Storytelling

Hercules and the Hydra, and the story of the Biblical Jubilee, are two very different semi-mythological stories that play foundational roles in the larger story of Western civilization itself. What can we learn from them?

Storytelling is a quintessential human activity. When people ask me my reading preferences, I must confess that they tend towards nonfiction. Yet storytelling is everywhere, and is inherent in all we do, including reading and writing nonfiction. Including even the "scientific method" itself. For what is an hypothesis we pronounce and then aim to prove, but a story of a certain kind?

Lately, we hear a lot about "fake news". The notion of "fake news" is itself authoritarian, even if we believe that objective truth is available for us to know. Because "fake news" presupposes that there is an obvious, objective truth, which we can arrive at by snapping our fingers or, more usually, listening to some authority figures, usually on the TV or in the "official" press, snapping theirs, usually accompanied by "experts" they chose. No wonder people are sceptical about it, when they discover there are many "stories" to choose from, and they can just as well choose the one that pleases their own personal fancy, as any other. That much, for good or ill, has been a gift of the Internet age.

We are constantly telling stories, and that can be a very salutary thing. To pretend that there is some kind of impenetrable firewall between stories and truth is a basic misunderstanding of the scientific method. Scientific truths are no more handed down by God from on high than any particular story, fictional or otherwise, necessarily is. And yet, any story automatically has a kernel of truth in it by the very nature of its effects on our thinking and our lives.

Stories always form the horizons and limits of our understanding of the world and its possibilities. In the book, "Many Headed Hydra", historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Reddiker refer repeatedly to semi-mythological stories, like that of Hercules and the Hydra from Greek mythology, and the Jubilee from the Bible, that in times past were foundational to many of our ancestors' ways of thinking about the world.

The stories of Hercules and the Hydra, contrasted with those of the Biblical Jubilee, represent almost opposite poles in the mythological underpinnings of the modern world. Hercules represented the metahistorical "Great Man", whose mighty individual strength puts down and defeats the disorderly and rebellious masses of commonfolk, represented by the Hydra. The commoners are embodied by the monstrous Hydra, an inhuman and ominous threat to all of civilization, which must be tamed, if not outright exterminated, to save the latter. The Great Man, Hercules, is the hero whose efforts attain this feat.

By contrast, the story of the Bibilical Jubilee, when all prisoners were set free, all debts forgiven, and the property of the great and powerful redistributed to the commoners, represented a great hope for moral and physical redemption, right here in this world and this life, for the downtrodden and struggling masses.

Whether a Jubilee ever actually occurred exactly as people understood it from reading the Bible was hardly crucial to the inspiration they drew from it. Likewise, whether a superman like Hercules ever really lived was hardly important to the social elites who drew inspiration from his myth.

Likewise, in our own times, the ignorance of stories like those of the Jubilee (or, for that matter, the origins and significance of the Herculean myth) represent a profound handicap for the moral imaginations of ordinary people. The particular facts of history are far less relevant than the impact they have (or the limitations they place) on the imaginations of those who do (or do not) learn them.

The Honorable Harvest

Extreme individualism harms the human individual.

The doctrine and philosophy of extreme individualism is, like an excess of a nutrient like vitamin A, harmful and potentially lethal to actual human individuals, both those who espouse it, and those who must live around and with them.

The ideological structure of the USA, its politics and society, privileges individualism above all else. The watchwords of the American revoltuion were “life, liberty, and property” (modified, in the Declaration of Independence, to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, which must have sounded less crass). Still, these are attributes pertaining to individuals only. It’s a striking fact, especially since the society of that time was far less obsessive in its individualism then, by economic necessity, in an historical epoch when most people were farmers and rural folk who depended on their neighbors for a multitude of forms of assistance, like barnraisings, than it is today, in a mostly urban population largely estranged from the activities of real production and subsistence. Being “lonely amidst a crowd” in the city is a commonplace observation.

When the individual comes to really believe that he or she is alone in the world, and reliant solely on his or her own efforts, the possibility or even the thought of any collective activity towards the common good becomes remote. The very notion of a “democracy” depends on some thought towards such a common good and working towards it, and it likewise becomes remote and unattainable.

