Valuable post at The Conversation on the internal resistance that trauma victims face in taking the first step towards healing: talking to someone about their experience.
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Yearly Archives: 2016
Healing the Legacy of “Black Gold”
I was aware of the exploitation of the indigenous peoples of Ecuador by Texaco, and must admit to not being terribly surprised that similar offenses have occurred throughout the world. Reparations and restoration may be impossible, given the vast extent of the degradation. They will certainly bankrupt the industry – Ecuador alone represents a $27 billion liability to Chevron, which bought Texaco back in 2001.
The two European oil giants, Shell and BP, have both made forays into renewables. This piece from Platform London describes their uncomfortable attempts to muster the conviction to do what is right for the future.
In America we addressed the issue of culpability for environmental degradation with the Clean Air and Water Acts. Parts of the legal framework were moderately unfair: “joint and severable” liability meant that if a small-potatoes polluter dumped something into a landfill, non-polluters had to pay to clean up the mess. Even when a polluter was able to pay, the chemical and oil industries have evolved a sophisticated array of legal practices to avoid financial liability, ranging from divestment of operations responsible for managing polluted sites all the way to bankruptcy.
As it became clear that the original Acts were not going to generate assets sufficient to undo decades of exploitation of workers and ecosystems, Congress responded with a broad tax on the industry. This recognizes that the benefits of exploitation accrued to the society as a whole, motivating local, state and federal elected officials to turn a blind eye to the effects of pollution. The Superfund Act recognized that society as a whole needed to take responsibility for the problem, and contribute through taxation to remedies.
I’m not certain whether those at Platform London and elsewhere recognize that we need to move beyond attempts to hold Big Oil responsible for its servicing of our addiction to fossil fuels. All of us, as citizens of an energy rich economy, need to do our part to contribute to a solution. That means a global pact to finance restoration and restitution.
Given the Brexit vote, it appears obvious that we lack the institutional means to negotiate that kind of commitment. What the activists might consider is that Big Oil itself may be a powerful and motivated partner in creating the conditions under which that negotiation can take place.
The Inevitability of Appropriation
I spent my childhood watching my father struggle to make himself understood. It was not that he was handicapped in a fundamental way, but rather that he recognized that most people were terribly imprecise in their use of words. To ensure that he was able to describe precisely his methods of software design, he invented his own notation and terminology. In the end, he spoke a foreign language.
Of course, that also brought a certain power. In working with him years later, his resistance to my innovation was to assert that I hadn’t spent enough time sitting at his feet to really understand what he was doing.
Although I shared his concerns regarding imprecision in the use of words, I had no intention of following in his footsteps. Most of the creative intellectual energy of my twenties was devoted to an attempt to facilitate moral discourse by reclaiming terms of common usage. That thinking eventually surfaced back in 2005 at my first web site. There I laid out definitions for ‘love’, ‘power’ and ‘maturity’ (among others). The goal was to ensure that the use of such terms was based in clearly defined and shared expectations for the behavior of the speaker. Having faith in love and good will, I believed that the power accruing to subscribers to the philosophy would eventually manifest in the spread of its wisdom to the rest of society.
This work of reclamation was incredibly difficult. It was inspired, growing up in the ’70s, by my sense that the world was teetering on the brink of destruction, along with the shocking realization that when offering “I love you” most people actually meant “I feel good when I am around you. Let me bind you to me with this token.” In other words “I love myself.”
The corruption of the link between meaning and behavior is philosophical appropriation. In normal usage, appropriation is defined as:
the action of taking something for one’s own use, typically without the owner’s permission (Oxford)
In this case, we are concerned with manipulation of the consensus regarding the meaning of words to convince others that they should contribute to our benefit. The “owner” in this case is society as a whole. The “taking” is of resources meant to preserve the common good.
A topical manifestation of the struggle against philosophical appropriation is in the debate in the Democratic Party over the legitimacy of claims to a “progressive” agenda. A thorough exploration of the ambiguity in the usage of the term is offered at the Electric Agora. The nuances of the analysis rapidly evaporated into a deep cognitive dissonance as I thought back to the explanation offered in my childhood that progressives believe that “all boats rise with the tide.” This simple precept was the engine of the post-WWII Veterans Acts, the wealth generated by and for the American middle class in the ’50s and ’60s, and the Civil Rights movement. It also informs equally the choices of the partisans across the Sanders/Clinton divide – although they might dispute it.
