“A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no
religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear
of punishment and hope of reward after death.”
–Albert Einstein
Twenty-five years ago Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon because Lennon was “a
celebrity.” The irony of this would not be lost on the songwriter, whose “Imagine” became an
anthem after his death. In it, Lennon postulates a world in which we are all able “to live as one,” a
world without a heaven, with “nothing to kill or die for,” and “no religion too.” That he should be
felled by a deranged fan, an adherent to the least principled of all modern cults, the cult of
celebrity, adds to the ex-Beatle’s tragic, poetic arc.
Arguably, the retribution was itself divine, as Lennon was a member of a band self-described as
being “bigger than Jesus.” But then, he was being ironic, just as he was in “Imagine”; his anthem
was irony. It’s not a heaven that’s the problem, nor even the religions we ride there. Rather, it’s
the rotten way we treat the concepts of faith and destiny, using our prizes of harps and wings and
eternal life, our promises of 40 virgins (and a mule) as justification for all manner of earthly
malfeasance. If we allow ourselves to be judged solely on principles that extend beyond the here-
and-now and beyond our bonds of “sympathy, education, and social ties,” as Einstein put it, then
we can easily create any means we like to fit those ends. There simply is no need for reality-
checking nor for factoring in such petty concerns as human suffering when your place in the holy
choir is at stake. Car bombings are just as legitimate as carpet bombings when you are blessed and
they are infidels. Innocents who may happen to get in the way and get turned into jelly need not
fear; if they are truly innocent, they’ll go to heaven no matter how they die.
This past week, George W. Bush, the fundamentalist Christian we call president, flippantly told a
reporter that the number of Iraqis killed in his recently ordered invasion and current occupation of
their country was “about 30,000.” He later expressed no regret about this, even though the
respected Brookings Institution has estimated that two-thirds of the dead–20,000 people–were
non-combatants. Mr. Bush admitted that the intelligence he used to invade Iraq was “flawed” but
that he would do it all again anyway.
With the blood of 20,000 innocent people on his hands, George W. Bush seems to simply not
care. He does not care precisely because this war is not about weapons of mass destruction as his
“flawed” intelligence claimed. It is not about freeing the Iraqis from the horrible dictatorship of
Saddam Hussein as Bush now claims–after all, there are plenty of people more in need of
liberation, such as the North Koreans, the Burmans, the Sudanese. And anyway, 30,000 is about
the number of his own people Saddam himself killed outright (if you discount his eight-year war
with Iran). No, the real reasons are the need for Bush to prove himself to his father, who did not
accomplish ousting Saddam, and the needs of the eschatological aims of fundamentalist
Christianity. As neoconservative advisors to the president put it, this is the contention that you
reach “Jerusalem through Baghdad.” Since Iraq is the source of instability in the Middle-East, the
theory goes, it is what is preventing the stability required for the Temple of David to be rebuilt in
Jerusalem and the events of the Book of Revelation to be set in motion.
This idea is nuts, of course. It not only ignores political realities, it completely distorts the biblical
text. But it is easy for Bush to believe because of his religion and because, of those 20,000
innocents, Bush has social ties with exactly none. And because of his upbringing as the son of
rich, well-connected parents, living a life of privilege and having had his many failed businesses
bailed out by various Saudi royals, Bush has no sympathy with those too poor and ill-connected
to be under the bombs when they fall instead of safely on the golf course or cutting brush on the
ranch. Because he is ill-educated in faith, history, and the humanities, Bush is largely incapable of
imagining the plight of the Iraqi people who, after a decade of crippling international sanctions
and 30 years of Ba’athist rule, were hungry for liberation but not for more death. Absent
Einstein’s three qualifiers for ethical behavior, Bush could hardly be expected to act in a decent
way.
