"You have allowed the material means by which you live to outdistance the spiritual ends for which you live."
My facebook friend Steve Sorkin recently posted the following selection from the speeches of Martin Luther King. The timeliness - I hope not "timelessness" - of King's words struck me hard, and I so I share them here.
"America, as I look at you from afar, I wonder whether your moral and spiritual progress has been commensurate with your scientific progress. It seems to me that your moral progress lags behind your scientific progress. Your poet Thoreau used to talk about "improved means to an unimproved end." How often this is true. You have allowed the material means by which you live to outdistance the spiritual ends for which you live. You have allowed your mentality to outrun your morality. You have allowed your civilization to outdistance your culture. Through your scientific genius you have made of the world a neighborhood, but through your moral and spiritual genius you have failed to make of it a brotherhood. So America, I would urge you to keep your moral advances abreast with your scientific advances. . .
I understand that you have an economic system in America known as Capitalism. Through this economic system you have been able to do wonders. You have become the richest nation in the world, and you have built up the greatest system of production that history has ever known. All of this is marvelous. But Americans, there is the danger that you will misuse your Capitalism. I still contend that money can be the root of all evil. It can cause one to live a life of gross materialism. I am afraid that many among you are more concerned about making a living than making a life. You are prone to judge the success of your profession by the index of your salary and the size of the wheel base on your automobile, rather than the quality of your service to humanity.
The misuse of Capitalism can also lead to tragic exploitation. This has so often happened in your nation. They tell me that one tenth of one percent of the population controls more than forty percent of the wealth. Oh America, how often have you taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. If you are to be a truly Christian nation you must solve this problem. You cannot solve the problem by turning to communism, for communism is based on an ethical relativism and a metaphysical materialism that no Christian can accept. You can work within the framework of democracy to bring about a better distribution of wealth. You can use your powerful economic resources to wipe poverty from the face of the earth. God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty. God intends for all of his children to have the basic necessities of life, and he has left in this universe "enough and to spare" for that purpose. So I call upon you to bridge the gulf between abject poverty and superfluous wealth.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Paul’s Letter to American Christians Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, on 4 November 1956.
Have you, by any chance, checked out the tabs across top of this blog? One of them is EcoCurious, my blog about matters of the environment and sustainability. If you've visited EcoCurious, you might have noticed a flip comment across the top, "If only the answers really were inside the envelope."
Well, duh. Of course the answers are outside the envelope.
If we look at the world we know as though it's the only possible world, if we look at the rules we operate by as though they are the only possible rule set, then we will remain stuck inside the envelope.
To find solutions that could create a different, better, healthier, more sustainable world, we have to believe that our world is just one possible version, that our rules are just one set of possible rules. We have to shake it up and find the alternatives. Shake it up!
Today I bring you Anthony Weston, a philosopher who spends his professional life helping people see beyond our mental obstacles to enable us to rethink our biggest, most complex ethical and practical dilemmas. He's mastered a method for enlarging the realm of choices, figuring out how to apply different sets of rules than the "usual set" to expand the possibilities for ethical problem-solving.
Let me give you a quick Weston example. You may have heard about the Heinz dilemma. It's an ethical quandry used by psychologists to test children for their level of moral reasoning. Since it's written for kids, it's will be easy for us to follow Weston's logic, as he deconstructs his process.
A woman is dying of cancer. There is a medication available to her, but she needs several treatments at $2000 per treatment, and she and her husband do not have that kind of money. The husband counts all his resources, sells what they don't absolutely need, asks his family to help, but the money he can scrape up does not amount to enough money to cover her treatment. He goes to the pharmacy and pleads that they sell the medicine for what he has, or she will die. They tell him, "no." The dilemma: Should the husband steal the medication so that his wife may live?
Let me simplify: Steal or die?
Weston asks his students to back up from the question, and see whether they can enlarge the realm of possibilities. They come up with these sorts of answers:
He could offer the pharmacist something he needs or wants, maybe trade his skills to make up the difference.
Maybe the wife could go to the pharmaceutical company and offer to be part of a follow-up study, in exchange for the medication.
