Alienation and the feeling of time

Activity slows the sense of time; passivity speeds it up. Spend a day making anything you love and you enter a state described by artists as a contemplative state. This state is hyper-aware, and the rush of passing time is suspended. It feels good, and afterwards you desire it again, like a longing for home.
But spend a day watching television and you’ll look up at dusk and wonder what happened.
A talk with a new love can last 12 hours, and seem like nothing. It is unfortunate that we use similar language to describe both the active and passive experiences – “it seemed like no time” when they are really very different.
Slowed time is addicting. Writers are literally addicted to writing, and painters are literally addicted to painting. Woodworkers are addicted to the lathe. They discover over time — some discover it earlier than others — than it matters little where you start, or what you are working on, as long as it matters to you. It is the activity of the will to create that suspends time and orders the faculties in a way that feels like a return to some Eden.
The common lament of getting older — that time passes too fast — is from the slow descent into passivity.
“Active” and “passive”, as I’m using them, does not correspond to the traditional distinction between Martha and Mary, the active life of service and the contemplative life of prayer. These two terms were actually unfortunate, since the contemplative life is as active as the active life, just in different ways. Contemplation is another form of activity; the contemplative is quite active at the level of the engagement of mind, emotion, and volition. Active and passive mean something like “work” and “entertainment”.
Earlier generations’ protests about the theatre and novels and recreation are now interpreted as puritan reactions. Some doubtlessly were, but for the most part the modern is simply explaining those old critiques in terms he can understand. Actually, the ancients were protesting the mode of those pasttimes as much as the content. They were protesting the passivity of entertainment.

To a discouraged leader

You walked into the meeting so upbeat at the opportunity to share your vision. But even as you talked, you could see the lists of objections forming behind the eyes of several listeners — the usual suspects, whose first reaction to most new ideas is to throw up a smokescreen of reasons why we can’t do it. Before you finished your first presentation, you could feel the wind leaving your sails. As you walked out of the meeting, you were as much dejected as you had been excited earlier that morning.

Then, you go through the stages of grief, inwardly and privately, telling yourself that you are never going to cast another pearl of vision before these swines of negativity. You’ll just live in the dull world they apparently inhabit, checking off duties, punching the mental clock, letting the workplace just drift and collecting your paycheck.

And of course, despite your best effort to kill your own soul, it miraculously persists. It catches you unawares. Before long, you have a new, exciting idea about how things can be better for everyone, and you find yourself almost against your will sharing your passion out loud to the swineherd again. (Isn’t it encouraging how those healthiest parts of you can’t actually be killed? What you like most about yourself just erupts in spite of everything. )

The truth is, no-one can suppress their own vision. So forget that. It can be exhilarating, in an ironic way, when the leader is forced to admit and embrace her own health. To admit to herself that what causes her pain among the swine is never going to stop, and she would never want it to, really. No, there are only two choices: succeed in getting these pigs to see what you see, or go find better pigs. (That’s quite enough with the swine metaphor, I agree.)

Courage to refuse the adversarial voice

As most managers will tell you, the hard part is the people. Policy and processes are matters of analysis and intelligence, and can be taught. But getting the people to be what the organization needs — managers who’ve spent time in a trench will tell you this is tougher. Which is why I say that the best leaders are the courageous communicators.

Sure, there are lots of managers who’ve made their way up the ladder in companies where you just need to be smart, articulate, hard-working, loyal, and passionate. All good traits, but you can be all these things and be a horrid manager – and a bad person.

It’s not enough to have a large vocabulary and a sense of syntax, not enough to be poised in front of an audience. Witty doesn’t help. It’s not even enough to see the essence of a matter through confusion and have the skill to say it clearly.

You can have all these tools and use them as weapons. You can be all these things and end up in the history books as just one of those dictators who finally hangs from a lamppost in the town square. Leaders need to be smart, articulate, and perceptive through confusion — but then need to use those tools with the right kind of courage.

We need, first, the courage to say something when saying nothing will get by. Then, when we do say something (and paint a red target on our forehead) we need the courage to resist lapsing, under fire, into our own adversarial voice. These two, together, make a jewel of a leader.

Helping

We are snobs by nature. If salvation had ever depended on us, we would never have deigned to redeem the world by entering its sordid mangers.

Even when we come for a moment under the spell of the fairy-tale peasant who becomes king, the slave who delivers the city, the cinder girl who marries the prince — after all that, when left to ourselves, we regress to our native snobbery. Like all snobs, we look down at the helpers.

