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?    

Slavoj Zizek Met The Buddha On The Road, But Didn’t Kill Him Because He Looked Like Slavoj Zizek

With First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, Slavoj Zizek is at the peak of his considerable critical powers. Zizek’s thesis here is that 9/11, at the beginning of this inauspicious decade, and the ongoing global financial crisis at its end, together signify the twin deaths of liberal democracy as hegemonic paradigm. Zizek maintains that 9/11 marked the death of liberal democracy’s political supremacy, with the financial crisis finishing off its claim to transcendence in the economic sphere. Zizek’s next, more problematic maneuver is a call for a return to a re-imagined communism in response to the failures of liberal democracy and the lurch in which these failures have left us all.

Zizek’s greatest strength is the critical eye he brings to bear on the current state of affairs. The first half of First As Tragedy, Then As Farce sings as Zizek shreds the pieties of liberal democracy’s “cultural capitalism”. Zizek nails precisely how capitalism has masked itself culturally, posing as the antidote for the poison to be found in its very own nature: “Consumption is supposed to sustain the quality of life, its time should be ‘quality time’ – not the time of alienation, of imitating models imposed by society, of the fear of not being able to ‘keep up with the Joneses’, but the time of the authentic fulfillment of my true Self, of the sensuous play of experience, and of caring for others, through becoming involved in charity or ecology, etc.”

Zizek’s key insight is that however you dress up consumption, in order for capitalism, “cultural” or otherwise, to function, consumption must continue apace. Zizek sees the pseudo-transformation of consumption on display in the Starbucks “It’s not just what you’re buying. It’s what you’re buying into.” ad campaign: “The ‘cultural surplus’ is here spelled out: the price is higher than elsewhere since what you are really buying is the ‘coffee ethic’ which includes care for the environment, social responsibility towards the producers, plus a place where you yourself can participate in communal life…. And if this is not enough, if your ethical needs are still unsatisfied and you continue to worry about Third World misery, then there are additional products you can buy.” Taking Zizek’s insight to heart, one is reminded of President Bush’s exhortation of Americans to fulfill their civic duty by continuing to keep shopping after 9/11, and of President Obama’s recent statements to the effect that if Americans will only keep shopping the end of the recession is surely in sight. The truth grasped by Zizek is that be it tragic horror (9/11), economic meltdown, or crippling guilt due to “Third World misery”, capitalism, again “cultural” or otherwise, has reduced us to one response: Keep Shopping!

First As Tragedy, Then As Farce climaxes just past its mid-point , when Zizek takes us where this is all headed (a place where our current leadership dare not gaze, as they remain duty bound in their loyalty to liberal democracy, that spouse of capitalism, the vehicle transporting us exactly where Zizek points). Zizek describes “an apocalyptic end point: ecological breakdown, the biogenetic reduction of humans to manipulable machines, total digital control over our lives…. At all these levels, things are approaching a zero-point; ‘the end of times is near.’” One is forced to decide whether Zizek is yelling “Fire!” in a crowded movie theater or whether he is simply a reasonable pessimist. I know what vibe I am getting.

Having walked up to the abyss and peaked over, Zizek spends the rest of First As Tragedy, Then As Farce in an impassioned plea for a return to a re-imagined communism for the 21st century. Given the track record of “really existing socialism” in the 20th century, it is almost impossible not to dismiss this portion of the text as a manual on How To Make A Very Bad Situation Even Worse. But if you give Zizek the benefit of the doubt that a constructive re-imagining of communism is even possible, then one of Zizek’s throwaway lines reveals the limitations of Zizek’s strict materialist imagination.

The passage in question, a familiar refrain from Zizek’s prior work, is his evaluation of what he terms “Western Buddhism”. Zizek’s stance on Buddhism as practiced in the west is that “it enables you to fully participate in the frantic capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it, that you are well aware how worthless the whole spectacle is, since what really matters is the peace of the inner Self to which you know you can always withdraw.” But one need only expose one’s self to such bestselling mainstream “Western Buddhist” authors as Pema Chodron to understand that the entire edifice of Buddhist dharma is intended to cultivate mindfulness, i.e. being fully present to the world and all its suffering. That Zizek’s caricature of “Western Buddhism” inverts the process of mindful awakening into a means of self-centered withdrawal, in effect accusing Buddhism of cultivating the very condition for which it is a cure, leaves Zizek’s painfully obvious reaction formation open to interpretation.

