CHARACTER MATTERS – A JOHN McCAIN PERSPECTIVE IN THE QUADRENNIAL MADNESS
James R. Fisher, Jr.
“It is impossible that an ill-natured man can have a public spirit; for how should he love ten thousand men, who never loved one?”
Francis de S. Fenelon (1651 – 1715), French archbishop
We are about to enter the quadrennial madness of presidential politics with people entering and bowing out of the race over the next two years. It is part of the American ritual of our best and worst moments, revisiting our national apathy and natural inclination to support a “winner.” That is why we have polls and are addicted to them.
Lost in the melee is the central issue that has kept our head above water in our worst moments. If you are not a reader of books, I hope that you are a watcher of the “American Experience” series on PBS television.
One of the surprising features of this series is that it puts flesh and blood on the skeletal remains of Our Founding Fathers and leaders throughout time, especially at our most critical moments.
For example when Benjamin Franklin was visiting France during the American Revolution to gain financial and military support, John Adams, who was to be our second president, was on a similar mission as well. Instead of combining their efforts, putting our fledgling nation’s best interests above their personal pride and ambition, both men were consumed with enmity and bitterness towards each other, nearly changing the course of American history.
You would see in this television series that George Washington had a Dwight Eisenhower kind of intellect, as did Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but all three men rose above their limitations because of their character.
They knew who they were and what they were about.
On the other hand, Thomas Jefferson, like John Adams, was the intellectual superior of his contemporaries, but of a flawed character that had a penchant for fortuity, which was not the case for Adams. The latter had a penchant for rubbing nearly everyone up the wrong side.
Likewise, his son, John Quincy Adams, our sixth president, was of superior intellect and character but not of a matching finesse. John Quincy’s greatest moments came when he was an ex-president and a member of the House of Representatives. There he displayed a powerful commitment to anti-slavery.
Neither Adams ever own slaves, but presidents before and after them did.
Currently, Time magazine features John Fitzgerald Kennedy (July 2, 2007) with the cover caption “What We Can Learn From JFK.”
The article is remarkable in its emphasis and omissions, making much of the man and little of his faux pas: e.g., little is made of his initiating the Vietnam War, the fiasco of the Cuban Invasion, where he lacked the will to give air support, his philandering, his precarious connection with mafia types and his hesitation to truly launch the Civil Rights Movement, while much is made of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was mainly self-generated.
It is understandable. JFK is the image Americans like to think of themselves: dashing, good looking, white, and above average. Profligacy has no place in this character image. It is as if JFK stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and (Theodore) Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore. It is Camelot of the Mind with a giant “what if” he had lived speculation.
Unfortunately, character is not something you wish for but something you are and demonstrate in what you do. The irony is that Time magazine doesn’t seem to realize it is illustrating our stuckness*** by exaggerating our sense of who and what we would like to think we are.
Some have wondered about my politics. Well, like my religion, they are not of a party or platform but of character and will that might lead us through our sick times and sick society. Who is that to be?
JOHN McCAIN, THE QUENTESSENTIAL AMERICAN
There is someone I find interesting. His name is John McCain.
John McCain may not get elected president, indeed; he may drop out of the race for lack of money, organization and support. But for me, he is the single character in the present firmament that seems real, flawed as this reality may appear.
McCain is not a good campaigner, not a good speaker, not robust or handsome, and certainly not dashing or debonair. Yet, I sense he has the will and the moral conviction to put American society back on its rightful axis.
In a strange way, John McCain, small, crumpled, white-haired, aging, disarmingly genuine and sincere in a humble way reminds me of John XXIII, the saintly pope that attempted to put a little reality and tolerance into his ancient Roman Catholic Church with the Ecumenical Council. McCain understands the United States, if it is to survive in tact, will have a more modest leadership role in the world. The Catholic church has not learned apparently from John XXIII's leadership, and so it continues to stumble forward. My hope is that America will be more fortunate.
