Posts Tagged ‘social commentary’
A few weeks ago I invented a new word for the manuscript of my next book (not the Loneliness book, but the next one after that, which (since it will be my sixth book), my girlfriend is calling it “Caprica Six”.)
The word is “misercorpism” (also: misercorpic, misercorpist); and it designates any disparaging, denigratory, or disdainful attitudes regarding the body, and embodied life generally. I thought you might like to see what I’ve written.
The week that wraps around the end of March and the beginning of April this year had rather a lot of well-publicised mass murders in the United States.
Sat 4 April: Father is suspected of shooting dead his five children, then himself, near Seattle
Sat 4 April: Gunman kills three policemen in Pittsburgh before being wounded and captured
Fri 3 April: Gunman kills 13 people at an immigration centre in Binghamton, New York state, then apparently shoots himself
Sun 29 March: Gunman kills seven elderly residents and a nurse at a nursing home in Carthage, North Carolina, then is shot and wounded himself
Sun 29 March: Man kills five relatives and himself in Santa Clara, California.
On 16th April, USA Today published a feature article describing the real motives behind the Columbine High School massacre, which are easier to discern now that the shooters’ personal diaries are being made public. It turns out that the cause was not violent video games, nor a desire for media attention, nor bullying nor harrassment. Rather, their minds were dominated by rather more straightforward dispositions: paranoia and suicidal depression (in the case of Dylan Kiebold) and misanthropy, superiority, and narcissism (in the case of Eric Harris).
But in today’s question, I’m less interested in motivations and explanations. I’m more interested in prevention and healing. And while an explanation may be useful in the crafting of preventative measures, I’m also interested in what, if anything, principles of earth-based spirituality could contribute to prevention and healing. Are ideas like the beauty of the earth, the reliability of intuition as a source of knowledge, the stories and the presence of the gods, and so on, able to help such people become better human beings? Are any of our wisdom-teachings, such as “The Earth is our mother, we must take care of her”, or “We are a circle within a circle”, or “All acts of love and pleasure are my rituals”, capable of preventing such people from appearing in the first place?
This is a much more serious question than it may seem at first, and it requires a serious answer. For a purpose like this, “visualising white light” and tapping the meridian points will not be good enough. I’m sure that if Jim Adkisson had Tarot card readers among his friends, or was receiving Reiki treatments for minor health ailments, he probably still would have shot nine people in the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, killing two of them. His suicide letter makes it clear that he was motivated by political hatred, as well as a sense of personal hopelessness. It might be added that he was certainly “doing his will”, which the Thelemites teach is the whole of the Law.
One way to approach the question might be like this. Christians present such people (well, everyone really) with the “good news” of Christ’s saving grace. Muslims present the Seven Pillars of Islam and other teachings of God communicated to humanity by the Prophet. Hindus offer the global and cosmic unity of the Atman, thus showing that in killing another he kills a piece of himself. Buddhists perscribe substituting compassion in the place of attachment. These ideas are presented confidently, seriously, with impressive conviction, and often in the face of extraordinary danger. What do we offer? What, if anything, can pagans helpfully say to the Timothy McVeigh‘s of the world? What, if anything, could we helpfully do for them, or with them?
And now it’s time for a tougher question.
Many religious people of the Abrahamic tradition (which means Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) claim that the belief in God is important because such belief is necessary to produce a healthy, peaceful, just, law-abiding, and even economically prosperous society. It is further claimed that the absence of religious belief will contribute strongly to social dysfunction. This is an idea with deep roots especially in America. For example, Benjamin Franklin stated that “religion will be a powerful regulator of our actions, give us peace and tranquility within our minds, and render us benevolent, useful, and beneficial to others.” The national mythology of America has from the beginning included the idea that America is an “exceptional” society, a “shining city on the hill” which serves as an example to the world of what a Godly, peaceful and prosperous society is like.
Today, organisations like the Discovery Institute work to undermine confidence in Darwinian evolution science, and to promote creationism and intelligent design, precisely because of the hypothesis that overt religiosity is socially beneficial, and that a secular society will degenerate into chaos. Indeed the social benefits of faith are sometimes taken as evidence for the existence of God, when other forms of scientific evidence are unavailable or doubtful. Numerous surveys also show that many people in America believe that religiosity is necessary for peace and prosperity in society.
However, at this time I have been able to find only one professional sociology essay which puts this hypothesis to the test: “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies” by Gregory Paul, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, 2005. in this essay, the author compares the rate of belief in God to several indicators of social health, such as the rates of murders, youth crime, STD infections, teenage pregnancies, and abortions. What he found was exactly the opposite of what the religious conservatives would expect: he found that the higher the rate of religiosity in a prosperous democratic country, the higher the rate of social dysfunction. Here is a quote:
Although they are by no means utopias, the populations of secular democracies are clearly able to govern themselves and maintain societal cohesion. Indeed, the data examined in this study demonstrates that only the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have, for the first time in history, come closest to acheiving practical “cultures of life” that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion. The least theistic secular developed democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most successful in these regards. The non-religious, pro-evolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator. The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience social disaster is therefore refuted.
Read the whole essay here. A similar conclusion was also reached in a book-length treatment by Phil Zukerman, which was discussed in a recent edition of the New York Times.
My question is: Given this statistical correlation between religious belief and social dysfunction, would Pagans be any better than Christians, Jews, or Muslims at delivering a peaceful and healthy society? Even if judged by our own standards? I must admit, I have my doubts.
