1. “Folly chasing death around the broken pillar of life.”  Wrote about this before.  In 1867 the fraternal Order of Myth (love that name!) created a float with that theme for the Mardi Gras parade.  One wonders what their thought process was, but whatever.  I do find this theme very apt for this Lent and our historical situation.  Lent should point us in the direction of some antidote for what ails us at a deep level….and this not just about our individual lives but also (and even more so) as some form of community….political, economic, social, religious….our whole culture “chasing death around this broken pillar of life.”  Where do we go from here?

It seems we are in the same position as Livy found in Rome over 2000 years  ago: “We can no longer tolerate what ails us nor its remedy.”

Read this insightful essay by David Todd McCarty with this title:

“America Doesn’t Solve Problems, It Treats Symptoms”

https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/america-doesnt-solve-problems-it-treats-symptoms-7cac0c6eae26

A problem that is played out at the social, communal level is only possible because it has its roots in the heart.  Here also we too often address a symptom instead of the problem….which may be very well disguised….indeed.

Doesn’t it seem that this is what Lent is for….to get a little better focus on what is wrong?  If we are called to “return to the Lord,” isn’t it because we need to diagnose what is truly wrong?  The diagnosis and the “return” are two sides of the same coin and the only liberation from “chasing death.” To say we “return to the Lord” without a true and deep diagnosis is a futile gesture and a misleading sentiment.

2. A personal note.  Ever since the last election day I have been wrestling with a lot of anger, resentment, ill-will toward a lot of people, etc.  I feel like shouting from a rooftop, “You stupid, ignorant, blind, deluded people, what have you done!?” Anger at a lot of people.  All the Hispanics and Blacks who voted in surprising numbers for Trump; the women who chose Trump; the Arab-Americans in Dearborn, Michigan (an Arabic community) who in their anger at the Biden Administration’s complicity in the destruction of Gaza decided to vote for Trump in large numbers and helped carry the state for him.  And never mind the American white male who has not voted as a majority for a Dem presidential candidate in something like 70 years!  Or take some of those states that Trump carried by something like 70%!  A lot of people to be angry about….very seriously…..  And lets be very clear, democracy was fully functioning to bring this situation about.  The people voted this in.  It was not some secret takeover.  A real majority wanted THIS!  Just as the Athenians voted to execute Socrates over 2000 years ago.  This election result is due to something really, really wrong within us as a people.  And lest I be misunderstood, no, no, no, the Dems are NOT and have NOT been worth voting for, but the choice was between something truly pathetic and bad and something really catastrophic for the country.  

However, my anger, my rage, my frustration is totally useless ….doesn’t do a bit of good…in part quite understandable and maybe inevitable. but it ultimately keeps me from seeing the reality truly, from understanding it truly, and so being able to respond in Truth.   It keeps me from seeing and understanding my own heart in this mess.  But maybe I can turn it into fuel for a deeper vision and a deeper response.   Good material for Lent!

3. Two responses that are both actually “on the mark” in their own way, but they simply add to my own anger, blindness, frustration; but I do find them in some strange way quite necessary….to see how awful and how extensive our social problem is.

The first is a rant by Chris Hedges:

“Kiss the ring. Grovel before the Godfather. Give him tribute, a cut of the spoils. If he and his family get rich you get rich. Enter his inner circle, his ‘made’ men and women, and you do not have to follow rules or obey the law. You can disembowel the machinery of government. You can turn us and the natural world into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. You can commit crimes with impunity. You can make a mockery of democratic norms and social responsibility. Perfidy is very profitable at first. In the long term it is collective suicide.

America is a full blown kleptocracy. The demolition of the social and political structure, begun long before Trump, makes a few very, very rich and immiserates everyone else. Mafia capitalism always leads to a mafia state. The two ruling parties gave us the first. Now we get the second. It is not only our wealth that is being taken from us, but our liberty.

Since the election of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, currently worth $394 billion, saw his wealth increase by $170 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, worth $254 billion, saw his net worth increase by nearly $41 billion.

Tidy sums for kneeling before Moloch.”

………..

Please read the whole essay: 

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-mafia-state

The second is a kind of global protest by digital collage by one of my favorite journals, Adbusters:  https://www.adbusters.org/

Both are right in a sense and I agree with them, but also both are lacking “only one thing,” something very important, something which is hard to put into words, a kind of purity of heart and clarity of mind if you will.  But it can be summed up in one word: Gandhi.  

