Mark W Tiedemann

Category: culture

  • Colloquial For “Why, I Didn’t Mean Nothin’ By It!”

    I confess when everyone started talking about Paula Deen this past week, I had a moment or two of complete cultural disconnect.

    Who?

    Oh, she writes cookbooks and does a show on Food Network.  Hm.  So what?

    I’m still not altogether sure what she did, what trial she spoke at where she rather obliviously let it be known that she thinks using the N-word is just fine.  I’m not really interested enough in her—or any other cooking personality—to give much of a damn.  I don’t read cookbooks (I have several, I couldn’t tell you who wrote them) and I don’t watch Food Network (we don’t have cable or dish), so this is a part of the popular zeitgeist of which I am rather oblivious.

    But I do work in a bookstore now and Paula Deen has a new book coming out.  I just learned that we won’t be handling it.

    Here‘s a good piece on this particular aspect and a good write-up on the controversy.

    Reading some of the reportage on this has put me in mind to recall all the casual bigots I’ve known over the years.  In some ways they’re worse than the very up front bigots.  With them you know where they stand.  They pretend nothing.  Take them or leave them and here’s why.  No betrayed expectations.

    Casual bigots—the ones who blithely reveal themselves in offhand comments and thoughtless characterizations the problems with which they clearly seem utterly unaware—sucker you in.  You start to like them or you do like them.  You might even find yourself building some kind of relationship with them, which suddenly, at the drop of an epithet, you’re forced to revisit.

    It’s worse when you work for them.  Your options become severely limited.

    I worked for one such for almost nine years.  He was a gregarious, congenial man with the intellectual depth of a Dick and Jane reader.  Quick with a joke, always ready to see the funny side to anything, a natural-born salesman.

    Who never understood why propositioning female customers or remarking that certain folks were okay because really they were white people in black skin wasn’t just, well, fine.

    Whenever one of his little racist aphorisms popped out, something primal in my backbrain stirred and I wanted a bar of soap or a leather strop.  He “meant nothing” by them.  So why say it? I’d ask.  Why is that guy (who’s white) an asshole and that guy (who’s not white) some variation of n—-r?  Why can’t they both be assholes, if that’s what you mean?

    And he for the life of him couldn’t get past the surface detail that the one was white and the other black.  “So a black asshole is fundamentally different than a white one?”

    Eyes would glaze over.  Well, obviously, because, well, he’s black.  Not white.

    We went round and round with this for years.  I continued to work there because I’d been working there before he bought the business and I loved the place.  I was committed to it on several levels.  He sorely challenged my devotion.

    But I also thought—hubristically, perhaps—that I could turn him around.  I really believed in the power of education, that if I explained it, showed him, that at some point the revelation would occur and…

    The problem is, many people, possibly most, live by categories.  They have separate compartments into which the different strategies and judgments they must make to get through a day are stored and rather than think it through each time, they just select among the bins.  At a certain level, this is probably necessary—we all have to function on autopilot at times, else we’d overload our consciousness with decision-tree minutiae that would make coming to any decision impossible.  Daniel Kahneman wrote an excellent book about this, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

    But the walls of the compartments are often porous and the arrangement changes over time with new information and understanding.

    For the casual bigot, though, particular compartments are very deep and filled with too much crap to be easily discarded, and the particular pathway to those compartments is a well-established trail—rut, really—and getting rid of it would require a major trauma.  (I suspect in some ways dealing with an up front bigot might be easier because the walls are even less porous and it might be possible isolate that compartment and sever the connection completely—but I’m guessing there.)

    It’s like the casual sexist who just can’t see what harm there is in thinking the way he—or she—thinks.  After all, they don’t mean any harm, and honey, if you’re gonna be one of them feminazis, why then you’re just lookin’ for somethin’ to be offended by.

    Gradually, I began to notice another aspect of his personality.  I’m theorizing here, but the behavior was such that it seems a reasonable conclusion.

    Losing a prejudice is directly proportional to knowing people.  How well and how deeply translates to a subsequent inability to discriminate.

    I don’t think he really “knew” anyone.  Everything was on the surface.  He went only so far even with people he genuinely liked.

    Not, I think, because he couldn’t.  But he’d never had to.  He couldn’t make the leap to stop designating people by surface details and secondary characteristics because he treated everyone as a collection of surface details and secondary characteristics.

    When he finally noticed that we’d lost many of our female customers (especially the younger, “attractive” ones), he seemed genuinely confused and I don’t think he ever recognized that his casual intimacies with them—uninvited—had driven them away.  “But they laugh,” he said when I explained to him once how what he’d been saying as his then-current joke was basically sexual harrassment.  They laugh, which to him meant acceptance.  (Of course, when one of our customers complained to me about it and I told her next time to shut him down, well, the moment she did she went from someone he liked to a Bitch.)  He never looked past that laugh to see the shock and nervousness.  It was all surface.

    So when someone so entrenched in certain cultural “norms”—like a Paula Deen—makes news for the apparently “innocent” remarks that have been okay in her group and among her “friends” for years, I recall that nine years of education I received in the company of someone who just never Got It.  And I wonder, how well does this person know anyone?  After all, Paula Deen has handlers, she has advisers, she has people whose job it is to make her aware…and if they can’t get through and break down those compartments, then I have to wonder.  Obviously, it caught everyone off-guard, so it’s not like she’s an up front bigot.

    I tried to explain a false syllogism once to my boss and after three sentences I glimpsed a brief manifestation of despair—he sensed, I imagine, that this was a concept that would require him to reassess…everything.

    And he just wasn’t able to do that.

    As for the “Why, I don’t mean nothin’ by it,” defense…well, then why did you say it in the first place?  Are you always that feckless and shallow?  Is there anything you say that you do mean something by?

    And if not, then why are you so confused that no one will take you seriously when you apologize?

  • On The Extraction of Feet From Mouths

    I’ve been thinking deeply about the recent eruption of controversy in SFWA over sexism.  Seems just about anywhere we look in the last several years there are examples of men behaving stupidly toward and about women.  While this is nothing new, where it has been cropping up seems surprising.

    There have been several incidents, both online and out in the world, within the skeptical community.  The boys came out to try to tell the girls to get their own clubhouse and stop invading what for some reason these males had regarded as somehow the province of people with testicles.  Prominent women—skeptics, humanists, atheists, scientists—have been treated to high school-level chauvinism by males intent on…

    On what?

