Living with a Wild God

Review of Living with a Wild God, by Barbara Ehrenreich.

In a nutshell: Living With a Wild God is the story of a rational, scientific-minded atheist wrestling with the meaning of a personal mystical experience.

Ms. Ehrenreich is an atheist, has been all of her life. And she is from a lineage of atheists that goes back to her great-grandmother (the great-grandma was Catholic and the priest wouldn’t show up when her father was dying unless they paid him $25; a few years later she was dying in childbirth, when the priest showed up, put a crucifix on her chest and started administering the last rites she hurled the crucifix against the wall.) 

But as a young teen-ager Ms. Ehrenreich was obsessed with the quest to find the “Truth”; in other words to find answers to such questions as why are we here, what is the point of life? At the same time she started having experiences where her perception would dissolve, like all the boundaries around separate objects disappeared. She had trouble putting the experiences into words in the journal she kept at the time, and the best word she could come up for it was “disassociation.”

Then one day when she was 17 she had a profound experience, which, again, she struggles to express. Her best metaphor is of fire: 

the world flamed into life…There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with ‘the All,’ as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, and one reason for the terrible wordlessness of the experience is that you cannot observe fire really closely without becoming part of it.

Because she had no framework for this experience, in the ensuing months she struggled to keep her equanimity. She worried she was mentally ill. Soon she left for college and the existential crisis passed.

Her father was a scientist, and she assumed from an early age she would become a scientist. She ended up getting a PhD in biochemistry, although she has never worked in the field. Instead she became a political activist and social scientist, writing such books as Nickel and Dimed about her attempts to live on minimum wage (imagine, a social scientist who experiments on herself).

Radical Equality

I became a fan of Sharon Draper when I read her book Out of My Mind earlier this year, but I didn’t know anything about her as a person (the copy of the book didn’t have an author photo).  Recently I wanted to refer to the book in a forum post and googled her to check a fact. I went first to an interview where someone asked why race hadn’t come up in the book. I thought that was an odd question, but it made me realize that race had never been mentioned. Then I clicked on another link and saw a photo of Ms. Draper and realized she is black. Then the question made sense.

But why should the book have to revolve around race just because she’s black? Ms. Draper was addressing an issue that confronts people of all races—the prejudice faced by a young girl with cerebral palsy—and giving the girl a racial identity would just have clouded that message.

Knowing this about her has made me even more of a fan. She is an example of the radical equality I dream of, where we don’t have to pay attention anymore to details like race, gender, or sexual orientation. Those things are immaterial; what matters is what kind of person you are.

American culture has made great strides in the last decade in recognizing the rights of LGBT people. But I dream of a day when no one has to “declare” their sexual orientation. In other words there is no “normal” sexuality that requires you to say “I’m not that, I’m this.”

Years ago SouthPark had an excellent episode about the end of racism. Chef, who is black, was angry about the town’s flag, which depicted a black man being lynched and white people dancing around the tree. The adults were confused about why Chef was angry—“this is our tradition,” they said—and the children were too…for a different reason. Chef realized that the kids didn’t see color—when one of them described the flag he said, “it’s a person hung from a tree and other people are standing around.” Chef realized his response had racism in it—it was all about color. The resolution was the flag basically stayed the same—a black person hanging from a tree and people all around—with one significant difference: the crowd is now multicolored and includes a black person.

One day we will all realize that everyone is radically equally human.

Update: my niece and I just read To Kill a Mockingbird, set in segregated Georgia in the 1930s. My niece thought that Calpurnia, the black cook/housekeeper, and Atticus were probably going to get married. By way of explanation she said, "The kids loved her!" I could see her struggling to understand as I explained why that marriage would have been unthinkable at the time. It was great seeing that the explanation made no sense to her.

Potato Salad and the Future of Work

At the beginning of July a man posted a project on Kickstarter: Making Potato Salad. He asked for $10 for supplies, and since this was his first potato salad, he said it might not be any good, but he’d send samples to anyone who funded him for $3. This is what he’d do if you pledged $20:

Receive a potato-salad themed haiku written by me, your name carved into a potato that will be used in the potato salad, a signed jar of mayonnaise, the potato salad recipe, hang out in the kitchen with me while I make the potato salad, choose a potato-salad-appropriate ingredient to add to the potato salad, receive a bite of the potato salad, a photo of me making the potato salad, a 'thank you' posted to our website and I will say your name out loud while making the potato salad.