We think of “helping” as the inferior role, or as a downward movement. And we feel any downward movement as a theft of our rightful dignity.

We think that helping someone do something is subordinated to the doing of the thing. But this is not God’s view. He was the King, yet He helped us, and in helping was glorified. His sees helping as a role distinct unto itself; so distinct, in fact, it requires the most exquisite and refined skill set of all. His view is the revolutionary one, while ours is wholly conventional.

This is really something to stop and think about, because it is in such simple language it is easy to miss how it violently upends the universe. So, stop right here: the helper of the gardener is not less than the gardener. The helper does not derive meaning from the helped, or from the work of the helped; the act of helping has its intrinsic and underived glory. Underived.

When Eve was appointed helper of Adam, she became something that Adam was not. Her charism is a unique and noble charism, and there is nothing over top of it in some hierarchy.

Indeed, the distinction of the helping office derives from the Godhead, who has named one of His Persons the Helper.

The unbaptized mind mocks this, and sees here a conspiracy to trick it with fancy words into slavery. It is suspicious of the father himself. I think the lack of a father’s love makes it hard to trust enough to find dignity in helping. The inability to trust is the unhappiness of the world.

The unbaptized mind scoffs, but the true loss of dignity is in the gasping, desperate clawing to move up. Because it is such an insult to our dignity, Jesus constantly condemns the upward ambition. Jesus constantly pictures His kingdom as a mirror image of the world’s.

The feminist objection to traditionalist gender conceptions is rooted in this snobbery. There is an embarrassment about not being the primary. This is an inability to trust, a scar from a primordial insult.

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Let It Be According To Your Faith

Matthew 7: the healing of the centurion’s daughter.

In fact, the centurion was wrong at some level, wrong in his assumption that he needed to extract a word from Jesus. There is a hint here, as elsewhere in the Gospels, of Jesus’ puzzlement that we so need His imprimatur.

In all of the life we know in this world, healthy people don’t actually want friends who remain utterly dependent. Only in Protestant theology is that a picture of health.

On finishing the Mataxas Bonhoeffer Biography

The Nazis hung him this time, again, just like the first time I read his story. I was so-o-o longing for a different end. Two weeks before Hitler killed himself, three weeks before the end of the war, that paperhanger SOB had to have all remaining conspirators hung in soite, even though his fate was long decided.
When I think of the word “integrity” I see Bonhoeffer’s picture. It’s not a picture of stubbornness but more a calm dead center reckoning on God’s personal word.
I hate the jibberjawing about his “decision” to join the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. This is the sort of abstract ethical hand-wringing that he put behind him in his Ethics…abstract for us, but not for him. At this historical distance, at our leisure, it seems frivolous. Being a Christian in Nazi Germany was so much at the extreme of ethical conflict that you’d have to have been there for me to listen to your criticism of Bonhoeffer.
I’m much more a pacifist than he wanted to be, but even I would have pulled the trigger on Hitler’s bemouthed revolver, myself.

The Ethic of Happiness Kills the Conscience

In Romans 3: 12-16, the function of the conscience is to hold us accountable to the ethic of fidelity. But in its dark opposite, the ethic of happiness, the conscience has no purpose.

The evangelists of the happiness ethic like to tell themselves, in the quiet of the night, that their pursuit of happiness is constrained by respect for others. Pursue your inner meaning, sure, but do no harm. So they would say that the function of your conscience in the happiness ethic remains wholly traditional; it should register guilt when you hurt someone.

But this is sophistry. On the page it reads well, but in real life it soon is meaningless, because the definition of harm has been stripped down. In real life the pursuit of personal happiness leads to absence from the lives of people we owe. Absence, when presence is owed, is betrayal. In real life betrayal is violence. In real life, for the self-actualizers, hell is other people.

The art of the modern ethic of happiness is the output of the movie and television industry in America. The protagonist in movies and television is constantly rationalizing — and being rationalized by his god, the writer — as he betrays or neglects loved ones. (Indeed, someone has said that the essence of modern drama is the rationalization of promiscuity.)

We are supposed to like this protagonist as he follows his dreams; after all, he doesn’t kill or maim. But the camera simply passes over absence. The camera easily glosses matters such as infidelity to his spouse and neglect of children. What is owed these loved ones is large, large enough to occupy everyone for their lifetimes of indirect happiness. But in pursuing direct happiness you can feel good that you didn’t assault them or stealing their money while still ravaging their souls by your absence.

