The Widening Gyre

There are many kinds of truth, and much confusion results from failing to distinguish between them.  One type of truth is described by the correspondence theory of truth: a proposition is true when it accurately or adequately corresponds to some reality.  There are many problems with this definition of truth so long as one expects truths to be absolute.  For instance, how can we know how accurately or adequately sense perception corresponds to “reality?”  And how much does language itself affect the way we perceive the world?  However, within a particular linguistic and perceptual context, it is entirely possible to make a useful distinction between true and false statements.  For example, the statement “my car is red” clearly either does or does not correspond to a certain perceptible state of affairs, even if “red” is solely an arbitrary linguistic demarcation of a range of sensual experiences (color) that have little to do with the nature of the object in question, and “car” refers primarily to the uses to which the object can be put.  (I’m not even going to get into “my” and “is,” or we’ll be here all day).  We might call this kind of truth literal truth.  Literal truth is a type of relative truth, because it is relative to the particular linguistic and perceptual context in which it is situated.

There is another type of truth which transcends language entirely.  One might call this mystical truth.  While literal truth is an attribute of  propositions, mystical truth could be said to be an attribute of experiences.  Ones manner of experiencing existence can be closer to or further from mystical truth.  Since the content of mystical truth is indescribable in language, I can only indicate its existence here by contrast with the other two types of truth I’m addressing.  Those who have had mystical experiences may have a sense of what I’m referring to.

There is a third type of truth, which is the primary subject of this post, and which I call mythological truth.  Mythological truth is an attribute of stories.  It is the kind of truth that allows fiction to communicate truths that a mere recounting of literally true facts cannot.  It is the kind of truth that makes good history not merely a recounting of literally true facts—it motivates the selection of facts and how they are strung together.  As an entrance into the discussion of mythological truth let’s look at one of my favorite passages about story, from Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story:”

You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let’s say, and afterward you ask, “Is it true?” and if the answer matters, you’ve got your answer.

For example, we’ve all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.

Is it true?

The answer matters.

You’d feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen – and maybe it did, anything’s possible, even then you know it can’t be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, “The fuck you do that for?” and the jumper says, “Story of my life, man,” and the other guy starts to smile but he’s dead.

That’s a true story that never happened.

This passage begins to get at the distinction between mythological and literal truth, or what O’Brien calls “absolute occurrence.”  O’Brien’s version of the story, the “true story that never happened” reveals something true about war, about the meaning of war, that the other story does not.  However, the kind of truth that O’Brien is getting at in this passage is not precisely mythological truth as I define it.  The “trite,” “Hollywood” story with which O’Brien begins also expresses a mythological truth about war.  It is both true that war is a meaningless, absurd exercise in futility, and that war brings out our capacity for courageous self-sacrifice for others.

So this example has revealed a couple of properties of mythological truth.  One is that there is no such thing as mythological falsehood, or perhaps that all stories are both mythologically true and mythologically false.  A myth—a mythological statement expressed by a story or set of stories—applies well to certain sets of facts, and poorly to others, and thus does not admit of empirical proof or disproof (I know that’s a big and not at all syllogistic leap.  Hold on).  A second property, suggested by the last sentence of the previous paragraph, is that mythological truths can be stated, or at least approximated, in something that looks an awful lot like a proposition.  So is there a difference between the mythological truth expressed by a story like “Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.” and what is expressed by a statement like “war brings out our capacity for courageous self-sacrifice for others?”  If so, what is it?  And if mythological truths can, in fact, be stated as propositions, what differentiates them from literal truths? (I’ve already given away one answer.)  So let’s take each of these two properties and unpack them a bit.