Within a week he had over $40,000 pledged.

I first heard about this from uber-liberal cartoonist Ted Rall, who found it outrageous that such a frivolous “project” could generate so much in donations. His cartoon, “Potato Salad Society,” includes these comments:

Meanwhile, worthier Kickstarter projects—and charities—go unfunded. It’s safe to assume that few of the potato salad supporters would give anything to save refugees in South Sudan…Finding donors online requires the deadpan, mildly amusing tone that has become the official vibe of the Web.” Rall’s conclusion: “We.Are.Doomed (Internet-friendly neo-Bob Newhart tone).

First off that is quite condescending and presumptuous to assume these people wouldn’t give to refugees, but this is in-your-face Ted Rall; he loves being confrontational.

But more importantly, I think Rall and other critics are missing something important here. I think this potato salad project could signal the future of how many of us earn a living.

I envision a future where some people make their living online, with sponsors contributing small amounts a month or year to support their creative output —a crowdsourced version of the wealthy patronage system that supported great Renaissance artists like Michelangelo. Instead of depending on one wealthy person, these people could live off thousands or millions of tiny contributions.

It’s becoming common today to see paypal “donate” buttons on websites. Ted Rall has one on his website, and I have contributed as a way of showing my support for his work (perhaps he’s bitter because he’s not generated the same level of support as the potato salad maker).

We could support people because we think his or her work is important, or because we want to be part of it. We could show our appreciation for something that makes us laugh, or think, or cry, by contributing a small sum. The Huffington Post interviewed 18 of the potato salad donors, and they said they had contributed because they thought it was “funny,” “charming,” and “genuine.”

Through the wonder of the worldwide reach of the Internet, those small sums could potentially add up to a decent living.

There are predictions that we are not far from a revolution in work, due to the roboticization of the workplace. This will throw a large percentage of people out of work, and we’re not talking about factory workers only, this includes doctors and lawyers (see my blog post). If this is true we’re going to need to find entirely new ways to earn a living. Supporting each other’s creative endeavors seems to me a very positive solution. 

Overestimating Consciousness

Some years ago I was pondering Civil War battles and in particular what could possibly motivate men to make a charge knowing there was an almost 100 percent certainty that they would die. This saying came to my mind: “We consistently overestimate our level of consciousness, and we consistently underestimate our level of unconsciousness.” This was the only way I could make sense of it; there was something besides the rational conscious mind propelling those men to their doom.

Over the years this insight has seemed more and more powerful to me. I think it can be applied in a general fashion. Most of us think we have a lot more control over our thoughts and actions than we really do. In fact, this is where the belief in free will comes from; we think we consciously choose our thoughts and actions.

Of course it’s easy to understand why we would have this bias. We are only aware of what is in our conscious mind, so we think that’s where all the action is. However, neuroscientists are now establishing the power of our unconscious mind and the limitations of consciousness. This may sound like a bad thing at first, but when you begin to understand how it works, you can learn how to harness the unconscious mind to your advantage.

Tape a Fight and Listen Together Later

My husband and I are musicians. Right now we’re preparing for a concert and every day we record our rehearsals. Yesterday we had a disagreement; the same one we’ve had a hundred times before. Except this time it was recorded. We could listen back.

When you’re having an argument and you’re deep inside your story and your position, it’s extremely hard to be objective about what you’ve said, and what the other person has said. Our minds distort reality to fit our preconceptions at the best of times, and when we’re angry it’s even worse. How often do arguments get to the point where you’re arguing about what the other person said during the argument?!

Comedian Dave Chapelle once did a funny skit about a couple who were always accompanied by a court stenographer who took down every word they said, even in bed, so they could always ask for the transcript to be read and find out exactly what insult had been lobbed their way.

And yesterday I found out how useful this is. While we were rehearsing, Arthur wanted me to take another approach with my rhythm guitar on a particular song (these are his compositions), and—as usual—he said, “try this,” I played one note, and he said, “no, no, not like that.” He had no idea that he was being impatient, and when I tried to tell him to give me a minute, he replied that I was just being stubborn and unyielding—as usual. But when we listened back it was obvious to Arthur that he had been impatient. And the next day when we were in a similar situation he was much more patient, explaining what he wanted and giving me a chance to figure out how to do it.