John McCain credentials match his temperament. He has been a combat veteran in Vietnam, and a tortured prisoner-of-war, and yet he doesn’t believe in draconian measures against incarcerated “terrorists.” He has been a dedicated senator pleasing neither party in his stand on controversial issues such as immigration, where he is empathetic to the demands of ethnic minorities, and the war in Iraq, where he advocates more troops against criticism from all sides.
In a word, he is Jacksonian (re: president Andrew Jackson) in that he represents blunt reality as did Jackson, more than a century and a half ago. Like Jackson, he is his own man with the pain and struggle of his life as testimony to his philosophy and politics.
As this is written, he is low in the polls and declining while a television dandy and personality, Fred Thompson, threatens to enter the quadrennial madness. Thompson looks presidential; McCain is presidential.
Americans have not always chosen wisely, even in times of crisis, aggravating the madness of their dilemma. Is this to be any different? Time will tell.
__________
***Stuckness is the central issue discussed in my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). For more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Monday, June 25, 2007
AUTHOR FISHER REFLECTS ON HIS RETURN TO HIS ROOTS!
AUTHOR FISHER REFLECTS ON HIS RETURN TO HIS ROOTS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 2007
Author Thomas Wolfe wrote a compelling novel, You Can’t Go Home Again (1940). It was his last novel published posthumously as he died two years before at the age of 38. In the novel, after being out in the world – these were the riotous years in Europe prior to WWII – he returns to his mountain home seeking the peace and quiet of his boyhood, only to find it caught up in the same nervous frenzy of his time.
When I first returned to Clinton after an absence of many years in the 1990s, many of my friends who had stayed were as congenial as ever. I spent twelve weeks during that decade researching IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE, a snapshot of growing up in Clinton in the war years of the 1940s.
I returned in 2003 for a speaking and book signing tour of this book in Clinton and the Quad Cities. I have not been back since.
Thomas Wolfe has a point that the home you leave is never the home you return to, partly because you have a perspective of a world apart, in my case working and living for many years abroad, and therefore lacking the continuity of the elapsing daily life in the community since I had left.
Take the magnificent courthouse prominently displayed on the front cover of IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE. It is still there, but totally gutted and modernized inside, while St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, Rectory and School on the back cover have been erased from the landscape, the sanctuary of my formative years.
Already in the 1990s, the playground that introduced me to baseball, football, basketball, and ice-skating in the winter -- the lawn bridging the county jail with the courthouse – was gone. It had been replaced by a public safety building for the county sheriff department.
By 2003, the scores of taverns that snaked their way along Clinton’s seven mile promenade had been largely replaced by fast-food restaurants from the city limits south and Camanche Avenue to Second Street north and Lyons.
Clinton was once famous for its collection of taverns. Also missing were the Chicago & North Western Railroad Shops along Camanche Avenue, once the primary employer of many members of my Irish-Norwegian clan.
If they didn’t work for the railroad, they worked for Clinton Foods, which has undergone many iterations of owners. My da once worked for both. Incidentally, if not for Clinton Foods, which employed me for five summers while attending the University of Iowa, I suspect my life would have turned out quite differently.
Like Thomas Wolfe, however, there are bittersweet memories as my roots rise out of South Clinton, which has been swallowed up by the current iteration of Clinton Foods (ADM) with the punctuation mark of a golden dome to mark its territory.
People of my generation identified with the neighborhood of their birth: south of the tracks (South Clinton), off Camanche Avenue (Chancy Park), above the big tree (Lyons), and so on. New neighborhoods have sprung up, but the old ones are still holding firm, except South Clinton, which is no more.
I mention this because my sense of place has never left my mind. This is where my values were first formed. Those values have given me an amazing freedom, and indeed security, to listen to my own drummer and to know I have real roots with real people.