Okay.  Property One, consisting of parts (A) mutually contradictory myths can be true at the same time, and (B) mythological truths are not conclusively empirically verifiable or falsifiable.  A myth I like to think about in this context is the myth of progress, because it’s such a pervasive one in modern, western, and particularly [US]American culture, with many different kinds of effects.  This myth is relentlessly articulated in fiction (Star Trek is a resplendent example).  It has almost completely appropriated the term “evolution” except in the most rigid scientific contexts.  It basically says, “things get better.”  Whether it’s because of some metaphysical or divine urge or plan, or whether it’s because humans inevitably learn from our mistakes and create more and more perfect cultures, technologies, and societies, a graph with time on the x-axis and the goodness of things on the y-axis, will, however bumpy it gets, always have a general upward trend.  There are many data points that we can use to support this myth.  If you follow technological sophistication or complexity of social organization over the last 10,000 years, you will see a graph such as the one I’ve just described.  But what happens if you look at biological diversity over the same time period?  If you asked people in Burma or the Democratic Republic of the Congo whether life has gotten better for them and their ancestors over the last hundred or thousand years, what would they say?  (I don’t know, but I imagine they would not give the same sort of answer that the average [US]American would give.)  What happens when global industrial civilization runs out of the resources it needs to continue its current levels of consumption, as it’s on track to do fairly shortly?  Well, we could use these other data points to argue for a counter-myth, that things get worse, or at least have been doing so for a very long time.  We could say we’re in the height (or depth) of the Kali-Yuga, or that technology or civilization or agriculture is inherently destructive and alienating and we “civilized” folks took a wrong turn back in the river valleys of Sumeria, Egypt, India, and China, and in Mesoamerica and the Andes.

But someone committed to the myth of progress could just as easily dismiss all of these objections as just bumps on the graph, even if they are rather large ones.  Even if global civilization collapses due to unregulated resource consumption, humanity will just learn from the mistake and make things even better in the long run.  Star Trek: The Next Generation is peppered with references to the dark, chaotic times of the 21st and 22nd centuries, after world war 3.  So which is correct?  Are things getting better or worse?  Clearly, I am going to say both are true.  (And both are false, but it is their truth that I’m more interested in, because we tend to be good at seeing the falsehood in others’ perspective and less good at seeing the truth.)  As Karl Popper has pointed out, certain kinds of theories are not falsifiable.  There is no data point or set of data that could possibly conclusively disprove the myth of progress.  Even if all life on earth were annihilated in an absurd, venal, Strangelove-esque catastrophe, one could argue that it was part of the cosmic plan, or that humanity has ascended to some non-physical next step, or even perhaps that things veered off of their natural course because some knuckleheaded statistical outliers in the human gene pool happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time for everyone else.  (Okay, maybe one couldn’t argue these things because one would be dead, but you get the point.)  Myths are not falsifiable, but this does not make them false.  Nor does it make them less important or useful than literal propositions, which can be falsified.  It just means that myths are subject to a different kind of truth than factual propositions and should be treated accordingly.  Propositions supply facts.  Stories and their underlying myths provide meanings.

Property Two: mythological truths can be approximated by statements that have the same linguistic structure as propositions.  At the beginning of this essay I said that mythological truth is a property of stories, and yet in the last two paragraphs I’ve been discussing myths almost entirely in the form of abstract statements like “things get better,” or “war is a meaningless, absurd exercise in futility.”  These statements are not stories.  They have the same sentence structure as a literal proposition like “my car is red.”  I think falsifiability is a good criterion for distinguishing these two types of statements: literal propositions are falsifiable, mythological ones are not.  But I’m less sure about whether “war is a meaningless, absurd exercise in futility”  fully expresses the mythological content of:

Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, “The fuck you do that for?” and the jumper says, “Story of my life, man,” and the other guy starts to smile but he’s dead.

Stories, especially the ones I like to call “good stories” are much more nuanced in their articulation of meaning than any explicit statement of that meaning.  In fact, when even simple, moralistic fables end with an aphorism stating the moral of the story, I have a subtle sense that a certain violence has been done to the story.  I always feel bad for the crow who gets cheated by the fox because of his vanity.  The mythological truth that O’Brien articulates above is more multivalent than my summary of it.  Reading his story, I get a clear sense that it has meaning.  He is not simply stating perceptible facts.  The facts add up to something. “War is a meaningless, absurd exercise in futility” is one (slightly redundant) possible articulation of something they might be construed to add up to.  But there are elements even in the four sentences of this story that escape that particular meaning.

Now, why do I make this distinction between literal and mythological (and mystical) truth?  How is it useful to us?