The bet here is that, on one level, Zizek is well aware of what the Buddhists are really on about; the Buddhists make no bones about their belief in the non-conceptual nature of being, that the utility of thinking has its limits, and that mindful awakening occurs only where thought intentionally leaves off. Zizek’s dust jackets proclaim that “he leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized”, equating Zizek with infinite theory. Oft referred to as the “rock star” of critical theory, it should come as no surprise that Zizek’s narcissistic equilibrium rests on the public recognition of the potency and unlimited nature of his theory, of his thought. Buddhism, with its emphasis on the limitations of thought, says to Zizek that there is a limit to how far his thinking can take us, and that the most important steps, even and especially for Slavoj Zizek, must be taken without Slavoj Zizek. The Buddha has thus left Zizek with a gaping narcissistic wound.

On another level, Zizek’s dismissal of “Western Buddhism” highlights the great, lasting flaw of Marxist materialism. The religiously atheist Marxist lineage, of which Zizek is the current standard bearer, bets the house that human social relations can be arranged such that peace and justice will reign. But Zizek, who is as indebted to Freud as he is to Marx, would be wise to revisit Freud’s remarks on communism in Civilization and Its Discontents: “the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest; but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influences which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property.” Never was uttered a more succinct explanation for the failure of “really existing socialism” in the 20th century. In whatever form Zizek re-imagines communism, he will have done nothing to alter the basic fact of human aggression, what Freud uncannily named our Death Instinct.

Only the world’s great religions, e.g. Buddhism, are equipped for the duel with the Death Instinct (Freud himself absented psychoanalysis from this epic duel with his belief that it’s utility was limited to tamping down neurosis into common every day misery; Freud’s atheism, shaping his disbelief in religion’s ability to pick up where psychoanalysis leaves off, marks him as one of history’s great pessimists). The frequent failures of religion are at their core no more than testimony to the power of the Death Instinct. It is the Death Instinct, not liberal democratic capitalism, that has brought this world to the brink of disaster. And it is only by connecting with something greater than the Death Instinct (something inside of us, outside of us, who anymore cares where this something resides?) that human civilization will outlast the century. If communism is indeed the answer, we will achieve that answer through (there is no other, less loaded word for it than) religion, including Buddhism. Zizek and his fellow travelers overlook the Buddha (and Christ, etc.) at everyone’s peril. Communism is fine just as it is, Mr. Zizek. Please help us re-imagine religion.

Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

James’ Portrait of a Lady brilliantly and tragically speaks to the seductive powers of the narcissist, and the vulnerability of the young idealist to those dark arts. In astonishingly elegant prose, James walks us through a trap that is all too familiar in contemporary pop culture; our current obsession with the banal comings and goings of celebrities and pseudo-celebrities reveals us to be under the same spell as that cast over Portrait of a Lady’s heroine, Isabel. James deftly portrays the risk inherent to Isabel’s youthful ambition to do something great with her life, as it leaves her vulnerable to her seducer Osmond’s narcissistic stance of standing outside and above. Our entanglement with narcissism, while similarly disabling, has darker roots. We feed the cult of celebrity out of a collective failure of the imagination, and it is into this void that the celebrity slides. When the only accomplishment left is fame, the narcissist is king at last. Portrait of a Lady rests on what Isabel would choose, once she realizes she has fallen under the dominion of the narcissist. Would that we could choose, so deep is our own devotion. If Portrait of a Lady is “a novel about dreams that do not come true”, as the afterword to my edition, penned by Stephen Koch, asserts, then our cultural narrative is about not having any dreams, except to be famous. James’ prose remains poignantly relevant, speaking to the lasting accomplishment of his art, and to our need to reclaim a desire to do something great, whatever the risk. Especially if the risk is that no one might notice.

A Survivor’s Guide to Swine Flu

As the days shorten and I put my pajamas on even earlier than the standard 7 pm, signaling, respectively, autumn’s yielding to winter and my enthusiasm for shutting off contact with the outside world at a more reasonable hour, flu season remains undimmed. If 2007 was the Year of the Pig, per Chinese restaurant placemats, 2009 has been the Year of the Swine. If not quite a swine flu panic, 2009 has witnessed full blown swine flu paranoia. Symptoms of swine flu paranoia are evident in any public gathering place. Foremost among these is the ”sanitizing station”, where one receives in one’s hands some version of cleansing fluid, gel or foam in a fashion that is highly evocative of receiving bread at communion. The occasional surgical mask sighting or the placing of newspaper over an offensive subway train pole demarcates the boundaries of the protective sphere cast by the sanitizing station. As we swim in an ocean of hand sanitizer, we talk incessantly of the invisible threat around us: about the dangers of coming into contact with children, whose schools have been reduced to germ breeding grounds; or the risk of entering people’s homes – pity the Mary Kay lady who takes her life into her hands to make her living. Most of all, we are afraid that each person we encounter in our everyday travels is a danger to our health and well being.