Everyone is now carrying audio recorders around with them in their smartphones. I suggest you try this: next time you and your partner get into that same old discussion that never gets solved (or you and your mother, or whoever you have those regular disputes with), whip out your phone and record it. Then wait until later, when tensions have calmed down, and listen to it together. Don’t focus on your individual cases and start the argument back up again; instead focus on how you’re approaching the conversation: Are you being dictatorial—it’s my way or else? Are you bringing in history that has nothing to do with the current situation? Are you whining, yelling, or crying? Are you misinterpreting and/or misrepresenting what the other person is saying? Listen to it as if you’re watching a TV show of another couple sharing their relationship.

A cautionary note from Arthur: recording can distort people’s behavior. If you know you’re recording and you act all sugary-sweet in order to make the other person look bad in comparison, that’s not what I’m suggesting. In addition, some people will get even angrier at the sight of a recorder, so it can be an incendiary tactic.

World-Rejecting Religions

“I’m going to have the time of my life when my life is over,” goes a gospel song refrain. Another assures us: “I’m going to get carried away, when I get carried away.” This is the message of the Christianity I was raised with: life is a vale of tears, but if we’re good, when we die we’ll go to heaven, a place of never-ending enjoyment. In other words, this life is just preparation for the real life that begins when we die. We’re suffering sinners now but we’ll be celebrating saints when we get to heaven.

Because I was raised with this theology, maligning the physical seemed normal to me: truly spiritual people deny the flesh through ascetic living—eating minimally, being chaste, living in Spartan quarters, even scourging themselves.

As I learned about other religions it became clear that this denigration of life was present in them also. Islam promises such a wonderful heaven that believers are willing to blow themselves up to get there. Eastern religions talk about reincarnation and the wheel of life and death—the goal is to become enlightened enough to get off the wheel and never incarnate again.

But it wasn’t until I read Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday that the problem with these philosophies crystallized in my mind. He called them “world-rejecting” philosophies, which

assert not only that there is an after-life, but that it’s even more important and long-lasting than this earthly life, and that the overriding goal of earthly life is to obtain salvation and prepare you for the afterlife.

Diamond says that not only is this sentiment strong in Christianity, Islam, and some forms of Buddhism, it’s even present in some secular philosophies such as Plato’s Divine Forms.

Diamond points out that these world-rejecting philosophies are a rather new development in human history. They arose when large-scale, stratified societies came into existence around the time agriculture was invented. He writes, 

If everybody around you is suffering as much as you are, then there is no unfairness to be explained, and no visible example of the good life to which to aspire. But the observation that some people have much more comfortable lives and can dominate you takes a lot of explaining and comforting, which religion offers.

Life was harder for early farmers than for hunter-gatherers: they worked longer hours, had worse nutrition, suffered more from infectious disease, and lived shorter lives (studies of human stature, which is a good indicator of nutrition, show that wherever agriculture took hold, average height dropped dramatically and took a long time to recover). These farmers were in definite need of comfort.

So religions developed which promised believers that their suffering would be redeemed after death, in a place where they would enjoy all the pleasures that the rich around them enjoyed—“in my father’s house are many mansions,” we’ll have “pie in the sky,” we’ll enjoy dozens of virgins, etc.

Recently I learned of a French philosopher, named Michel Onfray, who is an advocate of ethical hedonism—pleasuring yourself and others without harming anyone.

In his book Atheist Manifesto Onfray enumerates many problems caused by monotheistic religion. Rejection of the world is just one of those problems, and it includes:

hatred of life coupled with a passionate and unshakable obsession with death; hatred of the here and now, consistently undervalued in favor of a beyond, the only possible reservoir of sense, truth, certainty, and bliss; hatred of the corruptible body, disparaged in every aspect, while the soul—eternal, immortal, divine—is invested with all the higher qualities and all the virtues; and finally, hatred of women, condemnation of liberated sexuality and sex for pleasure. Religion sets up the Angel, a bodiless archetype, in preference to real women. Chastity is a virtue common to all three religions [Judaism, Christianity, and Islam].

Onfray envisions a

post-Christian morality in the West—a morality in which the body is not a punishment; the earth ceases to be a vale of tears; this life is no longer a tragedy; pleasure stops being a sin; women, a curse; intelligence, a sign of arrogance; physical pleasure, a passport to hell.

