The Coronation
For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them?
Covid-19 is showing us that when humanity is united in common cause, phenomenally rapid change is possible. None of the world’s problems are technically difficult to solve; they originate in human disagreement. In coherency, humanity’s creative powers are boundless. A few months ago, a proposal to halt commercial air travel would have seemed preposterous. Likewise for the radical changes we are making in our social behavior, economy, and the role of government in our lives. Covid demonstrates the power of our collective will when we agree on what is important. What else might we achieve, in coherency? What do we want to achieve, and what world shall we create? That is always the next question when anyone awakens to their power.
Covid-19 is like a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality. To interrupt a habit is to make it visible; it is to turn it from a compulsion to a choice. When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether we want to return to normal, or whether there might be something we’ve seen during this break in the routines that we want to bring into the future. We might ask, after so many have lost their jobs, whether all of them are the jobs the world most needs, and whether our labor and creativity would be better applied elsewhere. We might ask, having done without it for a while, whether we really need so much air travel, Disneyworld vacations, or trade shows. What parts of the economy will we want to restore, and what parts might we choose to let go of? And on a darker note, what among the things that are being taken away right now – civil liberties, freedom of assembly, sovereignty over our bodies, in-person gatherings, hugs, handshakes, and public life – might we need to exert intentional political and personal will to restore?
For most of my life, I have had the feeling that humanity was nearing a crossroads. Always, the crisis, the collapse, the break was imminent, just around the bend, but it didn’t come and it didn’t come. Imagine walking a road, and up ahead you see it, you see the crossroads. It’s just over the hill, around the bend, past the woods. Cresting the hill, you see you were mistaken, it was a mirage, it was farther away than you thought. You keep walking. Sometimes it comes into view, sometimes it disappears from sight and it seems like this road goes on forever. Maybe there isn’t a crossroads. No, there it is again! Always it is almost here. Never is it here.
Now, all of a sudden, we go around a bend and here it is. We stop, hardly able to believe that now it is happening, hardly able to believe, after years of confinement to the road of our predecessors, that now we finally have a choice. We are right to stop, stunned at the newness of our situation. Because of the hundred paths that radiate out in front of us, some lead in the same direction we’ve already been headed. Some lead to hell on earth. And some lead to a world more healed and more beautiful than we ever dared believe to be possible.
I write these words with the aim of standing here with you – bewildered, scared maybe, yet also with a sense of new possibility – at this point of diverging paths. Let us gaze down some of them and see where they lead.
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I heard this story last week from a friend. She was in a grocery store and saw a woman sobbing in the aisle. Flouting social distancing rules, she went to the woman and gave her a hug. “Thank you,” the woman said, “that is the first time anyone has hugged me for ten days.”
Going without hugs for a few weeks seems a small price to pay if it will stem an epidemic that could take millions of lives. There is a strong argument for social distancing in the near term: to prevent a sudden surge of Covid cases from overwhelming the medical system. I would like to put that argument in a larger context, especially as we look to the long term. Lest we institutionalize distancing and reengineer society around it, let us be aware of what choice we are making and why.
The same goes for the other changes happening around the coronavirus epidemic. Some commentators have observed how it plays neatly into an agenda of totalitarian control. A frightened public accepts abridgments of civil liberties that are otherwise hard to justify, such as the tracking of everyone’s movements at all times, forcible medical treatment, involuntary quarantine, restrictions on travel and the freedom of assembly, censorship of what the authorities deem to be disinformation, suspension of habeas corpus, and military policing of civilians. Many of these were underway before Covid-19; since its advent, they have been irresistible. The same goes for the automation of commerce; the transition from participation in sports and entertainment to remote viewing; the migration of life from public to private spaces; the transition away from place-based schools toward online education, the decline of brick-and-mortar stores, and the movement of human work and leisure onto screens. Covid-19 is accelerating preexisting trends, political, economic, and social.
While all the above are, in the short term, justified on the grounds of flattening the curve (the epidemiological growth curve), we are also hearing a lot about a “new normal”; that is to say, the changes may not be temporary at all. Since the threat of infectious disease, like the threat of terrorism, never goes away, control measures can easily become permanent. If we were going in this direction anyway, the current justification must be part of a deeper impulse. I will analyze this impulse in two parts: the reflex of control, and the war on death. Thus understood, an initiatory opportunity emerges, one that we are seeing already in the form of the solidarity, compassion, and care that Covid-19 has inspired.
The Reflex of Control
At the current writing, official statistics say that about 25,000 people have died from Covid-19. By the time it runs its course, the death toll could be ten times or a hundred times bigger, or even, if the most alarming guesses are right, a thousand times bigger. Each one of these people has loved ones, family and friends. Compassion and conscience call us to do what we can to avert unnecessary tragedy. This is personal for me: my own infinitely dear but frail mother is among the most vulnerable to a disease that kills mostly the aged and the infirm.
What will the final numbers be? That question is impossible to answer at the time of this writing. Early reports were alarming; for weeks the official number from Wuhan, circulated endlessly in the media, was a shocking 3.4%. That, coupled with its highly contagious nature, pointed to tens of millions of deaths worldwide, or even as many as 100 million. More recently, estimates have plunged as it has become apparent that most cases are mild or asymptomatic. Since testing has been skewed towards the seriously ill, the death rate has looked artificially high. In South Korea, where hundreds of thousands of people with mild symptoms have been tested, the reported case fatality rate is around 1%. In Germany, whose testing also extends to many with mild symptoms, the fatality rate is 0.4%. A recent paper in the journal Science argues that 86% of infections have been undocumented, which points to a much lower mortality rate than the current case fatality rate would indicate.
The story of the Diamond Princess cruise ship bolsters this view. Of the 3,711 people on board, about 20% have tested positive for the virus; less than half of those had symptoms, and eight have died. A cruise ship is a perfect setting for contagion, and there was plenty of time for the virus to spread on board before anyone did anything about it, yet only a fifth were infected. Furthermore, the cruise ship’s population was heavily skewed (as are most cruise ships) toward the elderly: nearly a third of the passengers were over age 70, and more than half were over age 60. A research team concluded from the large number of asymptomatic cases that the true fatality rate in China is around 0.5%. That is still five times higher than flu. Based on the above (and adjusting for much younger demographics in Africa and South and Southeast Asia) my guess is about 200,000-300,000 deaths in the US – more if the medical system is overwhelmed, less if infections are spread out over time – and 3 million globally. Those are serious numbers. Not since the Hong Kong Flu pandemic of 1968/9 has the world experienced anything like it.
My guesses could easily be off by an order of magnitude. Every day the media reports the total number of Covid-19 cases, but no one has any idea what the true number is, because only a tiny proportion of the population has been tested. If tens of millions have the virus, asymptomatically, we would not know it. Further complicating the matter is the high rate of false positives for existing testing, possibly as high as 80%. (And see here for even more alarming uncertainties about test accuracy.) Let me repeat: no one knows what is really happening, including me. Let us be aware of two contradictory tendencies in human affairs. The first is the tendency for hysteria to feed on itself, to exclude data points that don’t play into the fear, and to create the world in its image. The second is denial, the irrational rejection of information that might disrupt normalcy and comfort. As Daniel Schmactenberger asks, How do you know what you believe is true?
In the face of the uncertainty, I’d like to make a prediction: The crisis will play out so that we never will know. If the final death tally, which will itself be the subject of dispute, is lower than feared, some will say that is because the controls worked. Others will say it is because the disease wasn’t as dangerous as we were told.
To me, the most baffling puzzle is why at the present writing there seem to be no new cases in China. The government didn’t initiate its lockdown until well after the virus was established. It should have spread widely during Chinese New Year, when every plane, train, and bus is packed with people traveling all over the country. What is going on here? Again, I don’t know, and neither do you.
Whether the final global death toll is 50,000 or 500,000 or 5 million, let’s look at some other numbers to get some perspective. My point is NOT that Covid isn’t so bad and we shouldn’t do anything. Bear with me. Last year, according to the FAO, five million children worldwide died of hunger (among 162 million who are stunted and 51 million who are wasted). That is 200 times more people than have died so far from Covid-19, yet no government has declared a state of emergency or asked that we radically alter our way of life to save them. Nor do we see a comparable level of alarm and action around suicide – the mere tip of an iceberg of despair and depression – which kills over a million people a year globally and 50,000 in the USA. Or drug overdoses, which kill 70,000 in the USA, the autoimmunity epidemic, which affects 23.5 million (NIH figure) to 50 million (AARDA), or obesity, which afflicts well over 100 million. Why, for that matter, are we not in a frenzy about averting nuclear armageddon or ecological collapse, but, to the contrary, pursue choices that magnify those very dangers?
Please, the point here is not that we haven’t changed our ways to stop children from starving, so we shouldn’t change them for Covid either. It is the contrary: If we can change so radically for Covid-19, we can do it for these other conditions too. Let us ask why are we able to unify our collective will to stem this virus, but not to address other grave threats to humanity. Why, until now, has society been so frozen in its existing trajectory?