It will be important to return to these fears, but a reality check is in order. The public health and medical communities have broadcast loud and clear that YOU WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY NOT DIE FROM SWINE FLU. As names with the word Doctor in front of them are usually very reassuring in such matters, a quick web search should act as a tonic for swine flu paranoia. Dr. David Lipschitz, on creators.com, opines on swine flu thusly: “all the evidence suggests that swine flu is no more aggressive than any other seasonal influenza virus….it is also important to understand that only a very small percentage of people infected with this illness will develop life-threatening complications….we can all take a few simple steps to protect against the swine flu.” These simple steps basically amount to staying home if you’re sick and washing your hands regularly, with a little hand sanitizer thrown in for good measure (one could, of course, avoid touching one’s eyes, nose and mouth between hand washings, which is easy if you pee relatively frequently, so one could argue that drinking lots of your favorite beverage could replace the hand sanitizer, but hey, I’m not a doctor).

For a second opinion, Foxnews.com (yes, that Fox News) proffers Deborah Lehman, whose street cred practically drips from her title, Director of Pediatric Infectious Disease at Cedar Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Dr. Lehman provides the added perspective of comparing swine flu to what we’ve always simply called the flu: “At this point it looks like the seasonal flu will be responsible for more deaths than swine flu.” Dr. Lehman’s August forecast has held up. National Public Radio’s Morning Edition (there, that should get the taste of Fox News out of your mouth) reported this week (week of 12/7/09) that while the number of flu cases is up a bit, the number of flu deaths is only one third of its average rate. So, to sum up, swine flu is a bit easier to catch, but much less likely to kill you than good old fashioned flu. Everyone knows this by now; the bodies are simply not piling up at the morgue. But the hand sanitizer flows at a rate second only to the gushing of anxiety. The paranoid response to the reality of swine flu can only be described as irrational.

As irrational behaviors herald unconscious processes at work, if we are to understand swine flu paranoia we are tasked with interpretation. If that psychoanalytical giant Lacan is correct, and the unconscious is structured like a language, then words, signs, and symbols are the material in play. The beginning, then, is that honest name, swine flu. Too honest, in fact, for our times; swine flu was publicly sanitized into H1N1. But there is no such thing as H1N1 paranoia. What people fear is the “swine flu”, and in that pairing of nouns “flu” only relates to the fear in that it provides structure for how the fear manifests, because if we were really that afraid of the “flu”, we would have had sanitizing stations for the last one hundred years. Swine flu has opened the valves of anxiety because of the effect of the word “swine”.

That effect has nothing to do with our relationship to that class of animals which includes pigs, boars, hogs, razorbacks, etc. Swine flu paranoia is unrelated to the individual’s choice of whether or not to consume bacon (my wife tells me pigs are now considered smarter than dogs, which I take to mean that in fifty years when we’ve killed off most other species we’ll feel a little better about eating dogs, but I digress). Scroll down to the second definition of swine on the internet dictionary site that Google takes you to, and you will find “contemptible person”. Swine flu paranoia only takes on meaning in relationship to this secondary definition of the word swine. In short, swine flu paranoia is all about contempt.

We can begin to approach the link between swine flu and contempt by way of what some call, a bit melodramatically (our era majors in dishonesty with a minor in melodrama), the Conservative Media. Whatever else you say about the right, it’s populist radio talk show hosts are a reliable source of free-association levels of unconscious material, especially as relates to the aggressive drive (re. conservatives and the aggressive drive, I kid you not, I saw this bumper sticker last week: “Nuke Iran before Iran nukes us.”). So, according to MediaMatters.com (a lefty organization whose raison d’etre appears to be to reverse that tiresome cliché of “the liberal media” into its equally tiresome opposite) the Conservative Media (read: annoying radio hosts and Fox News) has been portraying the swine flu as the work of the devil, i.e. illegal immigrants. The right’s contempt for illegal immigrants appears to be one notch below that withheld for terrorists, although with swine flu’s help illegal immigrants might get to #1: MediaMatters.com reports that on Bill O’Reilly’s talk show a caller discussing the swine flu stated “each one of these people (illegal immigrants) is a biological weapon”, O’Reilly responded “You might be right.” If illegal immigrants can be considered terrorists, then there is no limit to the contempt in which one may hold them.

