, however, one would expect to find different players atop the leader board of triples from year to year in the big leagues. Unless, of course, some players are inherently luckier than other players. Until we can isolate the good luck gene, however, we must accept that the repeated appearance of the same players atop the triples leader board reflects a specific skill set on the part of the players in question. And the last ten years of baseball history are enough to convince us that triples have little or nothing to do with luck: Carl Crawford lead the AL in triples for three consecutive years from 2004 through 2006, Curtis Granderson lead the AL in consecutive years in 2007 and 2008, Jimmy Rollins lead the NL in triples in 2001, 2002, 2004, and 2007, and Jose Reyes lead the NL in triples in 2005, 2006, and 2008. Ask any player of a game of chance and he or she will tell you that luck comes and goes. What we observe in the records of Crawford, Granderson, Rollins and Reyes is consistent excellence. If luck is in any way involved then it is in the form of the old cliché that you make your own luck.

So what are the skills involved in hitting a triple, the skill set that enabled Jimmy Rollins, for example, to lead the NL in triples four times? The first skill counters another of Jason’s arguments, that baseball players do not attempt to “place” the ball when they swing at a pitch. But there are a number of situations in baseball when “placing” the ball is exactly what a hitter is attempting to do. “Placing” the batted ball is a huge part of baseball strategy. To wit, when a runner is on second with less than two outs, a batter will often be instructed to hit towards the right side of the field, so that a ground ball hit in this direction will result in the runner being able to advance to third. Or, a batter will make every effort to hit a fly ball deep enough to allow a runner to tag up and advance , whether from second to third or from third to home. There is even an official baseball term for this “placing” of the ball, the sacrifice. The sacrifice is considered such an important skill that it is tracked as a statistic; e.g. in 2009 Bengie Molina lead the NL in sacrifice flies with 11. And don’t think for a minute that when it is contract negotiation time that Molina’s agent isn’t pushing for more money based on this particular skill in “placing” the ball. Being from Baltimore, Jason and I both know about the “Baltimore Chop”, a batting strategy propagated by Baltimore Orioles legendary manager Earl Weaver in which the batter purposely made contact with the ball in a chopping fashion such that the ball hopped up extremely high, allowing time for the runners on base to advance safely. The “Baltimore Chop” is textbook “placing” of the ball. And, of course, the bunt is nothing other than the strategic “placing” of the ball in the field of play. Just as a successful bunt or “Baltimore Chop” depends on the successful “placing” of the ball, so does the triple. As the great Willie Keeler put it, “hit ‘em where they ain’t.” That, in a nutshell, is the skill involved in the batter’s greatest art, the triple.

Which brings us to another of Jason’s arguments, that no one tries to hit triples. This rebuttal implies that players do attempt to hit home runs. But any baseball man (or woman) worth his salt will tell you that the surest way for a batter to enter a prolonged hitting slump is to go up to bat trying to hit home runs. Swinging for the fences will get you a lot closer to the Mendoza Line then to the warning track. Professional batters, then, generally take the approach of trying to make good contact. Baseball presumes that the best result of making good contact is the ball that flies the furthest in the air. But is this necessarily so? It is just as easy to make a case that the best result of making good contact is putting a ball in play that is the most difficult for the opposition to field. The home run’s dirty little secret is that it would never be a chore for a defense to field a power hitter’s long ball were it not for the well placed fence; power hitters just hit a lot of long fly balls, i.e the power hitter is simply the disguised master of the sacrifice fly. The triples hitter is the true master of “hitting ‘em where they ain’t”, i.e. the true master of hitting.

The home run hitter also benefits from another bias, the misguided belief that power trumps speed. Invariably, the most gifted triples hitters combine the art of hitting with preternatural speed. The home run hitter’s work is done once he wallops the ball; all that is left is to waddle around the bases. The triples hitter doubles the home run hitter’s accomplishment, as his work has just begun once he has “placed” the ball. He must then combine a track star’s speed with the courage of the poker player whose chips are all on the table. The triples hitter’s athleticism and derring-do lends him a panache inaccessible to the lumbering slugger.

