My Spiritual Journey – Peter Shea
Circa mid 1990’s
A talk with Twin City Friends Meeting
It would be immensely easier to do this talk if I didn’t
know you folks, or if I knew you and didn’t have much respect for you. There are difficulties occasioned by knowing
you. I know what levels, what kinds of experience,
I’m confronting. And I also know how
profound in some ways my disagreements are with some of you. I have some
guesses with others. You did ask, and it
is one of my unbreakable rules that I always accept speaking engagements on any
matter I know anything about, and I think I know something about myself.
Every speaking engagement I accept changes my life, in
astonishing ways. Some years ago I was
asked to talk to the people who maintain audio-visual equipment in the public
schools. I gave about an hour’s worth of
talk on Zen and the art of maintaining slide projectors. And the ideas from that talk were a resource
for about two years, ideas I never would have pondered if someone had not asked
me to talk about slide projectors.
I wanted to start out with a story that might put anybody’s
talk on themselves in some kind of perspective. Observatories have trouble
resolving distant objects. For many years
it was believed that the problem there was the miles and miles of air between
us and the stars. So the idea was that
if we put a telescope in space and we don’t have the air, you can see the stars
just fine. I think around the time that
the Hubble space telescope became such a disaster, somebody actually took a
closer look at what the problem was, and determined that it wasn’t the miles
and miles of air in the upper atmosphere that was screwing things up, it was
the few feet of air in the observatory between the lens of the telescope and
the window. The turbulence in the
observatory was most of the problem, so if you just temperature control the
observatory, you get very much better images. The same way I think that
whenever you try to get perspective on your life, a kind of broad view, you
have to keep an eye on the bit of air between the lens of the telescope and the
window, however much you might think you are getting a broad view.
It has been an unquiet week in Lake Wobegon, and I think I
want to start with that. On Monday I
learned that I had been given a $10,000 grant from the Minnesota Humanities
Commission to implement a project to bring philosophy to embattled inner city
schools -- one in particular, but if it works we’ll replicate it.
This project is the fruit of probably ten years of fooling
around with different models of teaching philosophy to kids and getting schools
to do serious philosophical discussion.
If it works it will be a victory; if it flops, it will be a rather large
flop.
On Tuesday I finally connected up, after better than a year
of trying and thinking about it, with the list serves in philosophy, this
incredible electronic community of people talking about Kant and medical ethics
and all sorts of things. I finally got
myself to the point of receiving messages from all of these very strange
philosophic communities and thereby realized something that I have wanted for a
long time: a sense of a kind of global support community, unlimited by
institutional boundaries and to a certain extent unlimited by status.
On Wednesday, I taught probably the best philosophy class I
have ever taught. It was a class devoted
to issues of respect, questions of what it is to respect someone, when one can
respect someone. The audience was
student mothers, many of whom have been subject to significant physical abuse,
and the issue was: can one respect despite such abuse. And it was simply
wonderful, cathartic.
On Thursday, I went back and talked to the same group in a
session which I can only describe as the ante-chamber of hell. For 20 of the 40 minutes, four students were
talking as loudly as possible to talk, simultaneously, on topics significantly
to the left of the ice people myth, if you understand the racial issues here. At the end of this time, I ventured to bring
things back on track with a question which was taken by all concerned, most
concerned anyway, to be a totally inappropriate racist attack on my
students. The students demanded an
immediate apology and I said I don’t apologize for things I didn’t say, and
that’s the sort of issue one stake’s one’s job on.
On Friday I had a meeting with the principal of the special
programs for the Minneapolis public schools and the multi-cultural concerns
folks connected with that, and my students to try to work this all out, and I
would say we were on the order of 70% successful.
On Saturday I taught a class on purification myths in Phaedo
and the relation between those and the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. I somehow
or other allowed or prompted a group of adults to develop at a fairly deep level
the fundamental dialog between Marcus Aurelius and the gnostics, which is the
fundamental dialogue between someone who in some limited sense affirms the
world and the folks who want to get out of it as quickly as possible with as
little connection.
So as I say, it has been an unquiet week in Lake Wobegon and
anything I say from here on out will be filtered in various ways through
somewhat turbulent air.
I worried about giving this talk, partly because there are
some things that haven’t happened to me that have happened to some of you that
matter. I’ve never had anybody
significant die. I haven’t had a clear failure, lots of little ones, but
nothing horrendous, or a clear success.
