Cthulhu Loves Me, This I Know

 

A friend posted this story this morning: 

Deputies were called Sunday when a Christian prayer group and Native Americans faced off Sunday at the Great Serpent Mound, the Native American national historic site in southern Ohio.

The Native American leader who was there says they were trying to protect a sacred site that belonged to their ancestors.

The leader of the prayer group says the mound is a place where dark energy is released into the world.

"I'm not calling the Indians dark," Dave Daubenmire told The Enquirer. "This has nothing to do with the Indians."

It's shocking how much Daubenmire concedes to the Satanic forces of Political Correctness here. In the past Christians would not have hesitated to call the Indians "dark," and worse.  Denouncing pagans and calling their gods demons is an ancient Christian tradition.  Jesus even called his Jewish (that is, not pagan) opponents sons of the Devil.  At this rate, before you know it Daubermire will be saying that there are many religions but they all believe in the same God.

Spirituality is so beautiful.  Each man believes that the other has spiritual power that he has to cancel, and which his own god can protect him against, though Daubermire seems to feel more protected than Yenyo.  Are the Indians' gods so weak that the Christians can exorcise them?  Is "sacred space" so fragile?  These are serious questions.  I've often seen writings by adherents of the old religions complaining that they had their own earth-based gods of great power and holiness, but then the Christians came along and destroyed them.  Why didn't all the earth-based gods get together and give Jesus a wedgie?  Why did their power depend on the existence of their temples and shrines, even when their members were an overwhelming majority?  It's possible to give secular answers to such questions, but the non-Yahwists should answer them in their terms.  Mostly they just whine.  If I were a theist, I'd prefer gods who aren't losers; and make no mistake: these disputes are about power and winning, about honor and shame, not about "holiness" and "the sacred."

If a Christian prayer group is such a threat to the Indians' sacred site (owned by an unnamed "nonprofit"), why not counter them with the Indians' own rites -- dancing, chanting, burning sage?  Executive Director of the American Indian Movement Philip Yenyo told the Cincinnati Enquirer:

"It's a sacred site for us, but other people with other faith beliefs think they have the right to go there and do their ceremonies. In our opinion, they don't," Yenyo said. "It would be like me going into a church and doing my ceremonies in that church – disregarding and disrespecting their believes."

This is as disingenuous as Daubermire's claim that he wasn't calling the Indians dark.  I hope that Yenyo does "disrespect" Christian beliefs; why the hell shouldn't he?  If he can't lead a purification ceremony in a Christian church, why not do it on the lawn, in the parking lot, even across the street if necessary?  No wonder the sacred sites are under attack: he doesn't care about them that much.

It's also great to see the tranquility and peace that Faith and Spirituality bring to both sides, as shown in the lovely photograph above. Thanks to Dave Daubermire and Philip Yenyo for strengthening my atheism on a cold morning.

Scripture and Karen Armstrong

I'm aware of Karen Armstrong's books on religion, but it hasn't been a priority for me to try to read them.  Armstrong is a former Catholic religious who broke with (lost?) her vocation and turned to writing popular inspirational and historical books on religion.  Her newest book, The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts, published last month by Knopf, caught my eye and I decided to get the Kindle edition sample file and see what it looked like.  Since the entire book is over 600 pages long, the sample is fairly extensive.  I'm not going to spend $15 on the whole thing, and for some reason it isn't available in the public library, but I think I now have some idea of Armstrong's position.

This passage, I think, encapsulates her take on scripture:

Our modern society, however, is rooted in "logos" or "reason," which must relate precisely to factual, objective and empirical reality if it is to focus efficiently in the world: logos is the mode of thought characteristic of the brain's left hemisphere.  But just as both hemispheres are necessary for our full functioning, both mythos and logos are essential to human beings - and both have limitations. ... [Kindle sample loc 314]

The prevalence of logos in modern society and education has made scripture problematic.  In the early modern West, people began to read the narratives of the Bible as if they were logoi, factual accounts of what happened.  But we will see that scriptural narratives never claimed to be accurate descriptions of the creation of the world or the evolution of species.  Nor did they attempt to provide historically exact biographies of the sages, prophets and patriarchs of antiquity.   Precise historical writing is a recent phenomenon.  It became possible only when archaeological methodology and improved knowledge of ancient languages enhanced our understanding of the past [Kindle sample loc 314]

Ah, I thought, I see what she's doing here (aside from all the numerous factual errors and distortions): she's cheating.  (I could have said "equivocating", but better to call a spade a spade.)  Armstrong has an arguable point about "scriptural narratives," but narratives are not all there is to scripture.  About half of the New Testament, for example, is exposition, as with the letters of Paul, Peter, John, James, and Jude; and the letter to Hebrews.  Then there's the Revelation, which is neither narrative nor exposition.

The gospels contain a fair amount of non-narrative material, such as the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus' apocalyptic discourses, and the long theological rants in the gospel of John.  The narratives (primarily the gospels and Acts) have some funny aspects too.  They refer constantly to the Hebrew Bible, quoting passages yanked out of context to legitimize the Christian proclamation.  In a few cases they're simply made up.  This use of scripture, within scripture itself, doesn't really fit Armstrong's narrative.  And that's not because attention to context and authorial intention weren't known in those primitive times: the first-century Rabbi Hillel is credited with principles for interpreting Scripture that include attention to context.  These are all what Armstrong calls left-hemisphere approaches to interpretation, and they long predate "the early modern period."

There's a deeper problem with Armstrong's position: she claims that "the prevalence of logos in modern society and education has made scripture problematic."  Ancient education was largely rote memorization, which was hardly opposed to what she calls "logos."  But her claims rely on a dichotomy between "historically exact biographies" or "precise historical writing" and scriptural narrative that, on her assumptions, would have made no sense to the ancients, since what she sees as the necessary tools for such precision did not exist then.  Historiographers have been wrestling with this problem for many years, and when I began studying Christian origins in the 1980s there was a large and useful literature available on this subject.  It seems to me that if Armstrong is aware of this literature, she has oversimplified it for apologetic purposes. 

It happens to be false that ancient historians didn't understand precise historical writing.  The Greek historian Thucydides began his History of the Peloponnesian War, written in 431 BCE, by addressing the very problem that, according to Armstrong, he could not have conceived:

Having now given the result of my inquiries into early times, I grant that there will be a difficulty in believing every particular detail. The way that most men deal with traditions, even traditions of their own country, is to receive them all alike as they are delivered, without applying any critical test whatever...

With reference to the speeches in this history, some were delivered before the war began, others while it was going on; some I heard myself, others I got from various quarters; it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one's memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said. And with reference to the narrative of events, far from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions, but it rests partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the report being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible. My conclusions have cost me some labour from the want of coincidence between accounts of the same occurrences by different eye-witnesses, arising sometimes from imperfect memory, sometimes from undue partiality for one side or the other. The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

Was Thucydides typical of writers in his own time?  Of course not, but neither are today's logos-saturated historians.  By the time the New Testament came to be written five centuries later, the author of the gospel of Luke followed Thucydides' example.

Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely [or; accurately] for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent The-oph′ilus, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed [Luke 1:1-4].

Most Christian scholars see this writer as claiming a place in the tradition of Greek historical writing, which distinguished between "romance" and the application of "severe and detailed tests" as Thucydides put it.  It's entirely proper to be critically skeptical of Thucydides' and Luke's results, of course, just as one should be with modern historians, but it's misleading to claim that the ancient world didn't distinguish between story and "the way things really happened."

