One of my favorite sayings, which was from my first Zen teacher, is “We all live in a box, and the walls of the box consist of who we think we are and what we think life should be.”
There are some heavy-duty spiritual implications in the quote that I’m mostly going to skip here. The important point is that the box is, in a way, a contrivance; a fantasy; a delusion. Ultimately, there is no box. Yet we live in it anyway, and stepping outside of it is unthinkable for most of us.
Civilization itself is a kind of meta-box, or net connecting all the boxes, created by our collective projections and conditionings. Civilization can be understood as an intricate net of assumptions and agreements that allow us to live together and deal with each other in complex ways. This net has been crafted from ancient times, and each generation has added a little more to it. We are conditioned from birth to accept civilization as it exists in our time, and it’s so “normal” to us we often are oblivious to what a complex and astonishing thing it has become. It’s like air to us; we take it for granted.
Remember also that we humans are social creatures, wired to form associations with other humans to survive. And I mean “wired” in a physiological sense. Infants and small children deprived of social contact have been found to have abnormal brain development. Adults isolated from other humans will develop all kinds of psychological problems. We literally need each other to be who we are.
But let’s get back to civilization. Modern civilization is elaborately integrated. The web grows tighter and tighter. Our “normal” life, maintaining the box we live in, depends increasingly on very complex interconnections with the other boxes even for basic things like food and shelter, never mind Internet connection.
As recently as 150 years ago it wasn’t uncommon for someone to build a cabin in the woods on unclaimed property and live off the land. It may have been a nasty, brutish, and short life by our standards, but it was within culturally accepted norms of the time. There may be a handful of people today who could still do that, but for the enormous majority it’s not an option. Even if they had the survival skills, which most don’t, there’s not enough wilderness left to accommodate all the disaffected people of the world. And, frankly, the box most of us live in wouldn’t allow for it, anyway.
These days, in developed nations anyway, life in the box requires connection to the power grid and clean running water brought to us from distant reservoirs. We depend on commerce to make food and clothing available. We depend on an intricate, and often capricious, legal and financial system to create shelters we can live in. We are required to find some means of adding value to the commercial and financial systems to that we can receive credits (money) to exchange for what we need and want. And we are drawn like ants to honey to new communication technologies, so that we can interconnect with each other to our heart’s content.
This is the box we live in. This is who we think we are and what we think life should be. Our dependencies on each other are not negated by money — I paid for this! Nobody gave it to me! Indeed, the paper we carry in our wallet or the numbers in our bank accounts have value only because they are integral parts of our system of inter- dependencies. Otherwise, they would be valueless. And if we were challenged to cobble our own shoes, build our own shelters, or grow our own food, most of us would make a botch of it.
This also is why Ayn Randism and the “John Galt” pledge are so ridiculous. We cannot live for ourselves alone; it is not possible, whether we like it or not. We either live for each other, or we are cut off from civilization, and we die. People who think they really are living for themselves alone are oblivious to reality. (They also tend to be assholes, but that’s another rant.)
(And, seriously, if living for yourself alone is so all-fired important to you, why bother to reach out to other people and ask them to sign a John Galt Pledge on the Web? What this tells us is that Randism is a kind of romantic fantasy, and if that’s the box you live in you want other people to buy into the fantasy and reinforce it. That’s very human, and also utterly absurd.)
So let’s look at what’s been going on with civilization in our lifetimes. Even as the net grows tighter, ancient ethnic, racial and cultural boundaries are growing blurry. We’re literally finding new ways to form tribal associations, and the old ways rapidly are losing their function and significance.
Nations still play important functions in civilization, and I don’t see the phenomenon of the nation-state dissolving anytime soon. But it may be indicative of something that nations don’t seem to declare war on each other any more. Armed conflicts are waged by extra-national movements these days. I think this indicates a significant shift in the role of the nation in human civilization, although exactly where this is taking us is hard to say.
The changes occurring to civilization, many of which are being driven by rapid technological advances, are challenging the integrity of many boxes. If the box you live in depends on clearly drawn racial divisions, for example, the blurring of racial boundaries is very distressing. And people experience challenges to the integrity of the boxes they live in as existential threats. So, while some of us embrace modernity, others of us are recoiling in horror.