The answer is revealing. Simply, in the face of world hunger, addiction, autoimmunity, suicide, or ecological collapse, we as a society do not know what to do. Our go-to crisis responses, all of which are some version of control, aren’t very effective in addressing these conditions. Now along comes a contagious epidemic, and finally we can spring into action. It is a crisis for which control works: quarantines, lockdowns, isolation, hand-washing; control of movement, control of information, control of our bodies. That makes Covid a convenient receptacle for our inchoate fears, a place to channel our growing sense of helplessness in the face of the changes overtaking the world. Covid-19 is a threat that we know how to meet. Unlike so many of our other fears, Covid-19 offers a plan.
Our civilization’s established institutions are increasingly helpless to meet the challenges of our time. How they welcome a challenge that they finally can meet. How eager they are to embrace it as a paramount crisis. How naturally their systems of information management select for the most alarming portrayals of it. How easily the public joins the panic, embracing a threat that the authorities can handle as a proxy for the various unspeakable threats that they cannot.
Today, most of our challenges no longer succumb to force. Our antibiotics and surgery fail to meet the surging health crises of autoimmunity, addiction, and obesity. Our guns and bombs, built to conquer armies, are useless to erase hatred abroad or keep domestic violence out of our homes. Our police and prisons cannot heal the breeding conditions of crime. Our pesticides cannot restore ruined soil. Covid-19 recalls the good old days when the challenges of infectious diseases succumbed to modern medicine and hygiene, at the same time as the Nazis succumbed to the war machine, and nature itself succumbed, or so it seemed, to technological conquest and improvement. It recalls the days when our weapons worked and the world seemed indeed to be improving with each technology of control.
What kind of problem succumbs to domination and control? The kind caused by something from the outside, something Other. When the cause of the problem is something intimate to ourselves, like homelessness or inequality, addiction or obesity, there is nothing to war against. We may try to install an enemy, blaming, for example, the billionaires, Vladimir Putin, or the Devil, but then we miss key information, such as the ground conditions that allow billionaires (or viruses) to replicate in the first place.
If there is one thing our civilization is good at, it is fighting an enemy. We welcome opportunities to do what we are good at, which prove the validity of our technologies, systems, and worldview. And so, we manufacture enemies, cast problems like crime, terrorism, and disease into us-versus-them terms, and mobilize our collective energies toward those endeavors that can be seen that way. Thus, we single out Covid-19 as a call to arms, reorganizing society as if for a war effort, while treating as normal the possibility of nuclear armageddon, ecological collapse, and five million children starving.
The Conspiracy Narrative
Because Covid-19 seems to justify so many items on the totalitarian wish list, there are those who believe it to be a deliberate power play. It is not my purpose to advance that theory nor to debunk it, although I will offer some meta-level comments. First a brief overview.
The theories (there are many variants) talk about Event 201 (sponsored by the Gates Foundation, CIA, etc. last September), and a 2010 Rockefeller Foundation white paper detailing a scenario called “Lockstep,” both of which lay out the authoritarian response to a hypothetical pandemic. They observe that the infrastructure, technology, and legislative framework for martial law has been in preparation for many years. All that was needed, they say, was a way to make the public embrace it, and now that has come. Whether or not current controls are permanent, a precedent is being set for:
- • The tracking of people’s movements at all times (because coronavirus)
- • The suspension of freedom of assembly (because coronavirus)
- • The military policing of civilians (because coronavirus)
- • Extrajudicial, indefinite detention (quarantine, because coronavirus)
- • The banning of cash (because coronavirus)
- • Censorship of the Internet (to combat disinformation, because coronavirus)
- • Compulsory vaccination and other medical treatment, establishing the state’s sovereignty over our bodies (because coronavirus)
- • The classification of all activities and destinations into the expressly permitted and the expressly forbidden (you can leave your house for this, but not that), eliminating the un-policed, non-juridical gray zone. That totality is the very essence of totalitarianism. Necessary now though, because, well, coronavirus.
This is juicy material for conspiracy theories. For all I know, one of those theories could be true; however, the same progression of events could unfold from an unconscious systemic tilt toward ever-increasing control. Where does this tilt come from? It is woven into civilization’s DNA. For millennia, civilization (as opposed to small-scale traditional cultures) has understood progress as a matter of extending control onto the world: domesticating the wild, conquering the barbarians, mastering the forces of nature, and ordering society according to law and reason. The ascent of control accelerated with the Scientific Revolution, which launched “progress” to new heights: the ordering of reality into objective categories and quantities, and the mastering of materiality with technology. Finally, the social sciences promised to use the same means and methods to fulfill the ambition (which goes back to Plato and Confucius) to engineer a perfect society.
Those who administer civilization will therefore welcome any opportunity to strengthen their control, for after all, it is in service to a grand vision of human destiny: the perfectly ordered world, in which disease, crime, poverty, and perhaps suffering itself can be engineered out of existence. No nefarious motives are necessary. Of course they would like to keep track of everyone – all the better to ensure the common good. For them, Covid-19 shows how necessary that is. “Can we afford democratic freedoms in light of the coronavirus?” they ask. “Must we now, out of necessity, sacrifice those for our own safety?” It is a familiar refrain, for it has accompanied other crises in the past, like 9/11.
To rework a common metaphor, imagine a man with a hammer, stalking around looking for a reason to use it. Suddenly he sees a nail sticking out. He’s been looking for a nail for a long time, pounding on screws and bolts and not accomplishing much. He inhabits a worldview in which hammers are the best tools, and the world can be made better by pounding in the nails. And here is a nail! We might suspect that in his eagerness he has placed the nail there himself, but it hardly matters. Maybe it isn’t even a nail that’s sticking out, but it resembles one enough to start pounding. When the tool is at the ready, an opportunity will arise to use it.
And I will add, for those inclined to doubt the authorities, maybe this time it really is a nail. In that case, the hammer is the right tool – and the principle of the hammer will emerge the stronger, ready for the screw, the button, the clip, and the tear.
Either way, the problem we deal with here is much deeper than that of overthrowing an evil coterie of Illuminati. Even if they do exist, given the tilt of civilization, the same trend would persist without them, or a new Illuminati would arise to assume the functions of the old.
True or false, the idea that the epidemic is some monstrous plot perpetrated by evildoers upon the public is not so far from the mindset of find-the-pathogen. It is a crusading mentality, a war mentality. It locates the source of a sociopolitical illness in a pathogen against which we may then fight, a victimizer separate from ourselves. It risks ignoring the conditions that make society fertile ground for the plot to take hold. Whether that ground was sown deliberately or by the wind is, for me, a secondary question.
What I will say next is relevant whether or not SARS-CoV2 is a genetically engineered bioweapon, is related to 5G rollout, is being used to prevent “disclosure,” is a Trojan horse for totalitarian world government, is more deadly than we’ve been told, is less deadly than we’ve been told, originated in a Wuhan biolab, originated at Fort Detrick, or is exactly as the CDC and WHO have been telling us. It applies even if everyone is totally wrong about the role of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the current epidemic. I have my opinions, but if there is one thing I have learned through the course of this emergency is that I don’t really know what is happening. I don’t see how anyone can, amidst the seething farrago of news, fake news, rumors, suppressed information, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and politicized narratives that fill the Internet. I wish a lot more people would embrace not knowing. I say that both to those who embrace the dominant narrative, as well as to those who hew to dissenting ones. What information might we be blocking out, in order to maintain the integrity of our viewpoints? Let’s be humble in our beliefs: it is a matter of life and death.
The War on Death
My 7-year-old son hasn’t seen or played with another child for two weeks. Millions of others are in the same boat. Most would agree that a month without social interaction for all those children a reasonable sacrifice to save a million lives. But how about to save 100,000 lives? And what if the sacrifice is not for a month but for a year? Five years? Different people will have different opinions on that, according to their underlying values.
Let’s replace the foregoing questions with something more personal, that pierces the inhuman utilitarian thinking that turns people into statistics and sacrifices some of them for something else. The relevant question for me is, Would I ask all the nation’s children to forego play for a season, if it would reduce my mother’s risk of dying, or for that matter, my own risk? Or I might ask, Would I decree the end of human hugging and handshakes, if it would save my own life? This is not to devalue Mom’s life or my own, both of which are precious. I am grateful for every day she is still with us. But these questions bring up deep issues. What is the right way to live? What is the right way to die?
The answer to such questions, whether asked on behalf of oneself or on behalf of society at large, depends on how we hold death and how much we value play, touch, and togetherness, along with civil liberties and personal freedom. There is no easy formula to balance these values.
Over my lifetime I’ve seen society place more and more emphasis on safety, security, and risk reduction. It has especially impacted childhood: as a young boy it was normal for us to roam a mile from home unsupervised – behavior that would earn parents a visit from Child Protective Services today. It also manifests in the form of latex gloves for more and more professions; hand sanitizer everywhere; locked, guarded, and surveilled school buildings; intensified airport and border security; heightened awareness of legal liability and liability insurance; metal detectors and searches before entering many sports arenas and public buildings, and so on. Writ large, it takes the form of the security state.