That distinction was also recognized in the gospel stories of Jesus' death and resurrection.  The author of Matthew, for instance, informed his readers that although the Jerusalem authorities claimed that Jesus' followers had sneaked his body out of the tomb so that they could claim he was risen from the dead, Pontius Pilate had at their request placed a guard of soldiers to ensure that the tomb wasn't disturbed (Matthew 27:62ff).  The soldiers trembled and fainted when an angel of Yahweh appeared in an earthquake and rolled away the stone, but they still reported what had happened to the temple priests, who paid them to spread a false story.  "So they took the money and did as they were directed; and this story has been spread among the Jews to this day" (28:15).

On Armstrong's assumptions about scripture, none of this fancy footwork should have been necessary: the early Christians should simply have declared that they weren't writing a precise historical account for Chrissakes, they didn't have rigorous archaeological methodology or knowledge of ancient language, they were composing a beautiful right-brain narrative to express a Higher Truth.  What this tale makes clear is that both sides thought it made a difference whether the resurrection of Jesus was a sublime myth or a fiction.  It doesn't matter to me whether the story of the guard at the tomb is factually correct or a fabrication to shore up a fiction (though of course I believe it is the latter); whether Matthew just made it up or interviewed eyewitnesses to ascertain the facts, he wanted his readers to believe that the church was telling the literal truth and "the Jews" were lying.

The literal truth and a Higher Truth were not mutually exclusive, though: since Yahweh was in control of history, real-world events were suffused with spiritual meaning.  Armstrong's position relies on a false dichotomy, and the odd thing is that according to her historical claims, that dichotomy shouldn't be necessary.  Getting rid of it, though, would undermine her approach to scripture and the nature of religion.

Incidentally, there's a similar kind of scholarly folklore around the question of Biblical authorship.  Apologetic scholarship maintains that ascribing new writings to ancient authority was normal and accepted in those days. We shouldn't fuss too much over whether Paul actually wrote the letters to Timothy according to them, whether the disciple John wrote the Fourth Gospel, and so on, because the modern idea of authorship didn't exist in those days (sound familiar?) and nobody cared.  This claim is undermined by the fact that the ancient world was fully aware of false authorship and forgeries; Paul, for example, warned that letters purporting to be from him were circulating in some of the churches, and his followers should not be fooled by them.  But it's okay, because at least some of the genuine fake letters of Paul were "quite inspired by the Holy Spirit and very much enlightened as to the nature and character of Christ."  So that's all right then.

I also think that what Armstrong treats as ancient, pre-modern spiritual wisdom is as modern as today's news.  Did Parson Weems believe that young George Washington really cut down a cherry tree and confessed the truth to his father because he couldn't tell a lie?  (Weems evidently could, however.)  Do the people who spread what have come to be known as "urban legends" really believe that a young Alfred Einstein proved the truth of Christianity to a know-it-all liberal college professor, or that Marine Todd punched another (or the same?) liberal professor to prove God's existence?  Sure they do, but if you challenge them they'll just say that they don't care, they just like the message, but it totally could be true.  That's Karen Armstrong's position right there.  Medium calls Marine Todd "the internet's true folk literature," but he's really the Internet's Scripture.  Modern logos-driven, left-hemisphere scoffers just don't get it.

Off-Center: It's on the Internet So It Must Be False

Maybe we need a Fake Tao Quotes website.  I searched two online English translations of the Tao Te Ching for "tree," "forest," "wave," and "center," and came up dry.  That doesn't prove this quotation is fake, of course.  With a notoriously gnomic text in a language as far from English as ancient Chinese is, there could be many ways to render a passage; but it seems to me that those keywords ought to be there.  I'll try to find time later to read the full texts and see if I missed something, and will make whatever corrections may turn out to be necessary then.

But the really notable thing about this meme, to my mind, is that it basically contradicts itself: it accuses human beings of imperfection for seeing ourselves as imperfect.  (The comments I saw on it bear that out, mostly taking the form of exulting that Mr. Ching saw how screwed-up and stupid we human beings are.  For example:

It's worrying about what other people think of us that makes us so stressed and unhappy in our own skin ... If we could just learn not to care about other's opinions of us, we'd all be a lot happier.

And:

the arrogance of man - too many of us would tie the trees back till they learned to grow to please our eye while allowing us perfect access to the path, or cut them down if they would not comply - as to the waves - well someone somewhere is probably working on that

And, from someone who calls himself a Master (I don't know whether he considers himself a Dominant or a Teacher):

i feel this pic is talking about individuality and natural beauty and about us not trying to act or look the same as each other basically put like cosmetic surgery to change your natural look and embracing our individual unique physical imperfections and maybe also about us not looking at others and wanting the same as them and thinking life is unfair and instead embracing and being thankful for the smaller things in life that we may have that the others dont rather than stuff like obesity ???

The blinding irony is that just about all spiritual teaching starts from the postulate that human beings are off-center, have lost our way, are imperfect, even when it also postulates that we have a "true" nature that is perfect and centered, if we could just find our way back to it.  In a way this meme, even though it promulgates an apparently bogus quotation, could be taken as addressing that contradiction; but I may be giving whoever invented it more credit than they deserve.

Those Who Talk, Don't Know; Those Who Know, Don't Talk

It's funny how books chosen almost randomly can seem to interrelate.  So, for example, I recently decided to read April Sinclair's 1994 novel Coffee Will Make You Black because Dorothy Allison mentioned its "furious, charming adolescent" lesbian (okay, bisexual) protagonist in an essay in her collection Skin.  I'd heard of Coffee Will Make You Black before, but had never gotten to around to it because I hadn't realized it had a gay character, and then the e-book went on sale for a couple of dollars, so I went with it.

And I'm glad I did.  The story, which appears to be at least partly autobiographical, takes place in the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s.  It follows the African-American narrator, Jean "Stevie" Stevenson, from junior high to high school, against the backdrop of the political and cultural changes of the time.  But it also traces her own changes, and those of her peers: one kid begins as a scrawny, goody-goody nerd (as Stevie and some other girls see him, anyway) and metamorphoses into a Black Power militant, organizing actions in their high school.  Stevie comes from a mixed family: her dark-skinned mother has middle-class aspirations, but married a lighter-skinned man who never had or perhaps lost such ambitions early on.  He's a manual worker, drinks too much, and is constantly being corrected by his wife for grammar and other class-related infractions.  But they soldier on.  Stevie is good in school, but also wants to have friends.  Her best friend moved to another neighborhood a year or two before the book opens, and Stevie hasn't found anyone to replace her.  She's drawn into hanging out with some less ambitious girls, to her mother's anger and frustration -- and fear, that peer pressure will lead Stevie to get pregnant and drop out of school.  This doesn't happen (spoiler?), happily.

Stevie's emerging racial consciousness is encouraged by her grandmother, also dark-skinned, who has her own business, a successful fried-chicken restaurant.  She drops her g's and says "ain't," but she knows her own worth despite her daughter's chiding, and she's a lovely if somewhat stereotypical character, who gives Stevie the affection that Stevie's mother finds it difficult to express.  For whatever reason, Stevie seems to have a core self-approval that allows her to be friends with girls whose lives will take them in different directions than hers without surrendering herself altogether.  I kept worrying that she was going to cave in, but she never did, which was a relief after reading (not to mention knowing) about kids who go along with the crowd until they're damaged and find it much harder to repair themselves.  Sinclair followed Stevie to college in her second novel, Ain't Gonna Be the Same Fool Twice, which I'll probably read before this year is out.