I’ve never gone to jail. This is
the only context in which one can be embarrassed about never having gone to
jail. In the entire Twin Cities, this is
the only context in which one confesses that. So I feel that anything I say is
provisional. Things will change.
I also want to confess right at the beginning that with a couple
of exceptions about which I’m not willing to say anything, my experience has
been entirely ordinary, entirely common.
I do not talk to angels, I do not walk with Jesus, and the power of the Most
High does not overshadow me, neither do I stand in showers of gold. Most of my experience can be captured very
well on a tape recorder and video camera.
And I think that is a distinction between me and at least some and
perhaps most of the people in this room. That may be a limitation that means
that I should wait until I’m 50 to do this talk, but you asked.
I also worry a little bit because any time you do a talk
like this you set yourself up for something.
You put on your best suit, and this is the closest I have to a best
suit, and you pretend that you spend a lot of time doing high-minded
things. Just please allow for the fact
that there is as much soul crud in me as there is in anybody, probably more,
and that anything I say represents a fairly small slice of what I actually do,
a slice of what I’m actually fond of .
There is one other thing that bothered me about giving this
talk, the whole business of spiritual journey.
I have no memory for time in any very decent way, so the idea of
reconstructing a journey is hell. How do
I go back?
I don’t have a narrative memory. I don’t put events in that kind of order. And I don’t really see myself as being on a
journey. Nobody’s called me, nobody’s
sent me a ticket, I just kind of wander around.
I really think that what I’m doing so far is what I do when I walk the
dog. Since my neighborhood is a little
dangerous, I always walk the dog down the same street, go about the same
distance, and come back. But sometimes
there’s snow on things, and sometimes there’s not, and sometimes I see a rabbit,
and sometimes I don’t. It’s a walk
around the same objects over and over again, we’ve been living there about 8 years
now. That’s how I see it: it’s not a
journey, it’s a walk. I’m going to
invite you on a walk around some objects.
While I don’t have a narrative memory, I suppose there are
some things I should say about myself, just because it’s helpful for you to
locate me in traditions and so forth. My father was a North Dakota Catholic. This
is pretty primitive stuff. This is farm
Catholicism. This is my grandfather
going up to communion, standing just at the rail, and looking up. You can imagine this, looking up, “Father I
cussed my cow this morning, is it OK?”.
And father looks down and says “Sure Matt, sure”, and he goes to communion.
My father got the unenviable job once of taking around
something called the rosary pledge, a pledge to say the rosary in various
contexts. A lady said, “Nope, won’t
sign. My husband told me before he died ‘Don’t
sign anything, you might lose the farm.’”
And there’s a lot to be said for it. I have deep respect for it. It’s also
funny.
My mother was a Utah Mormon, a renegade from the Utah
Mormons . I think she couldn’t remain a
Mormon in any context in which there were Mormons within 200 miles because it
is a tremendously paternalist and patriarchal operation, and she gets into
fights real easy with that sort of stuff.
But in Minnesota among Catholics she could be a Mormon. For both of them,
I think, the coming to Minnesota was an escape from their roots, a kind of way
of starting fresh, so we were sort of not in a community but odd ducks making
our own way. Our nearest neighbors were a
quarter of a mile away and Norwegian, which means we visited them four times a
year.
So there was a certain isolation in my life. I was sort of raised Catholic, you had to,
you know, that’s the only way Catholics would marry you and otherwise you would
go to hell. I was sort of raised
Catholic, the “sort of” is far more important than the “raised”. I mean, I had the Mormons, I knew that my
mother’s folks believed six impossible things before breakfast that were quite
different from the six impossible things my father’s folks believed before
breakfast.
There was some distance.
I mean I still grew up being terribly afraid of going to hell. I confess to this day of being terribly
afraid of going to hell, and I have more reason now than I did then to be
fearful. But it was moderated. There were two things to balance that fear: I
had the counterpart from my mother’s side, and the other thing I had was the
great blessing of being taught by ignorant people.
I was taught by nuns a little bit, and I think the pathology
of rural nuns in Minnesota is a study in itself, something that somebody ought
to do some time: the incredible bitterness that people carry toward their
Catholic education. But mostly I was
taught by rather ignorant farmers who could read, and who were handed a book at
the beginning of the term by the priest, and told do this. So they read the book the night before and
tried to talk it through. So there was a
sense that the Catholic tradition was something we were all sort of trying to
figure out together. And that helped a lot.
