Agate “turtle” from China*
Come to the edge, he said.
We are afraid, they said.
Come to the edge, he said.
They came to the edge,
He pushed them and they flew.
Come to the edge, Life said.
They said: We are afraid.
Come to the edge, Life said.
They came. Life pushed them...
And they flew.
*
THE REAL TRAGEDY OF BETH MARCH IN “LITTLE WOMEN”
~ “People who have studied anything about Little Women know that the novel is based, roughly, on Louisa’s family, a clan of thinkers, artists, and transcendentalists who rubbed elbows with some of the premier minds of their time: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller.
Beth is no exception; she is based on Alcott’s second-youngest sister, Lizzie. Lizzie, like Beth, was stricken with scarlet fever. (During this initial illness, her family—vegans and believers in alternative medicine—did not send for a doctor.) Like Beth, she recovered from the illness but, her heart weakened, never regained full health. Like Beth, she died tragically young, though not quite as young as her literary counterpart.
But while Beth bore her suffering gladly, with unconscionable cheer and resolution, Lizzie was enraged at the fact of her own mortality. “In Little Women,” writes Alcott biographer Susan Cheever, “Beth has a quiet, dignified death, a fictional death. Although young Lizzie Alcott was a graceful, quiet woman, she was not so lucky. A twenty-two-year-old whose disease had wasted her body so that she looked like a middle-aged woman, she lashed out at her family and her fate with an anger that she had never before expressed.” Louisa and the others caring for Lizzie plied her with morphine, ether, and opium, though eventually the drugs lost any effect they once had on her. “[The] pain,” writes Cheever in American Bloomsbury, “seemed to drive her mad … even on large doses of opium, Lizzie attacked her sisters and asked to be left in peace.”
By the end, the fight had gone out of her body. The final words her family could understand were, “Well now, mother, I go, I go. How beautiful everything is tonight,” though she “kept up a little inaudible monologue” for a short while after that. When she passed, both Louisa and Abba, their mother, reported seeing a “light mist rise from the body and float up and vanish in the air.”
Lizzie was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, on a patch of land she’d chosen before her death. Thoreau and Emerson served as pallbearers. “Emerson told the officiating minister, who did not know the family well, that Lizzie was a good, unselfish, patient child, who made friends even in death,” John Matteson wrote in Eden’s Outcasts. “Everyone seemed to forget that they were not burying a child but a woman of twenty-two.”
But the grief is, otherwise, a strange and flattening thing; beneath its weight, Beth becomes faultless, angelic, positively uncomplicated. Her ambitions are not squashed by her infirmity, because she has none. Her only imperfection—shyness—seems like a humble-brag, like a job candidate telling an interviewer that her primary flaw is “working too hard.”
The scarlet fever chapter of Little Women is, I think, as close as Alcott gets to true, palpable horror. Beth talks in “a hoarse, broken voice,” tries to sing through a swollen throat, runs her thin fingers over her blanket as if trying to play the piano, calls her sisters by the wrong names. She is in a “heavy stupor,” her face “changed and vacant,” her hands “weak and wasted,” her “once-smiling lips quite dumb.” Her illness is, for lack of a better word, creepy. It is “uncanny valley,” dehumanizing. It is, like real illness and real death, terrifying and gross.
But after this nightmarish period, the rest of Beth’s death is positively Victorian: beautiful, holy, austere. In part two of Little Women, Jo observes that there is a “strange, transparent look about [Beth’s face], as if the mortal was being slowly refined away, and the immortal shining through the frail flesh with an indescribably pathetic beauty.” As it does in every film of the Final Destination franchise, the death that has been chasing her for so long draws near. Like the moment during her initial illness when she sat up and played the bedclothes on her lap like a piano, she hovers in the doorway between this world and another. There are many references to Beth as a “shadow,” and this language appears also in describing Lizzie, in Louisa’s journal, Abba’s, and Bronson’s. It is easy to see why casting directors chose baby-faced, wide-eyed, peach-cheeked Claire Danes for Beth in the 1994 film adaptation—she was eerily adept at that ethereal plane.
Late in the novel, Jo comes to believe that Beth has a big secret. After some deduction— including finding Beth weeping in the night — Jo concludes that her sister is in love with Laurie. “Jo mistakes Beth’s pallor for the conventional signs of unrequited love,” writes Athena Vrettos in her book Somatic Fictions, “[and her] first response is to try to write a new ending to Beth’s story as she might for her own heroines, thereby transforming the deathbed drama into a narrative of miraculous recovery.” Only later, during a trip to the seaside, does she find out that — far from a crush — Beth has accepted that she is going to die, and soon.
