Zen and the art of cognitive maintenance

What follows is something I wrote a few days ago but didn't post (ironically) because I thought it might be taken the wrong way by some of my potential viewers. Then I remembered that the point of the stupid thing was to remind myself that I would do well not to worry so much what other people think. Since I waited to post this, I thought I would add an epilogue tracking recent progress. I might be on to something after all.

The more things change...

...you know the rest. I'm finally writing a post that speaks to my blog's name. I started this thing because I've been in a rut, socially and academically, and was hoping to spark some discussion. While that might not have yet been achieved, it at least motivates me to put thoughts together in a more or less coherent fashion.

So about this rut. I had a bit of an epiphany today while on a hike (it certainly didn't take place during my visit to the therapist, which included a 10 minute discussion about her daughter's difficulties with standardized tests). I've experienced a general malaise the last few months, and I think I have pinpointed its resemblance to things past: the sense of alienation and role playing (not the good kind) I experienced during the closing months of my ill-fated marriage. To be brief, as my marriage took a turn for the worse, I realized a big part of the problem stemmed from my inability to express myself because of the bad reaction such expression would receive from Carrie. And here I am again: with the distinct feeling of anxiety that stems from regular self-censorship and role playing; followed by overimbibing; culminating in erratic, self-destructive behavior. Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, anyone?

I don't like to give Freud too much credit for anything, but he did have some plausible theories regarding the consequences of repression; my disagreement with him lies in his reliance on an unconscious censor, whereas I see the censor to be very much conscious, whether we like to admit it or not. The idea is: if you push things down long enough, and expend enough energy doing it, the effort will eventually waver and all that crap you've been pushing down will come right back up, with all the force and none of the control the ego might normally muster. In my case, this seems to follow the consumption of one too many beverages (my dreams are typically just as boring as my waking life).

Since I hate Freud, I might take the perspective of Cheri Huber, a Zen Buddhist of whom I very much admire. Her basic argument is that the more we resist the things we hate about ourselves, the more strength they have in directing our behavior. In Huber's view, the correct method of dealing with self-hate is acknowledging our faults or mistakes, taking note of them, but not attaching ourselves to them; not identifying with them; certainly not resisting them. Rather than dwelling on our perceived inadequacies and thinking, "I hate that about myself. Why do I always do that? I'm such an idiot," Huber thinks it better to look at the behavior and say, "Hmmm, that's interesting." My understanding is that in detaching oneself from the situation, rather than identifying oneself with it, it is easier to try to calmly assess the causal factors, make a note to self, and move on. If one would prefer a more scientific take, the most common and successful form of psychotherapy, cognitive restructuring, prescribes a similar method. When one begins feeling anxiety, for example, one might acknowledge the numerous physiological manifestations (increased heart rate, shortness of breath, etc.) and try to passively observe, rather than actively identify with the physical sensations in order to change the psychological connections previously associated with such phenomena.

So how does this all come together? The longer I stayed with Carrie, the more clear it became that a number of my core attributes and values were not particularly welcome in day to day affairs. The more I tried to ignore or suppress these characteristics of myself, the more they built up until they came to a head in none too pleasant ways. In trying to be the kind of person I thought she wanted me to be, I came to feel a sense of alienation between myself and the role I was playing as her husband. Similarly, since my arrival in Bloomington, I have found myself surrounded by a number of people who I don't find to be particularly amenable to my true nature (which is basically that of a skeptical, cantankerous asshole). In trying to play the various roles I see as more appropriate to my core audience, I am constantly repressing my natural inclinations and reactions, only to find them resurface in none too constructive ways. This of course leads to me beating myself up over these slip-ups, leading to further repression...you get the point.

I don't know if this is a particularly stunning breakthrough, and I'm not exactly sure what behavioral changes it will entail, but I'm pretty sure that if I'm going to be me, I'm going to have to be the skeptical, cantankerous asshole some of you have come to know and love (or at least put up with). And with any luck, I'll get through yet another semester from hell and hope for a better one to follow; or at least a better attitude towards it. Fingers crossed, eh?

Epilogue: So that was Tuesday, if I remember correctly. Here it is Saturday, and I can already tell a difference. Last night, for example, I ended up on the same roller coaster I was stuck on a couple of months ago. As I drove away from from the apartment of the former subject of my affection, I noticed myself growing frustrated and angry. And I thought to myself, "Hmmm, look at that. Dunstan is getting worked up again." Then I was able to laugh. I think that is one of the most important parts, following the stepping back and the observation: the ability to laugh at silly mistakes. Last weekend's mistakes, for example, I just look at and chuckle. I think, "There went Drunkstan again, silly bastard." Then I laugh. And I get on with it. I think my biggest problem is that I tend to take things way too seriously, and in giving them the weight that I do, I crush myself. But right now I feel much lighter, thank you very much, and I intend to stay that way. At least until I move in with my new roommate who cooks the most incredible meals, determining my future existence to be that of a certifiable land whale.