Splitting grammar school between Lyons (St. Boniface) and the courthouse area (St. Patrick’s), then high school (Clinton High), I experienced cultural shock going from private to public school that apparently is now a thing of the past, for there is no St. Boniface or St. Patrick’s.
The catholic school system of the 1940s with the nuns of the Sisters of St. Francis and the priests of the Davenport Diocese represented a total cultural immersion in the ancient tradition of Catholic programming. I have never outgrown this as a thinker or writer.
The movement of the casino from offshore to Clinton’s beautiful riverfront offends me. I see gambling as part of the new plague and write about it in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. In this convoluted climate, people are looking for something for nothing; for luck as substitute for misplaced pluck. It is actually evidence of being stuck, which is the subject of my book and on how to become unstuck. A casino is not the answer. It is part of our societal sickness.
Today, the nuns are gone in Clinton as elsewhere, priests are few and far between, and the public school system, which in Clinton has always been excellent, is greatly challenged in these flippant times.
The strength of Clinton is its people. They nurtured and launched me into the world. People of Clinton to whom I owe a special debt include Gussie Witt, Jack Dunmore, Lyle Sawyer, sheriff Ky Petersen, deputies Chris Stamp and Jim Gaffey, Bobby Witt, Del Ploen, Billy McKinley, coach Ed Rashke, coach Dean Burridge, of course, my parents, as well as Sister Mary Flavian, Sister Mary Helen, Sister Mary Gertrude, Sister Mary Cecilia, and Father Anthony Geertz.
It is no accident that the first and last sentence of IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE is of Bobby Witt. It was because Bobby was my ideal: open, fun, funny, intelligent, athletic, caring, modest, and there, always there. He also had a way to puncture my cockiness. Once I told him I had a photographic memory. He didn’t say anything until we attended a movie at the Rialto. After the film credits rolled, he said, “Did you see the credits?” I nodded. “Okay, hot shot, repeat them.” It is how I remember Clinton as I prepare to visit it once again.
____________
An edited version of this is to appear in The Clinton Herald in August 2007 prior to Dr. Fisher's book speaking and signing tour in the midwest.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 2007
Author Thomas Wolfe wrote a compelling novel, You Can’t Go Home Again (1940). It was his last novel published posthumously as he died two years before at the age of 38. In the novel, after being out in the world – these were the riotous years in Europe prior to WWII – he returns to his mountain home seeking the peace and quiet of his boyhood, only to find it caught up in the same nervous frenzy of his time.
When I first returned to Clinton after an absence of many years in the 1990s, many of my friends who had stayed were as congenial as ever. I spent twelve weeks during that decade researching IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE, a snapshot of growing up in Clinton in the war years of the 1940s.
I returned in 2003 for a speaking and book signing tour of this book in Clinton and the Quad Cities. I have not been back since.
Thomas Wolfe has a point that the home you leave is never the home you return to, partly because you have a perspective of a world apart, in my case working and living for many years abroad, and therefore lacking the continuity of the elapsing daily life in the community since I had left.
Take the magnificent courthouse prominently displayed on the front cover of IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE. It is still there, but totally gutted and modernized inside, while St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, Rectory and School on the back cover have been erased from the landscape, the sanctuary of my formative years.
Already in the 1990s, the playground that introduced me to baseball, football, basketball, and ice-skating in the winter -- the lawn bridging the county jail with the courthouse – was gone. It had been replaced by a public safety building for the county sheriff department.
By 2003, the scores of taverns that snaked their way along Clinton’s seven mile promenade had been largely replaced by fast-food restaurants from the city limits south and Camanche Avenue to Second Street north and Lyons.
Clinton was once famous for its collection of taverns. Also missing were the Chicago & North Western Railroad Shops along Camanche Avenue, once the primary employer of many members of my Irish-Norwegian clan.
If they didn’t work for the railroad, they worked for Clinton Foods, which has undergone many iterations of owners. My da once worked for both. Incidentally, if not for Clinton Foods, which employed me for five summers while attending the University of Iowa, I suspect my life would have turned out quite differently.