It was quite non-dogmatic. Also
we had a young priest who was trying to figure things out for himself and
decided that we were the folks he could talk to, so he spent half of his life
in our kitchen. And that helped.
So I had this kind of inoculation to Catholicism. I think that if I had ever gotten it straight,
I would have run away. But I got it so
attenuated in so many ways, by this priest who wasn’t quite sure what he was up
to, that I could kind of hold on to it.
Also I got to be an altar boy. I had ownership in the whole business. I
was never just people. I never wanted to
be just people.
But I naturally, very naturally, I grew up worrying a lot
about the status of belief, what it is to believe. Because, according to my
mother’s folks, what I was supposed to grow up to do was to be god and run a
planet. You don’t really know that; the
Mormons don’t tell you straight off, but that’s what it comes down to. You’re
supposed to grow up to be god and run a planet.
That was kind of appealing, if a bit daunting. I had megalomaniac fantasies, but being a
Mormon kid is a difficult matter. My
father’s folks said, if I can get the catechism right, that my purpose in life
was to know, love and serve God on earth and to share with Him the happiness of
heaven. That’s quite a different
mandate. It’s also rather perplexing to
try to love somebody, especially somebody invisible. It becomes more perplexing when one knows
that this person has at some point or other going to make the decision about
whether you go to hell or not. I think
this is an intolerable emotional thing to try to sort out for a kid. My first exposure to the tradition was much
easier and more earth centered. The
first thing I learned about God was that God was the Supreme Bean who made all
things. And I think I could have pretty
much done the Gaia stuff out of that. I could have really developed a theology
based on the Bean. I would have been fine. But as I had to sort it out later,
it became harder.
So I worried a lot about the status of belief. What kinds of
grounds belief needed, how these farmers who were in other respects totally
modest (if you asked them how many cows they had, they went out and
counted before they told you) could be
saying things in the Nicene creed like “Christ is begotten , not made, one in
being with the father through whom all things were made.”
Of course the Mormons were equally strange; they both relied
on holy books. So I never had the luxury
or curse of simple faith. But I also
felt sort of obliged to believe things, and that was nutty stuff. Another problem was that during my “obliged to
believe things” period, I took Jesus at his word about pacifism, and people
beat on me a lot. My parents suggested
maybe I should fight. This is good Irish stuff, also good Mormon stuff. So I counter suggested that if I was going to
fight I should take a knife and win. I
didn’t propose that it makes very much sense to fight to lose, and given my
opponents’ size that was what was going to happen. My parents then locked up the knives and
didn’t make any more suggestions. But
the issues around pacifism, the issue around really hating people, long term
deep, and feeling rather guilty for doing it, was something that was with me
and is still with me. And also a sense
which I have only begun to erode, that conflict is an irresolvable black fact.
Once conflict of any such sort happens, there is nothing, nothing, nothing that
can be done about it. You might as well
kill the person in terms of the possibility of any relationship of any
substance.
After Elizabeth Barnard’s talk a couple of weeks ago, I
thought maybe I would cast this talk as “The things I believe that aren’t
true.” This I believe, subset, the
things that I know not to be true. But
one of the things that I quite deeply believe that isn’t true is that conflict
is irresolvable and eternal. I’m getting
a little better about that.
I grew up trying to think about the word Christianly and
wondering how you could justify that. I
spent a lot of time, spent years not making any significant progress,
connecting with people or much of anything.
Being very isolated, country life is not what it’s cracked up to
be. Somewhere along the line I came to
the thing which has become a passion, which I call the serious communal
Investigation of difficult matters by talking a lot. The way I write it here is something I really
want to put out: I found my way to a
country where all citizens were equal provided only that they said what they
thought and experienced, listened and didn’t pretend to understand what they
didn’t understand. I liked the air there.
I liked that kind of freedom, and talking that went somewhere became my
chief pleasure. I wanted every conversation to be a voyage of discovery, after
I found out that this was possible. I
became a nuisance, obviously, and came to think of most people as for all
practical purposes dead from the neck up, and in need of my particular brand of
therapy. I was much more annoying than I
am now. However I’ve been doing
philosophic work and teaching, trying to live in the country where saying what
you experience and think is enough for about 20 years.
