I have written many times about our strange ability to pretend away the malign dominance over human affairs of the military industrial congressional investor complex, and I’ve also mentioned some of the curious ways in which technology has begun to distort human culture itself, in a worrisome oppressive and anti-humane manner.
But I don’t like simply listing concerns or just shaking a fist to make a pose. Plenty of that around anyhow, and I don’t know anyone who hasn’t got their own list of infuriations top of mind – especially lately.
What nobody ever seems to want to talk about in any serious way is why we in the western world, who for all our stressors are still by any objective measure the most fortunate and free numerous middle and lower classes in all of history, feel so completely powerless to do anything about our steadily degrading circumstances. As if there is no longer any hope of organization or creation, and the most we can expect of one another is infantile narcissistic whining and an occasional outburst of violent insanity.
I think I can point to something different and very very hopeful which is in no way out of our grasp – but to show what I’m on about clearly, I have to do a few more things that will sound grumpy first – please bear with me (I swear this is specific and purposeful, not frustration-porn).
When we talk about history nowadays, almost everyone can recognize there was a lot missing from the old ways of telling stories. Kings and Queens and wars and religious schisms absolutely are significant to the course of events – but so are the ways ordinary people interact and the way they feel about the world around them.
There is no one left alive who could swear to this from memory, but it is widely agreed that our modern sense of nationalism was impossible, until the invention of radio made it easy and appealing for much larger regions to identify with the same broad common narratives. Thus creating a far bigger in-group, and defining a smaller ‘them’ for that federation of formerly squabbling regions to compete against outside.
But we in the west have a tendency to talk about understanding as if it builds in a clear way and always improves at every step. This idea squares with the faith based notion of progress we are raised with, and it is flattering to our own vanity to think we know better than anyone ever has before – but I think this idea is not only wrong, but harmful to our clear perception, and outright disastrous for our understanding of history.
It seems to me that we have a certain limited amount of interest and caring we can dedicate to a number of areas of reality (and this mix often changes a lot over time). When we get especially interested in one thing (say, whales), we often develop especially stubborn ignorance about another thing, almost as if to balance it (children).
I don’t say this to be mean, nor am I without compassion for it. We are all in fact finite, we really do only have so much attention and caring, and so much time to spend on studying and responding to the world. The question to me is, how do we choose to spend that time – like petulant consumers on the sofa seeking bought gratification, or like determined (and self-authorizing, therefore unstoppable) producers of new good things and relationships in the world.
Last Few Holdouts
Now a grumpy bit – apologies to any who have heard this rant before. When I first started studying and practising yoga in the early eighties, it was mostly sweet old hippies and also rather sweet and charitable communities who wanted to share their beautiful thing with anyone open minded enough to benefit. There were some studios and some professionals, but the teaching of yoga was mostly seen as a calling or vocation, rather than a highly profitable industry. I got into Kundalini yoga, and so went to many classes taught by the 3HO group and always found their welcome and quality of energy modest and beautiful – all of which reflected extremely well on their spiritual mission (I also worked with several folks from their group years later, and they showed just as much integrity as coworkers, as they did as teachers).
Now, before anyone mistakes my gripe – I am not saying that yoga teachers no longer care, or that people shouldn’t be well paid for teaching. I’m also not saying that we should now avoid studying yoga, just because we have effectively westernized it. But I do want to ask you to think about the changes we made to its ancient established character to make it suit us better, and what those changes reveal about who we really are (as opposed to who we like to think we are).
I should also say that nineteen eighty two was not nineteen eighty seven. Our modern commercialization really began with the new age movement, and it’s hilariously narcissistic obsession with individual spiritual status, competition and one-upmanship.
As of eighty two there was no such thing as ‘yoga gear’, there was no social media to boast about your accomplishments, and most importantly, the main point of doing it was not even physical, it was to gradually and steadily work your way out of enslavement to your petty ego. Not to outright destroy your previous self, nothing so macho – just to attain a new and more measured relationship to it, by hooking yourself into a much more powerful system (universe itself).
