Atoms (a revision, first issued in 2013)

 Partially as a reaction to the victory of proposition 8 in CA (banning gay marriage), emails among people in my email loop began arguing that this indicates that organized religion and its practices allow doctrine to trump fundamental morality.  A few even contended that religions are bereft of morality.  The anti-doctrine folks argue that doctrine seeks to control behavior, especially moral behavior (i.e., ethics).  And the pro-doctrine folks argue that the anti-s basically don’t know religious doctrines.  They both might be right.  Let’s consider a look at both sides.  I’ll get to atoms toward the end.

First, what is church doctrine?  More to the point, why is church doctrine?   Church doctrine among Christian sects (including Roman Catholicism) is grounded in the Sacred or Hebraic Laws of Judaism.   Without the Sacred Laws, no Christianity.  The doctrine of this and those of all other religious doctrines are to sustain the believers in their beliefs, give them a system that makes sense out of the nonsense of being human.  All doctrines offer an explicit or implicit contract (e.g., the Ten Commandments) gathered around articles of faith (Christians have the Apostles’ Creed or simply The Creed). 

One either accepts them or does not.  To accept is to express a desire to have faith (blessed by omnipotence to belong to the believing group and its aspirations); to not accept is not to belong.  The doctrine embodies a code of moral and ethical standards.  To violate any stipulation of the code is to distance oneself from the core group and to create personal doubt.  Questioning and/or doubting initiates the slippery slope.  It’s not so much that one becomes a sinner; it’s that one displays a lack of faith. And, by the way, you can’t believe your way into faith (Unlike most English nouns, the word “faith” has no tansitive capacity—can’t be used in the verb position—it is transformative, not transactional.).  And if you lack faith, you lack moral standing.

So morality or moral standing is very much a part of believing.  The doctrine maintains that we are known by our behavior or moral actions around the issue of free will.  We can choose to follow the contract or not. The Puritans, for example, had a sub-contract called the Covenant of Works, which generally maintained that we express our condition of grace (having faith) as we display it in our good works, contributions to the society of saints (i.e., believers).   The morality of doctrine wants to keep the community together by the adhesion of common belief.  It’s like the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence.

Which leads me to what most people call secular humanism.  That too concerns the viability and integrity of the human community through its efforts to declare the correct behaviors in order to make sense and safety out of our divine comedy (yes, the Greeks had a much clearer system for all this—humanity’s efforts form the light entertainment for the gods).  The humanist doctrine is a little scary, though.  In it, we humans are basically alone. We share the idea of free will, but we have only immediate consequences, especially the good consequences.  We have a system of morality, but only we can speak for its legitimacy.  What is moral for us might and often does violate someone else’s moral code.  For example, the phrase “pursuit of happiness” for me might mean my goal is peace and well being, whereas for someone else in the next block it might mean as much greed as he or she can muster by whatever means necessary, which might include some suffering for me and others in the community.  It is, after all, a moral code. In the best of all possible worlds, the humanists believe that humans are basically a good lot, who by and large look out for the welfare of others, and who will benefit by that, because the others will return the favor. This so-called Golden Rule is based on one of the Christian beatitudes, love (or caritas).  But notice that it relies on an article of faith.

This is where the atoms come in.  One of America’s most famous and most derided poets, Walt Whitman, is also perhaps the most religious in both the Judeo-Christian tradition and the secular humanist tradition.  His detractors see him as a hedonistic primitive, not worthy of any moral consideration whatsoever.  And he was not only homosexual but perhaps also bisexual.  Yet this poet embraced the nobility and extraordinariness of all humans and all things.  He observes the natural world and everything in it as the glorious and exhilarating expression of endless spiritual energy, which is impossible to give a name.  He tells us this up front in his “Song of Myself.”

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,


And what I assume you shall assume,


For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

…

Creeds and schools in abeyance,


Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,


I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,


Nature without check with original energy.”

That is, all physical things are atomistic.  We can know them by what we see and by what we can examine.  But ultimately when we get down to the atom, we are confronted by a mystery.  What is the source of the force and energy that binds its matter?  And because we can’t know, we are better off to hold questions and creeds in “abeyance” and simply exalt in being alive.  That is the Whitman article of faith.   Being or having been human is miracle enough.   And this energy never ends.

“All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses.

And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.”

So much of what we humans are and do is incomprehensible and mysterious.  Libraries and databases bulge with attempts at comprehension and explanation, but ultimately these are unsatisfactory.  And the attempts fall short just when we think they are ready to present the sought after revelation.  So we are left to continue wondering.  Those of us who continue the pursuit continue the search.  Those of us, like the believers and Whitman, are satisfied that all is a mystery that will or will not be revealed when we stop being.

My "Hair" Problem

A few years ago some friends and I re-experienced the tribal rock musical "Hair."  The Bridgeport [CT] Downtown Cabaret's production precisely and enthusiastically re-created the version I gawked at in 1968.  I again held the same vision of life and wasted death I marveled at from the orchestra of some Broadway theatre a whole lifetime ago.

And that has become my problem.  That sense of life and travail is now more than I wanted to remember, and my eyes see with those other eyes every day now, and I know that the prophecy has come real. All that poetry and laughter has soured in our passionless lives and in the closeted cynicism of Washington.

I had just turned thirty that year, had just fathered my third child into a marriage that was on the wane, was new to Connecticut and in a new job, and was going to graduate school in lower Manhattan, bearing witness to the tempting lust and rage of Washington Square.  And I didn't know why I was doing or being any of it.

My Silent Generation did what we were told, listened and watched.   That socially acceptable voyeurism allowed me to be in the Sixties on the Square, on the train and on the job, but kept me from its harm as well.  I lived an invisibility provided by my thirty year old mask and costume, short-haired, drifting in and out of demonstrations and parlors, urging it on willfully but blending with the rest of the tourists my age.  And what a party it was.