Indolence upon indolence

At this point in the semester, you aren't going to get anything interesting out of me. So I'll just pass on things that I wish I had thought to write. Such as the following little snippet:
Dating the poorly-read

I might have a post in the near future on the successes of mindfulness/cognitive restructuring; so long as the benefits seem to last longer than four days. Here's to hoping.

Cultural offering

This poem should have been the preface to Rorty's Achieving Our Country. If you don't read the whole poem, just note the brilliance of these two simple lines:

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet

Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

Feel-good theism

I just got off the phone with K____, who is reading Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation. He is finding many of the arguments quite compelling, just as I did when I read it about a year ago. And we discussed how this begs the question: "Why is it that people like us find these arguments convincing while it is obvious that a majority of Americans (and people throughout the world) are not so compelled?" In fairness, as I understand it, K____ has never had any intuitions or predilections about the existence of God or the messianic status of Jesus, and I could rightly be labeled a flip-flopper, as I've gone back and forth on the issue over the years. But maybe there is something to be said for the fact that I have had different intuitions at different times, and certain arguments have proven to stick with me more so than others. But that doesn't tell me much about why people like K____ and I remain in the minority. Here's my hypothesis: Much of contemporary America has subscribed to a strange form of theism that defies both traditional Judeo-Christian conceptions of the nature of God as well as grounds for reasonable exchange.

I know that sounds like a rather strong statement, so I would like to make a qualification. I have a number of friends with very interesting theological positions and well thought out arguments for those positions. These are people that are well read in both the bible and theological literature and have a great deal of knowledge that grounds their intellectual/faithful position. What follows does not reflect those individuals, and people like them. Nor do the preceding qualifying statements reflect what I take to be the mainstream in American religion. Though I'm certainly willing to field objections. That being said, here's what I take to be the problem...

Traditional Christianity, founded in the New Testament as prophetic substantiation of the Hebraic literature that preceded it, provides a distinct (yet sometimes ambiguous) vision of the nature of God. As in most conceptions of a theistic God, the Christian God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Furthermore, this God sent his son to die on the cross for the sins of mankind. Finally, certain (yet sometimes conflicting) prescriptions are set forth for followers of Jesus to live by. While I will not attempt to lay out all the specifics, I take the fundamental tenets to be a commitment to God the father and his word (as inscribed in the Old Testament), love of mankind, and adherence to traditional Judaic morality (as codified in the ten commandments and the books of law). Not inessential to the Christian world view is the belief that in the end, God is going to somehow sweep in and right the wrongs of time immemorial. This last claim is perhaps controversial, but I don't think the words of Jesus can properly be understood without some recognition of this apocalyptic world view. While this all seems straightforward, I find it not to be reflected in much of the dialog (or lack thereof) pertaining to contemporary American faith. Rather, what I find instead is what might be understood as "feel-good theism", or perhaps "Oprah spirituality" if you would prefer.

What I hear so much in conversation and in past philosophy classes is an adherence to a God that is good, and provides meaning, and will accept you for whoever you are. While none of these claims are necessarily opposed to the outline I provided above, I find furthermore, either explicit in articulation or implicit in behavior, a pattern of inaction. What I see so often is not a lifestyle reflective of Christian belief, but an individualistic lifestyle that takes the mere agreement with above principles to be enough. What I hear so often are justifications for arguably unholy behaviors on the grounds that, "God knows me and my flaws and is accepting of all my illicit behavior [even if I am making no effort to alter that behavior]." What I find even more confusing is the pluralism of this feel-good theism. My impression of the Judeo-Christian God is that he is a rather jealous God who is wholly uninterested in alternative religious allegiances. Yet what I hear so often is the fuzzy acceptance of all forms of spirituality, no matter how incongruous they may be with the gospels. "It doesn't matter what you believe, so long as you believe in something, and my God will be down with that." The point is, in some ironic reversal, the feel-good theists have created God in their own images. I take this to likely be a product of a society that has grown increasingly individualistic since the end of World War II. A society where belief is not required to be founded on external justification but on what makes one feel good, or what best lines up with private goals and aspirations (no matter how inconsistent those goals and aspirations might be with civic or religious responsibility). You might rightly wonder, "So what? What's got you so worked up about this?" So I'll tell you...

The biggest problem with this kind of belief is, as Sam Harris might say, it is a complete conversation stopper. There is no way of arguing with such positions, regardless of what unfortunate behavioral outcomes might stem from them. Letter to a Christian Nation can never convince a feel-good theistic nation (even if it has enough trouble reaching a Christian nation). There are no grounds for reasonable exchange when belief rests on some sort of psychological need rather than evidence or justifiable argument. And this strikes me as bad for democracy. If the goal of democracy is to achieve a better society through persuasive discourse, I take better forms of persuasive discourse to be that which stems from the presentation of evidence and factual information. Otherwise debates are reduced to rhetoric. Which I take to be a bad thing. Admittedly, the realist in me recognizes that this might be the case regardless of religious or political persuasion, and the pragmatist in me wonders if I shouldn't just learn to play the game. Regardless, the idealist in me hopes that the epistemological impact of post-war individualism will one day retreat to allow for more reasonable democratic exchange. Fingers crossed, eh?