MediaMatters.com quotes a passage from talk show host Michael Savage that is even more telling regarding the link between swine flu paranoia and contempt. Discussing his strategy for remaining swine flu free, Savage remarks “How do you protect yourself? I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, and I don’t give a damn if you don’t like what I’m going to say. I’m going to have no contact anywhere with an illegal alien, and that starts in the restaurants. I will have no illegal alien workers around me. I will not have them in any of my properties, I will not have them anywhere.” (Savage was later heard stating “I do not like them with a fox, I will not eat them in a box, I will not eat them here or there, I will not eat them anywhere.”) Savage’s obvious deficiency in common sense aside (should Savage be able to somehow guarantee that no illegal immigrant crosses his path, I’m not sure how he will prevent himself from catching swine flu from a neighbor who has been infected by one of these walking biological weapons), his contempt for immigrants as would be carriers of swine flu is remarkable, absurdly comical, and frightening.

The Conservative Media’s irrational rage towards illegal immigrants as swine flu suicide bombers unmasks the interplay between contempt and swine flu paranoia. But if the Conservative Media is the crazy uncle who frequently ruins Thanksgiving, the rest of us remain garden variety neurotics, and it is to our swine flu paranoia that we now must turn. Just as the right wing talk show host’s swine flu rant expresses his contempt for illegal immigrants, our everyday acts of swine flu paranoia, the immersion in baths of hand sanitizer and the deluge of swine flu anxiety chatter (both external and internal), express our increasing perception of “the other” as a contemptible person. Swine flu paranoia is an expression of anxiety related to contact with the contemptible other, and a set of (neurotic) behaviors intended to inoculate one’s self from the dangers of contact with the object of one’s contempt. Each sanitization of one’s hands is an attempt to cleanse the contamination resulting from contact with the contemptible other.

The other is contemptible, of course. We are all contemptible. Each of us is a strange, fluid composite of the admirable and the contemptible. But swine flu paranoia reveals the degree to which we have collectively repressed those contemptible qualities which make up such a large, and necessary, portion of human character. This repression has been aided and abetted by what is best called the culture industry (a term coined, I believe, by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer). The culture industry, via the interwoven means of media and commerce, has been, amidst mountains of stuff, selling us one idea. This is the idea that if the individual conforms by consuming ever increasing mass quantities appropriately, then he or she can transcend all that is contemptible in him or herself, thereby attaining to a version of the self that is exclusively admirable. We purchase this idea in every thoughtless act of consumption. And with each purchase, we repress another piece of the contemptible within us. Or it might be better said that we put our contemptible traits on lay-away, because swine flu paranoia is the return of the repressed. Those qualities that we have repressed, in our undying effort to resemble the perfect advertisement for ourselves, have returned. We now see them in everyone else, and for reminding us of what we have rejected in ourselves we hold them in contempt. It is the ultimate irony that the mechanism for so much of our repression, the variety of media, is the primary carrier for the spread of swine flu paranoia. As the culture industry consolidates its grip ever further, instances of mass neuroses are inevitable, i.e. you ain’t seen nothing yet.

For the skeptics who might doubt the leaps involved in meaningful interpretation of irrational behavior, trust that there is method to the madness. But to question how one gets from the repression of contemptible traits to standing in line at the hand sanitizing station is not unreasonable. The theory in play holds that the return of the repressed necessarily includes irrational behavior. Freud, in Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays, describes the psychic distortion that leads to the return of the repressed in irrational and unrecognizable forms: “All the phenomena of the formation of symptoms may justly be described as ‘the return of the repressed’. Their distinguishing characteristic, however, is the far-reaching distortion to which the returning material has been subjected as compared with the original.” (p. 127) In other words, we repress that which is unacceptable in the advertisement for ourselves, and the repressed, contemptible traits undergo a process of distortion. At the end of the process the repressed returns, as it must, only now it takes the form of the contemptible other, who has me running scared for the sanitizing station.