Philosphical appropriation is driven by two forces. The first, suggested above, is simple hypocrisy. The second is more difficult to resist: it is the divergence between the original meaning of a term of social and political discourse and the mechanisms of its implementation. In religion, an early schism evolved from just such a critique. The Donatists, perceiving that priests were sometimes sinners, rejected the legitimacy of “sacraments” as administered by the Catholic Church. St. Augustine’s rebuttal was that the purpose of the Church was to reform and heal, which meant admission of sinners among the laity, and inevitably sinners among the priesthood. Augustine was concerned with the purpose of the Church as commissioned by Jesus of Nazareth; the Donatists were concerned consumers of its services.
Of course, neither the Church nor the Donatists disputed the value of the sacraments. Rather, both sides laid claim to legitimacy based upon the mechanisms of their transmission: the Church based upon the authority of Christ’s commission, which (at least in theory) established a gateway to grace that no priest could corrupt; the Donatists based upon the immediacy of Christ’s presence in the person of the administering saint. Obviously, the experience and forms of sacramental administration were different in the two societies. Eventually, those practical differences led to differences in their understanding of what was and was not a sacrament.
This is also apparent in the disputatious claims to the term “progressive.” The discussion at the Electric Agora focuses on the tension between inclusion and diversity, both considered touch stones of the progressive program. Among some, this leads to claims of hypocrisy: how can you maintain diversity while attempting to homogenize opportunity?
Obviously, we’d like to see unity and respect in the dialog between people of good will. This seems like an ideal place for philosophical intervention.
One approach in this program of intervention is to seek to elucidate the meaning of terms in use. In both cases under discussion, unfortunately, this leads to a fracturing of meanings, with philosophical tolerance allowing legitimacy to be claimed by both sides, creating opportunities for hypocrites to profit from the divide.
The other approach is to successively refine the principle behind the term, and to elucidate the connection between that principle and implementation. This serves both to conserve and strengthen the consensus so essential to constructive social engagement, while simultaneously defending the community against hypocrites.
I find it interesting to relate this back to the original split between idealism and empiricism. The empiricist Aristotle thought that observation of the qualities of things would allow us to group them into categories. Plato, conversely, held that only in ideas could firm meaning be established, and so concrete instances in the world must be derived from ideas. The success of science leads us in the modern era to prefer the empirical approach. In sociology and politics, however, it is the ideas in our minds that determine the subject of study – which is the aggregate behavior of citizens. Here it seems that idealism – the defense of the meaning of words – is the more powerful approach. Implicitly, it is the approach that I offer to philosophers seeking to mediate political and social discourse. First defend the coherence of the statement of principle. Only then turn your attention to the practical issues of implementation.
Yin Ping Zheng Water Colors
Here are details from the pieces I bought this weekend.
Peonies
Remember that this is water color: every brush stroke is irrecoverably committed to paper. Anything white indicates actually a lack of color.
The calligraphy is beautiful as well.
Lover’s Moon
The images don’t do justice to the background preparation.
Here’s wishing for future recognition and success for Yin Ping Zheng!
Santa Barbara Treasure
I took the first of my five necessary day trips out to Santa Barbara today. “Necessary” in the fiduciary sense because I bought a ten-trip Amtrak Surfliner pass that expires on September 6. “Necessary” in the personal sense because the move out to Port Hueneme has separated me from the dance communities down in the Santa Monica area, and if I don’t dance, I think that I’ll curl up and die. The nearest substitute is the Santa Barbara Dance Tribe that meets at the Gustafson Dance Center on Sundays from 11-1.
I thought that the weather was auspicious for the 4-mile pedal up to the Oxnard train station, but the fog burned off early, and my clothes were pretty damp by the time I pulled in to the station. Fortunately I had a number of shirt changes in my backpack, so the ride out to Santa Barbara wasn’t unpleasant.
Once in Santa Barbara, the sun was a little less harsh, but it was humid. The three mile ride out to the dance studio was up a slight slope, as well as going under the freeway in a couple of places. The footpath routing algorithm in Microsoft Maps also left me in a cul-de-sac at the bottom of a hill that carried the road over the freeway. Again, I was soaked with perspiration when I arrived.
The celebration was really nice. Two moments in particular stand out. The most energetic of the women danced joyfully with a number of men, and then settled to the floor to rest. I had been moving through the gathering, and found myself in her vicinity when the DJ put on Etta Jame’s At Last. The lady had settled on her shins, hands swaying gently in the air over her head. I swooped past her in a low lunge and then spun around behind her, and the air around us burst with energy. She accepted my attention as I filled the air around her for the next two minutes, smiling at me once or twice, but she didn’t get up on her feet.
