NOTE: DUE TO THE SENSITIVITY OF THE TOPIC, CHANCES ARE THAT I WILL BE EDITING THIS BLOG ENTRY A FEW TIMES OVER THE NEXT DAY OR SO. BEAR WITH ME.
The recent, socially and politically complex nightclub shooting in Orlando has prompted a whole load of anti-religion rhetoric. And justifiably so, sort-of: most recent analogous shootings — Dylann Roof notwithstanding — have been performed by people who claim to adhere to a certain religion: Islam. Since there is no reason for us to doubt someone's convictions and claims to follow any faith, we should not ignore or downplay it.. In the case of Orlando, the perpetrator, in his last act before the massacre, admitted his own Islamic religious angle himself. Religious identification is a common factor in the lives of people who perpetuate popularized violence in our worldwide culture today; I have no interest in trying to step around that fact.
However, saying "Muslims" or "Islam" or "religion" is the problem misses the mark by a wide margin. The religion isn't a problem on its own; a combination of factors is the problem. If I have to identify with a belief system, I will admit that I am a secularlist. I see no need for religion in my own life or in the political sphere. In my experience, and through my reading, I've come to believe that religion in all its facets causes more problems than it solves. It misguides people; it promotes authoritarianism; it defies reason; it obfuscates social and personal development. Religion inherently creates arbitrary, evidence-free lenses that confuse people from a potentially clearer view of reality. I shed my religion in order to better understand my world, and for me it has worked. But my fellow secularists like to point a singular finger at religion in situations like this, and I think that's also misguided. People are more complicated than their religious beliefs; culture is more complicated than religion, just as it's more complicated than economic factors. Pointing the finger at religion — or any other factor — creates a type of tunnel vision that misses out on the problem as a whole: that humans are animals living a far more complex lifestyle than any other animal has in the history of the world. We've made a real mess in our development as a civilisation and our brains haven't adapted as quickly as our societies have. Humans need a lot of shit to thrive. We need support networks; we need stability around us; we need autonomy; we need a sense of belonging; we need to feel as if we make a difference in our world; we need to express ourselves; we need medication and therapy. In short, we need a balanced life, as far as we can get it. And this can look like millions of different things. One balanced person might be a "pillar of their community" while another might be something more subtle. And it goes through changes over time and some people have to watch their balance more carefully than others. There is one person in my life who found an explicit way to balance out her life: my sister. She struggled in normalized Western life. She was out of balance in the hectic expectations we place on young, beautiful women in our society. She battled with mindless, retail jobs and empathized with people to a degree that would seem to debilitate her. She struggled to maintain her religious identity in a world that expected so much of her time and energy. But she was strong enough to do something about it, even though it was seemingly drastic. She joined a convent in late 1997; she has been a nun for almost 20 years. There, she has found a way to live a life that seems as balanced as it can be. It has its stresses, but she found a place where she belongs, where she knows her place and role in the community, where she can make a contribution to her limited, but real world. Drastic move for a Baptist pastor's daughter? Certainly. But it was effective. Essentially, she saw a means to reach the top of Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs and embraced it full force. Considering the news that's come out about Omar Mateen — that he was prone to rage, that he abused his wife, that he had a history of threatening people, that he would get angry when drunk and would drink in the corner of the bar alone — I think it's safe to say that he did not have a balanced life. I wouldn't be surprised if some sort of religious thinking legitimised his personal hatred of homosexuality. I imagine he had some severe morbidity of psychological disorders. He was a mess of a person, out of balance on many, many levels. He clearly lacked empathy and compassion. And he had access to guns that could shoot bullet after bullet after bullet. This is so tragic that I feel snobbish and elitist even attempting to put it into words. I'm not going to point at his religion and say "His religion made him do it." That's a gross understatement, just as it is when people say "It was a mental disorder" or "He was ostracised." There is a wide swathe of factors that contributed to this case of "homegown extremism" and "self-redicalization." I refuse to point at a finger at a single snapshot as if it could tell the whole story. Some secularists might suggest that Omar Mateen was just fulfilling the "essence" of his religion. I've heard many secular activists say things like "The extremists are the ones who are actually practicing the religion the 'right' way." But there is no "right way" for something that's already baseless, already in their own heads. Nobody has a trump card on the "right way" to do something that has no foundation in the first place, neither those who claim the religion or those who criticize it. Successful religions are megamalleable: adaptability is the hallmark of any enduring idea — religious, political, social, or even personal. Religions that cannot adapt to the disparate ideas in people's brains die out. And Omar Mateen adapted his religion too, just like everybody does. Through his own hateful, distorted lenses, for his own purposes, he killed. His religion was just a part of his already distorted, hateful, mindset. But it was not the cause. It was merely another factor among many, a rack on which to hang his hatred, disillusionment, and insecurity. Besides, which religion would we blame anyhow? Islam? Or perhaps his internal religion of masculinity? or of hatred? or of honor? It's just too messy to pinpoint. To put it another way, if you're a secularist who wants to blame all of this on Omar's religion, or if you're a liberal who wants to pin it to his psychological disorders or family history, and you don't take the whole picture into account, you're no better than the guy who's saying that this happened because Obama let him. We will always have imbalances in our world; we need to do our best to give everybody a chance to find their centre and balance in their own lives. Our culture's incessant focus on capital and growth thrives on instability, but we — as human being animals — don't. And when we create a shifty, careless culture and then give people access to handheld, legal WMDs, we pay a terrifying price for this cultural instability.