    It’s worth reading this article by Rebecca Watson, one of the most prominent women in the active skeptical world.  Some of what she has gone through seems totally bizarre, of the “what planet did this happen on” variety.  And yet, there it is.  The Thing We (people like me) Had Thought We Were Done With.  Males acting like schoolyard bullies toward women, especially women who claim themselves as individuals with minds, choices, and, apparently, interests that don’t include them.  The boys, that is.

    Reading that, someone like me can feel pretty virtuous.  “I don’t think that way!  I don’t do that!  The people I hang with don’t, either, we’ve outgrown adolescence and never were that gauche!”  We might feel that way and some of us might even be justified.

    But not all of us.

    I’ve been a science fiction reader practically all my life.  I’ve been a professional SF writer since 1990, therefore a member of SFWA.  I have credited science fiction, my early exposure to it, as reason for my awareness of gender issues, my embrace of feminisim, and certainly my affiliation with skepticism, rationality, and—may I say it?—humanist morality.  The circles in which I move resonate with all this as well and over decades a kind of blanket of comforting isolation has settled around me that has buffered me from some of the kinds of bullshit that has evidently been there all along.

    There’ve been several instances of sexism over the last few years within the science fiction community, some at an apparently low-level, others fairly significant, culminating in the current Matter At Hand over a series of articles in the SFWA Bulletin (as well as a cover painting for one issue) and the responses prompted concerning them.

    Disclaimer:  I tend to ignore the Bulletin anymore.  A lot of the information contained therein is wonderful for beginning writers or those just starting up the ladder of their careers.  Occasionally there’s something technical in an issue worth reading.  But really, it comes because I pay my dues and I go through the Market Report.  Therefore, I had to go find the issues at the center of the storm, dig them out of the pile, and read the pieces in question.

    Which means that I absorbed them somewhat in isolation.

    Nevertheless, to my complete embarrassment and shame, I misread what was supposed to be the problem.  Then I compounded that failure by defending them.

    Not full-faced “what the hell is wrong with you people” defend, just…

    The offending articles were two in the long-running series of dialogues by Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg about the history of the genre.  These are, for those of you who do not get the Bulletin and don’t know, done as conversations, two guys who’ve been around for a long time, yacking about the Old Days and who wrote what, published where, said that, or did this.  They are framed as personal reminiscence.

    Which to my mind is a somewhat different context than a straightforward article about, say, copyright law or manuscript formatting or how to write a cover letter.  It’s a different kind of work and therefore has different parameters.  Like memoir, what the author (or authors) get to talk about and how they talk about it gets more leeway.  Constraints are not as tight, subject and content are more flexible.  To my mind.

    So therefore when I read a couple of paragraphs in one of these about a particular editor who was evidently “drop dead gorgeous” and “looked great in a bikini” I thought nothing, or at least very little, of it.  It’s not the same as if it had been a straight up piece about how to submit a story to said editor and had included the aside, “and by the way, when submitting to her, keep in mind she’s a babe!”  Had such a sentence been in such an article, my hair would have stood on end and electric cascades would have run up and down my spine.  What the hell does that have to do with the professional relationship detailed in the article?  And it’s true, that if the article had been talking about a male editor, you would likely never see an equivalent remark “And by the way, when submitting to this guy, remember he has a hell of a package!”

    Had you read such a remark, we should all know (if it needs explaining, as it apparently does) that the difference is that in the case of the man it is an irrelevancy but for the woman it is a threat.

    More clarity?  While a man might view his “package” as an essential aspect of his identity, society at large does not.  The same cannot be said about a woman and her physical attributes.  Therefore, the inclusion of such a comment about a woman is automatically limiting and de facto sexist.  Because the writer has decided that this is the important fact about this woman and while he (or she) may not intend it to be limiting, there is a whole file cabinet of associated conclusions attached to such a description that gets opened once the statement is made.

    Is this a bad thing, you ask?

    Well.  As has been pointed out by some over this, good or bad, it is problematic.  Because the message has connotative force in the negative.  Because, unfortunately, for too many people, “looks great in a bikini” is the beginning and end of any worthwhile description.  All else becomes secondary.  Tertiary.  Immaterial.  Distracting.

    Welcome to Gor.

    My mistake was in not recognizing this essential fact.  That intent doesn’t matter when there is ample information that such a phrase will be taken as a threat by a great many people.*

    Resnick and Malzberg also consistently qualified who they were talking about.  “Lady writers” and “lady editors.”  Again, my context filters were on.  I thought, that’s who these guys are, they’re from a generation that would consider that a polite cognomen, what’s the big deal?  Forgetting, as I read, how qualifiers play into limiting people not of the majority culture in, say, ethnicity.  The main subject of the two articles was “Women In Science Fiction”—why the continued use of a label which served only to underscore a “specialness” that is not necessarily positive in the context of professional circles?  While the substance of what they had to say was overwhelmingly laudatory (Alice Sheldon was held up to be as good as Alfred Bester and at no point did a phrase like “well, she was really good for a woman” appear) that continual qualifier became a kind of apology.  In the context of a reminiscence, it was indicative of the character of the two authors—quaint, a “cute” term—but outside that context, it is like continually using the term “black writer” in a piece about African American Writers.  We already know the people being discussed are black, the only reason to continually use the qualifier is to make a point of difference.  Do it enough, the difference becomes the only relevant factor.

    I missed all this and shrugged it off.

    The other article was, in fact, a How To piece, in which Barbie was held forth as a model for professional behavior.  Now, I can see how the author thought this was tongue-in-cheek, a clever, satirical way to make a point, but…

    The only excuse for this is carelessness.

    Well, maybe not the only excuse.  Intentional, programmatic sexism is certainly possible.

    Barbie cannot be a model for any kind of self-aware, in control, self-directed person.  Other People have always determined, right down to the color of plastic used, what Barbie is, will be, or can be, and this point should have been obvious.  The use of a toy in a prescriptive article, aimed at women, can only be…well, problematic.

    Two things here.  The first is, I’m disappointed.  Science fiction has been for me a font of enlightenment.  I don’t mean by that “everything I know about living I got from science fiction.”  What I mean is, that many of the foundational ideas I consider important in my life first came to me from science fiction.  I had to flesh them out later, from other sources, but something as basic as gender equality first penetrated my adolescent brain from reading science fiction.  So for this to have occurred in the field which gave me my earliest intellectual nurture is profoundly distressing.  It’s almost like hearing someway say “Oh, I just say all that shit in my novels, I don’t actually believe any of it!”

    And, no, I am not saying that Resnick and Malzberg are themselves chauvinists.  I suspect they’re shocked and dismayed both by the reaction to what they wrote and hurt by the suggestion that they are sexists.  But they dropped the ball in understanding the context in which they wrote.  (They compounded it by crying fowl and bleating about censorship.  No one called for censorship.  If anything, a call was made for more awareness.)