I want to say some things on topics now and not be too
narrative. First of all, I want to talk
a bit about philosophy and why it’s important to me and how it’s important to
me and how it ends up being spiritually central to the extent that I have a
spirituality. I might find in
conversation with you folks over enough years that I really don’t have one and
ought to get one. This is a possibility.
Socrates is the major figure by far. There is nobody that
touches him in terms of influence on me, centrality in my life. The idea that you can go anywhere from the
thoughts you happen to have, if you just follow them out, and that the world is
deep in the sense that any topic of substance that you talk about will lead you
to discoveries and especially the discovery of your own ignorance vis a vis
that topic, not ignorance in the sense of butting your head against a brick
wall, but ignorance in the sense of, what’s the line from Pope, “… Alps on Alps
arise”.
When I talk to my kids, the ones I teach, I say, “Imagine
that you’ve inherited a large house, something huge. But somehow or other, the word hasn’t gotten
to you, but by some odd coincidence you’re without a place to live, and you
sneak into just that house by an unlocked back door, go down in the basement
and set up housekeeping in the wood room. So you have a little cooker there and
a little bed, and you sort of sneak out every night, every so often, and gradually
you become more familiar, and nobody bothers you, and you begin to look around
the laundry room and maybe check out the basement. And the oddity of the whole thing is that the
house is yours. And the problem exactly is to wake up to the fact that the
whole damn house is yours, all of the rooms.
That’s my sense of life. That’s
what I’m fundamentally doing as a teacher is to serve that image. That’s what I
have to say, in a nutshell.
I very firmly believe that if common sense is right, we are
all in deep trouble, and I do not have an experiential alternative myself to
common sense. There is a sense in which
I worship spookiness. I don’t find the
motivational psychology based on ambition, power, affection and sex
implausible; I just find it intolerable.
I don’t find common sense physics at the level I understand it an inadequate
explanation of the world, although I do
think that time can’t quite be the thing that people say it is if we can see
the future, and we do in certain non-inductive ways. But I find the strictures of physics
intolerable. I find the conception of
life based on ordinary assumptions not intolerable enough that I would kill
myself. That’s dying swan Wagnerian
dramatic, and I don’t like that kind of stuff.
But it’s just not something I want.
If that’s the way the world is, it’s cleverness, it’s nice playground, I
can diddle around for 70 years. I hope it’s not that way. I hope common sense is just the
foreground. I hope that the world is a
lot deeper than common sense thinks it is.
I hope that it’s deeply spooky, that there’s a ground, that there’s this
sort of light under this whole thing. I
don’t feel any particular need to believe that’s true. Belief is a precious commodity.
I don’t believe much, and I don’t feel a need to believe
much, but I understand people who do, and I understand something of why. I think our whole issue religiously, my whole
issue religiously, is where I direct my attention, where I direct my hope. The only things that matter are very
fundamental matters to me, on which one has to vote.
Thinking about the Our Father the other day: I’ve had
trouble with the Our Father all my life.
Every line of it has been the object of endless controversy. Simone Weil taught me a bit about how not to
do that anymore. So start out with our
father, and of course mother, or maybe not a mother, maybe some sort of cosmic
paramecium. But leave that. The minimal
content of the Our Father is that one’s addressing someone not oneself, about
whom one knows very little, who is in some sense the source of one’s life. The
alternative to that is that one is in some sense one’s own source of one’s
life, or that somehow the molecules did it.
I’ll vote for something I can talk to.
“Who art in heaven”.
I worried a whole lot about heaven, because there are so many
images. There are Hebrew images, which
is essentially a kind of perpetual restaurant reviewing party, where you don’t
get full. Plato’s image is like sort of a gigantic movie, it’s sort of a movie,
but the movie is, I don’t know what kind of movie to bring in there, it’s one of
those slow stately things where nothing much happens. But it doesn’t really
matter, what matters is that the thing one wants to talk to isn’t here. It’s someplace else. It may be here too, but at least part of it
isn’t here. That’s important. That’s fundamental.
“Hallowed be thy name”.
The name of God, the one name that doesn’t have a reference, the one
name that refers out. The only thing
that can be sacred really is the name out.
If you’re trapped, and I believe that common sense is a trap, that
physics is a trap, that ordinary motivation is a trap, the only thing that is
sacred is the exit sign. That’s why the name of God is sacred. And that’s the way it’s sacred.
