This is another one of those "the person you meet today is at a certain point in a long journey that started before you met him and is not yet over" posts. That thing I just put in quotes is the sort of thing we generally should assume about other people. I have met very few "flat characters" in my life.
But I have met some. More than I wish I could say. I feel pity for someone who is trapped in themselves and unable to grow but I think I feel more sympathy with everyone else in that person's life who has to deal with them.
I would say I know a lot about the way people work, what maintains behaviors, especially harmful or socially disruptive behaviors, and for most people, what motivates change. This is a large part of the work that I do as a social worker, with clients in various stages of change.
On that, before I get to the meat of this post, I want to point out that I do think people are accountable to themselves and others and responsible for change. That includes people who are also, at the same time, systematically oppressed. It includes many people who do not benefit from my combination of racial, sexual and educational privilege. I am responsible for holding people accountable. And every single one of my clients is part of more than one type of underclass. I hold people accountable for change and I do not feel conflicted about this in the slightest. The reason I bring this up is because conservatives love to trumpet about "personal responsibility" but have no appreciation for "personal context," whereas Leftist social workers kind of have to deal in both worlds, so we are naturally more tolerant of contradictions and ambiguity.
And contradictions and ambiguity are a big part of what I want to use this post to address. They are part of the Fifth Stage.
I supposed technically I was born an atheist. Technically everyone is born an atheist. But I was raised with a moderate degree of religion in my life. My family for most of my childhood until my mid-adolescence were "High Holidays Jews." We didn't identify really with any of the Sects like Orthodox, or Conservative, or Reform or Reconstructionist, from my earliest memories until sometime after my Bar Mitzvah, I would say my family tried to integrate religion and make it meaningful for us. My mother was not Jewish by birth. She converted when she married my father and this was done partly because she genuinely identified with the religion and culture but also because, at the time, their views on Israel were significantly less critical and in their early religious experimentation (their Stage 4), they wished for me and my siblings to be able to become Israeli citizens if we wanted, later in life.
Like I said, their views on Israel have changed.
Their views on religion also changed. And the change was in parallel but not in conjunction with my own.
I would say that I spent a lot of time as a kid trying to "find myself" and one of the ways I tried to do this was with intense spirituality.
Recalling this as an adult, it feels like a very inauthentic time for me, similar to when I was in the closet and trying to live life as a heterosexual or primarily heterosexual man. I remember being impatient with traditional religious instruction, and I had some pretty traumatizing experiences in Hebrew Sunday School (the story of the Binding of Isaac comes to mind, but also, the casual and bloodless fiction of Israel that the teachers presented, an extreme and distasteful nationalism, possibly fascism).
So, I never saw religion and politics as separate and as a religious minority as a child, I developed a very strong belief in the Separation of Church and State, in secular national discourse and justice, in secular public services and civic life. This concern of late has been subordinated by a more general hatred of both Capital and the State that protects it, and a feeling that much of the apparent "conflict" between "church and state" (what a predictably Christian-centric kind of term!) has to do with funding and tax codes and other aspects of capitalism which would be rendered irrelevant with the obsolescence of the system that maintains it. It is just another way that our ruling elites and bourgeois culture divides the working class. I always knew there was a problematic relationship between government authority and the authority of religious leaders and that the line had to be thickly drawn or it would be weaponized against minorities and used in the service of suppressing class struggle. This had literally nothing to do with "atheism." I was not an atheist at that time. I believed very strongly in something, some mystical element to reality, that could be called God.
After our Bar Mitzvahs, my friend Judah (who later became known to us as Paz) broke from his equally confusing religious home life (his mother was Christian, father was Jewish, and they celebrated both traditions) and he devoted himself to the practice of Wicca. Because I admired Paz's spirituality, I did the same. I learned about Wiccan theology and and ritual and I spent a good deal of time fashioning items for use in those rituals and writing spells and drawing runes in my Book of Shadows. I think this was even less authentic for me than Judaism. And I was ostracized and ridiculed for it, including by members of my own family, who already thought I was weird. These family members are conservative Christians and my experience with them is feeling like they are nice to my face but have fascist politics and would vote for Hitler if Hitler said he was against abortions and his opponent was not. And a certain traumatic childhood memory involves my judgmental, right-wing Christian aunt mouthsoaping my brother and I without my parents' knowledge in a restaurant bathroom for using mild swears in context, something which in my family was normalized, unlike the child abuse she subjected me too, not to mention, legal and ethical between consenting family members, and not abusive. I remember thinking "I know this isn't fair but I have to put up with it because she's an adult." I didn't know it was abuse. I didn't know my parents didn't know about it. I assumed they did because it did not occur to me that someone who was not my parent would discipline me without a parents' consent.
But right-wing Christians feel they need to take ownership of other people's morality, and when I came to understand how deeply my aunt has internalized a narrative of Secular America being crueler and more awful to (white) Christians than any other group, her boundary violations made sense, because as a secular person of a scientific worldviews, I feel my boundaries are constantly tested by a pervasive national narrative that we are a Christian Nation (hard variant) and that this should be reflected in public by government institutions, or (soft variant) that government institutions are not prohibited from endorsing religion in general over nonreligion. But again, I felt this way before I considered myself an atheist, and before I considered myself a philosophical materialist. It had nothing to do with atheism. It had to do with feeling threatened by assimilation and by assaults on the secular character of public institutions that were humiliating and invalidating of me, personally.