    The president of SFWA made a statement about all this which I think is worth reading.  Furthermore, the editor of the Bulletin has stepped down.

    I said two things.  I put my foot in my mouth over this because I also failed to see how things have evolved and how they have played out in the last 40 years.  I imagined that we might reach a time when men and women might be able to recognize and appreciate each others’ sexuality without such recognition in any way acting as threat or limitation.  Because a woman is beautiful (or a man handsome) does not mean she is obligated to be that for the fantasy edification of people she doesn’t know or should be constrained by that fact because others can’t see past the surface.  For many people, physicality is destiny.  Or fate.  And often, when people in possession of certain physical traits act in ways that don’t fit  those fantasy preconceptions, there is a kind of breaking that occurs which is profoundly tragic in that such preconceptions should never have been put in place to begin with.  Limitation goes both ways.  If all you can see is the great bod, the perfect smile, and the lush hair, I feel sorry for you—you’re missing a whole world.

    Men don’t see this as a problem, though, and that’s why it’s such a big deal.  Men have never been barred from being anything else they want to be by their looks.  At least, not as far as the larger culture is concerned.  A man is good looking, well, that’s just one more thing in the plus column, lucky bastard!

    Women have different experiences with that.

    Many men will still not get it.  (No doubt a lot of women, too, though for different reasons.)  What they will see is another demand that we stop enjoying women.  That we must ignore their physicality, their sexuality.  That we must turn our libidos off.  They will see this as another call that we stop being “men.”  That’s not it at all.

    Treat women as People first.  Not female People.  People.  It seems so simple, that.  And yet…

    Part of the problem in all this is the lack of grasp exhibited by otherwise bright people.  You have to ask yourself, what makes you think that the kind of stuff you’re likely to hear in a bar made suitable copy for a professional journal?  When you insert a sexualized comment in an article about professional people in a given field, you really aren’t talking about them, you’re talking about yourself.

    Anyway, I still have a couple of toes to extract, so I’m done talking for now.

    One last thing: You’re never too old to screw up, but you’re also never too old to learn from it.

     

    _________________________________________________

    * Threat?  What threat? I hear some think.  The threat that nothing one does matters if one doesn’t fuck.  That no matter what accomplishments a woman may have, if she’s not also someone interested in, willing, and able to get sweaty with a male who thinks it’s his right and her privilege, then she’s not worth considering.  That any female who seems to think she can be her own Self without this aspect is delusional and that self-selected male has not only the right but the obligation to “show her what she’s missing.”  Basically, we’re talking about rape, implied and actualized, because what matters is the sex.  To be sure, something of this attaches to men as well, but without the element of coercion, which renders it wholly different.  Consider for a moment the most basic difference in attitude regarding “conquests.”  Men who seem to have sex with numerous women acquire, with a few exceptions, a patina of glamor, respect, and envy, while women who engage in a similar lifestyle receive a very different designation and concomitant image and with few exceptions is generally negative.  Furthermore, for men, it is simply one more aspect of their overall image, but for women it almost wholly subsumes anything else about them.  If the boys want the women to stop pointing out their sexism, this will have to change, and the fact that it’s still the case means we have yet to achieve the kind of gender equity men like me thought we were on our way to achieving.

  • One Down…

    I don’t really have a lot to say about Michele Bachmann other than to note that her decision not to seek reelection seems to be a bellwether for the entire Tea Party movement.  Listening to her over the last several years, especially in her bids for the GOP nomination for president, has been like watching old episodes of the Twilight Zone, where the protagonist wakes up in a world that is similar to but not the same as the one with which he or she had lived in the day before.

    Bachmann put herself forward as some kind of Original Intent Constitutionalist during her last campaign, but any examination of what she said and a look at the actual history she was touting seemed to show that her version of what that meant was much like anyone’s version of something they think they understand but haven’t actually studied.  One of her major gaffs was her claim that the Founders had “fought diligently to end slavery.”  I don’t know what was said in her classes about that, but slavery was an off-the-table subject for most of the drafting of the Constitution because everyone knew the southern states simply wouldn’t have anything to do with attempts to outlaw it.  The closest thing to a “diligent fight” among the Founders was an address to congress well after the ratification by an aging and ill Ben Franklin and a few others and then the efforts of John Quincy Adams—son of John Adams, not a Founder—who proved an unpopular one-term president.

    Her grasp of the basics of constitutional history seem tenuous at best.  What she did  firmly grasp was the underlying sentiment of those who comprise the staunchest support for the Tea Party—white males with above-average incomes who don’t like taxes.

    The Tea Party itself seems to be devouring itself.  We may be seeing its death rattle.  One can only hope.  In terms of social dynamics, the Tea Party’s closest comparison would seem to be one of the extremist groups like the KKK or the John Birchers.  Unlike them, the Tea Party appears more mainstream because it has never espoused racial hatred, so seemed rooted in ideas people could embrace without embarrassment.  But when you look at it, the Tea Party merely replaced ethnic groups with political ideology as the focus for prejudicial treatment.  You can’t accuse them of being racists when it’s not even people they attack but institutions.

    Perhaps if they had been more thoughtful about their attacks…

    But at base they seem incapable of being thoughtful, at least in aggregate.  One of the reasons they may be falling apart is that individuals who previously identified with them  are  thoughtful and have been finding the movement less and less congenial because of certain unreasonable positions.  They in fact have no solid core to pull people together.  It’s all based on personal prejudice, a poor grasp of realities, and a tacit insistence on absolute individual license—except when it’s for something they don’t like.

    What it has been has been a social hissy-fit about the fact that the country is changing and instead of participating in any kind of constructive dialogue to accommodate the inevitable, they dedicated themselves as a group to obstructionism, as if to say “We won’t let anything pass that legitimizes what we don’t like.”

    Whether the architects of the movement intended that, this is the result in action.  The Tea Party has lowered public confidence in congress to all-time lows, cost us billions in pointless exercises in ideological spleen, and damaged institutions which previously served necessary functions, all in the name of reinstating a kind of America that seems to exist only in their imaginations.  Imaginations fed more on dinner table jeremiads than actual history.

    You can see their lack of real representation in two facts—one, almost all Tea Party candidates benefited primarily from newly gerrymandered congressional districts that went to great lengths to isolate just the right constituency to put them in office.  And even then, fact number two, their greatest successes have all been in midterm elections during low voter turn-out.  The 2010 debacle saw all those Tea Party seats taken with less than a quarter of eligible voters.  In 2012, they began losing those seats.  Bachmann herself barely hung onto hers, and she ran in one of the most tortuously contrived districts in Minnesota.

