Buckle Up, Indeed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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