When we mix religious ideas, politics, and psychological disorders or imbalances, we have a recipe for serious instability. All of these ideas are just that — ideas. And ideas are only real in the minds of people, and they're fluid and dynamic, and they create the mindsets and lenses by which we see the world. All these abstract layers of ideological blame are as unsteady as standing on a top-heavy Jenga tower, assembled on a trampoline.
I think that's what I appreciate about Obama's speech embedded below: he captures a level of pragmatic empathy that I believe is truly admirable in its forthright care for people.
UPDATE JUNE 16
This morning's diatribe on The Scathing Atheist drives this home from a different angle.
And Thomas at Atheistically Speaking also had some interesting conclusions:
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NOTE: I STARTED WRITING THIS POST ON THURSDAY, JUNE 9. I WILL NOTE WHEN I START WRITING ON JUNE 10.
JUNE 9, 2016:
I am grateful for practically everything in my life. However, I don't think I express my gratitude very often. I'm out of practice.
Yesterday, while I was reading the chapter on Emotional Literacy in Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, I came to a renewed appreciation for my generally peaceful, stable childhood. My parents and I certainly have our differences, but I think they appreciate me and I am grateful for their attempts to give their oddball, humanities-ish son a good upbringing. I had freedom to move around and make my own choices, and I did—in my own introverted, awkward way. I'm thankful for their efforts and continued support. This morning, while making my daughters' lunches, I listened to this video by the more-energetic-than-I-can-handle, proud-of-his-teeth Charisma on Command guy:
His "top of the ladder" is essentially a matter of day-to-day gratefulness, of being thankful for the things you have—without fussing over all the things you don't have.I've heard this sort of idea before, that gratefulness for the everyday is the pinnacle of inner peace, and I like the guy's "Ladder" image, so I went searching for some ways to organize some gratitude.
I quickly discovered The Gratitude Challenge, a 21-Day plan for practising gratitude deliberately and methodically. Although I'm not usually a fan of "challenges" like this, I think this might be a good time to take it on. Why?
There is no way that I could have ever imagined that I'd be in this place even a year ago. My life is practically unrecognizable to myself. From the outside, I think things look pretty-much the same, but on the inside the changes have been enormous and unprecedented. I'd like to keep most of those changes "on the inside," but I'd also like to share some of them a little. Just a little bit.
Here are the main "lessons" or things I've had to come to terms with this year, at least that I can think of tonight:
Me, I'm here on my own with the girls, working through my own stuff my own ways: through competence and relationships at work, the maintenance of positive, empathic relationships with my daughters, through reading, and through creation of content of different sorts. I've set up the microphones at the computer and hope to track down some inspiration of things to talk about and create. Here's to hoping it works out a bit.
My partner recently texted me the following article:
It's a good sentence-a-paragraph article that highlights a bunch of the contradictions our society faces as it tries to come to terms with mental illness and personality disorders.
Here's thepassage that stands out most to me: Stigma accompanies all mental illness to some extent, but in recent years, certain mental illnesses have been getting better press than others. Depression, for example, has been frequently covered in the mainstream media, from webcomics to feature-length documentaries.
It makes sense. We have these blatant contradictions that we cater to and idolize: we hate narcissists, but raise them up to lead our companies and parties; we hate psychopaths, but read books about them and follow them in art.
It's a sort of "othering" where we fetishize unconventional behaviour. It's a sort of At least I'm better than that, or I wish I could do that, but I'm so glad I can't. It's some messed up stuff. The thing about these sort of mental health definitions is that they are culturally dependent. I don't think narcissists in the West are necessarily narcissists in the East, for example. Nonetheless, some cultural compassion is needed for those we've pushed into cultural boxes. I, as a teacher, know full well that plenty of these ADHD-diagnosed kids are victims of the school system, its culture, its rituals. Their diagnosis would be unrecognizable outside the regimented strictures of the classroom. They might just be seen as creatives, shamans, warriors, or some other sort of specialization. With the ADHD label, driven by the classroom, they end up miscreants. I've been listening through Mark Goulston's Talking to Crazy and it's been an eye-opening experience for me. The book articulately makes the case for my own communication problems, which for years I had generally set aside. I already knew that I'd backed myself into corners, that I'd let "my own crazy" get the better of me, but I had no idea as to how I did it. I was clueless. But now I can see how my own desires to please people or counter everything with logic were in themselves irrational. I think I'm starting to be able to determine the differences between logic and rationality, between empathy and sympathy, thanks to this latest round of reading.. And it's giving me a new appreciation for articles like the one above, which try to help people sympathize with people who suffer from mental illnesses, as we define them in our culture. I don't know if I have any sort of diagnosable mental illness beyond depression, but I do know that my own mindset has exacerbated the people around me. I may not have a mental illness, but it doesn't mean my mental health has been up to snuff. One step forward. And another. One step at a time. |
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