    What successes remain have to do with reactions among independents who are more rationally uncomfortable with some of the policy changes coming down the pike.  Even so, one hopes that people in general are growing weary of the tactics of obstruction which seem to be the only card the Tea Party and its coincidental allies know how to play.  Standing in the way of policy, “just say no” rhetoric, is not policy, it’s irresponsible.

    We do need people to represent us who see the world as it is, not dismiss it out of hand and insist on their conception of what it might once have been and could be again, especially when that conception is built on the fabulations of a poor understanding of history and personal prejudice masquerading as thoughtful deliberation.

    Farewell, Ms. Bachmann.  Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

  • Bread and Sacred Cows

    Anyone who knows me knows I am in general antipathetic toward sports. I don’t watch it, I don’t follow it, and I could not care less who is winning or losing. The sun does not rise and set on finals, March Madness, seasons, MVPs, or any of that. I missed being infected with this particular virus as a child and have never regretted it, as I find the whole thing baffling.

    Mind you, I don’t have anything at all against playing sports. I think more kids should (if they’re allowed in by the jocks, that is). But watching?

    Regardless my feelings about sports as such, my biggest complaint is with the fetishizing of it and the profound cost of such obsession on just about everything. So much else of considerably more value often goes begging just so a city can have a brand new stadium. Sports, frankly, generates enough income just by being, it does not need tax payer support, and that we grant it any, never mind as much as we do, should be the subject of government hearings.

    But what really gets me hot is how much education is distorted by this obsession.

    Did you know that, in all likelihood, your state’s highest paid public employee is a coach?

    Here’s a delightful article with a colorful chart showing this fact state by state.

    Mostly football coaches.

    I’m sorry, but—what the fuck is wrong with everybody? With all that we have slipped behind so many other countries in so many academic areas, exactly how does paying the football coach the highest compensation of any other public employee in a state serve to correct the profound epidemic of DUMB that seems the chief problem facing us today?

    The article reiterates the well-established fact that major athletics programs make universities no money. They cost.

    We’re seeing tenure under assault, staffs being cut, tuition rising across the board, and money being spent on something that does nothing to advance the state of learning. And football? A moment aside for a personal note of invective. Traumatic brain injuries, not to mention life-long injuries in general, should place this sport in the same category with boxing. The group-think, team-spirit lunacy embraced—not by the players but by the fans—would not be a problem if it did not come at the expense of so much else.

    (It doesn’t help my attitude that I was once threatened by several members of my high school’s varsity team with being thrown bodily from a third floor window because I expressed the opinion in the school paper that just maybe some other things were perhaps more important than football.)

    With all the complaining about wasteful spending we have to listen to from people hell bent on curtailing just about anything useful in education (not to mention the country in general) why do we not hear congress up in arms about this?

    Let me be emphatic—when a coach makes more money than a dean of an entire university, something if very, very wrong. Spin it any way you like, I surely do not want to pay for this kind of crap.

  • National Day of Idiocy

    We should have a National Day of Idiocy to celebrate our rich heritage of public figures who make asinine statements.

    I find it both fascinating and revolting how a certain faction reaches for the Holocaust at every opportunity in order to retain their illusion that just about everything that makes them even mildly uncomfortable is part and parcel of the horrible paradigm that led to a slaughter which some of their supporters think never even happened.

    The mayor of Charlotte, N.C. declared May 2nd a Day of Reason. It also happens to be the national Day of Prayer. While some may see this as pure hype and opportunism, there’s common factor between the two things—both have to do with finding guidance. I doubt the majority of people see much conflict between prayer and reason—in fact, most would likely conjoin them, if not as philosophical counterparts at least as practical allies—but there are always those who will insist on seeing Evil in everything that is not christian.

    So, the Enlightenment led to the Holocaust (because of moral relativism). My my. I suppose that’s why Hitler kept burning books, because he was such an Enlightenment fan boy.

    This also overlooks things like the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Spanish expulsion of Jews, the Thirty Years War, the murder of Giordano Bruno, the Albigensian Crusade…

    Of course, all those things were, I suppose, in response to moral relativism?

    No, this is typical ahistorical nonsense from people who can’t seem to pull their heads out of the heavenly clouds. It would be laughable if not for its scope. Lamar Smith of Texas is proposing a bill to eliminate peer review in government-funded science programs. It’s a bit more complex than that, but in essence Smith wants technology programs, not basic research, and clearly does not understand how science is conducted or even why it’s important. And he’s on the Science. Space, and Technology Committee. No, wait, he’s the chair of the committee.

    Laugh, cry, or go on vacation. The only question is how these people got where they are and have the ability to disrupt so much by sheer assertive nonsense.

    What might follow now, as in past posts, would be a lengthy discourse on the nature of reason and why these people are wrong, but I’m tired and really, if you already find what they’re saying and doing crack-brained then you don’t need the lesson. I applaud the mayor of Charlotte for having the chutzpah to declare a Day or Reason in a state that thinks prayer will prevent Obama from being re-elected. (I’ll give you all a minute to digest that.) I’d like to see a few more politicians stand up to the idiocy.

    Maybe we should establish a national Day of Lunacy on which we all find someone steeped in misinformation—you know, people who think FOX news is actually news?—and attempt an intervention. Get them to a lecture on the scientific method. Make them watch an episode of NOVA. Take them to lunch with Neil de Grasse Tyson.

    What I would very much like to see is a genuine response among enough people matter to defend reason and science and instead of it just being a cool trendy thing that gives us new toys every few years actually elevates the level of national discourse.

    Yeah, I still dream occasionally.

  • Original Intent

    According to recent polls, a growing number of Americans believe that the Second Amendment was put in the Bill of Rights in order to guarantee that our government will not impose any kind of tyranny upon us.  That an armed populace is a bulwark against government oppression.

    As far as it goes, there should be no argument over this.  Especially at the time it was adopted.  It was a statement that declared that the authority for military action, domestically, resided with the People.  Even then, however, a group of citizens was not much of a match for a well-trained and equipped military force, and anyone even slightly acquainted with the history of the revolutionary war should be aware that the biggest problem Washington et al had was equipage and training.  The famous instance of the Prussian drill master Baron von Steuben, while part of American myth, nevertheless points up a real problem of the Continental Army—the men didn’t know how to fight.  Washington’s army, to put it mildly, fared poorly in just about every engagement with the British it had.  Just having guns made little difference.

    Fast forward to today and the problem is multiplied.  To imagine a gaggle of weekend warriors mounting a successful resistance to a modern military force is absurd.

