In Defense of the Dissidents, The End

Published at August 23, 2008 in Uncategorized. 3 Comments

Sorry guys, I have been in Denver organizing a super-rally so I haven’t had time to respond to your many good comments. I will soon. Here is the last part. I want to say that my attempt to articulate these thoughts was intended as an experiment; I did not want it to convey hatred or bitterness but rather to offer an honest expression of things people don’t usually write–things that I think are important to write, even if sometimes cruel. I did not want to offend people or indicate that I was above the things I was criticizing.

All I really want is for someone to hear me describe a problem and then to say (if they agreed): “You are right. What you are describing is wrong, and the Church should not get any unwarranted defense just because it happens to be the Church and can ask for our unending apologetics. We should do something about it, for the sake of the disenfranchised, who according to Christ matter every bit as much as the powerful.” Instead, my critiques of both Church and State (in the form of a critique of Obama and support for Nader) are almost always answered with this: “Yes, I can see how you think that is wrong, and it probably is. But you’ve got to be (patient, faithful, meek) and wait for (authoritative pronouncement, slow change, the right moment).” They admit that it is wrong and then strip me of my right to be outraged, to make a difference, to call for a change. They manipulate personal virtues to perpetually defer right action.

I no longer accept this.

I also believe that this kind of manipulation exploits not just human conscience but also harms people psychologically. Tristan Call and Katy Savage have recently introduced me to the ideas of Gregory Bateson, who has developed a theory called the Double Bind to explain, among other things, why people become schizophrenics. While I have not read Bateson, Tristan’s explanation in his own Sunstone talk articulated the very problem I have been trying to pinpoint in Mormonism (and elsewhere).

The theory is basically this: You have a person who is in a relationship that she can’t easily leave or reject—with her parents, God, a church, or a country. The authority figure in this relationship—parents, God, church, country—make a rule and impose it on the person. The cost of breaking the rule is punishment. Later on, they make another rule that partly or entirely contradicts the first rule. The cost for breaking this rule is punishment, as well. Often, the second rule (or the overarching rule) is that the person is not allowed to ask for clarification about which rule is more important, or that the person cannot point out the inconsistency between the two, or that punishment cannot be seen as a punishment and, if it is, the person who sees it that way will be punished. This analysis is obviously pertinent to so many of the things I have been talking about: the honor code, for instance, which sets up a situation in which I would feel forced to civilly disobey (against the honor code) to be honest about what I believe (required by the honor code); Mormonism, which often pits love of the neighbor with acceptance of US policies that hurt the non-US neighbor, etc. The more important point, however, is not that there are contradictory rules, but that asking a clarifying question about those inconsistencies—or questioning them at all—is now included in what ought to be punished, and that seeing this as a punishment—rather than an act of righteous judgment or love—is also punishable.

This is the power structure in the Church that has the power to psychologically damage dissidents and minorities. As Bateson points out, the fall into schizophrenia is really a fall into not being able to distinguish between the intent of different claims but fearing to ask a clarifying question. I believe that the psychological manifestations of this structure are not restricted to schizophrenia, but to the loneliness, bitterness, and anger of many people in the Church who, to use Tristan’s paraphrase, have been punished for correctly discriminating the kind of message (the class of communication) that is occurring. These manifestations are, sadly, used to reinforce the claim that these people were unrighteous, dubious or deviously-intentioned in the first place. This retroactive condemnation—to use someone’s anger at being mistreated as proof that they had bad or angry intentions to start with—completes the circle and totally absolves the majority from listening to the “unstable” minority (think D. Michael Quinn as ‘embittered historian’, a insult that has nothing to do with respect for history and everything to do with our distaste for his discrimination between kinds of messages). Additionally, their meta-critique—a critique of structural inequity—is confused with object-level sin and communication, with the prescribed antidote being an object-level forgiveness and an abandonment of the meta-critique.

To quote Tristan again:

“The point is that messages are generally sent through multiple orders of communication. The message might be, ‘I am not punishing you,’ but the second-order message, conveyed by body language or context, is ‘I will punish you.’ This is precisely why you are not allowed to ask for clarification, because you would be revealing the deception between levels of communication, a deception that is intended for you to understand, but unacceptable to explicitly acknowledge.”

The phenomenon functions much like the public opinion criticized by de Tocqueville and Mill, a pervasive force understood by everyone but inappropriate to acknowledge or question—a force that is infinitely more powerful than argument because it is illegal to recognize and because it is not posed as an argument but as something utterly proven, something beyond even fact.