No doubt such thoughts influenced the philosopher Victor Frankl, when he urgently proposed that postwar America seriously consider building a “Statue of Responsibility,” to offer some counterbalance to its existing Statue of Liberty. For what can “responsibility” possibly mean, if not responsibility to others?

The false opposition between the individual and the common good can be considered the cornerstone of the “American ideology” (aka “American Dream”), par excellence. Instead of comparing it to Socialism, or Communism, or other ideologies, we can most readily contrast it with another, much older ideal for the goals of human existence that was clearly already native to these shores, once called “Turtle Island” by some of its original inhabitants, and which predated what is now known as the “American Dream”. The botanist and Native American (Potawatomi) writer, Robin Wall Kimmerer, beautifully evokes this other worldview in her 2013 book, “Braiding Sweetgrass”

In “Braiding Sweetgrass”, the author relates the relationship and worldview of native peoples of the Americas, one which survives to this day for some, in which the Earth and its other creatures are co-equals in meaning and significance to human beings, and to which the latter owe a debt of gratitude and reciprocity. Indeed, the principles of gratitude and reciprocity form the cornerstone of their relations to both the world and each other. The author describes a guiding and overarching code of conduct that she says forms the most fundamental of moral teachings for native peoples, at the heart of which is what she calls “the Honorable Harvest”. The Honorable Harvest is entirely incompatible with individualism as an ideology privileging the individual for its own sake. In the indigenous understanding of the world, the individual is entirely dependent on a web of relationships for his or her own survival. An imbalance in these relationships can quickly lead to disaster. Our own actions, whether through greed, or laziness, or inattention, can always threaten such a disaster. Responsibility to the whole becomes paramount.

There are four precepts required for observing the Honorable Harvest:

• Take only what is given;
• Use it well;
• Be grateful for the gift;
• Reciprocate the gift.

For the native peoples of this land, it was evident that all of life abounded with gifts that they could not possibly have produced by themselves alone. Gratitude came easily and naturally under such circumstances. But for the mostly European settlers who supplanted them, the good things in life were literally “goods”, often commodities to be bought and sold, but only after being wrested by force from the Earth.

It is easy to see how the doctrine of individualism as a paramount end unto itself arises naturally from the latter worldview. The growth of consumer capitalism carries it to its apogee.

Recently, I read that the rate of suicide is reaching epidemic proportions. In some places and age groups, it is now the leading cause of death, rivaling or surpassing car crashes. The Brave New World of the “rugged individual” appears not so rosy anymore.

Can the Honorable Harvest Kimmerer describes become an antidote to modern anomie and despair? Can we recover a different outlook on life, and intentionally cultivate the kind of gratitude that once came naturally to many people?

Bosses Against Meditation

“Hey, boss, you don’t want your workers meditating”, screams a provocative New York Times headline.

The article purports to relate the results of research which is supposed to be controversial and attention-grabbing. Surprise: meditation makes workers less motivated to make more money for their employers (and themselves), not more!

Of course, anybody familiar with meditation and other mindfulness practices would not be surprised by this conclusion.

The article is thought provoking, though, but not for the reasons the author thinks.

The article takes it as a given that the sole measure of the legitimacy of any worker’s activities is whether it contributes to an employer’s “bottom line”.

Now, anyone can easily think of rebuttals to such an argument. Doesn’t an employer care about whether that worker can get along with others in a harmonious way? Can’t a person who enjoys greater serenity and confidence around others contribute to an employer’s bottom line in other ways, not as easily quantified, but still real and valuable?

However, such arguments are hardly rebuttals to the basic assumptions of the author. Because the author takes for granted, for example, that the wellbeing of the employer, by whatever measure chosen by him or her, is the problem of paramount concern, and that the worker – or at least that portion of the substance of the worker’s life, his or her time spent in his employment by his boss – is the only valid measure of any activity by the worker. The worker, in short, is truly a “wage slave”, and except for whatever laws and regulations by which the government has deemed fit to limit him, an employer may do with his worker as he sees fit. Whereas, for the worker, it is “not his to reason why, his but to do or die.”