As this interpretation began with language, it is to language that we turn in closing. My wife saw a sign at our synagogue the other day which warned “Germs are everywhere”. We now know that this sign is warning us that contemptible persons are everywhere, so slather on the Purell. But if we wish to step back from irrational swine flu paranoia, and towards basic sanity, the etymology of the word “germs” provides a clue. Germ is first recorded in 1644, with an original meaning of “rudiments of a new organism in an existing one.” It had the sense of a sprout or a bud; think “wheat germ” or “germ of an idea”. But by 1805 germ came to mean “seed of a disease”, and by 1871 it came into the meaning it has in common usage today: “harmful microorganism”. Our increasingly pathological relationship to that which is contemptible within us mirrors the evolution of the meaning of the word germ. We increasingly relate to our contemptible traits as a harmful microorganism within us to be eradicated. But eradication is impossible, and repression, and its eventual return, the inevitable outcome.

But if we return to the original sense of germ, conceiving of our contemptible traits as rudiments of a new self in an existing one, we begin to get close to a truth that our spiritual traditions have known down through the ages. The way forward is through the flaws and the pain, through what is contemptible in each of us. It is the by the grace of God that the repressed must always return, even if that means scrubbing our hands raw at our local sanitizing station. For if the repressed did not return, if we could indeed eradicate the contemptible, we should have rid ourselves of the only way out of this great big mess. I’ll start by not trying to be a hybrid of Phillip Marlowe and John Boy from The Waltons, which I somehow decided long ago was the perfect advertisement for me.

Inherent Vice  by Thomas Pynchon

With Inherent Vice, Pynchon does an admirable job of tackling and integrating the realms of the hard boiled gumshoe and early 70's California hippie culture. He gets there by way of his protagonist, Doc, a constantly stoned P.I., who seems to just float through the novel, his altered state taking just enough of the edge off of every jam in which he finds himself. Pynchon in turn does just enough with the plot to keep the mystery interesting, but is at his best capturing the mood of the naivete that was both the hippie movement's charm and its undoing. The LAPD is, perhaps, the novel's true villain, and in a world where the cops are more noir than the criminals it comes as no surprise that peace and love faded away into the smog of 70's LA. Inherent Vice is at its core a lament for a dream that never really was, but one that is remembered fondly nevertheless.

Take out the papers and the trash (in the same trash bag)

Nothing assuages the guilt of consuming mass quantities like putting a heaping bin of recyclables out by the curb for pick up, secure in the knowledge that one’s assortment of Suave family-size shampoo bottles, Diet Mountain Dew two-liters, Prego jars (It’s in there!), and all the sundry paraphernalia of comfortable modern living are not headed to the landfill, and are, as such, surgically excised from one’s conscience. And this is exactly why, if you hope to save the Earth, you must stop recycling RIGHT NOW. Step away from the government-issued blue plastic recycling bin, and put the empty can of Manwich down (sidebar to my wife: how ’bout some sloppy joes, hon?).

Because recycling ultimately has nothing to do with saving the Earth, and everything to do with guilt. Recycling is, at its core, a response to the guilt accrued by those participating in the aggressiveness of industrialized, consumerist lifestyles. A few words from Freud will help us to grasp the link between recycling, guilt, and the human aggressive drive. As to aggression, Freud stipulated in his clearest philosophical work, Civilization and Its Discontents, that aggression is the gravest challenge facing humanity: “The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.” (p. 154) Today this aggression most prominently manifests under the cover of everyday life, in the form of a consumerism that is entrenched and pathological. Unchecked, this consumerism threatens to transform us into the Uroboros; we will literally eat ourselves until we are gone. Of course, the Uroboros traditionally symbolizes the beginning of a new cycle, or re-creation. The risk we now take is that the re-creation will be an Earth without humans, or at least, without human civilization.

Fortunately for us humans, there is a psychic mechanism, guilt, which acts as a brake on the destructive bent of the aggressive drive: “The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization, therefore, obtains a mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.” (p.121) Or, perhaps, not so fortunately, as the nature of this mechanism, guilt, led Freud to remark: “What a potent obstacle to civilization aggressiveness must be, if the defense against it can cause as much unhappiness as aggressiveness itself!” (p.151) For Freud, the price we pay for civilization, this constant torment of guilt, constant in the sense that one is punished by the superego as much for one’s thoughts as one’s actions, is criminally high. But in lieu of a post-apocalyptic Mad Max lifestyle, I’ll keep my civilization and happily pay the guilt bill.