The strange thing is that everyone already knows the triple is the most difficult hit to obtain in baseball (barring the inside-the-park-homerun, which we shall return to shortly). It is a baseball truism that the most difficult phase of hitting for the cycle (hitting a single, double, triple, and home run in one game) is getting the triple. Any time a player is getting close to hitting for the cycle the announcer will invariably either, a) point out that the hitter already has a triple, the most difficult part of the cycle, or b)note that the player has not yet hit a triple, the most difficult part of hitting for the cycle. And everyone accepts this as valid precisely because the triple is the most difficult hitting feat in baseball. The missing element in achieving one-year greatness in baseball hitting is referred to in the title of that very feat; by naming the act of leading the league in average, home runs, and RBI’s the “Triple Crown”, baseball is unconsciously acknowledging that the greatest player is not the one who leads in any of those (lesser) categories, but he who is the king of the triple.

With the preeminence of the triple now established, before we address the changes necessary to fix baseball, we must return to my earlier assertion that baseball must needs be fixed. Why bother? One might argue that in focusing on the difficulty of the triple I have overlooked the fact that the home run is judged most important because it accomplishes the object of the game, scoring runs. But this response is simply advancing the argument that since baseball has always had a flawed and illogical scoring system, than it must continue to do so. Which brings us to the core reason that baseball must be fixed, which is quite simply in order to save it. Baseball was the most popular team sport in America for at least the first half of the twentieth century, as along with horse racing and boxing it dominated the sports scene. This is largely because baseball is the perfect hybrid of individual and team competition. The showdown between pitcher and batter rivals the two greatest individual sports, boxing and tennis, for mano a mano thrills. But baseball, at the same time, offers everything that comes with great team sports, most importantly the beauty of watching men (or women) function as a unit and the joy inherent to participating and witnessing that unity in multiplicity. Despite these attractions, the illogical structuring of baseball’s scoring system puts it at odds with the driving force of sports as entertainment, which I touched upon at the beginning. People watch sports for many varied reasons, but the primary reason men (and some women) watch an ungodly number of hours of sports broadcasting is that sports holds the illusion of a world that makes sense. Unlike real life, which is largely irrational and incoherent, in sports there are clear rules with definitive winners and losers. Men deeply long for the world to be like this, although it obviously isn’t.

Baseball, with its rules that reward the easy over the difficult, is far too close to real life to hold our interest as we cope with the irrationality of a world that accelerates as rapidly as our technology advances. Football, the king of American sports, long since surpassed baseball in popularity. It did so in the 1960’s, as the world shifted, we landed on the moon, and things made less sense than they ever had before. Things continue to make less sense every year, which is why football, which makes perfect sense, grows in popularity every year. If baseball is to survive, it has to reverse the Talking Heads and start making sense.

So, how to fix baseball? A simple adjustment to the scoring system should suffice, leaving intact everything beautiful about the game. Home runs will still be rewarded with a run. Doubles will now also be worth a run. Triples will be worth one and a half runs. And, to prevent runners from stopping at third, and to reward the only feat more difficult than the triple, the inside-the park-homerun will now be worth two runs. These simple changes in baseball’s scoring system will give us back our national pastime. In Baltimore we used to yell out “O” as loud as we could during the “O say does that star spangled banner yet wave” line of the national anthem. We used to really care. We might not be able to make Peter Angelos sell the Orioles to Cal Ripken and save our team, but we can still save our sport.

What Does a Woman Want?

Freud famously expressed a frustration born from his inability to fathom the feminine mystery: “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’” That Freud, one of the most insightful thinkers ever, failed to answer this question satisfactorily speaks less to the difficulty of the question and more to the thickheaded nature of men when it comes to women. Because this is actually not in the least a difficult question to answer. A woman’s core desire is to have a desirable partner of her choosing, and, more importantly, to be the most important thing in the life of her chosen partner. There are of course individual exceptions, but by and large if you spend any time with women and listen to them talk it becomes clear how central the desire for this ideal union is to almost all of them. Women may want more out of life than this, but never less.

And yet we all go around acting as if the answer to Freud’s question remains a mystery. I think that we do this because we focus on the “more” that women may want out of life, while ignoring the foundational desire common to almost all women. The “more” will of course be unique to each woman, and certain patterns may emerge in the female collective. The great mistake is to look at these patterns as if the answer to the question of what women want is to be found there, rather than in their (mostly) uniform central desire. Women themselves make this mistake, too. Carol Queen, noted author on female sexuality, wrote an essay in which she lists top five things that a woman wants, and the entire list consists of trends that exist in the “more” of female desires: 1) Equal pay for equal work, 2)Respect, 3) Trust, 4) Communication, 5) Sexual Permission. While each of these desires is reasonable, and while numbers two through five would be elements of a harmonious partnered relationship, a woman with all five of these elements in her life but who lacks a partner for whom she is the most important thing of all, would still exist in a state of fundamental discontent. Whereas a woman who has a desired partner for whom she is the most important thing of all, but who lacks one of these five elements, is still likely to feel a core of contentment that is unavailable to a woman who has a fabulously high paying job that has burst through the glass ceiling, and even has a desired partner who gives her respect, trust, communication, and sexual permission, if, for example, this partner’s career is more important to him or her than the woman in question.