There, on the shore of her own metaphor, Beth says, “Every day I lose a little, and feel more sure that I shall never gain it back. It’s like the tide, Jo, when it turns; it goes slowly, but it can’t be stopped.”
*
It’s weirdly hard to dislike Beth; she’s unflaggingly kind and selfless. A bit Pollyanna-ish, sure, but ultimately a force for good within the family. Alcott gives the tiniest bit of lip service to Beth’s human qualities—that is to say, the normal difficulties that mark everyone—but they do not emerge on the page. Beth does not rage against the unfairness of her situation; but even worse than that, she wants nothing.
It is impossible to imagine her adulthood. Not even just the reader; Beth can’t imagine it, either. “I only mean to say that I have a feeling that it never was intended I should live long,” she tells Jo shortly before the end of her life. “I’m not like the rest of you. I never made any plans about what I’d do when I grew up. I never thought of being married, as you all did. I couldn’t seem to imagine myself anything but stupid little Beth, trotting about at home, of no use anywhere but there.”
Lizzie’s family had a narrative about her, and it killed her. Not just once, but over and over again. A woman who lived and had thoughts and made art and was snarky and strange and funny and kind and suffered tremendously and died angry at the world becomes sweet, soft Beth. A dear, and nothing else.
When she was a baby and sat playing on the floor of the family home, Lizzie’s older sisters built a tower of books around her. She was so agreeable about it, they kept going until she was entirely concealed. Then — losing interest in the game — they wandered away and forgot about her. When the Alcott family discovered that baby Lizzie was missing, they searched and searched. Eventually they found her “curled up and fast asleep in her dungeon cell,” Louisa wrote in her journal. “[She] emerged so rosy and smiling after her nap that we were forgiven for our carelessness.”
There are so many ways to read this story. Lizzie as inherently passive. Lizzie as a good-natured child. Lizzie as a character in a novel engaging in some good, old-fashioned foreshadowing. That last one is the one I cannot shake: Lizzie sitting obediently as her family built a sepulcher of words around her.” ~
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/08/29/the-real-tragedy-of-beth-march/
Mary:
I remember Beth's passivity, that sort of gentle acceptance of fate, as annoying even in my first reading of Little Women. In fact, the only character I found not just appealing but fully human, likable, and believable, was Jo. Beth was a pale shadow, Meg was boring and ordinary, Amy a petulant spoiled brat, whose creativity never convinced me. The moralizing tone made me itch, and only Jo seemed to question and challenge the confining roles and precepts of her time. Not heroically, but believably. Not a retiring Victorian "angel of the house," but a woman of great spunk, integrity and practicality. Like Jane Eyre, another heroine who, while still confined by the society of her time, is modern in her desire for self-sufficiency, and delightful in her ability to insist on independence and respect. Of course neither character transcends the demands and definitions of their time, finding ways to live and survive within them...but they have both a shining intelligence and the spark of rebellion. Villains and misfits always make the best characters; saints simply bore.
Oriana:
Yes, Jo is everyone’s favorite “little woman.” But then it’s the modern culture of the readers. And the real-life Beth, we now learn, was anything but passive — she did rage at the dying of the light.
Saint Francis was both a saint and a trouble-maker, as was Teresa of Avila. There were probably some other historical saints like that. Not all sweetness and light — not at all. Their earnestness and depth made people uncomfortable. I guess all outstanding individuals make many others uncomfortable. It’s the price of being different.
And imagine choosing to be a hermit, especially for a woman. An immediate suspicion would follow — is she a witch, the devil’s consort? To fit in, we are supposed to be superficial. Be too pious, too dedicated to your vocation, whatever it may be — you’ll be in exile, without even needing to live in the wilderness.
When I was an active poet, I was once sternly warned that other people in the workshop don’t take poetry as seriously as I do. Even my mother, a dedicated, pioneering scientist, told me, “You have the temperament of a fanatic.” Who did she think I took after?
But I can understand the objection. I had a cousin who struck people as “too religious” — during the most intense phase of her piety, that was indeed alienating.
Mary:
Thanks for reminding me of the interesting saints!! Francis and Teresa certainly, and I also think of Hildegarde of Bingen, St. John of the Cross, even the founder of the Ursuline order of nuns and her passion for the education of women. (I think that's St Angela) — certainly all passionate and creative people, and often women who found freedom and power in religious roles that was otherwise unavailable to them in that time and place.