The Self and its Discontents

I am currently reading Bob Dylan's autobiography, Chronicles and while I'm not particularly taken by Dylan's prose, I have found one aspect of his development relatively interesting, insofar as it relates to some of the material I covered in my undergraduate thesis. As many of you probably know, Bob Dylan was once Robert Zimmerman, until he decided to change his mid-west persona to become the folk singer with whom we are all now familiar. The way he tells the story, he felt he wasn't Robert Zimmerman; he didn't identify with anything from his past in small-town, conservative, Cold War America. And thus he became Bob Dylan. While this point might merely be metaphorical, in many ways he sounds like he is describing a reinvention of himself without regard to his past. If anyone is familiar with some of the ideas I developed in my thesis, one might guess why I find such a proposition puzzling: Can someone feasibly conceptualize oneself divorced from the past to which one's present necessarily refers? My intuition is that such a feat could not be accomplished without some level of psychological discord.

If any of the claims in my thesis bear some resemblance to reality, I think the most promising candidates are found in my discussion of the self, and how it is to be rightly understood. The simplified version goes something like this: The self is no more (or no less) than the narrative that an individual constructs to explain the individual's situation at the present moment. In matters of personal identity, when philosopher's ask what it is that makes a person the same person at t1 and t2, I think the answer is to be found in his or her own narrative. To put it plainly, the self is simply the story that one tells to provide coherence to one's current situation with reference to one's past. And this is where I find difficulty in the intelligibility of Mr. Dylan's story.

In developing my view of the self, I built off of Richard Rorty's philosophy, mostly from Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and an essay on what he takes to be Freud's contribution to self understanding, "Freud and Moral Reflection." Rorty sees a normative dimension to the narrative conception of the self. When people are given choices on how to act or what to do in a given situation, they should ask themselves: "What kind of action would I perform that would make for a story I would like to tell later?" or "If I do this rather than that, what kind of story would I have to tell about myself later?" [Editor's note: Though this looks (and is) rather subjective, Rorty's pragmatism precludes options that would result in the suffering of others. To be brief, these kinds of questions relate to the development of one's self, and pertain to projects of private self-fulfillment. Rorty sees nothing incongruous between such projects and those of social solidarity, i.e., those of ethical/political spheres.] I will admit that a logical contradiction does not seem to arise in what Rorty takes to be essential to the self and what Robert Zimmerman, a.k.a. Bob Dylan, claims to have done. It seems logically possible to say that Robert Zimmerman looked at the narrative that led to a particular moment, at which point he said: "From hereon, I am Bob Dylan, and I want the story I tell later to contain no elements of Robert Zimmerman's life." But logic and experience rarely match up as neatly as we might like.

Elsewhere in Rorty's political philosophy, he speaks of the importance of a certain kind of nationalism. Rorty's nationalism is one that recognizes the failures of the past, but calls for the individual to identify with the kind of liberal democracy he or she wants to achieve; this nationalism assumes that such national allegiance will translate to a commitment that inspires proactive involvement in a better future. Implicit in this conception of nationalism (I think) is a subscription to a narrative conception of national identity: The nation is no more (or no less) than the narrative constructed to explain the nation's situation at the present moment. Achieving desirable ends seems improbable without recognition of the nation's past. Practical adjustments to national failures seem wholly unrealizable without such recognition. So should we expect anything less from the self?

This is my intuition that stems not from logical conclusions but experiential premises: A decision to reinvent oneself is necessarily predicated on a past that would make such a decision intelligible. Therefore a total disavowal of that past is unintelligible. For why would one feel the need to reinvent oneself, from Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan, in the absence of a prior story that doesn't jibe with the story one wants to tell in the future? If this reinvention attempts to erase the past that provides its explanation, how can one not feel a sense of alienation from oneself? It would be as if someone creates an artificial break in a narrative and attempts to render coherent a life lived without precedent. Would it not be better to acknowledge and own the past that led to such a decision, rather than attempt to divorce oneself from oneself? I admit that my hang-ups on these issues reflect the sense of alienation I experienced in my past endeavors to reinvent myself in ways inconsistent with the life I led prior. Based on my own personal experience, I wonder if there exists some substratum of beliefs and values that is so entrenched in our narratives that any attempt to reinvent the self in ways incongruous will only result in alienation or anxiety. Regardless, I wonder if there isn't something more universal here than my own personal experience. Or maybe, as Scot Kotterbay would say, I'm just smoking crack.