I’d like to draw attention to this post by erynn999 concerning an Aboriginal community which, due to a collapse in their fishery this year, has not enough money to buy heating oil. In the winter. In Alaska.
Some of the comments she read in response included statements that the people should just move, or they should get off welfare.
In response to such comments, Erynn wrote this post, which was angry — and I think righteously so.
Self-reliance may well be a heroic virtue — but poor bashing is not. Generosity and hospitality are the Celtic values that should be applicable here. Self reliance as a virtue has nothing to do with blaming the poor for their situation, nor with leaving them alone to die in the winter.
Self reliance cannot be practiced by those who lack the material means to do so, and certainly cannot be practiced by those who have had their livelihood taken away from them, whether by fate (the collapse of a fishery) or by colonial conquest (as in the case of almost all Aboriginal people on this continent).
But those who cannot be self-reliant for lack of the material means are not therefore un-virtuous, nor deserving of scorn. They are un-fortunate, in the sense of one whose fortune turned out for the worse: and they are deserving of our generosity. What miserly and cold hearted people would we be, if we withheld that generosity!
CRs, druids, and celts of this day and age need to find new ways to be heroic. Perhaps one way to do this would be to expand the cirlce of honour: where once the values of generosity and hospitality were intended for one’s family and tribe, and the occasional stranger who happens upon your door, now it should be extended to the whole of humanity. Might this be the new heroic?
Let not rich gifts or great treasures blind you to the poor in their suffering.
– The Testament of Morann.
Do not refuse to share your meat; do not have a niggard [greedy person] for a friend.
– Fionn MacCumhall.
It is riches you love,
Not men; as for us, when we lived,
It was men we loved.
– The Lament of the Old Woman of Baere.
During this past Christmas break, there was a lot of activity here at home. We had five ‘big family dinners’, which means a lavish feast for 30 or more people, all of them family members or near-family members This includes all seven of us kids, plus nephews / nieces / grandchildren / husbands / engaged fiance’s / in-laws. The meal might take two or three days just to prepare. Then we take almost all of a Sunday afternoon to eat it. These occasions are a lot of fun, and I usually look forward to them. After the meal there might be recitals of poetry or drama, philosophical debate, some horseplay, or even a ceilidh (a music / dance party in the Irish tradition). Yes, we have enough people to dance the Haymaker’s Jig. My family really is that big.
The occasion for so many of them in a short span of time this year was not just the Christmas holiday. It was also the arrival of my sister Niamh’s newborn child, Aoife, and the arrival of several of her husband’s family from Scotland to attend the baptism.
And they are all Catholics. Not lapsed catholics, not easter/christmas catholics, but Catholics. As in, many of them go to Mass five times a week. In case you haven’t got the point yet, one of those big family dinners was attended by the bishop. Yes, my parents are on a first-name basis with a bishop. There were 50 + people in the house that day.
So, being able to closely observe the feeding habits of this rare breed of primate, Homo Christianius Maximus, I think I figured out what it is that pisses me off about Christian “family values”.
What pisses me off is that “family values”, according to these people, is the one and only absolute cornerstone of all social order, all political stability, all personal morality and all spiritual aspiration. More than that: No matter what the problem or conflict, no matter what the challenge or the issue, the root cause is always the breakdown of family values. All problems are traced to their root in the breakdown of family values.
The “attack on the family” (yes, that’s how they talk) takes the form of the prevalence and acceptance of divorce, abortion, same-sex relationships, contraceptives, and young people who choose not to marry.
Yes, I think they truly, honestly believe that all problems in society can be traced to those things. Crime and criminality? Apathy among young people? Obviously the kids have come from broken families, or they didn’t have strong and reliable fathers nor caring and nurturing mothers. Political corruption? Clearly the politicians are letting themselves be persuaded by the minority lobbyists who advocate for abortion, same-sex marriage, and so on. Except for the politicians who are active enemies of the family. Economic instability, unemployment, and poverty? It’s only an outward sign, a ‘trickle-down’ consequence, of the breakdown of the family, since as everybody knows the family is the root of society. Global warming and climate change? It’s the family again: if people held on to their family values then they would want to take care of the planet for the sake of their children.
Some of their reasoning does follow logically. A family often is a microcosm of the larger society. But there is almost never one single answer to all problems. And their reasoning can go from the sublime to the ridiculous. My father once suggested that the breakdown of the family will lead to the extinction of the human race, because due to abortion, divorce, and same-sex partnerships there will not be enough people producing new children. On another occasion he said “What next–will people be allowed to marry their dogs or cats?” When I pointed out what a ridiculous slippery-slope that is, he immediatley cited some legal case in Nevada where exactly that is supposed to have happened. A rich and idle society-woman, recently widowed, applied for and recieved a license to marry her dog. (According to him, anyway. I did a Google News search for information about this, and found nothing.)
So, there you have it, folks. To all of my friends who are involved in non-traditional relationships: those of you who are polyamorous, or gay, or who use contraceptives with their hetero partners, or who (god forbid!) have sex with even their hetero partners before marrying them, you are all personally and directly responsible for the War in Iraq. I’ve got it from the highest authority: my own father. After all, he’s the head of my family, and in accord with Catholic family values I’m supposed to believe whatever he tells me.
Actually I think the lesson of the tale is more like this. If someone believes that there is only one explnanation for all problems in the world, you should take it as a sign that this person is locked into a programmed non-rational mode of thinking. If someone claims that there is only one ultimate source for all conflict, criminality, and trouble in the world, the speaker might be a member of a cult.