The conventional wisdom claims we were a nation torn by the times, especially by the Vietnam War issue.  But what I recall is a brawling, sprawling national family that cared enough about all its members to hate them and call them pigs and commies and hippies.  Everyone was desperately proclaiming superior morality and acting on that claim.  As I see again the rushing crowds pushing into the streets and buildings now, I see a nation that cared deeply about all of it and argued endlessly over the differences.  I'm looking into the face of a Parkway toll taker as he's declaiming against my McCarthy bumper sticker.  And we're heading for a demonstration somewhere, anywhere.

But today as I look around with the eyes that "Hair" gave me, I see blank faces on kids and anger in the eyes of two separate parents, scrambling at their separate jobs and fretting over day care, a nation of cellular phone drivers sealing their deals from the steering wheels of their imported four-wheeled cubicles.  If it's all for fun, then nothing is funny enough.  At least, the fun of the Love Children had an edge of desire to it.  The fun of our Yuppies and their acquiring children mews empty phrases in pursuit of soft memories.  They have hard bodies and healthy lungs, and they have vapid minds speaking smarmy jargon to justify their latest crystallized morality that avoids the snarling looks of honest people.

"How can people be so heartless?" runs the lament of Sheila in "Hair" as she confronts her lover's choice to leave.  And that earnestness and desire make me cringe in the face of the mean-spirited avarice we wallow in.  Her lover leaves for an ideal he's not sure of except that it promises more than the overload of ritualized drugs and nameless sex partners in the tribe.  As it turns out, he dies like some 50,000 others, wondering what it all was for, what the ideal meant to all the people at home and in Saigon who didn't want to fight.

Even so, he held a belief.  His short life meant more than a Volvo or a Hummer and the latest wonder toys from the Silicon Valley and Japan.  As I look at the faces of my students and my forty-something neighbors, I see the look of a beater, flicking fierce eyes around to see the opening, the squeeze to get over on the system or the sucker.

We don't live in an age of greater morality or new morality.  We live in an age of amorality.  The only values are the codes of easiness and success.  For all the health crazies around, my Hair-ed eyes see precious few people who are willing to exert a pinch of real effort to work on large problems that don't directly benefit them individually.

And so I have this "Hair" problem.  Actually, it's an eye problem.  With these eyes, I can't overlook things anymore.  Like a few of my contemporaries, I had compromised with the spiritlessness of our age.  I had blinded myself to the rudeness and crudeness that is commonplace.  I had learned carefully to avoid the spin and curl of the slick-lipped hustlers.  But then along came last year's emptiness, and I couldn't turn the other way.

I saw the bathos in local politics and could see how its canker festered exponentially in national politics.  The Kerry/Bush Follies was hyped as a nasty campaign. But my eyes saw a soapbox derby with mediocrity's lowest common denominator the face at the finish line.  The country didn't win or lose.  The country sent a clear message.  It doesn't care, because nothing about those guys matters.  The most justified addition to Mount Rushmore for the 21^st century would be the Happy Face.

So the Age of Aquarius has shmoozed into the Age of Putty.  The starshine of the Sixties is the American Idol of the 21^st century.  Perhaps, despite all our fun, the sound behind our laughter is the whimpering that closed T.S. Eliot's vision of the modern era. Perhaps, in this new century it's the nasal sneer of the cashiers when they say to me, "Have a nice day."

Encouragement (thoughts from 2008)

These are difficult times for us.  They're difficult, because we Americans think we need to be optimistic.  And when times—like these—are chaotic...for every small up, there's a larger down, for every common sense, logical statement, there's a longer, more convoluted, absurd and nonsensical statement...optimism seems to be hiding.  We've achieved longer lives, which we will now fill more with work than with pleasure. It takes courage to search for optimism right now.

The good news is that encouragement and optimism still survive.  The less-than-good news right now is that they survive outside our borders.  The things about Barack Obama that everyone could agree on are that he represented hope rather than fear, alteration rather than stagnation, actuality rather than mythology and veracity rather than mendacity.  As general Powell said, he indeed, represents transformation.  And who realized this?  According to a contemporary survey of 22 nations by the BBC, the voters in those countries preferred an Obama America by a 4 to 1 margin.  And—here's the important part—nearly half said the election of Obama would fundamentally change their perception of the US.  The optimist remaining in me assumes that means they would have regarded US at least as a respectable nation.

On the other hand, I feel seriously that we must increase our vigilance toward the way some people among US reacted to the Obama hope.  On her way home from work last night, my wife caught some of Michael Savage's and Bob Grant's bile.  These monomaniacal troglodytes push their withering envelopes to such outrageous levels I can assume only that they want to discover at what point their apostles will finally lose interest.  But they never do. These seriously troubled listeners keep heaping praises on these two haters and feeding their nefarious ends.

But I'm not worried about the two troglodytes.  I'm worried about those lonely loser denizens, fearful of change, of the loss of their "dream," of  "that one" and those ones and, finally, of difference.  I can feel in my bones how daytime stopped for an entire weekend when JFK was assassinated.  I felt the same thing only more in shame than fear when MLK was assassinated. Then Bobby Kennedy was taken down.  And that final blow I think created my loss of hope and optimism for a very long time.  As history has shown, we have been numb for 40 years.  This is not the legacy we want.  

We can't talk hope alive, and we can't shout fear down.   It takes vigilance, identifying with cultural purpose and—more than anything—the certainty that people are more important than any bottom line.

(P.S.  2017 The troglodytes have metastasized and the audacity of hope has withered into crusty audacity.  The center does not hold, and the people who should realize that don't have a clue.)