“Thy kingdom come.” I
worried a lot about the kingdom. Here’s
the king who does the Job trick. Here’s
the king who pretty much ordered the butchery of the Canaanites. I worried a whole lot about how you conceive
the kingdom. I’ve come to think that it doesn’t much matter. The important point is the Kingdom isn’t here
either but there is one. The place I
want to be a citizen of isn’t here or isn’t here yet. And the will to which I
want to subordinate myself isn’t my own. Whatever that will might be, it isn’t
my own.
“Give us this day our daily bread”. Doesn’t much matter what you take bread to
be, the whole point is there’s something I need I can’t provide, end of
story. That’s the minimal content.
And on and on, you can do the rest. That’s the level at which I believe anything
I believe. It’s direction of attention,
it’s a vote on some very basic matters, and the dogmatic intricacies don’t
interest me very much.
It’s very odd to live a life in which one isn’t very sure of
much of anything. I find that very odd.
My favorite story is about a guy who went out searching for wisdom and
went to various holy people, expended his substance and found no answer. Finally, with his last bit of funds, he goes
to the last Tibetan mountain, climbs over the obligatory rocks and glaciers,
arrives at the obligatory cave with the old wizened man sitting on his bed of
nails and says to him “Master what is the secret of life ?” And the fellow says “Life, my son, is a
fountain.” The guy thinks about it a
little and says “A fountain?” and the fellow on the bed of nails says “You mean
it isn’t a fountain?” Very odd.
If I were going to do a flag for myself, what I would put on
the flag is the following motto at least this week: “Almost nothing is almost
enough.”
I spent a lot of time talking myself out of needing to
believe things I didn’t believe. I say it’s
taken me 20 years not to have an agenda.
But only to try to figure out how we are situated, what realities we
confront, and where the particular arguments we give might take us. It’s an odd thing to be a philosopher. I don’t think other people, who don’t have a
professional interest, find themselves as much in the situation as I do of
having arguments take them where they don’t want to go. You wish the best
argument you can find didn’t have a conclusion you don’t want to believe.
I should tell you about my road to pacifism, I think that
might give you an idea, because early on in my life, it was one of the first
few chains. I woke up one day to realize
that what war really is about is people who were too dumb or too honest to
avoid the draft in various countries, generally farmers and laborers,
attempting to kill each other in support of some policy or other. And when I
realized that, I immediately said, “I don’t want to kill a bunch of poor
farmers. I may not like my neighbors, but I don’t dislike them that much. It’s
just poor farmers of various sorts in all different countries getting together
to kill each other. If I’m going to kill
anybody, I wanted to kill the bastards who started the mess and I had some idea
of who those were on all sides.”
In other words, I don’t want to be a soldier, but I don’t
rule out being an assassin. And so I
lived for quite a while thinking that being an assassin would be really A-Ok
and probably actually a pretty good life, drawing up my own better-dead
list. And then at some point, that whole
business just repelled me, the whole idea of taking it upon oneself to decide
not just that one should kill, but that this particular person ought to die. Out
of that revulsion, I sort of ping-ponged ball back to being a sort of pacifist,
this week anyway.
I think I have an allergy to finishing a PhD. I’m not quite sure
why that is. There is lot of neurosis there, I could furnish a yacht for a good
psychiatrist sorting that stuff all out.
The only honorable thing I can find in it is that I never want to lose
track of what I care about, in some sort of fit of buckling down. I’ve watched that happen, and I’ve seen that described
by very good scholars: Gregory Vlastos in his last book, his very late book on
the Socratic ironist. I’m very scared of
tying things up in a knot, tying things up in such a neat package so that
somehow I can’t get at what it was that made me work on this stuff to begin
with. And whenever I get close to tying
it up that way, I bounce back.
Nevertheless I think I’m probably destined to have a PhD as I have no
manual skills and at some point I might get hungry.
I’ve got to say a few words about the fact that I’m
Catholic, and you folks by and large are Quaker. And how it is that I stay Catholic
and you stay Quaker and I don’t think I’m going to become Quaker and you sure
as heck aren’t going to become Catholic.