Like Thomas Wolfe, however, there are bittersweet memories as my roots rise out of South Clinton, which has been swallowed up by the current iteration of Clinton Foods (ADM) with the punctuation mark of a golden dome to mark its territory.
People of my generation identified with the neighborhood of their birth: south of the tracks (South Clinton), off Camanche Avenue (Chancy Park), above the big tree (Lyons), and so on. New neighborhoods have sprung up, but the old ones are still holding firm, except South Clinton, which is no more.
I mention this because my sense of place has never left my mind. This is where my values were first formed. Those values have given me an amazing freedom, and indeed security, to listen to my own drummer and to know I have real roots with real people.
Splitting grammar school between Lyons (St. Boniface) and the courthouse area (St. Patrick’s), then high school (Clinton High), I experienced cultural shock going from private to public school that apparently is now a thing of the past, for there is no St. Boniface or St. Patrick’s.
The catholic school system of the 1940s with the nuns of the Sisters of St. Francis and the priests of the Davenport Diocese represented a total cultural immersion in the ancient tradition of Catholic programming. I have never outgrown this as a thinker or writer.
The movement of the casino from offshore to Clinton’s beautiful riverfront offends me. I see gambling as part of the new plague and write about it in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. In this convoluted climate, people are looking for something for nothing; for luck as substitute for misplaced pluck. It is actually evidence of being stuck, which is the subject of my book and on how to become unstuck. A casino is not the answer. It is part of our societal sickness.
Today, the nuns are gone in Clinton as elsewhere, priests are few and far between, and the public school system, which in Clinton has always been excellent, is greatly challenged in these flippant times.
The strength of Clinton is its people. They nurtured and launched me into the world. People of Clinton to whom I owe a special debt include Gussie Witt, Jack Dunmore, Lyle Sawyer, sheriff Ky Petersen, deputies Chris Stamp and Jim Gaffey, Bobby Witt, Del Ploen, Billy McKinley, coach Ed Rashke, coach Dean Burridge, of course, my parents, as well as Sister Mary Flavian, Sister Mary Helen, Sister Mary Gertrude, Sister Mary Cecilia, and Father Anthony Geertz.
It is no accident that the first and last sentence of IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE is of Bobby Witt. It was because Bobby was my ideal: open, fun, funny, intelligent, athletic, caring, modest, and there, always there. He also had a way to puncture my cockiness. Once I told him I had a photographic memory. He didn’t say anything until we attended a movie at the Rialto. After the film credits rolled, he said, “Did you see the credits?” I nodded. “Okay, hot shot, repeat them.” It is how I remember Clinton as I prepare to visit it once again.
____________
An edited version of this is to appear in The Clinton Herald in August 2007 prior to Dr. Fisher's book speaking and signing tour in the midwest.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
THINKING ABOUT RELIGION & GOD
THINKING ABOUT RELIGION & GOD
JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.
© June 2007
“Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it.”
Caleb C. Colton (1780 – 1832), English clergyman
My da once told me when I was a boy to never get embroiled in a discussion of politics, religion or race, and he was Irish, which makes this suggestion an oxymoron.
In a way, religion embraces everything including politics and race.
Religion has succeeded, for example, to generate selective forgetting by insisting on its territorial imperatives. How else can we explain the thousands of religions and the hundreds of dominations. Yet, the fact remains there is but one race, and that is the human race.
No other race exists except in the mind, which is the playground of religion.
Religion throughout our Western history has displayed the full range of human emotion from the sublime to subterranean.
Dante showed great skill in this with his "Divine Comedy." He found himself lost in dark and frightening woods, and as he was trying to regain his path, he came to a mountain, which he decided to climb in order to get his bearings. Strange beasts blocked his way, and he was forced back to the plain. As he was bemoaning his fate, the poet Virgil appeared and offered to conduct Dante through Hell, Purgatory, and blissful Paradise.