I mentioned above that the myth of progress has lots of effects on modern societies.  Let’s enumerate some of them.  I believe the current economic crisis and our response to it are, at least partially, results of the pervasiveness of the myth of progress.  The myth of progress tends to produce a society that runs on debt.  If we implicitly believe that we will have more in the future, it makes sense to spend some of those future resources now.  If it is inevitable that housing prices will continue to rise and people generally assume they’re entitled to upward economic mobility, it’s easy not to notice that you’re part of an unsustainable housing bubble (or a mortgage derivative investment bubble).  So when economic trends went down instead of up our society was unprepared to deal with it, making the crisis far more severe than it would have been had people had the reasonable expectation that at some point the boom and bust cycle would do that thing that cycles do.  And of course the government’s response to the crisis has been more debt.

This response reveals the most frightening effect of the myth of progress: the assumption that the world economy will continue to grow forever regardless of any environmental limitations.  Our culture broadly fails to distinguish between the literal, factual, observable upward trend in the material resources under humanity’s control and a mythological guarantee that this trend will continue.  The result is that there are virtually no serious efforts being made to deal with the fact that we are using resources faster than they can be replenished and damaging the earth’s ecosystems in ways that could spiral out of control.

Another area in which the distinction between literal, mythological, and mystical truth is useful is in conversation about religion.  Such conversation too often devolves into arguing the literal truth of religious stories.  The Bible, for instance, is full of stories replete with mythological truths, which are frequently bypassed by believers and nonbelievers alike in service of a much duller discussion of absolute historical occurrence.  Was Jesus, in literal fact, resurrected three days after he died?  There are, perhaps, some tatters of evidence to be presented with respect to this question.  But why do we care?  When people debate the resurrection, what they are really debating is whether the meanings implicit in the story are mythologically true.  If Jesus was resurrected, that means all sorts of things about the triumph of spirit over flesh, renewal, redemption, humanity’s place in the cosmos, God’s role in the universe and in people’s lives, etc.  If we make a distinction between mythological and literal truth, we can choose to contemplate and converse about these mythological questions without engaging the literal truth of the resurrection.  The same goes for every other story in the Bible, for every religious text and doctrine.  And through contemplating the mythological content of religious discourse, we might even glimpse mystical truth.  But if we bar the gates to religious thought with our literal, factual objections, then we can never walk in those gardens.  We also impoverish ourselves if we are so committed to the literal truth of one religion that we refuse to examine the mythological content of others.

Essentially, the concept of mythological truth allows us to see the instances in which our own myths may be false, and to see how others’ myths are true, even when they conflict with our own.

This essay has been primarily an exercise in semantics.  I have not made many explicit claims about the nature of things (though some of my assumptions may be showing).  Rather, I have introduced new terms with which to discuss old concepts.  However, new terminology can divide conceptual space in unfamiliar ways that bring attention to previously unnoticed features of its topology.  So I invite you to try on this (nonexclusively) tripartite model of truth.  Do the contours of your attitudes, beliefs, and experiences take on any new aspects in its light?  I hope that the conceptual ground I have mapped out is fertile for you.

Here’s a post that’s been languishing in my drafts folder for a very long time.  I banged out the last couple points I’d been planning to make, and here it is.

One very basic conservative view seems to be that it should not be the responsibility of people with more money to use it to help people with less money.  Because, after all, people who have money have earned it, and poor people have not.  As far as I can tell, this view is based on a few faulty assumptions about capitalism.  Here they are, as I see them.  I welcome criticism.

Assumption 1: Capitalism rewards hard work (or merit of any kind). This assumption is not 100% without truth.  It certainly is possible, in the right circumstances, to accumulate enough wealth through hard work, determination, ingenuity, etc. to alter one’s “socioeconomic class.”  However, this is the exception rather than the rule.  Hard work is not what capitalism is structured to primarily reward.  In fact, capitalism is structured so that laborers retain as little as possible of the wealth that they help produce. What capitalism is structured to reward most generously is having money to begin with. Or rather, having money and investing it.  A corporation is required by law to have as its primary motivation the financial benefit of its stockholders—people who (for the most part) do nothing but contribute money. As much as possible of the wealth created by a company’s economic activities must go to the investors.  This means that as little as possible must go to the laborers.  The reward for hard work is the smallest amount of money that people will do that work for.  Therefore the people who work the hardest are quite often the ones that make the least—the workers who harvest food, extract raw materials, and manufacture consumer goods. By design, capitalism constantly increases the disparity between rich and poor, by creating wealth and distributing that wealth in as uneven a manner as possible.