As soon as I finished reading Coffee Will Make You Black, I picked up Ruth Moore's first novel from 1943, The Weir.  I've read and discussed two of Moore's later books here before.  The Weir is an impressive debut, I thought, though I wasn't happy with the ending, which seemed forced onto the story rather than developing out of it.  Still, Weir had her command of small-town and island life in Maine from the start, and overall I enjoyed the book as much as I did the other two I've read; I'll continue reading her novels.

Something struck me, though, almost immediately.  I noticed that the family constellation in The Weir was very similar to that in Coffee Will Make You Black, with a crusty grandmother, conflicts and worries about the children's future, and so on.  At times during the first fifty pages or so I had to stop and remind myself that I was reading about 1940s Maine rather than 1960s Chicago.  This was mainly because both 1960s Chicago blacks and 1940s white Maine fishermen had what looked to me like similar ambivalences about education, manual work, money, and relations between insiders and outsiders.  Can black folks / islanders trust white folks / summer people (or "foreigners"), make friends with them, intermarry with them?  Can our kids move on to better lives without despising their roots?  What should be done about those kids who aren't interested in finishing high school, let alone going to college?  What about those who could move on but choose to stay?  I often have the feeling that many of the differences that people see between their group and other groups are illusory.  Of course that may not be because the differences don't exist in reality, or that there are no differences; it may just be that writers of fiction tend to rely on similar themes and models, regardless of whom they're writing about.  Still, moving from one novel's environment to the next, I felt more continuity than difference.

I began reading Swinging on the Garden Gate: A Spiritual Memoir by Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, originally published by Skinner House Books in 2000, before I read either Coffee Will Make You Black or The Weir.  I decided to give it a try because I was intrigued by the subject, an avowedly bisexual woman's quest to integrate her religious life and her sexuality.  I got bogged down about a third of the way through, however.  For whatever reason -- autobiographical accuracy, literary convention, "spiritual" convention that requires that the seeker hit bottom before finding enlightenment / salvation -- I found Andrew an unrelieved drag.  I am being too mean there, I know; not everyone has an easy life, and as someone who spent much of his youth in a haze of self-pity I am in no position to condemn her.  But as she tells it, her childhood and adolescence had no positive aspects at all, not because of poverty or racial or class oppression, not because of her family, not because of her peers, not because of abusive religious teaching -- but because she seems to have suffered from what someone (Angelo D'Arcangelo, maybe) called a "spiritual vitamin deficiency" that kept her drooping well into adulthood.

Again, this is not a condemnation: I'm talking about temperament, not anything that is her fault.  It's not her fault that she felt alienated from her female body, which made adolescence unpleasant.  Still, Stevie Stevenson (who, as I said, appears to be as much her author's autobiographical projection as Andrew is in her memoir) has a harder time of it: severe monthly cramps, nausea, for a couple of days during each period.  (Compare too, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, which addresses similar bodily alienation in adolescence with more insight and richness.)  Yet Stevie's much more interesting to read about than Andrew, with more going on in her head.  As for her sexuality, Andrew appears to have come of age sometime in the 80s, in a liberal religious and political environment, not in the early sixties before the Women's Health movement, women's spirituality, and other cultural upheavals changed the way women and girls saw their bodies.  Yet Swinging on the Garden Gate begins (in the twenty-first century?!) with an adult Elizabeth Andrew still depressed about her body and her bisexuality and hoping to advance spiritually in a retreat environment.  You'd think that the LGBT Christian and other religious trends hadn't already been active and influential in such circles for three or four decades by then.  Yet (as of page 52 out of 175 or so) no awareness of these possibly helpful resources was evident to me.

Speaking of spirituality, I found a strange dissonance going on in Andrew's account of her spiritual development.  On the one hand, as a child she's somehow closer to God as children stereotypically are, she knows better than the adults around her who are tangled in the coils of Organized Religion and its confining traditions and rituals; on the other, she feels almost a vocation and wants to be part of the rituals and traditions of her Organized Religion.  On yet another hand, she's ignorant about God and his plan for her, being naïve and ignorant and undeveloped, but she still somehow knows better than anyone around her what God wants and expects.  Maybe all these stances can be reconciled, but I don't think so.  It seems to me that if God did exist as a vaguely paternal superior being, he could have been more helpful as Elizabeth Andrew trod hopelessly through her slough of despond.  For that matter, I wonder if the adults around her were as unhelpful and clueless as she makes them seem, or if she shut them out herself, as many kids do.  Self-pity is one thing; self-righteousness is another; the two combined are downright toxic.

It's true, you got to cross that lonesome river by yourself, but at the same time you never really do it alone, especially in a time and place (she's not living in Afghanistan under the Taliban, for heaven's sake) where so many other people are walking the same paths and have had a lot to say about their experiences.  This seems to me of a piece with the isolating individualism of the Culture of Therapy, which I wouldn't criticize so much if it worked better, if it produced more positive outcomes instead of fostering an ongoing dependency on leaders, workshop leaders, life coaches, and such people.

Maybe I should try to clarify what I mean by "spiritual"; I'm an atheist, after all, and I don't believe in spirits.  I agree it's not the best word, but I don't know of a better one, and fussing over specific terminology for abstract concepts is often a way to waste lots of time.  When I use the word "spiritual" I'm thinking by analogy of the difference between mind and matter, melody and invidual notes, rhythm and individual beats, the individual frames of a movie and the illusion of motion that succeeding frames produce.  Neither in itself is bad; only trying to isolate them and rely on one to the exclusion of the other.  So, "spirituality" means attending to the continuity, the connection, between individuals and the different components of their lives, but also of the continuity between themselves and society and the world.  "Spirit" in this metaphorical sense is the illusion of wholeness, connection, as opposed to the illusion of separateness and isolation.  We are at the same time discrete individuals and inseparably part of the whole, without which we couldn't exist. That's probably not an adequate explanation, but I hope it will do for now.

According to her website, Andrew is now a "spiritual director" as well as a writer and writing teacher.  I thought I found more genuine spiritual insight in The Weir and Coffee Will Make You Black, though neither book has pretensions to such, than in Swinging on the Garden Gate.  (I also kept thinking of the passages I quoted in this post as I struggled to read it.)  I intend to finish Andrew's book, but I found it offputting enough that it may be some time before I continue.  I'd generalize from that: with a few exceptions, I've found more spiritual insight and value where they aren't advertised or promised than where they are.  But that's just me.

Inner Peace

A friend posted this image to Facebook today, and it bothered me enough to move me to comment on it.  I found that I had a lot to say about it, so I decided to continue my complaint here.

I wouldn't want to say that Thich's statement is utterly false.  I can understand it in a way that I could agree with at least partially, as saying that one can't just sit at home and wait for peace to happen, one must rouse oneself to act, in concert with others. I could go further and agree that one must be prepared to change oneself, as well as other people, and structures and systems constituted of those people.  It could be that "spiritual" practices of the kind associated with contemplative religion would be among the means one could use to change oneself.  So far so good.

But some people talk about changing oneself as though the process had to be complete before one ought to engage in activism, or action of any kind.  Though I know almost nothing about him, I doubt that Thich would agree with this, since according to the Wikipedia article about him, he mixed spirituality with political activism early on in his career.  Nor, surely, would Martin Luther King have agreed.  It was King's association with Thich here (again according to Wikipedia, King nominated Thich for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967) that made me uneasy when I saw this image.  I admire and respect King a great deal, and I've often cited and quoted him in this blog, but from what I know of him I don't think he was a placid, perfected spiritual master.  He seems to have been conflicted, often angry, often uncertain how to proceed in his work.  He was also, I gather, sexually compulsive.  Such traits don't, to my mind, disqualify King as an activist or a spiritual person.  Rather the opposite: they mean that you can work hard and do important things without being perfect or pure in every way.

