Homo sapiens...

A species of intelligent primates that thrives on 6 of 7 continents despite a perpetual surplus of swagger and bluster and a running shortage of wisdom and good humor.

Failure and recrimination...

The headline is almost more important than the article...

America's Longest War...A nation once joined together in shock and vulnerability is now riven by failure and recrimination...

http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7854412

If there is one word that describes my concern with America, right now...and I don't mean the American government...I mean Americans, although it's not just Americans...I've heard it with people from all over the world these days...

If there is anything that describes my concern with the world, right now...it is the recrimination...

I don't just mean looking for who to blame, although that is a fairly ignoble instinct as well...

I mean all of the ugliness and destructive attitudes about who to get, where retribution needs to be meted out, and how else to rationalize ugly feelings post-9/11 and post-Iraq war...in its most extreme, it manifests itself as genocide and terrorism and oppression...in it's least but still important extreme, it manifests itself as hurtfulness and insensitivity and a lack of compassion...

The partisanship we've experienced, I think, is a function of a nation lost, still, in its grief over 9/11 and the failures of the Iraq war and looking to take that out on someone...and, at some level, everyone...and a world wracked by violence and power-struggle and inequity and repression...and all of the ways that our worst instincts divide us...

My concern is with the us vs. them mentality that is the foundation for partisanship that assumes that one group of good people must dominate another group of good people if goodness is to be restored to the world...

It's all the rage, these days...liberals believe it...conservatives believe it...it's nonsense, of course...it is just as much nonsense as when democratic citizens in the 20th and 21st centuries look back at sectarian divisions among Protestants and Catholics in Great Britain or France or Spain that plunged those countries in endless wars and civil wars...it is just as much nonsense as 21st century democratic citizens look on with incomprehension at Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq or the broader Middle East and wonder how any group can believe that theirs will win some kind of final control or why they want to win even temporary control over the other...

It's foolish and nonsensical...and deeply destructive, for no good purpose...

But, sadly, what both divides Americans and people all over the world, right now, and what so many of them have in common is recrimination...is the desire for revenge and retribution...is the constant hair-splitting over what is unpardonable, because we are just too cowardly to forgive...

It is profoundly wrong-headed and destructive and it is nice to see one magazine pause and ask us if we have not lost track of our souls in the process...

It's the seriously troubling self-fulfilling prophecy of aggression and power-hunger...pursuit of power rationalizes destruction and the maintainance of power rationalizes destruction, which creates grief for others who then seek revenge or power to impose grief on those they see as enemies or opponents...

It doesn't start out that way...but it always ends up that way...
And right now is the worst that I have seen it in my lifetime...
And the more I see how ugly all people can be of all political, religious, nationalist, ethnic, gender, racial, class, and whatever other backgrounds, the less I romanticize any of it and any member of any group...

Fundamentally, we all are human beings...

And this time, more than any other, I see how important it is is think in those terms rather than in terms of all of the things that divide us...because we are too easily divided, for very little good purpose...
Power does not resolve our problems...nor does it resolve our grief...or our desire for revenge...

Forgiveness is the only way out of the recrimination and grief and desire for revenge...and power and aggression must be used as little as possible if we are to get anywhere as a species and a human family...and as long as we rationalize power and aggression for the benefit and at the expense of another, we will suffer this kind of division and violence and destruction...it doesn't matter for what purpose...we will always suffer together until we learn to treat one another better and respect limits on our capacity to hurt and force and compel one another to do our bidding...

The last 6 years, and as my friend Carson says, in the last 5 years, in particular, we have been lost on a road of darkness that promises to deliver us nowhere...

I no longer believe that that dark road is led by one group or one ideology or another...anyone and everyone who does not take forgiveness and dealing with the pain and grief seriously leads us down that road...and anyone who creates more pain and grief while detaching themselves from responsibility for that compounds the problem...

We will not ever resolve the important issues among us with power or force...we will, at best, win a battle, only to prolong a longer war...
We can, on the other hand, learn to respect and embody democratic ideals that sort out our fundamental needs, together...we can learn to respect one another's need for self-determination and self-governance, our need for freedom and our need to learn to take responsibility for ourselves without coercion (as a general rule), our need to be treated as equals and with an attention to equity when it comes to the talents and abilities we have to offer, our need to be helped when we are suffering, and our need for dignity while suffering or not...our need for love and genuine concern...our need to be loved and cared for and to love and care for others as human beings, not as members of parties or ideologies or religions or ethnicities or genders or races or sexual orientations or nationalities or any other way that we too often divide ourselves...

And as long as we do not take those ideals seriously, we can expect to be divided and to be treated badly as a consequence of those divides...