This is all like a dream, and it might well have come to Dante as such, along with his Beatrice, the soul of his beloved.
Beatrice is more prominent in a less well known work of Dante's, "The Vita Nuova" (the new life). This work is a celebration in prose and poetry of the great poet's love for Beatrice Portinari.
When Dante first saw Beatrice he was nine and she was eight. He was so affected by the sight of her that his "vital spirit" trembled, his "animal spirit" was amazed, and his "natural spirit" wept. He was in love, and to know love as love was meant to be known.
Notice that love, even in the very young, embodies life, instinct and lust, all essential components in the heart of man that give expression to his humanity.
If you read the definitions of religion in the dictionary, you discover the seeds of the problem immediately.
Religion is defined as "the state of a religious; the service and worship of God or the supernatural, commitment and devotion to religious faith or observance, a personal or institutional system of religious attitudes, beliefs, practices, or scrupulous conformity to a system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith."
Dante (1265 - 1321) was fighting through this narrow view of religion in the dawn of the Renaissance, long before the Medici’s and Michelangelo and da Vinci would take on prominence.
The foundation of the early Christian Church was by such Church Fathers as Tertullian (160 - 220). He was a harsh theologian whose influence was demonstrated centuries later with "The Inquisition." He ranted against heathens and Jews, and heretics while championing asceticism. No one was a greater influence between Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, as his rigors proved endemic to Latinity followers for centuries.
Somewhat later, Saint Benedict (480 - 550) came along. Benedict had an outlook characterized by prudence and moderation in a framework of authority, obedience, austerity, stability and community. His product was the domestic life, which, obviously, was common to few but still influenced many.
This gentle saint had a rather harsh view of married love. If the "husband was transported by immoderate love, his intercourse with his wife so ardently in passion would be a sin."
James Cleugh studied the impact of this psychology in his book "Love Locked Out: A Survey of Love, License and Restriction in the Middle Ages" (1970).
The startling nature of this study is that the source of many problems of the twenty-first century life appears through the lens of this period of repression, suppression, suspicion, and guilt that were being programmed into the religion of Western man.
This psychosexual obsession with "locked out love" has had aberrant manifestation in scandal after scandal with the contemporary clergy. As Cleugh points out, it "gave birth to pornography in the middle ages."
Cleugh sites that unnatural fear of the natural has festered like a cultural plague throughout the ages.
Saint Benedict's aversion to sexual love was an invitation to make it an obsession. Love is the diet of the mind as food is diet to the body.
Obsession is fed by the perversion of the natural object be it of food or sex, or, indeed, of religion.
Society, for one, has become obsessed with obesity. It hasn't reduced obesity but increased it. At the same time, placing society on a diet has created a multibillion-dollar industry, which is constantly being replenished by the turnstile of recidivism. People today think constantly about food. It has become the narcotic of the pathology of normalcy and its bi-product is a bloated culture.
When you force people to stop smoking, all they think about are cigarettes. It is like an inverted chemical equation -- always getting the opposite reaction of what is desired or expected.
So, as Cleugh points out, if you tell people they can't have sex, or that they shouldn't enjoy sex, or thinking about sex is not healthy, then they are going to be obsessed with sex, when sex in the most active members of society in chronological time is fleeting at best.
It is psychological time that is the killer. Obsession is fueled by psychological time.
The irony is that if you choose to be master of psychological time, then you eat to live rather than live to eat, and you quit smoking "cold turkey." No drugs, no patches, no diets, no gurus. And sex emanates naturally from romantic to physical love and is expressed in other ways such as a look, a touch, or a caring remark.
Young males believe there is something wrong with them if they are not obsessed with sex, and girls think there is something wrong with them if someone is not hitting on them constantly. It is a double bind that has created a whole new industry of gurus that pander to these obsessions.
