Crisis 22
Political Modes of Being
Connections - Keats - Eliot - Aurelius - Pseudaurelius - Eyes - Religion - Violence
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Connections
On the previous page I noted how Whitman copes with everyday problems and with the horrors of fratricidal war by using the same strategy: being both in and out of the game. His strategy is uniquely expressed yet it has much in common with ideas advanced by Keats, Eliot, and Aurelius. I might also note here that in Gospel & Universe (my study of agnosticism) I connect this strategy to critical thinking and to a variety of thinkers — see Critical Distance, Locke’s Double Key, Montaigne’s Balance, Pyrrho’s Equilibrium & Zhuangzi’s Pivot, Hegel’s Dialectic, Whitman’s Cosmos, Byron: Carrying Sail, and Keats’ Negative Capability.
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Keats
In getting at a mental state of simultaneous engagement & detachment, one might also consider Keats’ twin notions of 1. the chameleon poet who engages with both good and evil and 2. negative capability which encourages critical thinking and psychological openness. Combined, these concepts present a Romantic model of 1. how to maintain an engaged and rational approach to life, and 2. how to maintain a stoic detachment in the face of uncertainty. This second part, the stoic detachment, is perhaps the most difficult — although the ease with which some people ignore or minimize the present crisis is a difficulty of a different type …
Keats’ definition of negative capability suggests a deep relation between accepting things as they are — with all their difficult uncertainty — and finding a place within our selves, deep in our perception of things, which releases us from the burden of those things, all the while not averting our eyes from them:
I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
Like Byron, Keats entertained a Romanticism that prefigured the Transcendentalism of writers like Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau. Both Keats and Byron accepted the Age of Reason with all its science and technology, but also kept the door open to emotion, spirituality, and Beauty with a capital B. Unlike Blake, they didn’t disparage the rational or the empirical in any way. Yet like Blake, they felt that “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
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Eliot
Being in and out of the world in Whitman’s poetic and mystical way is also reminiscent of what T.S. Eliot calls “the still point of the turning world.” Eliot is closer to Whitman here, in that he sees a specifically theological dimension to this experience. Byron and Keats on the other hand tend to think in secular terms of psychology, aesthetics, and myth. Where Byron and Keats find Beauty, Whitman and Eliot find the Beauty of Being and God.
Eliot writes about the still point in his long poem Burnt Norton, which he first published in 1936, three years before the start of WWII. The connection to religion and to God — or to what Aurelius calls the universal mind — is subtle, especially at the beginning of the poem, where the still point and the dance merge, suggesting a paradoxical order. This order, with its hint of spiritual essence, is one that appears lost amid the chaos of conflict these days. Eliot suggests however that it can always be found — at the point between past and future:
at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
— Burnt Norton II (Part 1 of Four Quartets)
Thinking deeply about the Ukraine War is harrowing, yet it might also be a difficult rehearsal for dealing with the relentless and at times overwhelming flow of life. It might become a sort of meditation, yoga, or phenomenological exercise allowing us to see where we are now. To hold the present still for a moment. To see that the moment is all we really have. Whether we can find in this moment a greater design or universal mind may not be as important as arriving at this still point, and looking for something, even if all we find is the hint of a rhythm, a dance, or a connecting link between our experience of the past and our prospect of the future. In this moment, we’re aware, in an expansive state, looking for connections and solutions.
It’s for this reason that I chose a snowflake as the icon for the name of this page, ❄️ Political Modes of Being. In the 2020s we’re in a new version of the old Cold War, yet the flake that falls through this coldness is beautiful in itself, in its still state, which corresponds to our inner selves, the “Me myself” that Whitman writes about. We are that we are, and the freedom of this state of awareness is a microcosm of the larger freedom we want for nations and for the world.
This awareness also makes us aware that we’re falling, falling into whatever transformations await us, from icy height to expanded flake, to rain, or crashing to the ground. That is life, the living moment before the inevitable fall. We can hold that moment, and see within it a movement, a dance, a slight turning of the wheel. Whether we call this awareness Heraclitan, Buddhist, Existential, mystical, poetic, or phenomenological, the name we ascribe to it isn’t as important as the experience, that is, as the fact that we feel, think, live the moment, in all its dimensions — awareness, conception, thought, feeling, reason, intent to act — and in the full knowledge of its transience as well.
