A "Rapport Revolution"?

Christine Emba

I'm grateful for Christine Emba's op-ed, "Let’s rethink sex," in today's Washington Post. Ms. Emba wants us men to prioritize building "rapport" with our potential sexual partners instead of merely obtaining "consent." It would pave the way for "a clearer, more boundaried sexual ethic" than we have now.

Beginning with the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s, our society has veered toward today's "hookup culture." It is now, says Emba, "America’s prevailing and problematic sexual ethic." Prior to the inception of the hookup ethic, "sexual encounters outside of marriage [were] disallowed or even discouraged." So we have swung from a maximally restrictive ethic to a minimally restrictive one. One result has been the ungodly frequency with which sexual assaults and incidents of harassment have been taking place over the past few decades.

Emba is saying we now need to move back toward the middle of the sexual-ethic continuum. We need what I might as well call a "rapport revolution." I heartily agree!

The Male Libido ... Is It Brutal?

Stephen Marche

In "The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido" in the New York Times, Stephen Marche has it that: "For most of history, we’ve taken for granted the implicit brutality of male sexuality. ... How are we supposed to create an equal world when male mechanisms of desire are inherently brutal?"

I think Marche is wrong. Male "mechanisms of desire" are not "inherently brutal."

Yes, the recent upwelling of powerful men being credibly accused of sexual abuse against unwilling women shows that some men are sometimes brutal in their sexual expressions. Men "from Bill Cosby to Roger Ailes to Harvey Weinstein to Louis C.K. to Al Franken and ... Charlie Rose and John Lasseter" have indeed acted brutally at times. But I'd be willing to bet those same men have most often acted gently in expressing their libidos. So have virtually all of us men.

Yet the questions Marche implicitly raises are valid ones. Why do some men's sexual and romantic lives sometimes turn brutal? Is that happening more often today than it used to? (Keep in mind that most of the allegations against Weinstein et al. go back many years, even decades.) How can we men, starting right now, arrange for it to happen less often, en route to some virtual vanishing point? If, as Marche says, sexual and social norms have been changing, what further changes would be needed to tamp down sexual predation? And is not the current discussion a fitting prelude to their much-needed arrival?

"Do Gun Rights Make Us Freer?"

Elizabeth Bruenig

The title of this blog post echoes the headline of a piece by Elizabeth Bruenig in today's Sunday Washington Post. The title of the piece as rendered online is "Do we really understand the Second Amendment anymore?" In it, Bruenig ties today's debate over gun rights and the Second Amendment to various notions of "the good" which Western philosophers have debated.

Do gun rights make us freer? The answer to that question, writes Bruenig, depends on whether the freedom to own guns advances that which, as a separate category of thought from liberty itself, can be deemed "the good."

Until the 17th century, Christian philosophers such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas held that "service to the good" trumped liberty as the prime desideratum of humankind. Beginning in the 17th century, though, "the good" as a rationale for liberty gave way to freedom itself as the single desideratum of any pluralistic, democratic society such as our own.

Hence Bruenig's worry that "freedom unchained from the good" is actually making us less free today, as we hunker down and try to protect our families from mass murder at the hands of crazed gun wielders.

While I think Bruenig's view is well taken, I think she misses something. Her vantage point is indeed quite a valid Western one; still, if we shift focus to the spiritual philosophies of the East, we are likely to discover that "the good" is not some external reality above and beyond the nature of our human souls. It is instead something that comes from within our own minds and hearts. In a Buddhist or even a quasi-Buddhist understanding, that which makes us "good" is:

• Being compassionate to others
• Being self-compassionate
• Being spiritually "on center"

Most of us would agree with the importance of being compassionate to others. Being self-compassionate, though: what does that mean? I am learning about the theory of self-compassion from Kristen Neff's excellent book Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. Neff writes:

From the Buddhist point of view, you have to care about yourself before you can really care about other people. If you are continually judging and criticizing yourself while trying to be kind to others, you are drawing artificial boundaries and distinctions that only lead to feelings of separation and isolation. This is the opposite of oneness, interconnection, and universal love — the ultimate goal of most spiritual paths, no matter which tradition.

"You have to care about yourself before you can really care about other people": that seems to invite each of us to be maximally self-indulgent, and not necessarily compassionate toward others, right? Actually, says Neff, wrong. She tells us that she herself once worried about just such a result:

"If I’m too self-compassionate, won’t I just be lazy and selfish?" It took me a while to get my head around [the idea of self-compassion]. But I slowly came to realize that self-criticism — despite being socially sanctioned — was not at all helpful, and in fact only made things worse. I wasn’t making myself a better person by beating myself up all the time. Instead, I was causing myself to feel inadequate and insecure, then taking out my frustration on the people closest to me.

In the recent mass shooting at Sutherland Springs, Texas, the shooter (Devin Patrick Kelley) was taking out his frustration over a marital breakup on a church congregation of which his estranged wife and her extended family were members.