Now we actually have yoga magazines with cover stories about getting your ‘yoga booty’ in shape for the beach – because nothing says modern western yoga more than vanity and self-absorption. (Or should we leave the word yoga out of that entirely?)
I always found Pilates a bit bothersome for making yoga techniques feel almost like a regimented calisthenic system, but physical excellence is at least a worthy goal.
Raw desire greed and glamourizing the surface self in hunger for the admiration of others though – that stuff is about as far from the still valid and precious point of yoga as it is possible to get.
The way I usually put this gripe is much simpler. If you had told me in nineteen eighty two that yoga would be wildly popular in the west in forty years, I would have been overjoyed, because if that many of us really were getting over our vanity and hooking into universe itself instead, we wouldn’t be having the ridiculous passionate two-sides-wrong fights we keep having, we wouldn’t be so proud of our lack of general compassion, we definitely wouldn’t see the whole world being upended by reckless warmongering statecraft, or millions facing immediate threat of lethal starvation while our corporate war profiteers grow fatter and more powerful than ever.
I mean that – straight up. All of our modern foolishness is supported by our own almost universal and incredibly stubborn ignorance. If we were the kind of people who were open to being changed by yoga, we could not be acting the way we are acting. What we are instead is the kind of people so riddled with insecurity and hunger for reassuring delusion, that we have changed once sacred yoga. Made it a consumer product that serves our need to feel good, rather than to steadily become better.
The strangest byproduct of this mode of thinking is the number of people who think of yoga as something they buy in the form of classes, rather than something they have decided to pursue and practise regularly. But a music student who doesn’t practise in between lessons, but only goes because they find spending time with a teacher makes them feel good, is wasting their money on lessons! (Nothing wrong with mentoring, to be clear – I think that and apprenticeship are superb ways of conveying wisdom and inspiration across generations – but we should be clear about what we seek – so we can be sensible about who we are asking to give it to us).
Imperium/Emporium
Okay so – what’s the incredibly hopeful thing we can do differently? Nothing so fancy as enlightenment. In crudest terms, we can do the world, rather than ourselves.
More specifically – think about your friends who always seem to have particular difficulty getting things together. We can all look at a whole complex of challenges which stand in our way when it comes to getting from where we are in life, to where we would like to be. And I mean this emotionally, practically, financially – however we frame our personal goals.
The thing about identifying the vast range of diffuse forces which stand is in our way is – it doesn’t change our frustrating conditions at all.
Learning a new skill, meeting new and very different people, helping someone we haven’t helped before, lending a hand in a modest way, or simply doing more of the good work we know we do best always makes a change in our conditions, because we are treating the world with more respect and offering it more – rather than just staying inside our own personal justifications of frustrations. (Again, I’m not saying these are faulty – only that they are not functional – this is a practical, not a moral point).
So what about the big picture stuff. Can we take a righteous pose, consume a few slogans and thereby achieve useful and lasting social change?
It seems pretty clear now that the slogan “defund the police” was a poor choice. Even places where this was done are now quickly undoing it, and the clearest political consequence so far is a huge election boost for representatives for the right. You tell me – are we learning anything from this, about the crucial difference between the emotions and intentions inside our heads, and the lasting repercussions and results in the real world?
With almost no money at all but tons of spirit and drive, the Black Panthers organized programs to feed poor kids every day, they set up neighbourhood clinics and organized programs to help elderly and infirm people get to doctor’s appointments and visit relatives in distant prisons. They established free education programs at odd hours so that people who worked all day, could still advance their knowledge and ambition steadily.
With millions and millions in private and corporate contributions, black lives matter has bought some choice real estate, and also helped many republicans get elected. No sign of large scale organizing of programs to feed poor kids. No early morning or night classes for struggling workers, no community support for the elderly or infirm. Crimes of the past are highlighted, but there is no sign thus far of any call for reparations for the Congo, where we all just now armed and paid the murderers of literally millions of black lives, just so we could have cheap cellphones.