In Alan Watts's The Way of Zen he quotes a Zen master who said, "Now that I'm enlightened, I'm just as miserable as ever", and another who said of himself, "On rainy days the monk Ryokan feels sorry for himself" (189).  I found these sayings liberating, because they implied that rooting out every negative thought in myself wasn't vital to becoming wiser or happier.  I sometimes quoted them to friends who touted this or that guru or tradition to me, which always incensed them, though some later changed their minds.  I can't blame them: one of the major benefits people seek from spirituality is an end to suffering and unhappiness, so the last thing they want to hear is that the teachers they revere as role models are still imperfect (to put it mildly).  It's not as if I was Little Mr. Sunshine myself, then or now: I too wanted less unhappiness in my life.

Some of my friends angrily accused me of cynicism, of not wanting anybody else to be happy just because I'd been disappointed in the spiritual quest.  I suspect this was an answer they learned at their teachers' knees.  I don't think I was being cynical: rather, I was taking a different approach to personal growth than the cult of personality they were using, in which the teacher becomes an idealized father figure who'll never let them down.  If you expect perfection from parents, you're bound to be disappointed; and for at least some of my friends, their spiritual quests consisted of a series of letdowns, followed by a search for the teacher who wouldn't have those annoying human faults.  What I learned from Watts was that at least some of the canonical teachers were doing something else.  I wanted to know what happiness and "enlightenment" meant in the lives of real people who had succeeded in finding them.  (In just the same way, I wanted to know, not what an ideal couple would be like, but what real happy couples were like.  Some people have accused me of having unrealistic expectations of relationships, but they had no answer when I asked what realistic expectations were.)

I've known activists who scorned spiritual practice as an excuse for quietism, and Thich's statement above can be used as one.  If you have to purify and perfect yourself before you can work for peace in the world, then there's no need to involve yourself in messy political struggles.  Indeed, such people may believe that merely sitting at home and meditating is enough to change the world -- the hundredth monkey effect -- and there's even the notion of darshan, whereby one derives spiritual benefit simply by sitting in the presence of a holy person.)  People like King refute such an idea by their own example: they were, and are, able to work productively without being perfect.  There's also evidence that political activism itself makes people happier and more autonomous.  (I'll try to find some links, but I'd begin by pointing to Nina Eliosoph's Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life [Cambridge, 1998].) As you work to change the world outside yourself, you will change yourself too.

I'm wary of using the word "saint," but because Thich and King are religious figures in the conventional sense, it's hard to avoid entirely in this context.  For many people, a saint is someone who's essentially good, tranquil, endlessly giving, who achieves great things because of that essential inner power.  Such a person can't really be a role model, because he or she is fundamentally different from you and me.  Ths isn't a specifically religious or spiritual attitude: secularists often use secular high-achievers like Noam Chomsky as an excuse for inaction, because they could never do everything he does, he's a genius, he deconstructs the propaganda machine, they could never do that.  Significantly, Chomsky's own heroes are peasants and working people whose names you've never heard of.  (On a less exalted scale, some gay people have dismissed my views on the importance of coming out because, they said, "it was easy for you."  They knew nothing about me, and they were wrong: coming out was not easy for me at all.  But pretending that it was created a gulf between us that justified their apathy and inaction.)  I think that if we must use the word or concept of a saint at all, we should pay close attention to the weaknesses and failures of our saints.  Instead of They could do it, so I don't have to, the approach should be They did it, so I can do it too.  Not I could never do all that (which is probably true), but I could do some of that, so I might as well get started.

It may well be that what I'm saying here is exactly what Thich meant by 'beginning with oneself.'  If so, fine.  But I'm sure it's not what many other people (including some people I know) think he meant by it.  It even looks to me as though the approach of self-perfection first interferes with their achieving peace on any level, whether the personal or the social.  (The friend who posted the meme doesn't let his spirituality block him from action: he's involved in dog rescue and adoption efforts, for example.)

"Spirituality" is an easily-abused buzzword, but I don't think it's necessarily useless: I personally think of it as covering questions of meaning and value that science doesn't (and can't).  I mainly object to people's trying to partition it off from action.  A valid spirituality will have to address action as well as inward contemplation, the world as well as the void, culture as well as Nature, the city as well as the desert and the mountains.  (One of the neopagans Margot Adler interviewed years ago complained that a modern paganism was going to need gods of the city as well as gods of the woods and fields.  I don't need gods, but I liked his point.  I'm not aware of any religion that really seems at home in the city, and I'm not sure atheism is either.)  Martin Luther King and other religious activists have tried to create a theology of action and activism, though I'm not sure where someone like Thich Nhat Hanh fits in.  If anything, inaction and withdrawal have become secularized in the past several decades as certain schools of psychotherapy have taken them in; I don't think it's a coincidence that those trends have been embraced by big corporations, as a means to keep their workers oriented to fitting into the system rather than questioning it.

"Peace" is overrated, at least in some of its meanings.  If it's invoked to keep conflicts from being addressed and resolved, it's just one more opiate of the people. As the opposite of war, it's desirable; as the opposite of difference and even conflict, it's not.

Let the Sunshine In

Just when I start to think that I may after all be a bitter, carping, negative old queen who doesn't like anything (yeah, like that's a bad thing!), something comes along to restore my faith in humanity.  This weekend it's My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History (North Carolina, 2011), by the late Allan Bérubé.  He's best known for Coming Out Under Fire, a history of gay men and lesbians who served in the US military during World War II, his first and (until now) only book.  (It was later made into a documentary that won numerous awards.)  Bérubé's friends and colleagues John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman contributed a biographical essay as introduction, which also sketches the history of GLBT American history.  The essays they chose include Bérubé's early work on passing women, preliminary reports on the research that became Coming Out Under Fire, and his accounts of the history of gay men's bathhouses, and conclude with selections with the project he was working on when he died (of complications from stomach ulcers), on the gay-friendly, antiracist Marine Cooks and Stewards Union.

So, why does this book make me feel good, despite its often downbeat content?  One factor is Bérubé's constant focus on resistance, ordinary people's dogged insistence on living their lives and seeking happiness even under persecution -- even fighting back, as he shows many times.  I still must remind myself sometimes that life before Stonewall wasn't always the depressing twilight world between the sexes of smoky, crummy bars, guilt, and shame that straight society wanted us to believe it was, and some gay people choose to believe.  (This notion survives as the plaintive cry, "Why would someone choose a 'lifestyle' that causes them to be hated and persecuted?" used by many of us and our allies in defensive mode.)  A lot of our forefathers and foremothers apparently lived reasonably happy and fulfilled lives -- at least as fulfilled as many heterosexuals do.

Another factor is his emphasis on class, and particularly on what it means to be a working-class intellectual.  Many people, whether middle-class or working-class, take for granted that if you are interested in books and ideas, you must be interested in upwards mobility, in leaving the trailer park for Manhattan or at least the Ivory Tower.  Bérubé himself was working-class, the first in his family to go to college, though he didn't finish his degree.  (We have a number of other traits in common, from Catholic families to having been conscientious objectors during the Vietnam era.  This makes the differences between us very instructive to me.)  In his historical work he paid most attention to people who weren't rich, famous, or white.  This was more radical when he started his historical work than it is now, but even now his manner, the way he treats his subjects, feels unusual to me.  I haven't yet read the essays in My Desire for History where he deals directly with class, but it's everywhere in his work.