In one of his workshops, a group of nurses even suggested that the wife steal the drug, specifically to get herself arrested, because the law requires medical care for all prisoners, and that way the state would pay for the drug.
What about the community? Could it band together to raise the money?
So now that we're brainstorming ideas, I bet you can come up with a few yourself.
Weston's point is this:
What if, instead of distancing ourselves from the question, and asking, "What should he do?" we ask, "what can we do?" Or even, simply, "what all could be done?" The realm of possibilities expands beyond "steal or die," both of which are not ethically acceptable or morally desirable.
This made me think. Weston's simple dilemma is really not very different than the way we've taken to laying out our most difficult dilemmas. Look how some of our current policy debates are framed:
Affirmative action or fewer minorities admitted into programs and hired into jobs?
Drill for oil in the United States or continue to be dependent upon foreign oil?
Keep shipping soldiers to the middle east or be subject to the murderous intentions of extremist Islamist fundamentalists?
And so on... We have become a nation of simplifiers, a nation of sound bites and political slogans. We scream, it's either this way, or it's that way! It's my way, or no way. We are so polarized.
What if, what if. What if we could get good at backing up from the either this, or that solution envelope? What if we could get outside the envelope altogether?
Have you, by any chance, checked out the tabs across top of this blog? One of them is EcoCurious, my blog about matters of the environment and sustainability. (In CuriositySquared, I write about stuff .) If you've visited EcoCurious, you might have noticed a flip comment across the top, "If only the answers were in the envelope."
Well, duh. Of course the answers are outside the envelope.
If we look at the world we know as though it's the only possible world, if we look at the rules we operate by as though they are the only possible rule set, then we will remain stuck inside the envelope.
To find solutions that could create a different, better, healthier, more sustainable world, we have to believe that our world is just one possible version, that our rules are just one set of possible rules. We have to shake it up and find the alternatives. Shake it up!
Today I bring you Anthony Weston, a philosopher who spends his professional life helping people see beyond our mental obstacles to enable us to rethink our biggest, most complex ethical and practical dilemmas. He's mastered a method for enlarging the realm of choices, figuring out how to apply different sets of rules than the "usual set" to expand the possibilities for ethical problem-solving.
Let me give you a quick Weston example. You may have heard about the Heinz dilemma. It's an ethical quandry used by psychologists to test children for their level of moral reasoning. Since it's written for kids, it's will be easy for us to follow Weston's logic, as he deconstructs his process.
A woman is dying of cancer. There is a medication available to her, but she needs several treatments at $2000 per treatment, and she and her husband do not have that kind of money. The husband counts all his resources, sells what they don't absolutely need, asks his family to help, but the money he can scrape up does not amount to enough money to cover her treatment. He goes to the pharmacy and pleads that they sell the medicine for what he has, or she will die. They tell him, "no." The dilemma: Should the husband steal the medication so that his wife may live?
Let me simplify: Steal or die?
Weston asks his students to back up from the question, and see whether they can enlarge the realm of possibilities. They come up with these sorts of answers:
He could offer the pharmacist something he needs or wants, maybe trade his skills to make up the difference.
Maybe the wife could go to the pharmaceutical company and offer to be part of a follow-up study, in exchange for the medication.
In one of his workshops, a group of nurses even suggested that the wife steal the drug, specifically to get herself arrested, because the law requires medical care for all prisoners, and that way the state would pay for the drug.
What about the community? Could it band together to raise the money?
So now that we're brainstorming ideas, I bet you can come up with a few yourself.
Weston's point is this:
What if, instead of distancing ourselves from the question, and asking, "What should he do?" we ask, "what can we do?" Or even, simply, "what all could be done?" The realm of possibilities expands beyond "steal or die," both of which are not ethically acceptable or morally desirable.
This made me think. Weston's simple dilemma is really not very different than the way we've taken to laying out our most difficult dilemmas. Look how some of our current policy debates are framed:
Affirmative action or fewer minorities admitted into programs and hired into jobs?
Drill for oil in the United States or continue to be dependent upon foreign oil?
Keep shipping soldiers to the middle east or be subject to the murderous intentions of extremist Islamist fundamentalists?
And so on... We have become a nation of simplifiers, a nation of sound bites and political slogans. We are so polarized.