Everyone knows this, but we like to pretend we don’t, so the obvious question is why? Freud posed the question well before feminism had achieved its greatest accomplishments, so we can’t lay the blame for our collective faux-beffudlement at the feet of the feminists, but they may play a role in its current version. Feminism, rightly, demanded the right of women to pursue the “more” that had been denied to them down through the ages. So when a feminist like Carol Queen thinks about what a woman wants she is going to emphasize those aspects of female desire that have traditionally been denied to women. A feminist who responded to the question of “what does a woman want” with the real answer would risk rolling back all of the triumphs of the past century which allow women to pursue the “more.” So, by definition, a committed feminist is someone who can’t correctly answer the question, “what does a woman want?” Of course, that does not stop women, feminist and otherwise, from constantly talking about what they really want, the aforementioned chosen partner for whom they are the most important thing of all. They just can’t have this discussion in the context of the question, “what does a woman want?” If asked what they want, feminists must provide answers that only provide “the more”, or, if they reveal their desire for a chosen partner who values them more than anything else, this desire must be portrayed as an ingredient to satisfaction in life, thereby disguising its true status as the sine qua non of female happiness.

Men take this opening and run with it as an excuse not to do the hard relationship work involved in valuing their female partners above all else. The cost of doing business paid by the feminists is that they have allowed men the stance that as long as they are respectful, trustworthy, etc. towards their wives/partners, then they have done their best to give women what they want, even if they have not made their women number one. It is, as one of my astute female colleagues pointed out to me, easier for a man to stay late at work then it is to come home from work and take equal responsibility for helping to raise the three children and do a fair share of housekeeping. But it is only by doing the latter that a man will communicate to his female partner that he values her above all else. This is called doing the dirty work, and men too often like to keep their hands clean under the cover of career advancement or by simply spending too much time attending to their own set of interests. But the price paid for this is to never experience the truly adoring female partner, which is the best that life has to offer (straight) men. Nothing in the world glows like the woman who feels that her chosen partner values her above all else, because nothing comes close to a woman who has her central desire in life met consistently. The selfish man pretends that he doesn’t know what women want in order to avoid the labor necessary to achieve relationship greatness. Labor is a term not coincidentally connected with giving birth, that other greatest thing that life has to offer, which underscores the fact that anything in life worth having requires labor. The love of a man’s life should be his central labor. I would argue that what you choose to labor for most intensively should be something that can love you back.

Perhaps we are also all invested in maintaining the “mystery of woman.” This element of mystery could be seen as a necessary ingredient for the sexual dance, and as such our blindness to the lack of mystery as to “what does a woman want” could be seen as biologically determined. But I’m not so sure. I believe that it is us humans, men and women alike, who are mysterious, and that this mystery comes from the “more” that each of us wants out of life that is so individualized and can be so inscrutable to the other. Every individual on Earth wants something different, but all women want the same thing, and all men (or women who love women) would be wise to give it to them; it is our surest route to happiness, “more” notwithstanding. Another astute married female colleague of mine taught me the phrase “happy wife equals happy life.” These are words to live by. The real mystery is why we so often don’t.

Oh Lord, It’s Hard to be Humble

Nietzche’s infamous challenge to belief, “God is dead,” along with his impassioned arguments against Christianity, has always lurked around the edges of my faith. I have always felt that an encounter with Nietzsche, perhaps the Judeo-Christian tradition’s greatest critic, was inevitable. What value faith if it can’t withstand Nietzsche’ penetrating scrutiny? A layman rather than a Nietzsche scholar, I have turned for help in my encounter to Baltimore’s own H.L. Mencken (killing two birds with one stone, as I had never before read Mencken, one of my adopted home town’s literary giants) . Mencken penned The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, a remarkable summation of Nietzsche’s thought, recently republished and thankfully available at the local biblioteque. (It is important to note that, like Nietzsche, Mencken was a gifted thinker and writer, but also, like Nietzsche, fell into the trap of racial determinism. Put more bluntly, Mencken was an overt racist, as exhibited in The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche when Mencken touts the inherent superiority of European Americans to their African American countrymen. We shall return to the shadow cast by Nietzsche’s philosophy, a darkness which haunted Mencken’s thought and continues to trouble humanity today, but this caveat should be noted from the start, as warranted by the worst chapters of our recent human history.)