The second was towards the end, when many of the dancers had settled to the floor to ground the energy we had raised. I found myself scooping the air on one side, reaching up and out to gather in the messages that were waiting for me, curling my arm over my head before pulling them into my heart, and then doing the same on the other side. It wasn’t easy – just a lot of sorrow. When I had taken as much as I could bear, I lifted my hands to the heavens, and felt something enter from above, providing my heart with the responsive energies it needed.
I couldn’t schedule the bike passage for the mid-afternoon train back to Ventura, which left me six hours to fill until the 6:59. So after the dance I pedaled back down to the train station (fortunately mostly downhill this time). After checking my backpack, I backtracked to the Neighborhood Bar and Grill, where I had a great veggie burger and honey wheat ale.
The train station is only a few blocks from the beach, so I rode down to the shore and took the bike path up the strand. Santa Barbara has an art walk every Sunday. A lot of what I saw was touristy, until I came to Yin Ping Zheng’s booth. The work was classic Chinese brush calligraphy and painting on rice paper. On the edge of the booth, a typical vertical nature study caught my eye: a cluster of starkly colored peonies – deep red, yellow and pure white demanding the eye’s attention – anchored the bottom of the strip. They were subdued from above by a delicate pink cluster, annotated in the classic Asian style. The obvious contrast of masculine and feminine energy also seemed to suggest the contrast between Western and Asian art.
I ended up buying this piece and another that also displayed Zheng’s unique sensibilities. The second is a panel of ungrounded bamboo poles, rendered in rich green but punctuated by black-fingered leaves with white speckles (snow?). Two sprays of pink blossoms enter the frame in the upper left, cupping a featureless moon set against a pale ground of blue-white snow. I noticed the calligraphy on the right side, and Zheng shared that it was the last line of a poem that offered the moon’s witness and solace to two lovers sundered by distance.
Zheng is devoted to his art, and as we waited for BofA to pre-authorize the purchase, he talked about his training, confirming my sense that he was attempting to introduce strong Western color to add tension and dimension to the introspective style of Chinese rice paper painting. He also kept offering concerns that his devotion was not earning him material rewards – a point that resonates deeply with me.
It’s my birthday tomorrow, which is my way of justifying the extravagance of the purchase. But I did so with honest pleasure, and was gratified that Zheng accepted my stumbled expression:
Thank-you so much for being here today. It added a special aspect to my day to have had the opportunity to buy two such beautiful works of art.
Zheng has a blog out here at WordPress, but it only has one photo. I’m too tired tonight to unroll the pieces to take pictures of them, but I’ll get some details posted on Tuesday night.
Internet Autocracy
Article at The Conversation on the internet as a centralized form of media that can be exploited by authoritarian regimes, particularly among citizens using it primarily for entertainment.
My comment:
I believe that the jury is still out on this one. One of the factors that fueled international respect for authoritarian regimes was external propaganda. Leaders of developing nations were beguiled by the perception that state-run economies and militaries were equally effective as those managed by decentralized cultures. The internet completely skewers that façade.
Most authoritarian regimes are sustained by revenues obtained through labor and resource exploitation by the developed world. As the consumer nations shift to automated and sustainable alternatives (respectively), those revenues will dry up. The old Roman dictum “bread and circuses” fails when there is no bread. When there is no bread, people will be forced to organize in a decentralized fashion to obtain basic goods. The internet will be the mechanism that facilitates that organization.
And there is still the lesson of the Cold War: if the international community can avoid creating external conflicts to justify the fear-mongering, the investment in lies eventually divorces the leadership from reality. The internet only provides the appearance of greater efficacy. The people learn to go about their business independently by pushing responsibility upwards. The retort is always “I’ll do it, boss, if you show me exactly how.” It’s like that scene in Life of Brian where the two prison guards stutter and garble words until the interrogator leaves, then start speaking coherently.
In the meanwhile, liberal societies will rocket ahead using the benefits of network effects (the value of a communications network goes up as the factorial of the number of participants). In the era of rapid change driven by global climate stress, that facility will be essential to survival.
The Big Bang Collapses
Yet again.
One of the challenges confronting astrophysicists is figuring out how galaxies form. The problem arises in kind of a round-about way.