The mantra “safety first” comes from a value system that makes survival top priority, and that depreciates other values like fun, adventure, play, and the challenging of limits. Other cultures had different priorities. For instance, many traditional and indigenous cultures are much less protective of children, as documented in Jean Liedloff’s classic, The Continuum Concept. They allow them risks and responsibilities that would seem insane to most modern people, believing that this is necessary for children to develop self-reliance and good judgement. I think most modern people, especially younger people, retain some of this inherent willingness to sacrifice safety in order to live life fully. The surrounding culture, however, lobbies us relentlessly to live in fear, and has constructed systems that embody fear. In them, staying safe is over-ridingly important. Thus we have a medical system in which most decisions are based on calculations of risk, and in which the worst possible outcome, marking the physician’s ultimate failure, is death. Yet all the while, we know that death awaits us regardless. A life saved actually means a death postponed.
The ultimate fulfillment of civilization’s program of control would be to triumph over death itself. Failing that, modern society settles for a facsimile of that triumph: denial rather than conquest. Ours is a society of death denial, from its hiding away of corpses, to its fetish for youthfulness, to its warehousing of old people in nursing homes. Even its obsession with money and property – extensions of the self, as the word “mine” indicates – expresses the delusion that the impermanent self can be made permanent through its attachments. All this is inevitable given the story-of-self that modernity offers: the separate individual in a world of Other. Surrounded by genetic, social, and economic competitors, that self must protect and dominate in order to thrive. It must do everything it can to forestall death, which (in the story of separation) is total annihilation. Biological science has even taught us that our very nature is to maximize our chances of surviving and reproducing.
I asked a friend, a medical doctor who has spent time with the Q’ero on Peru, whether the Q’ero would (if they could) intubate someone to prolong their life. “Of course not,” she said. “They would summon the shaman to help him die well.” Dying well (which isn’t necessarily the same as dying painlessly) is not much in today’s medical vocabulary. No hospital records are kept on whether patients die well. That would not be counted as a positive outcome. In the world of the separate self, death is the ultimate catastrophe.
But is it? Consider this perspective from Dr. Lissa Rankin: “Not all of us would want to be in an ICU, isolated from loved ones with a machine breathing for us, at risk of dying alone- even if it means they might increase their chance of survival. Some of us might rather be held in the arms of loved ones at home, even if that means our time has come…. Remember, death is no ending. Death is going home.”
When the self is understood as relational, interdependent, even inter-existent, then it bleeds over into the other, and the other bleeds over into the self. Understanding the self as a locus of consciousness in a matrix of relationship, one no longer searches for an enemy as the key to understanding every problem, but looks instead for imbalances in relationships. The War on Death gives way to the quest to live well and fully, and we see that fear of death is actually fear of life. How much of life will we forego to stay safe?
Totalitarianism – the perfection of control – is the inevitable end product of the mythology of the separate self. What else but a threat to life, like a war, would merit total control? Thus Orwell identified perpetual war as a crucial component of the Party’s rule.
Against the backdrop of the program of control, death denial, and the separate self, the assumption that public policy should seek to minimize the number of deaths is nearly beyond question, a goal to which other values like play, freedom, etc. are subordinate. Covid-19 offers occasion to broaden that view. Yes, let us hold life sacred, more sacred than ever. Death teaches us that. Let us hold each person, young or old, sick or well, as the sacred, precious, beloved being that they are. And in the circle of our hearts, let us make room for other sacred values too. To hold life sacred is not just to live long, it is to live well and right and fully.
Like all fear, the fear around the coronavirus hints at what might lie beyond it. Anyone who has experienced the passing of someone close knows that death is a portal to love. Covid-19 has elevated death to prominence in the consciousness of a society that denies it. On the other side of the fear, we can see the love that death liberates. Let it pour forth. Let it saturate the soil of our culture and fill its aquifers so that it seeps up through the cracks of our crusted institutions, our systems, and our habits. Some of these may die too.
What world shall we live in?
How much of life do we want to sacrifice at the altar of security? If it keeps us safer, do we want to live in a world where human beings never congregate? Do we want to wear masks in public all the time? Do we want to be medically examined every time we travel, if that will save some number of lives a year? Are we willing to accept the medicalization of life in general, handing over final sovereignty over our bodies to medical authorities (as selected by political ones)? Do we want every event to be a virtual event? How much are we willing to live in fear?
Covid-19 will eventually subside, but the threat of infectious disease is permanent. Our response to it sets a course for the future. Public life, communal life, the life of shared physicality has been dwindling over several generations. Instead of shopping at stores, we get things delivered to our homes. Instead of packs of kids playing outside, we have play dates and digital adventures. Instead of the public square, we have the online forum. Do we want to continue to insulate ourselves still further from each other and the world?
It is not hard to imagine, especially if social distancing is successful, that Covid-19 persists beyond the 18 months we are being told to expect for it to run its course. It is not hard to imagine that new viruses will emerge during that time. It is not hard to imagine that emergency measures will become normal (so as to forestall the possibility of another outbreak), just as the state of emergency declared after 9/11 is still in effect today. It is not hard to imagine that (as we are being told), reinfection is possible, so that the disease will never run its course. That means that the temporary changes in our way of life may become permanent.
To reduce the risk of another pandemic, shall we choose to live in a society without hugs, handshakes, and high-fives, forever more? Shall we choose to live in a society where we no longer gather en masse? Shall the concert, the sports competition, and the festival be a thing of the past? Shall children no longer play with other children? Shall all human contact be mediated by computers and masks? No more dance classes, no more karate classes, no more conferences, no more churches? Is death reduction to be the standard by which to measure progress? Does human advancement mean separation? Is this the future?
The same question applies to the administrative tools required to control the movement of people and the flow of information. At the present writing, the entire country is moving toward lockdown. In some countries, one must print out a form from a government website in order to leave the house. It reminds me of school, where one’s location must be authorized at all times. Or of prison. Do we envision a future of electronic hall passes, a system where freedom of movement is governed by state administrators and their software at all times, permanently? Where every movement is tracked, either permitted or prohibited? And, for our protection, where information that threatens our health (as decided, again, by various authorities) is censored for our own good? In the face of an emergency, like unto a state of war, we accept such restrictions and temporarily surrender our freedoms. Similar to 9/11, Covid-19 trumps all objections.
For the first time in history, the technological means exist to realize such a vision, at least in the developed world (for example, using cellphone location data to enforce social distancing; see also here). After a bumpy transition, we could live in a society where nearly all of life happens online: shopping, meeting, entertainment, socializing, working, even dating. Is that what we want? How many lives saved is that worth?
I am sure that many of the controls in effect today will be partially relaxed in a few months. Partially relaxed, but at the ready. As long as infectious disease remains with us, they are likely to be reimposed, again and again, in the future, or be self-imposed in the form of habits. As Deborah Tannen says, contributing to a Politico article on how coronavirus will change the world permanently, ‘We know now that touching things, being with other people and breathing the air in an enclosed space can be risky…. It could become second nature to recoil from shaking hands or touching our faces—and we may all fall heir to society-wide OCD, as none of us can stop washing our hands.” After thousands of years, millions of years, of touch, contact, and togetherness, is the pinnacle of human progress to be that we cease such activities because they are too risky?
Life is Community
The paradox of the program of control is that its progress rarely advances us any closer to its goal. Despite security systems in almost every upper middle-class home, people are no less anxious or insecure than they were a generation ago. Despite elaborate security measures, the schools are not seeing fewer mass shootings. Despite phenomenal progress in medical technology, people have if anything become less healthy over the past thirty years, as chronic disease has proliferated and life expectancy stagnated and, in the USA and Britain, started to decline.
The measures being instituted to control Covid-19, likewise, may end up causing more suffering and death than they prevent. Minimizing deaths means minimizing the deaths that we know how to predict and measure. It is impossible to measure the added deaths that might come from isolation-induced depression, for instance, or the despair caused by unemployment, or the lowered immunity and deterioration in health that chronic fear can cause. Loneliness and lack of social contact has been shown to increase inflammation, depression, and dementia. According to Lissa Rankin, M.D., air pollution increases risk of dying by 6%, obesity by 23%, alcohol abuse by 37%, and loneliness by 45%.
Another danger that is off the ledger is the deterioration in immunity caused by excessive hygiene and distancing. It is not only social contact that is necessary for health, it is also contact with the microbial world. Generally speaking, microbes are not our enemies, they are our allies in health. A diverse gut biome, comprising bacteria, viruses, yeasts, and other organisms, is essential for a well-functioning immune system, and its diversity is maintained through contact with other people and with the world of life. Excessive hand-washing, overuse of antibiotics, aseptic cleanliness, and lack of human contact might do more harm than good. The resulting allergies and autoimmune disorders might be worse than the infectious disease they replace. Socially and biologically, health comes from community. Life does not thrive in isolation.