Men of the cloth have taken a back-seat to the shock jocks of radio and television, and the pop artist that weave sexual themes into their lyrics often of a barbaric nature. Then there are those "doctors of this and that" who probe willing psyches on the tube, persons who appear to have little clue they are being used and exploited if not abused, reminiscent of obsessed clerics of the past.
These new advisers, often rich and famous, have been given the power by a passive society to tell them how to run their sex, personal and dietary lives, only to exacerbate their problems and fuel their turmoil.
When the natural becomes unnatural, when the pathological becomes the norm, the other side of religion surfaces and dominates. The spirit is driven out of religion and it becomes a shell game.
Religion is not a church but a mindset and as such, it can be engaging or cruel, reassuring or defeating.
Madonna knows this and has used religion to exploit the popular mania, as have sex clubs, the phone sex and pornography industry, and now the Internet. Still, the answer is not to restrict these ventures under rights provided by the first amendment of the United States Constitution. The answer, it seems to me, is to allow young people to experience their religious education, entertaining their doubts in a safety zone of trust where they can discover for themselves what is relevant and what is not.
Children are not own by their parents but only pass through them. It is however an equal problem when children own their parents.
Unrealistic, you say? I don't think so. We are moving into a truly multicultural society in which fences and walls, psychological and physical barriers cannot hold back what Alvin Toffler called "the Third Wave." Toffler envisions a gyrating economy, a "blip culture," the post-nuclear family, the "electronic cottage," the stripping away of the nation-state, and the shift in politics from totalitarian to twenty-first century democracies.
Toffler is a mechanic. He thinks like a mechanic, and sees the future in mechanistic terms with more sophisticated "Machine Age" thinking.
But such thinking is still geared to a "machine age" focus and projection. We have left the Machine Age even if we don't know it. Were all these things Toffler envisions to take place, there would still remain the problem of cultural man and entropic spirit.
He is part of the organic landscape every bit as much as other plants and animals, and is not the master of nature but simply a factor in nature, subject to its laws and limitations. Thus far his intelligence has failed to make this connection.
At the heart of culture is language and religion, and at the heart of language and religion is man with a capacity to love and an inclination to hate, a lust for power and a fear of death. This will not change as man has not changed in tens of thousands of years.
Religion has always been a vehicle for man to run away from life and nature and into what is often called "God." God exists but in the heart of man, not outside of him. As soon as we separate God from man, we run into all these obsessions, all these religions that separate man-from-man and man from himself, which are founded in fear, not in trust, and are devoid of spiritual connection with all of life.
We have been stuck a long time in this "Sensate Culture" that Pitrim Sorokin wrote so eloquently about. Sorokin even predicted more than 70 years ago that we would become obsessed with sex in the dying Sensate, and that the church and religious would lose their way. I don't expect to be around for "the coming Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow," which may take a hundred or two hundred years to become truly established. But it will come. Tensions now are but signs of the restless spirit for embracing it.
That said man is not patient and he forgets that a habit of a lifetime, say smoking or eating too much, or insisting on believing "this or that" cannot be precipitously changed with a patch, a diet, or a new messiah. Man is stuck with himself on this small planet, which is shrinking all the time, so he had better get used to sharing toothpaste with the neighbor next door who looks and speaks and thinks differently than he does. Religion, after all, is of the mind but affects the body. It has always been so and it will always be so.
_________________-
Note: Themes such as this are perused in my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007).
JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.
© June 2007
“Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it.”
Caleb C. Colton (1780 – 1832), English clergyman
My da once told me when I was a boy to never get embroiled in a discussion of politics, religion or race, and he was Irish, which makes this suggestion an oxymoron.
In a way, religion embraces everything including politics and race.
Religion has succeeded, for example, to generate selective forgetting by insisting on its territorial imperatives. How else can we explain the thousands of religions and the hundreds of dominations. Yet, the fact remains there is but one race, and that is the human race.