Because Nietzsche’s thought has the breadth and depth befitting a great philosopher, it will serve our purposes here to simply jump in where Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity goes off the tracks (for a proper overview of Nietzsche see Mencken). Mencken captures the core of Nietzsche’s assault on Christianity: “Nietzsche maintains that Christianity urges a man to make no… efforts to insure his personal survival in the struggle for existence. The beatitudes require, he says, that instead of trying to do so, the Christian shall devote his energies to helping others and shall give no thought to himself.” This reading of Christianity leads to the necessary conclusion that if a man were to follow Christianity’s urging, then (again here Mencken interpreting Nietzsche) “his activity is restricted to one of two things: standing perfectly still or deliberately making himself inferior.” Mencken provides Nietzsche’s own words to clarify this stance, with Christianity understood as “the tendency hostile to life”, and that which “thwarts the law of development , of evolution, of the survival of the fittest.”

Nietzsche was philosophy’s first great Darwinian. His rejection of Christianity is the necessary counterpart to his embrace of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Per Mencken, Nietzsche “proposed, then, that before it was too late, humanity should reject Christianity, as the ‘greatest of all imaginable corruptions,’ and admit freely and fully, that the law of natural selection was universal and that the only way to make real progress was to conform to it.”

Nietzsche has misunderstood both Christianity and humanity’s relationship to Darwin’s theory of natural selection in one fell swoop. It is necessary first to treat of Darwin’s reductionist views on Darwinian theory. For Nietzsche, as seen above, Nietzsche’s theory of natural selection, with its emphasis on survival of the fittest, applies to humanity in the exact same fashion as it does to every other variety of flora and fauna. Per Mencken, “Nietzsche says that the thing which best differentiates man from the other animals is his capacity for making and keeping a promise.” I would argue that, instead, the most important difference between humanity and other animals is that, unlike animals, we humans are capable of destroying the world right along with ourselves. It is this crucial difference between humans and other animals, one that is overlooked by Nietzsche, which creates a separate framework for our relationship to evolution.

It is in this separate framework in which the teachings of the world’s great faith traditions, including Christianity, attain to heights of wisdom unavailable to Nietzsche in his reductionist stance of equating humans with all other creatures. But before we go any further, it is important to correct Nietzsche’s key misunderstanding of Christian teaching. While the gospels are replete with Christ’s insistence that his followers become less obsessed with their daily welfare, by, for example, pointing out how well cared for are the lilies in the field, these are primarily teachings to reframe his followers understanding of creation as a place of abundance. Of course, it is no mystery that even in the most abundant of settings one must still put in the requisite labor to reap the bounty, and I don’t believe that Jesus’ basic teaching that God will provide in any way denies the need for the labor required to access those provisions. Nietzsche would argue that a good Christian would be too busy looking after his neighbor to put in the necessary labor. In making this argument Nietzsche has misread the second in the pair of central commandments on which all of Christianity rests; this commandment states “Love your neighbor as yourself,” not “Love your neighbor instead of yourself.” The central point here, and one lost on Nietzsche, is that in order to do a good job of loving your neighbor you must be loving yourself an equal amount. And, if I am not mistaken, the love of neighbor will grow out of an abundance of love for one’s self, such that there will never be an inadequacy of love for self that might prevent one from reasonably seeing to one’s own welfare in the normal every day ways that no one else can provide. There is work that one can only do for one’s self. Part of loving your neighbor is letting her do this work while you take care of your own business. (The first in the pair of central commandments, to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” {Matthew 22: 37) is simply a translation of the greatest gift of Nietzsche’s philosophy, his “Yes to life!”)