Point 1 - I don’t think I could ever imagine joining the Catholic church. First of all I can’t imagine not being
Catholic, which is the first thing you have to imagine to imagine: being
Presbyterian or Unitarian or Isaac Asimov or somebody and then coming to say
“Gee Catholicism is wonderful”. Somehow
I can’t imagine doing that, and that probably fortunately for me wasn’t the
situation I was born into. And so the
issue would be leaving, and I expect for some of you, if you really interrogate
your hearts, you will find that you think that I have and anybody has simply an
obligation to leave.
Here we have an organization that, I think one could
plausibly say, is bad on war, bad on women, bad on sex and quite bad on
intellectual freedom. Now if you take
the long view, as Catholics are wont to, the 2000 year view, you want to say
that if Europe’s confrontation with these matters had been left to the Marcus
Aurelius Roman types, and the Vikings and the Druids, Europe would probably be
lots worse on war, worse on women, worse on sex, and intellectual freedom
wouldn’t even have come up as an idea, but nevertheless the current pope and
the kinds of things that come out of the Vatican sometimes make outsiders and
insiders sometimes think that membership in the church is rather similar to
membership in the American Nazi party.
It’s the sort of thing that, if you find yourself in it, that you should
take yourself out of it.
I have a few things to say about this and some of this is at
least rather controversial if not unpleasant.
The church is an immensity. One
of the things that I think keeps me out of Quakers is that at some very fundamental
level I reject the teaching about simplicity.
I really think that’s it very important to have a basement full of
useless things that you might need someday.
And the church is the largest basement full of useless things that
humanity might need someday in the entire cosmos, to my knowledge. It’s
gargantuan. And whatever may come out of
Rome is the tiniest fraction of one percent of what’s there. I’m Catholic for the same reason that I chose
the broadest possible major in college: you never know what you might want to commit
to someday. You never know what you might need.
I find also that Catholics and Quakers have a great deal in
common in a sort of odd way. They have
something in common that is not what at least a lot of Protestants
believe. Catholics and Quakers both
believe that there is something quite spooky at the heart of things. They are circling spookiness. That’s why you have at the center of the Mass,
you have the transubstantiation, this celestial magic trick, which nobody can
make any sense of and nobody can leave out.
And at the heart of the meeting you have the silence and light, and they
are just the same thing. They’re like
black holes. They’re like the name of God. They’re like the exit sign. OK, you understand exit, this is the way out
of the mess I do not want to stay in. This is the name of god.
I think the Catholics are anthropologically right. I think it is very very valuable to have an
inventory, a mnemonic, a memory house for all the things that are important in
life. And that’s what the Mass is. It’s a weekly reminder of all the things you
ought to care about, that you ought to think about, that you ought to worry
about. And the Catholic Church year is a
yearly reminder in the same fashion. You leave that and you’re thrown back on
your own resources. It’s not a bad
thing, but not everybody can do it. You
can go real crazy if you get fixed ideas, if you begin obsessing on this or
that or the other piece of the puzzle. And one of the things that Catholicism
represents is fundamentally sanity. That
is: fundamentally you always do the whole damn inventory every Sunday.
I also want to say that I think Quakers need to be careful
of a couple of things. Here I’m talking
to my betters, but I realize that. I
think they have to be careful of thinking of their institution as
uncompromised, whereas Catholics are of course deeply compromised and so are
lots of other people. I’m afraid you’re
not. I mean, the biggest problem I see
with Quakers , the thing I think they really need to wrestle with, is their
involvement with the magistrates. I think that’s a terrible problem. And if
Clinton manages to redescribe the US army as a police force, you’re going to
have a dickens of a time maintaining conscientious objection as a Quaker
teaching. There isn’t as much difference as one might want to think between the
police and military.
I remember how it struck me one day when I saw my home was broken into. I called the police
because I wasn’t sure if the robbers were still there, and I saw people
entering my house with drawn guns. I
wouldn’t have entered my house with a drawn gun to chase somebody out, but I
found myself quite glad they were. And I
think that’s a problem. I’m not saying
that’s a reason to give up anything; I’m just saying that’s an incredible moral
tension. And it stretches not just to involvement with the police but to
involvement with the entire legal system, which puts incredible obstacles it
seems to me against any absolute commitment to straight speaking. Also, of course, the involvement with the
American prison system, which Quakers to some extent invented, or helped to
invent. It’s a real difficulty. It’s
just to say that any institution that’s been around for more than five years
runs into moral tensions and moral compromises. When an institution has been
around for 2000 years, it’s picked up a lot of them, but I think Friends have
picked up some.