No other race exists except in the mind, which is the playground of religion.
Religion throughout our Western history has displayed the full range of human emotion from the sublime to subterranean.
Dante showed great skill in this with his "Divine Comedy." He found himself lost in dark and frightening woods, and as he was trying to regain his path, he came to a mountain, which he decided to climb in order to get his bearings. Strange beasts blocked his way, and he was forced back to the plain. As he was bemoaning his fate, the poet Virgil appeared and offered to conduct Dante through Hell, Purgatory, and blissful Paradise.
This is all like a dream, and it might well have come to Dante as such, along with his Beatrice, the soul of his beloved.
Beatrice is more prominent in a less well known work of Dante's, "The Vita Nuova" (the new life). This work is a celebration in prose and poetry of the great poet's love for Beatrice Portinari.
When Dante first saw Beatrice he was nine and she was eight. He was so affected by the sight of her that his "vital spirit" trembled, his "animal spirit" was amazed, and his "natural spirit" wept. He was in love, and to know love as love was meant to be known.
Notice that love, even in the very young, embodies life, instinct and lust, all essential components in the heart of man that give expression to his humanity.
If you read the definitions of religion in the dictionary, you discover the seeds of the problem immediately.
Religion is defined as "the state of a religious; the service and worship of God or the supernatural, commitment and devotion to religious faith or observance, a personal or institutional system of religious attitudes, beliefs, practices, or scrupulous conformity to a system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith."
Dante (1265 - 1321) was fighting through this narrow view of religion in the dawn of the Renaissance, long before the Medici’s and Michelangelo and da Vinci would take on prominence.
The foundation of the early Christian Church was by such Church Fathers as Tertullian (160 - 220). He was a harsh theologian whose influence was demonstrated centuries later with "The Inquisition." He ranted against heathens and Jews, and heretics while championing asceticism. No one was a greater influence between Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, as his rigors proved endemic to Latinity followers for centuries.
Somewhat later, Saint Benedict (480 - 550) came along. Benedict had an outlook characterized by prudence and moderation in a framework of authority, obedience, austerity, stability and community. His product was the domestic life, which, obviously, was common to few but still influenced many.
This gentle saint had a rather harsh view of married love. If the "husband was transported by immoderate love, his intercourse with his wife so ardently in passion would be a sin."
James Cleugh studied the impact of this psychology in his book "Love Locked Out: A Survey of Love, License and Restriction in the Middle Ages" (1970).
The startling nature of this study is that the source of many problems of the twenty-first century life appears through the lens of this period of repression, suppression, suspicion, and guilt that were being programmed into the religion of Western man.
This psychosexual obsession with "locked out love" has had aberrant manifestation in scandal after scandal with the contemporary clergy. As Cleugh points out, it "gave birth to pornography in the middle ages."
Cleugh sites that unnatural fear of the natural has festered like a cultural plague throughout the ages.
Saint Benedict's aversion to sexual love was an invitation to make it an obsession. Love is the diet of the mind as food is diet to the body.
Obsession is fed by the perversion of the natural object be it of food or sex, or, indeed, of religion.
Society, for one, has become obsessed with obesity. It hasn't reduced obesity but increased it. At the same time, placing society on a diet has created a multibillion-dollar industry, which is constantly being replenished by the turnstile of recidivism. People today think constantly about food. It has become the narcotic of the pathology of normalcy and its bi-product is a bloated culture.
When you force people to stop smoking, all they think about are cigarettes. It is like an inverted chemical equation -- always getting the opposite reaction of what is desired or expected.
So, as Cleugh points out, if you tell people they can't have sex, or that they shouldn't enjoy sex, or thinking about sex is not healthy, then they are going to be obsessed with sex, when sex in the most active members of society in chronological time is fleeting at best.
It is psychological time that is the killer. Obsession is fueled by psychological time.