In coping with war, it may be helpful to read poets like Eliot, who suggest a liberating dimension within us. Or we might listen to bands like Pink Floyd, who in “Us and Them” give full scope to simple words like “Down and out / It can't be helped, but there's a lot of it about. / With, without / And who'll deny it's what the fighting's all about?” Or to Bryan Ferry, whose ascents and descents, flights and falls in “Reason or Rhyme” don’t deal with the ups and downs of politics or war, yet get at the fundamental ebb and flow that can be turned into rhythm and dance, urging us to seize the moment:
Why must you shed such tender tears
In the evening of your years
No other love could stem the tide
Of the loneliness I hide
Inside out, upside down
Obscured by clouds, or underground
The sun and moon and all the stars
They bow down to you whenever you pass
Wherever you are, whenever you speak
These are the moments in my life that I seek
No reason or rhyme, by chance or design
Just a dance to the music of time
By condensing the complexity of life — whether it’s full of conflict or love — into simple terms and symbols, poetry can help us gather our dispersed thoughts and feelings. It can bring them, from ocean or galaxy, to a place that’s right before us and within our grasp, thus helping us come to terms with them.
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Aurelius
The Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius is especially helpful for those who need to cope with crisis and war yet don’t follow a traditional religious philosophy. Aurelius is especially helpful to non-believers and doubters because his brand of Classical philosophy — open, vague, questioning — is rather easy to reconcile with skepticism and with most religious thinking. His stoicism is in some ways close to open agnosticism, which highlights the possibility that there’s a greater meaning in the universe, however improbable that may seem in this world of wars, intolerance, and hatred.
Aurelius was also no stranger to military conflict at the highest level. He was a Roman emperor who lived during a Golden Age yet who died along the battle front of the Rhine. To put it mildly, he knew about what he spoke.
[On the Russian army…]
'They kill, they cut in pieces, they hunt with curses.' What relevance has this to keeping your mind pure, sane, sober, just? As if a man were to come up to a spring of clear, sweet water and curse it — it would still continue to bubble up water good to drink. He could throw in mud or dung: in time the spring will break it down, wash it away, and take no colour from it. How then can you secure an everlasting spring and not a cistern? By keeping yourself at all times intent on freedom — and staying kind, simple, and decent. ❧ Meditations 8.51 (trans. Martin Hammond)
[On Putin…]
Anyway, where is the harm or surprise in the ignorant behaving as the ignorant do? Think about it. Should you not rather blame yourself, for not anticipating that this man would make this error? Your reason gave you the resource to reckon this mistake likely from this man, yet you forgot and are now surprised that he went wrong. ❧ 9.42
[On the Kremlin mess…]
Take a view from above – look at the thousands of flocks and herds, the thousands of human ceremonies, every sort of voyage in storm or calm, the range of creation, combination, and extinction. Consider too the lives once lived by others long before you, the lives that will be lived after you, the lives lived now among foreign tribes; and how many have never even heard your name, how many will very soon forget it, how many may praise you now but quickly turn to blame. Reflect that neither memory nor fame, nor anything else at all, has any importance worth thinking of.
[We should cultivate a] Calm acceptance of what comes from a cause outside yourself, and justice in all activity of your own causation. In other words, impulse and action fulfilled in that social conduct which is an expression of your own nature. ❧ 9:30-31
[On the unfairness of it all for everyone affected, everyone suffering or dead because of Russia’s needless invasion…]
Nature gives all and takes all back. To her the man educated into humility says: ‘Give what you will; take back what you will.’ And he says this in no spirit of defiance, but simply as her loyal subject.
The time you have left is short. Live it as if you were on a mountain. Here or there makes no difference, if wherever you live you take the world as your city. ❧ 10:14-15
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From The Aphorisms of Pseudaurelius
May 30, 2024
🏛️ Accept Fate, but stare it in the eye. Face it like a line of Russian tanks bearing down on Kiev.
🏛️ Accept that Fate may not be what it seems.
🏛️ When a nuclear-armed hypocrite decries the sins he commits, and snares half the world in his lies, pay attention. But not too much. Try to remain engaged, yet somehow above it all. Try to be both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.
🏛️ Above all, live in the moment, unbounded by space and untrammelled by time.
🏛️ In order to get revenge on Putin, seize every moment. Let your retinas soak in all the beauties of the world — yet sleep with one eye open!
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Eyes Wide Closed
June 1, 2024
Last night I dreamed I was in the middle of an enormous brawl. It wasn’t a bar brawl, or if it was, it had spread into the street. Hand-to-hand combat was everywhere.