I also want to warn you about the attic business. Let me just give you one example of what I’m
worried about. I think that Friends are
implicitly iconoclastic, although it’s not really clearly in front of your minds. That is, I think that images will never be a
very big part of this meeting house.
There are dippy little attempts here and there. But there isn’t anything
serious as an image here, and I don’t think there will be. That’s fine for some psycho-physical types
and rather dangerous for others. Because
I think that a good bit of the real thinking that has been done about the human
beings’ relationship to God has been done in the context of the visual arts
tradition of Western Europe, the accessible tradition. I’m sure there are Buddhist traditions that
are somewhat less accessible. But the
visual art tradition of Western Europe is full of stuff we need, and especially
it’s full of stuff that some of your kids need. I think it’s very important to
realize that the attic has to belong to you, whether or not you want to be
Catholic, the attic of western religious culture has to be accessible to
Quakers or some of your kids are going to be in trouble. Some kids aren’t of
the right type to connect to as spare and uncompromising and abstract a
religious view as Friends is. So my
warning.
Again, I’m very very fond of Friends. I’m very fond. I find the Catholic Mass runs far too fast
for me with far too little time to concentrate and I end up far too conscious
of the pimple on the priest’s nose. Meeting is immensely more powerful and
sometimes also more dangerous. I think I’ll
remain, I may, ask me again when my father dies, I may end up, I may move, but
at present I think I am at the edge of this wonderful place.
I have to finish on a bad note just because it’s the last
piece of my thing. I think what I have
to say wouldn’t be complete without saying something about my politics. I think
people are interested in politics and some people think that politics is sort
of religion.
I’m afraid I’m kind of desperate about that. I’ve studied the math on the doubling rate of
the population. By 3770, I think, at the rate of population growth we are
currently at, the human flesh on this planet will equal the mass of the
planet. About 3000 years later, it will
equal the mass of the universe. This
can’t continue. And I don’t think the message, any message, that would slow it
down is going to get to anybody fast enough.
Barbara Ward is Pollyanna: the
rich nations and the poor nations. You
can’t be hopeful about Barbara Ward unless you assume that information travels
very much faster than it in fact travels.
So on natural assumptions I think a lot of projects that people invest a
lot of their lives in amount to saving one group of people at the eventual
expense of another group of people. I
don’t have contempt for that for a moment, I think it’s terribly important to vote
on the side of life, but I see it as a rather symbolic matter in a lot of
cases.
Two things to gain from this, again I renew my commitment to
the spooky, to the supernatural. On
natural assumptions there is no hope for most of the things, political projects
we are undertaking. Unless common sense
is wrong, things are going to get very very very bad. I just hope it’s wrong, and I keep pushing to
try to get people to hope it’s wrong.
That’s most of what I do in class, is to try to get people to say things
they didn’t expect to say, and to think things they didn’t expect to
think. Because the only way we can get out of the political
messes we are in is to press some of the boundaries of common sense. I’m also inclined to think that one of the
things we need to look at carefully as politically thinkers is autocratic
government. I think we need to look at
models of autocratic government that are controllable, because I think that as
life gets more complicated on this planet, participatory stuff is not going to
be possible. These are thoughts I wish I
didn’t have, and if anybody can talk me out of them, I would be very happy. For
most of the things, I’ve kind of come to a point where I very much wish
somebody could talk me out of them. But for what it’s worth, it’s what I think.
I think, in closing, there is a kind of power in a certain
sort of modesty if one can hold onto it.
If one goes over the fairly simple things one thinks, slowly try to see
what they mean, if one tries to believe the things that one knows for certain
are true, if one tries to do the obvious things, if one tries to keep one’s
hands off those levers, those machines that multiply force beyond one’s sense
of where it goes. The great temptation with modern people is to get involved
with either bureaucratic levers or technological levers, which are sort of the
equivalent of shooting an arrow into the air with your eyes closed. If you can stop doing that as much as
possible, if you can watch to make sure you know something about where your
actions are going when you set them off,
and if you do the obvious things, you’ll find that there is quite enough
to do. If you think the obvious things,
there’s quite enough to think. I don’t think almost nothing is quite enough. If
Jesus wants to talk to me, I suppose I’m willing to listen, although I probably
will finally get myself to a psychoanalyst the day after. But one can live with almost nothing. That’s what I have to say.
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