But I wonder how many of these–sympathy, education, and social ties–most human beings can
reasonably maintain. We have more people with college degrees in this country than ever before,
but few of them can we call truly “educated,” as colleges and universities have become glorified
trade schools to meet the demands of the market. Sympathy is an abstraction that requires having
lived among others to concretize, and as our communities balkanize, our spheres of experience
contract to home and work and retail space. Even our media experiences have narrowed to “all
food” or “all racing” or “all women’s tennis on clay courts” all the time. It becomes increasingly
difficult to understand how others see the world. Few of us ever read, and those who do have
similar options to read only within their tiny slice of interests: westerns, techno-drama, sci-fi,
romance.
Social ties, too, collapse as we pick up and move every five years, on average, in pursuit of more
dollars, cushier digs, the illusion of safety and quiet. Cities, divested of their high-income earners
by the siren call of the suburbs, can ill-afford to care for their homeless and starving, and business
long ago abdicated any responsibility it once might have felt for the health and the safety of
workers. Our own loyalties have dropped off in kind: why get close to a neighbor you won’t
know anymore in a few months’ time? Why be loyal to a boss who would just as soon get you off
his payroll to curry-favor with investors than look at you?
Maybe America especially needs religion, with all the dopiness Marx described, to fill in with the
heat from below and its riches above when our sympathies and educations and social ties wear
thin from the grinding of war and economic uncertainly and disdainful rule. Maybe Einstein’s
ideal–and Lennon’s–can only work as ideals; maybe the raw chaos and stupidity and dullness of
most of us can be made to feel in no other way than the harp and the whip.
When Mark David Chapman pulled the trigger and George W. Bush gave the order to invade they
were both practicing faith, both reaching out for something greater. He problem they both faced
was a breakdown of their respective religions. But for stultifyingly average men like these,
perhaps that is the best they could do.
Nixon II: Electric Bugaloo.
(just keeps gettin’ deeper.)
Having been a student and an instructor at both small, private colleges and large, state-funded research institutions, I have found the following guidelines, while not guarantees, keys to succeeding in higher education:
1. Go to class. Sure, you’ll have some huge classes in which you’ll not be missed, but those actually constitute a minority of the classes you’re likely to take. And, contrary to popular belief, a lot of knowledge (and even some wisdom!) is imparted in the classroom itself. It’s also where changes in course policy and/or scheduling are announced. At any rate, somebody is paying a lot of money for you to be there, so you may as well show up.
2. Do your work. It seems simple, but keeping up on assignments, even if you do them poorly, is still a very important part of making it in college. If you’re dismally bad at your assignments, get help. Just about all colleges offer it , and there’s no shame in availing yourself of it. You paid for it with your tuition, after all, and therefore you have every right to use it.
3. If you’re getting bad grades, find out why, and fix the problem. Most instructors comment on written assignments. Read these comments and adjust accordingly. They’re not doing this to be tyrants (well, most of them aren’t); they’ve been studying their subjects for a long time and, for the most part, know what they’re talking about. Rarely are bad grades given out of spite. Most of your instructors are either indifferent to you personally or like you in the vague sort of way one likes all human beings. They honestly don’t have the time nor the energy for personal vendettas, especially at research institutions. In those cases, your instructors are far more worried about their next publications and satisfying their tenure committees than they are about you and your snotty attitude. This only holds unless you’re caught plagiarizing or cheating in some other way. Then they take it personally. Very personally.
4. Party, nap, stay up all night. As long as it does not interfere with guidelines 1 through 3, nobody really cares. But don’t nap in class or your instructors will think you’re a dolt. Having said that, it is generally true that students who party or stay up all night every night or sleep all day every day are unable to keep up on their work and/or make it to class and flunk out. Once in a while, some preternatural genius is able to get a 4.0 drunk, stoned, sleep-deprived and hung-over. If you’re not sure this person is you, it probably isn’t and you shouldn’t try it. If you’re absolutely sure this person is you, it probably isn’t and you shouldn’t try it. I’m not saying that you should never kick up your heels or should never try out that new beer bong; nearly all students party some. It’s just that the successful students party after they get their work done, not before.