It might help here to consider another wisdom tradition. I once went to a conference about working with troubled youth at which one of the speakers (see reclaiming .org for the speaker’s website) described his youth program’s approach as based on a central tenet of a particular American Indian tribe’s wisdom tradition. This tradition held that all individuals require four basic opportunities to prosper. The opportunity to experience, respectively, achievement , autonomy, altruism, and attachment; they are easy to remember when you name them the “Four A’s”. You would naturally pair the more individualistic pursuits of achievement and autonomy, and also pair the more communal elements of altruism and attachment. Jesus’ teaching of “Love your neighbor as yourself” is simply a pithy phrasing of how to achieve a life affirming balance of the Four A’s. Nietzsche’s will to power, however, is but the exclusive emphasis of achievement and autonomy, and a complete denial of the need to balance them with altruism and attachment. Perhaps, in the long history of Christian influence on western civilization, altruism and attachment were emphasized as spiritual virtues more-so than their counterparts of achievement and autonomy. To the extent that they were, than Nietzsche’s contribution can be seen as reawakening us to the need for achievement and autonomy in a healthy human individual. But mistaking Nietzsche for a prophet of truth rather than knowing him as a balancing corrective, is to invite disaster. One need look no further than the co-optation of Nietzche’s philosophy by the Nazi party to witness the dangers of misunderstanding Nietzsche’s contribution.

But a Christianity informed by Nietzsche would be a reinvigorated force for good. When Christianity loses its balance and overemphasizes attachment and altruism, when it does teach “Love your neighbor more than yourself,” it’s values are warped. An example of this is the Christian value of humility. A Christianity uncorrected by Nietzsche, skewing towards attachment and altruism, elevates humility to an end unto itself; one is to practice humility simply because it is good to be humble. But humility understood as an end unto itself is warped beyond repair. I’ve never liked Ralph Lauren Polo garments, largely because of the Polo logo affixed prominently to the left breast of every Polo shirt. My distaste for the Polo logo is based on my contempt for the act of wearing the Polo logo as an expression of socioeconomic status. But my refusal to don Ralph Lauren is an act of neurotic humility, because by refusing to wear Polo, based on my judgment that people who wear Polo are snobs, I necessarily conceive of myself as superior to the Polo consumer because of my humility. When humility becomes an end unto itself then all acts of humility based on this value are just another way of being better than other people, thereby rendering this warped form of humility neurotic. (Speaking of neurosis, after reading Nietzsche I realize that the father of all things neurotic, Sigmund Freud, was just a Nietzchean. Freud’s theory of dreams as wish fulfillment and his theory of guilt as the aggressive drive pointed inward both appear first in Nietzsche. Nietzsche also wrote eloquently about the unconscious, a concept with which Freud built the entire edifice of psychoanalysis.)

The true, non-neurotic function of humility comes into focus when Christianity is balanced by Nietzsche’s reemphasis of achievement and autonomy. When achievement and autonomy are as important as attachment and altruism, there must needs be a mediator between the individualistic and the communal elements of human life. Humility is that mediator. This function of humility is seen clearly in the old cliché “keep your feet on the ground while you reach for the stars,” i.e. the only way to stay grounded while you strive for the heights of individual excellence is through displays of humility. We display humility not because it is important to be humble in order to be “good people”, but because humility allows us to maintain attachment, often by way of altruism, while we pursue achievement and autonomy. Humility strikes the necessary balance for us to keep the commandment of loving our neighbors as ourselves.

In closing it is important to return to the crucial difference between humanity and the rest of creation, which is nothing other than our ability to destroy all life on the planet. Unlike all that came before us, which evolved according to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, humanity is that which must evolve to the state of loving our neighbors as ourselves, if we are to survive. We must temper our Nietzschean need for achievement and autonomy, our will to power, with equal consideration for attachment and altruism. Doing so is the only true way to say “Yes to life!”; not doing so will end all life as we know it. I would say that this is the true meaning of Jesus’ promise of eternal life for all those who follow him. Humanity can choose to follow the teachings of our great sages by loving our neighbors as ourselves, or not. Whether humanity lives on eternally depends precisely on this choice.

Belief and Behaviorism

“Do you believe in God?” is among the most common of questions. But the question itself raises another, perhaps more interesting question: what does it mean to believe in God? The answer rests in our understanding of what is meant by the word believe. Merriam-Webster defines belief as “a state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing.” The key words here are “state… of mind”; belief is conceived as, sensu stricto, a mental state. One might say, “I hold the belief that ___”, and everyone would understand that one holds the belief in one’s mind.