The folks above are calling for a kind of revolution, but Gandhi recognized that the essential and fundamental revolution is the one within, which then radiates into all of life.  (And here Adbusters is “so close to that Kingdom.”)  Otherwise the social revolutions not only fail, but they simply recycle the distortions, the delusions, the violence of the “ancien regime.”  India, which was Gandhi’s big “experiment”  is actually a real failure…from the Gandhian perspective; and Gandhi saw that clearly at the end of his life.  No matter; the revolution was ongoing within him….only a bullet could stop his body….and only his body…..   Are we going to walk away from that “one thing necessary”?  A thought for this Lent:  think of Lent as a call to revolution, the true revolution.  Forget “give some little thing up” for Lent, or “going to Church more often,” or giving something extra to charity.  No, start a real revolution!

4. Gandhi built his house not on sand but on solid rock….Truth.  This    surprises a lot of people….that the foundation is not love.  That is too easy for self-delusion, which a lot of writers, both secular and spiritual, have well documented.  See the lies that abide in all realms.  (By the way, who is the “father of lies?”)  Truth within oneself; truth between two human beings; truth as the fabric of real community.  Truth is the goal; ahimsa (nonviolence) within the totality of life is the means(this is comprehensive and one that many misunderstand how demanding it can be).  We are now much closer to the real meaning of love….even as the most powerful force of social change!

Gandhi:

“The way of peace is the way of truth. Truthfulness is even more important than peacefulness. Indeed, lying is the mother of violence. A truthful man cannot long remain violent. He will perceive in the course of his search that he has no need to be violent, and he will further discover that so long as there is the slightest trace of violence in him, he will fail to find the truth he is searching.  There is no half way between truth and non-violence on the one hand, and untruth and violence on the other. We may never be strong enough to be entirely non-violent in thought, word and deed. But we must keep non-violence as our goal and make steady progress towards it. The attainment of freedom, whether for a man, a nation or the world, must be in exact proportion to the attainment of non-violence by each. Let those, therefore, who believe in non-violence as the only method of achieving real freedom keep the lamp of non-violence burning bright in the midst of the present impenetrable gloom. The truth of a few will count; the untruth of millions will vanish even like chaff before whiff of wind.”

Thomas Merton on Gandhi (long quote but very significant):