“Somewhere in Europe” — that sounds like my own caption, reposted later. *
“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. Every path leads homeward.” ~ Hermann Hesse
*
THREE TRAITS OF IRRESISTIBLE PEOPLE
HUMILITY
This trait is the root of all growth, learning and kindness. It’s the belief that you are not yet so great that your mind cannot be opened, and it’s the presence of mind to remember that we are all interconnected equals, and that injustice against one is an injustice against all. It is, flatly, an absence of entitlement. People who exhibit humility let their work speak for itself, they remain stoic in the face of their own suffering, and they remind themselves — and others — that life is fragile and therefore valuable. Humility quells ignorance and cultivates grace. I want this in the people I hold dear.
CURIOSITY
Without curiosity, you cannot be enthralling or even engaging, nor — most rudimentary of all — successful. It is frankly impossible. Curiosity drives an insatiable quest for knowledge, culture, novelty, experience, beauty, art and connection. It is the bedrock upon which you can build a life filled with stories, memories, accomplishments and relationships. People who exhibit curiosity can become masters, or polymaths, or auteurs — but they must first always have an open mind. They first seek to listen, to absorb, to immerse, to traverse. The world is too large and their time on it too short to ever remain fully satisfied in their pursuit of whatever new ideas pass in front of them. I want people around me to remain curious, routinely examining the world through fresh eyes, and using their eyes to find fresh corners of the world.
EMPATHY
This trait is the miracle drug of humanity (and elephants, and dolphins). It is the simplest, sweetest attribute one can possess, and the most worthwhile one worth cultivating for social success. Empathy brings people closer, and makes others feel understood and less alone inside. And if there is one thing we’re all looking to become a little less of, it’s alone. When I see truly empathetic people, I see people who genuinely care, but also people who remind us that sometimes it’s okay to be still with someone else and not invade their space or encroach their boundaries. This unique ability to understand the world through others’ eyes and cut to the heart of what others are feeling and experiencing. Empathy breeds compassion, connection and love. It is an important precursor for honesty.
*
Humility is the soul. Curiosity is the mind. Empathy is the heart.
Humility is how you value yourself. Curiosity is how you value your others. Empathy is how you value the bonds between yourself and others.
Humility is the soil of knowledge. Curiosity is the water that helps it grow. Empathy is the sunlight that shows us which way to bend.
https://medium.com/personal-growth/the-3-keys-to-becoming-irresistible-d2f689ea4bf1
*
DON’T WORRY ABOUT WORK-LIFE BALANCE; SIMPLIFY
~ “Research shows that people who believe they don’t have time for their personal life, feel drained and distracted at work.
Recently I was talking to one my friends. He and his wife recently had their second baby. And he was saying how he struggled with balance when they had their first child. But now, he decided to simplify things.
90% of his time goes to family, work, and himself. All the other things in life he ignores. No balance. All or nothing in a few areas.
And I’m exactly the same. I don’t think balance is a good strategy.
*
Let’s say you have 9–5 job. But you want to be in the office by 8.30am. So you leave the house at 7.30am. You want to leave early and you finish up work at 5.30pm. It’s 6.30pm before you get home.
That whole work aspect of your day takes 10 hours in that scenario, which is not uncommon.
Let’s say you sleep 7 hours. That gives you 17 waking hours.
That means you spend 59% of your time on work related things.
There goes your balance.
Plus, we spend most of our free time thinking, worrying, and talking about work.
It’s safe the say there’s no such thing as a work-life balance.
You see? Work is life.
If work is holding back your personal or spiritual growth, find different work.
If work is messing up your relationships, again, find different work.
Balance only makes life complicated. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t mind complicated things. I like math and econometrics.
But I don’t like it when people complicate very simple things. Work-life balance is only an issue if you turn it into one. And why do you even need to balance a thousand things?
Henry David Thoreau said it best:
“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand.”
If you oversimplify your life, and decide what your life is exactly about—you will find there are only a few priorities that matter.
You don’t need to do everything. It’s fine if you only have time for a few things in life.
Don’t worry. Don’t balance. Simplify." ~
https://medium.com/darius-foroux/why-i-dont-believe-in-work-life-balance-52ee12396055
Mary:
On work and life, simplicity and balance..the assumption seems to be that concentration on work is a kind of unpleasant task we have to “get through” so we can have pleasure and freedom in the time we are not working. This only floats if work is an obligation, not a joy, something forced rather than chosen, a punishment or tax we have to pay in order to claim any “free” time. Sounds like work as it's been since the industrial revolution and the economics shaped by it. If your work is your passion, the thing that gives you both joy and torment, there really isn’t that divide between work and play, forced labor and freedom. Your work and your life are congruent, not opposed.
