Archive | December, 2021

Storm Surge:  Clearing 2021s Mental Debris, Dr. Robert Zuber

31 Dec

I never made a mistake in my life; at least, never one that I couldn’t explain away afterwards. Rudyard Kipling

Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.  Margaret Atwood

When we kill people, we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretense of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history. Shashi Tharoor

He had a clear conscience. Never used it. Stanisław Jerzy Lec

So distracted have we become sating this new need or that material appetite, we hardly noticed the departure of happiness. Randall Robinson

Of what use was memory anyway than as a template for one’s most reassuring self-deceptions! Ashim Shanker

No one, Naomi had learned, did evil without believing it was right at the time. Maybe this was why it was nearly impossible to talk them out of it?   Rene Denfeld

The most trustworthy and likable guides are the ones who occasionally ask others for directions. Frank Bruni

I know that I promised fewer of these posts but the transition from one difficult year to another which, despite the hopes that we will pin on 2022, is likely to be saturated with challenges at personal, community and global levels that seemed to warrant a bit of reflection.

As 2021 and its lessons fade from conscious awareness, we at Global Action are attempting to do what we should have done years earlier – ask others for directions, including on how and where we should place our energies in what is already poised to be another time of challenge, both familiar and fresh. 

We have commented before on the wide range of skills and capacities which the times demand, ranging from the deeply intimate to the most technologically sophisticated, just some of what we will need to tap if we are to effetively care for the sick and isolated, ensure that provisions are accessible by refugees and others in almost unimaginable need, launch and monitor telescopes that can bring us closer to the edge of creation, and reverse what we can of the damage done from a warming and warring planet.

None can attend to all of these things, certainly not alone. Indeed, any contributions we might make are constrained as we allow our own capacities to erode and as we fail to address what seem to be widening gaps between what we feel we must do and what we are able to do.  Like many others, we at Global Action are trying to discern the frontier of our effective actions, a task in part about making more sound judgments regarding the efforts we can undertake ourselves and those times when we are much better off helping to enable others.

But success here also requires us to get our own heads straight, to clear away some of the psychological and conceptual debris that is holding us back, and by no means us alone.  Amidst the pull of caregiving of all kinds, amidst our dangerous and often petty political rhetoric, amidst the necessity of broadened educational and health care access as well as restoring the impaired biodiversity on which our very lives depend, there are modes of thinking and feeling which have dominated much of our social life in this past year, modes which have wasted precious human energy and sown distrust at community and policy levels,  modes we would do well to abate as this new year begins, if not relinquish entirely. 

There are many candidates that could have been listed in this post, but three rose closest to the surface for me.  The first of these was a focus of classical psychotherapy as practiced by persons such as Erich Fromm – pointing out our almost obsessive tolerance of “rationalization,” the half-truths (at best) we tell ourselves about our motives, our intentions, our goals; our unrelenting efforts to justify the unjustifiable; the misrepresentations we parrot with such frequency that we come to believe them – no matter how many others remain duly skeptical.

Such rationalization has done and continues to do damage to our social fabric.  We are inclined, as Fromm himself noted, to invest enormous amounts of personal energy – energy we simply cannot afford to squander in these precarious times – protecting ourselves from the truth of our own intentions, the “explanations” that hide as much as reveal, the rationalistic “after-thoughts” of decisions which are often driven by desires we can scarcely admit we have, desires which might call into question our carefully-crafted images that fool only some of the people some of the time.

In this social-media saturated world that we have constructed for ourselves, we have been conditioned to purchase the surfaces, to make snap decisions (and often inflexible ones) based on mere snippets of camera-ready activity and/or personality.  We seem committed more and more to the principle that what is true is what you can convince others to be true.  This principle becomes an incubator of rationalization, exacerbating the trend of hiding often-complex truths about ourselves from ourselves.