What if we could get good at backing up from either this, or that solution envelope?
"Life is pretty bleak at the top too. All of the bobbles of the rich, they're kind of this phony compensation for the loss of what's really important: the loss of community, the loss of connection, the loss of intimacy, the loss of meaning. Everybody wants to live a life of meaning. But today we live in a money economy, where we don't really depend on the gifts of anybody. We buy everything. Therefore we don't really need anybody. Whoever grew my food or made my clothes or built my house, well, if they died or I alienate them, if they don't like me, that's OK. I can just pay somebody else to do it. It's really hard to create community if the underlying knowledge is, 'we don't need each other.'" ~ You Can't Evict an Idea
# # #
Yesterday my friend Cathy Wiken shared an #Occupy movement video (embedded below), "You Can't Evict an Idea," by economist Charles Eisenstein. My friend was raised in a conservative household in a conservative town, and she is still very much a conservative. But she is also an expansive thinker, and she can see past labels. The video reached her in a place of higher humanity - a place that transcends politics and ideology and talks to us about what is becoming of our world in terms of human experience. Regardless of one's politics, it is impossible not to be moved by the slide of our global community into economic decline and therefore human impoverishment in all its multiple manifestations.
Today is the Jewish Sabbath. The Sabbath - Shabbat - was God's way of urging us to regularly step back from the rush of our lives across the fulcrum from birth to death, to ask ourselves if the path we are taking to that eventuality is the one we want to be on. This Shabbat, I feel grateful to Cathy for giving me pause to think about our greater purposes, to ask myself whether I am contributing.
So, Cathy, this blog is for you. I want to share with you - a non-Jew - the Jewish mystical view of the human condition, of why we are here. And crazy enough, I want to connect the deeper urges of the #Occupy movement with a longing to act upon the oldest and most sacred obligation of humankind.
To put this in context: I worry about the power of language to shape our reality, and in fact to lead to the ultimate destruction of society. Jewish mystics would likely not be surprised if the world's end is facilitated through the power of words. Such is simply the logical flip side of this Jewish belief: the word is so powerful that God created the universe by speaking it into existence. We are all familiar with the fable where a woman's cruel words have scattered like scrap paper to the winds; there is no way she can reclaim them to undo the damage caused. Words are not simply mouth noises controlled into formulaic emissions. They are powerful tools of construction and destruction.
Today's political parties and their operatives are experts at the use of language. Specifically crafted language, slogans and framing are artfully employed to manipulate opinions. The best arts, science and tools that marketers and demographers have to offer help us agree on policies that sometimes stand directly in opposition to what is good for us, and for humanity generally. Plenty of research has explored the reasons why people often support social policies that appear to be contrary to their own interests. While academically this is all very interesting, practically speaking we have endless examples of the destructive outcomes from using language manipulation for political power and control. Outcomes ranging from national paralysis in the face of economic disaster to jihad to genocide.
What if we could somehow strip away all the lingo? What if we could strip away the anger and disagreements that tear us apart as a nation, and as cultures fighting over a planet? What if we could shed the stylized, formulaic and strident speech imposed upon us by those in power, rhetoric that allows for little conversation or disagreement?
"Anything people can articulate can only be articulated within the language of the current political discourse, and that entire political discourse is already too small. And that's why making explicit demands kind of reduces the[#Occupy]movement and takes the heart out of it. It's a real paradox. I think the movement understands that." ~ video "You Can't Evict an Idea"
If we strip away the rhetoric, the demands, aren't we likely to find underneath it all that we are all much the same? That we are all, more or less, simply yearning for the opportunity to get by in peace, to do our best to be good family members, neighbors, community members? To self-fulfill through relationships and finding purpose and meaning in our work? Oh sure, we come from different cultures and celebrate different holidays, but how is it that we are different, really? At base, we are human animals. What gives us the illusion of difference is our verbal insistence that we are. Why cling to these verbal representations past the point of sanity?
I'm not suggesting that we return to the melting pot, trying to assimilate the black and the brown and the foreign and the native into the majority culture as though all vanilla all the time is better than 31 flavors.