But they do seem to offer the exact same giant corporations who have been deliberately chipping away at the quality and dignity of work for everyone for decades, a special moral pass in exchange for their performative recitation of the current fashionable catechism. Grotesque exploitation of workers, customers and environment is not a barrier or a serious moral problem, as long as all of those same old evil things are described henceforth only in brand new tightly constrained Orwellian language.
This is hardly the only wonky and deceitful moral measuring being popularized nowadays, the super powerful play this game too. According to the Word Economic Forum, Exxon is now officially rated as an environmental stock, and Tesla is off the list. But the transformation of an aspirational movement into a corrupt and self-serving institution has rarely been quite so whipsaw-fast as this.
Way too much like going to the teacher because they make you feel good, without even realizing that you are supposed to be learning to make your own music!
We can’t ever buy our liberation from a corporation, or a cynical corporate excusing gang like that. Liberation is something we have to DO. And it isn’t done by complaining about how the other guy lives – the point is to model a better way of doing things and then prove with our determination and skill that it actually has superior results in the real world.
Work to Do
I always thought one of the most powerful things Mark Twain ever observed was the way the riverboat captains won their powerful union. They got together and organized a series of lock boxes on every dock up and down the Mississippi (with postal quality locks – the best available) in which each captain who was in the union would leave a detailed record of all of their observations of river conditions on their trip so far, and also look at the latest notes from captains who had just passed the way that they were about to go.
Back then especially (before the army corps of engineers started messing about with it) the conditions on the Mississippi changed very fast, as sediment was moved from place to place and areas that were easily navigable one week, might be completely impassible and outright dangerous the next.
The owners of the riverboats hated the idea of the captains having a union or any clout in negotiating with their bosses at all – but they still had to get insurance for their fleets, and when the insurance industry saw how much lower the accident rate was among union captains, they soon made it unaffordable to hire anyone else!
Organization, shared skill, specific loyalty and excellence. Admittedly, we do not always see such a sweet alignment of possibilities as this, but the principle stands.
Working to demand a hostile institution do more to safeguard us from our own risks can only make us ever more dependant on them, and leave us feeling helpless and weak.
Working to create completely independent associations and institutions characterized by outstanding excellence or usefulness is a whole different play. We get stronger with every step we make (even the errors, as long as we are sincere and apolitical enough to learn from them) and we add new options for others around us also – especially that most basic inspiration we all find, whenever we see proof that the world contains a greater range of choices than we realized the day before.
Am I saying we all deserve this mess? Nope – once again (and I hope I say this as often as the also precious “Variation between individuals exceeds variation between types”) the point I am making here is not emotional moral accusatory or sanctimonious, it isn’t about finding a reason to justify living inside our anger forever, it is about not ever being stopped by it, and therefore making real things in the world around us better.
If we wait for them to sell us freedom, it will not only be a very long wait, but also a product which ultimately offers freedom only for the owning and selling class – at our expense. That’s what they do.
THERE IS NO APP FOR THIS!
But – if we finally recognize we aren’t cultural and emotional enemies – the way the rulers insist we see ourselves – but actually the most natural and inevitable practical allies in the world AGAINST THAT SAME ARISTOCRATIC MONOPOLIST CLASS – and then make solid relationships and build our own freedoms and our own better institutions for ourselves, we will be in a position to cut a completely different kind of deal with the sleazy aging and demonstrably insane owners of the modern world.
Of course, admitting we were ever wrong is emotionally hard – many prefer escapism, so we could always stick with our stubborn ignorant pride and “Stay the course” as a concession to the misery we are comfortable with – and just keep right on being both the luckiest and also the whiniest most ungrateful people on the entire planet earth.
But this is really not a great look, peeps – and even less of an answer. (I mean seriously – wouldn’t you rather go out with a pang than a whopper?)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Here’s a light piece I did quite awhile ago about a very early and comparatively crude intrusion of machine thinking into culture (most easily recognized by the depressingly common and objectively reasonable question – “why does so much modern music suck so bad in exactly the same way?”)
And here’s someone who many of us have found to be rare wise calm counsel through the covid panic, very simply proving his profound humane integrity by being aware enough about the world to say, “No actually, what we should all really be concerned about is famine.”