I also appreciate his approach to spirituality, notably in "AIDS and the Meaning of Natural Disasters," a 1988 essay that deserves more attention.  It emerged from his own struggle to come to terms with the death of his partner Brian Keith, and addresses some trends in gay spirituality that have bothered me too.

There are two different ways to respond to the "why" questions we ask about AIDS.  Their differences are not between religious and secular, the political right and left, antigay and gay, but in the ways each assigns meaning to misfortune.  One response offers questions: the other accepts uncertainties and dwells between the questions and the answers.  When people respond with answers, they are likely to explain why AIDS at particular times to particular people and what AIDS teaches us.  They can cause harm when their definitive answers keep people from finding their own meanings, blame people for their illness, or fill the silences in which people can face their fears and grieve.  When people respond to the tragedy of AIDS without answers, they are likely to challenge moral explanations and open up the possibility of wondering, listening, and being silent together. But without answers, people can feel isolated, helpless, and without direction.

Each of these kinds of responses has ethical implications.  The stories we tell  each other about why particular people do or do not get AIDS have tremendous power.  They touch real lives with real consequences and have the potential for framing some of the most profound experiences in a person's life.  Even our most casual comments or reassurances -- "You should have loved yourself better" or "There must be a reason why your son is suffering" -- can be fragments of a moral framework which, if we could see it whole, we might not condone.  It is important for us, as individuals and as communities, to examine our assumptions and begin openly discussing with each other the ethics of how we ask and answer questions that assign meaning to other people's misfortunes  [151-2].

If I had seen this essay while Bérubé was still alive, I'd have sent him a copy of my more polemical review of gay New Age spirituality, which also criticized the destructive certainty of many spiritual teachers.

As I read the biographical introduction, I began wondering if I should have moved to a city like San Francisco or New York, as Bérubé did.  But I realized quickly that the difference was that he worked much harder than I ever have at building his own community of like-minded thinkers and scholars.  I've had some such community here in Bloomington, but not to the same extent: not because it couldn't have been available here, but because you have to make it yourself.  It's not something that already exists anywhere.  And I'm not saying this to complain, only as another example of the kind of things I'm learning from this book.

Another theme is one I want to tie to other things I've written, namely my criticism of post-colonial and other scholars who see the American construction of gay community as whimsically hostile to family.  Bérubé showed that urban lesbian and gay communities grew after World War II because of veterans who'd been expelled from the military for homosexuality.  They couldn't go back to their smaller communities and families because of the stigma -- jobs were hard enough to find in the postwar readjustment even for the honorably-discharged -- and often enough their families rejected them too.  So they stayed in the cities where they'd first found community, and often their first chance to explore life outside of the limits of heterosexuality.  Some of them were involved in the first gay-rights organizations (with staying power, anyway), which emerged in those cities.

My Desire for History is a good introduction to GLBT American history; it would work well as a basic text in a class on the subject.  But it's also a fascinating read for anyone with any interest in knowing where gay community in America came from.

We Are the Hollow Men

When I saw a link to a Salon article called "So What If America Is the Most Religious Nation?" I thought it was by the dread and inconsistent Mary Elizabeth Williams, so I clicked to see what she had to say on the subject. Instead the article turned out to be by one Bernard Starr, "formerly professor of developmental and educational psychology at the City University of New York, Brooklyn College, writes a blog for the Huffington Post. His latest book, 'Escape Your Own Prison: Why We Need Spirituality and Psychology to be Truly Free,' is published by Rowman and Littlefield." (According to the image at Amazon, however, the subtitle of the book is "What Spirituality Provides that Psychology Can't.")

The article itself was about what I expected, summed up well by its subtitle, "If you compare creed and deed, the claim is hollow." Starr begins with a derisive swipe at atheists:

A Rice University study of 275 scientists at 21 “elite” research universities in the United States found that while 61 percent declared themselves atheists or agnostics, 17 percent have attended church services. Whether genuine devotees, just hedging their bets or doing it for the children (as some say), there’s little doubt that America is a religious nation.

I haven't checked all the links in his essay, but clicking through to the Rice study gave me reason not to trust the author. I checked it because I wondered if the 17 percent who have attended church services were 17 percent of the self-declared atheists or agnostics, or 17 percent of the total sample. It was the former, but it's still meaningless. I'm an atheist, and I've attended church services, either with my mother's family when I was a child, or more educationally at a variety of churches with my father until I was about ten. As an adult I've very occasionally attended services with believing friends, but without any real interest (let alone conviction) on my part. I attended Friends' silent meetings a few times while I was in college about 40 years ago, but while I found them interesting and attractive -- an atheist could be a Quaker, I believe, without compromising his or her atheism -- I haven't been back in a long time. Read the linked article yourself and see if you think Starr described it accurately.

Starr also shows his ecumenical knowledge by rendering the plural of "mitzvah" as "mitzvahs" instead of "mitzvot," though I admit I'm nitpicking. From there, of course, the lengthy piece is mostly about the gulf between "creed and deed" in American religion, ranging from poverty to our inadequate health care system, concluding with our sins against ecology:

In our hubris we forget that we are guests on a tiny rock floating — in an infinite universe of rocks — that uniquely supports life in a delicate balance of natural and mysterious forces. We have the choice and the responsibility to act. Or, as one theologian cautioned: ”God will not save us.”

Another nitpick: human beings are not "guests" on the earth: we are part of the biosphere, no more guests than bacteria. beetles, or wildebeests. (That's an acceptable plural form, along with "wildebai.") He concludes:

What is religion?: Love, caring, serving, giving, sharing, oneness, brother and sisterhood, compassion and selflessness. Summed up: “Thy neighbor is thyself.”

Yet one more nitpick: "Thy neighbor is thyself" is not biblical (it almost sounds as if he confused "Love your neighbor as yourself"), and I couldn't find it on Google. Nor does it ''sum up' Starr's list of virtues. I think it stinks of solipsism: my neighbor is an Other, but that's no reason not to engage with him or her. Like people who talk as though diversity is okay only as long as we're all alike anyway, Starr seems to think we should only care for others because they are us anyway. (We have met the enemy and he is ... ?) Jesus did better than that with the parable of the Good Samaritan.

What really stinks, though, is Starr's definition of religion. First, you can find love, caring, serving, giving, and the rest as virtues in most religions, but that is because they are human virtues. Human beings created and constructed and revised our religions, so it's hardly surprising that our virtues (as well as our vices) found their way into the religions we made. It would be just as accurate to say that religion is hate, disdain, demanding, taking, enmity, indifference, and selfishness, because we put in those qualities too.

Second, most atheists and agnostics would agree with Starr's list of virtues, or most of it. So he's either claiming that atheists and agnostics don't care about love, caring, etc. — which is false — or it implies that we’re really “religious” after all, whatever we happen to think. I think that virtues are double-edged, and can easily spill over into vices, but that's another post. If Starr wants to claim that I'm really being religious, despite my atheism, when I exercise compassion, then he's engaging in religious imperialism, and failing in several of his virtues.

Third, and more important, Starr is playing the game of No True Scotsman. He defines religion so as to suit himself, but he's begging the question. How does he know what religion "is"? I'd say it's reasonable to suggest that instead of idealizing and abstracting, we should look at a real-world religion and see what it looks like.

Read the entire New Testament, or if that’s too much work, read just one of the gospels in its entirety.  (Mark is the shortest one, if that helps.) True, Jesus talks about love, but he also talks about demons, the final judgment, miracles, the wrath and vengeance of God, the torments of hell, and becoming a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven.  (That last one is in Matthew, not Mark: 19:12, to be exact.) "Love" in the New Testament is actually hard to reconcile with love as human beings know it.