    However, this is becoming mainstream opinion, that because so many Americans have firearms in their possession our government will not engage in dictatorial practices.  It enjoys a certain logic and in the past this has been a not altogether fallacious argument.

    Taking this as a basis for rejecting any kind of control over the manufacture and dissemination of firearms for the purposes of community safety is taking original intent out of context and ignoring basic realities.  This isn’t a frontier nation anymore and the phrasing of the Second Amendment itself suggests it was never intended as a guarantee that John Q. Smith, esquire, would be absolutely free of constraint.

    We have no rules that absolutely free us of constraints of one kind or another.

    My own personal pick for absolutist appraisal is the First Amendment, but we have many rules regarding use of language and freedom of speech.  (I would hazard a guess that many of the same people arguing for complete freedom from even the hint of constraint on their Second Amendment rights have no problem with constraints on Speech, as indicated by support of various forms of censorship from pornography to flag burning.  Cherry picking “rights” is a great American tradition.)  We have such rules in order to maintain a civil society, a goal the Founders fully endorsed.  Barring the capacity of individuals to self-police personal conduct, we have laws to control misuses.  We get along quite well (usually) with said laws and in some instances wish these laws were stronger, all in the name of maintaining the kind of society with the types of security we wish to enjoy.

    I personally have mixed feelings about all possession laws.  Telling people it is a crime to simply possess something, to my mind, is a pernicious act of intrusiveness that is fraught with the potential for abuse.  Just having something it is against the law to have invites fraud, entrapment, and a loss of other freedoms.  I can well understand the civic interest in not allowing individuals to have something, but beyond removing it once found, criminalizing possession is a road to hell many people who have been set up on false drug possession charges know all about.  It ceases then to be about public safety and becomes a contest of will between people and authority.  It’s fair to say that the Drug War has become less about drugs than about the power of agencies to enforce their will.  The purpose of the original laws is lost in the subsequent political and legal struggles between two ideologically opposed factions.  (If it weren’t, then spending money on treatment would not be in the least controversial.  At its simplest, this is about conformity, not safety.)  I also have little optimism that any kind of confiscatory rules would do anything other than create another drug war type conflict and again, safety would take a back seat to ideology.

    As it is anyway.

    For the record, I do not own a gun.  Not because I am opposed to them, but because I believe one should not own something one is not prepared to treat with diligence and respect by taking proper training, keeping responsible track of it, and maintaining it properly.  No one should treat a firearm like the old clunker that keeps failing inspection but gets driven anyway. I have neither the time nor inclination just now to qualify at a range and stay qualified.  Furthermore, I do not live in such a way that it would be useful to me.  That could change, I admit.  As a child, I grew up with firearms.  Hunting with my dad was a regular thing, something we gave up when apparently part of the necessary equipment among far too many hunters became a cooler chest loaded with beer.  Safety, dammit!

    That said, there are a couple of items both sides should be more aware of in this, because the debate is heading toward another national deadlock, and just now we don’t need another divisive issue based on nonsense.

    Deaths by firearms are decreasing.  Have been for some time.  You can check the FBI crime stats for this.  A growing fraction of gun deaths is suicide.  It may well be argued that if these people did not have ready access to a firearm, their self-inflicted deaths might be delayed or prevented.  The salient factor here is mental health, something we as a nation seem loathe to address.  There is a stigma attached to mental health problems which we stupidly maintain and people who need help fail to get it, often with calamitous results.  PTSD among returning veterans has been shining a light on this, but the fact is it remains a problem for the general population, one which for whatever reason we want to deny.  (Of course, we also don’t want to spend any more money on health care, which is another matter.)

    The dramatic, Rambo-esque shootings that have spotlighted gun violence in the last several years are exceptions.  Tragic as they are, they do not represent the vast majority of either gun deaths or American gun owners.  In almost all of these instances, other factors have been primary in the incidents, involving mental health issues.  In a way, such events are like earthquakes.  Unpredictable, horrible, lamentable.  Unlike earthquakes, we have the tools to do something about them before they happen, but again this involves attitudes about mental health, and since the rhetoric surrounding this issue has acquired as part of its machinery a rejection of government intrusion into our personal lives, we are stuck in a quandary.

    Secondly, we have already seen that “assault rifle” bans do very little in terms of actual decreases in gun violence.  Most, the vast majority, of shootings are done with handguns.  The “ban” is little more than an æsthetic statement.  High capacity magazines may be another matter, but the fact is we’re talking about banning something because of the way it looks more than anything else.

    That said, we really need to stop pretending æsthetics don’t matter.  We know personality changes under certain circumstances, and as ridiculous as it may sound, we also know it is true.  Fashion would not be the industry it is if people did not experience modifications in self-image and, subsequently, behavior by wearing different kinds of clothing.  Consider the changes in demeanor involved with motorcycles.  A person can be one way and then, donning leathers and climbing aboard a Harley, he or she can for a short while be very different.  Ninety-nine percent of the time, these changes are mild, short-lived, and fun, but they are real.  And for a fraction of people, they go beyond manageable.

    When you look at the mass shootings and the types of weapons involved, it seems obvious that, within whatever passes for conscious decision-making with these people, they are playing a role, one which involves some sort of para-militarism.  They are assaulting positions, enacting retribution, fighting a war no one else around them seems aware of, and they have equipped themselves accordingly.  While most of us play act from time to time, we keep it within our control and within the bounds of social convention.  Again, we’re talking about people who seem to have a less solid grasp on the reality the rest of us share.

    A reality which is getting holes punched in it by the extreme rhetoric of political posturing and the paranoia that emerges out of responding to claims that our rights are under threat.

    Two things about that, related to each other.

    When President Obama says that talk of government tyranny is absurd, because here we are the government, he is correct at least in an ideal sense.  We The People are supposed to be in charge.  That we don’t seem to be is the direct result of the consistent and traditional lack of involvement in politics by average citizens.

    Nevertheless, there is a confusion in this stemming from a fundamental misunderstanding of the term The People.

    I’ve grown up listening to the dinner table dissections of the Second Amendment and what the Founders meant.  Separating out one clause from another, that “militia” is something distinct from “the people” because of a problematically placed comma.  It took some time before I realized that they were all missing the point.

    The Founders, if nothing else, were world class grammarians and rhetoricians.  They knew the meaning of words, the intent of phrases, and used them very precisely.  When they said The People they were not talking about Joe Whatsisname down the block, they were talking about a political aggregate.  The People is us as a polity.

    You can tell because when they meant something to apply to individuals, they used Person.  Read the other amendments.  The People was not a catch-all term that stood in for Me and You as isolated individuals.  It meant the community from which government, in this place, derives its authority.

