You've Got Problems

Forgiveness, part 1

You’ve got problems. I kinda know what some of them are. Others, I have no idea of. But even if you’re someone here today who I’ve never met, I know you’ve got problems. We all do. And here you are at Community Unitarian Universalist Congregation. At CUUC, we have small groups; we have worship services. Perhaps you're thinking we can help with those problems -- give you some tools for getting through your week; help you be the person you really want to be. Or maybe, what you’d really like is confirmation that you’re just fine and your problems all stem from the evil or stupidity of other people. (A lot of people are in houses of worship this weekend – as any weekend – expecting confirmation that they are right and it’s “those others” who are wrong and are the problem. I understand. We all like a little confirmation. I’m not immune to that myself.)

In any case, you’ve got problems. And maybe forgiveness is one of them. Or maybe forgiveness is a whole bunch of them, because there are a lot of different issues that all fit under the general heading, forgiveness. In no particular order:

1. Someone wronged you, and you resent it. You carry a righteous grudge, whether they apologized or not.
2. Someone wronged you, and they apologized and you said you forgave them, but your heart didn’t really forgive them. You’re conflicted: part of you wants to let go of the grudge, but part of you is holding on to it.
3. Someone wronged you, but they won’t apologize. You could forgive them could just acknowledge that they hurt you, but they won’t acknowledge it, so you can’t.
4. You wronged someone, or they think you did, and they have a grudge against you. You’re mad at them for being mad at you, which makes it impossible for you to have any interest in apologizing, so you’re stuck.
5. You wronged someone, and you’ve apologized but they haven’t forgiven you, and you feel miserable not being in their good graces.
6. You and another person had a falling out – in the course of which you have both done some hurtful, regrettable things, and you want to repair the relationship, but you don’t know where to start, or how.
7. Same falling out as before, but you’ve decided you don’t want to repair the relationship. You regard the relationship as ended. You want to have nothing further to do with that other person. Yet, despite your protestations to the contrary, you’re feeling that something’s missing from your life without that person.
8. You wronged someone, and it took you a while to fully realize it, and now you want forgiveness, but they aren’t available. They’ve died, or moved away and you have no idea where.
9. Someone wronged you, and you’d like to forgive them, but they’ve died or are otherwise unavailable.
10. You did something wrong, and the affected parties have sincerely forgiven you, but you’re having a hard time forgiving yourself. You keep beating yourself up, harshly judging yourself, because of the error.

I’ll stop there. I’m sure those aren’t all the problems that we confront under the category of forgiveness. We could probably keep going until we got to 83, but you get the idea. This forgiveness thing is the name for a host of different problems. If those aren’t your problems, you have had them, or you will.

If you’re here so I can tell you something to make those problems go away, I can’t help you. If you wanted to hear that the problem is all other people, I can’t help you with that either. At least, not until we first acknowledge the 84th problem.

You see, there’s a parable from the Buddhist tradition – I think I’ve mentioned it once before -- that Gautama – the Buddha – in his travels through India was visited by a farmer, who said, “I attended your public talk. It was beautiful; I was moved. Please help me with my problems.” And the farmer started listing his problems: some of his cows got diseases; the grain market wasn’t consistent; fertilizer prices kept going up; his spouse was sometimes contrary; his children wouldn’t do what he told them; the neighbor’s dog was harassing his chickens.

Finally, the Buddha interrupted him and said, “You have 83 problems.”

This gave the farmer pause, and he said, “I hadn’t counted them, but that sounds about right.”

The Buddha said, “I can’t help you with any of them.”

The farmer was incredulous and angry. You’re this great, renowned spiritual teacher, and you can’t help me with any of my problems? What good are you?”

Buddha said, “You will always have 83 problems. Sometimes you can solve one of them, or it goes away by itself, but another one comes along to replace it. Always 83. However, perhaps I can help with the 84th problem.”

The farmer said, “What’s the 84th problem?”

The Buddha said, “You think you should have no problems.”

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Forgiveness"
See also
Part 2: Problems We Were Made For
Part 3: Problems Are the Path
A four-part series on Forgiveness from 2014, begins HERE

Tragedy In the Context of Beauty. Or Maybe Vice-Versa.

Poetry Celebration: Ferlinghetti, part 3

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem, “Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes” describes four people – two garbage collectors and an elegant couple -- stuck at traffic lights in downtown San Francisco. The contrast between the two pairs, the class divide, bridged and yet not bridged by the circumstance of a traffic light, is a critique of American classism.