We have deferred to the primacy of mental states at least as far back as Descartes, whose cogito, “I think therefore I am”, is the ultimate expression of our bias in favor of mental states, as through them we find the very bedrock of our existence. But it is this bias, one that plays out in our use of language, which confounds us in our understanding of what it is to believe. Our use of language separates belief as a mental state, the “state of mind” referred to by Merriam Webster, from actions, which are considered to be the result of these mental states. Our language provides the template for this understanding of belief, as one would explain a specific belief thusly: “I believe that fire burns, therefore I do not touch the flame.” Our use of language typically describes belief and action as a one-two punch combination.

Fortunately, the behaviorists have seen clearly through the fog created by our use of language and our Cartesian fondness for mental states. Within the tradition of behaviorism is the recognition that the separation of belief and behavior is a false divide. Using the example of the burning flame, it would make no sense for someone who claims to believe that fire burns, to proceed to touch the flame (unless the individual were a masochist, in which case her actions would still agree with her stated belief that fire burns). If I believe that the flame will harm me if I touch it, and if I don’t wish to be harmed, but then I go ahead and touch the flame anyway, then it can rightly be said that I did not really believe that the flame would harm me. The next step, made difficult by language and Descartes, is to recognize that belief does not exist as a mental state that informs actions, but instead resides in acts themselves. I only believe in the flame’s power to harm me through the act of not touching the flame; likewise, were I to touch the flame, just to see if it really will burn me, could I be said to believe? To be clear, I do not have a belief that the flame will harm me that exists apart from my action of not touching the flame. Not touching the flame is my belief that the flame will harm me. Since we can only be said to believe in something if our acts reflect that belief, the false divide collapses, uniting act and belief.

Sit in meditative observation of the mind and try to locate belief. It is nowhere to be found. Is it thinking the phrase, “I believe that fire burns”? But I could just as easily think the phrase “I don’t believe that fire burns”, yet there’s still no way that I am going to stick my hand inside my burning woodstove.

I often find myself wondering if I really believe in God or not. I have always claimed to believe, but never had the certainty of possessing a genuine belief. If belief is a mental state, then how am I to know if the mental state coexisting with my verbal assertion of belief is indeed the real thing? The emphasis of organized religions, particularly my faith tradition of Christianity, on belief as the sine qua non of spiritual life, combined with our linguistic and Cartesian misconception of belief itself, leaves us all thinking that the mental state of belief must include doubt; no lesser an authority than Kierkegaard expresses the mental gymnastics required to conceptualize belief as a mental state: “If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.” Paraphrasing Wittgenstein, perhaps the best to be hoped for is to believe that I believe it. But all that changes if belief in God is no different than belief in other things, such as the power of the flame to burn me. Understood this way, belief in God resides in the acts of belief, the same way that belief in the burning power of the flame resides in not touching it. Of course, it is then necessary to catalogue a list of acts in which belief in God might reside, but reasonable people would certainly agree that, depending on your chosen religion, the list might include prayer, worship, meditation, keeping the Sabbath, and the spectrum of virtuous acts such as doing good to those who hate you (dangerous extremist behaviors are of course not ruled out by this conception of belief, but neither are they ruled out for atheists; dangerous extremism seems to be a human problem more so than a religious problem). Thus conceived, the belief in God resides in these acts, and nowhere else, even and especially the mind of the believer; the chains linking belief to our ever-shifting mental states, the home of doubt and fear, are cut. Believer is as believer does, forever and ever, amen.

Of course it might be argued that one is comparing apples and oranges by comparing belief in God with the belief in the power of fire to burn, as one can be proved and the other can not. But belief that resides in action has nothing to do with proof. You can’t prove that unicorns exist, but you can believe in them in an altogether serious fashion by spending your life searching for them. For a real life example see those individuals who devote their lives to finding the Loch Ness Monster or Big Foot. The bloke who looks for Nessy has a belief in the same category as my belief in fire’s power to burn because both of these beliefs reside in our actions. Whether acting as if God is real is any better or worse than looking for unicorns or avoiding contact with fire is, of course, at the individual’s discretion. But belief, in each case, resides in the act.