I reject the circle that keeps dissidents from expressing themselves as human beings with legitimate, and often vital, things to say. I believe that a church that rejects its dissidents will ultimately reject more than that—will reject the truth and caution that dissidents bring. I believe that the psychological damages of circular arguments are real, and that we should prevent more of this damage by frankly acknowledging injustices, mourning for them, and doing something about them.

In Defense of the Dissidents Part III

Published at August 20, 2008 in Uncategorized. 6 Comments

I first encountered this phenomenon when I first read the Book of Mormon. I would read, for example, the account of Korihor and find that I agreed with most things he said—that he was making a good argument. Then Alma/Amulek would come in and counter the argument using circular reasoning, making sure to add the caveat: anyone who thought like Korihor had surely been tricked by the devil. Alma/Amulek’s arguments were decidedly worse than Korihor’s, and didn’t answer any of his questions, but they had the circle on their side—they did not argue against Korihor, they condemned him—delegitimized his argument by questioning his character. In the end, Korihor would admit to everything, the chapter would end with “thus we see,” and people like me would feel awful, wondering why it was that our line of thinking always ended up as the caricature of evil.

I have felt this way innumerable times since I was young, and each time it feels worse. Every time I believe I have found an honest, fair way of thinking about something, I need only to go to church or watch General Conference to find it not only discredited, but annihilated by an argument that cannot possibly be wrong and assures that its detractors cannot possibly be right. Reading the histories of BYU made that old anger and loneliness come back in waves. To see a person stand up and say: “Blacks should be equal and our arguments against them are sacralized bigotry,” and then to see the Church not only disagree with them but to include a caveat in their virtues list that made these people voiceless—and absolved others of having to listen—merely because they disagreed. When an ideology includes a virtue that condemns questioning or correcting the ideology, it has become dangerous and destructive.

I bring this up in conjunction with minorities because the situation I am describing is not unique to dangerous ideologies, but to the problem of being a minority itself. The whole time I was presenting at Sunstone, I kept thinking—and this is not intended as a self-aggrandizing analogy—about civil rights leaders, immigrants, and homosexuals. Specifically, I thought of the psychological wear that comes with having to fit your big idea into the small discourse around you—to know that you are making a basic moral argument but to have to defer to arguments that are insane and immoral but backed by mere virtue of being institutionalized. It is disgusting to be trying to say nothing more than that you should be treated like a human, but to have to hold it all inside while the majority gets the benefit of assuming their ideas are self-evident. I think it can destroy a person to be part of an indecent culture that is so powerful that the idea of its injustice does not even come up. This kind of situation can easily lead to a person trying to interject their ideas (since they will never simply come up), being silenced by a flippant counter-comment (that does not have to argue its own assumptions but merely reject the intrusion of a new idea), try again, be silenced again (by the majority demanding things—like hundreds of sources or reasons for anger—that they do not demand of themselves), try again, be subject to epithets and hypocrisy (the majority questioning the minority’s sanity or character and smugly applying requirements of peacefulness and forgiveness to keep the minority from making a structural argument), feel angry, lose legitimacy for being angry, and, giving up, prove all the built-in majority arguments about them being motivated by all the wrong reasons and not tough enough to face the truth. It is a no-win situation, particularly because the whole rhetorical discourse is rigged against a minority ever simply wailing, expressing a profound anger or pathos at injustice.

The problem is this: should a minority fighting against an immoral or impermeable majority be allowed to do and say things that the majority should not be allowed to do and say? For example, should Mexican-American author Gloria Anzaldua be able to say, in one of her post-colonial novels, that she hates the white man? Many would tidily term this reverse racism, but—while I can understand their concern—I think that minorities are routinely denied their psychological fury at having to live in an unjust world that, furthermore, does not recognize or care to address its injustices. I believe that minorities are justified in doing certain things that they are arguing that the majority should not be able to do—that the majority does without any compunction but is shocked when the minority dares to do.