Instead, I'm asking whether we might do more justice if we could shed the human-contrived definitions of truth, definitions keeping us perpetually angry at one-another for failing to see it my way. I'm asking whether we might do more justice if we come at our earthly problems from a sacred place, a universal place, a place that employs rhetoric of healing and wholeness, from which we could begin to work things out among us.
Jewish mysticism has a metaphoric explanation for our world that goes roughly like this (I am about to way oversimplify here for the sake of getting a point across):
God was always everywhere and took up all the "room" in the universe and beyond, and in fact is the universe, or rather the universe is part of the everything that is God...
Then it arose in the Divine will - e.g. God decided it was time - to create our finite Universe. To differentiate some of God's being into us. There are some who say God was lonely and others who say the Universe is simply the evolution of God's will over time.
In order for the finite Universe to be created, God is said to have 'constricted' God's self or pulled inward (in Hebrew, tsimtsum), and then re-expressed outward, resulting in the creation of a "first" Adam (adam is Hebrew for earth), a prototype, if you will. Some say the constriction was to 'make room' for the finite.
A series of these constrictions followed by re-expressions is said to have lead to the creation of our finite world. It's a hard idea to follow. I like to think of a metaphor where a baby is born through a series of contractions, each of which pushes the baby closer to its birth. The finite world in this view could be said to have been pushed through a series of heavenly "contractions" into being.
Like a baby is not yet an adult, this heavenly birthing exercise did not complete our finite world.
It is said that during these holy contractions, if you will, God's holy light, the force or energy necessary to propel and complete the finite world, had to be gathered. I guess another way to say this is that, prior to this gathering of light/energy, one might think of God as undifferentiated holiness. To create something as uniquely differentiated as our finite world required God's energy and holiness to be corralled. It was corralled into ten "vessels" representing ten attributes of God that must have been necessary to the creation. I do not pretend to know exactly what is meant by the word vessel, for while you would think that God's energy could not be contained by anything like a ceramic vessel, on the other hand, the finite world IS made of destructible materials like board and brick and flesh and bone. SO apparently these vessels were destructible. In fact, the light pouring into these "vessels" was so intense and the energy so strong that the vessels did shatter. God's energies remained "above" (in the heavenly realm?) but the vessels exploded into pieces. Permeated by holy light, the vessels' shards scattered about our newly formed world like so much sacred shrapnel.
The Jewish mystics say that these ten attributes of Divine energy now infused into shards, must, for the completion of God's creation - our world - now be collected and reclaimed by we sons and daughters of Adam.
Are we here to collect the shattered pieces, or are the shattered pieces here so that we may collect them?
Because everything is by Holy design, we can surmise that the infusing of the vessels with holy light and energy, and their breaking and scattering, was not accidental. Our world was intentionally broken into tohu, or chaos, shaping our existence here. The mystics say that our job on earth - our reason d'etra if you will - is to collect the shattered pieces of vessel, and "lift them back to holiness." Lifting each piece to holiness will in some way complete the human connection with the Almighty, and will help to finish creating and making holy - you could say "healing" - our broken, unfinished, finite world. My apologies to any Kabbalists who find themselves shaking their heads, muttering "that's a vast oversimplification." Well, yes. http://tinyurl.com/shatteredvessels
What is involved in "lifting the shards"? To find and lift the shards, we must learn to recognize the pieces of the vessel when we see them. These pieces are not actual shards laying around like pottery. Rather, they are the opportunities for interaction with one-another, with the earth, with God. How will we treat these relational opportunities? With anger? With kindness? With impatience? With arrogance?With mercy? With selfishness? With empathy and compassion?
If we choose to live our lives in a way that promotes healing and wholeness, then we sanctify the shards. If we choose to live our lives in a way that promotes only self-aggrandizement, selfishness, the destruction of "the other," then we miss an entire lifetime of opportunity to help finish God's creation.
I'm pretty far away from my original proposition about the #Occupy movement, so let me bring this back to where I started.