Seeing the world in us-versus-them terms blinds us to the reality that life and health happen in community. To take the example of infectious diseases, we fail to look beyond the evil pathogen and ask, What is the role of viruses in the microbiome? (See also here.) What are the body conditions under which harmful viruses proliferate? Why do some people have mild symptoms and others severe ones (besides the catch-all non-explanation of “low resistance”)? What positive role might flus, colds, and other non-lethal diseases play in the maintenance of health?
War-on-germs thinking brings results akin to those of the War on Terror, War on Crime, War on Weeds, and the endless wars we fight politically and interpersonally. First, it generates endless war; second, it diverts attention from the ground conditions that breed illness, terrorism, crime, weeds, and the rest.
Despite politicians’ perennial claim that they pursue war for the sake of peace, war inevitably breeds more war. Bombing countries to kill terrorists not only ignores the ground conditions of terrorism, it exacerbates those conditions. Locking up criminals not only ignores the conditions that breed crime, it creates those conditions when it breaks up families and communities and acculturates the incarcerated to criminality. And regimes of antibiotics, vaccines, antivirals, and other medicines wreak havoc on body ecology, which is the foundation of strong immunity. Outside the body, the massive spraying campaigns sparked by Zika, Dengue Fever, and now Covid-19 will visit untold damage upon nature’s ecology. Has anyone considered what the effects on the ecosystem will be when we douse it with antiviral compounds? Such a policy (which has been implemented in various places in China and India) is only thinkable from the mindset of separation, which does not understand that viruses are integral to the web of life.
To understand the point about ground conditions, consider some mortality statistics from Italy (from its National Health Institute), based on an analysis of hundreds of Covid-19 fatalities. Of those analyzed, less than 1% were free of serious chronic health conditions. Some 75% suffered from hypertension, 35% from diabetes, 33% from cardiac ischemia, 24% from atrial fibrillation, 18% from low renal function, along with other conditions that I couldn’t decipher from the Italian report. Nearly half the deceased had three or more of these serious pathologies. Americans, beset by obesity, diabetes, and other chronic ailments, are at least as vulnerable as Italians. Should we blame the virus then (which killed few otherwise healthy people), or shall we blame underlying poor health? Here again the analogy of the taut rope applies. Millions of people in the modern world are in a precarious state of health, just waiting for something that would normally be trivial to send them over the edge. Of course, in the short term we want to save their lives; the danger is that we lose ourselves in an endless succession of short terms, fighting one infectious disease after another, and never engage the ground conditions that make people so vulnerable. That is a much harder problem, because these ground conditions will not change via fighting. There is no pathogen that causes diabetes or obesity, addiction, depression, or PTSD. Their causes are not an Other, not some virus separate from ourselves, and we its victims.
Even in diseases like Covid-19, in which we can name a pathogenic virus, matters are not so simple as a war between virus and victim. There is an alternative to the germ theory of disease that holds germs to be part of a larger process. When conditions are right, they multiply in the body, sometimes killing the host, but also, potentially, improving the conditions that accommodated them to begin with, for example by cleaning out accumulated toxic debris via mucus discharge, or (metaphorically speaking) burning them up with fever. Sometimes called “terrain theory,” it says that germs are more symptom than cause of disease. As one meme explains it: “Your fish is sick. Germ theory: isolate the fish. Terrain theory: clean the tank.”
A certain schizophrenia afflicts the modern culture of health. On the one hand, there is a burgeoning wellness movement that embraces alternative and holistic medicine. It advocates herbs, meditation, and yoga to boost immunity. It validates the emotional and spiritual dimensions of health, such as the power of attitudes and beliefs to sicken or to heal. All of this seems to have disappeared under the Covid tsunami, as society defaults to the old orthodoxy.
Case in point: California acupuncturists have been forced to shut down, having been deemed “non-essential.” This is perfectly understandable from the perspective of conventional virology. But as one acupuncturist on Facebook observed, “What about my patient who I’m working with to get off opioids for his back pain? He’s going to have to start using them again.” From the worldview of medical authority, alternative modalities, social interaction, yoga classes, supplements, and so on are frivolous when it comes to real diseases caused by real viruses. They are relegated to an etheric realm of “wellness” in the face of a crisis. The resurgence of orthodoxy under Covid-19 is so intense that anything remotely unconventional, such as intravenous vitamin C, was completely off the table in the United States until two days ago (articles still abound “debunking” the “myth” that vitamin C can help fight Covid-19). Nor have I heard the CDC evangelize the benefits of elderberry extract, medicinal mushrooms, cutting sugar intake, NAC (N-acetyl L-cysteine), astragalus, or vitamin D. These are not just mushy speculation about “wellness,” but are supported by extensive research and physiological explanations. For example, NAC (general info, double-blind placebo-controlled study) has been shown to radically reduce incidence and severity of symptoms in flu-like illnesses.
As the statistics I offered earlier on autoimmunity, obesity, etc. indicate, America and the modern world in general are facing a health crisis. Is the answer to do what we’ve been doing, only more thoroughly? The response so far to Covid has been to double down on the orthodoxy and sweep unconventional practices and dissenting viewpoints aside. Another response would be to widen our lens and examine the entire system, including who pays for it, how access is granted, and how research is funded, but also expanding out to include marginal fields like herbal medicine, functional medicine, and energy medicine. Perhaps we can take this opportunity to reevaluate prevailing theories of illness, health, and the body. Yes, let’s protect the sickened fish as best we can right now, but maybe next time we won’t have to isolate and drug so many fish, if we can clean the tank.
I’m not telling you to run out right now and buy NAC or any other supplement, nor that we as a society should abruptly shift our response, cease social distancing immediately, and start taking supplements instead. But we can use the break in normal, this pause at a crossroads, to consciously choose what path we shall follow moving forward: what kind of healthcare system, what paradigm of health, what kind of society. This reevaluation is already happening, as ideas like universal free healthcare in the USA gain new momentum. And that path leads to forks as well. What kind of healthcare will be universalized? Will it be merely available to all, or mandatory for all – each citizen a patient, perhaps with an invisible ink barcode tattoo certifying one is up to date on all compulsory vaccines and check-ups. Then you can go to school, board a plane, or enter a restaurant. This is one path to the future that is available to us.
Another option is available now too. Instead of doubling down on control, we could finally embrace the holistic paradigms and practices that have been waiting on the margins, waiting for the center to dissolve so that, in our humbled state, we can bring them into the center and build a new system around them.
The Coronation
There is an alternative to the paradise of perfect control that our civilization has so long pursued, and that recedes as fast as our progress, like a mirage on the horizon. Yes, we can proceed as before down the path toward greater insulation, isolation, domination, and separation. We can normalize heightened levels of separation and control, believe that they are necessary to keep us safe, and accept a world in which we are afraid to be near each other. Or we can take advantage of this pause, this break in normal, to turn onto a path of reunion, of holism, of the restoring of lost connections, of the repair of community and the rejoining of the web of life.
Do we double down on protecting the separate self, or do we accept the invitation into a world where all of us are in this together? It isn’t just in medicine we encounter this question: it visits us politically, economically, and in our personal lives as well. Take for example the issue of hoarding, which embodies the idea, “There won’t be enough for everyone, so I am going to make sure there is enough for me.” Another response might be, “Some don’t have enough, so I will share what I have with them.” Are we to be survivalists or helpers? What is life for?
On a larger scale, people are asking questions that have until now lurked on activist margins. What should we do about the homeless? What should we do about the people in prisons? In Third World slums? What should we do about the unemployed? What about all the hotel maids, the Uber drivers, the plumbers and janitors and bus drivers and cashiers who cannot work from home? And so now, finally, ideas like student debt relief and universal basic income are blossoming. “How do we protect those susceptible to Covid?” invites us into “How do we care for vulnerable people in general?”
That is the impulse that stirs in us, regardless of the superficialities of our opinions about Covid’s severity, origin, or best policy to address it. It is saying, let’s get serious about taking care of each other. Let’s remember how precious we all are and how precious life is. Let’s take inventory of our civilization, strip it down to its studs, and see if we can build one more beautiful.
As Covid stirs our compassion, more and more of us realize that we don’t want to go back to a normal so sorely lacking it. We have the opportunity now to forge a new, more compassionate normal.
Hopeful signs abound that this is happening. The United States government, which has long seemed the captive of heartless corporate interests, has unleashed hundreds of billions of dollars in direct payments to families. Donald Trump, not known as a paragon of compassion, has put a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions. Certainly one can take a cynical view of both these developments; nonetheless, they embody the principle of caring for the vulnerable.