The irony is that if you choose to be master of psychological time, then you eat to live rather than live to eat, and you quit smoking "cold turkey." No drugs, no patches, no diets, no gurus. And sex emanates naturally from romantic to physical love and is expressed in other ways such as a look, a touch, or a caring remark.
Young males believe there is something wrong with them if they are not obsessed with sex, and girls think there is something wrong with them if someone is not hitting on them constantly. It is a double bind that has created a whole new industry of gurus that pander to these obsessions.
Men of the cloth have taken a back-seat to the shock jocks of radio and television, and the pop artist that weave sexual themes into their lyrics often of a barbaric nature. Then there are those "doctors of this and that" who probe willing psyches on the tube, persons who appear to have little clue they are being used and exploited if not abused, reminiscent of obsessed clerics of the past.
These new advisers, often rich and famous, have been given the power by a passive society to tell them how to run their sex, personal and dietary lives, only to exacerbate their problems and fuel their turmoil.
When the natural becomes unnatural, when the pathological becomes the norm, the other side of religion surfaces and dominates. The spirit is driven out of religion and it becomes a shell game.
Religion is not a church but a mindset and as such, it can be engaging or cruel, reassuring or defeating.
Madonna knows this and has used religion to exploit the popular mania, as have sex clubs, the phone sex and pornography industry, and now the Internet. Still, the answer is not to restrict these ventures under rights provided by the first amendment of the United States Constitution. The answer, it seems to me, is to allow young people to experience their religious education, entertaining their doubts in a safety zone of trust where they can discover for themselves what is relevant and what is not.
Children are not own by their parents but only pass through them. It is however an equal problem when children own their parents.
Unrealistic, you say? I don't think so. We are moving into a truly multicultural society in which fences and walls, psychological and physical barriers cannot hold back what Alvin Toffler called "the Third Wave." Toffler envisions a gyrating economy, a "blip culture," the post-nuclear family, the "electronic cottage," the stripping away of the nation-state, and the shift in politics from totalitarian to twenty-first century democracies.
Toffler is a mechanic. He thinks like a mechanic, and sees the future in mechanistic terms with more sophisticated "Machine Age" thinking.
But such thinking is still geared to a "machine age" focus and projection. We have left the Machine Age even if we don't know it. Were all these things Toffler envisions to take place, there would still remain the problem of cultural man and entropic spirit.
He is part of the organic landscape every bit as much as other plants and animals, and is not the master of nature but simply a factor in nature, subject to its laws and limitations. Thus far his intelligence has failed to make this connection.
At the heart of culture is language and religion, and at the heart of language and religion is man with a capacity to love and an inclination to hate, a lust for power and a fear of death. This will not change as man has not changed in tens of thousands of years.
Religion has always been a vehicle for man to run away from life and nature and into what is often called "God." God exists but in the heart of man, not outside of him. As soon as we separate God from man, we run into all these obsessions, all these religions that separate man-from-man and man from himself, which are founded in fear, not in trust, and are devoid of spiritual connection with all of life.
We have been stuck a long time in this "Sensate Culture" that Pitrim Sorokin wrote so eloquently about. Sorokin even predicted more than 70 years ago that we would become obsessed with sex in the dying Sensate, and that the church and religious would lose their way. I don't expect to be around for "the coming Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow," which may take a hundred or two hundred years to become truly established. But it will come. Tensions now are but signs of the restless spirit for embracing it.
That said man is not patient and he forgets that a habit of a lifetime, say smoking or eating too much, or insisting on believing "this or that" cannot be precipitously changed with a patch, a diet, or a new messiah. Man is stuck with himself on this small planet, which is shrinking all the time, so he had better get used to sharing toothpaste with the neighbor next door who looks and speaks and thinks differently than he does. Religion, after all, is of the mind but affects the body. It has always been so and it will always be so.
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Note: Themes such as this are perused in my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007).
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