The space the fills our universe is remarkably uniform. That’s surprising, because it formed from an extremely violent context. We would expect it to be warped, in the mode of Einstein’s general relativity, causing light to “bend” as it traveled the great distances between galaxies. In addition, until a couple of years ago it was believed that the universe was coasting to a stop. In other words, the mass of the universe appeared to be just enough to keep the galaxies from flying apart forever, but not so much that they would turn around and collide together in a “big crunch.”
These two questions were reconciled with Alan Guth’s “inflationary universe” hypothesis. This holds that the universe was created with an invisible, uniform background energy that dissipated very early, creating most of the matter that we see around us.
One consequence of this model is that matter should be distributed uniformly in the universe. This is a problem for galaxy formation, because if matter is distributed uniformly, there’s no reason for it to start clumping together. There have to be little pockets of higher density for galaxies to form. When only normal matter is included in the simulations of the early universe, galaxies form way to slowly, and don’t exhibit the large-scale structures that we observe in the deep sky surveys.
Worse, when we look around the universe, we can’t actually see enough visible matter to account for the gravitational braking that slows down the rushing apart of the galaxies.
One way of solving these conundrums is “dark matter.” The proposed properties of dark matter are that it does not emit light (it’s dark) and that it has a different kind of mass that causes it to clump together to seed the formation of galaxies.
Today we have a negative result from an experiment designed to detect dark matter. This won’t deter the theorists for long – they’ll just come up with new forms of dark matter that are invisible to the detector (this is an old trick, which caught out my thesis adviser back in the ’80s). But it does seem to make Occam’s razor cut more in the direction of the generative orders proposal for the formation of the early universe. That model doesn’t need inflation or dark matter or a multiverse to work. It anticipates just the universe that we see around us.
*sigh* Just saying.
Infestation
In decrying injustice, we tend to focus on the tall nails – the people with power that misuse it. In the end, though, these people really do not amount to much, because the power accumulated in love is so much greater than the power that they can scrape together here on Earth.
Rather, it’s the “scraping together” that is so hard to overcome. It’s like a disease of a certain type. We have these gifts all around us to use in healing the wounds left in us by selfishness. These gifts include food, air, light and companionship. The disease is to consume those gifts and do nothing with them while others do the work of bringing love into the world.
Anyone that has had the flu knows what it’s like to host this kind of activity. Jesus’ teaching on the matter reflects that reality. At the end of the parable of the talents, he commands [ESV Matt. 25:30]:
…cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
This metaphor is the prop for conservative political philosophy. Indeed, the only coherent definition of “Conservatism” holds that institutions are extremely difficult to create, and are the first thing to collapse when resources are wanting. Therefore they must be conserved at all cost against the locust-like masses.
Unfortunately , the trap that has snared so many Christian Conservatives is built right into the parable of the talents. It is the convention that money is the measure of value, and so we weigh the contributions of our companions by the wealth they have accumulated. As explained in The Soul Comes First, however, Jesus’ reference to wealth was intended to be ironical. The parable was offered to a collection of disciples that didn’t have two minahs to rub together on the road to Jerusalem. Jesus didn’t inspire them with wealth – he inspired them with courage, purpose and faith. The disciples were being cautioned to mind that investment, and seek to expand its reach.
If on the cross Jesus took sin into himself to heal its effects, how would infestation have manifested in the project of Christ? Today I see it in ministers that substitute rigid rules for compassionate and creative problem-solving. It manifests more subtly in the queen bee that organizes social pressure to protect husbands and ministers threatened by those that seek to put love before convention. But it is also in those that come to church on Sunday seeking forgiveness for the sins they commit every other day of the week.
In my own case, I’ve been struggling for some time with another manifestation of infestation – a purely spiritual manifestation. In the great struggle against selfishness, there are personalities that live by the zones in which pressure builds. They siphon away energy, creating little kingdoms without contributing to the creation of a world guided by love.
Addicts call theirs “the monkey on my back.” In my own case, it’s been described as a fairy that chops at the side of my head with an axe. It’s been a source of injury to me. I’m not certain that was its intention, but in trying to manage my influence on the community I love, it’s drawn in all kinds of sin. Inevitably, it’s become infected itself.
Down at LA Ecstatic Dance yesterday (my last dance with them, unfortunately), Ataseia got me on the massage table and tried to push it out. He was really conscious of the process, pulling its roots out of my back and arms to push it up into my left shoulder, and then through my neck and up toward the crown chakra.