The camera won’t see what you SHOULD have been doing. You can consume your attention for decades with rich and difficult work that might even win you a Pulitzer, while your child grows up certain that her father hates her. And you could make it to your deathbed within this ethical universe with a silent conscience.

The Pursuit of Happiness Kills Stories

The ethic of fidelity is the nursery of stories. The agon, the struggle of life is to be true. All else pales. Interesting stories are exaggerated versions of overcoming the obstacles to fidelity: to be true to your wife, your husband; to do right by your children, your parents; to keep your feet against the pressures to lie cheat, and steal in business; to be true to God’s call each day. To leave home to find someone who is lost, because they belong to you.

To be “true to yourself”? Well, there is a little…truth in this phrase, but it is only true in the context of fidelity to others. Here is the pattern: as you pursue fidelity, you learn more about yourself, about why and how you are made. That experience of sudden insight is exhilarating; now you see your self, for a bright moment, as an object of knowledge. And it looks pretty, right then, and it feels joyful because joy itself is just the experience of newness. But the mistake is to extract that new knowledge (and the moment of discovery) from larger life, and make it the direct object instead of the indirect effect.

Those who make it the direct object talk the language of the ethic of happiness, which makes sense for a little while, but the glow is really the burning off of capital fuel from the earlier fidelity. Two steps down the road the self is suddenly disoriented. The self, by itself, suddenly dissipates into nothingness — this sudden loss is surprisingly fast and surprisingly literal. The story of your life suddenly looks like a white page.

The ethic of happiness destroys drama, because the wiser the audience, the more they see that the traditional dramatic obstacles for the protagonist are first internalized, and then lost. The protagonist is no longer interesting. The pursuit of a lover is interesting; the quest for the grail is interesting; the fight with the dragon is interesting; the search for “self-actualization” is banal.

When there is no plot people can go on for a long time scratching at meaning, and even make the loss of plot a liberation. For a time. The art of self-actualization is the art of an instant of sensation, the snapshot. Haiku, imagism, the absurd, the barbaric yawp flung upon the roof the world, the song of myself in which I very well contradict myself — all fun stuff as momentary diversion.

But the soul of man needs a plot like fish need an ocean.

The Myth of Female Peacefulness

Some think that a government filled with women would be more peaceful; a senate of women would get more done with less conflict. But there is no evidence for this, and plenty of evidence for the opposite.

Forget the “studies”. There are lots of real life laboratories, called workplaces. Go to a workplace dominated by females. There are still lots of them — hospitals, for example, where the nursing staffs are still mostly women. Ask the women what they think. Many of them will tell you that trying to manage a group of women is a nightmare compared to managing men. They’ll tell you that the conflict level is high and unremitting.

Again, the women say this about themselves. I first heard it from women whom I’ve supervised over the course of 15 years in management now. (I’m a man.) The small businesses I’ve managed have had workforces of more than 90% women. Over the years many women have spontaneously offered me their sympathy for my task of keeping the female peace. I’ve had many women say to me “I’d much rather manage a bunch of men than a bunch of women.”

There is no doubt that women value collaboration more than men do, and naturally choose to work collaboratively when given the chance. Cooperation is their default mode, while isolation is the default mode of the male. But you have to distinguish between what women value and what they actually do accomplish when in task-oriented groups. In fact, that they treasure collaberation so much actually makes them more sensitive to slight errors of cooperation, since they also perceive much, much more nuance in the interpersonal space than men do. (I hope this last assertion is not controversial. Have you never been married?) And it is precisely this combination which is fatal for the outcome.

The combination is the problem. They both value cooperation and at the same time perceive interpersonal imperfection. This combination exponentiates within female task groups, so they have an exponentially higher list of mental grievances against each other at any given moment than would a group of relatively obtuse, individualistic men. And because these issues are not just cognitive observations but are rooted deep in their value system, they cannot pass them over.

This means that a working group of women will fight more, about more, than a similarly tasked group of men. So, all other things being equal, the female group will be much more likely to break down in conflict than the male.

Of course all things are not equal, so we can’t conclude from this observation anything about the relative efficiency of a female group. Other factors count.

For example, negligence is a male specialty. The general scofflaw in the workplace, who just skips whatever he can get away with, is more likely male. Also, when they do fight, the male group’s fight is more likely to be physical and destructive.