A few more examples from the Sunstone experience. For one of the panels, I had arranged a mediation between parents, young people, and church leaders so that they could discuss their differences openly and try to understand each other better. In the dialogue, the mediator told us several times that it was important to be honest about how we were actually feeling, to allow conflict so that we could move toward a real conversation. I had tried so hard to peacefully explain what I thought some problems were in the Church, but the second night—after reading the BYU histories—I tried to take the mediator’s advice seriously and admitted that I was very angry and sad about the way faith was defined in the Church and the injustices that definition sponsored. I gave what I thought was a very calm but honest explanation of the problem and asked if anyone felt differently. Later, one of my friend’s parents—who had participated in the discussion—told my friend: “I think Ashley is a very angry and bitter person.” As my friend pointed out, all my effort to organize a peaceful discussion, all my intelligent and calm articulation, had been delegitimized precisely because I had tried to follow the dialogue rules in good faith and admit that I was angry. (I hadn’t even acted angry; I had simply said that I was!) Also, the inherent anger in making blacks, women, and homosexuals into second-class citizens was, apparently, not anger simply because the anger was diffused within an institution.

Later, in one of my talks on dissent at Sunstone, I brought up the case of Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the grief he had gotten for simply applying scriptural commandments to the United States. Because he had dared to wed the personal and political and actually be angry about the rampant injustices perpetrated by the United States (instead of allowing them in the name of being a political realist or because they were institutionalized), he was emotionally crucified. I could hardly find a single comment in all the millions of youtube inanities that could even imagine that what he was saying was true and that, if true, was cause for anger and indignation. I finished the talk with a defense of righteous anger and of dissent in general, saying that dissent was necessary to separate religion from dangerous culture.

In the Q and A session later, I was asked if it was difficult for me to go to church and not feel like I could speak my opinion. I decided to break with arm’s length analysis and admitted, feelingly, that it was so difficult that I rarely felt up to going.

After I was done, lots of well-meaning people approached me and said the same stuff as always. “The Church needs you,” they said. “You’ve got to stay.” Instead of smiling and accepting something I had heard a million times before, I continued my structural critique and said, honestly, “If the Church needed people like me it would treat us better.” They did not like that. They said I should forgive the weaknesses in the Church and do as much good as I could. I replied that I was happy to forgive the Church if that forgiveness was not exploited to get me to stop issuing structural critiques of real problems. I said that the request for forgiveness has historically been used for precisely that purpose, so that, for example, millions of slaves forgive their masters in a true Christian manner but are prevented, in the process, from questioning the structure of slavery itself. I said that this kind of ‘forgiveness’ created a hierarchy of peoples, which required the perpetual forgiveness of the powerful at the expense of the weak, and that I would not support that kind of false forgiveness.

One person standing nearby said, archly, that I seemed very disheartened. It was clear from his tone that he meant this as a criticism, that being disheartened was yet another strike against my character. I said yes, I was very disheartened, and that I couldn’t understand why it was an epithet to be disheartened at great injustices, or to apply a critique consistently even if it travelled into hallowed territory.

In Defense of the Dissidents Part II

Published at August 19, 2008 in Uncategorized. 5 Comments

Being a person who was psychologically traumatized at BYU (a strong phrase but true), and feeling a consuming indignation and sorrow for the stories I had read, I tried to use my talk at Sunstone to explain what it felt like to live under the honor code—under any system, including the Church, that rests on circular arguments that demonize awareness of the circles. I knew that in doing so I was risking the exact consequences that I was criticizing. If I stood up and honestly expressed my terrifying anger at the injustices of the honor code and BYU culture, I would lose the legitimacy to speak at all—at least in the eyes of the majority of my audience. My honest emotional descriptions would be interpreted as hysteria, weakness, irrationality, and unfair or ‘sweeping’ condemnations. I would be asked, certainly, to change myself before changing the Church, to work from the inside, to put Church imperfections ‘on the shelf’, to focus on the good, to avoid anger, to remember the difference between gospel, church, and culture, and any other arguments that require perpetual deferment and miss the point of the criticism entirely—that respond to injustice and sorrow with strategy.

And indeed, that was what happened: One person stood up and condemned my descriptions as totally fallacious and generalized (forgetting that any criticism is necessarily a caricatured warning but does not necessarily lose criticism for being such); another man told me and the other panelists that he was “charmed” that we were still surprised at injustice; while the responses to the Salt Lake Tribune article included the 150 inevitable comments suggesting that I knew what I was getting into when I went to BYU, that it was a private university and could do whatever it wanted, and that if I didn’t like it I could stop wasting the Church’s tithing money and get the hell to Berkeley. I wanted to tell the first commentator to do a rhetorical analysis of the billboards from Salt Lake to Provo and then maintain his contention that Mormons do not equate righteousness with money, modesty and self-satisfied provincialism. I wanted to tell the second man that I was not ‘surprised’ at injustice, but actively concerned, and that it disturbed me if sorrow for sufferers was now a charming idiosyncrasy of youth. And I wanted to ask the hundreds of Salt Lake Tribune commentators if the qualification for belonging to a school, church or country was unadulterated acceptance of whatever those institutions decided to champion, and if they thought that the definition of “private university” exempted all of us from a discussion about the morality of that school’s principles. Just as in modern political discourse, religious strategy now not only outweighed but utterly eclipsed the ethical or substantive conversation that should be occurring. Punditry and presentation has replaced the moral polemic.