This kind of simple unity is possibly only found now in artists and scientists, fairly impossible for most other wage laborers, even those in what are considered "professions." To find freedom and joy in work it must be something you love, something you are perpetually curious and intrigued with, something you can't tear yourself away from. Definitely not a "day job," one you must punch in and out of, one whose rewards are only financial, and where your best dream is a vacation away from it.
I am also interested in the spur of ambition, and its effects on both productivity and happiness. I have always been unable to feel ambition, think in terms of "building a career", "rising in the ranks," "climbing the professional ladder." This was true for me both as a Registered Nurse and in my studies of literature and writing poetry. A nurse who climbs the ladder is no longer at the bedside, no longer a care deliverer, but a "manager," with little actual patient contact. Many pursue "careers" not only for increased compensation and prestige , but precisely because it will take them away from direct care..that often gritty and demanding battlefield. It had no appeal for me...I wanted to actually be a practicing nurse, not a manager, to do hands on care, not sit in an office behind a desk.
This lack of ambition to build a career is also how I operate as a poet. I find the idea of, as I have heard it expressed, the "po-biz," singularly unappealing. I certainly have had things published, and enjoy engaging with other poets and their work, but haven't felt any overwhelming drive to get a book published or do the promotion it would require. I don't think this is simple laziness, but that almost all my joy is in the process of writing itself, the"work" part of it. The rest simply isn't urgent, and in any case, nothing to break your heart over. Time will swallow it all up, even stars and galaxies will die, and our memories are short...in fact the whole story of our existence amounts to only the tiniest splinter of time.
As soon as the work is no longer a passion and a source of joy, it loses all meaning, at least for me . There is the work of writing, and the rest is just decoration, not necessity. Some artists make their art their career, others do not. Which is the better choice?? The answer would depend on who and what is asking...there is no one way to be an artist as there is no one way to be human.
Oriana:
I totally agree. I've experienced enough jobs that were meaningless to me to know the downright intoxicating job of the kind of work into which you put all your heart. For me that has been both teaching and writing, sometimes intermingled.
As for the advice to simply put your whole being into whatever work you do, well, I imagine that sometimes it works: first you start working hard, and then true zest develops. There are office managers who love their work, and even waitresses who do: they enjoy interacting with customers. But we are limited in our capacity for passion, and the work itself needs to fit our talents and personality. It's a great good luck to have a job you love for which you actually get paid.
But it says everything if anyone is willing to put in endless hours into the kind work that's rewarding to that person. When Freud named "love and work" as the two most important things in life, he must have meant creative work, not the boring kind.
*
“What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart? Oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.” ~ Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
THE HELL OF POETS?
When Franz Wright first sent a few of his early poems to his famous father, James Wright wrote back: “So you are a poet. Welcome to hell.” Dante’s Canto III comes to mind, the inscription on the gate:
Through me the way into the suffering city, through me the way into eternal pain . . . Abandon hope, you who enter here.
The poets’ hell was also mentioned by Milosz: it was a part of the hell of artists: those who put the love of art ahead of human love. Milosz said that Anna Kamińska was not an eminent poet; she was too good a good human being “to learn the wiles of the craft.” Her life was rich with human joys and suffering rather than creative agony and ecstasy.
Agony and ecstasy, the cross and the delight: the agony of poetry’s difficulty, the capriciousness of inspiration, waiting ten years for the right ending (now and then it’s precisely what happens), the impossibility of writing good work every time. And this before we even begin to lament the wounds in the struggle for recognition, the constant rejection and humiliation. “You die not knowing” if your work was any good, as Berryman says in Merwin’s poem.
For Franz, there was also the problem of being regarded as “the wrong Wright,” the son not half the lyricist that his father was. “No magic,” I kept thinking when I read Franz’s poems. I have since changed my mind — Walking to Martha’s Vineyard was one of my sources of sustenance when I was in the hospital.
But all poets have the less personal but even more demanding mothers and fathers, the great poets whose best work set the standard. We want lyricism, subtlety, the bliss of poetic beauty; and we want insight and surprise. We want to learn about the poet’s life, to have a sense of his or her personality —but not to be drowned in excess detail. Offhand, it seems impossible — and yet excellent poems get written every day.