Martin Luther King was not some naive idealist, some pawn or passive collaborator in the brilliant machinations of Malcolm X...he was the most genuine moral leader of the 20th century, outside of Mohatma Ghandi, despite his foolhardy embrace of radicalism in his later, apparently more bitter years...and it is his message of love and compassion and forgiveness that is his greatest legacy, no matter how much our rationalizations try to twist that differently...that is the reason that his loving message is taught in schools and why we celebrate Martin Luther King day...to embrace what brings us together, not to vindicate what divides us...

And the significance of love and forgiveness is stronger than King or Ghandi or Jesus or Buddha or any of the people who taught about it...
And there has been no other time in my lifetime which has so embodied the need for love and forgiveness as our center...as our moral center, as our political center, as our human center...

The grief and repression and overweaning power that we impose on one another perpetually rationalizes further rounds of those ugly impositions, as Pablo Freire and Desmond Tutu remind us...just as the violence and bloodshed perpetually rationalize more violence and bloodshed until at last humanity can think and feel its way out of the ugliness and destruction...

Maslow was incomplete in his description of people losing their emotional life and vitality because of what happens to them in their lifetimes...what is more true is that people lose life and vitality in their lives because they lack the courage and willingness to face the pain and heartache and let it go...our lack of will more than what happens to us is responsible for our smaller visions...and the consequence is the cynical world that then further rationalizes our cynical outlooks which then further rationalizes a cynical world which then further rationalizes our cynical outlooks...

There is only one way out...Desmond Tutu writes powerfully about it...it is our need to forgive and to be forgiven...to love and to have compassion...there is no other path...everything else is a fool's journey...

There is no division of people that will finally vindicate us...vindicate how right we are/were or vindicate why we are superior to others or worthy of our larger rewards...

All of our divisions are premised on the notion that if we can root out those we see as different from us or defeat them or oppose them, then we can live in peace...it is false premise of peace and of a more universal humanity which is necessary for that peace...

We obviously must use force and aggression, at times, for our self-defense and for the defense and liberty of others...but we should use power as little as possible -- so that we can trust better when authorities must use power when it is genuinely necessary -- and we must use the least possible force and aggression necessary for our purposes at times when terrorists threaten or genocide must be stopped or dangerous and violent people must be captured...we must widen the scope of freedom, not narrow it, to build faith in our common political institutions -- particularly for times when that faith is necessary, as in the case of collective self-defense or criminal justice -- and to build our trust between one another...there is no trust with power...there is only fear...and fear is not a sustainable or decent way to lead people...it is a means of control that inevitably leads to abuse and/or corruption...

We must earn the trust of one another and build institutions -- with our words and our votes -- that earn the trust of all people...anything less is a recipe for prolonged and sustained conflict which will always threaten those institutions until it is resolved...

It is not power that keeps us together during these dark times...it is an idea...the idea of our common humanity...of our need to look after ourselves, and help others as we can...our need to be decent and take each individual seriously in their own rite...our need for love and compassion and understanding...our need to forgive and to share burdens and to mutually engage one another...our need to think and be open to ideas of people who disagree with us or see the world different from us...our need to be our best selves and to forgive our worst...

We have a million reasons for why we don't live up to that idea...for why we don't take that idea seriously...

But those reasons are all excuses that serve neither us nor anyone else...

As Jesus said, we are much more apt to see the splinter in our neighbors' eye than the beam in our own...

And as I hope we are learning during this period, our rationalizations can go as low as we'd like...that is the nature of our free will...whether we try to force away that reality or not...

Power and violence rationalize themselves...because someone exercises power over me or because they are violent with me, I must aspire to be likewise to avoid their grip...as my good friend John Shtupka (sp?) used to say when I first moved to Lawrence, "Life is a shit sandwich. The more bread you have, the less shit you eat." Fill in power for bread -- meaning money -- and you have the essence of that rationalization...it happens to be false, by the way...we all eat shit, no matter how much money and power we have...and often we eat more shit when we have more money and power, which then reinforces peoples' desire for more money and power for the greater amount of shit that they eat...

It is a powerful rationalization that animates much of the world, sadly...though it genuinely serves noone...

And our capacity for rationalization is the reason why ideals and ideas are so important...because they check our capacity for acting rashly and compounding the rationalization...and they are the only basis for a sustainable future...

I think I understand in this period more than any other the importance of the idea of public education, where we all learn together and take thought seriously together...

As adults and as kids we often pair and divide off into people who think or act or we believe are more like ourselves...but the truth is that what has sustained us through this period has not been any central power...to the contrary, in the realm of politics, divided power and our ability to dissent and to criticize and to engage and to block abuses of authority, when necessary, has been terribly critical to checking the power-hunger of all people with authority...and there is still much more to do, in that regard...

What has sustained us, independent of the political process, has been our capacity to think and reason and aspire independently and together for something better than our current malaise...

This Economist article or Joe Nye's work on Soft Power or Mark Twain's literature, in that regard, are and have been, during this period, much more valuable than anyone being elected or unelected...we just persistently take it and the ideas and heart that are the real backbone of humanity and human life for granted...