This disparity is exacerbated further by the fact that capital is allowed great freedom of movement, but labor is not.  Most of the people laboring to produce the goods consumed in the US live in other (poorer) countries.  So-called free trade policy (as well as centuries of official and unofficial colonialism) has ensured that rich people from rich countries can invest their money in poorer countries where labor is cheaper, and therefore profit margins are greater.  Of course, these profits go to the investors in rich countries.  This means that a huge portion of the wealth produced in so-called undeveloped or developing nations doesn’t actually stay in those nations.  And when the governments of poor countries have tried to to nationalize their industries—to keep the profits within the country—rich countries have supported often very brutal regime changes to ensure that this does not occur.  (For one of many examples, see Chile on September 11th, 1973)  And while massive state violence is used to safeguard capitalists’ ability to move their capital to the country where they will get the best return on their investment, state violence is also used to prevent laborers from migrating to the countries where they will get the best value for their labor.  So not only is capitalism designed to distribute the products of the “free market” overwhelmingly to those who already have money, but violent, coercive means are used to restrict the economic freedom of laborers to maneuver themselves to get the smallest share of a larger pie.

Manual laborers in poor countries aren’t the only ones who get the short end of the stick.  Anyone who makes money solely through their own labor is getting less than they could by investing money in someone else’s labor.  This includes relatively highly paid professionals—engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc. These professions garner more pay because otherwise people would be unwilling to invest the time and money necessary to be trained for them.  But the stockholders of the companies they work for still profit from their labor without having to do anything other than already have money.

Assumption 2: The capitalist economy consists of independent individuals making free decisions about wealth that they rightfully possess. This assumption has two parts.  One is that we rightfully possess our wealth.  I’ve hinted above at why this is problematic.  The wealth that people in capitalist society possess has been acquired through a long history of violent coercion.  If you live in the US, the land you live on, the land on which much of your food is grown, the land from which so many resources that you use have been extracted, was acquired through genocide.  Colonial policies backed by massive military violence have ensured that wealth is transferred into the hands of people in the privileged classes of certain nations.  Much of the wealth and infrastructure that white Americans have inherited was built by slave labor.  Examples could continue, but the point is that only if we turn a blind eye to this history can we reasonably claim that people who have money have an absolute right to dispose of their money as they wish, because it’s theirs.

The other part of this assumption is the existence of the independent individual.  I find it ironic that the iconic first-world independent middle class (male) individual is in fact in probably the most dependent economic position in history.  He depends on a vast chain of laborers for nearly every daily action that he takes.  Every item that I use, every meal I consume is the result of the efforts of dozens or hundreds of people, most of whom I’ve never met or even thought about.  And if they all stopped doing what they do, I’d be in a pretty sorry state.

The individual’s dependence extends further and deeper than economics.  Here I’m venturing into a more philosophical realm that has perhaps a somewhat tenuous connection with the argument I’m attempting to refute, but I think it is relevant to some of the assumptions that underlie capitalism.  The individual is dependent on her social environment for her very identity.  Who and what each of us thinks she is, the values and inclinations upon which we base our decisions, the concepts and vocabulary that we use to navigate the world, are all created in a matrix of interactions with others.  If other people did not exist, I would unravel, thread by thread, until there was nothing left.  If I am obliged to others for my very existence, for every (or at least nearly every) aspect of my mind, thought, and will, on a moment-to-moment basis, it seems petty to begrudge those lower on the merciless food chain of capitalism some of “my” money.*

*This existential line of thought seemed central to what I had to say about capitalism when I began this post over a year ago.  Now I’m not sure where I stand with it.