From all over the world we hear stories of solidarity and healing. One friend described sending $100 each to ten strangers who were in dire need. My son, who until a few days ago worked at Dunkin’ Donuts, said people were tipping at five times the normal rate – and these are working class people, many of them Hispanic truck drivers, who are economically insecure themselves. Doctors, nurses, and “essential workers” in other professions risk their lives to serve the public. Here are some more examples of the love and kindness eruption, courtesy of ServiceSpace:
Perhaps we’re in the middle of living into that new story. Imagine Italian airforce using Pavoratti, Spanish military doing acts of service, and street police playing guitars — to *inspire*. Corporations giving unexpected wage hikes. Canadians starting “Kindness Mongering.” Six year old in Australia adorably gifting her tooth fairy money, an 8th grader in Japan making 612 masks, and college kids everywhere buying groceries for elders. Cuba sending an army in “white robes” (doctors) to help Italy. A landlord allowing tenants to stay without rent, an Irish priest’s poem going viral, disabled activitists producing hand sanitizer. Imagine. Sometimes a crisis mirrors our deepest impulse — that we can always respond with compassion.
As Rebecca Solnit describes in her marvelous book, A Paradise Built in Hell, disaster often liberates solidarity. A more beautiful world shimmers just beneath the surface, bobbing up whenever the systems that hold it underwater loosen their grip.
For a long time we, as a collective, have stood helpless in the face of an ever-sickening society. Whether it is declining health, decaying infrastructure, depression, suicide, addiction, ecological degradation, or concentration of wealth, the symptoms of civilizational malaise in the developed world are plain to see, but we have been stuck in the systems and patterns that cause them. Now, Covid has gifted us a reset.
A million forking paths lie before us. Universal basic income could mean an end to economic insecurity and the flowering of creativity as millions are freed from the work that Covid has shown us is less necessary than we thought. Or it could mean, with the decimation of small businesses, dependency on the state for a stipend that comes with strict conditions. The crisis could usher in totalitarianism or solidarity; medical martial law or a holistic renaissance; greater fear of the microbial world, or greater resiliency in participation in it; permanent norms of social distancing, or a renewed desire to come together.
What can guide us, as individuals and as a society, as we walk the garden of forking paths? At each junction, we can be aware of what we follow: fear or love, self-preservation or generosity. Shall we live in fear and build a society based on it? Shall we live to preserve our separate selves? Shall we use the crisis as a weapon against our political enemies? These are not all-or-nothing questions, all fear or all love. It is that a next step into love lies before us. It feels daring, but not reckless. It treasures life, while accepting death. And it trusts that with each step, the next will become visible.
Please don’t think that choosing love over fear can be accomplished solely through an act of will, and that fear too can be conquered like a virus. The virus we face here is fear, whether it is fear of Covid-19, or fear of the totalitarian response to it, and this virus too has its terrain. Fear, along with addiction, depression, and a host of physical ills, flourishes in a terrain of separation and trauma: inherited trauma, childhood trauma, violence, war, abuse, neglect, shame, punishment, poverty, and the muted, normalized trauma that affects nearly everyone who lives in a monetized economy, undergoes modern schooling, or lives without community or connection to place. This terrain can be changed, by trauma healing on a personal level, by systemic change toward a more compassionate society, and by transforming the basic narrative of separation: the separate self in a world of other, me separate from you, humanity separate from nature. To be alone is a primal fear, and modern society has rendered us more and more alone. But the time of Reunion is here. Every act of compassion, kindness, courage, or generosity heals us from the story of separation, because it assures both actor and witness that we are in this together.
I will conclude by invoking one more dimension of the relationship between humans and viruses. Viruses are integral to evolution, not just of humans but of all eukaryotes. Viruses can transfer DNA from organism to organism, sometimes inserting it into the germline (where it becomes heritable). Known as horizontal gene transfer, this is a primary mechanism of evolution, allowing life to evolve together much faster than is possible through random mutation. As Lynn Margulis once put it, we are our viruses.
And now let me venture into speculative territory. Perhaps the great diseases of civilization have quickened our biological and cultural evolution, bestowing key genetic information and offering both individual and collective initiation. Could the current pandemic be just that? Novel RNA codes are spreading from human to human, imbuing us with new genetic information; at the same time, we are receiving other, esoteric, “codes” that ride the back of the biological ones, disrupting our narratives and systems in the same way that an illness disrupts bodily physiology. The phenomenon follows the template of initiation: separation from normality, followed by a dilemma, breakdown, or ordeal, followed (if it is to be complete) by reintegration and celebration.
Now the question arises: Initiation into what? What is the specific nature and purpose of this initiation?The popular name for the pandemic offers a clue: coronavirus. A corona is a crown. “Novel coronavirus pandemic” means “a new coronation for all.”
Already we can feel the power of who we might become. A true sovereign does not run in fear from life or from death. A true sovereign does not dominate and conquer (that is a shadow archetype, the Tyrant). The true sovereign serves the people, serves life, and respects the sovereignty of all people. The coronation marks the emergence of the unconscious into consciousness, the crystallization of chaos into order, the transcendence of compulsion into choice. We become the rulers of that which had ruled us. The New World Order that the conspiracy theorists fear is a shadow of the glorious possibility available to sovereign beings. No longer the vassals of fear, we can bring order to the kingdom and build an intentional society on the love already shining through the cracks of the world of separation.
Sacred masculine. Comminuty. Warrior energy. There was ever so much — the most neutral (and lacking!) word I can use — “discussion” about this very thing, this very thing, this very thing (insert “stuck in a loop” here) in oh my word *serious* men’s work. The phase that ended, oh, ten, maybe twenty years ago. Iron John, and the invaluable King, Warrior, Magician, Lover or whatever it is and all of that. (My own copy is dog-earned from re-reading.) The wider circle of men who were and are genuinely ready willing and able to change themselves and to extend only by example thank you the, ah, “opportunity” (it’s rarely perceived as such) got brought up short every single time by the same thing, the same thing, the same ….. Inertia. Seemed to us hey-we’re-LISTENING-now-what? types that innumerable episodes, such as the one you described, were no more than popcorn. Intertia won. Again. I suspect (drumroll) The Issue is not community, although resolution certainly will come from there. I think drafting an Action Plan is premature at best. (Those things take forever. The person, male or female, who is maddest, loudest, and equipped with stainless steel vocal chords usually wins. And his / her mono-themed initiative thereby loses buy-in. The corollary is, of course, everyone loses.) The tired part of me wants to try one more time. The cynical part has a pretty valid point: what’s the use? The heart part knows: growth will come from pain, not from grace. When we — that’s the big we, as in “country” — are, as the cliche goes, sick and tired or being sick and tired, we will change. Not before. As usual, Sir Winston (white male! privilege! patriarchy!) had an incisive observation: “the price of greatness is responsibility.” Whoa. Responsibilty, then forgiveness. Responsibility, then a new community ethos. Responsibility, then acceptance. Good luck with that. Denial is soooo much easier.
Hi David, and thanks Charles and David for both blog and comment.
As a man among hu-man beings, I’ve read Iron John, sat in men’s circles for decades, done the Mankind Project New Warrior Training Adventure, and deepened powerful, trans-formative life vows and mission statements of my self, regarding masculine and feminine balance within my self, and in relationship with women.
Despite much earnest effort, it’s not working well. Our society seems hell bent on dis-integration. Women, with good reason distrust men, and keep raising the standard higher. Walls higher and thicker, and guards at the gates.
Misandry also happens. I keep living for the more beautiful world our hearts all know is possible. Maybe, another life-time. If not now, here, when?
Blessings, be well, enjoy life.
Grateful for your work. Please keep going. My offering to you and all men on this journey:
http://marydorgan.blogspot.ca/2014/07/brothers-in-light.html?m=1
Hi Mary,
Thank you for your words of healing wisdom.
Aho, which means I receive and seek to understand and agree with these words.
Yes, let us hold hands, and step forward, being together, in love and unity.
Let us love one another, and help heal our selves, from the traumas of the past, that we may help others heal as well.
A few verses:
“Like trees cut down, we bleed, in silence;
Our stories stack like cordwood,
Our bodies dry and age;
In time, often in a communities hearth,
we burn.
Our ashes seed a new reality;
A fertile sea and earth.
For a re-birth…
Wow, Charles! Your most important essay yet. Congratulations, it’s wonderful!
Righteous indignation is so tempting. ‘You’re wrong, I’m right.’ As a friend likes to say, “You can either be right or be in relationship.”
I have long observed more misogyny than misandry (hatred of a person simply for being male). In fact, I confess to labeling such incidents as ‘testosterone poisoning.’ Ditto when a tech executive can’t ‘find’ qualified female employees, or a president starts a war.
Isn’t Jared and Jacob’s violence really the result of an imbalance of power? We still live in a male-dominated world, which leads to males being corrupted by that power. Our dimorphic species means the average male is larger and stronger than the average female, but if humans were like eagles, with females being larger than males, the problem would ‘estrogen poisoning.’
Just as whites still have undue economic and educational advantages, and often end up thinking they are entitled to those privileges simply due to the low amount of melanin in their skin (and, speaking as a pale person, I rarely question those economic and social advantages, which are so pervasive that it’s like the goldfish saying, “What water?”), so too do males feel entitled to treat females as the Other.