So, how to keep the civilization? We, meaning those of us in the industrialized west, must simply consume radically less. Of course, this message is already out there, and the statistics supporting it are easy to find on a variety of websites. Just one example among many, greenlivingtips.com reports that “12 percent of the world’s population lives in North America and Western Europe and accounts for 60 percent of private consumption.” Put simply, no matter what else we do about climate change, population growth and other assorted dangers, it won’t matter a bit if industrialized, consumerist peoples do not radically reduce their rates of consumption. If we don’t consume very much less, we will die, or our children or their children will.

So we should all be recycling, right? Recycling means that less stuff gets consumed, which has to be a good thing if the path to salvation is by way of consuming less stuff. The catch is that recycling impacts our pathological urge to consume in the wrong direction, by “liberating” the aggressive drive from its natural keeper, guilt. Of late recycling has been linked in a triad formula of reduce-reuse-recycle, which begins to acknowledge the limitations of recycling alone. But those limitations are not the real problem with recycling, or reducing and reusing for that matter. Our way of life, and recycling’s true relationship to that way of life, are the real problem. That way of life depends upon constantly increasing consumption, and we have stepped up to the plate like Barry Bonds on steroids. One example plucked from many: from 1973 to 1993 per capita consumption in the United States rose 45%, according to John Cunniff in the Seattle Times on 9/19/93. Continuing the engorgement could not occur without recycling.

We know that we are killing the Earth by consuming it. Al Gore is here to make sure we know this. The dykes holding back aggressiveness have burst under a tidal wave of consumption. This onslaught of aggression in the guise of shopping and eating has triggered our natural response, guilt. The burst in recycling of recent years, according to treehugger.com only 23% of Americans now don’t recycle (a number they still find appallingly high), is representative of nothing else but a seismic shockwave of guilt. We are killing the planet and we know it, but instead of changing our way of life we deal with our guilt by putting our recycling on the curb. Recycling is but a ruse to fool the superego, thereby extinguishing the psychic pain of guilt. Of course, the price of fooling the superego is preventing it from doing its job, which, sans recycling, would be to ramp up the guilt until we changed our destructive ways. But by recycling, we have pulled the wool over the eyes of the superego in order to have our cake and eat it too. But when the cake is gone there will be nothing left for anyone to eat. (In recycling, we are remarkably like the teenage female who engages in anal sex to avoid the guilt of losing her “virginity”. She, like us, is simply trying to fool her superego, yet she has engaged in a sexual act unrivaled in heat and intimacy, with all of the attendant physical and emotional consequences. In fooling her superego she has dispensed with the most effective prophylactic of all: guilt as guarantor of abstinence, or at least some reasonable facsimile thereof.)

So enough with the recycling. If our way of life depends on consuming mass quantities, let’s figure out how to change our way of life. This kind of radical change won’t seem so radical in a few years when, to mix metaphors, it’s time to pay the environmental piper and the shit truly hits the fan. The sooner we start the less painful it will be, but there is going to be a great deal of pain, one way or the other. Let’s just hope that the pain is constructive, like anxiety from a guilty conscience. But I assure you I will feel no guilt tonight when I throw my can of Dr. Pepper in the regular trash bin.

Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

One of the best pieces of pessimistic cultural theory you are likely to ever encounter. The entire work seethes with revulsion at the black hole of late capitalism, which the authors portray as draining meaning out of every human life sucked into its vacuum. But Adorno and Horkheimer are at the absolute peak of "it's all going to hell" brilliance with their chapter on the culture industry. Riffing primarily on the effects of film and radio, which they diagnose as instruments of mass conformity, one can only imagine their response to the all-pervasive media of our 21st Century cum electronic womb. A clear forerunner to later important works, such as Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment is a must read for anyone with even just a shred of doubt as to where this is all going.

Against Homework: A Polemic

As a schoolboy I tirelessly resented the intrusion of homework. School had me seven hours a day, my body rigidly confined to a desk, my mind a captive audience to the vagaries of curriculum, the insistence upon behavioral compliance the grinding subtext of every school-bound moment. This strict compliance includes the body, witness my kindergarten teacher placing me in a chair in front of and facing my classmates as I waited for my mother to rescue me with clean clothes after my bladder had not complied. It also includes the social, as evidenced by the fourth grade teacher who enforced complete and total silence in my elementary school cafeteria during lunch, and who made us proud of our subjugation by afterwards congratulating us all over the intercom for our spectacular act of capitulation. But this was never enough. In order to fulfill its overarching mission of subjecting the pupil to the sufficient degree of domination necessary for casting the dye of a conforming worker, school required homework.