At the stoplight waiting for the light
nine a.m. downtown San Francisco
a bright yellow garbage truck
with two garbagemen in red plastic blazers
standing on the back stoop
one on each side hanging on
and looking down into
an elegant open Mercedes
with an elegant couple in it
The man
in a hip three-piece linen suit
with shoulder-length blond hair and sunglassed
The young blond woman so casually coifed
with short skirt and coloured stockings
on the way to his architect's office

And the two scavengers up since four a.m.
grungy from their route
on the way home
The older of the two with grey iron hair
and hunched back
looking down like some
gargoyle Quasimodo
And the younger of the two
also with sunglasses and long hair
about the same age as the Mercedes driver

And both scavengers gazing down
as from a great distance
at the cool couple
as if they were watching some odourless TV ad
in which everything is always possible

And the very red light for an instant
holding all four close together
as if anything at all were possible
between them
across that small gulf
in the high sea
of this democracy.

“As if anything at all were possible” he writes, with a kind of meta-irony. It's ironic, because he's exposing that the appearance of the possibility of equality and democracy is not the reality. And at the same time it's unironic, achingly sincere: for the closeness with which are held is the reality, and it's the gulfs between us that are small, and merely apparent. Ferlinghetti thus calls us to a politics in which we notice that equality and democracy aren't real -- and yet are. Our aspiration must be to better live out, live into, live from, the reality of connection, care, respect, mutuality, oneness that we vitiate by ignoring. We are like fish who deny or fail to notice that we are submerged in water -- giving our lives a kind of dryness even as, in reality, we are soaked through.

Other of Ferlinghetti poems engage with paintings. Ferlinghetti himself is a painter, and his painting gives visual expression to his words. In turn, his poems sometimes give verbal expression to a painting, and he shows us a new way to see a well known art work. “Short Story on a Painting of Gustav Klimt” is Ferlinghetti’s meditation on “The Kiss.”

They are kneeling upright on a flowered bed
He
has just caught her there
and holds her still
Her gown
has slipped down
off her shoulder
He has an urgent hunger
His dark head
bends to hers
hungrily
And the woman the woman
turns her tangerine lips from his
one hand like the head of a dead swan
draped down over
his heavy neck
the fingers
strangely crimped
tightly together
her other arm doubled up
against her tight breast
her hand a languid claw
clutching his hand
which would turn her mouth
to his
her long dress made
of multicolored blossoms
quilted on gold
her Titian hair
with blues stars in it
And his gold
harlequin robe
checkered with
dark squares
Gold garlands
stream down over
her bare calves &
tensed feet
Nearby there must be
a jeweled tree
with glass leaves aglitter
in the gold air
It must be
morning
in a faraway place somewhere
They
are slient together
as in a flowered field
upon the summer couch
which must be hers
And he holds her still
so passionately
holds her head to his
so gently so insistently
to make her turn
her lips to his
Her eyes are closed
like folded petals
She
will not open
He
is not the One

Politically, socially, personally, and in all aspects of life, we find ourselves living amidst both beauty and tragedy – constant joy and constant sorrow. This is the fundamental condition to which both preachers and poets are always speaking, so it is that theme to which I return.

Unitarian minister Forest Church spoke of the twin realities of being alive and having to die. The tragic parts seem divided between those that are unavoidable -- old age, sickness, death – and the parts that leave us wondering whether maybe we could do better. The serenity prayer asks for the serenity to accept what I cannot change, the courage to change what I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. But it’s that “wisdom to know the difference” part that is so elusive. We never know. Ferlinghetti seems to be simultaneously calling for change and accepting our shortcoming as “the constipations that our fool flesh is heir to” – while also at the same time celebrating the beauty and joy of life in a way that is simultaneously earnest and ironic.

Benediction: "The World Is a Beautiful Place," by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don't sing
all the time

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn't half bad
if it isn't you

Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't much mind
a few dead minds
in the higher places
or a bomb or two
now and then
in your upturned faces
or such other improprieties
as our Name Brand society
is prey to
with its men of distinction
and its men of extinction
and its priests
and other patrolmen

and its various segregations
and congressional investigations
and other constipations
that our fool flesh
is heir to

Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
and singing low songs and having inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
and even thinking
and kissing people and
making babies and wearing pants
and waving hats and
dancing
and going swimming in rivers
on picnics
in the middle of the summer
and just generally
'living it up'
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling

mortician

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Poetry Celebration: Ferlinghetti"
See also
Part 1: Some Ferlinghetti
Part 2: Ferlinghetti and the Good of Poetry

Ferlinghetti and the Good of Poetry

Poetry Celebration: Ferlinghetti, part 2

The news has a crazy addictive attraction. I'm not talking so much about the storm and flood news about Harvey or Irma. I'm mostly talking about the news from D.C. about our elected leaders, and from wherever there are demonstrations about which said leaders may be commenting. I get fixated on knowing details of each fresh craziness. Much of the news this year has been both funny and deeply concerning at the same time. And many days I am scanning several times a day for the latest take on what’s happening -- torn between the impulse to giggle and the impulse to rage.