This impediment is related to another which was also not invented during this past year but seems to have flourished at this dangerous moment – the tendency to judge (and even demonize) others about whom we know little, including little about their familial, social and economic contexts.   The volume of judgements emanating from people of all political persuasions, all races and genders, regarding people that they don’t know, indeed don’t have any interest in knowing, is quite staggering. Those who struggle mightily to discern the truth of their own motives seem to have surprisingly little difficulty in pinning down the motives of perfect strangers often in the form of self-interested and overtly stereotypical rants.   “We” know about those liberals, those refugees, those proud boys, those racists.   What “we” know in fact are too-often carefully groomed snippets of behavior and perspective, now mostly social media-mediated, which serve to confirm rather than complicate our snap judgements.  If we were more mindful and honest about the opportunities, limitations and challenges embedded in our own contexts, it might well help to moderate much of the self-righteous and context-challenged stereotyping that breeds division far more than understanding.

Finally, it would be good if in this new year we could find a way to abandon, or at least modify, our current widespread tendency to apply an anti-scientific mind-set to our assessments of science.  We have been living through a period characterized by a profound skepticism of any official views of anything, coupled with a stunning lack of skepticism regarding the conspiracies which challenge such official views. Many also have doubled down on their desire for what John Dewey called “monistic” ideas, the “science” that is “true” once and for all, the “science” that eschews the “plurality of ideas employed in experimental activity as working hypotheses.”  In other words, a “science” which intentionally rejects the methodologies and conclusions-in-process of science.  

The solution to this is not what Dewey referred to as a “thoughtless empiricism” devoid of culture, of value, even of faith.  What is required instead is a rejection of the fanatical claims of some, often draped in religious as well as scientific terminology, that what is “true” must be true for all in all circumstances.   Regardless of culture.  Regardless of context.  Regardless of gender or race. Regardless of revisions to our understanding of the world required by subsequent research in many fields including by new technologies that allow us to see deeper and further such as the Webb Space telescope now probing areas of our universe hitherto beyond our reach.

It has become clear to me, rightly or otherwise, that the current skepticism regarding a “science” incapable of revealing or sustaining “monistic ideas” is merely one component of the same conceptual “field of debris” that we have duly laid out for ourselves and reinforced over this past year.  One that rationalizes and conceals rather than reveals; one that habitually judges harshly, categorically and independently of context; one that pledges allegiance to the one that that claims to uphold the “truth” that is right for all in all circumstances, even as the actual truth lies elsewhere.

As our calendar year flips, we have so much on our collective plates if we are to keep ourselves sane and our progeny alive.  Some of this is related to the pursuit of justice and physical health, the restoration of our environment, the resolution of conflict threats.  But some is related to the debris rummaging around in our psyche that we generally seem unable or unwilling to clear away:  the need to hide our true motives from ourselves, the need to de-contextualize those with whom we disagree; the need to turn pending truths into eternal ones. Overcoming these self-imposed impediments, these wounds inflicted over and over on our social fabric, is the new year’s resolution that can help heal our divisions, our democracies and possibly even our planet.   Let’s give it a try.

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Muscle Pain: A Christmas Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

23 Dec
See the source image

The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.  bell hooks

All that surrounds him hastens to decay: all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. Your god is a masked Death.  Charlotte Brontë

Your gentleness shall force more than your force move us to gentleness.  William Shakespeare

An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes.  Ayn Rand

Everything precious was also vulnerable.  Mary H.K. Choi

While most of us are, at some level, guilty of creating what some scribes and religious texts refer to as “graven images” of deeper and more challenging spiritual realities, our imaging has taken a particularly sinister turn as this season of Advent transitions into the season of the Christmas manger.

Many have seen for ourselves images of smiling elected officials and others sitting around Christmas trees while holding deadly weapons and asking Santa for suitable ammunition. We have also heard preachers, not always from obscure denominational backgrounds, urging a brand of “godly” violence in an effort, or so it seems, to drag an otherwise disredited version of Christianity out of the shadows and on to the pedestal of governance. It is as though we never abandoned the aspiration of “holy empire” nor ceased to honor the (mostly) men who perpetuated it.