“And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed him. A gale arose on the lake, so great that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep. And they went and woke him up, saying, ‘Lord, save us! We are perishing!’ And he said to them, ‘Why are you afraid, you of little faith?’ Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a dead calm. They were amazed saying, ‘What sort of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?” (Matthew 8:23-27) In answer to the disciples’ question, he was one whose belief in God, as witnessed in his acts, was complete. Jesus’ critique, here, of his disciples’ degree of belief is accurate not because Jesus has some special ability to see into their mental states, but because the disciples’ belief is clearly not on display in the only place anyone, including Jesus, might find it – in the disciples’ actions. The difference between Jesus and his disciples, and the teaching for those who engage with this gospel story, becomes clear once belief is conceived of correctly. The only difference between Jesus and his disciples that day in the boat was that Jesus engaged in the act of belief, while his disciples engaged in the act of disbelief.

One enters the Kingdom of God when one’s belief in God resides in one’s actions to the same extent as does one’s respect for the power of fire to burn.

Why I Loathe Bill Belichick

It’s not Bill Belichick’s three Super Bowl rings. Bill Walsh had three and, while I rooted against his 49ers as I would against any dynasty that does not belong to my team, hating the 49ers was never about Bill Walsh. It’s not Bill Belichick’s sour demeanor in post-game news conferences, either. Bill Parcells, Bellichick’s mentor, could be just as sour, and was more confrontational to boot, but it always seemed like it would be fun to play on Parcells’ side. And it’s not the fact that Belichick is credited with coaching genius, despite the fact that he never won a thing as a head coach until he paired up with Hall-Of Fame talent Tom Brady at quarterback.

It’s not any of that. I loathe Bill Belichick simply because of the obnoxious game day outfits that have become his signature, like Tom Landry’s fedora. Ahh, If only Belichick’s costumes had a shred of the elegance of Landry’s fedora. Belichick insists on prepping for the camera by donning a Patriots hoody sweatshirt. So far, no problem. The hoody might be a bit casual, but it could signal function over form, a coach too busy out-scheming his opponent, too busy taking care of business, to bother with how he looks. Or it might be a gesture of humility, Belichick’s way of saying that the role of NFL head football coach has taken on a bit too much gravity, and that he’s just a guy doing his job. But all of these benign possibilities are undone by what Belichick does with his sweatshirt: he cuts off the sleeves above the elbows. Belichick wears not his heart, but his ego on those cutoff sleeves; Bellichick’s is as studied a look as, for example, NBA coaching great Pat Riley’s slicked back hair and designer suits, if a bit counter-intuitively.

Let me be clear that I am not against having a little fun in what is often disparaged as the No Fun League. When Jerry Glanville was walking the Atlanta Falcons sideline dressed in black and leaving tickets at will-call for the late Elvis Presley, we ate it up because it was a natural outgrowth of Glanville’s wild-man persona, and, as such, fun. His team’s performance may have been mediocre, but Glanville’s antics served to put the spotlight on his team (quite an accomplishment in Atlanta, perhaps the worst major city sports town in America). Belichick’s affected thrift store look ironically does just the opposite. Belichick coaches what was up until very recently a dynasty; his teams are among the best to have ever taken the field in professional football. But Belichick’s shredded sweatshirts, just undignified enough to hold our attention a beat too long, make the Patriots remarkable run of success all about Belichick, which is exactly why he wears them. The sweatshirt screams “I’m Bill Belichick and I’m so good that I don’t even have to dress professionally like all the other poor schmucks who wish they were me.” Belichick’s cutoff sweatshirt is the pinnacle of preening.

Belichick’s version of Landry’s fedora? Bellichick donned a retro beanie with a pom-pom tassel and a logo of the Patriots old cartoon mascot for last Sunday’s playoff drubbing at the hands of the Baltimore Ravens. Such a childish chapeau crowning an accomplished leader of men seemed oddly out of place, until one realizes that the child’s cap fits Belichick just right. As children we all think we are the center of the universe. Belichick still does.

The Problem With Really Existing Democracy

            There is a popular bumper sticker that reads “Don’t blame me, I voted for X”.  In Maryland, where Democrat Martin O’Malley (an odd mix of a very poor man’s John Kennedy and Jon Bonjovi if he sang Irish bar tunes) occupies the governor’s mansion, the bumper sticker currently reads “Don’t’ blame me, I voted for Ehrlich”, a reference to erstwhile governor Bob Ehrlich, the Republican ousted by O’Malley in the last gubernatorial election.  In addition to voicing the bumper sticker affixer’s (BSA) displeasure with O’Malley, “Don’t blame me, I voted for Ehrlich” is a clue to the problem with representative democracy.