I have a jones on to know what’s going on, to make it all make sense, even if the sense it makes is that our species is incapable of making sense. I amass the bits of articles and videos hoping they will help me get a handle on what I’m supposed to do, hoping they will provide a clue about where all this is headed.

Are we as a people going to learn something, swing back the other way? Are we seeing the reactive death throes of white supremacy, patriarchy, etc. -- one last gasp before we as a people finally settle into the reality that black lives do matter, immigrant lives matter, women’s experience and wisdom matter, science and facts and telling the truth matter, ecosystems and species diversity and climate change matter? Or is this instead the beginning of the descent, the first steps down the road to a barren and vicious Mad Max dystopia?

Where is human civilization headed? The question keeps me fascinated by the news feed. But whatever the answer is, my job is the same: to love and be present to each moment as it presents. Lawrence Ferlinghetti said, “All I ever wanted to do is paint light on the walls of life.” That’s my job – maybe yours, too. Paint light on the walls of life. And consuming column-inches about what some elected official or other has gone and said now really doesn’t help me do that.

But poetry does help. And by "poetry," I mean engaging in each of four activities:

• Read poetry to yourself. Find favorite poets. Take looks at unfamiliar ones. Read one or several poems every day.
• Speak poems. Reading or recite them aloud to others, giving yourself the chance to savor the oral qualities, notice the interpretation that your own voice gives them, and notice the reactions of your listeners.
• Listen to poetry read aloud. Attend poetry readings, or, if that's really un-fun for you, then have a partner or friend occasionally read a poem to you at home -- or, heck, just listen to a recording (youtube has lots). Poems are meant to be heard -- at least every once in a while -- as well as seen.
• Write poetry. Yes, write poems -- yes, you. They don't have to be publishable; they don't have to be "good;" they just have to be your sincere effort at getting at something real or vital with words on paper. Most of them can be purely private, without another human ever laying eyes on them, although it's a good idea every once in a while to share one with another human being.

William Carlos Williams wrote 60 years ago:

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

Poetry, said Ferlinghetti, should be dissident, subversive, an agent for change. He wrote:

Every great poem fulfills a longing and puts life back together.
Every bird a word, and every word a bird, and birdsong is not made by machines.
Poetry breaks the brass wall between races.
Poetry is the distillation of articulate animals calling to each other across a great gulf.
It is worth nothing and therefore invaluable.
The idea of poetry as an arm of class war
Disturbs the sleep of those who do not wish to be disturbed in their pursuit of happiness.
The natural-born nonviolent enemy of the state
It is the ultimate resistance.
It is the voice within the voice of the turtle
It is the face behind the face of the race.
It is the voice of the Fourth-person singular
Poetry: the last lighthouse in rising seas.

In another work, Ferlinghetti calls on us to take up arms by taking up pens:

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.
If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.
You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain,
you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay,
you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini,
you are an American or a non-American,
you can conquer the conquerors with words.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti -- poet, painter, publisher, activist – was born here in Westchester – in Yonkers. His father died six months before he was born. His mother was committed to an asylum shortly after he was born. He was taken in by an aunt – actually his mother’s uncle’s former wife – who took him to France for his first five years. Returning to the US, this aunt surrendered the boy to an orphanage in Chappaqua, where he stayed for two years until taken in by a wealthy family in Bronxville. He went to Bronxville public schools. Became an Eagle Boy Scout.

During World War II, he served in the Navy. He later explained: “It’s what everyone did. I’d never heard of conscientious objection.”

He saw the devastation of the nuclear bomb in Nagasaki. Six weeks or so after that bomb, Ferlinghetti was part a detail that walked through the destruction where he saw the bones amidst the rubble. “It made me an instant pacifist,” he said, and he’s remained one ever since.

After the war, he went to Columbia University, studied literature and particularly loved Shakespeare, Marlowe, the Romantic poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Joyce, Whitman, Eliot, Pound, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, and novelists Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos. Then he went to Paris, and got a doctorate at the Sorbonne. Got married, and the two of them settled in San Francisco.

In 1953, Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin founded City Lights bookstore, the first bookstore in the country to sell only paperback books: He wanted literature to be cheap and available to everyone. Two years later, Ferlinghetti, now the sole owner of City Lights, launched the publishing wing of the enterprise. The first book he published was his own first book of poems, Pictures of the Gone World.

Ferlinghetti is often classed as one of the West Coast Beats, along with Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, and Phillip Whalen, in distinction to the East Coast Beats, Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs, but Ferlinghetti denies that he is a Beat writer. It’s true that he wasn’t much like a Beatnik: he was married, a war veteran, had graduate degrees, had a day job running a bookstore and publishing house, was not part of the On the Road life Kerouac and others wrote about.