For the same reason that most people choose long-term monogamous relationships over the thrill of fucking strangers, I have confidence in peoples' capacity to recognize this...recrimination or power-frenzy or identity politics or ideological or any other form of polarization are all highly charged forms of rebellion and dark impulse for people in the short term...

But they can't sustain a culture or a democratic government...that can only be sustained with something more genuine and honest and sincere and true...

We all know that...even as we indulge our darker temptations and impulses...

Failure and recrimination can rally us around ignoble ends...but they cannot sustain us...thought and compassion and common bonds are the only things that can sustain us...everything else is a fool's journey...

Love,
Ben

Healthy regression as a necessary element of progress...

When I studied Maslow for the first time more than 4 years ago, now, while I was in grad school, he introduced me to so many new ideas in his really remarkable theoretical work, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature...

But one idea that I don't think I had encountered before was the idea of healthy regression...

At the time, I didn't understand it very well...I appreciated the idea as an appreciation of the human experience...but I didn't quite understand what he meant...

But I think I'm beginning to understand what he means...

What I think Maslow meant was that progress is not an automatic march forward...that's why I didn't understand the idea when I first read it...because at the time I thought of progress as more of an automatic march forward, or regress as some kind of temporary reaction by a society...

But I think I'm beginning to understand, better, what Maslow was saying...at the cultural and political level as much as at the individual level...

Freedom is central to Maslow thinking about people and their thinking and values the ways that their thinking and values evolve over time in response to realities...

And I think what he was saying, now, is that we don't get better in some steady, automatic march...quite to the contrary, we have all kinds of moments of weakness and foolishness and ignorance and hurtfulness...

And there are times when we indulge or give into that weakness and foolishness and ignorance and hurtfulness...

And progress results from our thinking about our experiences and making choices from experiences and reflections on experiences...
But experiences include good and healthy choices...and they include bad and hurtful and ugly and unhealthy choices...

So, while the choice, itself, may not be a good choice...the need for freedom to make the choice...and the need to experience our choices and their consequences results in learning that is absolutely necessary to progress...

Meaning, not only is there some inexorable march forward to progress uninterrupted by regress or bad choices or reactionary cultural and political moments (which I think America and the world is in the midst of, right now) and poor reasoning and adaptation of values to realities...

But bad choices are necessary for us to better appreciate and internalize values and good choices...they bring a reality to our experience and learning that is only abstract until the experience is a part of our choices and lives...

There is no life where people don't make bad choices...that's the insanity and futility of trying to beat bad choices out of people...people need to make bad choices if they are going to learn better values and ideas and experiences...

And the irony is that the more we try to beat bad choices out of people, generally, the more they are attracted to the very choices we are trying to steer them away from because, fundamentally, people have a healthy aversion to control and a need to make choices freely...they can repress that need, but it has consequence in their lives, first and foremost being both an insecurity about a world full of uncertainty and their own propensity toward making bad choices, but also an internal conflict that never gets resolved while people try to live lives of perfection that are not possible and unhealthy until people are able to learn from their choices...

As the really brilliant play, Genesis, performed by EMU recently and written by high school kids, amazingly enough, at the Manhattan Theater Workshop, says, choices, including moral choices -- meaning including sin or serious mistakes -- are epistemological...we're not quite sure if what we've been told about sin or mistakes or choices is true...so we want to try it out to see if we can trust what people tell us...because we are all individuals, living individual lives and cultivating individual judgment...and that judgment, quite naturally and healthily, is skeptical of the judgment of others...

So we try to choice...and if it's a real sin, we get burned...or perhaps we
don't but the thrill of the sin wears off as we are humanized to our experiences, good and bad...

Jonah Goldberg is just wrong...hurting people for making mistakes is not necessary or helpful...protecting ourselves from people who engage in seriously dangerous or violent behavior is reasonable...but hurting them is often retribution, not justice...they are not the same thing...retribution is our rationalization of our desire for revenge...a weakness or sin, not a value of nobility...there are just many among us who have a hard time looking honestly at themselves, enough, to be honest with themselves about this weakness...many, many people have a hard time being honest with themselves, constantly absorbed in their defenses of their egos...

But a loving, compassionate attitude towards are sins and mistakes and choices allows us to live more functional lives where we make choices -- good and bad -- and learn from them, rather than being obsessed with tasting forbidden fruit, hiding our true selves, lying to ourselves and others about our behavior for fear of being found out and suffering sanction, pretending that we believe things we don't for fear of being hurt while believing otherwise in our hearts, and otherwise compounding our original mistakes with all kinds of deception and self-deception...punishment creates the need for deception and self-deception, in fact...there is no need for it, otherwise...and ironically, punishment is generally our own flawed belief and habit of indulging a weakness for revenge or for believing that punishment actually makes a behavior go away, which any basic psychology student could tell you does not happen, since punishment generally wears off over time...that's why we have to go to more and more severe punishments, because lower level punishments -- from the time of our childhoods -- wear off over time...