I've found that pointing this out infuriates liberal Christians more than almost anything I can say about their cult. They pay lip service to "holistic" interpretations of the Bible, but in practice their approach to the Bible is fiercely one-sided. They pick one or two verses out of context, usually “Love your neighbor as yourself” (which is, of course, an Old Testament quotation), “Let him who is without sin be first to cast a stone” (which probably isn’t an authentic part of the New Testament anyway but a later addition), and maybe “God is love” (from one of the Johannine epistles, again out of context) or Paul’s hymn to love from 1 Corinthians. They ignore the context in the gospels: the faith healing, the hellfire and brimstone preaching, the apocalyptic threats and promises, the hostility to sex and the body (such as “If your eye leads you to sin pluck it out”), the hostility to the family in favor of the cult (“Those who do the will of my father in heaven are my mother and brothers and sisters”, “Let the dead bury the dead”), and so on. But reading for context is difficult; cherrypicking verses to bash your opponents with is easy and more fun.

Then look at what people want from religion. A few years ago I wrote about a Pew Poll on the factors that bring the fallen-away back to church. "Those who leave the ranks of the unaffiliated cite several reasons for joining a faith, such as the attraction of religious services and styles of worship (74%), having been spiritually unfulfilled while unaffiliated (51%) or feeling called by God (55%)." Not "I felt there wasn’t enough love, compassion, giving, or selflessness in my life," but something more like "I felt there wasn’t enough praying, kneeling, incense, hymns, organ music, and sermons in my life." To each his own, of course. Look at other world religions, and you'll see that this tendency isn't limited to Christianity. Buddhism, for example, began as an iconoclastic sect that broke off from Hinduism; agnostic about and indifferent to gods, the Buddha stressed right thinking and right practice, boiling everything down to a simple list of Noble Truths. Before too long (if indeed Gautama ever really had gotten rid of these accretions), Buddhism became a religion of rites and hierarchies. In practice, religion includes simplicity and complexity, leveling and elitism, compassion for suffering and contempt for those who haven't freed themselves from illusion.

Finally, to refer back to the original subtitle of Starr's book, neither "psychology" nor "spirituality" has much to be with being free. Most modern psychology denies the existence of human freedom, as far as I can tell: free will is an illusion, we’re the slaves of our brains or our genes. Most spiritual traditions are at best ambivalent about freedom: it’s more a come-on for religious hucksters: come follow me and do what I tell you to do, and you’ll be free! No, thanks. Freedom is a complex matter, but neither religion nor psychology has said much to say about it that I’ve found useful.

For the Love of D-g

Two new posts at Lambda Literary got my attention today, though the newsletter has been in my inbox for a few days. Both touch on sexuality and spirituality, and I wonder if the site editors noticed that they almost cancel each other out.

The first was an interview by Christopher Hennessey with the editors of two recent anthologies of gay and lesbian poetry with "spiritual" ambitions. One collection, Milk and Honey (Midsummer Night’s Press), edited by Julie Enszer, is devoted to poetry by Jewish women; the other, Kevin Simmonds's Collective Brightness (Sibling Rivalry Press), collects "LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion and Spirituality." I haven't read either one of them, though I might if the library gets copies; some of the poems described in the interviews sound interesting.

The other article was a review by Jeffrey Escoffier of a new biography of the gay S&M filmmaker and theorist Fred Halsted. I've never seen any of Halsted's films, partly because I'm not interested in S&M, but reading Escoffier's history of gay male film and video pornography Bigger Than Life has made me want to try to track down some of the classics. Many of them are available on DVD. But for now, I'm concerned with something Escoffier wrote in this review:

The one area of Halsted’s life that Jones doesn’t explore sufficiently is Halsted’s radical philosophy of sex. Several years ago Patrick Moore devoted a chapter to Halsted in Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality. Halsted believed that the erotic is transgressive and sacramental, that it is inherently violent and involves acts of violation. “Sex is not ‘coming,’ that is superficial sex,” he once explained. “Mine is personal cinema. I don’t fuck to get my rocks off. In the best scenes I’ve ever had, I haven’t come. I am not interesting in coming. … I am interested in getting my head off, my emotions off—and if I get my dick off, my rocks off, it really doesn’t matter that much to me. … I am interested in emotional satisfaction and intellectual satisfaction.” In some ways, Halsted seems to have anticipated Foucault’s view of S/M as a “creative enterprise” which imagined “the desexualization of pleasure.”

"Foucault's view of S/M as a 'creative enterprise'" reminds me of what Brian Eno, and others, have said about art as self-expression: that you express yourself every morning when you choose your clothes for the day. Anything can be a creative enterprise, from cooking to deciding how to organize your personal library, so it's no stretch to include sadomasochism in the list. I've also run across the notion that sex is "inherently violent and includes acts of violation." Sex, like most human activities, isn't "inherently" anything. One of our most troubling tendencies as human beings is the desire to define our personal tastes and quirks as the essence of the realms in which they occur; such ex cathedra claims can almost always be translated as the speaker's description of how he or she experiences something. For Halsted sex is is one thing; for someone else, it will be something different.

This is just as true of spirituality. (I'll bet you saw that coming.) It's virtually a cliche that the spiritually-minded person finds God (or whatever) everywhere. As William Blake put it:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

I've seen this quatrain on wall posters illustrated with pretty pictures of green blades of grass, crystal-clear drops of water, and other beauties of nature. But everything, and I do mean everything, has a spiritual dimension: self-mutilation, fasting, flagellation, the extremes of asceticism; but also highly oppressive social systems, which are of course ordained by the gods; wars and other forms of human sacrifice. The Bhagavad-Gita, for example, spiritualizes war: Krishna tells Arjuna that the warrior slaughters his opponents not for self-glorification or bloodlust, but in the service of one's temporal duty, so go get 'em champ! And Arjuna did. As the Gita's American admirer "Winthrop Sargeant explains, 'In the model presented by the Bhagavad Gītā, every aspect of life is in fact a way of salvation.'" As the Gita itself put it: "No work stains a man who is pure, who is in harmony, who is master of his life, whose soul is one with the soul of all." Such a man could be a torturer, could drop napalm on children, could set fire to bums, as long as he stayed pure. (I'm not being cynical: see my remarks on the New Age teacher Chris Griscom here.)

Spiritual aspirants have also contemplated mortality, decay, rot, the yucky stuff of life; as well they ought. There was a guy Margot Adler mentioned in her survey of American neo-paganism, Drawing Down the Moon (I read the 1986 revised edition published by Beacon Press; Adler has updated the book several times since then), who argued that there were gods of cities as well as of the countryside, and pagans should acknowledge them; but he was the only person she wrote about who thought so. It seems to me that the kind of spirituality with the most commercial potential among educated (and mostly white) Americans today tries to ignore these matters, presenting a cleaned-up, sanitized product. That's not all there is to spirituality, including the ancient sources it invokes to give it authority.

If Halsted and others sought transcendence through an erotic theater of abjection, abasement, explicit power relations, costumes, and paraphernalia, including "acts of violation," fine for them. They could do much worse. But they have no more business legislating this as the essence of sex for everybody than an evangelical Christian has legislating his or her peculiar interpretation of the Jesus cult as normative for everybody.

As with many spiritualistas, I'm skeptical about the effectiveness of Halsted's praxis. He was, says Escoffier, "alcoholic and tortured by self-doubt and insecurities that undermined his public persona as the ultra top—the role he chose to play in his own movies." Like every god I know of, Halsted's failed him; it couldn't stop him from destroying himself. But then I remind myself that self-destructive tendencies are common among religious seekers and teachers; think of St. Francis of Assisi, who died of complications from stigmata, eye disease, and fasting at the age of 45. Halsted was 47 when he died by his own hand, of an overdose of sleeping pills. It's not exactly news that the spiritual quest isn't necessarily good for the body.