What he did do is publish the Beat writers, gave them a platform, and his publishing allowed them to become known as a movement. The Los Angeles Times called Ferlinghetti, “The man without whom the Beat Generation might never have found its voice.” In style and theme, Ferlinghetti’s work is certainly quite different from what united Ginsberg and Kerouac, but every Beat writer was different, and Beat writing is not defined by any one style and theme.

Reasons for including Ferlinghetti among the Beat writers include: he shares the populist, democratic, Bohemian spirit of the Beatniks – the rejection of the stiff, stultifying conformity of the 1950s, the subversive impulse, the social critique that’s more implicit than explicit, and conveyed through irony, the questioning of authority. He wrote:

‘Truth is not the secret of a few’
Yet
you would maybe think so
the way some
librarians
and cultural ambassadors and
especially museum directors
act

you'd think they had a corner
on it
the way they
walk around shaking
their high heads and
looking as if they never
went to the bath
room or anything

But I wouldn't blame them
if I were you
They say the Spiritual is best conceived
in abstract terms
and then too
walking around in museums always makes me
want to
'sit down'
I always feel so
constipated
in those
high altitudes

Ferlinghetti also shares the Beat writers sense that poetry is an oral medium, meant to be read aloud, shared among real-live physically-gathered listeners, not merely ink on a page in an academic library. And the connection with jazz music. Ferlinghetti gave hundreds of poetry readings in the 1950s and 60s, reading counter-cultural poems to the accompaniment of jazz music – often, I might add, while wearing a beret. You can't get much more Beat than that.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Poetry Celebration: Lawrence Ferlinghetti"
See also
Part 1: Some Ferlinghetti
Part 3: Tragedy In the Context of Beauty. Or Maybe Vice-Versa.

Some Ferlinghetti

Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, read at the Sunday service on Aug 27.

I Am Waiting

I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Second Coming
and I am waiting
for a religious revival
to sweep thru the state of Arizona
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am seriously waiting
for Billy Graham and Elvis Presley
to exchange roles seriously
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped onto church altars
if only they can find
the right channel
to tune in on
and I am waiting
for the Last Supper to be served again
with a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting for the living end
and I am waiting for Dad to come home
his pockets full of irradiated silver dollars
I am waiting
for the atomic tests to end
and I am waiting happily
for things to get much worse
before they improve
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the human crowd
to wander off a cliff somewhere
clutching its atomic umbrella
and I am waiting
for Ike to act
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed
and I am anxiously waiting
for the secret of eternal life to be discovered
by an obscure general practitioner
and save me forever from certain death
and I am waiting
for life to begin
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting
to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and tv rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am waiting for old man river
to just stop rolling along
past the country club
and I am waiting
for the deepest south
to just stop reconstructing itself
in its own image
and I am waiting for god to look out
from lookout mountain
and see the ode to the confederate dead
as a real farce
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did
to Tom Sawyer
I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting
for Tom Swift to grow up
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch up to each other at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

A Coney Island of the Mind #17: This Life Is Not a Circus

This life is not a circus where
the shy performing dogs of love
look on
as time flicks out
its tricky whip
to race us thru our paces
Yet gay parading floats drift by
decorated with gorgeous gussies in silk tights
and attended by moithering monkeys
make-believe monks
horny hiawathas
and baboon astride tame tigers
with ladies inside
while googly horns make merrygoround music
and pantomimic pierrots castrate disaster
with strange sad laughter
and gory gorillas toss tender maidens heavenward
while cakewalkers and carnie hustlers
all gassed to the gills
strike playbill poses
and stagger after every
wheeling thing
While still around the ring
lope the misshapen camels of lust
and all us Emmett Kelly clowns
always making up imaginary scenes
with all our masks for faces
even eat fake Last Suppers
at collapsible tables
and mocking cross ourselves
in sawdust crosses

And yet gobble up at last
to shrive our circus souls
the also imaginary
wafers of grace

A Coney Island of the Mind #5: Sometime During Eternity

Sometime during eternity
some guys show up
and one of them
who shows up real late
is a kind of carpenter
from some square-type place
like Galilee
and he starts wailing
and claiming he is hip
to who made heaven
and earth
and that the cat
who really laid it on us
is his Dad

And moreover
he adds
It’s all writ down
on some scroll-type parchments
which some henchmen
leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres
a long time ago
and which you won’t even find
for a coupla thousand years or so
or at least for
nineteen hundred and fortyseven
of them
to be exact
and even then
nobody really believes them
or me
for that matter
You’re hot
they tell him

And they cool him

They stretch him on the Tree to cool
And everybody after that
is always making models
of this Tree
with Him hung up
and always crooning His name
and calling Him to come down
and sit in
on their combo
as if he is the king cat
who’s got to blow
or they can’t quite make it