Lest we accept such an ideology at face value as the natural order of things, it is worth pointing out that, had the original US labor movement, born after the American Civil War, succeeded in its complete program and objectives, the rights of workers would have been founded on the basis of the 13th amendment of the US Constitution, that which prohibits slavery, and therefore would have been taken to be inalienable human rights. As it turned out Instead, however, the judicial branch did uphold the power of government to regulate the conditions and wages of workers against challenges by employers made under the doctrine of the supposed sanctity of “freedom of contract”, but those judges, of both past and present, based their decisions on the Commerce Clause and the power of the federal government to regulate all interstate commerce. Therefore, labor became an article of “commerce”, akin to a box of wigs or a bushel of wheat, as opposed to the substance of the life of a free man or woman.

These are the assumptions and this is the jumping off point for an article such as the one that lately appeared in the New York Times. This is what the radical Italian philosopher and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci meant by “hegemony”: the power to dictate ideological discourse so forcefully that it becomes axiomatic, so that one can write an article such as this based on assumptions – such as the greed of an employer and his absolute right to use his employees to serve that greed as he sees fit – with scarcely a thought that the public might bat an eyelash at them. More likely still, such a thought did not even occur to the author himself.

Delusions are endless

What are delusions? In Buddhism, a delusion is a form of misunderstanding that is not necessarily strictly voluntary nor involuntary. Certainly it is true that delusions can be willfully indulged. Sometimes the expression "wishful thinking" approximates this kind of delusion. Other times, the misunderstanind might be inadvertent. Seen another way, though, we can never be certain, because we can arrive at a misunderstanding in so many ways. For example, laziness, haste, failure to take the time to carefully observe, or other mistakes can cause us to shortcircuit the process of discernment that could have resulted in a better understanding of a situation. Other times, we may willfully indulge in averting our gaze from unpleasant truths, and become so practiced at that bad habit that we forget we are even doing it, and start to believe sincerely in the wishful thinking we are actively cultivating.

Such an outcome should not come as a surprise. Habits eventually harden into character, ie, a set of traits that we cannot simply will away, even when we start to actively regret them, in other words, they are not completely voluntary anymore.

I have a close relative who often expresses puzzlement or annoyance at my deliberate avoidance of any packaged and processed foods. I have a lot of reasons for this avoidance. I know that any food that is packaged has to produce a profit for multiple middlemen. That leaves a strong incentive for those intermediate parties between me and the original harvester, farmer, or other producer to cut corners in the quality of the ingredients used, the care taken with them in the packaging and production, and so on, to ensure an adequate profit after all their expenses are taken into account.

The more middlemen, the more acute the problem. I have often shared with this relative snippets from the endless barrage of articles that come out every day about contamination of industrial food products, everything from melamine in dog and baby food, to willful use of moldy ingredients in canned tomatoes, to heavy metal contamination of corn syrup and illicit importation of Chinese products like "counterfeit" honey (honey that has been dilluted illegally with cheaper adulterants like contaminated corn syrup, and ultrafiltrated to remove any traces of pollen, preventing palynologists from tracing its sources -- products cannot be legally labelled as honey in the first place if all pollen has been removed from it, because any real honey always contains pollen, but pollen also allows forensic investigators to trace its source to within a few miles, since pollen from every locality has very distinct characteristics, so organized crime interests who know this will cover their tracks, even though the ultrafiltration raises the production cost of the illicit product).

The industrial economy presents us with an apparent cornucopia of products, most of which are useless if not actively harmful to our long term personal and planetary health. We cannot kick the habit though, because among other things, an entire "better-living-through-chemistry" generation has grown up accepting these things as givens, without question, and no amount of factual information will "stick" with most of them that there is a deadly urgent problem afoot. Staring these truths in the face would put them too far outside of their comfort zone. The delusion here is definitely neither strictly voluntary nor involuntary.

When I retell my relative the same information six months or a year or two years later, they sincerely express astonishment and swear it is the first they ever heard all this. And it's not on account of age-associated memory loss, because they don't exhibit any other kind of forgetfulness.

Delusion is the foundation of the entire industrial economy. It is evident to even a child who hears any tv news segment today that our civilization is careening towards oblivion. Only a rigorous habit of distraction and obliviousness can obscure that truth. Alas, precisely such a habit is omnipresent and at work every day to keep us on track for the approaching apocalypse.