To her credit, Julie Enzser resists the boxes her interviewer tries to put her into.

Sensuality and the lesbian body are big themes in my own writing and in what I love to read. I’m drawn to poetry that includes erotic writing about lesbian experiences; I am interested how we write about our bodies and the physical and sensual experiences of our bodies. Although I would like to say that I think that this is a hallmark of Jewish lesbian poetry, I think it is more of an idiosyncratic characteristic of me as a reader and editor.

She also acknowledges that some of the poems' spirituality, or even Jewishness, emerges mainly in the context of the anthology. By analogy, if I sing a set of songs which explicitly express romantic love between men, then sing one which is ambiguous, you're more likely to hear it as a song of romantic love between men than you would if you heard it in a heterosexual context. (Unless you're absolutely determined to hear heterosexuality except when homosexuality is explicitly invoked.) What presumably makes these poems "spiritual" is that they are labeled so. Hennessey asks her at one point, "Eleanor Lerman’s poem’s ending really complicates what we think about God" (because she writes "God" instead "G-d", as religious Jews often do), and as usual my first reaction was "What do you mean 'we'?"

Once again, trying to subsume all kinds of religious (or other) experience under one word -- "spiritual," in this case, which functions along with "faith" nowadays much as "gender" does with regard to "sex" or "ethnicity" to "race", and "identity" does with just about everything -- ends up homogenizing difference into grey mush. Judaism is historically a religion about practice, not faith, doctrine, or even "spirituality." I don't say that to imply that it's a deficiency (or as some Jewish partisans would infer, a superiority); it's just a difference.

Is This Trip Really Necessary?

My old school friend the minister is going on sabbatical. Here's how he explained it on Facebook:

It is a time of renewal where a pastor is allowed to step away from the responsibilities of leadership - so his or her soul can reconnect with God. It is a time for travel...for just hanging around...for finding joy.

Well, good for him; I'm about to go on a semi-working vacation myself. But I was struck by his inflationary and obfuscatory rhetoric, making his time off seem like it's more significant on a cosmic level than the time off of his congregation, to say nothing of those of us who don't have Jesus' number in our iPhone. He's going to spend a little Quality Time with God -- no doubt exchanging high fives and chest bumps, maybe even punching each other in the arm and wrestling each other to the ground, because that's the way guys show their love for each other. The rest of us will go to our time-shares in the Smokies or camp out in the Hoosier National Forest, while I will be attending the next Queer Culture Festival in Seoul. Of course, that is a highly spiritual experience in itself.

I realize of course, that the overheated rhetoric and inflated sense of one's status in the cosmos go with the job. Or do they? Should they? I remember noticing, when I read Francine du Plessix-Gray's portrait of the Berrigan Brothers in her book Divine Disobedience, that the alternative seemed to be a self-conscious use of painfully outdated slang by clergy, but that too is a symptom of a clerical cult of personality: I could be all hoity-toity, but instead I'm the fighting young priest who's not afraid to talk to the young in their own language. Either way it seems at odds not only with the doctrine of Original Sin, but with the whole Protestant tradition of the priesthood of all believers. The word "minister" originally meant "servant," and I think it's telling that it has come to mean someone who is above others in the spiritual hierarchy, not under them.

Here's another of my old friend's status messages:

Great meeting with our Staff Parish Relations Committee last night. God is doing cool things among our people and leaders as I prepare to exit July-September for my Lilly-sponsored sabbatical. People looking at what we do and how we lead, work together, and asking, "Is there a better way?" Good stuff...lots of joy...God has cool people here ...!

The whole self-importance thing is hard to separate from Christianity: when your sacred book assures you that the saints (e.g., humble little you) will judge the angels, that a place in Heaven has been prepared just for little old you, that indeed the universe was created as a stage for the drama of salvation that culminates in you you you -- well, then it's not surprising that congregations believe that the Holy Spirit is sitting in on their staff meetings, guiding them, working through them, lifting them up. Or that athletes pray before games. The trouble with that is not that a god whose eye is on the sparrow isn't watching -- what better way to spend his day of rest than to kick back in front of his big-screen TV and take in a football game? -- but that the other team either wasn't praying, or that their prayers weren't worth listening to. I guess it's better to lose a game than to burn in Hell for eternity, but still.

Assimilation and Its Discontents

I've been dithering around writing about gay people and assimilation for years. People are still talking about it, and every year or so I get a request from a student journalist to ask if any Speakers Bureau volunteers are willing to talk about the assimilation question. I think my position has more or less stabilized (though you never know), so here goes.

I think GLBT assimiliation is a non-issue -- I'm not sure the idea even makes sense. First, we are born assimilated into straight society: our parents and families are overwhelmingly heterosexual. There's no analogy between our situation and that of people who come into a new culture from another one, speaking another language, having other customs, used to other political systems. (Even this ethnic model of assimilation has been questioned, though in many respects it seems a moot point: most immigrants' children and virtually all of their grandchildren learn English and acculturate. This article, for example, mentions a study which found that "after four years of American high school the children of Mexican and Filipino immigrants were fifty percent more likely to self‑identify themselves as Mexicans and Filipinos than as Mexican‑Americans, Filipino‑Americans, or unhyphenated Americans." It's not clear what the "decrease" was measured against historically, compared to previous generations of Irish or Germans or Italians, and I wonder what effect anti-immigrant sentiment and propaganda had on the self-perception of the kids in the study. But anyway...) If queers want to refuse assimilation, we have to secede, though often enough we're expelled. Still, I'm not sure how well either withdrawal or expulsion fits with the notion of assimilation or its rejection.

Nor am I sure what constitutes assimilation. Many of us take for granted that same-sex marriage is assimilationist, and I agree that the motives of many if not of its advocates are precisely to blend into mainstream society. But will they succeed? How well do same-sex couples blend in? I'm not the only person who's noticed that same-sex and especially same-gender couples undermine the gendered, separate-spheres structure of "traditional" marriage. That is certainly among the reasons why religious bigots oppose it: they want marriage to be hierarchical, with one person in charge and the other subordinate. Heterosexual marriage was already becoming homosexualized in this sense before the same-sex marriage movement got into gear; the controversy lies in whether or not you consider that a good thing.

On the other hand, I've also noticed that many straight male liberals who are vocal in supporting same-sex marriage and an end to Don't Ask Don't Tell are still homophobic, often intensely so. They reflexively fall back on homophobic imagery to describe conflict and unfairness -- bending over, having something rammed down their throats, castration and the lack of "balls", and so on -- and fag jokes are still part of their repertoire. Assimilation is never as easy as the assimilees think it will be, and resistance runs deep. German Jewry was Europe's most assimilated, and they were very proud of the extent to which they'd Germanized themselves, right down to assimilating hatred of "stereotypical" Jews. In the end their assimilation was used against them, just as gay invisibility has been used against us (we're a fifth column, trying to undermine society, pretending to be normal when we're not, etc.)

Sure, the craving of so many Homo-Americans to be recognized as a regular, normal part of our glorious country makes me gag. Which isn't to say it doesn't make a kind of sense, since as I just said, we are born and grow up as part of American culture. It's not surprising (to me, anyway), that many people would react to attempts to expel them by refusing to be expelled, to insist that they do so belong. And who's to say they don't? As I've said before, my own experience has been that being openly gay enabled me to mix (not to assimilate) among straights, while gay community / culture seemed to me like a product of the closet.