*
It took me years of despair to come to see that the last words written on gate also pointed to the paradoxical way out of hell, especially the hell of trying to get published. “Abandon hope” -- stop striving for instant perfection and struggling for recognition, and enjoy the peaceful pleasure of concentrating on the work itself, on the beautiful unfolding of the creative process.
This is Buddhist and Taoism wisdom, but not exclusively so. Some Western thinkers have also discovered the bliss of dropping the striving, of dropping the self-flagellation with the whip of “Achieve! achieve!” They advise dropping the dream, the great ambition, and concentrating on “micro-ambition”: the task at hand, without thinking of the results. “Don’t have a dream!” Focus totally on what’s in front of you.
It’s also a matter of trust, of relinquishing conscious control. The best writing flows from the unconscious when it is ready, in its own time. Once writing ceased to be overwhelmingly important, I began to watch with pleasure how it emerges, one image leading to the next, one idea opening an infinity of ideas. That’s where the inner critic must awake and choose only the best — again, with as little struggle as possible, since choice too is part of the inspiration, and will come when it is ripe.
*
There is no circle of poets in Dante’s hell. Virgil is one of the noble pagans who dwell in Limbo. Brunetto Latino, Dante’s mentor, runs on the burning sand under a rain of fire as punishment for homosexuality. Most unforgettable is Bertran de Born, who holds his severed head like a lantern. But no one is in hell for dedication to his art rather than to god.
In Dante’s hell I’d probably find myself in the circle of the heretics. For Dante it meant those who denied the immortality of the soul, i.e. the afterlife. Those who dared to think for themselves and concluded that consciousness dies when the body dies, are doomed to live in open tombs filled with flame. After Judgment Day in the Valley of Josaphat near Jerusalem, the heretics, their bodies restored, will return to lie down in their tombs -- but now the stone lid of the tomb will be shut.
One might point out that the suffering would be greater if the heretics had some hope of getting out of the tomb and seeing “the sweet light” of earth. Then they’d be trying and trying, only to fail again and again. But without hope, they will not engage in useless struggle. Strange as it may sound, they’ll be at peace while consumed by the eternal flame.
Jerusalem, the Valley of Josaphat, assumed to be the site of the Last Judgment. In the foreground, is that a cemetery? A cemetery without tall trees and vines, how sad . . .
Beauty is holy to me, and “the heart's affections.” Milosz thought that people could be divided into those "born pious" and the naturally impious. The pious have a sense of awe, a
sense of the sacred in the world.
A POPULIST (AND POPULAR) GERMAN PHILOSOPHER
~ “In 1979, Peter Sloterdijk moved to India, where he studied with the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, near Pune. He says that the greatest discussions of Adorno he ever heard were on the fringes of an ashram there. His time in India led him to challenge many of his intellectual assumptions. “In the German philosophical tradition, we were told that we humans were poor devils,” he said to me. “But in India the message was: we weren’t poor devils, we contained hidden gods!”
In 1983, a few years after his return, Sloterdijk published a thousand-page book that has sold more copies than any other postwar book of German philosophy. The title, “The Critique of Cynical Reason,” seemed to promise a cheeky update of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” but the book instead delivered a wildly personal polemic about the deterioration of the utopian spirit of 1968 and called for Sloterdijk’s generation to take stock of itself. His peers, as they reached middle age, were pragmatically adjusting to global capitalism and to the nuclear stalemate of the Cold War. He issued a challenge to readers to scour history and art for ways of overcoming social atomization. Punning on Kant’s concept of the thing-in-itself, he asked, “Have we not become the isolated thing-for-yourself in the middle of similar beings?”
The antidote to cynicism, he suggested, was a re-immersion in the heritage of the Cynics of ancient Greece. He looked to the philosopher Diogenes, who rejected the social conventions that governed human behavior and said that people should live instinctively, like dogs. The word “cynic” comes from the Greek kynikos, meaning “doglike,” and Sloterdijk coined the term “kynicism” to differentiate Diogenes’ active assault on prevailing norms from the passive disengagement of the late twentieth century. He celebrated the direct way that Diogenes made his points — masturbating in the marketplace, defecating in the theater — and suggested that the answer to his generation’s malaise was to repurpose the spontaneous currents of sixties counterculture.