Homework accomplishes a necessary step in the molding of the agreeable worker. The assignment of homework, whether completed, ignored, or eaten by the dog, demolishes the barrier between the realm of labor, with school but a proto-workplace, and the private sphere of home and family. With homework, home is metamorphosized into the place where work goes and they have to take it in. After homework, the home becomes little more than a branch office with better office furnishings. Henry Ford famously stated that you could have his Model T in any color you wanted, as long as it was black. Homework says you can do anything you want to do in life, as long as it is a job.

The best pupils, those who please their teachers most, are inevitably those who spend the most time doing homework. By giving their lives over entirely to school they have received everything that prep school has to offer, a preparation for replicating their self-sacrifice on the altar of professional success. Amidst the absence of sturm und drang, the silence, as hallmark of a well-modulated, professionally aspirational student body, shouts one thing: you can only serve one master. Doing all of your homework is the first and foundational act of serving that master for the rest of your life. The master rewards such servitude the only way it can, with some cash and yet more work. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, in their masterwork The Dialectic of Enlightenment, capture this succinctly: “The gradations in the standard of living correspond very precisely to the degree by which classes and individuals inwardly adhere to the system. Managers can be relied on.” The best early outward sign of this inwardly grounded reliability is doing your homework.

And I do mean early. A friend and, yes, co-worker of mine (my life is as dominated by work as the next guy; outside of my wife and family nearly the only people I interact with on any consistent basis are my co-workers) recently told me that her three-year-old daughter’s day care provider was assigning homework. My wife regales me with tales of published studies establishing the complete lack of any academic benefit to such early assignment of homework. But of course, any academic benefit of homework is always completely beside the point. By assigning homework at age three, the day care provider is passing on the only folk wisdom we have left, our societies’ master signifier, symbolically branded onto the forehead of every homeless vagrant cum economic deserter: Get A Job.

So when our childrens’ spines are literally bent by the weight of the homework they must tote home every night in their backpacks, a deforming of the body marking the self-sacrifice of their voyage to Harvard and beyond, a deforming, it goes without saying, preferable to those tattoos and piercings which might forever bar the door to observable managerial reliability, let us be reminded that these contrasting outward markings of, respectively, inauguration into or exclusion from professional status, are both symptoms of the soul-bending force of economic conscription. Let us remember this when we ask our daughters and sons if they have done their homework before they are allowed to go outside and play. But, of course, if they are staying inside to play another six consecutive hours on their Playstations anyway, perhaps the battle is already lost. They might just as well complete yet another pointless worksheet. Is it still too late to talk my wife into reconsidering homeschooling?

Gotta Get Back In Time

Socrates’ famous remark, “the only thing I know is that I know nothing”, is perhaps history’s most pithy commentary on the illusory nature of reality as it is lived. The magic that maintains the illusion, and the element which makes the illusion necessary, are one and the same. Sometimes dressed up as The Fourth Dimension, that which beguiles Socrates and all the rest of us hides in plain sight as the common coin of daily drudgery, time (see “time is money”).

Our collective complicity is necessary for the magic to work; we maintain the illusion by accepting the received wisdom that time marches ever forward in a linear fashion, and, even more importantly, that within this inevitable progression cause always and necessarily leads to effect. Cause and effect is the most fundamental given of our daily experience of reality, and as such shapes our encounter with time, thereby empowering time to delude us all into believing that reality is unassailably monolithic. To encounter reality instead as soft clay, one must first disenchant the spell cast by time, a spell that bewitches via the sorcery of cause and effect.

Time’s power, its ability to pen us into the present moment with its attendant horrors and without hope of escape, rests in our programmed experience of the present as impenetrably remote from the past, and untouched by a not-yet-existent future. In our belief in a bright line which separates past from present we are like a racehorse wearing blinders; seeing only that present moment right before us ,we rush forward, blind to the big picture that is our true reality. This big picture is captured best by William Faulkner: “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” To that I would only add that the future is not even future.

What Faulkner understood, and what we like to ignore through our purchase of time’s snake oil, is that the past is right here in the room with us in the present. Psychoanalysis is nothing other than a system of healing founded on this, time’s dirty little secret. Those psychotherapists who insist upon attending exclusively to the here and now are trafficking primarily in illusion, as whatever help they offer leaves the patient still stranded on an island that does not exist. Psychoanalysis stakes its claim that speaking in the present is giving voice to the past. Everything we do and say in the “here and now” is always a reckoning with everything that has come before; the present moment is nothing other than an improvised encounter with the past. This is all well and good for as far as it takes us, but where Faulkner and Freud’s past leaves off we are still haunted by cause and effect. With a nod to Dickens, enter the Ghost of Christmas Future.