This list doesn’t even try to get into the finer points of what it takes to be an educated person, doesn’t get into reading more than is required, doesn’t touch on being inquisitive and open to new ideas. This list deals with the bare minimum. But if you want to step into the great educational beyond, if you begin to learn wherever you are–in the movie theater seeing Slaw II, watching Grillmore Girls, playing World of Wartcraft, listening to Death Club for Cuntie, doing those wacky thing you college kids do–you’ve already graduated into being the sort of person your instructors want to help. You have become the kind of person who makes an instructor’s class time worthwhile. In that case, congratulations: you have discovered what education is really about.
Diane Ackerman defines pain as more a matter of culture and tradition than of physical sensation caused by nerve stimulation. She writes of the way a fakir’s flesh begins to sear and cook as he walks across hot coals and the fact that soccer players don’t feel their injuries until after the game ends. In my own experience as a shade-tree mechanic, I have often broken knuckles wide open and not realized it until I looked down and saw a line of fresh blood on the handle of the wrench.
Perception of pain is all governed by the brain, after all, and the brain is full of tricks. Well trained (or well distracted), it can make the most excruciating circumstances appear commonplace. But the brain also needs that pain–feeds on it as it feeds on all sense perceptions. The brain needs pain not just as an indicator of physical damage but as an acknowledgment of suffering. It is through suffering that we come to know how to be human. It is through suffering that we come to understand one another.
Zen Buddhism recognizes this, that the human condition is defined by suffering–indeed, that to be alive is itself to suffer. Judaism and Christianity both recognize this in the story of The Fall: the Judeo-Christian foundation story is the story of how our partaking of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil leads us into sin (ie. suffering). The fruit is not of knowledge simply, but of the knowledge of good and evil. Knowledge is not to blame, but rather the awareness of being favored or wronged, the ability to discern good and evil, is what both makes us “like God” and causes our most basic transgression. It is the foundational myth because it defines human nature: our sin causes us to toil, and to toil is to suffer.
This myth, like all creation stories, is descriptive: it tells us who we are in relation to the rest of the world. In the case of the Judeo-Christian foundation story, then, we humans may be defined as those who suffer.
Suffering is at the heart of the Torah, a vein that courses with the spiritual blood of the people of Israel. No people have learned or created more from their pain. The tragedies of the Jews have helped us see how suffering makes us, in the end, not less human, but more noble, more, if you will, like God.
This is echoed in the early Christian experience in the symbolism of the Crucifixion and the scene of suffering as re-visioned as the Resurrection. Unlike the Genesis story, which described the human condition, the Resurrection describes the human capacity for re-creation, for the healing that suffering implies. In this it reflects all mythologies of death and re-creation, from the Phoenix to Persephone. Sadly, too many of those who call themselves Christian don’t understand the symbolic importance of this and instead get bogged down in idiotic squabbles over the scene’s veracity. It is simply unimportant that we should or should not live like Jesus–at least not literally, for that would be suicide–but that we do already: we die and are reborn through bouts of physical pain, depression, anger, even the normal cycles of sleeping and wakefulness. If we recognize this in one another, Christians should preach, we will be more likely to practice forgiveness.
Buddhism, likewise, echoes death and rebirth through the life-cycles moving toward Nirvana. But it recognizes the more immediate cycles of suffering through meditation. The breath draws in suffering and draws out inter-being. Through mindfulness we heal the schism of our isolation as individual beings. Sin, thought Paul Tillich, is separation. It is the suffering of being apart, of being unable to understand our pain as anything other than that which is inflicted upon us by evil, by accident, by the inexorable forces of an indifferent world.
Since culture is the tool we use to interact with others and our environment, it has a role to play in the creation and the regulation of suffering. Rather than being a set of controlling metaphors that debate how we live, culture, when it is functioning, reflects that delicate interplay between pain as individual experience and suffering as a means of understanding. When the traditions through which we worship and play, through which we practice fellowship and build and destroy are working well, they determine not only when we feel pain but define the instruments through which we breach the dam between the spirit and the blood.
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