The book caught a moment and made philosophy seem both relevant and fun, beguiling readers with arguments about the philosophical import of breasts and farts. But although it made Sloterdijk’s name, he remained an academic outsider, drifting from post to post for almost a decade. His response was to dismiss those who dismissed him — “Their codes and rituals are reliably antithetical to thought,” he told me — and to forge his reputation instead with articles in magazines and newspapers. He received job offers from America, but it was becoming clear that he was by nature a gadfly — that he and Germany needed each other because they agitated each other so much.”
The most notorious episode occurred in 1999, after Sloterdijk published “Rules for the Human Zoo,” an essay about the fate of humanism. Since Roman times, he argued, humanism’s latent message had been that “reading the right books calms the inner beast” and its function was to select a “secret élite” of the literate. Now, in the age of media-saturated mass culture, reading great books had lost its selective function. “What can tame man, when the role of humanism as the school for humanity has collapsed?” he wrote. Channelling Heidegger and Nietzsche, Sloterdijk imagined an “Über-humanist” who might use “genetic reform” to insure “that an élite is reared with certain characteristics.”
In Germany, where the very word “selection” is enough to set off alarms, Sloterdijk’s essay invited antagonism. Was he making a plea for eugenics? Jürgen Habermas, the country’s most revered philosopher, declared that Sloterdijk’s work had “fascist implications,” and encouraged other writers to attack him. Sloterdijk responded by proclaiming the death of the Frankfurt School, to which Habermas belongs, writing that “the days of hyper-moral sons of national-socialist fathers are coming to an end.” German intellectuals mostly sided with Habermas, but Sloterdijk emerged from the scuffle with his status considerably enhanced. He was now a national figure who stood for everything that Habermas did not.
In “Rage and Time,” Sloterdijk writes that the discontents of capitalism leave societies susceptible to “rage entrepreneurs”— a phrase that uncannily foreshadows the advent of Donald Trump. When we spoke about Trump, Sloterdijk explained him as part of a shift in Western history. “This is a moment that won’t come again,” he told me. “Both of the old Anglophone empires have within a short period withdrawn from the universal perspective.” Sloterdijk went so far as to claim that Trump uses fears of ecological devastation in his favor. “The moment for me was when I first heard him say ‘America First,’ ” he said. “That means: America to the front of the line! But it’s not the line for globalization anymore, but the line for resources. Trump channels this global feeling of ecological doom.”
I asked Sloterdijk if there was something specifically American about Trumpism. “You can’t go looking for Trump in Europe,” he told me. “You know, Hegel in his time was convinced that the state in the form of the rule of law had not yet arrived in the new world. He thought that the individual—private, virtuous—had to anticipate the state. You see this in American Westerns, where the good sheriff has to imagine the not-yet-existent state in his own private morality. But Trump is a degenerate sheriff. He acts as if he doesn’t care if the state comes into being or not, and mocks the upright townsfolk. What makes Trump dangerous is that he exposes parts of liberal democracies that were only shadowily visible up until now. In democracies, there is always an oligarchic element, but Trump makes it extremely, comically visible.” For Sloterdijk, Trump’s true significance lies in the way that he instinctively subverts the norms of modern governance. “He’s an innovator when it comes to fear,” Sloterdijk told me. “Instead of waiting for the crisis to impose his decree, his decrees get him the emergencies he needs. The playground for madness is vast.”
Little by little, the discussion gravitated to assaults on Sloterdijk’s positions. “You sound like the right-wingers when you speak of the refugees,” an elderly doctor stood up and declared. “We cared about refugees after the war and we can do it again.”
Sloterdijk replied impatiently. “The Americans gave us this idea of multiculturalism that suited their society fine, but which, as software, is not compatible with our German hardware of the welfare state,” he said. “There’s this family metaphor spreading everywhere: the idea that all of humanity is our family. That idea helped destroy the Roman Empire. Now we’re in danger of letting that metaphor get out of control all over again. People are not ready to feel the full pressure of coexistence with billions of their contemporaries.”
He went on, “In the past, geography created discretionary boundaries between nations and cultures. Distances that were difficult to overcome allowed for mental and political space.” Space and distance, he argued, had allowed for a kind of liberality and generosity that was now under siege—by refugees, by social media, by everything.
