I don’t trust systems. The sort religions and their gurus invent to keep the faithful in line. The kind political parties use to gain control, build upon exclusion and instill fear. Even scientific systems, if they do not understand that they will be outranked at some future date by a later scientific system based on knowing more.
As a poet I’m not even particularly moved by poetic systems, like sestinas, sonnets, pantoums, limericks, odes, villanelles, or haikus. To my way of reading, a poem succeeds through its ability to pull the reader or listener into an experience. Rhyme schemes and numbers of lines per stanza are fine as long as they enhance the poem’s impact, not constrict it.
What particularly annoys me is when someone or a group of people finds a system that works for them and immediately tries to push it off on everyone else. I find proselytizing presumptuous and arrogant. Sharing experiences, including what has been useful in a particular situation, can be generous and helpful; while assuming one’s own experience will be helpful to everyone is absurd, often dangerous.
I remember twenty or so years ago, when feminist psychology began producing methodologies that helped victims of childhood abuse free up our memories, work through them, and very often turn victimhood into survival. These methodologies were rooted in recognition of personhood, and teaching us to trust our deepest instincts. They freed memory. Never has a philosophy found its way into everyday life in a way that was more vital or empowering. I credit one of these methodologies (and a brilliant psychotherapist) with my own healing from incest at the hands of my maternal grandfather.
But this advance, like so many others, came with its burden of arbitrary, often unscientific, therapeutic rip-offs. The assumption was “one size fits all.” Suddenly personal testimonies and elaborate treatises claimed that the abused must forgive their abusers, or that belief in a higher power lessened the damage done. Some therapists carried their patients’ loads (and income-generating fees) for years, rather than give them the tools to deal with the residual damage in their lives. At the other end of the spectrum was the now thoroughly discredited “False Memory Syndrome,” claiming that all such memories were figments of the victims’ imaginations. It wasn’t hard to figure out whose interests they were defending.
I never doubted that my memories were real. But the routes to healing could be as different as those making the journey. I soon realized that forgiving was necessary for some, meaningless or even offensive to others. Appealing to a higher power could be useful for those who hold a belief in that higher power; for non-believers it was beside any possible point. We are all different, each with her or his history, culture, degree of damage and personal resources. I feel fortunate to have had a therapist who understood this.
Political sectarianism can be just as ferocious, and its damage much more public. The Communist parties of the past century honed sectarianism to outrageous levels. Parties with their roots in the old Soviet Union shaped the system they believed would change the world based on that nation’s experience. Those that had their roots in Mao or Trotsky promoted alternative variations. The local party—be it in the US, Cuba, Mexico, Peru or elsewhere—too often took these dictums to absurd heights. They were unable to factor in their own cultural or historical singularities, and their sweeping generalizations prevented otherwise intelligent minds from looking at local particularities. Thousands of generous men and women died as a result.
Bourgeois political parties such as our Democrats and Republicans, although they had their moments of importance, are no longer concerned with creating a more just world. Each only wants power: for the party as a whole and its individual members. This translates into damaging insinuations aimed at distorting an opponent’s ideas and destroying his or her reputation, blatant campaign lies, backroom deals and slick maneuverings. Money is everything. It has now fully replaced ideals in its ability to get a candidate elected to office. Truths are twisted and decimated as long as it helps the big boys (and occasional girls) get their way.
And so, the tried and true systems of commercial advertising take possession of exercises still presented as debates, town halls and even informal discussions among those who, after all, are reduced to modeling their behavior on that of the professionals. Most people believe what they are told; independent research is rare. Thus so-called representative democracy has been reduced to anything but, and all through the subtle or not so subtle manipulation of systems once believed to safeguard justice. Justice itself is reduced to mockery when members of a nation’s highest Court favor their political persuasions over a system of laws meant to promote even-handedness.
It may be that when extremist religion and extremist politics come together for a cause most serious damage is done. The so-called Holy Wars were an historic example. Today in some parts of the world young people, frustrated to the point of madness, blow themselves up, claiming many innocent victims in the process. And here at home religious bigots join with the political right in pushing “right to life” and anti-gay agendas.
Indeed the systems that regulate our lives are vitiated, often to the point of delivering the very opposite of what they were intended to provide. We have a political system that screams democratic principles and attempts to impose them throughout the world (often through the force of arms), yet it itself has become less and less democratic. Never have the rich been richer or the poor poorer.
We have a public education system that poses as a way for generations of young people to learn, yet it has become the very antithesis of real learning: one in which rote memorization and standardized testing have increasingly encroached upon teaching students to think. And we have a healthcare system in which profit defies healing at every level. Powerful insurance and pharmaceutical companies reap obscene amounts of money, while those in need of help find it more and more difficult to get that help in direct and appropriate ways.
Our prison system is another example of distorted intention. It is which is billed as punishment combined with reeducation. The privatization of our so-called correctional institutions also privileges revenge and profit over correction, such that the very essence of crime, punishment and recidivism is corrupted. The United States is one of the few developed countries in which capital punishment is used. Racism is a core element in a system that confines a far higher percentage of people of color and the poor, vastly disproportionate to the percentage of those groups within the general population. And we continue such cruel practices as confining long-term prisoners to solitary confinement for forty years or more, despite court orders to the contrary.