To repeat, the future is not even future. The radical step necessary to demystify the nature of time is the acknowledgment that “cause and effect” is joined by its equal partner in the realm of causality, “effect and cause”. Conditioned to believe that an effect can only follow a cause in the sequence of time, what we traditionally refer to as “cause and effect”, we have repressed our knowledge of the truth that effect can and does occur in the sequence of time prior to its cause, a phenomenon we might simply label “effect and cause”. Amidst our repression we give voice to our intuitive insight into “effect and cause” with that everyday cliché, “everything happens for a reason.” This cliché, commonly used as a verbal crutch when, as so often happens, there is a void in the place where we go to find meaning, is actually a trace of deep folk wisdom. This is the knowledge that if the reason or cause for an event cannot be found in the past, that the void is not an absence of meaning, but a sign pointing to the future genesis of that meaning, i.e. the cause of the effect is yet to come.

A popular Taoist legend, copied here from www.webtapestries.com, hints at the presence of the future in the “here and now”:

‘A chinese farmer's neighbors came over to offer him their sympathy after his horse ran away. "I'm not so sure it's a misfortune", said the farmer. The neighbors left, shaking their heads.
The next day, the farmer's horse returned, and three wild horses came home with him. The neighbors returned to congratulate the farmer on his good fortune. "I'm not certain that it is good fortune", replied the farmer. The neighbors left, more bemused than before.
Later that week, the farmer's son broke his leg trying to train one of the new horses, and the neighbors came by to offer condolences. "I'm not sure this is a misfortune", said the farmer again. The neighbors left, discussing the man's mental state among themselves.
The next day, the emperor came through, gathering up young men to be in his army. They bypassed the farmer's son, since he had a broken leg.’

The traditional interpretation of this legend is rather straightforward: since we can not see the future, we are unable to determine what is blessing and what is curse, so let us instead live detached from our mind’s storylines, peaceful and awake in the moment. Seen from another angle, however, the legend is subversive to the reification of the concept of cause and effect, clearing space for a liberating relationship with time. Understood thusly, the legend is an exemplar of a chain of “effect and cause”, with the horse’s escape “caused” by a temporally subsequent “effect”, the return of the horse with three additional wild horses. Continuing the chain, the return of the four horses is “caused” by the “effect” of the son’s broken leg, and, finally, the son’s broken leg is “caused” by the “effect” of the conscripting emperor.

With the radical move of establishing the reality of “effect and cause” accomplished, our understanding of the interplay of past, present, and future can be fine tuned. It is an oversimplification to oppose “cause and effect” against “effect and cause”, as if only one element, past or future, comes to bear on the present. It goes without saying that some degree of “cause and effect” will always be in play in the present; in the legend above it would be foolish to deny that a series of events, perhaps the farmer’s son having left the farm’s gate open, has played a role in the outcome of the horse’s departure from the farm. However, in every present moment “effect and cause” partners with “cause and effect” to shape the possible experiences of the present moment. In this example, the horse’s subsequent return with three additional horses is equal to the postulated left-open gate as a causative force in the horse’s escape. To be crystal clear, the events that occurred after the horse’s escape were just as important in causing the escape as the events that occurred prior to the escape. “Cause and effect” works in tandem with “effect and cause”, equal partners in crafting the potential present. The old saying “that horse has already left the barn”, commonly used to express the irretrievable quality of the past, may also be understood to say the future is now.

We may discard our notion of time as a linear flow from past, to present, to future in which each moment is sacrosanct in its isolation, and in which each inviolable moment lays a stranded human monad. In its place we might think of time as a thread with three strands woven together such that encountering the thread at any site along its length we come into contact with all three strands: past, present, and future. This thread is both the abstract notion of time and a lived human life, unending as time itself. Lest this understanding of time threaten with the specter of hard determinism, rest assured that all which is created by the past and the future in crafting the present is but a stage for the creative improvisation of the now. We always act in relationship to the past and future, but our actions within the scope of this stage are free and unlimited. As for time travel, there is really nowhere to go. The boundless landscape of past and future are right here in the infinite present.