The experience made me think, as I often do, about the problem of minorities. I am sure there are many definitions of “minority,” but mine is this: a person or group that must bear the consequences of the majority’s lifestyle—that, being necessarily ‘removed’ from reality, keeps the majority from having to see those consequences; a person or group that will be eternally discredited because the things they suggest are not institutionalized and the things they decry—no matter how insane or wrong— always are; a person or group that realizes that the conversation is not about right or wrong but about inside and outside, that the majority’s smug, self-serving morality is simply a polemic of insides; a person or group that the majority will try to contain by prescribing personal morality in response to its structural critiques—that will say ‘forgive this leader or that injustice’ rather than admitting the consequences of those structural, built-in atrocities; a person or group that gets progressively angrier at the bullheaded unimaginativeness of the majority—at their smug cruelty encased in arguments that make that cruelty necessary, inevitable, or even invisible—but whose anger disqualifies them from participating in the conversation, whose anger will offend the politeness of the cruel majority that sees anger at its cruelty as the only impropriety (that refuses to acknowledge the diffuse anger of a system built on inequalities); a person or group that will, if practicing the virtues of the majority, be defined only in the negative (if they are persistent they are egotistical, if they are Christian they are extreme, if they fight injustice they are complainers, if they admit unpleasant truths they are whiners); a person or group who can never, never say how they feel when they are subjected to cruelty or injustice, if only because the whole system of discourse is designed to prohibit and profane the honest expression of personal pain.

At least, this is how I have felt as a minority in my religion and at BYU. Every time I have tried to say that something was frightfully wrong, I got a load of strained apologetics, a prescription for PR, and a blight on my character for getting mad at injustice in the first place. Worse still, though, my criticisms were neatly folded into the everywhere-system I was criticizing.

Nader Rally Speech

Published at August 18, 2008 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

If any of you are interested in watching my speech at the Nader rally, here is a link. I will put up the rest of the links as soon as they are available.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPbJY2rs0QI

In Defense of the Dissidents Part I

Published at August 18, 2008 in Uncategorized. 5 Comments

The following is a long piece broken up for readability. Some questions or criticisms you have at the beginning may or may not be resolved by the end, but don’t withhold commenting just because of that.

I am so sad that it is hard for me to even write; I have been avoiding it for days because I do not believe that I will be able to articulate the mad rush of thoughts and the agony I have been feeling for so long. I feel particularly paralyzed because I feel that if I were to be completely honest about how I feel, people would accuse me (or I would accuse myself) of being self-righteous, overly personal, or extreme. In reality, I do not believe that the things I am feeling are self-righteous, overly personal, or extreme, but I feel strangled by a writing culture that seems to demand a distanced rationality and a calm approach to one’s own agony. Because the fact is that the things I am  feeling are bellies full of indignation, rage, and censure—so much so that I am considering standing on a street corner and preaching—and I would be indicted by a culture that draws such a small circle around those feelings.

I believe that my fear about people’s potential responses is justified, and that is partly what I want to write about in the first place. To use the most recent example, I presented the other day on the honor code at the Sunstone Symposium. Half of my talk was an analysis and a polemic about the destructive parts of the code, and the other half was a plea, an emotional description of how it feels to be trapped inside a circular argument that brings out the worst in religion and people.

I had spent the previous two days reading two histories of BYU, and I was furious and weary and incredibly sad. Both books were crammed with stories of the Church censoring intellectuals and people who failed to agree with the synonymy of the Church and American nationalism. I read account after account of the arguments and epithets used against these people—people who were saying nothing more shocking than that blacks and women should have the same rights as whites and males. These arguments were met with hatred and hysteria, and the chief architects of the arguments were Church leaders themselves. I read about the excommunication of Sunstone regulars for extending the right of conscience beyond the clean lines of dogma, and I read excerpts from the General Conference immediately following, in which general authorities inveighed against these dangerous intellectuals, even quoting George Q. Cannon about being glad that ‘evil’ people could fall away from the Church so that they did not contaminate it. I then read about the development of the honor code at BYU, which was in all essentials a grand collusion between 1950’s paranoia, American economyths (defending the right to consume), and the lopsided terror over economic systems that ‘took away agency’ (hardly the real criticism, since capitalism—a grand defeater of freedoms at almost every level—emerged unscrutinized and unscathed). I had read these books and discovered these facts before, but it didn’t take out the sting.