Putting forth a notion of a “muscular Jesus” is not a new phenomenon in our culture, but in some circles it is clearly poised to make some fresh noise.  An article this week in the Washington Post by Peter Manseau cited the desire in some “Christian” quarters for a “viral and manly Jesus” on the basis of which weapons and other threats of force can be justified, necessary to the “preservation of the good,” including the good of restoring a more testosterone-laden version of Christianity which, as they see it, had been allowed (by liberals mostly) to get too soft, too gentle, too “feminine” as it were.

This relishing of muscular force as a global (and even religious) good has a long and checkered past.  While taking a break from weekly posts, I came upon a commentary on the iconic “Iliad” by the illustrious Simone Weil, one in which she reminds us of the deeper truths embedded in that seminal work, truths about ourselves including our almost genetic obsession with violence and its justifications.  As she navigates the text, she is clear throughout that the “center of the Iliad is force,” force that enslaves, force before which our “flesh shrinks away,” force which “turns anybody subjected to it into a thing,” in essence making “corpses” of all of us.

This is sobering reflection, made more so by the accuracy of its portrayal.   As a species we have long been addicted to the allure of force, which includes the assumption (until proven otherwise) that our choices are only between the projection of force and its receipt, that we have little recourse in this life aside from being on one end of a weapon or another, creating things out of people or, alternatively, enduring the experience of being turned into things by others.

This dystopian view generates plenty of supporting evidence, and we often seem surprised by how shallow are our collective alternatives, our practical commitments to the values of peace, dignity, compassion and tolerance. Weil notes that in the Iliad there are moments of grace to be found, but these are often buried along with the corpses of those fallen in battle or through siege, signaling the likelihood that the cycles of violence to which we have become all-too-accustomed are poised to flare up yet again.

And yet amidst the pain and carnage of our weapons and muscular mindsets, a child is born, a son is given, a manger barely fit for livestock has become the stage for a different way of engaging the world, one less involved in pumping iron and packing heat, and more interested in demonstrating that, even in this force-addicted world, another more peaceful course forward is possible.

The manger, after all, is more than a humble birthing location; it is a metaphor for what is to come: a life spent bringing dignity to outcasts who might otherwise have been ignored; a life bearing forgiveness in settings where many of us would likely succumb to bitterness; a life showering compassion on the sick and hungry beyond the influence of any comfort zone; a life rejecting the very violence and self-reference which some in his name would have you believe is a core component of a proper, “manly” faith.  We hear the testimony of that divine life: Give him your cloak as well.  Put away your sword.  Cease your elbowing for honor and recognition. Understand that the ways of the world – embracing the coerciveness of muscular force – will not be your way, must not be your way if we are to have a way forward at all.  

That same manger also sends a message to those who fear above all their own vulnerability and insufficiency, who measure strength by their ability to coerce others and even make them beg for mercy, who seek to double down on the terms of the current world rather than the terms which the ministry of Jesus embodies, a message that there is grace, dignity and forgiveness to be found emanating from the most extreme and forlorn places, even from a barn at the edge of town on a bone chilling night.

The late senior pastor of New York’s Riverside Church, William Sloane Coffin, used to speak of the essential Christmas choice as one between “shoving and loving.”  This always struck me as hopeful but not uncomplicated phrasing.  For we have constructed a world where the threat and use of force is, for many, the wallpaper that covers their world, an expectation that literally envelops their reality with its overly-muscular and militarized imagery, its inflexible bureaucracies, its self-refereential supervision, its stubborn power imbalances. It is hard for many now, as perhaps it has always been, to imagine a world suggested by the manger – vulnerable beginnings which transition into lives which are threatening only to those whose influence in the world is a byproduct of what we at the UN refer to often as “coercive measures rather than of commitments to compassion, forgiveness, dignity and equity.

And the “loving” option is certainly no simple matter either.  Indeed, it is a matter much more easily professed than discharged, a claim too often drowning in intangible sentiment that sounds perpetually better in theory than in practice.  Love is, for most of us, an easy choice, but as we soon find out is one fraught with missed connections and self-deceptions.  We tend to forget (or ignore) how much of our being is earmarked for competition, possession and, yes, force, and this is increasingly true in some measure across lines of gender, culture and ethnicity.  We are generally not as loving as we profess to be, surely not towards ourselves, certainly not towards others.