At the end of the talk, the faithful of all ages lined up to buy copies of “After God.” The polite chatter momentarily gave way to the brisk ritual of book-signing. Sloterdijk scrawled on the open books offered to him. Bearing a freshly signed copy, a pastor visiting from the Rhineland sympathized with Sloterdijk’s predicament as a salesman. “We become more like America every day,” he told him. “Isn’t it a pity?” ~
(first published as “Dr. Zeitgeist”)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/26/a-celebrity-philosopher-explains-the-populist-insurgency?utm_campaign=falcon&utm_brand=tny&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=facebook&mbid=social_facebook&utm_medium=social&fbclid=IwAR3tS2swyEwoW9PQDVyF_iLc1Hrwf7Xj72-nrj6VEKHqct2DRGmLDpm_64E
Let’s detox with a chuckle (though perhaps only women will understand):
CHRISTIANS UNSURE ABOUT THE BASICS OF CHRISTIANITY
~ “Sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton coined the term “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” after interviews with 3,000 teenagers. What they discovered is that many of today’s youth view religion and Christianity under the following set of core beliefs:
God wants people to be nice and fair to one another.
The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
God doesn’t need to be involved in your life, unless something is going wrong and you need it resolved
Good people go to heaven when they die
Most adults ascribe to this view of moral and therapeutic deism as well. God is a cosmic genie or butler who gives you Werther’s Original candies — much like your WWII vet grandad did — as long as you’re nice.
Orthodox Christian beliefs thus become whatever makes you feel good or makes you happy. When I say “orthodox” I don’t mean secondary or tertiary issues like “When was the Earth made? How about tattoos and alcohol? Do we have free will?” I mean essential core beliefs that define Christianity. Stuff like — Jesus was God and man, born of a virgin, died on a cross, resurrected, commands you to love your neighbor as yourself, instructs you to die to self, and asks that you create other followers.
The mark of today’s Christian is you do you. Be happy and believe whatever you want. Just be nice to each other and you’ll reach the pearly gates. You may think I’m making this up, but in 2016, LifeWay Research confirmed the vast majority of self identifying Christians believed this, and 73% of America claims they’re Christians.
There’s one major problem with this thought process though. You can’t remove a few screws from a bicycle essential to holding it together without the bike falling apart. If Christianity is all about happiness, then what about those pesky orthodox beliefs? New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof questioned popular New York City pastor, Tim Keller, on why he couldn’t just accept Jesus as a nice guy and emulate his kindness, while still calling himself a Christian. Keller responded:
”If something is truly integral to a body of thought, you can’t remove it without destabilizing the whole thing. A religion can’t be whatever we desire it to be. If I’m a member of the board of Greenpeace and I come out and say climate change is a hoax, they will ask me to resign. I could call them narrow-minded, but they would rightly say that there have to be some boundaries for dissent or you couldn’t have a cohesive, integrated organization. And they’d be right. It’s the same with any religious faith.”
Here’s a fun trick to play on Christians, especially if you want to expose their hypocrisy. Just ask them, “Please explain the Gospel.”
For those not of the Christian faith, the gospel is the defining belief by which all Christian traditions hinge their faith on (should you care for a more in-depth explanation, I’ve written a popular piece about that here). My moment of horror came the day I asked a group of twenty-somethings the question — what is the gospel? The mix of confusion, babbling, and absurd declarations were genuinely breathtaking. That they couldn’t explain the essential message of their faith meant they didn’t even know it to begin with.
Instead, most I’ve encountered can tell you about their moral behavior or when they said a prayer to invite Jesus into their heart (which is nowhere in the Bible and makes no sense). In effect, it’s like we have an entire population of people who claim to have seen the movie The Goonies but can’t explain the plot — and when they do — it’s about a group of teens who fight a T-Rex.
So if you believe whatever you want, your utmost focus is on yourself, and you can’t explain what your faith teaches, is it any wonder why Christians in America kinda suck? For instance, here’s something to consider. A core tenet of Christianity is called “The Greatest Commandment.” In it, Jesus commands Christians to “love God and your neighbor as yourself.” He explains everything hangs on this simple, yet profound command. A religious expert then challenges him and asks, “Well, who’s my neighbor?”
Jesus tells a follow-up story that’s now become a pop culture reference entitled “The Good Samaritan.” The story goes that a man is traveling down a road, gets robbed, beaten, and left for dead. A priest and religious man pass him by, but a Samaritan stops and cares for him. Most people assume a Samaritan is someone who stops and does the right thing when others don’t. What everyone misses, however, is that a Samaritan was someone the Jews of antiquity reviled and hated.
If we were to recreate the story in America today, it would be the equivalent of a white Klansman stopping to help an African-American member of Antifa. When Jesus asks “Which proved to be the neighbor?” the religious expert is so appalled he can’t even say the word “Samaritan.” Instead he says, “The one who showed mercy.”