I would say I became a Seeker. That is Fowler's 4th Stage, after the 3rd Stage, which is characterized by conformity to a religious ideal. This was, at first, Judaism, and then, Wicca, which was more syncretic and led to explorations of other faiths and practices (these are not always the same thing, for example, some religious, like Judaism, are more practice-oriented than oriented to what most American Christians would consider "faith," and for many "practicing" Jews, faith doesn't really enter into it much. But in Stage 4 I was a seeker and I began to integrate knowledge into a novel synthesis.
I graduated slowly from that to agnosticism and then atheism because I became fascinated by human evolution and read everything I could about evolution and the beginning of the universe and paleohistory and prehistory and cultural anthropology and sociology and biology, and after absorbing all that information I concluded that God was a failed hypothesis and ceased to believe in the "spiritual." The reason that word is in scare quotes is because I don't actually mean "concerning the human spirit" but rather the "immaterial" which is what most modern Americans take that word to mean. I think more religious people than myself have ruined that word, which is why I am using it, in this context, in scare quotes. I would say that as a materialist with a background in cultural and biological anthropology, I have a spiritual life (no scare quotes) that involves writing and hearing and reading and telling stories. My spiritual life is "narrative." But I don't use that word a lot because it's been robbed of its semantic utility. Similarly, I prefer to describe myself as a "philosophical materialist" than an "atheist" because while I am an atheist, atheism as a label isn't very useful. It only says that I disbelieve in one particular thing. But I am many things. I am a scientifically informed skeptic, with a philosophically materialist metaphysical worldview. These are things I actually do believe in.
I am also an organizer and while I think there is some utility to organizing around certain church-state separation issues, I don't think that alone can created a broad enough coalition around it without also adopting and aligning with the economic critique of the Left.
My experiences with "Organized Atheism" were brief and dramatic and traumatic and disappointing and many other regrettable things. I very briefly watched Richard Dawkins videos and posted on "Rational Response Squad" and I loathe to admit these things, but it was only for a few months when I and some online friends tired of what we were seeing and instead attending a conference for a group called CFI (Center for Inquiry) that promotes science, secular humanism, and church-state separation. They were not explicitly an atheist group although the majority of the people there were atheists and that was primarily who attended the student conferences. This was in college, I was a super senior, a stoner and a drunkard, and probably had a bit of acquired situational narcissism at the time. I was also neurologically speaking, at age 23, still bascially an adolescent (a point I will continue to harp on, as I think this aspect is lost and ignored in public discourse surrounding student activism). At 23, one tends to be an extremist. But I was uncomfortable with a lot of groupthink and quasi-cultish behavior I witnessed in "Organized Atheism" and by other aspects of the whole thing that were, frankly, alienating to a lot of more Leftist-minded people in that milieu, who later left and ceded that fetid sewer to the Dawkinites. CFI later merged with his Richard Dawkins' Foundation, and that was the point I left, because I wasn't a fan and I disliked the cult of personality surrounding him. At the time I was involved, regrettably, from 2008-2011, the general political biases of the student wing were somewhere on the centrist-liberal spectrum with a few oddball socialists like I was.
Later, so I hear, it got taken over by neoliberalism and the early stages of the Alt Right development.
I'm not surprised. The whole thing was a house of cards. Like I said, certain church-state issues are worth organizing around, but there's no real unity in atheism or even scientific skepticism. There's just not enough there and it's not inclusive enough. It's an oblique and off-centered analysis of fundamental social problems, a wrong analysis that doesn't address the inequalities that create those problems.
I regret my involvement from 2008 to 2011, but I don't beat myself up over it. I left. I'm not one of those people.
I'm in Stage 5: the "Conjunctive" Stage. At this stage I tolerate ambiguities and contradictions as a matter of maintaining a healthy mind and healthy relationships. I don't really trouble myself with people who persist in boundary violations or are unwilling to grow with me. I just don't have the emotional capacity left to deal with that. I cut them off, and I focus on the healthy relationships. I'm very satisfied with my life and if I seem like I'm not, you're not hearing my critique. I am extremely dissatisfied with our socioeconomic order. I love life. I (mostly) love people. I have a lot of faith in people. I've talked about this before, I think libertarians, and liberals, and theocrats, and fascists, and centrists and conservatives lack faith in people. They see themselves as part of a tribe or as individuals unconnected with the class struggle. I think this is incorrect but I don't think it's a moral flaw. It's a flaw of ignorance. But persistent ignorance is design. Design is agenda, and agenda is bias.
And there is nothing inherently wrong with agendas. But there is something wrong with the pretension that one has no bias.
I'm not sure Stage 6, the Universalizing Stage, really exists except in theory.
And not everyone gets through every stage. Some people never leave Stage 2 or 3. That describes most fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals, unfortunately.
But I'm glad to know that there is forward movement.
It is 12:42 AM.
Good morning.