Letter to a young secularist (pace Rilke)

More specifically, Letter to a young secularist (raised in and having rejected radical Christian Evangelism) having a depression/existential crisis:
______________

> Everything is okay for the most part. I'm just terribly unhappy,
> to the point where I've lost motivation for everything. Maybe
> I'm just having an existential crisis. Maybe I need Jesus. ;-)

Dear X:

For what it's worth, here's my take on depression/misery and its causes. Since you mentioned existential crises, I focus maninly on (3). (3) is also, ultimately, the bottom line.

1. Depression caused by external stressors. A chronic single or a couple of simultaneous big misfortunes overwhelm someone's normal emotional resources. If there's a chronic stressor, it's important to end it. May often require meds to break the cycle and get back to (3). See below.

2. Purely physiological. May very well require meds and therapy to break and resume (3).

3. Normal. Happiness isn't a given. It's not a default setting. Unfortunately. It's necessary to construct structures in one's life -- goals, activities, call 'em myths if you like -- and to work on them in order to give oneself a sense of accomplishment, progress, meaning. That's the primary engine of day-to-day happiness. Triage measures -- meds and therapy -- don't and can't replace that meaning-structure / happiness-engine; they're designed merely to free up a person so that they can get out of bed and back to the business of creating those goals/activities and plugging away at them.

(3) is precisely what "Jesus" -- religion -- is: a created structure of goals, activities and rewards. The reason that religion is a popular meaning-structure/happiness-engine is that so much of it is arbitrary: effortless actions (speaking magic spells) can produce infinite rewards (eternal bliss). (3) is also easier for religionists because religion is a widely- and strongly-enforced myth structure. Crises of faith are strongly discouraged. It's very easy to go from day to day with utter certainty that the religious meaning-structure you're committed to and working on is Right, not just a hamster wheel: everyone around you is utterly insistent that it's so.

(3) is more difficult for secularists. You've seen through the Big Meaning-Structure, i.e. that it's just a hamster wheel, just a tool for generating self-satisfaction somewhat arbitrarily. That calls all other meaning-structures into question. Help others? Do good work? Write or paint? Teach? Make friends? Influence people? Why? Aren't they all just hamster wheels? To a scary extent, yes -- and voila, that realization is what we call an "existential crisis." If a secularist wants to be happy, he has to "re-enchant" himself. He picks a structure (goal/activity) that he sort-of believes might be worthwhile, and that he has at least some interest in and capacity to do, and he persuades himself, like the religionist does, that it really is worthwhile. And it's not pure delusion: it's worthwhile to be happy. It's perfectly fine to answer, when asked "Why do you do X?" that "You've got to do SOMETHING." Of course, the more you can persuade yourself that X has value, the easier it is to do it.

(3) is the most difficult for FORMER religionists. Growing up in a religious environment is like being conditioned to live on pure sugar: the meaning-structure requires minimal input for maximal reward and is universally acclaimed as True. Self-enchantment for former religionists is difficult: non-religious meaning-structures a) require harder work-input, b) offer less fabulous reward-outputs, and c) are far less universally acclaimed. It's an obstacle, but it's soluble; you have to a) lower your expectations and b) make an additional effort to form a little mini-religion, as it were, around yourself: a religion of fellow artists, fellow teachers, fellow writers, fellow freaks, fellow gamers, fellow serial killers, whatever the hell your meaning-structure is.

"To be is to do." Sartre. If true, then non-doing = non-being, and non-being doesn't sound like it'd feel very nice. So all the above boiled down to a one-word injunction, would be: "Do."

There's an important flip-side. The above is all, obviously, totally un-Zen. If Zen were reduced to a one-word injunction, it'd be "Don't": don't strive, don't desire, don't self-enchant, don't do anything at all. But this is just a tool of Zen -- what you do in brief periods of meditation -- not the goal of Zen. The tool is designed to clear your mind of everything customary and habitual, of all the crap you've been TOLD to want. With a mind cleared of other people's crap, it's easier to sense what YOU actually enjoy, value, want to do. Then you get up from your meditation and go out and do it. That's the goal of Zen. Zen is really just a programmatic method of disenchanting yourself from crap and re-enchanting yourself with something better and more reliable. There's a wonderful little book called "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" by Shunryu Suzuki that's available everywhere. Suzuki was the cat who brought Zen the US in the early 20c. Check it out. Also, if you don't have Kahlil Gibran's little book "The Prophet," get it. Two little books that are worth as much as a truckload of Wellbutrin.

Spengler, Obama, dissent and distribution.

Re: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JB26Aa01.html


What an excellent essay.  Extremely well-written.  And a very interesting fellow, this Spengler:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spengler_%28Columnist%29

I'm not surprised that journalists are turning to Obama's familial background to try to get some insight into his character.  Spengler's right: we hardly know the guy.

I loved Spengler's acidic characterization of anthropologists as "the curators of soon-to-be-extinct cultures," and of how Bush "squandered a great strategic advantage in a sorry lampoon of nation-building in the Muslim world."

But I take exception to one of the fundamental premises of his argument: that the sort of dissent he attributes to Obama (via his mother and wife) equals "hatred of America" or presages “handouts.”  Neither equation is necessarily the case. 

Dissenters usually see themselves as patriots, not traitors.  This isn’t an unreasonable assumption on their part.  One needn’t make any unweidldy value-judgements about whether a culture’s headed in a “good” or “bad” direction at a given time in order to characterize its dissenters as more patriotic than treacherous; one must merely assume that mainstream thought -- received wisdom -- usually deserves critique and can stand improvement.  A reasonable assumption.  And if true, dissenting critique might be wise or foolish, but its motivations are constructive.  And if we WERE to venture into “unweildy value-judgements,” there are a lot of very bright and patriotic folks today, of both political persuasions, who make cogent arguments that America has drifted alarmingly far from its founding principles.

As for handouts, Spengler oversimplifies.  The sort of dissent he alludes to is socialist, ergo obviously top-down redistributive.  What’s NOT obvious is whether that sort top-down redistribution is more expensive, or is worse for the economy, than the sort of bottom-up redistribution we’ve seen a resurgence of since 1980.  Again, one needn’t come down on either side of the (eternal?) debate between supply- and demand-siders; but one SHOULD acknowledge that it’s not cut-and-dried, and that both sides can legitimately critique each other’s (re)distribution policy.

There’s a deeper premise lurking behind Spengler’s position: the fool’s errand of libertarianism.  All societies redistribute.  The very nature of social living -- mere law -- IS distributive.  What constitutes “fair” social interaction isn’t given; it’s precisely what law (social agreement) stipulates.  Every society -- every group living impacting each other -- has to muddle through who gets what of how much there is to go around.  Some societies choose to distribute wealth narrowly, others widely -- but it’s all (re)distribution, and its nature is according to values that we choose, not values that alight on us from an alien planet.