But having made the choice to eschew a life defined by “shoving” is an important transitional step, a step in keeping with a humble manger and the divine spark which emanated from it. While loving may ultimately offer “no place of safety,” as the late Gloria Jean Watkins (bell hooks) reminded us, it does offer us a path to follow, one suggested by humble origins and a subsequent life of divine purpose, a path which can take us to places where muscular force and the pain it inflicts has a measurably declining impact on how and why we live, what we can reasonably and hopefully aspire to for ourselves, our communities and our progeny.

The manger signifies more than merely tickling our sentiment.  It suggests a fresh way forward, a path towards higher levels of dignity and service; a path towards reversing the self-inflicted decay which now envelops too much of our planet, a path wherein we are moved to both protect what is most vulnerable and invest in what is most precious such that others can also share in the remaining manifestations of abundance which we who are most privileged so often prefer to horde.

Let us be clear: the Jesus we revere especially on this Christmas Day did not advocate violence nor find it attractive; did not spend his precious time on earth working on his abs; was not to be found “packing heat” (or the biblical equivalent) on the donkey that carried him ultimately into Jerusalem; did not conveniently turn away from acts of compassion and healing, even unto death.  And while he apparently turned over a table or two in the temple and had more than a few harsh words for those who represented or enabled a coercive empire, his cheeks always seemed to be turned.

Despite the contentions of some muscle-bound, force-challenged Christians, the Jesus who emerged from the Christmas manger is not “masked death” but unmasked life, offering guidance towards a world where the pain from coercion is no longer coin of the realm, and where what is most precious is duly acknowledged, protected and shared.  This is why the wonders and aspirations of Christmas still matter to me.  Perhaps to you as well.  

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A Grateful (and short) Note to our Twitter Community, Dr. Robert Zuber

20 Dec

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

As 2021 comes to a close, I wanted to let you know how much we appreciate your engagement with this account as well as with the issues we cover both inside and outside the United Nations, issues which directly impact the health of our planet and the future of our children.

We very much appreciate your loyalty, your patience with our mistakes, and your many hopeful actions in the communities and contexts in which you work to help build a more just and equitable world.

As you may have noticed, we have started to scale back a bit, both in terms of daily coverage of UN events as well as our weekly reflections on global events, both of which have sought to reinforce how improvements in the world which are sustainable must be accompanied by improvements in ourselves. 

And yet, despite prodding by us and many others, we continue to make too many weapons and lie about their consequences. We continue to increase emissions and reduce prospects for the biodiversity on which our very lives depend.  We continue to discriminate and stereotype, to act upon beliefs that we cannot possibly prove to be true, to horde rather than share, and to forge ahead without asking ourselves “what can go wrong here” and then preparing to address those gaps and threats.

You all know this.  We have tried to use this space to connect issues and people across culture and geography, but we aren’t ever telling you anything you haven’t already suspected.  Indeed, one of our regrets so far is that we haven’t learned nearly enough from you.   Not nearly enough.

We will take a bit of step back at year’s end, given financial and other circumstances.  For a while at least, we will be covering the UN less, commenting less, sharing less.  We’re not going away, more like going into a light hibernation. It has been a long and sometimes stressful haul for us – 20 years as an organization, 10 years on this platform.  We need some time to reflect and reassess, to discern how we might add value going forward, how we might better enable and share, rather than impede, the invaluable contributions of others, including your own.

We have been honored to have shared our own opinions and energies over this time, and even more pleased to have been tethered to your own good work.  If you need to leave us during this coming period of reduced coverage, all best to you as you go forward.  If you have ideas for us as to how we can make more relevant contributions once we find our new bearings, we’re always happy to hear from you.

Thank you again for all you are doing to make this troubled period in our human journey less troubled.  We need to get through this treacherous moment.  We have little choice but to do so. We count on your energies and gifts to that end.

Warmest regards and blessings in this season from all of us,  

Bob

Dr. Robert Zuber