Bureaucracy is often blamed for systems going bad: an organizational design may have started well but top-heavy administration or too many checks and balances thwart original intention until all that remains is an unwieldy mechanism that does right by no one but those jockeying for positions of power. Then again, some degree of order is surely necessary for the accomplishment of goals. The Occupy Movement that burst upon our political scene in 2012 never went further than showcasing popular discontent precisely because it lacked organizational directives that might have enabled it to move from action to concrete change.
Extreme fundamentalist religiosity and extreme political sectarianism have been responsible for extreme terror—from the ancient Roman practice of throwing Christians to the lions through the Inquisition and into a present of Islamic Jihads and vicious hate crimes.
Surely our greatest problem today is human-made climate change, and fundamentalist religious fanaticism is behind the inability of many minds to accept the evidence of that change. Clearly some politicians who refuse to read the writing on the wall are protecting private interests. But many ordinary citizens are unable to respond to the danger because they are blinded by systems requiring that they suspend disbelief.
Yes, you may say, systems may be corruptible but science is science. When it comes to tested theories and proven algorithms there is no question that the system works. Well, at least until more is known about a particular problem and a better system is developed. Perhaps the sure thing is change.
We will always have those men and women who choose to substitute belief for analysis, those who prefer adherence to some ancient text (usually taken out of context and rendered in ahistorical translation) than their own process of free thought. We will always have those who rely on fairytales to bolster their own ignorance or position, arrogance or status.
And we may always have to contend with those who see science and art as irremediably antagonistic to one another, those who lack the imagination to understand how magic and “proof” dance together in this choreography that is life. In this regard, those who decry the capitalist system ignore its capacity for honoring privacy and encouraging personal initiative. Those who call socialist systems deadening producers of sameness are unable or unwilling to embrace the benefits of social equality. Those who laud biblical systems forget times have changed. And those who privilege science as the only purveyor of truth cannot admit that the glorious paintings on cave walls in southern France, the magnificent architecture of Machu Picchu, Bach’s haunting Brandenburg concertos, and the Terracotta Warriors of Xian—to name just a few extraordinary works of art—soar beyond any scientific principle to take their places in the universal pantheon of what makes art art.
I write these lines on the last day of 2013: as every year, at least symbolically a time of reckoning. I would like this not to be merely a rant against that which does not work or seems suspect, but a recipe for improving all our lives. It seems to me that one big step toward that would be tolerance. Tolerance, an effort to disengage with labels and look analytically at the many pieces that make up those systems we so readily denigrate.
For example, rather than assume that democracy describes a perfect system take a hard look at how it works (or doesn’t) for different social classes, racial and ethnic groups, genders, and people with varying degrees of education and/or mental and physical abilities. Are speech and opinion really protected? Are whistleblowers able to signal breaches of trust without being ostracized or worse? Are those brave men and women fighting on foreign shores really keeping us safe and protecting our national security?
Personal privacy and the opportunity for individual initiative are surely gems in capitalism’s crown. Both are under brutal attack these days, the first because government has assumed the right to play Big Brother on a scale only imagined by the likes of George Orwell, and the second because a consumerist commodity system overrides the original meaning of free enterprise.
Communist experiments have largely failed in recent years, or morphed into hybrids that are pale examples of formerly hopeful systems. Socialism struggles on in only a few countries. In our global economy, to have even a chance of success communist economics would require interlocking trade and exchange on a global scale. Capitalism clearly won the dirty war.
Yet there is no doubt in my mind that the stated aims of communism and socialism would make for a more compassionate world: a narrower gulf between the haves and have-nots, racial and gender equality, free public education and universal healthcare. These aims were betrayed in country after country. Sadly, real Socialism proved no more capable of achieving these goals than Capitalism has.
“From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” This phrase, popularized by Karl Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program, espoused the view that such an arrangement would be made possible by the abundance of goods and services that a developed socialist society would produce. With the full development of unfettered productive forces, he believed, there would be enough to satisfy everyone's needs. And yes, there would be. But this didn’t take into account the created loopholes and manipulative strategies to which every system ultimately succumbs.
Labels—communism, socialism, capitalism, democracy, even freedom itself—mean different things to different people. And labels are so easily manipulated, so often used to denigrate those who use them most innocently. Rather than toss about a label in order to misinform or deceive, why not look at all angles of a proposed solution? Surely each is composed of dangers but also worthwhile ideas. Deconstructing our vilified philosophies, taking what works and discarding what doesn’t, might put us all on a road to survival.
I venture to suggest that in such an exercise we would find that an inclusive and loving spirituality is healthier than belief in a vengeful God, that war never brings peace, and that most Muslims and Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, non-believers and others favor tolerance over revenge—even when small extremist groups within all such configurations promote domination and senseless killing.
Stop speaking long enough to listen. An idea in another’s pantheon just may be a piece of the puzzle we all need to complete in order to create a space for possibility. Perhaps it is time to replace arrogance with humility and prioritize questions over established systems. Perhaps this might help usher in a year in which hope can be renewed.
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