"This movement isn't about the 99% defeating or toppling the one percent. You know the next chapter of that story, that the 99% create a new one percent. That's not what it's about. What we want to create is the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible, a sacred world, a world that works for everybody, a world that is healing, a world of peace. You can't just say, 'We demand a world of peace..." ~ "You Can't Evict an Idea"
I truly believe that the political rhetoric and labels and framing and slogans are keeping us from sanctifying the shards. That the rhetoric and formulaic ideologies keep us from seeing the holiness in the relationship opportunities we have - with each other, with the earth we were given to live on, with God, Him(Her)self. I believe God wants us to get out from under the rhetoric and see our relationships as opportunities to bring God's energy back into alignment and finish this holy creation. To heal and finish making whole.
Ideologues are people who can only see the world in one way and would discard everything and everybody who does not fit this limited vision or agree to conform. Ideologies - like communism or capitalism, either one - are just man-made theories that ask us to believe there is only one way to put the vessels back together. But these are human blueprints, and they fall short of offering a way to put God-made vessels back together. Human ideologies are not encompassing enough, any of them, to be a blueprint for a Holy creation.
One of the reasons I love the #Occupy movement is because it is self-organizing. By that, I mean that in its emergence, it is following its instincts rather than any ideology. In fact is refusing to be co-opted by ideologues. While embracing all who wish to help or join, it has refused to adopt or become a tool for a single perspective. It has refused MoveOn.org. It has refused the Obama-ites. It has refused to wear the union label. Refusing these labels, refusing to grant these formalized organizations a place of leadership, creates room to follow our God-given human instincts.
Some of these instincts will be base. The media likes to point its cameras to the basest parts of humanity. But some of its instincts will be holy - or you could say "transcendent." By refusing a single ideology, #Occupy asks us to look into the deepest parts of ourselves, beneath the many unholy grails that pervade our media, into our souls. To reconnect with our deepest sense of humanity. And to lift up what we find there out into the light of day. To become something better, more humane, more giving and therefore more sacred.
And if that's not why we're here on earth, I really don't know what else God might have intended.
"You have necessary and important gifts to give...as more and more people wake up to the truth, that we're here to give, wake up to that desire, to the understanding that the other way isn't working anyway, the more reinforcement we have from people around us, this isn't crazy, this makes sense, that this is how to live, and as we get that reinforcement then our minds and our logic no longer have to fight against the logic of the heart which wants us to be of service.....An economist says that essentially more for you is less for me, but the lover knows that more for you is more for me too." ~ "You Can't Evict an Idea"
Inspirational video by consultant Hildy Gottlieb suggests that the future we achieve is the one we envision. For me, the most important message she puts out is that we can't be flummoxed by obstacles, or by our preconceived notions of what should work. If the first path isn't getting you somewhere, simply find another path.
The following poem, by Dr. Dawna Markova, expresses beautifully the expansiveness of spirit, the passion for healing, I feel all around me these days. So fabulous, I just needed to share it...to scatter it further out into the universe.
I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid, more accessible,
to loosen my heart until it becomes
a wing, a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance,
to live so that which came to me as seed
While doing some research on freshmen trends for a class I teach, I ran across a 40 year trending report published by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program [CIRP], a project of the Higher Education Research Institute out of UCLA. CIRP surveys 300,000 incoming freshmen annually, at over 600 colleges and universities nationwide.
Buried among much fascinating data I found a graph depicting the shift in student views on abortion. The question asked was a simple yes or no question, "Should abortion be legal?" It was not confounded by nuances like health of the mother, pregnancy as the result of rape, number of weeks to viability, parental consent or issues of the various medical procedures.
There's a myth among women of my and my mother's generation - the generations that actively fought for women's rights, including control over one's own reproductive system: today's women - the GenX and GenY women - don't get involved in the issue of choice because they perceive the matter as settled. Such a belief, if true, would indicate that most women are comfortable and have acclimated themselves to the existence of an abortion option.
This chart belies that belief.
Just for grins, I decided to see what today's women are talking about. What I found surprised me - putting aside altogether the arguments of the religious right - two opposing but feminist positions. I'm going to lay them out and then posit that we need to dialogue ourselves to a third, more equitable position.
The first, the one I am most familiar with, was the one rung out with the full feminist furry of my generation, the pro-choice position:
A woman's ability to exercise her full citizenship rights requires her to be able to determine when and if she wants to have children. Anything less relegates her - without choice - to the kitchen.