Ironically, when an incident like this generates a lot of indignation, the reaction is just more imbalance of power. Now that Waking Life Espresso has lost public respect and closed, it’s easy to pick on the owners.
We ridicule the old Communist policy of re-education, rightfully so because it was done with all the imbalanced power that caused the accused to be unfair to others in the first place. But the concept is akin to truth and reconciliation, and restorative justice. Jacob and Jared could see the error of their ways, if they weren’t bullied into it.
In a world of scarcity, dominance insures survival. The same planet, seen through the lens of sufficiency, would reveal that there’s enough to go around if we operate by consensus rather than ‘might makes right.’ Democracy is a good intermediate step, but it isn’t enough to get us where we need to be so that violence is no longer the main way to ‘solve’ problems.
“Tragically, the dominating, controlling, and abusive behavior enacted by insecure, patriarchy-damaged men doesn’t meet their real needs. They are diverting their need for intimacy onto sex, and their need for unconditional acceptance onto control.” Wow. Please return to these two unmet needs again and again. Thank you Charles
Call me crazy but that all makes perfect sense to me!!! PLEASE…. Remorse and Reconcilliation instead of shame and punishment.
“To some extent, I bought into using women as a kind of social currency. I also used sex and the affection of a female as a way to assuage my insecurities and salve my wound of self-rejection. In other words, I think the actions of Jared and Jacob are on a continuum with my own attitudes and actions.” As a woman, I appreciate your honesty. Let me be honest about how my own attitudes and action fall on this continuum, particularly with regards to how I used to feel about myself, as a young girl, and how I sometimes feel now, as an adult woman; how much I *consciously* hated myself when I was younger, decidedly detested the only face I had, the one that stared at me in the mirror every day, the one that I would shut my eyes to, rather than bear to look at – because of its stark contrast to the desirable objects I saw in the media; on TV; at school – as a girl, I learned at a very young age that my currency lay solely in my appearance, and its value on my facial symmetry; friendship, popularity, companionship, love – all of these very desirable things depended upon my appearance, the very thing I could never change about myself. The very thing that made me, me, was the very thing I hated, despised, because of what society taught me to believe was my worth.
In some way, I realize now that I was mirroring the misogyny that is woven into the very fabric of our society. While you reflected your insecurity onto female objects, I expressed it by hating the very image of myself.
In a society where those things that come naturally to you are honoured, nay, celebrated, it is easy to *forget* the privilege this bestows upon you.
I had no such luxury, no such privilege. I was the female object, and not a very desirable one at that. As a child, I knew this acutely. I knew this, in my need to pretend at my joy of the sciences, focus on the mathematics, in school; even as I would sit, with my physics textbook on my desk, great heaving sobs wracking my body – crying for what, I knew not, until I found an essay you had written, and the memory of my tears came back to me – endless streams of pain from a 15-year old girl, anguish, at a world where this was all there was – Newton. And his laws.
“The unconscious shadow rises into our awareness for a reason – to be faced and to be healed. Here is misogyny, previously underground, made visible to the community. The community can accept this opportunity for healing, or it can simply banish the men and pretend that the problem has gone away.”
As a woman, I do not wish to banish men. I value men, I respect men – greatly, deeply, fully. I wish to honour that which I do not fully understand – your ability to separate feeling from intellect; my intellect is driven by my feelings. And deeply, I feel it is a disrespect, to women, to reduce the misogyny women face, all over the world, day in and day out – in science; in religion; in culture; in law; in politics – to a lack of consciousness. To suggest this would be to dishonour the pain and anguish thrust on women – I do not wish to negate the pain that man must go through, at his own actions – however, to suggest that misogyny, all misogyny is unconscious, in the shadows – something in me bristles, at this idea. But maybe I misunderstood; Perhaps that is not what you are saying?
“When women are turned into objects and sex is made artificially scarce (all things become scarce when subject to property thinking), then of course men will be insecure. As with money, they will attempt to gain a semblance of security through control of scarce resources. They will feel a compulsion to dominate – because in a world of scarcity, Can you really trace a linear progression, first from women, as sex objects, to men as becoming insecure? Am I to apologize to man, for being turned into a sex object (by man), that then led to his insecurity? Please do not suggest that misogyny, sexual objectification, is somehow the expected response to scarcity, without also first making it clear that the vast majority engaging in these actions are *men*. Women live in scarcity, but the vast majority do not wish to dominate, to control, to overpower.
Where is the accountability for man’s actions? Man sustains patriarchy. Man suffers as a result of it. Why should this accountability, this acceptance, negate the suffering of man as a result of patriarchy? Can they not co-exist? However, it is one thing to suffer in a society that praises and holds to high regard that part of your nature that comes easily to you. Living in a society that denigrates that part of you that is the easiest, most central to your identity – that is an entirely different kind of suffering.
How am I to forgive man, for his ongoing destruction, of the feminine, when he cannot consciously take responsibility for his role in this madness?
Finally….Restorative Justice was attempted recently, in Dalhousie Dental School in Canada, where male dental students wrote sexist, misogynistic comments about female students on a facebook page. The victims did not feel the process was just; nor that it honoured their feelings, their needs. How will the restorative justice you propose be different?
Dear Pri,
Thank you for your heartful, and intelligent reply. I appreciate your willingness to banish men, and your need for men to take conscious responsibility for the his stories of past patriarchy, and their perpetuation in misogyny today.
Indeed, how does restorative justice evolve to heal our selves in this toxic, imbalanced world? Truth, reconciliation, council, open hearts? How is trust and respect restored?
Heart math, tantra, or union of heart empathy, may be one way to heal. That is to say, an embrace between hearts, regardless of gender, can create resonance and restore harmony.
I’d invite women and men to take a risk to heal each. Choose to take a chance to change. Healing begins within one’s self.
Projecting expectations via force such as rules and law on another seldom heals.
Gaze into one another’s eyes. Spoon, or touch each other’s hearts. Face the shadow of your self, and see, per movie, ‘Avatar’ one another as a hu-man being, a hu manifest being of one spirit and earth, despite the illusion of separate, and shadow self.
I hope these words help. I need a hug and gaze my self. Blessings, and enjoy life.
Oops, I meant to type “your willingness NOT to banish men’ Freudian slips happen.
Dear Brent ~
Since it seems we *both* could use a Hug and a Gaze, let’s share one via these interwebs.
Much internal work to be done, by both men and women as groups and more importantly, by individuals. Healing always begins at the personal level.
Healing IS beginning – and provoking push-back and resistance, as is natural.
Bright Blessings ~
Dear Karen J,
Yes, we need healing hugs, and gazes all around. I much agree healing begins within each of our selves.
Bright blessings and be well,
context:
http://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/2015/09/26/look-behind-pickup-artists-theory-and-rape-culture-waking-life/72826230/
I see this event as mainly a catalyst to Wake us up to the harm on women, on the nurturer, the emotional, receptive part in all of us that patriarchy seeks to dominate and control – So that we may stand up to it and work to heal the Whole. Its beautiful and important this discussion is happening. The violence on women is directly proportional to the violence on the earth. and that is supported by the religions. I honor the men that are part of the discussion and really invite ya’ll to feel confident to stand up to protect Life Force in a loving and honoring way. Women are gathering to talk and figure ways of action, ways of changing the violence. This post gives me hope the men are concerned and gathering as well to help their sisters – or at least that is my hope – I do hear much of your post is concerned with the men involved – but I hope, I hope the men come together to support women and stop the violence. we need you.
There is an open forum at Lipinsky on wed and a candlelight vigil on pack place on thurs to stop violence on women.
thank you 🙂 as we approach what it means to feel the deepest pain, let us remember that all genders are equally suppressed. misogyny wouldn’t exist without misandry, and vice versa.
I deeply appreciate the opening essay and the following conversation.
And I’m deeply intrigued the the comment by Ivan’s words, “all genders are equally suppressed. misogyny wouldn’t exist without misandry, and vice versa.”
I do not know that this is necessarily true. But I will say that it’s worth seriously considering as a possibility.
In my heart and core, I’ve always felt androgynous. I am male. That is my body is male. But I do not seem to fit in any gender containers or constructs. I’ve always felt a bit of an outsider in gender discourses and “wars.” None of it made any deep down feeling sense to me, as I’d be just as happy to have a female body…, to love men and women in body and soul…. (I have had male and female loves–and partners–in my life. I value both, equally.) But I can also say I’ve received a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle threats (conditioning), insisting that I “be a man,” which does often seem to mean “be insensitive, bee dominating, be on top…”. I neither with to be on bottom or on top. I have no desire to dominate, nor to suppress my sensitivity, warmth, vulnerability, feeling…. So I’ve been caught up in this weird gender game our society is caught up in — though the premises underlying it don’t at all FEEL valid or real to me, and never really have.
For what it is worth.
I think that we are all living out a Mythos that has told the story of separation between the Sacred Masculine and Feminine, Spirit and Matter, Yin and Yang, Isis and Osiris, Jesus and Magdalene. This Mythos is resolving though and it is now possible for each one of us to experience Sacred Union. It is time! We are all on the way to restoring ourselves to our Original State of Grace.