“What is certainly true is that Gandhi not only understood the ethic of the Gospel as well, if not in some ways better, than most Christians, but he is one of the very few men of our time who applied Gospel principles to the problems of a political and social existence in such a way that his approach to these problems was inseparably religious and political at the same time.
He did this not because he thought that these principles were novel and interesting, or because they seemed expedient, or because of a compulsive need to feel spiritually secure. The religious basis of Gandhi’s political action was not simply a program, in which politics were marshalled into the service of faith, and brought to bear on the charitable objectives of a religious institution. For Gandhi, strange as it may seem to us, political action had to be by its very nature “religious” in the sense that it had to be informed by principles of religious and philosophical wisdom. To separate religion and politics was in Gandhi’s eyes “madness” because his politics rested on a thoroughly religious interpretation of reality, of life, and of man’s place in the world. Gandhi’s whole concept of man’s relation to his own inner being and to the world objects around him was informed by the contemplative heritage of Hinduism, together with the principles of Karma Yoga which blended, in his thought with the ethic of the Synoptic Gospels and the Sermon on the Mount. In such a view, politics had to be understood in the context of service and worship in the ancient sense of leitourgia (liturgy, public work). Man’s intervention in the active life of society was at the same time by its very nature svadharma, his own personal service (of God and man) and worship, yajna. Political action therefore was not a means to acquire security and strength for one’s self and one’s party, but a means of witnessing to the truth and the reality of the cosmic structure by making one’s own proper contribution to the order willed by God. One could thus preserve one’s integrity and peace, being detached from results (which are in the hands of God) and being free from the inner violence that comes from division and untruth, the usurpation of someone else’s dharma in place of one’s own svadharma. These perspectives lent Gandhi’s politics their extraordinary spiritual force and religious realism.
The success with which Gandhi applied this spiritual force to political action makes him uniquely important in our age. More than that, it gives him a very special importance for Christians. Our attitude to politics tends to be abstract, diverse and often highly ambiguous. Political action is by definition secular and unspiritual. It has no really religious significance. Yet it is important to the Church as an institution in the world. It has therefore an official significance. We look to the Church to clarify principle and offer guidance, and in addition to that we are grateful if a Christian party of some sort comes to implement the program that has thus been outlined for us. This is all well and good. But Gandhi emphasized the importance of the individual person entering political action with a fully awakened and operative spiritual power in himself, the power of Satyagraha, non-violent dedication to truth, a religious and spiritual force, a wisdom born of fasting and prayer. This is the charismatic and personal force of the saints, and we must admit that we have tended to regard it with mistrust and unbelief, as though it were mere “enthusiasm” and “fanaticism.” This is a lamentable mistake, because for one thing it tends to short circuit the power and light of grace, and it suggests that spiritual dedication is and must remain something entirely divorced from political action: something for the prie dieu, the sacristy or the study, but not for the marketplace. This in turn has estranged from the Church those whose idealism and generosity might have inspired a dedicated and creative intervention in political life. These have found refuge in groups dominated by a confused pseudo-spirituality, or by totalitarian messianism. Gandhi remains in our time as a sign of the genuine union of spiritual fervor and social action in the midst of a hundred pseudo-spiritual crypto-fascist, or communist movements in which the capacity for creative and spontaneous dedication is captured, debased and exploited by the false prophets.
In a time where the unprincipled fabrication of lies and systematic violation of agreement has become a matter of course in power politics, Gandhi made this unconditional devotion to truth the mainspring of his social action. Once again, the radical difference between him and other leaders, even the most sincere and honest of them, becomes evident by the fact that Gandhi is chiefly concerned with truth and with service, svadharma, rather than with the possible success of his tactics upon other people, and paradoxically it was his religious conviction that made Gandhi a great politician rather than a mere tactician or operator. Note that Satyagraha is matter for a vow, therefore of worship, adoration of the God of truth, so that his whole political structure is built on this and his other vows (Ahimsa, etc.) and becomes an entirely religious system. The vow of Satyagraha is the vow to die rather than say what one does not mean.
The profound significance of Satyagraha becomes apparent when one reflects that “truth” here implies much more than simply conforming one’s words to one’s inner thought. It is not by words only that we speak. Our aims, our plans of action, our outlook, our attitudes, our habitual response to the problems and challenges of life, “speak” of our inner being and reveal our fidelity or infidelity to God and to ourselves. Our very existence, our life itself contains an implicit pretension to meaning, since all our free acts are implicit commitments, selections of “meanings” which we seem to find confronting us. Our very existence is “speech” interpreting reality. But the crisis of truth in the modern world comes from the bewildering complexity of the almost infinite contradictory propositions and claims to meaning uttered by millions of acts, movements, changes, decisions, attitudes, gestures, events, going on all around us. Most of all a crisis of truth is precipitated when men realize that almost all these claims to meaning and value are in fact without significance, when they are not in great part entirely fraudulent.
The tragedy of modern society lies partly in the fact that it is condemned to utter an infinite proliferation of statements when it has nothing to reveal except its own meaninglessness, its dishonesty, its moral indigence, its inner divisions, its abject spiritual void, its radical and self-destructive spirit of violence.
Satyagraha for Gandhi meant first of all refusing to say “nonviolence” and “peace” when one meant “violence” and “destruction.” However, his wisdom differed from ours in this: he knew that in order to speak truth he must rectify more than his inner intention. It was not enough to say “love” and intend love thereafter proving the sincerity of one’s own intentions by demonstrating the insincerity of one’s adversary. “Meaning” is not a mental and subjective adjustment. For Gandhi, a whole lifetime of sacrifice was barely enough to demonstrate the sincerity with which he made a few simple claims: that he was not lying, that he did not intend to use violence or deceit against the English, that he did not think that peace and justice could be attained through violent or selfish means, that he did genuinely believe they could be assured by nonviolence and self-sacrifice.
Gandhi’s religio-political action was based on an ancient metaphysic of man, a philosophical wisdom which is common to Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity: that “truth is the inner law of our being.” Not that man is merely an abstract essence, and that our action must be based on logical fidelity to a certain definition of man. Gandhi’s religious action is based on a religious intuition of being in man and in the world, and his vow of truth is a vow of fidelity to being in all its accessible dimensions. His wisdom is based on experience more than on logic. Hence the way of peace is the way of truth, of fidelity to wholeness and being, which implies a basic respect for life not as concept, not as a sentimental figment of the imagination, but its deepest, most secret and most fontal reality. The first and fundamental trust is to be sought in respect for our own inmost being, and this in turn implies the recollectedness and the awareness which attune us to that silence in which a lone Being speaks to us in all its simplicity.
Therefore Gandhi, recognized as no other world leader of our time, had done the necessity to be free from pressures, the exorbitant and tyrannical demands of a society that is violent because it is essentially greedy, lustful and cruel. Therefore he fasted, observed days of silence, lived frequently in retreat, knew the value of solitude, as well as of the totally generous expenditure of his time and energy in listening to others and communicating with them. He recognized the impossibility of being a peaceful and nonviolent man if one submits passively to the insatiable requirements of a society maddened by overstimulation and obsessed with the demons of noise, voyeurism and speed.”