And this takes us to fundamentalism. The scholar Karen Armstrong defines fundamentalism as a “militant religiosity” that is a “reaction against and a rejection of modern Western society.” I would turn that around a bit and say that religious fundamentalism is a kind of social pathology that expresses itself as religion. Although the pathology comes in a religious package, the pathology, not the religion, is the driving force. I say that because, time and time again, we see that any teachings of the religion being used as the container are ignored if they conflict with the pathology.
By the same token, I say that current “movement conservatism” is a social pathology expressing itself as political ideology. Conservatism has taken on many of the attributes scholars associate with fundamentalism, such as the view that they are engaged in a cosmic struggle between absolute good and absolute evil. They also “affirm their identity by selecting doctrines and practices from the past,” one of the markers of fundamentalism in this review of one of Armstrong’s books. They’re adopting rigid doctrines about taxes and monetary policy, often without even a glimmer of understanding how taxes and the monetary system work. They accept the doctrines of the tribe because those are the doctrines of the tribe. Oh, and freedom.
It’s getting uglier and uglier because many people are living in boxes that are utterly out of sync with the way civilization really works these days. Eventually this will fade, but not in our lifetimes. Until then, we’re going to have to put up with lots of people who are raving and fearful and irrationally thrashing about in all directions because the box they live in is threatened by modernity. So be it.
One of the things that strikes me, over and over again, about the reactionaries calling themselves conservatives these days is the degree to which they are utterly oblivious to the interconnections. You’ve got a Republican presidential ticket made up of two guys born into wealth and privilege who see themselves as self-made men, and don’t understand why everyone can’t be as successful as they are. You’ve got the baggers in Medicare-paid power scooters rallying against socialized medicine.
And then there’s the “you didn’t build that” flap. You can’t explain to the baggers that the President was talking about essential infrastructure. They deny that business needs infrastructure. Build a nail salon and they will come, I suppose. I actually ran into someone on a Web forum who refused to believe that business needs stuff like roads and utilities. They built Las Vegas in the desert, didn’t they?
This morning’s rant was touched off by a comment on this page. JETHRO212 wrote,
The ironic thing is, if you listen to the entire Obama “You didn’t build dat” thing, it gets way worse, if you listen to the whole thing he goes way off into it wouldn’t even be possible to have a business without Government.
But … it really isn’t possible to have a business, as we understand business, without government. Currency? Government. Without government, we’d resort to a barter system; we really would be taking chickens to the doctor. Contracts? Without a legal system, contracts are worthless. Legal system? Government. Someone robs your store, you call the police. Police? Government. Without government, the only people in business are mobs and pirates. Civilization itself was built on the premise that somebody is in charge and makes the rules. In recorded history there has never been a human society that didn’t have some kind of government, even if just a tribal chief who got the honor by beating up all the other chief candidates.
I have a fantasy that all the wingnuts who want to “go galt” be given a big tract of land somewhere and allowed to take whatever power generators, tools, and means to produce food they can carry, and then they can be on their own. And as long as they stay on the “res,” and didn’t interact with the rest of society, they wouldn’t have to pay taxes. They also forfeit all government benefits, of course. But they could build whatever they wanted and be self-made men (and, trust me, most of ’em would be men) all day long.
I’d give it two years, tops.
Excellent post.
I also note the sphere of Christianity impossibly crammed into the Borg-cube box of Randism, by the likes of Mr. Ryan. Jesus preached constantly about caring for others; Ayn Rand disparaged both this preaching and its author. And Paul Ryan is too shallow to detect any conflict.
I heard an interesting rumor yesterday, among the snarkaholic commenters at Wonkette. They suggested that, late in life, Ayn Rand used her married name (husband a painter; Frank O’Something?) to receive Social Security payments. I haven’t the stomach to research her bio, especially its many hidden sections, for confirmation, but the thought made me laugh. She was a dreadful, needy hypocrite, so I wouldn’t be surprised.
As usual, you are too kind and charitable! I’d give it two days, tops.
WOW, maha, good job. I’m reminded of the number of American companies/corporations which moved offices etc. to Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. They saw a mass of citizenry hungry for what had been a dearth of consumer goods and they would provide them.