My life has intricately played out the mythos. As a child i was molested by an Uncle priest, then emmersed in the lesbian separatist culture and then became the hetero emotionally abused and abandoned Bride left with child. It is not until 2 days ago that I finally reached a sense of deep love, respect and excitement for the male and female aspects within me…after years of inner work and prayer.
Twelve months ago, my daughter and I decided we needed to leave conventional life so that we could free ourselves from the voices of conditioning and hone our skills at listening deeply to our inner wisdom. It has been a daily practice of supporting the Feminine instinct while also encouraging Her to find the places and spaces where love and care were having trouble finding a place to rest within. More and more,our instincts and healing lead us to people and places that felt alive and abundant and without having the things that consensus reality told us were signs of stability, protection and success. This was so liberating and built a confidence in our Feminine Power.
For me, once my Feminine felt strong enough in Her abilities and trusted Her own perceptions, then She was able to begin receiving love. Opening and receiving deeply. As I read in a book long ago, “the more I know myself as a woman, the more my values are coming out of my own experience and the stronger my creative masculinity becomes.” My inner Feminine could surrender and trust my Masculine Manifestor. The minute my Feminine relaxed and asked my Masculine to bring Her the riches of his creative power, I could feel this absolute excitement and relief that He was finally being called upon and trusted to do what he loves, create.
I believe that it is the Feminine within us all who must first heal, surrender to love, and become empowered. Feminine Power is the Wild embodiment of Soul that challenges the idea of conformity and victimhood. The empowered Feminine beckons the pure creative energy of Her Male counterpart. Her surrender to love heals his lust and He feels Her trust to manifest from the Divine Instinct she now channels.
I ain’t gonna study war no more…
I surrender to the tension of opposites until they either pull me apart or snap back with such force that they become one.
My surrender gives birth to “a radiant child born strong enough to transcend the obsolete Herods who seek to kill him and creative enough to move into a different reality.”
Bless The Sacred Family Within.
Hello all of you,
For a long time I was a very sick person. I almost died. It was asthma and eczema, but in a extreme way. Do you know this is only mental? I was outing my fears and anger by the means of my skin and breath. So the body does hard work. But it was endless and it hurts a lot. I’m healthy now. How come? I succeeded to leave my anger, not only from this life, but also from former lives. I found out, that I always have claimed for equal rights between men and women, but you can guess the result of opposing masculine societies in those former lives, don’t you? And even in this life, when you grow up in a ‘beautiful’ family with ‘awful’ secrets and they force you to share the secrets, to undergo and not to speak anyone about it. Now I’m safe again, I could leave behind my awful youth and experiences about my father.
Maybe I had to solve this bad karma and not only for my own benefit. People told me that in the two family lines the abuse in physical, moral and even sexual ways was already going on for generations and generations… So, during my youth I focused on the imbalanced world and shared some good environment projects, mostly in order to forget what happened within my micro-cosmos. As an adult, I focused on myself and my health and what I could do within me, because the imbalance starts there, like you said before.
My husband is the best, so I broke the circle of generations by choosing him. But I’m sorry, this is only for a part. There is no man I met who has a better heart than he, but I could only manage to see this fact with clear eyes, when I re-opened my own closed heart (closed for protection), about 17 years after my marriage. (I’m a mother of 3 children.) So he must be very patient too. 🙂 Of course many things are invisible on the surface and he didn’t want to be my doctor. It would not be fair to treat him in that way. So, it took me years to realize that only I had the key to heal myself. No doctor, no man, only me. I had to leave my incorporated (and well hidden) hate for all men. Not all men are like my father or like the bad ones i must have met in former lives. Of course I always realized this in a rational way, but not inside me. So I myself, had to balance my masculine and feminine parts within myself, in my own heart. And that’s the reason why I healed and why I’m a very healthy person now. All the diseases left my body, without any medicine. So not only men have to accomplish things, women too. If you want to read my story about this life, you can. The book is called ‘A deadly Cocktail’. My writers name is Catherine Wheels. The book is published on Amazon. It’s meant for victims of abuse, for abuse-survivors, therapists and even for abusers who want to escape from their own behavior by getting insights. So I really hope the book will give insights to heal others, to heal (individual, groups- family- and worldkarma) to make our world a better world. For writing it, I had to break through the big barrier of shame and I had to remember things I did not want to remember ever. Lieve Smolders helped me to focus on the mission and not to get lost again.
Thanks to Charles for being a man with a great mission to balance the masculine and the feminine. I’m very grateful to you.
First off, I appreciated Charles’ willingness to step outside of the framework that excessively scapegoats individuals for problems that have deep systemic roots. I also resonate with the intent to go beyond the paradigm of blaming and punishing, and toward an approach that could restore human dignity and well-being. For such a restorative approach to be useful to all involved however, it must address the ways that individual (males in this instance) have societal wide structures that give them more access to power, and that individual abuse of that power is a symptom of systemic oppression (of women in this case). Rather than squelch the symptom, we could see the symptom as a doorway into addressing the deeper pattern of oppression. At heart, we are being asked to make visible those invisible structures that perpetuate injustice and violence, with the aim of dismantling and transforming them.
Charles proposes that a process of Truth and Reconciliation could aid this healing between the men and women involved: “I would like to see the men be confronted by those they harmed, and really hear what it was like for those women, their families, and their community to be humiliated.” While I appreciate the intent behind this statement is to foster healing, understanding, and empathy, in my experience, such an approach can actually further harm the oppressed, and keep the privileged entrenched. The ever-insightful Mikki Kashtan, of Bay Area NVC recently addressed this conundrum in her essay “Empathy and Privilege”:
I can immediately see the appeal of the conclusion, or dream,
that bringing individuals together from across lines of oppression,
and getting them to hear each other’s stories and develop empathy,
would be a step towards transforming the oppression. After all,
empathy is liberating, whether we receive it in response to our
own suffering, or when we open our hearts widely to shine its light
on others and to recover our sense of their humanity. Except that
in practice, what I have seen in groups I’ve been part of is
not supporting this hypothesis. Instead, what I have seen and heard of,
in contexts of power differences, has finally led me to the
opposite conclusion. Unless some very specific ways to focus attention
and choice are part of the picture, I now believe that the goal of
having “both sides hear each other” reinforces rather than transcends
the power differences. http://thefearlessheart.org/empathy-and-privilege-in-an-interdependent-world/
We need to begin to see these invisible power differences, and how they effect us. The reason I cringed when Charles prescribed restorative justice is this: unless the receiver of the oppressive action is the one deeply seeking the restorative process, and the power imbalance is rectified so that individual comes to the process from a place of actually having access to choice, autonomy, and power in the process, even something as well-intended as truth and reconciliation, when prescribed from the outside, could be yet another way that oppression is perpetuated, because the structural elements that supported an imbalance in power are not addressed.
In the context of massive power imbalance, the process of “restoration” can easily be co-opted to make the community and the oppressors feel better without actually addressing the underlying structures that led to the oppression in the first place. Folks may say: “See, she forgave him. Hugs all around. Isn’t that nice? All better. Now let’s go home and keep the underlying status quo ” Those who committed the oppressive acts as well as the wider community, are thus relieved from personal tension and guilt without actually changing the privilege/power differential that led to the oppression in the first place. If the receiver of oppressive acts is going to truly have autonomy to restore connection, they must at the same time have full support to chose not to restore, not to forgive, not to drop the lawsuit or charges if they wish. Part of what made truth and reconciliation so powerful in South Africa, was that the oppressed actually had power to punish and imprison those who had oppressed them. And from that place of power, they chose to extend an offer to listen, to understand, and to reconcile. Again, Mikki Kashtan points out that this type of power and choice is key to true transformation:
I still believe that what I have always intuited and experienced
is true, that opening to the humanity of the oppressor is, indeed,
a fast track to inner freedom and liberation… EXCEPT I now
realize that it cannot be expected of the oppressed person.
Given the pervasiveness of pain, suffering, and especially the
inner and outer assault on the dignity of the oppressed,
this expectation then becomes one more aspect of the
oppression,regardless of how liberating it would be if
done voluntarily.
(http://thefearlessheart.org/empathy-and-privilege-in-an-interdependent-world/)
The word “voluntarily” is key, because it points to how accessing our individual autonomy transforms and integrates. Choice matters. Consent matters. Who makes the decision matters. Those who have been harmed and violated deserve to regain sovereignty and authorship of their own lives. When we have access to structural power and privilege, we can listen, we can ask “how have you suffered at the hands of my group?” and “what is the next thing you need to regain your wholeness?” We can extend empathy to those have experienced oppression. We can support people who wish to initiate restorative practices, but let’s not assume that those with more access to structural power can force liberation from the outside.