Only he don’t come down
from His Tree

Him just hang there
on His Tree
looking real Petered out
and real cool
and also
according to a roundup
of late world news
from the usual unreliable sources
real dead

A Coney Island of the Mind #15: Constantly Risking Absurdity

Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of day
performing entrechats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be

For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap

And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence

Dog

The dog trots freely in the street
and sees reality
and the things he sees
are bigger than himself
and the things he sees
are his reality
Drunks in doorways
Moons on trees
The dog trots freely thru the street
and the things he sees
are smaller than himself
Fish on newsprint
Ants in holes
Chickens in Chinatown windows
their heads a block away
The dog trots freely in the street
and the things he smells
smell something like himself
The dog trots freely in the street
past puddles and babies
cats and cigars
poolrooms and policemen
He doesn’t hate cops
He merely has no use for them
and he goes past them
and past the dead cows hung up whole
in front of the San Francisco Meat Market
He would rather eat a tender cow
than a tough policeman
though either might do
And he goes past the Romeo Ravioli Factory
and past Coit’s Tower
and past Congressman Doyle
of the unamerican committee
He’s afraid of Coit’s Tower
but he’s not afraid of Congressman Doyle
although what he hears is very discouraging
very depressing
very absurd
to a sad young dog like himself
to a serious dog like himself
But he has his own free world to live in
His own fleas to eat
He will not be muzzled
Congressman Doyle is just another
fire hydrant
to him
The dog trots freely in the street
and has his own dog’s life to live
and to think about
and to reflect upon
touching and tasting and testing everything
investigating everything
without benefit of perjury
a real realist
with a real tale to tell
and a real tail to tell it with
a real live
barking
democratic dog
engaged in real
free enterprise
with something to say
about ontology
something to say
about reality
and how to see it
and how to hear it
with his head cocked sideways
at streetcorners
as if he is just about to have
his picture taken
for Victor Records
listening for
His Master’s Voice
and looking
like a living questionmark
into the
great gramaphone
of puzzling existence
with its wondrous hollow horn
which always seems
just about to spout forth
some Victorious answer
to everything

A Coney Island of the Mind #9: See It Was Like This When

See
it was like this when
we waltz into this place.
A couple of rakish cats
is doing an Aztec two-step

And I says
Dad let's cut
but then this dame
comes up behind me see
and says
you and me could really exist

Wow I says
Only the next day
she has bad teeth
and really hates
poetry.

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Poetry Celebration: Lawrence Ferlinghetti"
See also
Part 2: Ferlinghetti and the Good of Poetry
Part 3: Tragedy In the Context of Beauty. Or Maybe Vice-Versa.

Reason's Role

Moral Psychology, part 3

Our moral intuitions and emotions are vital -- we can barely function without them. They, more than our rationality, provide us with the basic sense of right and wrong we draw upon at dozens, if not hundreds, of decision points every day. Important as they are, they are limited and sometimes wrong. One problem is that these feelings are highly resistant to reason. Thought experiments like the trolley conundrum illustrate that a feeling of the wrongness of an action is hard to shake, even for a hypothetical scenario in which you are repeatedly reminded that one of the conditions is that you know that the counter-intuitive action would have the better results.

While reason won't sway moral intuitions much, nonrational factors do so with worrisome ease. In Rob Drummond's show “The Majority,”

“The votes are interspersed with Drummond’s narrative, . . . about how he got involved with the anti-fascism movement and ended up being arrested for punching a white supremacist.” (Sophie Gilbert, Atlantic)

Later, Drummond shares his “disgust with himself for, as he puts it, ‘punching a man for having an opinion.’” He asks again whether it’s okay to abuse someone for something they personally believe, and this time 87.6 percent say no. He has, essentially, converted the audience. And the ease with which he’s done it is, muses Sophie Gilbert,

“yet another unnerving element to bolster his argument — that few of us really know or deeply consider what we’re voting for.”

Our moral decisions -- sometimes even life or death decisions -- aren’t very carefully considered. Studies have revealed:

• People shown a comedy clip, and then asked whether they’d push the large man to his death, were more likely to approve killing the large man than those in another group that was shown a “tedious documentary about a Spanish village.” (Sarah Bakewell, New York Times)
• We are more generous toward a stranger if we have just found a dime.
• A judge’s decision to grant parole depends on how long it has been since he or she had lunch.
• Subjects asked to make judgments about controversial moral questions -- for example, marriage between first cousins or the making of a documentary in which people were tricked into being interviewed -- make harsher moral judgments if they are standing next to a smelly trash can than if they are not. The brain more easily finds behavior morally disgusting if the disgust reaction is already given a little jump start.

Even what feels like a deep-rooted moral instinct can be pretty fickle and easily manipulated. And that has huge consequences.