The brawl wasn’t like a simulation in a video game or movie. Within the dream it was real, and therefore gut-wrenching, terrifying. People were clearly bent on killing each other.
Across the fray I saw a big sturdy man — he looked alot like Yevgeny Prigozhin! — punching a smaller man. I yelled out, “Pick on someone your own size!” He left off hitting the smaller man, and immediately the smaller man was replaced by a tall wiry man who was wearing a stained light blue sweater. He looked like he just came from an Australian football pitch, and wasn’t afraid of standing up to a bully.
The tall wiry man faced off against the big sturdy man, who planted a hatchet in the middle of his forehead.
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Stoic Q & A
Aurelius was a Roman emperor and he was was as deeply engaged in politics as it is possible to be. But what can the average person do about it? We can become part of the political establishment, or find ways of influencing that establishment. Or we can analyze, educate, and fight against the never-ending lies and distortions of Putin and his enablers.
Beyond that what can an average citizen do about it? Nothing. Nothing but seize the day. Carpe diem.
What is the best way to fight, to be fruitful, to get revenge on Putin? Live as if he didn’t exist. Joyously, exploratively, compassionately, creatively, appreciatively, thankfully. Again, seize the day. Carpe diem.
But what do we do with the fear of losing this world in a nuclear blast? If we have a soul, and if there is a spiritual dimension, this world may come again, perhaps even only the best of it. If we have no soul, and if there is no spiritual dimension, we won’t feel or be aware of anything, including all the beauties and horrors humans created for themselves. Again, and always, seize the day. Carpe diem.
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Religion: Strider vs. Sauron
Aurelius’ stoicism could also take the form of any philosophy or religion that allows us to engage in issues and also to range free of them; any mode of being which doesn’t allow us to escape the issues yet doesn’t allow us to be trapped by them.
All serious religions and philosophies contain versions of this, although there are dangers in both. Philosophy can help us to cope with the duality of engagement and transcendence, yet it can also leave us in the middle of intractable difficulty. For example, in the existentialism of Sartre, there’s no escape from life’s problems into another dimension or care-free attitude; the only authentic course of action is to engage with these problems. Religions can have the converse problem: one can escape too easily into quietism or transcendental indifference. Yet religion can also accommodate a realistic, practical duality by urging both a responsible engagement in the problems of this world and a spiritual escape from it.
There’s no escape from this war, either on the political or military front. We must help Ukraine, and in doing so we can’t escape nuclear threat. Nor is there any religious viewpoint which allows us to entirely escape the situation. Quietism in this context amounts to indifference. There are however religious perspectives which encourage us to engage and disengage simultaneously. In the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna counsels Arjuna to fight his cousins, yet also not to live for the results of his fight. In Christianity, Michael fights the dragon, which symbolizes evil or Satan, and in the iconography Michael always remains at a lance’s distance above his enemy.
In Lord of the Rings Strider and the lowly hobbits fight Sauron (Satan), yet must resist being pulled into the power and violence they are compelled to employ. This example may seem fantastic and out of place, yet Lord of the Rings was written from 1937 to 1949, with Hitler and WWII in the background. It includes the magic of religion yet it focuses on the human effort and sacrifice that the threat of tyranny demands. The three main characters give us a range of characteristics we can emulate: Gandalf quakes with indignant rage and secret strength, Strider calmly bides his time, hidden, yet waiting to strike, and Frodo has none of the lofty qualities of Gandalf and Strider, yet finds within himself a courage to stand up to awesome and devastating powers of evil.
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Religion & Violence
While some believe religion to be antithetical to violence in every way, I would argue that being against violence means, practically, that you must oppose violent imperialists like Putin. And to oppose him you must use violence, because no amount of talk about peace is going to dissuade him from using violence to get what he wants. In this sense, religious violence is pivotal to my argument.
While there are few moments in world history where religion should condone violence on a massive scale, the fight against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is one of these moments. The religious taboo against violence is a sacred one, to be lifted only in self-defence or to counter a clear and present danger. Ukraine is clearly defending itself, and Russia presents a clear and present danger to all peaceful, free, and democratic nations. Another way to put this might be: if God wants us to live in freedom and peace, we’re going to have to fight for it — just as we did in 1939 (it’s tragic that our ally in that war is our enemy in this one). My overall point isn’t however about realistic politics (I get to this later) but rather about psychological states and philosophies that we might need to adopt in order to avoid turning into the illiberal, irrational, dogmatic enemy we oppose.