The immediate benefit has been a greater sense of connection to the left side of my body. But I’m not ready to let it go yet. It’s tied to one of those kingdoms I mentioned, and now that I’ve got it up in my mind, it’s time to cast some light into that realm. They’ve had their reasons for hiding, but now it’s time to put their talents to good use. While the rulers of that realm will resist the loss of autonomy, I’ve found that most subjects will embrace enthusiastically the opportunities presented to them.
It’s not the last such problem I’ve got to deal with – there is something wound about my waist that doesn’t respond to reason.
I offer this today to stimulate similar introspection in others. Each of us has a world inside, and some of those worlds are rich enough to support independent personalities. To discipline them to loving is necessary to our own immersion in Christ.
He that Lives By the Gun, Dies By the Gun
The parable of the Good Samaritan is offered by Jesus in response to a challenge by a Hebrew lawyer, an expert on the law, who asks “Teacher, what must I do to attain eternal life?” Jesus responds with a question of his own, prompting the lawyer to summarize the law. Rather than listing the main categorizes and precepts, the lawyer says [NIV Luke 10:27]:
‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’
To which Jesus affirms:
You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live.
Obviously the focus is not this life on Earth, but the life of eternity lived with God. It is in this vein that we should also interpret his warning to the disciple in the Garden of Gethsemane [NIV Matt. 26:52]:
Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.
This is not a prophesy of human retribution, but one of a piece with his testimony that eternal life can only be found through him. When we depend upon violence for our security, we sunder ourselves from the spirit of love that forgives all sins – the same spirit that thereby gains the power to heal the wounds in our souls.
So to those that both:
- see gun ownership as a necessary antidote to governmental over-reaching, and
- threaten those that see violence as the greatest wound to civil society:
You may be able to assert your power in this world, but you surrender participation in the world to come. You may assert your freedoms in this society, but unless you lay down your weapons of your own volition, you will be left behind when the Prince of Peace welcomes souls into his kingdom.
You see, love amplifies all things, and to allow into heaven those that believe in violence would be to allow violence into heaven, and amplify its presence. That would be to betray those that have invested and suffered in peace for His promises. He will not bend to the ‘freedoms’ presumed by the NRA, even if they are enshrined in the US Constitution.
Filling the Holy Spirit
In Love Works, I have a short section called “Hat Trick” in which I explain the Trinity. The only subtlety is the Holy Spirit.
I have to start here: we are God’s medicine for the world. It might be hard to see, because our Darwinian programming coupled with the strength of our minds makes us incredibly powerful predators. We are the fourth of Daniel’s beasts – the huge monster that devours all before it with our iron machines. But we have been wearing down our Darwinian impulses and subjecting them to the discipline of love. It’s a slow process, in human terms, but when seen against the background of a billion years of creatures that came before us: we’ve made enormous progress over the last 30,000 years.
The reason love wins is because, where predators turn on each other after their prey is consumed, those that love stick together. They take refuge in Christ, who had the strength to be consumed by sin and yet continued to love. It is in his sacred heart that spirits that love find refuge from sin. From that refuge, as the Holy Spirit they dispense wisdom – the insights gained from their practical experience of loving – to those still trying to shed their attachment to sin.
Sister Gloria picked the parable of the Good Samaritan for our contemplation this week. During the discussion, several people mentioned that when confronted with the call to offer mercy and compassion to a troubled soul, they resisted, thinking “Well, you’re only getting what you deserve.”
As I see it, though, those are the most valuable moments for the Holy Spirit. The impulse to offer compassion and mercy is the Holy Spirit saying to us: “Yes, this troubled person represents a powerful pattern of destructive behavior. Bring us near to them. Be our eyes and ears, our hands and feet, so that we can learn how to bring strength to them.”
Every person that falls and is redeemed blazes a trail through human nature. They create a nexus in time that reaches out through the Holy Spirit to others facing the same struggles.
We sometimes fail to offer mercy and compassion because we are have been convinced by the materialists that only clothing and feeding is important. Ultimately, though, those things are meaningful only in that they bring the spirit closer to salvation, and thus a return to the place of our origin.
If you don’t have the means to solve the material problems (and that’s becoming true for more and more of us), don’t discount that power of mercy and compassion. Mercy and compassion bring the Holy Spirit close to those in need, helping them find the strength to resist destruction, and tendering hope that helps them seize the initiative in their lives. When we call it close in moments of need, the Holy Spirit burnishes our souls, preparing us for full citizenship in the kingdom in which love reigns.
everdeepening 