A year or two ago I was eating dinner with a certain contingent of my extended family.  These are the (mostly conservative) southern relatives.  One cousin-once-removed opined, “Lemme tell you about Chileans: I got no use for ‘em.”  He went on to explain that while Argentinians think—or rather, know—they’re better than everyone else, Chileans think they’re better than everyone else, and they’re going to prove it to you.

I asked, “Where do Americans fit into this?”

Another relative, who’s done a lot of traveling, said “Americans don’t think anyone else exists.”

I am regularly reminded of how sadly, frighteningly true this is.  (Not the thing about Chileans.)

Democracy Now recently ran an interview with two Ugandan gay rights activists about the pending anti-homosexual bill there.  There’s something that’s been disturbing me a bit about US coverage of this bill, and the Democracy Now story was no exception.  Amy Goodman spent over half of the interview (as I remember it a couple of days later) asking her guests about the involvement of US christian right groups in promoting the atmosphere of homophobia out of which this bill has grown.  Other coverage that I’ve been exposed to has also drawn a lot of attention to connections between the US right and the legislators who have been pushing the bill.

These US groups certainly deserve to have their role exposed.  However, what disturbs me about the emphasis on their involvement is that it evokes a certain racist, colonial subtext.  There’s an implication that this horrific bill is the fault of the Americans who have promoted homophobia in Uganda.  It seems that responsibility is placed disproportionately upon the shoulders of these white “meddlers,” rather than on the Ugandans who actually drafted the bill and are promoting it using all kinds of hate speech and fear tactics.  These news stories echo an old colonialist narrative in which the natives don’t really think for themselves, but merely act on the influence of whites.  This idea was bandied about a lot when Africans were resisting European colonial rule: the blacks are like little children.  They need whites to take care of them.  They’re just confused because some socialist European meddlers gave been giving them crazy ideas.  The story I hear underneath the emphasis on US influences on the anti-gay bill is “Homophobic, fear-mongering rhetoric about the Homosexual Agenda to destroy the traditional family is all objectionable enough in the US where we’re civilized enough not to go around executing gays.  But these Americans should’ve known better than to bring it to the Dark Continent, where anything goes and the most unspeakable horrors happen on a daily basis.”

This narrative is not explicit, and I’m sure it’s not intentional.  But I’ve noticed it popping up in my mind whenever I hear one of these news stories.  And if it’s lurking in my mind, then it must have come from the culture somewhere, and it’s hard to think it doesn’t have some influence on the way the issue is being reported.

But even discounting this subtext, the way Amy Goodman and others in the US have chosen to report this bill is a deliberate effort to tell the story in terms of US politics.  Goodman is using this story as a way to attack the US right.  This attack may be well justified, but it is a transparent example of the difficulty that Americans have with seeing issues (and people) outside the US on their own terms—the tendency to make everything about the US and (United States of) Americans.  The thing that makes us talk about how many American lives were lost, rather than how many human lives were lost.

I’m glad that I know that US Christian groups have had a hand in what’s going on in Uganda.  But now I want to know what’s going on in Uganda.  Far more useful than spending 20 minutes discussing exactly how and how much these US groups have been involved would be discussing the economic, political, social, and religious realities of Uganda that allow a bill like this to be proposed and make it so likely to pass.  Or discussing what GLBTI Ugandans are planning on doing if it passes.  Or whether and how I can help keep it from passing.  Usually when I see this kind of hate-mongering, it’s being purveyed by people with power who want to cement and increase that power, to people who are in some kind of desperate situation such as poverty or, say, an AIDS pandemic.

If this bill passes it will have profoundly life changing, even life-threatening (though I believe the death sentence provisions have been removed), effects on countless LGBT Ugandans and their friends and loved ones (the bill includes punishments for people who know of and fail to report homosexuals and homosexual activity).  Can we stop thinking about how this bill is relevant to Americans and the US for a minute (I know, that’s what most of this post has been about, too) and start thinking about the people who are truly affected?

Enough about the US news media.  I have the internet:

Gay Uganda is a blog by a gay Ugandan, who (unsurprisingly) talks a lot about this bill.