    The British were not marching on Lexington and Concord to bust down private doors and confiscate fowling pieces, they were marching to seize the local armory—which was there for the local militia—which was made up of local people, many of whom did not own their own weapons (they were bloody expensive!)

    We have separated these things in our communities since WWII, true, so we no longer have the reality of a local militia anymore.  We mistake the National Guard as one, but it’s not, really.  Militias were vital when we as a nation eschewed large standing armies and had to rely on the availability of a ready pool of volunteers who had, presumably, trained through local militia organizations.  We needed them especially when we have a frontier.

    But the idea that we have a right to take up arms against the government is false.  This country never allowed for that.  Shays Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Civil War…in each instance, the response has been to put the rebellion down and strengthen the adherence to the federal constitution and government, because what we are building here is not a haven for quasi-libertarian laissez-faire self empowerment at the expense of community.

    Rights are not settled outside the idealized confines of academic discourse.  They are living things, constantly tested and argued, limited and expanded, revisited and revised.  My right to swing my arm ends when the end of my arm touches the end of your nose.  Sounds reasonable, but in reality we are always trying to determine both where the end of my arm actually is and how far out you can stick your nose.  The dance of negotiation and compromise is what has built this country, despite the misapprehension that it is absolute individualism that did it.  The community is the seed bed in which the flower of constructive individualism grows.  They need each other, but the relationship is symbiotic.

    The rhetoric of armed resistance has one other major shortfall, and it’s fatal.  Power does not work here through the barrel of a gun, it works through the ballot box and the willingness of the population to accept the determination derived from the vote.  We do not collapse into sectarian violence here because we have a long tradition of viewing elections as the final word, at least until the next election.  When it’s done, we go home, we do not tear down city hall.  The day enough people decide they must take up arms to get their way, all that ends, and we will pay dearly to put it back together again.  Likely the thing being defended will be sacrificed in the initial exchange of fire, and for my part I sincerely doubt we have the collective wisdom in sufficient degree to revive the experiment.

    Common sense should tell us that there are some people who simply should not have access to firearms.  We have to figure out how to address that reality.  All or nothing approaches which ignore this will end up at best irrelevant and at worst destructive of the nerves that allow us to be a country.

  • Wrong Is Right: Political Absurdity Incarnate

    Eleven North Carolina state representatives are attempting to do something which has been illegal in this country since the ratification of the Constitution.  Namely, establish a State Religion.

    Here’s what they’re trying to pass:

    SECTION 1. The North Carolina General Assembly asserts that the Constitution of the United States of America does not prohibit states or their subsidiaries from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

    SECTION 2. The North Carolina General Assembly does not recognize federal court rulings which prohibit and otherwise regulate the State of North Carolina, its public schools, or any political subdivisions of the State from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

    This resolution flies in the face of two centuries of settled law.  Furthermore, it also takes a run at the decision which was settled by the Civil War.  I think it’s fair to say that there is more than a smidgen of secessionist sentiment and some borderline treason there.

    Need I add that the eleven representatives in question are all Republicans?

    If the Bill of Rights was not clear enough about the intent of what America meant by “freedom of religion” and the quite tangible rejection of such meddling of government into the arena of religious expression, the Fourteenth Amendment made clear just which set of laws held the upper hand.  (For those not paying attention, there has been a steady tremor of right wing rhetoric in the last year or several directed at repealing the Fourteenth Amendment, for exactly this sort of purpose, to return to states the sole right to dictate to their citizens how they should conduct themselves as Americans, at least in the view of a given state.)

    Why this should need to be rehearsed again and again I do not understand, but it’s been obvious for some time that the advocates for religious establishment—North Carolina House Majority Leader Edgar Starnes and his ten colleagues, for instance—are not interested in embracing religious liberty.  The only purpose of establishing a state religion—and please, while I realize there is no phrase in the two clauses quoted above that expressly state that North Carolina is establishing said religion, it takes little reasoning to realize that the only utility in claiming a right to make law concerning religion is in order to do exactly that—is to (a) enforce not only public conformity but private as well and (b) deny equal rights to religions that do not meet a given criteria.  One does not, under these conditions, even have to overtly pass a proscriptive law to seriously erode the ability of non-sanctioned religions to operate.  All one needs to do is deny recognition in favor of a preferred denomination.

    The hue and cry of hyper-sensitives for the last couple of decades who claim religion—their religion, specifically—is under assault and requires extraordinary protective measures is at its base disingenuous.  (I could remark that, unlike certain institutions that must put up with mobs of sign-wielding and often aggressive picketers trying to block access, there are no widespread attempts to block people from attending church.  And unlike those other institutions, if someone tried that, no one would argue much at all if the police hauled them away.)  No one has passed any laws forbidding prayer—no, there are no laws banning private prayer, only public practices in certain places, which is not the same thing— nor has anyone successfully mounted legislation to rescind the tax exempt status of religious institutions across the board.  Christianity enjoys pride of place among all other religions in this country, so much so that it is virtually impossible to be elected to public office unless one prescribes to one denomination or another.  The president publicly announces prayer breakfasts, Congress opens with a prayer, and successful attempts to block zoning advantages churches have are rare.

    This is about nothing but intolerance and a desire to make laws about how people conduct their private affairs. (Conformism to religion is about as personally invasive as you can get.)  One of the manifest ironies of all this is how many of the people who think this is a good idea also claim Libertarian values and do not see the contradiction inherent in their position.

    Or don’t care.

    But this North Carolina proposition has gone a few steps farther and it will be interesting to see what happens if it gets out of committee and onto the floor.  If it actually passes, the federal response will be fascinating to observe.  Religion aside, this is a state claiming the right to ignore national law.

  • Undeserved Entitlement

    It’s wearying, this constant reminder that we live in a culture that has standards at odds with lofty goals.  People make special conditions for their principles.  The people lamenting the “ruined” lives of the Steubenville rapists would no doubt feel completely different had the victim been their daughter.  But there’s no hesitation to indulge in public shaming since it’s their favored sons who are going to have pay a penalty for indulging what we too often give implicit permission.

    I remember clearly the moment the disparity really struck home for me.  I was maybe eighteen or nineteen, watching a Sixty Minutes segment on some aspect of sexuality.  Most of the report is a fog.  It had to do with attitudes in Italy, where publicly available contraception had caused a huge stir (for obvious reasons) and Sixty Minutes did its usual job of crunching numbers and finding relevant interviews.  The bit that stuck with me was a breakdown of premarital attitudes of Italian males and females.