I saw how this system was used to further terrorize and traumatize people who dared question another entrenchment of nationalism and Church, and how it made their lives lonely and their mouths voiceless. Worst of all, I saw for the millionth time how the code—and the concomitant Church culture—completed a seamless argument against critics that had the power not only to disparage their criticisms but to pull breakaway criticisms back into a comprehensive ideology. In other words, the code and the culture were so comprehensive that they included ‘virtues’ that served little purpose except to trap a critic inside the pronouncements of the code and culture, to make the ideology most binding on critics at the precise moment that they were questioning the truth or rightfulness of that ideology. Thus, by making an argument at all, critics lost the legitimacy of making an argument, and in questioning definitions (of sin, righteousness, etc) they were condemned by the caveats in those definitions that demonized the act of questioning definitions.

How Can I Help: Rock the Bike

Published at August 9, 2008 in Uncategorized. 5 Comments

Today, I present lovely guest blogger Micah Elggren of Washington DC (currently Tanzania), who decided to really go for it and not ride his bike for thirty days. Here is his cry for help.

But first, the challenge: For the truly hardy and committed, do the Micah and don’t touch a car for thirty days. If you can’t do the Micah, pick an uncomfortable amount of time to go without a car and stick to it, riding only public transport, a bike, or your feet. Report back in two weeks (even if you are choosing a month) to tell us how it went. Do it for your health, do it for your sanity, or do it for Mama Earth.

MICAH:

As an experiment this month, I engaged life without cars. I wanted to experience the inconvenience of not using personal auto-vehicular transport devices. Why? Well, sometimes I forget the cost involved with driving (or riding in) a car because I do it so often that it has become normal. Lest you worry, there will be no experiments with brushing teeth or showering.

When I reference the “cost” of driving a car, I mean the environmental toll associated with burning fuel by using vehicles. One day early in May, I got stuck in traffic on the I-495. As I came around the bend, heading toward the Virginia boarder, I caught a glimpse of the freeway traffic ahead. I don’t know if I’ve paid any particular attention before, but on this occasion I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of vehicles heading in both directions on the freeway. Ten lanes, bumper to bumper. There was a soft haze floating in the air around us, caused by some combination of heat and exhaust from the cars. I realized that the scene played out miles ahead and miles behind me. I also realized that similar scenes played out all over the world, especially in places which much lower standards for fuel efficiency than DC. My awareness was heightened in the days and weeks that followed, and I noticed more and more the amount of cars around me. It really is amazing—there’s so many that it’s easy for me to just not notice unless I’m making an effort to be attentive. But they are there, and they’re obviously adding something to our air.

The wheels in my head began to turn (there was a momentary squeaking sound because it had been so long), and eventually I came up with the idea to do without.

My research question: What conveniences associated with using cars have blinded me to the minor inconveniences of doing without? I hoped that by doing without I’d become aware of times when instead of just jumping in my car to go somewhere I could easily find an alternative, less environmentally intrusive way of getting from here to there.

My experimental parameters: Simply, no personal vehicles. Public transportation (e.g. Metro, buses), just fine. But carpooling, no way.

My conclusions: Cars are awesome (I realize this now more than ever) but perhaps not as necessary as I tend to make them out to be. Will I ever ride in a car again? Oh, most definitely. But it became obvious over the course of the month that there are areas where I’ve become too reliant, too lackadaisical with regard to my car.

I now have moments when I’d prefer not to take a car. Take going to church, for instance. Riding a bike or taking public transportation seems like the perfect opportunity to be a good steward over the earth that God has bless us with. We’ve been commanded to replenish, and so why not find a less invasive alternative to getting to worship services. Plus, a route to and from church that treks through parks or forests offers moments of reflection on God’s creations. BONUS!

There were certainly times where I wish I had never committed to doing without. Those instances normally included riding or walking in torrential downpours, waiting for the bus or Metro, getting hit by cars and other bikers, or turning down offers for fun camping trips and other far-away activities. But even in these moments, there was a certain gratification that came from sacrificing something that I wanted at the time for something that I could look back on with satisfaction.