A post about the bill on African Activist

An excerpt from a speech about the human rights impacts of the bill by Silvia Tamale on November 18, 2009 at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda on allAfrica.com. It has some really great analysis of what the bill means in African and Ugandan terms.

The text of the bill at Box Turtle Bulletin

There’s a lot more out there, but you have the internet too.

Pick a tarot card with a human figure or figures on it. Visualize the card with the race(s) of the figures changed. Or even get the uncolored BOTA Tarot deck, make copies, and color the people different colors. Try different combinations of skin colors. Meditate on the card with these changes, and observe how it changes your reaction.

For example, how does The Lovers strike you differently depending on whether the man is black and the woman is white or the woman is black and the man is white, or the man is Asian and the woman is black, etc.

It can be pretty disturbing, if you’re honest with yourself and haven’t done a lot of work on being mindful of your own prejudice.

You can also try switching the genders of the people in the cards to get a better sense of how gender is encoded in the imagery.

Perhaps I’ll post a personal example later.

I may not understand the term the same way others do, but I think white guilt is a good thing.

Guilt has gotten a bad rap for some reason.  Perhaps because it’s no fun.  Perhaps more because we don’t know what to do with it.  Guilt exists for a reason.  Like anger, it is there to tell us that something is wrong and needs to be changed.  In her essay “Killing Rage,” bell hooks talks about the rage that black Americans feel in response to racism.  She says that this rage is a healthy response which should be directed into militancy, self-determination, and action for change.  I think white guilt is a similar response to the same phenomenon from a different vantage point.  When you’ve been hurt, you get angry.  When you’ve hurt someone you feel guilty.  The healthy response to both emotions is to do something to change the situation—to redress the wrong and/or heal the hurt.

The problem with white guilt is not that it’s bad, but that it’s not enough.  Guilt is a largely selfish emotion by itself.  When I feel guilty I’m focused on the fact that I did something wrong and how bad I feel about it.  What I should then do is start to think about the person I’ve hurt, how they’ve been hurt, what they might be feeling and wanting.  Basically, guilt should lead to compassion.  Then I should think about what I can do to make things better for them.  And I should, of course, consult them in this process.

So white guilt sucks when we get stuck in it—when it becomes a way of beating ourselves up, of closing ourselves down, of isolating ourselves further from ourselves and others.  But it doesn’t have to be this.  It can be a doorway to opening ourselves up to deeper connection with ourselves, people around us, and our world.

A large part of the reason there has been so little activity here so far is that I have placed myself under the absurd onus of needing to have something deeply insightful and meticulously thought out that NO ONE HAS EVER THOUGHT OF BEFORE!!!! to say before I say anything at all.  I am now changing this policy, because contrary to what we might read in history groundbreaking ideas do not sprout fully formed from the minds of individual geniuses who carry humanity leaps and bounds beyond where it was before.  Groundbreaking ideas are the result of collaborative efforts of many people thinking about the same things, sharing their ideas, agreeing, disagreeing and elaborating.  Or rather, both narratives have some truth, but the first places the emphasis on how Important and Awesome are the (usually) guys who articulated a particular idea from a privileged enough position to be widely heard.  And yeah, I want to be Important and Awesome.  But what is more important is the actual beneficial effects that ideas have on the lives of people.  So for me to hoard my thoughts until I am convinced that they are perfect enough to reveal to awestruck adoration (which is, realistically, never) is to waste whatever contribution I might actually make to a discourse that might lead to real benefits to people.

Even from a purely selfish perspective, this policy change is a good thing.  My desire to be Important and Awesome leads directly to more suffering, whereas my desire to help liberate others from suffering leads in the opposite direction.  So this is now a place to expose my thoughts in whatever stage of development I find them.  It is a place to make myself vulnerable.  It is a place to air my process of figuring shit out.

So please, point out my blind spots.  Tell me if I’ve said something insensitive, or if there are holes in my logic, or if there’s something I’ve failed to consider.

I’ve been reading a lot about  oppression.  About sexism and racism, about feminism and anti-racism.  About rape.  And a (very) little about transgender issues.  And throw in some Noam Chomsky on US foreign policy.