I just finished reading Smash the Church, Smash the State!: The Early Years of Gay Liberation (City Lights Books, 2009), edited by longtime activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca. It's mostly a collection of short memoirs by people who were involved in the radical gay movement that exploded in 1969 and petered out sometime in the mid-1970s, with some contemporary documents, some of them published in full for the first time. For those of us who lived through that period and were inspired by that movement, the book is an important jog to the memory; for those who were born long afterwards, it will be probably be something of a revelation. The writers don't minimize the downside of those years -- the government repression from outside, the ego trips and burnout that sent Gay Liberation into a downward spiral, though it never quite died out. Gay Liberation still should be an inspiration, simply because it asked deep questions and proposed radical answers and tried to live them. This was true not only of Gay Liberation but of other movements for social justice and radical change that flourished in the 1960s and were crushed in little over a decade, and that are commonly derogated now as utopian foolishness by a society that was nevertheless affected by them. People who didn't grow up in the 1950s and 1960s can't feel in their bones how much things changed. If those movements didn't directly cause the change, at least they were the vehicles, the channels through which the change flowed.

One thing that struck me as I read Smash the Church, Smash the State! was how many of the writers, men and women alike, have become therapists. That looks like assimilation to me. Given the historical role of psychotherapy as an enforcer of conformity (and worse -- remember the major role therapists and counselors played in the Satanic Ritual Abuse witch hunt of the 1990s), I find this fact disquieting. Did we take over the profession, or did it co-opt us? I think it's more the latter. So I had probably my most mixed feelings about Don Kilhefner's contribution, "The Gay Community in Crisis." Kilhefner was involved in GLF, helped found what is now called the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center (later to be taken over by professional diversity managers -- see Jane Ward's Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture in GLBT Activist Organizations [Vanderbilt, 2008]) , and was a co-founder of the Radical Faeries. He's now "a Jungian psychologist and shamanic practitioner" in Los Angeles.

I agree with a lot of Kilhefner's diagnosis of the current gay malaise, though I think it applies no less to other minorities. He writes (275), "It saddens me tremendously today when energized young gay men want to know where they can go to become actively and constructively involved in the community. For the first time since the 1980s I have no place toward which to point them. It tears me apart when intelligent young gay men tell me they have to 'dumb it down' to be part of the gay community. I have a hunch this is true in your community as well." But then I remember having to struggle against dumbing-down in the early 1970s too. There was great resistance to gay politics of any kind among most gay men I met in those days. It wasn't just heterosexuals who laughed at the idea of homosexuals organizing, making demands, changing the way we saw ourselves and expecting straights to do the same. I had unrealistic expectations of the thoughtfulness of other gay men when I first came out, and remember that I did so in a college town.

Of the genesis of Faery, Kilhefner writes (273),

I had gathered together all the gay visionary literature I could get my faggoty hands on, beginning with Walt Whitman and including Edward Carpenter, Gerald Heard (writing under the pseudonym D. B. Vest in homophile publications), Harry Hay et al.; culled the evolutionary biology and sociobiology literature about us at the time; and also rounded up the other usual suspects.

The reference to "evolutionary biology and sociobiology" put me on the alert. I remember seeing Harry Hay refer to sociobiology in interviews during the 1980s, and I'd wonder what he could be thinking. In the 1970s some sociobiologists were suggesting that (male) homosexuality could be explained in terms of "kin selection" -- that our cultural contributions in emergent human societies balanced our nonreproductive tendencies. When I first encountered this speculation (which was all it was), I thought it was plausible until I began reading the critiques of sociobiology that began appearing at around the same time. I also wondered what counted as "homosexuals" in this scheme, since most gay men and lesbians are capable of reproduction; the assumption (which is all it is) that we are somehow totally uninvolved in making or raising children is false. This theory is also at odds with the rejection of assimilation, since it assumes that homosexuals have always played an important role in their societies, rather than being outsiders with a society of our own.

But Kilhefner takes sociobiology very seriously (275f):

Evolutionary biologists inform us that the basic function of heterosexuals is the reproductive survival of the species. The most essential question for us at present is: What is the evolutionary function of gay people? What are gay people for? To mimic heterosexuals? I don’t think so. Otherwise, evolutionarily speaking, we would have gone down the drainpipe of history long ago.

This assumes, first, that gay people are biologically distinct from heterosexuals, which we aren't. If we were, we would indeed "have gone down the drainpipe of history"; the sociobiological fables were concocted to explain in Darwinian terms how a non-reproducing adaptation could have arisen in the first place. Second, it assumes that you have to have an "evolutionary function," and you have to know what it is, and if you know what it is you have to conform to it because it gives your life meaning. Or something. I certainly don't see why it's an "essential question," let alone the most essential "at present" -- if it matters, it always did, though it could hardly have arisen before Darwin. (Two centuries ago, I suppose a Don Kilhefner would have been saying that the most essential question before Mollies, Sodomites and Sapphists was to know our role in God's plan; the two ideas are functionally equivalent, and equally unimportant.)

Assimilationists will say we are basically just like heterosexuals except for our choice of sex partners. (Harry [Hay] would say to me: “We’re just like hets when it comes to sex, and in most other ways we are different.”) Assimilationists act as if we already have an identity (homosexual), and with cybersex and hookups who needs a community or even an intellectual life?

Harry Hay's quip has often been quoted, and while it's a cute, Wilde-wannabe paradox, I don't agree, or even get his point. What are those "most other ways" we're different? (I'd rather point out that the assimilationists' claim contradicts their rage at those who'd reduce gayness to mere -- you know -- sex.) I think that, given sexism and male supremacy, the sex of one's sexual partner has some serious consequences; it's not exactly trivial. But most of all, I reject the idea that there are heterosexuals, who are all pretty much alike, and then there are homosexuals, who are all pretty much alike. I've never wanted to assimilate to gay men's culture, any more than I wanted to sit around with a bunch of guys chugging brewskies, slobbering over the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue, or screaming at a big-screen TV on Superbowl Sunday.

One thing that bothered me about Michael Warner's The Trouble with Normal (The Free Press, 1999), which I mostly liked, was Warner's apparent acceptance of 'mainstream' society's self-presentation at face value: if respectable men pretended to be monogamous family guys who'd never think of sneaking off to a strip club or an adult bookstore, let alone a gay cruising area, then that was what they were. The underside of the "normal" is part of society, and can't be separated from it. Similarly, as I've suggested before, "assimilationist" gay people will most likely end up being as hypocritical as their straight counterparts, because hypocrisy is part of respectability.

It doesn't seem to me that gay enspiritment, as Kilhefner calls it, offers much of an intellectual life, which is one reason why I've always given it a wide berth. Especially the Jungians, who are especially pernicious. (Kilhefner also refers in his essay to "father hunger", which indicates his ties to the Mythopoetic Men's Movement, another hotbed of creepy pseudospirituality and anti-intellectualism.) A lot of very fine books have come from GLBTQ scholars, but the most resounding turkeys -- Judy Grahn's Another Mother Tongue, Jamake Highwater's The Mythology of Transgression, Mark Thompson's Gay Body, Arthur Evans's Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, Mab Segrest's Born to Belonging come to mind off the top of my head -- all come from the therapeutic/spiritual, and especially Jungian wing of the community. (Well, them and the New Agers, but then the latter are part of the therapeutic/spiritual wing anyway.)

Which doesn't mean I'm complacent about gay politics and community today, as anyone who reads this blog should know. But I think that pursuing "enspiritment" and the culture of therapy has been the road too many of us have taken to become lost in the wilderness.