How many are still in Russia. Not many, if any of consequence. Russia’s infrastructure at the time was so non-functioning that it was simply unable to provide what any modern business must have in place to do business.
As to the effects of modern society on today’s people, they are profound. Ours has been called the “remote control” society where we have been conditioned to expect to live life without-having-to-get-up-to-change-channels – thus “remote control.”
Another perhaps seemingly small but I’d argue profound difference between the time when a rural life was a way of life and now when it no longer exists (at least in developed countries) is we no longer are ‘forced’ to spend any time thinking, just thinking and all it entails. When we tended flocks we were basically alone for most of our waking hours – we were ‘forced’ to think, in other words.
Needless to say, I really appreciate your post today.
These sociopathic wannabe combo’s of John Galt and Daniel Boone wouldn’t last more than a fortnight on their own, maha.
And you’re right, most of, if not all of them, would be men.
They are selfish and self-important, not self-reliant.
More ready to shoot themselves in the foot than to shoot some game, to whine than to make their own wine, and to bitch than dig a ditch.
For most of them, after a week without their Blackberries, cable tv, and internet porn, they’d be sending out smoke signals and homing pigeon, or signaling with shiny objects to any airplanes over them, for someone to rescue their sorry, miserable, hungry, wet, and scared, asses.
If only their intellect’s were as great as their ego’s, and they felt as much empathy for others as love for themselves.
But like you can’t explain it’s place in the universe to a ficus, you can’t explain reality to these selfish sociopaths.
How can the Earth circle the Sun, when the Universe revolves around them?
My comment went into the intertubes, and got stuck somewhere.
Oh, shoot, I forgot – I spelled out p-o-r-n!
“I say that because, time and time again, we see that any teachings of the religion being used as the container are ignored if they conflict with the pathology.”
As I have mentioned before, I live in a community that was formed by a fundamentalist church. I get along fine with my neighbors despite political and spiritual differences. But, I have noticed something odd about them and my fundamentalist friends on facebook. I can’t remember ever hearing any of them talk about Jesus or his teachings in any meaningful way. There are a lot of calls to prayer and citations of Old Testament laws and prophecies. Usually, these are interwoven with some right wing political agenda, although the prayers are usually about people in need. Guys like Newt Gingrich talk about the “secularization” of America, but, I think many fundamentalists that I know personally, have secularized their own religion. They have made it into a political party. When I hear some of the opinions they express, I wonder how they could have even a nodding acquaintance with the teachings of Jesus.
Superb post! Right on the money, IMO.
But as erewhon says: I’d give it two days, tops.
Especially if you allowed them to lug in all the weapons they would want, along with the generators and stuff.
Yes, Felicity. I think you are right. For what it’s worth. I still spend most of my work time in nonhuman company. We killed out TV eleven years ago and I don’t do ipods, the goats would probably eat it (the iPod) anyway.
Some of the most enjoyable time is when I’m mending fences or something and I get to thinking. I guess it would pretty much fit the “monkey chatter” category. But, most of us live in a world where there is always something to throttle the inner voice. Usually, it’s something “entertaining”. I guess what I am saying is, that to the extent I have experienced the rural life, it does “force” you to entertain yourself and to think. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make you good at thinking, but that never stopped anybody.
By the way, I saw a coyote out by our barn this morning. We’ve lost some hens lately and he would be more than a match for any of our dogs, so the entertainment today has been a bit edgy.
Goatherd, if your coyote is receiving packages from amazon.com (today’s “Acme Corp.”), you’re in luck; sooner or later he’ll self-destruct like an Objectivist in the wilderness.
Otherwise, you may need to shoot him. It’s a hard world.
I vote for Arizona, but only with a very secure border. The trafficking with Mexico would be so heavy we’d need a war on air conditioners. What a great reality show – two days, definitely.
We need job training schools for cult deprogrammers.
GOP libertarianism is particularly vile, because the jettison the “good” part — Gov’t not messing with people’s lives (personal liberties)– and keep the ugly part– Gov’t doesn’t help you either.
Dubious as the life of Ayn Rand may be, I think she would have sued had she lived to hear anti-choice White Supremacists, like the Paul clan invoking her name.