If moral assessment is so easily manipulated, that means voting behavior is too. What candidates actually say in the course of a campaign has little impact on voters. Most voters just take in the vibe and let their unconscious biases pull them toward trust or distrust. Completely irrelevant factors can shift how a voter feels about the world, and a good feeling about the world benefits the incumbent.

• In areas with a strong college football fan base, it was found that if their team won its most recent game before the November election, the incumbent candidate got a big boost.

The citizenry is not competent to make electoral decisions, as the last election so vividly demonstrates. I’m not saying throw out democracy, because any other form of picking leaders would also be fraught with irrational biases.

In the end, reason is our only hope. It’s slow, and its plodding, and it’s pretty useless for day-to-day moral decision-making, where our emotional habits of right and wrong guide us, and our biases are just consistent enough to lend us an appearance of integrity. In fact, reason often takes generations to successfully call into question an unquestioned moral habit.

Firm moral habits widely held 150 years ago upheld slavery, those of 100 years ago denied women the right to vote, those of 50 years ago denied marriage equality to same-sex couples. Pressing questions that asked for rational justification of these habits gradually shifted them. Are darker skinned humans really so different that enslaving them is reasonable? Why shouldn’t women vote? Why shouldn’t gay people marry and have family lives? Repeatedly pressing such questions eventually pushes human brains to draw on parts other then the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in the quest to articulate defensible reasons.

A question now beginning to be pressed in public discourse is: Why exactly do we still have Confederate monuments?

I’m not keen to question all of our moral shortcuts. I want a life that feels sacredness, even if there is no good reason for it – so I have some empathy for those who find sacredness in a statue of Robert E. Lee. I want a life where at least some of my loyalty can be taken for granted without being subject to a need to rationally justify it. I want a life where I trust authorities, like scientists who tell me about climate change when I can’t make the calculations myself. We need our moral shortcuts. For all their irrationality, fickleness, and manipulability, we’d be uprooted, adrift, and lost without them.

The spiritual lesson of this is, first, humility. What feel like our strongest convictions aren’t so strong in a different set of circumstances, and what seems like ironclad logic is probably an illusion of rationalization. So let us hold our own opinions with humility.

Second, relatedly, let us try to have empathy for those with whom we disagree. Yes, their brains have built-in biases. Our brains were built the same way and are just as biased. Where we have no certain access to truth, let us seek to replace the urge to be right with the call to love.

And let us try – not all the time, but sometimes – to take the time to take the slow road of entertaining hard questions of whether our own most precious moral intuitions really are justified.

And one other thing: maybe visit the Against Malaria Foundation website, and send them a donation. I now have.

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This is part 3 of 3 of "Moral Psychology"
See also
Part 1: Do We Want Our Moral Intuitions to Be Rational?
Part 2: Care, Loyalty, Authority, Fairness, Liberty, and Sacredness

Care, Loyalty, Authority, Fairness, Liberty, and Sacredness

Moral Psychology, part 2

For many people, it just feels wrong to push a person to his death, even if doing so will save five other people, and it doesn't feel wrong to pull a lever to consign one person to death instead of five – even though the results in both cases are the same. But most of us have a hard time articulating a rational basis for that feeling.

The two points I want to make are:

1. Moral intuitions are crucial. We need them. Rationality is too slow and plodding to the do the job alone.
2. Moral intuitions are also problematic: on the one hand, they are stubbornly resistant to evidence that they are misguided, yet on the other hand they can often be easily manipulated to our detriment. Bringing in reason, plodding as it is, can, over the long haul, slowly tend to correct for the limitations of our moral intuitions.

First: our unreasoning feelings are very important for making moral decisions. Our moral intuitions are there to guide us in real-life situations where we don’t have the sort of certainty that the trolley scenario asks us to assume. No matter how much you’re told that you know pulling the lever will save five and kill one person on the side-track forty yards away, and that you know pushing the large man onto the track will likewise save five, the damage of pulling a lever just doesn’t feel as certain as the harm of pushing somebody right next to you off a platform into the trolley’s path. Thus, we can’t help but recoil from the near harm more than from the distant harm – which is also surely a factor in why we haven’t sent $50 to the Against Malaria Foundation: it’s so far away.

Consider what life would be like without the moral emotions. Patients who suffer damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex lose their emotionality.

“They could look at the most joyous or gruesome photographs and feel nothing. They retained full knowledge of what was right and wrong, and they showed no deficits in IQ. They score well on tests of moral reasoning. Yet when it came to making decisions in their personal lives and at work, they made foolish decisions or no decisions at all. They alienated their families and their employers, and their lives fell apart.” (Haidt 39)

You need your gut instincts, your moral intuitions, even if you can’t rationally justify or explain them.