The other, more current, opposing feminist, pro-life perspective:
The idea that women need the option of abortion in order to participate fully in society outside the home in fact is dictated by a male-centered world view that values commerce more than motherhood.
To speak the pro-choice position another way, if women are to be valued in the workplace, we must free ourselves of the women's work of motherhood that splits our loyalties between our children and our jobs, freeing us to work with as singular a purpose as any male toward society's goals, whatever they be.
To speak the pro-Iife position another way, if, to be rewarded with opportunity and money like men in a man's world, we perceive the need to give up or perhaps put aside - for now?for ever? - the very thing that makes us uniquely women - the ability to carry children - then abortion is a solution that accommodates a male-dominated - not a feminist - view of the world.
I find I am strongly drawn to the rationale of the latter view, while yet denying that the right solution is the outlaw of choice. I prefer a third viewpoint, "reproductive justice," that emerged first from the Black Women's caucus in 1994, and has since been put into succinct language by an organization called the Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice:
"Reproductive justice exists when all people have the economic, social and political power, and resources to make healthy decisions about our bodies, sexuality and reproduction for ourselves, our families, and our communities."
SisterSong, a reproductive justice movement (and much more), illuminates this idea,
"Human rights provide more possibilities for our struggles than the privacy concepts the pro-choice movement claims only using the U.S. Constitution. Reproductive justice emerged as an intersectional theory highlighting the lived experience of reproductive oppression in communities of color. It represents a shift for women advocating for control of their bodies, from a narrower focus on legal access and individual choice (the focus of mainstream organizations) to a broader analysis of racial, economic, cultural, and structural constraints on our power."
For me, this perspective makes sense for all women, regardless of skin color. The good fight for the right to make choices about my own reproductive path still has to be made in the court system, of course. But in a way, my generation's perspective was one deeply embedded in the male world view - one in which we felt the path to success was paved by the opportunity to put aside child-rearing in order to do what - they - men - were doing. Still, that left us with gut-wrenching choices about parenting versus getting ahead.
As I reread my own writing, I am bothered by the mere fact that I identify the possibility of "getting ahead" as an alternative to parenting.
My friends and I experienced these choices repeatedly and painfully. Some could afford nannies but still anguished over what they missed. Most, including me, couldn't afford or didn't want a nanny to sub for us. We used day care, or worked part time, regardless of the loss of income.
Personally, I wrestled with it the best I could. I hurried a wedding and put off law school when I discovered I was pregnant. By the time I got to law school, I was single again. I took only those classes that did not interfere with my children's school schedules. I took a reduction in pay at my first job in exchange for the guilt-free freedom to come and go for my children's assorted needs, even though I put in as many hours as everyone else in my firm - many of those hours from home, after my girls slept. Later, I slowed and eventually put my practice aside - gave away excellent clients - to care for my adolescent children when their lives got complicated and they needed me.
Their father never saw any of this as his role. Today, like many, many women, my lifetime earnings, my career path, my current work are all impacted by the choices I made. Their father's earnings, career path and current work were not impacted by parenting obligations.
This is wrong-headed and oh, so short-sighted. Bearing children is the path of survival for our species, and women are uniquely gifted with the ability to bear our future. Yet, society has not figured out a way to reduce the conflict between bearing and caring for children, and taking an active, participatory monetarily rewarded role in the workforce, in policy-making, in communal and national leadership.
It's a good thing baby-making is an instinctive urge, because if more and more women simply shook the urge in order to have what men have, society would eventually wither away.
There are those who will read this and cry foul. They will say that they've managed to have brilliant careers and feel very good about their parenting too. And I applaud all of you who've managed that. But the numbers belay. Click this sentence to read a study that shows women's but not men's income is negatively impacted by childbirth. Click this sentence to read a study that shows the lifetime earnings gap between men and women continues despite the progressively larger number of female entrants into many fields.
Don't get me wrong. I'm still all for choice. I'm simply saying, we need to rethink the rationale we've accepted for needing choice, and work toward a system of commerce that embraces true choice - the choice that rewards women for being vibrant, active, fully rewarded societal participants, with or without children.