Excellent post, Maha..It’s so uplifting to hear the voice of understanding and wisdom..I thank you.
” my sheep, they hear my voice”
@joanr16. Yes, Rand collected Soc. Sec. and Medicare. She filed under the name “Ann O’Connor”. I recall seeing her S.S. record online. A social worker explained to her that she had paid in and was entitled to her benefits. Plus, her income wouldn’t meet her medical needs so Medicare was necessary. Apparently, Rand kicked up a fuss but finally conceded to the logic of finances. Probably not hypocrisy but rather acceptance of reality.
What’s worse than reading Ayn Rand is having a idiot son named in her honor.
Julie, I consider Ms. Rand to be a hypocrite mostly because she expected everyone around her– her husband and her acolytes– to sacrifice their needs for hers. This while writing crap like Atlas Shrugged.
Thanks for explaining the SS and Medicare story! I do wonder, though, who she thought set up and administered those systems? Leprechauns?
joanr16.. In Ayn’s defense..She only wrote a work fiction,she can’t be blamed if others distorted her work into the immutable and inerrant word of conservatism.
One of the first things those Galtians would do, of course, would be to form some kind of government, to secure and protect their holdings against the rabble outside and to maintain their own internal order.
Identifcation request: Urgent
Sir: Have spotted late model Volvo. Florida license tag# XOX-SJU. Bumper sticker reading: Who is John Galt?
Conservative or Liberal?
Swami, it’s a work of fiction so very badly written there is no defense. And let’s remember, she did try to pass off “Objectivism” as an actual philosophy. Without even getting a mail-order philosopher’s certificate or nothin. Scam artist!
Ha, a Volvo with a John Galt bumper sticker! Conundrum!
thank you, maha, especially for this:
“religious fundamentalism is a kind of social pathology that expresses itself as religion”
And, as for needing government, here’s a small story: I used to work in a law firm that had clients living in Mexico. We tried to send them documents via the Mexican mail system and the documents never reached the clients. I phoned them; phones were sporadic in the area of Mexico where they lived (this was pre-cell phone).
Nex time we saw them, we asked them what had happened. They said, “Never mail anything to us in Mexico, the postal service throws half the mail in the trash.” They used a mixture of private delivery services and friends coming to visit to get documents essential to their business delivered to them in Mexico.
Yes, you need a functioning government to do business.
As for the reactionaries, ship them all to South Carolina.
Just think, Karl Rove and his ilk would soon be on the other end of the gun, and bereft of all their valuables in no time flat!
Of course, having generators would not be at all valuable, since they could not acquire petroleum products to run them! Wood for heat, and bee’s wax for light is all they get, if they can get it themselves… Would we even allow them to trade amongst themselves???
Yes joanr16, it is indeed a hard world. Coyotes are particularly difficult to kill, even for very experienced hunters. By the time I got to a gun, he was slinking off. I’ll be pretty well armed whenever I go out over the next week or so. I really don’t much like playing cowboy, but sometimes it comes with the territory. A wild shot would hardly be fair to my neighbors, but, I have a very cool head in emergencies, so I have to prepare for the event. The sensible thing would be to get a couple of donkeys. They will fight wolves and coyotes and get the better of them.
I remember so many years ago, I was still moving us up from Florida. I was talking to my wife on the phone. A neighbor’s goat was killed by a feral dog (coyote?) My father-in-law, who was a flag rank naval intelligence officer was patrolling with a .357 in one hand and a vodka and lime in the other. I knew our little farm was in good hands.
I have to admit, I think I am ready for an urban setting in the EU. I hear rose is a very decent wine for a brunch there.
Anniecat45 yes I had some clients from Mexico and Subornos always had to be factored into the relocation fund. “Ellos son bien cabrones” was a phrase I heard often.
There’s a lot to talk about in your excellent post. I’ll only focus on a couple things.
There’s a progression in developmental psychology, that Steven Covey talks about in his famous Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Kids start out being dependent on adults, then independent, then hopefully they mature into interdependence. It’s no accident that Rand’s books speak most loudly to teen-age boys, who are very much in the normal developmental stage of working on the task of becoming independent from their parents. Her writings could be considered teen fiction. Most people get past this.