5. What if we live in a culture of  lies?  What happens if our language, one of the key vehicles of truth, becomes abused, misused, distorted, propagandistic, etc.?  There are several ancient traditions that show a real concern for the consequences.  Confucius, for one, spoke about the need for “rectification of names.”  He said that if there was to be harmony at any and all levels of society, family, community, state, language must be a real vehicle of truth and not our delusions.  Cao Feng, a Chinese scholar, had this to say:

“Confucius was simply the first person in history to realize the importance of language in politics. As a politician, Confucius noticed and foresaw the influence that the indeterminacy, ambiguity, and arbitrariness of names could have on politics. He discerned the political consequences when language could not accurately express meaning or when there was no way for people to accurately perceive it. He also recognized how names, as a way of clarifying right and wrong and establishing norms, could have a great effect on a society’s politics.”

Plato aimed so many of his works against the sophists of ancient Athens.  Sophistry was a communal poison and not just an intellectual game.

And in modern times George Orwell has written forcefully about this issue.  His classic novel, 1984, written about 70 years ago, is a nightmarish picture of a totalitarian society where all of reality is now distorted and reconfigured.  Here is the opening line from the novel and more:

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”

(Slogans of the state.  Absurd you think?  Well think about how we invaded Iraq because we were told of “weapons of mass destruction.” And the infamous saying from the Vietnam era, ‘we destroyed the village in order to save.’)

“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

But of course the one who has written the most eloquently and most comprehensively about this problem of distortion of reality through distortion of language is Thomas Merton.  The following read is a must:

https://merton.org/ITMS/Seasonal/27/27-1Daggy.pdf

6. Over 60 years ago a Canadian English professor, Marshall McLuhan, produced a revolutionary appraisal of media on culture and life in general:  Understanding Media and The Medium Is the Message.  He stunned a lot of people when he proposed that Hitler was only possible because of the invention of the radio and the loud speaker system.  Hitler was able to project his hypnotic delusions and his hypnotic madness to the masses through this means.  His mesmerizing darkness was enabled and enhanced by the  new technology.  With  his voice alone he would have reached dozens of people at a time; with these inventions he could reach thousands and hundreds of thousands in one speech.  Ok, I agree with that insight, but I would like to point out that you have to look also at what was wrong with the “receiving end” of this delivery.  Just consider:  Germany in the 1930s was the most educated country in the West, and if you count church attendance, the most religious.  So how did they fall for this madness? 

I wonder what  McLuhan would say about our internet and cell phone!?  I recall talking to an early Silicon Valley troll in the 1980s who told me internet would do wonders for the porn industry.  Of course internet is also a vehicle for a lot of good, a lot of essential good,  but we need to be aware that within this culture of lies which is our communal home, it is an increasing enabler and enhancer of lies, disinformation, distortions, fears, our darkness. In fact, the culture of lies would be a mere shadow of itself without internet.  So we seem to be back at “Livy’s problem”!  And with virtual reality and AI things are only going to get more “interesting.” 

And then there is this: the cell phone.  

Dopamine Nation. Title of a recent book by Stanford psychiatrist, Anna     Lembke, an authority on addiction treatment.   An important study of a growing problem:  addictions of all kinds growing in the U.S.  Across all age groups; all social and economic classes…..  Among the various agents of addiction is the cell phone.  Youngsters even in grade school get hooked.  Dopamine, that “feel-good” hormone comes on with every click of the cell phone. And with game playing, a multi billion dollar industry, you are cooked!  Dr. Lembke points to our disconnect from reality “out there” and from each other….kind of ironic in that the cell phone is seen as “connecting” us.  But we no longer talk to  one another face to face, exchange ideas and opinions, try to understand the “other,” etc.  Kids are less exposed to the wonders and mysteries of the natural world.  What is “real” is only what is on the screen.  We are approaching a new kind of Orwellian world.

7. Again, from the Upanishads:

From the unreal lead me to the real!

From the darkness lead me to the light!

From death lead me to immortality!

(Patrick Olivelle translation)

When I was studying Greek in Berkeley many years ago, I wore a tee shirt with these words on it in Greek:  PATHEI MATHOS.

This means “learning through suffering,” an expression from Aeschylus.  

We the People will learn eventually; it will be hard.