Here’s something reasoning is good for: You need to buy a new washing machine, and you have to choose from among ten options. Assuming you have no brand loyalty, you list your criteria and you do some research on how each machine rates on each of your criteria: price, energy efficiency, water use, load capacity, cleaning efficacy, durability and repair record. You work out some way of balancing strengths in some areas with weaknesses in others, and you make your selection. Now

“imagine what your life would be like if at every moment, in every social situation, picking the right thing to do or say became like picking the best washing machine among ten options, minute after minute, day after day. You’d make foolish decisions, too.” (Haidt 40)

That’s what life is like for people with ventromedial prefrontal cortex damage.

Moral intuitions, tied to our emotional reactivity, give us our shortcuts. Reasoning it all out is just too slow and tedious. We have certain moral circuitry that allows for the quicker judgment we need.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has identified six moral foundations that, he says, have a genetic basis because they helped our ancestors survive, and also require learning and training to take particular shape. The six moral foundations are: care, loyalty, authority, fairness, liberty, and sacredness. In each of these areas, our brains develop shortcuts of moral reactivity that guide us in negotiating the complex moral landscape that we face every day.

Liberals tend to emphasize care. Caring for people is good, harming them is bad. (Cf. Judith Shklar's definition of a liberal as someone for whom cruelty is the worst thing we do.) Conservatives tend to emphasize loyalty and authority. Betrayal and subversion are bad. Conservatives also value caring for people – their children and families; liberals also value certain contexts of loyalty and respecting authorities, like teachers and doctors who can help us. So it’s a matter of emphasis.

Additionally, all of us value fairness and liberty, but these play out in different ways. For liberals, fairness is a matter of extending universal human rights. Everyone deserves education, health care, a chance at a decent living, nondiscrimination – denying these things to anyone is unfair. For conservatives, fairness is a matter of people getting what they deserve: hard-workers deserve their income, criminals deserve their punishment – anything less is unfair. For liberals, fairness is about equality. For conservatives, fairness is about differentiation.

Liberty also plays out differently. Liberals are more attuned to the threats to liberty that come from the oppressive working conditions and labor practices purveyed by corporations, or oppressive policing. Conservatives are more attuned to threats to liberty from oppressive taxes or government regulation, because that violates their fairness foundation – that people deserve what they work for, and ought to be rewarded, not hampered, in doing that work. They are less concerned about oppressive police, because their stronger authority foundation identifies police as necessary authority.

The sixth moral foundation is sacredness. Certain objects are sacred: flags, crosses. Certain places are sacred: Mecca, or a battlefield related to the birth of your nation. Certain people are sacred: saints and heroes. Certain principles are sacred: liberté, egalité, fraternité – or, for Unitarian Universalists, our seven principles. Our bodies are sacred – which is why desecrating (de-sacred-ing) bodies of the dead feels so wrong even if it doesn’t do any objective harm.

The psychology of the sacred – and of the disgusting (the opposite of sacred) – offers a clue toward understanding how one animal, humans, managed to form such large, complex cooperative societies. A shared sense of what is sacred and what is disgusting helps bind individuals into moral communities.

The sacred and the disgusting are a bit more prominent in conservative than in liberal minds. Several studies have shown that conservatives are more easily disgusted than liberals – and that holds in cultures all over the world. Conservatives talk about the sanctity of life, the sanctity of marriage, and of the body, seeing the body as a temple. Liberals are more likely to have the sentiment expressed on this bumper sticker:

Liberals, though, also have a sense of the sacred. Often, it is evoked by nature, which helps energize concern for the environment. Rationally, yes, we pay attention to the science, but it’s hard to keep track of all the factual details about what consequences will result when from what environmental practices. A sense that forests are sacred, that ocean and desert ecosystems are sacred, is a very helpful moral shortcut.

We all value care, loyalty, authority, fairness, liberty, and sacredness. Some of these are in tension: liberty, for instance, is in direct tension with authority; loyalty to your own group can be in tension with care for people outside your group. We balance and prioritize these value foundations in different ways.

We have emotional feelings for these values, and for some of the balances we’ve worked out between them, and that’s a good thing. Without the intuitive, quick-reaction moral feelings -- the feelings lost when the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is damaged -- we only have our plodding rationality, and we can’t function very well.

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This is part 2 of 3 of "Moral Psychology"
See also
Part 1: Do We Want Our Moral Intuitions to Be Rational?
Part 3: Reason's Role

Do We Want Our Moral Intuitions to be Rational?

Moral Psychology, part 1

There’s a one-man show now playing in London, called “The Majority.” The writer and performer, Rob Drummond, asks the audience to vote on a variety of ethical questions. The audience members on the way in are issued an electronic keypad and are invited to vote “yes” or “no” on the series of propositions prompted by the narrative. The tally is instantly displayed. The show itself, or so we are told, can go in different directions depending on how the audience votes.