In today’s culture, people believe “I don’t hate my neighbor, therefore I love them,” but that’s missing the point and not love either. The point of the commandment is that Christians are commanded to love and care for the very people they might despise. The same people who take everything they find holy and spit on it. Then Christ commands them to love their enemy the same way they’d want to be loved.
In my life, I know I want to be loved without judgement or condemnation. I want people to put up with my shortcomings. I want people with different beliefs to like me and not lash out because I think differently. I’m willing to bet you want to be loved the same way too. So how many Christians do you actually see doing that?
When I first became a Christian several years ago, there wasn’t an instantaneous change. I spent a few years getting hammered at the bar on weekends and hooking up with (or objectifying) women every chance I got. There’s always a learning curve when you’re new to something and you’ll need guides along the path. Several men loved me through multiple mistakes, idiotic remarks about “bitchez,” and general jackassery. Through their patience and kindness, they taught me to live in community, love God, and serve others which began a radical heart change. So much of my needs that were once the focus of my life, became about the needs of others.
I don’t blame newer Christians for doing dumb things, because I was once them. We don’t know any better. But imagine one day you go to splash pad for children and find a 50-year-old man having the time of his life with a bunch of kids. It’s like a scene straight out of Billy Madison where the guy is sitting on a splash jet saying “That’s nice.”
Because of this constant Christian infancy we can see played out around us, the Western American church is in the last throes of its death song. You can easily see this as the mark of today’s Christian is constant outrage, especially if something involves politics. If someone says something you disagree with — don’t love them — just attack them. After all, it’s all about you according to our new Christian ideals. Most church services reinforce this focus on self. The vast majority of parishioners go to church to be entertained. If the music, sermon, or kids program isn’t to their flavor, they bounce to a place that “feeds them.” To keep numbers and donations coming, the church bends to the will of the congregation. So if the church reinforces a self-focus, then it's easy to judge and attack others because your needs matter most.
When people find out HeartSupport — the organization I work for and whose publication you’re reading — is a Christian organization they’re not surprised. We work in the mental health arena, but we’re pretty open about our faith. A large majority of our community is not Christian (including some of our writers) because we let them know “You’re our neighbor, and we love you regardless of your beliefs.” We don’t have requirements for who we help, either. When people see other people act in love like Christ that’s not a surprise. What’s a surprise to most people are Christians who — with their mouth praise a supposed loving God — then stab other people with the next words out of their lips. The disconnect between belief and action is so traumatic, the whole thing becomes laughable.
I’m not saying we do this right or we’re the example to follow because we’ve hurt our fair share of people too. There are no perfect organizations out there, let alone perfect people. But we are trying. We're trying to love people even when we blow it. And how you respond after screwing up — however minor — says a lot about the depth of your faith. Do you respond with love, gentleness, and an apology? Or a defensive posture? One shows you understand Christ’s great command, while the other is once more about how you’re perceived and self focused. Thus, the bad taste left in the mouth of those who interact with Christians has more to do with the fact Christians ignore this simple — yet great — command.
So, yes, Christianity isn’t quite “Christian” anymore. But as the West turns its back on those who look nothing like the man they follow, my hope is they’ll turn to meet men and women who do. And perhaps that will change their heart and this world.” ~
https://blog.heartsupport.com/lets-stop-pretending-christianity-is-even-christian-anymore-455f8897ba74
Good Samaritan; Domenico Fetti, 17th centuryEnding on beauty:
CONFESSION
Bless me, Poetry
For I have sinned
It has been
Two weeks
Since my last poem
Please show me
The grace
Of falling rain
And dying leaves
Amen
~ John Guzlowski
Lilith:
New insights:
Trump as the degenerate sheriff in the Western. Fear of ecological devastation and America first as “first in line.”
Also, I loved John’s poem at the end — the Catholic confession template.
Realizing, too, after reading the piece about populism in Germany, the Republicans really don’t care about preserving our democracy.
That’s why they defend the indefensible.
They would rather have a dictatorship, as long as their guy is the dictator. And that will take me time to absorb.
Oriana:
Thanks for the comments. Yes, I felt frightened when I first came across the idea that the right wing would much rather have a dictatorship — of course only if the dictator is “their guy.” In this country there is at best only a vague idea of what a dictatorship is like — how oppressive it would be to everyone, even to those who adore the dictator. And the world used to think that the US was the opposite of Russia. It’s been rough to realize that any Americans could be opposed to democracy. Still seems a contradiction in terms.
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