    Something like 80% of Italian girls (premaritally) wanted to marry a man who had had sexual experience.  Close to that percentage of young Italian men insisted they would only marry a virgin.

    How was this to be addressed?  Where were all those young men going to get the experience their future wives desired if not from the very girls the men would then refuse to marry should they provide said experience?

    I worked this over for weeks, trying to make sense of both the disparity and a culture that accepted this without much question, with an “of course” attitude that expected boys to get laid before marriage and demanded girls keep their legs crossed.  Regardless of the stated principles of society, down deep where people live in their skulls, this is the common attitude, and has been thus for millennia.

    That’s the attitude we’re seeing on full display in the reaction to the Steubenville trial.  Oh, they were just being high-spirited boys!  They didn’t mean anything by it!  Why ruin their futures with a guilty verdict for doing what we all expect undisciplined unreflective un-self-aware young males to do?  I mean, there but for the grace of Twitter…!

    And the girl?  Fox has named her, an absolutely unconscienable act of malice and insensitivity, and most of the networks have been focusing on the “promise” of these boys now endangered and the hell with the girl.

    Because she shouldn’t have been there.  Because she’s one of those girls that teased the bull and “got what was coming to her.”

    We have halfway internalized the idea that women are allowed to have sex lives, but on some level it seems a lot of people think that if indeed a woman wants to partake of sex outside the rigid guidelines of past traditions then she should be willing to accept it no matter what form in comes in.  That any woman who wants to have sex outside of marriage (before, during, after, or remaining unmarried) has forfeited the right to be selective.  Whether we say that or not, this is at the heart of the reaction to this case.

    And somehow, the idea that we should teach young men not to rape is viewed in some quarters as an absurd idea.

    Why?

    This is, by the way, one of the main bases of fundamentalist Islamic practices in this regard, that men have no control over their libidoes and the only solution is to keep the women in cages to spare the hapless males the temptation.  I mention it here because in Islamic sha’ria law it is so blatantly obvious, but we in the West more or less nurture a similar idea.  It is a ridiculous abandonment of an idea of teaching and training that is taken for granted in most other areas of life.  We assume we can teach people to behave when it comes to just about anything else.  It would be laughable if a defense were mounted for a thief that said, “Well, that house should not have been there, looking so prosperous.  My client couldn’t help himself seeing such temptation.”  We would laugh and unsympathetically sentence the thief for his crime.  Because we assume people can learn, can be taught.

    Except in sex.  Gosh, when it comes to that, there’s nothing we can do.  Despite evidence to the contrary, despite programs that do just that—programs that are fought tooth and nail by people who seek to blame the woman because their feckless men can’t understand limits, boundaries, and seem to have the notion that any sex they can get (and get away with) is just their due.

    The added fact that these boys were football players just makes it even more absurd.  How could such youth not be given complete sympathy?  They are the standard bearers of our culture.  Football is next to christianity to some people.  You can’t take that away!

    We privilege our athletes too much in the first place.  Males who already believe they have rights to other peoples’ well being who are also athletes make for an ugliness of which we should ourselves be ashamed, because we’ve handed them the keys to the house and implied that any harm they do we’ll put down to “boyish enthusiasm”—because we don’t want them to be punished when what they do is so important to us.

    I’ve got no sympathy for these boys.  They thought they were getting away with something.  They furthermore didn’t think what they were getting away with was really wrong because they bragged about it.  I want to know how come they missed the part that says fucking someone who has not said, very explicitly and very soberly, yes is absolutely wrong.  By bragging about it, they not only demonstrated that they didn’t think it was wrong but that they felt they deserved it.

    And The Culture seems bent on validating their belief.

    Shame on us.

  • Banks Passing

    One of the founding members of a band I have loved and followed since I first heard them over 44 years ago has died.

    Peters Banks  was the original guitarist for Yes.  As noted in the obituary, he recorded the first two albums with them before being asked to leave, to be replaced by Steve Howe.

    The video below is from 2007 and shows a performance by Banks of a piece from his first solo album, Two Sides of Peter Banks, which was released in 1973.

    I have written elsewhere about the peculiarity of certain musicians within certain milieu.  Banks, outside of Yes, was a first-rate player.  He did not shine so much with Yes, but a large part of that is probably because Anderson and Squire were going in one direction and Banks had other ideas in mind.

    In the last few years I’ve found and purchased three other Banks recordings.  All instrumental, very layered works, part jazz, part rock, part Something Else, I’ve listened and admired the distinctiveness of his sound.  He did other bans after leaving Yes (Flash, Empire) and a lot of session work.  I’ve always been impressed by the list of players on that first solo album, though.  He had Phil Collins (Genesis), Jan Akkerman (Focus, Brainbox), John Wetton (King Crimson, UK, and later Asia) Steve Hackett (Genesis) and others, all first-rank players, all fitting together seamlessly in a wonderfully eclectic musical experience that showcased a wide range of influence and style and ambition.

    Here’s a rare video from a Yes session with Banks on guitar:

    Time catches us all eventually.  It’s good some things are not forgotten soon.

    Farewell, Pete.

     

     

  • Meaning, Cults, Freedom

    Recently, I finished reading Lawrence Wright’s new book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollwood, & the Prison of Belief, about Scientology.  It’s a lucid history and examination of the movement.  I wrote a review of the book over at the Proximal Eye, here.  In that review, I touched on a few of the concerns I harbor in regards to religious movements, Scientology in particular, but all of them in general.

    The central question in Wright’s book—and indeed in others, for instance Jon Krakauer’s Under The Banner Of Heaven about Mormonism—is the question of volitional surrender.  Why do people hand over the keys to their being to institutions and ideologies that are often based on dubious claims, led by people with clearly autocratic tendencies, to live lives of functional servitude, if not physically certainly intellectually?

    There are separate questions here, concerning different stages.  For those born into a group, being raised within its codes and customs, the Outside is by definition alien and the individual is required to do exactly the reverse of the adult who comes into that group from the Outside.  The same question can apply to the apostate who has grown up knowing nothing else—why would you throw over all that you know to embrace this Other Thing?  (The Amish offer an excellent example of the problem, with their practice of rumspringa, a kind of wanderjahr for the youth to go see the outside world and decide for themselves whether to stay or leave the community.  It would seem to be a fair practice, offering freedom of choice, but how fair can it be?  One can read a book about another culture, “know” it intellectually, but that’s a far cry from being able to operate within it, or understand it on any visceral level.  Instead, it’s a kind of wilderness test, which more than likely causes sufficient anxiety that a return to what one has known one’s entire life is virtually guaranteed except for the most adventurous—which may serve the community by culling out those so independent-minded who may cause problems later by nonconformity.)