I haven’t seen the show – because, it’s in London. I read about it in an article by Sophie Gilbert (HERE). The night she was there, when the question was, "Do you believe in absolute freedom of speech?" 61.7 percent said no. "Is violence sometimes the answer?" 51.2 percent no.

Then Drummond presents the Trolley problem, a scenario familiar to me from my years of trying to engage undergraduates to think about morality. Suppose you are standing on a platform and you see below you a runaway trolley headed for five people who have no chance of getting out of the way. They’ll all be killed! However, you just happen to be standing next to a lever which, due to your familiarity with that trolley station, you know will redirect the trolley onto a side track. Just as you reach for the lever, you notice that the side track has one person there who likewise has no chance to get out of the way. If you pull the lever, he’ll be killed. Do you pull the lever to kill one person, or let fate take its course, killing five?

The night Sophie Gilbert attended “The Majority,” 70.9 percent of the audience said they would pull the lever to sidetrack the trolley to kill one person rather than not act and let five people die. Then Rob Drummond asked his audience: suppose there were no lever, but a very large man was standing next to you peering over the edge of the platform. You could push him off, onto the path of the trolley. He’d be killed, but his large body would stop the trolley or slow it enough for the five to get to safety. Morally, isn’t it that the same? Kill one to save five? And yet 71.1 percent said they would not push the large man off – almost exactly the same percentage that would pull the lever the first time.

More scientific surveys of the US population show an even wider gulf between willingness to pull the lever and willingness to push someone to their death. About 90 percent of us say we would pull the lever, while about 90 percent of us say we would not push the large man. (Sarah Bakewell, New York Times)

I get where people are coming from – my moral intuitions were shaped by a socialization very similar to theirs. But are our intuitions rational and reasonable? Do we want our moral intuitions to be rational?

Sometimes our moral intuitions seem hard to justify. First, is it really OK to kill one to save five? Second, if killing one to save five is OK, then why is doing it by pulling a lever different from doing it by pushing someone to their death?

On the first question: people who say they would not pull the lever say they can’t play God, deciding who lives and who dies. They couldn’t live with the fact that their direct action killed a person – though they can live with their inaction killing five. (Interestingly, studies show a gender difference here – women are less likely to pull the lever.) By doing nothing, the responsibility is on whoever let that trolley get out of control, but by pulling the lever, you take direct responsibility for killing the one person. But aren’t you just as responsible for your decisions not to act as you are for a decision to act?

Let's look at that question: are you just as responsible for your voluntary inaction as you are for your voluntary action? Consider this: for $5.00 donated to the Against Malaria Foundation, one mosquito net could have been provided to areas of Africa at highest risk of malaria. A million people a year die of malaria, mostly children under age 5, and 90 percent of the malaria cases occur in sub-saharan Africa. For five bucks, you could have saved one of them. Well, maybe: some people with the nets get malaria anyway, and some people without the nets manage not to get it, or they do get it but recover, so there’s not a one-to-one relationship between nets provided and lives saved. But if you buy, say, ten nets, there’s a really good chance that one of the ten recipients will be a person who otherwise would have died of malaria, but thanks to the mosquito net you provided, doesn’t. So, call it 50 bucks to save one life. But you didn’t send the Against Malaria Foundation $50, did you? I didn’t either. And even if you did, you could have sent $50 more, but you didn’t. And that inaction cost a life.

Compare that to a different case. You get an email from Africa, but instead of saying that they need your assistance to get $20 million dollars out of Senegalese bank account, it says:

“I’m a farmer and I really hate my neighbor. I want to kill him. I went to our local shaman, and he said, it’s OK for me to kill my neighbor but only if I could get an American Unitarian Universalist to say it was OK. If I send you $50, will you send me an email that simply says, ‘You may kill your neighbor.’”

You would probably say, “that’s really weird,” hit delete, and go on with your day. But what would you think of someone -- let's call her Sue -- who replied, “let’s see the $50”? Suppose the check arrives; Sue deposits it; it clears. And Sue then keeps her end of the bargain: she sends an email saying, “You may kill your neighbor” -- and suppose the guy in Africa kills his neighbor. How does that compare with the malaria situation? Do we not find Sue's action more appalling than the inaction of someone who did not contribute to the Against Malaria Foundation? Yet in both cases, there’s $50 more than there would be in the American’s pocket and there’s a death in a faraway place as a result. So maybe we aren’t as responsible for a decision not to act as we are for a decision to act. Or maybe you'd still want to say that we are.

As these are cases illustrate, our moral intuitions can get stymied. What do -- or should -- we do about that?

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This is part 1 of 3 of "Moral Psychology"
See also
Part 2: Care, Loyalty, Authority, Fairness, Liberty, and Sacredness
Part 3: Reason's Role