So I’m not saying that females are less good at anything than a male group (indeed, they usually believe they are better, and I’ve not seen evidence to the contrary.) I am saying they do not have less conflict.

You might argue that productivity and efficiency are exactly the issue, since a female group that experiences more conflict yet still is productive is precisely evidence that women do something to overcome all that conflict. But do they, or is it overcome, suppressed, or dampened for them by management support? To extrapolate their productivity-in-spite-of-conflict to a hypothetical governing body, you would have to remove the influence of management — since a female Senate would have no referee.

We should distinguish between task-oriented groups and other types of gatherings. Women love to gather when there is no external task, but rather just explore the richness of friendship. These are different, and I don’t have near the direct experience of the latter as I do the former.

But, you say, the world’s literature is full of woman’s hatred for war. Of course women hate war more than men do, because they feel the bond of love more deeply then men. Mothers and wives feel the loss of sons and husbands more acutely than a man can imagine. But these are distinct matters; women’s suffering from war is not evidence they would be less warlike as governments.

Based on my experience as a manager of women and their own testimony, I’m metaphysically certain that if you elected 100 women to the United States Senate today, tomorrow the conflict level in that body would go up, not down.

The Disingenuous Voice in Politics

Political junkies are regularly shocked when their opponents mistreat one of their own appointees to some important office. Well, I’m shocked that they are shocked. They must not understand their own axioms, or maybe they just are fooled by their own disingenuous inner monologue.

But, let’s back up: politics is the struggle between two visions of justice, which share the common assumption that force can accomplish the vision. In one vision, that of the political left, injustice is mostly represented by an incorrect distribution of the money. In the vision from the political right, the first group is just a pack of thieves. Both sides think the other needs to be cudgeled.

So all daily tactics are part of a holy war over the control of the coercive power, to control the money. In the end, it’s just a simple brawl over money, but the activists in each camp do see it in stark moral terms. Either the world is broken and we need the gold to make the world right; or the pillaging barbarians are at the gate, demanding the gold.

The political conflict is, for activists, an absolute moral vision, and so it requires victory at all costs. Politics is jihad. There might seem to be an occasional compromise but those are tactical pauses, in which both sides use the calm to reload.

The two visions cannot be reconciled, because visions are rarely formed by argument or reason, and so rarely change in response to argument or reason. They are pre-cognitive, aesthetic constructs, formed in early childhood, and if you believe in them enough to fight for them you constantly select evidence from your environment to confirm your lifelong vision.

On the left, your side looks to you like a band of saints just building an earthly paradise. Just imagine how beatific it shall be; it is the pearl of great price, this just community , and for it a man or woman will sell all. You are on the barricades in Les Miserable, singing anthems and waving flags. Your hair, despite your beret, is swept back by your own intrepidity. Your eye is like a raptor’s, your talon is clenched around arrows, you are gaunt with ascetic devotion. It’s all stronger than heroin.

Visions are also all-embracing. You sincerely think the other side is either crazy or malicious. There is no terrain outside the vision for the conscience to find a critical foothold. So all political activists are indistinguishable from that long-recognized type, the fanatic. Only the dilettante is squeamish. Since your vision of the final state of society has in it all that you’ve ever imagined of justice, even a transient sacrifice of momentary conscience is justified by the equation in your head. This sly word, that hyperbole, this heightening of my opponents wart, that ignoring of his humanity, — these small mischiefs the price of cosmic justice. Done. Misdemeanors only, since you need the gold to make the world right.

So political candidates and nominees in America are routinely slandered and demonized by tactics that all the activists teach their own children are immoral. Each side sees the other candidates or nominees as willing enemy combatants, intellectual terrorists, but they see their own as smart, qualified servants of the just cause. Therefore, the tactics of the other side look devilish, while the tactics of your own side seem fair, given the larger context of the vision. All armies will commit atrocities if the only other choice is slavery; all political activists demonize people on the other side who are better people than themselves. So both sides become devils, and they are all fighting against devils.

Most soldiers on both sides are congenitally incapable of fairly imagining their opponents’ vision, and those who are so capable actually make bad soldiers and get drummed out early, so the army is selected for hysteria. As your comrades get shot, your picture of the other side as demonic gets confirmed, and embedded deeper and deeper into your emotional life. That’s how war works. You start – start! – with the other side de-humanized, and the process of fighting actually confirms and embellishes the gargoyles you see across the wire. People who enlist for either side tend, over time, to subsume their consciences to the victory of their vision. This is how war works. Everything, including the integrity of language itself (cf Orwell), is eventually submerged by the Cause, and the more clearly you see your vision, the more you see your friends wounded, the more quickly and happily you drown your conscience.