The big realization from the month is a bit more abstract than the decision whether to use a car to go grocery shopping. I’ve realized that I don’t normally operate my life with much deliberateness. It doesn’t take much planning to get to the grocery store when I can just hop in my Subaru, pick up items in whatever quantity I want (using as many plastic bags as I want), and run countless errands on the way home. Stretching myself just a little bit by not using my car requires just a little more intentionality—checking to see whether it’s going to rain on shopping day, limiting the amount of groceries to what can fit in my saddlebags and backpack, timing a grocery run so that it fits into my schedule for the week. Operating with an increasing amount of deliberateness helped me reconnect myself with the activities that I participate in, life being the most prominent activity of them all. There’s no opportunity for mindlessness when the details of the day need to be managed and planned. I’m feeling that’s a good thing.
 

My Apologies

Published at August 8, 2008 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

I have not written in a long time. I have a lot going on in my mind and heart, and a lot of it is really discouraging. I have a hard time writing when I am really discouraged, even though that is the precise time that I should be writing.

I want to thank all of you who participated in the first ”How Can I Help?” challenge. It moved me to read your stories and I think you are brave for taking my dare. As I mentioned, I talked to my dad about single payer healthcare. This was not easy. My dad and I are very close, but I have rarely been able to breach the politeness threshold and actually have a back-and-forth conversation about a political topic. My parents are extremely supportive of me, but since they are largely apolitical (which translates in Utah to default conservatism) they tend to view any critique of the government as cruel. The consequence is that I am afraid to discuss things with them because I am afraid of making them sad; I am afraid that my dad in particular will feel depressed by my comments but feel like it is his job, as someone who loves and supports me, to not say anything at all. This stifles the discussion before it begins, and we compenstate by acting nicer and nicer to each other without addressing the elephant in the room.

One thing I have learned from this two-week (okay, ultimately month-long) exercise is that I interpret my parents in the language of my own fears and suspicions. In reality, I think they are willing to do hard things to have conversations with me, and I am the one who usually avoids those conversations because I am afraid of how much bravery and time they will require.

 So here is what I did to take my own challenge:

 I talked to my dad about single payer healthcare. We went back and forth for one hour. I listened to him talk and tried to ask him questions about why he believed what he did rather than contradicting him as soon as he finished. He did the same for me. When it looked like we were about to slip into a false or preemptively polite solution, I tried to press forward and admit what I really felt. We ended up having a meta-conversation about how we got our ideas about capitalism and socialism, and I pressed him about inconsistencies in the things he said and he pressed me on the same and we ended admitting the personal reasons behind our abstract arguments.

 I also organized a dialogue for the Sunstone symposium. I invited people my age, their parents, and Church leaders and we spent four hours over the course of two nights talking honestly about what we love and what we do not love about the Church. I invited my parents to that, too, and tried to say things I meant and sustain the conversation when I got back home.

 This post has not been very specific, mostly because I am feeling defeated about a lot of things religiously, but hopefully it will count as my contribution.

From now on, I am going to have guest posters write in every two weeks about a topic they care about and then collaborate with them to give a “How Can I Help?” challenge for the next two weeks. The point of having guest writers is to give people who care a lot about a certain issue a forum to explain why they care and then to ask for the help that they need to see their project inch closer to realization. If you want to be a guest poster, just let me know. Tomorrow’s guest poster will be amazing. Wait for it.

How Can I Help?

Published at July 19, 2008 in Uncategorized. 5 Comments

It has been two weeks, and it is time to write in about your experiences with the “How Can I Help?” challenge from two weeks ago: talking to someone you love about things that you believe but are intimidated to tell them.  I will write about my own experience(s) tomorrow, but I want to hear about yours so post them as comments to this entry. They can be long! (It should be obvious by now that I don’t mind that!)

The Cloud Atlas

Published at July 8, 2008 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

At five this morning, on page 508 of The Cloud Atlas, I found a speech I would have written, if I were brave enough and if there were ever audiences for any speeches that anyone actually means. But if there were a crowd of two or three, and one of them had asked me, I would have said the same thing Adam Ewing did:

“Scholars discern motions in history and formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises and falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes.

What precipitates outcomes? Vicious and virtuous acts.

What precipitates acts? Belief.