Punishments hurt people without really leading them to think differently...to the contrary, they often obscure the reflection process which is responsible for behavior changes because they lead to deception and self-deception to avoid hurt as a defense mechanism and thus shortcircuit the reflection process which is really the critical process...

The key to behavior change is thinking differently...and punishments often obscure the terrain, unnecessarily burden people with stresses that serve very little real function -- except perhaps to cower some people, but even then either temporarily or with the counterproductive consequence of cowering them from worthy pursuits, as well, as cowardice becomes a habit...

Our propensity to want to hurt people for most reasons is often related to our own pain -- whether we are honest about or recognize that or not -- that, as Desmond Tutu and Pablo Freire teach, we often want to inflict on others out of a illusive hope that it will make us feel better...it generally doesn't, as most people who hold onto various bitternesses either figure out or live in misery not figuring it out...

But it doesn't serve any objective purpose in promoting better behavior, generally, except as an indirect means of prompting reflection that is often shortcircuited or undermined by the punishment itself as people try desperately to avoid facing painful realities and sharing painful realities with others...

The truth is that people like Jonah Goldberg just haven't thought about this very much, I generally think...because almost never do I hear a reasoned discussion of the matter...almost always it is to reinforce our biases and vanities about our desire to see ourselves as successful in changing behavior in ways that are generally inaccurate and untrue...
I think the reason why less educated people tend to be, often though not always, more aggressive is because they have the hardest time learning to reflect on their aggression enough to consider whether it has been effective in achieving their goals or not...and when it doesn't achieve their goals, then often just go on doing the same dumb thing again and again...especially if they have people all over the culture reinforcing that stupid original mistake, as is the case now...

We are amidst a period of regress, I think, because everyone is reinforcing the same dumb mistake that somehow change in behavior can be forced (which it clearly can't to anyone who is looking seriously and not just reinforcing the same biases...it can influence behavior, short term, but choices and the conscience that develops from those choices always controls behavior, long term...

It's just a really dumb mistake that people can't let go of, for whatever reasons...

Which is fine, because as I said, earlier, eventually we have to face the consequences of our choices...good and bad...we can't just keep making the same dumb mistakes into perpetuity and never learn from them...ok, some of us can, but a lot of people don't, and most people end up following stronger wisdom once people get off the stupid notions...

This is a regressive period, in my view, because it is a time when a mistaken notion -- that serious behavioral change can be forced -- that this idea is holding sway and choices in that direction are being reinforced like gangbusters...so people follow the idea, no matter how bad it is, because an awful lot of people look more to others to answer the question, "Is this a good idea?" then they look to their own developed thoughts and consciences...we all do, is the truth, though there are those among us with more developed thoughts and consciences to deal more effectively with the problems we face and to develop values that are consistent with better thinking about those problems...

But it is a healthy regression, insofar as bad choices are necessary to understand, better, what good choices look like and to internalize rather than just abstract why choices are good or why choices are bad...

There just is no way to make forward progress all the time...life is not a race where we do the simple task of running over and over again into perpetuity...life is a long and dynamic experience that involves thought and choices about how to navigate that experience, and making choices involves making good choices and bad choices...

There is no way out of that, no matter how much parents and teachers and politicians try to force people to only make good choices...it's not possible to only make good choices...and those who are trying to are fooling themselves...we can make better choices, over time...but better choices necessarily involve bad choices as well...there is just no way around that...if we can develop patience for that fact...which we clearly can...though so many people -- most people -- are still foolishly convinced that somehow we can force away bad choices, which is just a mistaken way of looking at our experience as people...

Freedom is fundamental to our natures because freedom is necessary to learn...it always has been and has had to be stolen in the night when it was more closely guarded, restricted and repressed...

But more open freedom has allowed us to both make better decisions with more freely made choices in a way that is sustainable wisdom rather than relearning the wheel each generation and more open freedom has allowed us to be more realistic about people's learning and experiences that contribute to learning rather than fruitlessly repeating the same mistakes from past generations...

This particular regressive period has involved people romanticizing a fairy tale past, I think, believing that there once existed a moment in time when mistakes were not made...or when repression served us better than it really did...and giving into the weakness and foolish belief that such repression can actually make choices we don't like go away, rather than just allowing the mistakes and the learning that comes with them...

The latter is much more healthy and was what Maslow was referring to with the concept of healthy regression, I think...and I think we are wise to heed his thinking about the matter rather than to foolishly and arrogantly make the same mistakes from past generations...

So much more to write, but I'm exhausted and need some sleep:)...another time:)...

Love,
Ben