EXCUSE ME WHILE I PONTIFICATE
”All through the day: I me mine I me mine I me mine.” —George Harrison
As I anticipate Yom Kippur landing with a -plotz!-, I’m thinking about that cartoon in which the waiter asks the diners after they’ve been served their plates: “Is anything all right?”
These days, nothing much seems all right to me, outside my golden bubble. We’re murdering our planet; we’re spending billions and billions on Artificial Intelligence, despite having seen The Terminator three times apiece; we’re adjusting to depression, isolation, conformity, and anxious chatter so beautifully that we don’t even go out to movie theaters, let alone bowling alleys, any more; and we are lied to constantly, yet remain naive enough to allow the repetition to seduce at least some of us into believing that IT MUST BE SO.
Collectively, we are terribly off-course — and terribly un-collective. Even our most prevalent beliefs seem designed to push us in the wrong direction, towards the I-me-mine and away from the reality of interdependence and interconnectedness.
• We still believe, for example, that people are sorted into “races,” and we have built elaborate hierarchies and caste systems based on that belief. Yet the FACT is that race is a social construct — there is no meaningful biological difference among people in their various skin shades. Nevertheless, after centuries of racism, that fact is counterintuitive to most Americans.
• Our habituation to patriarchy runs so deep that we’re not even surprised that there are only 25 women out of 100 U.S. senators (and there have been only 60 since the founding of our country!); that there have been more women killed by intimate partners than there have been American soldiers killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. over the past two decades; that far more American women than men are poor; that professions involving the care and education of young children and old people are among the lowest-paid; and that in our hierarchical systems, the most competitive, alpha-type males are still consistently granted the most power.
• We view wealth as an individual achievement and a mark of virtue, rather than equally as much a product of centuries of collective human achievement, using resources that are humanity’s common endowment (air, water, soil, minerals, etc.). The social reality of wealth is ignored, in other words, while policies are set forth that reinforce the inviolable individuality of wealth.
• We believe competition and hierarchy to be overarching principles of human relationships, and we’ve built an economic system, an educational system, and a mass culture that avidly celebrate and cultivate those aspects of our humanity. Meanwhile, the cooperative aspects of human nature, and the activities that promote awareness of our kinship, are under-celebrated and under-cultivated, relegated to the status of hippie dreams.
• Our predominant American religion — thank you, Jesus! — treats salvation as something to be won individually, through belief more than through social responsibility. It portrays life as a prelude, rather than as the main act, and it glorifies and idealizes suffering rather than protesting it.
• Our sense of what constitutes “freedom” in our Land of the Free is limited to a leave-me-alone freedom (what Timothy Snyder calls a “freedom from”) rather than an obstacles-removed freedom (what he calls a “freedom to”). We therefore don’t consider economic stability to be a vital part of freedom; we fail to give children and young people the resources needed to maximize their “freedom to”; we view freedom as a set of rights for individuals, rather than as a social-istic [sic] quest; and for all our talk of freedom, we still barely tolerate, let alone value, nonconformity.
Good grief: So much false consciousness packed into a single superpower!
The start of all radicalism, perhaps, is the realization that the society in which we are embedded, including the ideas that justify its customs, is NOT reality, after all, but a construct that can be deconstructed and reconstructed.
How to participate in that awakening, especially in a time of such fear, disaster, and reactionary power? I have no idea, apart from writing occasional essays — but here’s a triad of mantras that have become the starting points of my politics, and which I try to convey to others when I’m granted the opportunity:
• We all originated in Africa. Possibly even from the same locale. We are all kin.
• We all suffer — in our own ways, within our own dramas.
• Both anger and compassion are contagious — with anger feeding the suffering, while compassion heals it.