Belief is both prize and battlefield, within the mind and in the mind’s mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation, and bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, and history’s Horroxes, Boerhaaves and Gooses shall prevail. You and I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage and our legacy? Why fight the “natural” (oh, weaselly word!) order of things?

Why? Because of this–one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

Is this the doom written within our nature?

If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth and claw, if we believe divers races and creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable and the riches of the Earth and its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Tortuous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s word.

A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson will inherit, this strikes me as a life worth living. Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a  self-freed slave and because I must begin somewhere.

I hear my father-in-law’s response:

“Oho, fine, Whiggish sentiments, Adam. But don’t tell me about justice! Ride to Tennessee on an ass and convince the rednecks that they are merely white-washed negroes and their negroes are black-washed Whites! Sail to the Old World, tell ‘em their imperial slaves’ rights are as inalienable as the Queen of Belgium’s! Oh, you’ll grow hoarse, poor and gray in caucuses! You’ll be spat on, shot at, lynched, pacified wuth medals, spurned by backwoodsmen! Crucified! Naive, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay it along with him! And only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!”

Yes, but what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

I have decided, at 5 am and on page 509 of The Cloud Atlas, that it is not and will never be my job to accept inequality in the name of a creed, that any creed that fails me in this impulse is not mine, taht pragmatism is the worst and most failing creed, that human nature is what we make it, that we must keep our words as beautiful as what we’d make, that what is natural most always hides what is emphatically artificial–the world we have constructed to justify the lie of power, the lie of hierarchy–that our creed of human nature merely shows the lie that makes us comfortable. That we must keep using beautiful words even if no one listens, even if the whole world is intent on one version of the story, even if people have grown to love their own inequality, even if our words grow hoarse in our throats, even as we grow heavier and heavier with hearing a story that wants the whole world to undo itself or stay exactly the same, that is hungry for a comfort or destruction that will forget all excesses.

To hope to live through this is not naive and will never be. It is simply the decision to act honestly amidst lies that would kill us before we die.

Everything I have wished to be in the small event of my life I have tried to be in homage to the people who have taken the challenge, who have gone to east and west, etc to convince people of things they do not want to hear, to remind them of the most frightening idea: that they are not slaves or even enslavers. I track the progress of these few, and I see the promised results: the are mocked, derided, scorned, and lectured against, until one day they die, curshed under a human nature they insist is not so, killed by what they are killing. And then someone throws a medal, and we are grateful.

I would like to be a person who believes people while they are alive, who does a small part in alleviating the mockery and ridicule that true people must bear too, too much of. It isn’t even that I want to be great. I would rather live and listen and speak so that it is easier for other people to be great–less lonely, less fearsome, less weary of hope.

I will start by never believing the father-in-law. Because we should itch at injustice. We should abandon our privilege and do what is right. Against all odds–that is to say, against all common stories. We should decide which person, race, or belief is now suffering the consequence of our cloistered comfort, and we should not allow our comfort to allow us to allow it. If we can do that while we live we can die brave enough to face the eyes that will look backward. If not, we deserve their scorn. History won’t do our work for us. None of our tidy inevitabilities will. We must work for history or suffer the end of it.

That is what the Cloud Atlas told me.

That is my declaration, and next will be my first challenge for people to take to try to start doing something so we don’t become the dystopia that we are trying to avoid.

How Can I Help?

Published at July 6, 2008 in Uncategorized. 6 Comments

For the first summer in five, I am not working at a place called Birch Creek Boys Ranch in Spring City, Utah. I miss it.

 Birch Creek Boys Ranch was born Bennion Teton Boys Ranch in Driggs, Idaho. It was founded by Lowell Bennion as a way to teach normal, everyday kids how to work hard, play outside, and help their neighbors. If you are Mormon and don’t know Lowell Bennion, you have a lot of Mormoning to do. Okay, joking, but he is a hero of living a religious life with great and expansive spirit. He wanted to reinvigorate the religion of simplicity and service, and he used the ranch to teach people how to make their lives an elegant economy of gratitude and giving.

The boys ranch (and now a girls ranch) where I have spent my past five summers grew out of Lowell’s prescription: Every morning, we wake up early, eat a good breakfast, and spend four hours working. We divide our time between our own ranch and the community, some days building our straw bale lodge and other days helping a farmer buck bales of hay. By the end of the summer, we have repaired fences, painted barns, cleaned sheep pens, or sledgehammered something for every farmer within twenty miles. We are strong and tan and we feel good.