Yep, this:
“In the context of massive power imbalance, the process of ‘restoration’ can easily be co-opted to make the community and the oppressors feel better without actually addressing the underlying structures that led to the oppression in the first place. Folks may say: ‘See, she forgave him. Hugs all around. Isn’t that nice? All better. Now let’s go home and keep the underlying status quo.’ Those who committed the oppressive acts as well as the wider community, are thus relieved from personal tension and guilt without actually changing the privilege/power differential that led to the oppression in the first place.”
People aren’t just disgusted because of these two men. It wasn’t an isolated incident; the larger cultural context of the incident is dominator culture/rape culture that treats women as disposable as unchallenged status quo. A first response as a call for reconciliation that centers the needs of men as those wronged by the dominator culture is to try to offer them a full meal when they already have more food (power) than the women they’ve hurt within the larger context of rape culture – which is the real enemy. Keep these dudes safe and let them have some unburned bridges as the community works this out, but please see the larger context that makes women’s lives darker, more marginalized, more unstable because of behavior like theirs, and please make it the first order of business to slay that vampire.
My perspective on this is informed by my whiteness and my search to understand what “whiteness” really is. As Ferguson unfolded, I learned that one tool for me to undo the harmful construct of my whiteness was to stop (unproductively) protecting my feelings in the storm, and to instead center Black rage and Black voices. To know what was really wrong, I had to first accept and understand that I had a false sense of being the one who had solutions. I’d been told that I did as a white person, indirectly, my whole life, by culture that is about privileging my feelings over those of Black folk.
Before we stress “reconciliation,” let’s look at the truth of a cultural context of staggering informally institutionalized imbalance of power full of fear that silences women (rape culture).
Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (just reading a few pages will be inspiring; I haven’t read it all. It’s very worth browsing!) frames the idea that in order to revise culture, we have to think of the oppressed as our teachers (the expert reverse-engineers of oppression). They hold the real teaching keys to undo dominator culture because they know its shadow territory. They know its maps by heart. Privilege their voices amd center their anger; let it destroy a status quo that is demeaning to everyone. After the truth is told, then see what’s worth reconciling with. We need to rebalance, like a forest that needs a natural burn to get rid of what isn’t needed. Women being angry can be that fire if we support it anf let their agency rebalance things.
“Killing Rage: Ending Racism” by bell hooks could be another model for men looking to redefine masculinity and separate the wheat from the chaff around what is and isn’t generative in their identities. It was mindblowing for me to understand that I had ghosts occupying my identity as a white person that weren’t really mine. Not taking it personally that my constructed “whiteness” has to go in order for the whole human ecosphere to flourish has been empowering! It uncovers in me what really is mine while I live this short life.
Men don’t need to be afraid of centering women’s rage at false masculinity; if the hurtful things about constructed masculinity are not inherently part of men, they will survive the rage and become something new. I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that men should submit to being put down, per se, by women. I’m suggesting that men use the warmth of women’s rage – the penetrating aspect it has – to risk seeing what they (men) think could be done away with in old-fashioned and harmful definitions of what is and isn’t manly.
Please center women’s rage and use it as a scalpel or see it as necessary natural forest fire to examine what in the status quo needs to go, before you rush to reconcile with a status quo that is truly infected. Please don’t repress the medicine of women’s rage. Sitting with others’ powerful rage can seem counterintuitive in a culture where we’re all abused by kyriarchies (systems based on the idea that we need to organize around domination), but I can say with certainty that I see most Black rage in the face of instituitonalized oppression to be medicine, and that it’s helped me.
A last note: this is not work you can do without good self-care and it’s not about masochism or sefl-punishing. If it makes you feel worse or less-than, you aren’t doing what I’m suggesting! It’s worth trying, though! I need to use serious physical practices of getting grounded in my body to deal with the feelings that come up. “What is really me, and how do I define me” in the face of misogyny, racism and climate disruption are good questions. They involve a practice of decentering “self” and recentering “other” for reasons of love (not for reasons of wanting spiritual attainment) that blow the idea of “service” away. It’s just like, I’m feeling biophilic here, trying to recognize that in practice so I can share the love.
Decentering the self in the face of the rage of the oppressed is something privileged people gotta learn to do. And embodying the rage of the oppressed is something those who are oppressed need to learn to see as medicine for all, and to not stop showing that rage and raising their voices about what oppression feels like and why it’s got to go, no matter what. Center them and encourage them for the team win.
I love your piece, Charles. One of my favourite things you’ve written. I am in full support of all you say. I encourage you in following your new focus on masculinity, men’s work, gender, etc. Nothing was new to me in what you wrote – which is one of the reasons I love your writing so much: you take thoughts and ideas I have had or heard from disparate sources, and you articulate and synthesize them so beautifully, which makes me feel less pressure to try and do so myself, when my calling is rather to play music. I am so grateful there is someone out there saying what you do, and with the large audience you have. And then on top of that, quite frequently, you say something completely new that either opens up a subtly new way of thinking about something, or just blows my mind completely. Example: “When . . . sex is made artificially scarce (all things become scarce when subject to property thinking), then of course men will be insecure.” I’m not even certain what that means, and I look forward to having it unpacked either by my own reflection or by future writing from you. Will you (or anyone else) elaborate now? Thank you Charles, for consistently finding the highest and most heart-full moral road of any thinker I know of today.
Aho, Michael. I echo your observations about Charles piece, and his ability to synthesize and articulate one’s own thoughts.
Regarding the scarcity of sex in our society, and men’s related insecurity, this is an essential insight for healing sexuality, and harmonizing relationships between women and men. So much has been written, so much has occurred (in our past – individually and collectively), and so much more longs to be at-one-d, or a-mend-ed, in our minds, hearts and bodies.
We, each of us, do what we can do, as inspired, and according to our circumstances, to heal our selves, our relationships, and others in our world.
Blessings and peace, live well, enjoy life.
I love the sincerity of all the comments and Charles. two books i want to mention, CS Lewis “til we have faces” what its like to be an unattractive woman in a society that demands beauty, and Dorothy Sayers, “are women human.”
“Society is becoming aware of the damage that patriarchy has visited upon women, from economic oppression to domestic violence, sex trafficking, rape, and genital mutilation.”
What are we calling “patriarchy?” Is it purely the negative aspects of a male-led society? If so, then sure, some of that is tied up in patriarchy. But if we’re saying that basically the entire globe has been under “patriarchy” for the last many centuries, and that is the thing that has brought us economic oppression, sex trafficking and rape – that’s patently absurd and utterly one sided. How can you sit in an air-conditioned house, safe from attack from animals, with an abundant supply of food around, and say society has failed you and attacked you? If we’re calling America a patriarchy, then Women have benefited greatly under patriarchy, no? They live to be 80+ years old, they have food, safety, and abundance like no other people has known in history, and you complain that women are economically oppressed under patriarchy? Why would a patriarchy inherently bring rape? Obviously no one wants there own tribe raped. Might there not be other explanations for why someone rapes? Might there be problems between people caused by the fact that humans evolved to be in tribes of a few hundred, and now find themselves sometimes in cities of millions? Mightn’t living among strangers cause problems like sex trafficking, rape and economic oppression? Isn’t domestic violence associated with women as well as men? Isn’t violence between some percentage of couples expected in a volatile thing like sexual relationships? Isn’t it totally understandable that the weaker, more vulnerable (due to childbirth) sex, which has less variation in IQ (there are less smart and dumb women), would not end up as the majority of powerful people? Isn’t it totally understandable that, even if now there are more women who want to work and not be child-carers, that in the past there would be less demand or desire for such a thing? Are we to imagine that thousands of years of evolution should disappear overnight? That women should be 50% of business owners and leaders now, even though many fewer women have striven for such things in the past and now?
No, no, the problem is of course the men who built society and all the comfort we take for granted. They must change because now we feel quite safe in our abundance.
Most men would never intentionally harm anyone male or female. Many many men were extremely active and instrumental in building the society of abundance you find yourself in, and they didn’t do it by using their skills in service of “dancing” with women and impressing them – well, actually, maybe that was the ultimate point – but they turned their skills in service of learning maths, studying the world with science, protecting their tribe (male and female) from animals and attackers, and in the process seems to have found dominance to be good in many situations.
The problem of sexual relations in modern society (like rape, mistreatment of one’s partner, misogyny/misandry) are probably more related to the abundant pornography, the intentionally miseducating education system, the lack of strong male role models and lack of energetic masculine pursuits available, and the broken down structure of families and communities, then it has to do with male-leadership being inherently evil.
Hi Charles,
One woman’s recent story about “The Husband Stitch”, a purportedly commonplace practice in which doctors stitch a woman’s vagina after childbirth as a “favor” to the husband, is stirring up quite a bit of controversy.
Healthline just published a report on the medical reality of the Husband Stitch; the why, the how, and the potential future of this controversial practice.
You can see the report here:
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/husband-stitch-is-not-just-myth
We’d love to hear your take on the husband stitch, and discuss how we can work together to share information like this to help women take back the delivery room.
In health,
Maegan
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Maegan Jones | Content Coordinator
Healthline
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