Any more sophisticated depiction of a political fight is propaganda, to be consumed by spectators.

Activists find it useful to label themselves something else, because soldiers long ago discovered that if you look like a non-combatant you can knock off opponents easier. So, today for example, we get such amusing labels as ‘advocacy journalist” and “political blogger” and “‘policy wonk” and so on. If you can pretend to be lounging at the side of the battlefield, just writing down what is happening, you can shoot the enemies of your vision, the killers of your friends, when they are not looking. No matter the label, these are killers all, for a vision of who should possess the money.

The side that is losing at the moment bemoans the state of the country, talks about it going to hell, wails about the Eden now lost, and so on. In five minutes, the battle shifts and the wail erupts from the other camp. The wail is a tactic. The political battle is no different now than it was in 1960, 1860, or than it was in Athens centuries before Christ. People behave a certain way in wars.

But what the activists think about their enemies is never true. Political visions, though rooted deeply in personal psychologies, have little to do with what we would traditionally describe as goodness of character. These two things – political vision and personal goodness – seem to run on nearly independent tracks within one psyche. And this lack of correlation between politics and personal goodness is important. Both sides passionately resist this knowledge, because it is structurally necessary that the other side be devils.

You doubt this? You’re a true believer yourself, I take it.

Imagine you are caught in a natural disaster, like the flood which inundated New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. Imagine you found yourself in a band of ad-hoc rescuers, working 18 hours a day for a week, taking survivors off rooftops, all of you risking your lives together to save people you don’t know. Imagine you found yourselves of one mind, exhausted together, trusting each other completely in that crisis atmosphere. It happens, thankfully.

Suppose a year later, someone organizes a reunion, because as the horror wore off you began to remember that week as a strangely golden and precious experience. The foxhole bond needs honoring. You get together in a nice hotel, and this time there is leisure to get to know each other. As the evening wears on, do you think the people you respected the most on those rooftops will be found to agree with your politics? You do realize, don’t you, that political allegiance will be distributed randomly among your heroic group?

So activists of all types are deluded, because they need to be. You can’t shoot people, but you can shoot devils.

Activists are different in private than they are in public. In private, they are jocular about the blood on their hands. In public, clean, but this cleanliness is not for the benefit of the enemy army but for the neutrals. I take all this time to develop the context of political arguments because said context is studiously hidden by both sides in order to recruit civilians. Activists are known by their disengenuous voice.

Disingenuous, in the dictionary, means lacking candor, insincere. But this is imprecise, and so throws away a useful word into a tangle of synonyms. The disingenuous voice is not just insincere; it is fake sincere, it is faux-innocent. It is the voice which extracts an assertion from its bloody context and offers it as clean.

Here is what to listen for: the disingenuous voice talks about some moment in this war as if it is not a war. All such statements of the form “he is for the children” are intentionally ignoring the larger political fight in an effort to utterly fictionalize the moment.

This is for the benefit of the civilians, who have not enlisted yet, and who need to be recruited to feed and clothe your army. If it looks to them like your army is building bridges and roads — not shooting the other side to get the gold – then they’ll more likely feed and clothe you.

So: imagine a nominee for a cabinet position. Suppose the position concerns health care. Let’s stipulate that he is brilliant, a visionary, a good man, a father perhaps, a husband perhaps (I simply don’t know), understands the American health system better than anyone alive. Stipulate that he tells good jokes, sacrifices for his family, loves puppies, and weeps at every Nora Ephron movie. Add your stipulation here.

He may actually think he is just being asked to fix health care, or however he would express it. The combat engineer thinks he is a builder of bridges. The quartermaster thinks he is a feeder of villages. They probably are sincere in their work, enjoy it, are good at it, and so on. All sincere, all good, but all cogs in a killing machine. How war works.

To talk about this or that episode in American politics as if it is any less than a skirmish in the war to own all the wealth in America is to be deceptive. Mr. Nominee, the agency itself, the programs of the day themselves, the use of words like ‘compassion’ and “suffering”, the high-toned arguments about the legitimate powers of the State — these are all instruments in the war. The activist frames the debate. The distinction between the journalist and the activist is that the journalist does not speak in the disingenuous voice.