Afternoons, we see what games we can make from the things we have. We cut plastic tubing into shooters, nail together scrapwood into bunkers, and play a vicious round of marshmallow war. We draw. We play dominoes in the sun. At night, we have artists, thinkers, and musicians come and show us how to rethink (re-draw, re-hear) the world. We play frisbee as the sky goes dark. Weekends are camping, hiking, waking up to the sky. 

Sundays are my favorite. Sunday is Chapel in the Pines.

Chapel in the Pines is actually Chapel in the Junipers. There are benches facing a big rock, and a question–a different question every week. There is “Why do or don’t I believe in God?”, ”What’s the most important thing?”, “What I can offer that no one else can?”, and “How can I learn to love?” We go up to the rock, stand on it, scuff our toes, look out at the audience, put our hands deep in our pockets, and say something we really mean (which is my definition of sabbath, as far as I can tell). But every year, there is always one question, a nod to Lowell. His favorite question: ”How Can I Help?”

And we stand on the rock and try, we think really hard. We think days and weeks and months in advance, and we try to articulate how we might do something good, something that will last for someone, even if that someone is just us.

Lowell used to answer the phone that way: “How can I help?”, and that one question gave people permission to unfold, to ask for something they could not have asked for from someone else. Lowell’s family said their vacations were never really vacations. Three hours into it, Lowell would have already found someone whose house needed painting or whose garden needed weeding or whose wallet needed moneying or fridge, fooding. And so that’s what they would do instead.

I am saying all this because I have been thinking about Lowell and how much a person I’ve never met has affected me. I am thinking about how many blessings even I contain, and how much I could give that I do not give and how much the giving I do manage might someday help someone I have never met to give also. I am saying this because I miss standing on a rock and committing myself to being a blessing,  a future of blessing to someone else.

So I am doing three things. First, I am standing on this rock, the Internet, and committing myself to being a person who helps to ease hardship–any sort. Second, I am writing postcards and sending them off to strange and familiar people. The postcards have phrases on them, phrases that people have said to me in my life, things said maybe even in passing but that have disproportionately affected who I’ve become. I am asking these people to send their own phrases on to the people who have said words that have blessed the person they now recognize as themselves, and I am asking them to send these phrases back to me. So that I can make a web, of postcards and string, between one act of loveliness and the next, and all the influences and braveries in between. So I can remember to see the world that way.

Second, I am starting a tradition on my blog. Every couple of weeks, I will put up a post called How Can I Help? It will be in honor of Lowell, a person I have never met, a phrase on a postcard many strings away that has swung down, on strings, to bless me eight or fifteen or fifty postcards later. The How Can I Help? posts will be part of an experiment, a single experiment that will hopefully turn into a group kind of magic. I will write every two weeks with a challenge to help in some way. Some will not be concrete; some will demand an act of bravery; some will be political; some will ask you to change an old habit. They will all be done in the spirit of the following belief: that there are ideas, people, and movements out there that need our help, and that I can use this small blog to orchestrate a big help–that with the knowledge of a problem, we can combine into a great force and meet that problem boldly.

After I post the How Can I Help? post, you will have two weeks to complete the challenge. As you complete it (or whenever the two weeks expires), you can log on and post a comment describing your experience. They do not have to be positive responses, just honest.  I want to catalogue our great effort, whatever it costs or however poorly or greatly it works.

So: Here is the first challenge, and it may seem (after all my cheerleading) somewhat oblique. You might say, “How is this helping? I thought I was going to give bread to a homeless person or something.” Well, that one is probably in the offing, but today’s challenge is different. I want to start with a daring prospect: the prospect of deliberately trying to communicate what we believe to the people closest to us.

I believe that one of the most difficult things is to break through the usual character of familial love–which, in my experience, is accomplished mainly through inference and a silent kind of knowing–to explain the things we usually keep quiet, to dare to actually voice something we believe and to have the arduous but beautiful conversation of discovering what someone else believes, and why.

The challenge, then, is this: Call someone in your family–someone you love but someone to whom you are scared, in some way, to express your beliefs. Tell them something you believe. Ask them what they believe in return. Have that conversation, back and forth, until it is actually over. Be willing to listen but also to disagree. Do this with love.

Write back about it.

I did my version of the challenge today. I talked to my dad about single payer health care. This may seem silly, but we both worked hard to do it. It was brutal and wonderful. I will write more about it later.

Love,

Ash

P.S. Thanks to Thelma Young for doing something brave like this and for inspiring me to finally brave up and do my own version of it.