It’s disturbing to read and think about this stuff.  It’s disturbing largely because I realize how easy it’s been for me to remain ignorant of so much pain and injustice.  It’s disturbing because I know I benefit every day from it.  It’s disturbing because virtually every course of behavior for which I have any kind of cultural script contributes to or benefits from this pain and injustice.  It’s becoming increasingly clear that in order to fight against the injustice endemic in the social fabric of my existence I have to truly step out of my comfort zone.  I have to participate in the process of forging new cultural scripts.  I have to put myself at risk in ways that I’m not used to being at risk.  In order to meaningfully confront racism, misogyny, transphobia/cissexism, ablism, homophobia/heterosexism, etc., even on a surface level, I have to risk losing friends, jobs, teachers, etc.  I have to be willing to confront the *ist sentiments in those around me (and of course, most importantly, myself) even and especially when it’s inconvenient or potentially painful.  Because these are precisely the situations where someone in an oppressed group would be unable to avoid pain and difficulty.  It is only because of my privilege that I have a choice.

When my taiji teacher makes a hateful comment about women of size, I can choose not to say anything and thereby maintain my non-threatening image in his mind.  He has certainly alienated me a bit, but I can choose to continue to get the same level of respectful treatment from him that I’m used to by leaving his comment unchallenged.  The only side effect is that I have tacitly given him the message that such sentiments and their expression are acceptable.  The situation would be very different if I were a woman of size.  Those hateful sentiments would have been directed towards me from the beginning of our acquaintance.  This would most certainly be significantly more painful and humiliating than the potential awkwardness of me, a thin young white male, objecting to his ideas.  One reason for this, besides the obvious, is that I have the luxury of being “polite” about it.  Such comments don’t have the kind of emotional impact on me that they would on someone who had been dealing with this kind of antipathy directed at them personally for their entire life.  Moreover, a given level of emotion is unlikely to be perceived in the same way when I express it as when a woman expresses it.  Anger from a woman is quite likely to be labeled shrill or hysterical, whereas anger from a man is much more likely to be seen as healthy or righteous, or at least normal if perhaps regrettable male aggression.

And of course, confronting such comments is only the tip of the iceberg of stepping out of my comfort zone to fight oppression.  The struggle against oppression is not the struggle against oppressive sentiments in the privileged.  Racism is not ended by making individual people less racist.  Oppression is ended by changing the structures that systematically strip certain groups of people of their humanity for the benefit of other groups of people.  What disturbs me is that the entire trajectory of my life so far, even raised in a very progressive community, has been at best of very little benefit in this direction, and in many ways actively harmful.  And there’s no obvious, well-marked path to follow to change this.  Of course there are others who have gone before me and are blazing trails.  I have been trying to seek them out and will continue doing so.  If you have any suggestions please let me know.

I read this at my union ceremony on September 7th:

We have not yet decided whether we will be legally married or refer to this union as a marriage, and we’d like to say a little bit about why.  The most pressing issue for us in this place and time in history is that one of the things that marriage has become is a set of legal and social privileges bestowed on people whose relationships conform to a particular image of what love can and should be.  The legal privileges are clear and distinct (as much as anything legal ever is). The social privileges are more subtle.  If I can refer to L as my wife rather than as my partner, that places me in a familiar category.  It smoothes my relations with people.  That subtle distinction could make the difference between getting a job (or house, or business deal) and losing it to someone else who makes a better—safer—impression; the difference between  acceptance, rejection, or that dubious concession, tolerance.  As two able-bodied, cis-gendered, white Americans in a heterosexual relationship, we are already afforded this privilege, this benefit of the doubt, in most cases anyway.  And as a heterosexual couple we have the privilege of the choice whether to marry or not.

But marriage is more than a set of legal and social privileges.  Marriage is older than history; it has been and continues to be many things.  It has certainly been a tool for the oppression of women—a contractual agreement in which men dispose of the lives, loves and bodies of women without acknowledgement of those women’s agency.  But it has also been a celebration of love and a sacrament of union.  A sacred joining of separate lives in the creation of something greater.  An acknowledgment and affirmation of the mystery of the way families converge and grow.  Marriage is not one thing.  It is not merely an established institution that we may choose either to submit to or to reject.  Like all human ideas and practices, it is a work of art to which we are invited to contribute.  Whether we ultimately decide to use the word marriage or not, this ceremony  both owes a debt to and is our contribution to this tradition.