Onfray, being an atheist, thinks that we’ll have to reject religion in order to enjoy this new celebration of the physical. But recently I heard a nondenominational minister (Howard Hanger, of Jubilee Community Church in Asheville, NC) speak about embracing the physical as holy. He said:

Somewhere along our rocky religious road we have picked up the notion that physical delight is somehow wrong, or if not wrong, at least superfluous. We have been taught that serious prayer, somber meditation, solemn contemplation is more holy than a deep belly laugh, or a dance with your sweetie in the kitchen, or the taste of a chocolate cream pie. We have been trained to think of God as a stern and strict judge who is more concerned that we follow religious rules than enjoy the life that God has given… 

We teach and have been taught that physical pleasure on Earth will lead to physical misery in the afterlife. And we’ve also been taught that not having physical pleasure on Earth will send you to eternal physical pleasure when you die. What if we’ve gotten it all wrong?

The conclusion of his message was that “sex is the way that God planned for life to begin. Humans did not invent sex. Sex was created by God and is therefore a holy act. And it may well be that physical delight is a way of honoring our creator.”

This resonates with me. We don’t have to throw out the divine to experience pleasure in the flesh. We can have a world-affirming religion, one that celebrates life and the physical as an aspect of the spiritual. As Alan Watts said, “Matter is spirit named.” There is no difference. To love God you must love the world.

Glimmer of a Meritocracy

I watched The Best Years of Our Lives recently. This is a great film set a year after World War II, about three men returning home to the same “heartland” town and readjusting to life after military service. At the beginning of the film they flew home together in a military transport plane and all you knew about them was their military ranks. As they were dropped off at their homes, in order of rank, much was revealed: the sailor lived in a solidly middle-class neighborhood, the Army sergeant lived in a swank downtown apartment building, and the Air Force captain was from the slum. The sergeant had deferred to the captain while they were in uniform, but out of it he was a wealthy banker, while the captain had worked as a soda jerk before the war. What was communicated eloquently was that in the military during wartime, character and competence was rewarded with less regard to class status than in the civilian world. What you learned in war was that a man’s ability was not linked to his position in society.

One of the themes of the film is the transition from the relative meritocracy of the military back to the ruthless world of capitalism where the main consideration is your money or your training. Being a good, capable man is not enough. The captain ended up back in the same drugstore, working as a soda jerk. The banker was put in charge of making G.I. loans, and when an ex-soldier applied for a loan, the banker approved it even though the man had no collateral. He later had to defend the decision to his boss, saying in the war he learned how to read a man’s character and he knew he could tell a good risk, a man who would pay his debts.

I found myself wondering how much this experience of meritocracy, created by the war bringing men of all classes together, led to what economists call the Great Compression. This was the period from the 1950s through the 1970s when income inequality was at its lowest in the United States. When CEOs of companies didn’t expect to be paid hundreds of times their employees’ salaries. When taxes were much higher than today and wealthy people paid them. When unions were thriving.

French economist Gabriel Zucman has been researching tax evasion around the world. In an article in yesterday’s New York Times, “True Cost of Hidden Money,” he’s quoted as saying that it was not socially acceptable to evade taxes in the years after WWII:

“There’s a profound shift in attitudes that happened in the 1980s,” Mr. Zucman says. “In the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, taxes were much higher, yet it was not considered normal to try to aggressively minimize your tax bill and even to evade taxes.”

This idea that social norms have shifted is also in Tom Toles’ blog post today:

'TOO MUCH!' that’s what we’re missing. We are living in a social environment in which the idea of ‘too much’ has all but vanished. Why is wealth distribution skewing so uncontrollably? Because those few who are blessed, or cursed, by finding themselves in the top 1% simply cannot stop themselves. Because there is no such upper bound as ‘too much.’ Whatever they have cannot possibly be enough, because somebody else has more, or might tomorrow. If they had a thought, or a feeling, or noticed that there was a social norm called ‘too much,’ things would be different. We have far too little ‘too much.’

There was once a glimmer of a chance at the U.S. becoming a classless meritocracy, but I think we’ve lost the chance.

Update: I just watched a documentary about Eleanor Roosevelt, and learned that three of FDR's sons couldn't attend his funeral because they were serving in the military during WWII.  One was a pilot who flew combat missions, another was a lieutenant in the Navy, and the oldest was an officer in the Marines. Can you imagine that today--a President's child not only serving in the military but going into combat?