    It would be easy to dismiss certain problems with cultism by seeing past eras as offering essentially little to counter the claims of a charismatic proselyte offering a path to transcendence, but the fact is most of these movements seem immune to any kind of counterargument for those who seem determined to join something that offers them such a path.  For the first generation of Mormons, it didn’t matter that Joseph Smith was obviously coming up with his revelations out of his own head.  When his wife called his bluff on polygamy, all she managed to do was sheer off a splinter group and increase the resolve of the core followers.  What was happening was a sophisticated con, but it didn’t matter, not to those surrounding Smith and later Brigham Young.  It was at that point no longer Smith’s revelation but theirs.  He couldn’t have stopped if he had wished to.  The intricate and alchemical brew of group coherence had happened and it had become Another Thing, an Experience that was true as an experience, regardless of the facts or the motives behind its inception.  The followers had created it and made it its own entity.

    Which would suggest that the thing being believed in is less important than the clear need on the part of the acolyte to believe.

    Subsequently, this creates a hermetic seal around the object of belief, because belief is not real unless it is absolute.  Criticism of the tenets of faith are not so much attacks on details as on the act of believing.  The whole being of the believer becomes so intertwined with the thing believed as to be one and the same, inseparable.  Personal.  And yet, curiously dispassionate.  It’s not so much a choice as an inevitability, a recognition, an “of course” moment, a “how could I have been so blind?” revelation…

    …which automatically renders any question of “how can I be so blind?” inadmissible, unhearable, unsupportable.

    It has nothing to do with intelligence.  It’s all about meaning.

    The central question of all philosophy is simple: Why am I here?  Even philosophies that seem to render this as an unanswerable—and therefore purely academic question—start from there.  It’s a good question.  What is my purpose in this life?  Religion supplants the inward-directedness of this by offering more cosmic possibilities, often of an unknowable nature, which require belief.  Faith.  No matter what, there is a purpose, a point, and even if I can’t see it, it is at least there.  Meanwhile, here are some guideposts, some rules, some practices that will keep me on a path more or less in sympathy with this higher purpose.  By serving this belief in a telec universe, our own sense of purpose can be, if not answered, at least validated, even if the cause is abstruse or abstract.

    Trusting that purpose will be fulfilled simply through faith is not sufficient for the organizations commanding the obeisance of their membership.  If there is a purpose, then actions must be taken to fulfill it, and in lieu of any other clear program, conversion becomes their raison d’être.  They must be seen to be purposeful.  What higher purpose, then, than to change the world.  The clearest way to do that is to convert the world to their cause.  (This is functionally impossible, because there has always been and will always be competing doctrines, but it does raise an interesting question of what would they do if they achieved this end?  After the point at which everyone believed in the same thing, what next?)  And so the continual proselytization such institutions sponsor. (This has the added benefit of redirecting any kind of skepticism from the proselytes potential to ask questions of their own faith into a concern for the potential converts lack of faith.)

    There are many definitions of cults, some of which contradict, but at base it is a tricky thing because a “cult” bears sufficient semblance to well-established religions that the only apparent difference is size.  If a charismatic preacher with a hundred followers claims to speak directly to god, he’s a nut.  But if the pope makes the same claim, it is accepted as a matter of faith and accorded a kind of respect the preacher cannot command.  Size.  A hundred people can be deluded, but a billion?  At that level, we tacitly acknowledge that Something Else Is Going On.

    My own test has to do with permeability.  Is there egress equal to ingress?  How easily can people leave?  What restrictions are placed on individual interaction with the so-called Outside World, if any?  It’s one thing to claim that people are free to leave at any time, but if the organizational structure requires a cutting off of contact, a limitation of information from outside the group, whether physically imposed or simply a matter of conformity to the group, part of its identity, then it becomes a question meriting a closer look.  Cult? Or religion?  Or, more accurately, cult or church?  The Amish offer an apparent open door, but it’s not really.  Young Amish go out on their rumspringa utterly unprepared because all their lives up to that point have been lived in a bubble that limits information, limits experience, limits contact, and then makes it an either-or test.  (That the limits are self-imposed does not matter since they are self-imposed in  order to avoid group censure.) They are unequipped to make the kinds of judgments and choices so many of us take as a simple right to associate with whom and in what way we choose.  (The big difference regarding the Amish is they do not proselytize.  They don’t go out actively recruiting.  This, to my mind, removes them from cult status and makes them simply what might be called a Pocket Culture.)

    A cult guards itself from the Outside by demanding its members shut out anything not wholly contained within the cult.  It actively discourages interface with the world at large.  Sometimes it will go so far as physically impede such contact.

    But the members will accept this.  The question brought up by Wright’s book is, why?

    If one genuinely believes that their salvation is at stake, that they risk losing an eternal soul should they question—if, in other words, fear is the motive for strict adherence to a set of doctrines and behavioral restrictions—then it is possible one is being abused.  We have ample evidence and example of abused children remaining intransigently loyal to their abusers.  The possibility of inhabiting another condition, whether “better” or not, is unthinkable, because they risk their identity.

    Within the precincts of certain ideologies, part of the experience is literally seeing the world in a different way.  The “truth” of the doctrine is exampled in this seeing.  Things “make sense” in ways they never did before.  (It doesn’t matter here that this new way of seeing can happen with any conceptual breakthrough and that if we’re lucky it happens all the time, throughout life, as a natural part of learning.)  That apparent “clarity” can become so important that anything which endangers it must be avoided, actively shut out.  Questions about the central doctrines simply cannot be entertained when the stakes are so high.

    In this way, the apparent glassy-eyed acceptance of conceptual weirdness within certain cults makes sense as the only possible path for someone who has achieved a fragile balance because of a framework of belief and is afraid of losing it by questioning the very beam on which they now stand.  The tragedy is that this balance should be theirs no matter which beam they stand on, but the institution has convinced them that it is not theirs should they question or leave.  People feel they have found a home, but a home is a place from which you can come and go as you please, bringing back what you find, enlarging it and decorating it with new things.  The door is never shut in either direction.  Wright’s subtitle posits “the prison of belief” and that pertains when the door is shut and you either don’t leave or if you do you can never come back, which turns the world to which you’ve escaped into just another prison.

    Ironically, the one in the deepest cell may be the figure at the center of the movement.  The founder.  Jim Jones, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, all the others.  None of them could stop being who their followers thought they were.  Ultimately, it killed them all.  They had even less freedom to leave.  Their task was to design the prison and always be in it.  One wonders if they in any way fulfilled their own definition of purpose.