It would be naïve to think that simply by refusing to use the word marriage or take advantage of its legal manifestation we could absolve ourselves of complicity in a society that uses marriage as one of many ways to separate people into categories and value some of these categories over others.  So as we stand here ready to affirm our love before and with our community, we wish to acknowledge all those around the world who are unable to enjoy this same affirmation, and we promise that we will always defend the right of everyone to love whom we will, how we will, and as much as we will.

I went shopping at Target today.  Faced with that monumental amount of crap, I was reminded of what exactly is collapsing, and feel a lot less bad about the whole thing.  

Perhaps next we can come up with an economy that supplies more people with basic needs and actually useful goods and services, rather than six different neon colors of plastic snakeskin purses that will break within a year of use.

Coming up, a more exhaustive and less flippant discussion of the shortcomings of capitalism.

I just read this post by Jess at Flip Flopping Joy, a long meandering reflection on, among other things, privilege and perfectionism.  It struck a chord.  Jess writes about suffering from at times debilitating depression based to some extent in a need to justify her existence through accomplishment—through some sort of contribution demonstrating exceptional intelligence or ability.  I may not be representing her story completely accurately, because I am also expressing mine.  And it became clear in the comment thread that this sort of depression is a very common experience.  People in the thread attributed this phenomenon to capitalism, white supremacist culture, the Midwest, being poor and trying to compete with/become the rich—and I would add modern education.  While all of these may be complicit, it is not my intention here to find the culprit and excoriate it.  

In fact, I’m not quite sure what my intention is.  Reading Jess’ post brought me out of myself a bit; made me realize that the experiences that I struggle with in solitude—the very experiences I use to isolate myself—are shared by many, many others.  Two of my dear friends seemed also to have recognized themselves.

I have been studying Buddhism and dabbling in the practice of tonglen, or sending and taking.  I’ll explain my understanding of it.  If this interests you, find some genuine Buddhist teachings on it.  Pema Chodron is a good source.  Tonglen is a practice in which one breathes in suffering and breathes out happiness.  One can begin with some suffering one is experiencing, such as (to take one personal example) anxiety about finding a job.  One breathes in this anxiety, then breathes out spaciousness, acceptance, or even the image of having a job.  Then one thinks of other people having the same (or a similar) experience—perhaps one or two people one knows—and breathes in their anxiety as well as one’s own, and exhales relief to them.  Then one inhales the anxiety of all the people in the world who are unemployed and worrying about it, and exhales happiness to all of them.

This and other Buddhist practices have been encouraging me to allow those private sufferings which normally cause me to draw away from others to instead bring me back into connection with my fellow human beings.  However, Jess’ post brought the point home in a way these practices have not.  It made me realize that yes, other people really do have debilitating doubts about whether they deserve to exist if they haven’t or won’t make some brilliant contribution to the human race.  And something as simple as expressing this can be tremendously helpful to others who share that pain.

The discussion was not, however, entirely about the depression that comes from this sort of paralyzing perfectionism.  It was also about how this myopic attention to whether I’m good enough or smart enough or doing enough gets in the way of helping other people who are suffering—whether that’s by engaging in mass activism, or simply being ready to really listen to the next person who talks to me, and really be present in my reply.  Again I’m blending her thoughts and my own.  Jess’ post, for me, was about realizing that it doesn’t matter how good what I write is, if it helps one person to soften as I did when I read her words.

I’ve been just a tad livid about the McCain campaign’s (primarily Sarah Palin’s) horrifically but infuriatingly deniably racist comments about “real Americans” and “the pro-America parts of the country.” Karnythia at The Angry Black Woman has an excellent post about how it is often precisely those who have sacrificed the most for America that are routinely excluded from “Americanness.” I would just add that the further you go back in history the more glaring this becomes *coughcoughslaverycough*… excuse me.