First Baptist Church at
Sutherland Springs, Texas

Did Kelley tend to "beat himself up" over his own inadequacies? We can never really be sure about that, but we can reasonably guess that Kelley's personal self-esteem had been wounded by the breakup of his marriage, that he was feeling separated and isolated from the rest of humanity, and that he was driven to his heinous deed by his overwhelming self-righteous anger. His ego and wounded self-esteem were in control of his actions. And Neff writes that "the relentless pursuit of self-esteem" is what drives our souls off-center:

Although thousands of [scholarly] articles [have] been written on the importance of self-esteem, researchers [are] now starting to point out all the traps that people can fall into when they try to get and keep a sense of high self-esteem: narcissism, self-absorption, self-righteous anger, prejudice, discrimination, and so on. ... self-compassion [is] the perfect alternative to the relentless pursuit of self-esteem.

Neff accordingly writes of the crucial importance of "staying centered." Her book is a guide to doing just that. Although it is not a religious book, it is in fact a spiritual one.

Hence my "yes, but" reaction to Bruenig's piece. I feel that our society and culture tend to push us away from our proper spiritual center. I am just realizing that I am quite off center, myself. Fortunately, my own off-centeredness doesn't incline me to gun violence. Yet I also realize that there are inevitably going to be those of us who cannot say the same, and who will pack heat as a way of coping with their antisocial feelings. One of these sick people was Devin Patrick Kelley.

Put in terms of "the good," what I am saying is that it is not really sane to consider the liberty to own guns as an absolute right, the philosophical search for "the good" notwithstanding, unless we also consider the desperate need for all of us — not to mention our culture as a whole — to find ways of being much more spiritually "on center" than we currently seem to be today.

Let us try self-compassion, then, and see whether it really leads us to true compassion for others and to being more "on center" spiritually.

Societal Dysfunction, the Alt-Right, Spirituality, and Following Your Bliss

A headline at today's online New York Times: "‘Hero’ Bystander Shot at Texas Killer; 26 Dead at Church." The reference is to the shooting at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., which claimed the lives of 26 innocent people and ended with the death of the shooter himself. The hero in question was an unidentified bystander, a man who pursued the shooter and exchanged fire with him with his, the armed bystander's, own rifle.

Candlelight vigil following the
First Baptist Church shooting

The shooting was yet another sign of the burgeoning dysfunctionality within our society. Such awful things are happening more and more these days.

Looking for a solution to the gun violence problem, we've talked about passing tighter firearms laws. I support such measures, but I know they are politically impossible at this point. Besides, all this gun violence is but a symptom of things that are wrong with our society at a deeper level — at a spiritual level, I'd say.

By "spiritual" I mean something that taps into the universal human capacity that goes beyond the teachings of any particular organized religion. I mean what Rabbi Michael Lerner talked about in such books as his 2000 "Spirit Matters." A quote from Lerner:

Reality is much more complex than any judgment of right and wrong encourages you to believe. When you really understand the ethical, spiritual, social, economic, and psychological forces that shape individuals, you will see that people's choices are not based on a desire to hurt. Instead, they are in accord with what they know and what world views are available to them. Most are doing the best they can, given what information they've received and what problems they are facing.

We're encountering a potpourri of different world views in America today, which is one of the principal factors that blocks us off from attaining greater unity and harmony. One of the world views that is coming to the fore right now is that of the so-called "alt-right." In the Sunday Washington Post yesterday, I found a Carlos Lozada review of three new books about this phenomenon. "Where the alt-right wants to take America — with or without Trump" has it that the participants in the alt-right movement occupy "an alternative dimension, a mental space beyond fact or logic, where the rules of evidence are replaced by paranoia."

The alt-rightists are deemed, at least by their opponents (of whom I am one), to be white supremacists/nationalists. I'd accordingly say each of them must feel as if he (I use the pronoun because most are white males) is someone from whom something has been taken. They each feel as if their once-dominant culture has come under attack from the cultural left, with its insistence on the so-called "identity politics" that empowers nonwhites, immigrants, women, gays, and so on.

In other words, they feel as if society has herded them into some sort of cultural jailhouse. And it's true: the cultural left has pretty well established a new set of strictures on thought and behavior. The strictures are what's called "political correctness." The alt-rightists hate political correctness.

But that means there is a tendency for alt-rightists to be haters in general. Their vituperative online behavior — so-called "trolling" — bears witness to that. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary online offers this definition of "troll":

to antagonize (others) online by deliberately posting inflammatory, irrelevant, or offensive comments or other disruptive content

Hate is not a spiritual value. Rather, just as is the burgeoning gun violence in America today, it is symptomatic of a spiritual deficiency.

In 1949, Joseph Campbell wrote in his premiere book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there is something lacking in the normal experience available or permitted to the members of society. The person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir.

To Campbell, the "hero adventure" that is at the heart of much of the world's trove of mythological wisdom is a spiritual journey towards personal compassion, not hate. Vituperation and hate offer the hero no life-giving elixir, no vitalizing boon that the journeying hero can bring back to his troubled society to heal its wounds. Rather, said the late scholar of myth, the true path to spiritual elevation is for each potential hero among us to "follow your bliss."

"Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be," Campbell said. The things that initially may seem to be soul-strangling strictures imposed upon the individual by society are ultimately illusory. The hero's adventure takes him or her beyond the current politics or current sociology of his society to reveal a life-giving elixir that is compounded of courage and compassion. The pathway of vituperation and hate does not lead to such an elixir; that's one of the lessons taught by Jesus.

So, please, let's all look elsewhere than the alt-right for paths to America's spiritual healing. Let's all learn to go on a hero's journey and (what amounts to the same thing) to follow our bliss.