All the Galtian nonsense coming from the right is so much adolescent fantasy, the romantic outbursts of boy-men who haven’t gotten past this point. What interests me is how large numbers from an entire generation could get stuck in this adolescent phase, and not want or be able to move into interdependence. I don’t have the complete answer to this, but I do know it has its roots in how the baby boomer generation transitioned into Generation X. I’ve brought up The Fourth Turning before, and I’ll just say that it talks a lot about how one generation succeeds the next, and the social and political implications. It explains how warm and glorious summer – the height of liberalism – becomes autumn, and colder.
I’ve mentioned before the notion of the yugas, or ages of Man. While there is controversy over how these are calculated, I subscribe to the idea that we have entered dwapara yuga, or the age of energy, about a hundred or more years ago. There are several physical implications, including: the realization that matter is energy (Einstein in 1905), and the widespread utilization of energy, at a level exponentially greater than generations before.
The social implications are even more staggering: the collapse of distance, and the emphasis on the individual. Nobody is safe, because there is no longer really anywhere to hide. It’s been said that the United States, with its emphasis on individual freedom, was the first country born in the dwapara yuga. All the implications have yet to be fully played out, and it’s often very difficult for the kali yuga (the preceding darkest age, the age of materialism) to fully transition to the dwapara. It will take a couple hundred more years is my guess.
There are a couple implications I’d like to talk about. One is the end of isolation, which means the end of tribalism. We take it so for granted today, but as little as hundred years ago, few people in the US had ever seen a Hindu or (probably )a Buddhist, much less knew anything about them. Today that’s not possible. Advanced religious texts of nearly any tradition are now available to anyone from bookstores, which wasn’t true only a few decades ago. Contemporary spiritual masters use the internet and webinars to reach students located all over the globe. Difficult and expensive travel is no longer quite so necessary.
Because of the collapse of distance, there’s a great deal of pressure to move past the limited belief boxes of the past, which is tremendously threatening to those invested in them. I’d rephrase that: there’s a great deal of pressure to grow up. There’s a great deal of pressure to formulate a new spirituality which includes all the wisdom from all the traditions of the past. This revolution is inevitable when the physical boundaries and distance disappears.
The emphasis on the individual means, individuals become stronger than states. We saw this with how Osama Bin Laden suckered America into bloodying itself in the Middle East. Wingnuts who think we killed Bin Laden and therefore “won”, are wrong, and are fooled (as usual) by surface appearances. He is winning, and is laughing at us from beyond the grave.
The rise of the individual means the rise of a class of super wealthy people, who have no particular allegiance to any state. They can be philanthropists or greedheads. Think about the success of a Mark Zuckerberg, Mr Facebook – from an invention cooked up in his dorm room that is pure dwapara yuga – it collapses space between people, and is a runaway success.
Romney, with no allegiance to any one place, but definitely allied with money – is the political forerunner of these people – Matt Taibai so perceptively talked about it in his Rolling Stone article. Whether Romney explicitly says it or not, the message from his class is that countries and governments and taxes are for losers. Whether he’s aware of how these things got him to where he is now, or not. People from this class do need the services a country provides – a stable currency, the enforcement of contracts, and so on – but these can be obtained in many locales. The perspective of people in this class is worldwide. The saying “the world is their oyster” was never so true as it is with people from this class.
Finally, there is the fact that civilizations run on energy, and Joseph Tainter’s idea, that increasing complexity means that a civilization requires ever more energy. When that energy isn’t forthcoming, systems go through a collapse, a simplification, which can be dramatic. Ours is hitting the upper limits of what we’re able to extract from the ecosystem, given our present know-how and political will.
I’ve often felt that the average wingnut’s immature individualism and groupthink is really a generation’s cry to tear everything down and start over. It’s in concert with the energy limits our civilization is hitting. It’s in concert with the super wealthy, who don’t need a particular country and few of the complexities therewith, and are happy to feed the wingnuts’ cry, holding out the carrot that anyone can become like them. Zuckerberg is the model, who I think politically is a libertarian.
Whatever the causes, the boxes so many of us live in are being reconfigured. The individualists have the upper hand right now, destroying or weakening the older connections. But because humans are so social, I am confident that new and old ways of connecting and interacting will eventually in-fill their work.