           

 The key word in the bumper sticker’s formula is “blame”.  To accept blame is the ultimate act of responsibility; only those in power have the authority to say “the buck stops here.”  To accept blame is to accept responsibility for and, by extension, exercise power over the community in which you exist.  The denial of blame gets one off the hook for responsibility, but unmasks a powerlessness beneath the blamelessness.  You can only deny blame if you abdicate the exercise of will.  It is the absence of will that marks the masses who participate in democracy.

           

Everything comes at a price, and democracy is paid for by the transfer of the will from the population at large, the voting public, to its representative government. Representative government holds out the promise of duly elected officials carrying out “the will of the people.”  What gets lost in the ideology of representative democracy is that in order to carry out the will of the people, the government must have in its possession that very will.  This is, of course, guaranteed by the process of free and fair elections; if elected representatives fail to carry out the will of the people they are summarily replaced by those parties who can, for the time being, act as more trustworthy surrogates for the people’s will.  But while the major parties take turns exercising the will of the people like basketball teams alternating possession, the people are relegated to the bleachers, mere spectators.

           

The subtext of “Don’t blame me, I voted for Ehrlich” is the implication that the BSA’s obligations as citizen end in the voting booth.  The BSA need not serve her community because she has met her responsibility in the act of casting her vote.  From that moment on she is blameless.  This passive stance is necessary for the blame, and all of the responsibility that accompanies blame, to be shifted onto the democratically elected government.  There is no reason for the BSA to serve her community, because the responsibility for the welfare of her community is not hers, it is her representative government’s.  Re. the well-being of her community, the BSA’s will is in absentia.  You can find it at City Hall.

           

Ironically, the conservatives who rail against the intrusion of “big government” into the lives of the citizenry are far more likely to display “Don’t blame me, I voted for X” bumper stickers than their liberal brethren.  Conservatives may take their ideology in and out of the voting booth at their leisure, but they leave their will in the ballot box like everyone else.  As liberals prefer naivete to bitterness on their bumper stickers, they must find other means to express their lack of will.  A frequent favorite is the empty gesture of threatening to move to that great white utopia to the north, Canada, where health care is free and the national identity consists of Not Being American.  Liberals, of course, never actually move to Canada.  But what they express in threatening to do so is that they have absolutely nothing to do with the conditions on the ground, which is exactly what the conservatives are saying with “Don’t blame me, I voted for X.”  Void of their will, the liberal instinctive fantasy is flight.  Conservatives, bound by another bumper sticker’s credo, “America, love it or leave it”, encounter the void of their will with the instinctive fantasy of fight, on full display in this recent bumper sticker: “Nuke Iran before Iran nukes us”.  (Perhaps an equivalent liberal bumper sticker might be “That’s it, I’m moving to Canada”, which would of course circumnavigate the highways of America in an endless loop, as endless sign of the American-bound liberal’s escapist fantasy.)

           

“Don’t blame me, I voted for X” can be translated as “Don’t blame me, I voted for Daddy.”  In transferring their will to the representative government, the voting public has regressed to the role of child, with the two major parties assuming the role of Mommy and Daddy.  The child-like fantasy that maintains the transfer of the will of the people to their government is that Mommy and Daddy will take care of everything.  Whether you prefer Mommy or Daddy is ultimately beside the point, as what you really want, as evidenced by the aversion to blame at the core of our bumper sticker’s formula, is to be completely unaccountable.  We will gladly hand over our will if we are allowed to suckle at the breast forever.

           

“Don’t blame me, I voted for X” can also be translated as “Don’t blame me, I didn’t ask to be born,” the common adolescent rallying cry in the face of adult authority.  It is the ultimate passive stance: not only am I not responsible for my actions, the responsibility is yours and became eternally so the moment you created me.  Translated thusly, “Don’t blame me, I voted for X” takes the more radical step beyond emptiness of will to emptiness of being: I do not even exist, except as your creation.  The flight from blame reaches its apogee.  The representative government is left to its own devices; there is no will of the people to enact, as there are no people.

           

As we no longer exist in relationship to our government, and as our government no longer has any use for our will in its current state of self-sufficiency, a space has opened up in which we might reclaim our will.  Of course, by doing so we take the risk of blame, and the risk of forfeiting escape, to Canada or elsewhere, by taking our stand here and now.  We are irrelevant to our government, and our complicity in this irrelevance is total.  As the government, in feigned representation of our will, consolidates global interests with a will that is exclusive of the people, we are left in possession of our “useless” wills.  That is the position from where we start.  What shall we will?