Speaking Poetry to Punditry Why Nancy Pelosi &Ted Cruz should Start a Jam Band “Real life consists of the tensions produced by the incompatibility of opposites, each of which is needed” ― E.F. Schumacher Maybe I am a gluten for punishment or just have little short term memory. I consistently go the 24/7 news cycle as offered by MSNBC, FOX, CNN, etc. & find it beyond exasperating. I am alarmed at the level of clamorous baying & attempted persuasion done through purposely hurtful contempt and scorn for one another’s ideas & utter existence it seems. As a believer I am tempted to shrink the current debates down to some moral maxim that places an individual’s behavior at the center of the universe. I.e. “If Trayvon Martin had not been walking down that road that night in a hoody looking suspicious things would not have turned out that way.“ I want to know who is following the rules and who is not. Thus, I want to shout and tell the ugly I see their visage & I find it foul & obnoxious. Wow, there I said it. I am a hater. I can empty my spleen in a heartbeat & name all my enemies by name & worldview. Here is the irony. I get that this horrid condition of my soul is my choice, my chosen posture of soul. Why do I slip into this stridency when I so condemn others for its supposed expression? It is in my best interest in the short term to delineate to those in my inner circle that I see the infidels. I know them & their motives. Unfortunately, anytime I name & hang on others these types of surface identities I am taking God’s creation & renaming one of its truest glories. That is ..the creation of humankind in God’s image.” Wow. Wait a minute. You mean I am talking trash to someone who is a reflection of the very Godhead I so glibly refer to as “on my side?” Is there indeed a side to all this? I wonder if there is a deeper air we breathe when we seek the atmosphere of the Kingdom? Coleridge said, “the medium, by which spirits understand each other, is not the surrounding air, but the freedom which they posses in common.” I wonder if the very thing I am to offer “my enemies” is the freedom to be wrong….& the freedom to be right? We all might want to read E.F. Schumacher’s stellar work “A Guide for the Perplexed” as part of our devotionals this year. A radical Catholic economist, Schumacher was part apologetic preacher & professor and part activist. Along with great thinkers like G.K Chesterton (distributivism)and radical activists like Dorothy Day (another Catholic by the way), Schumacher offered a way of being and living that certainly defied the binary thinking of bad science & economic theory going even as far as critiquing the very atmosphere of 20th century modernism. In 1957, Schumacher argued in one of his talks (The Insufficiency of Liberalism) that we are mired in an attempt to offer a very tribal and nation state type of religious experience to a much more complex world. But it was clear to Schumacher that liberalism had offered a highly limiting theoretical platform for discerning truth & changing culture as well. Instrumental logic for Schumacher tends to discount man’s ultimate aim and purpose. It is as if all of life can be shrunk to some kind of equation. But, if higher obligations are indeed part of the human experience, the Machiavellianism in politics would never bring about solutions we need to offer hope to the world. For Schumacher, we learn and grow & listen and learn to help us clarify the ideas through which we think. That is right. Read it again. We learn, listen, collaborate, create & ponder so we can better identity the ideas through which we think. Kind of like Steven Hawking. We need to help to learn how to speak through the Matrix by understanding what ideas are animating our voices. For Schumacher, we don’ merely think ideas, we think through ideas. Knowing the metaphors & the very lexicon of a culture allows us to discover why we talk the way we do & why certain conundrums are impossible to solve given the current form of dialogue & communication. The current stridency of dialogue heard on the 24/7 news punditry world is due, in part, to an inept binary thinking construct that does not allow for nuance, subtlety, complexity ort even suffering to be part of the solution. In truth, it does not allow for humans to be humans. It wants logical machines. What is my point? For Schumacher scientific positivism would never touch the intentions and deepest inclinations of the human heart. Science, provability studies, assumptions of the veracity of data, etc.…all tend to empower what he referred to as convergent thinking. Convergent thinking tends to make us all reductionists. We want to shrink all of life, matter, soul, & being into easy quantifiable and discernable equation or moral maxims. Doesn’t work. Why? Problem solving strategies that are built on such elaborate systems tend to dismiss & overlook the actual world. The actual world is complex and full of interdependent realties. If life were merely a matter of adding up numbers or doing some kind of cost analysis on the soul, then mathematical analysis would prevail. Bu it has not & is not prevailing. It does, however, cause many in politics to have this overly simplistic cause and effect form of rationally that it superposes over social and spiritual problems. Unfortunately, problems that come from the real world do not submit themselves to such reductionism. They require divergent thinking or jamming if I continue the music metaphor. When dealing with “freedom & order” as we are with gun control & the NSA & governmental intrusion into our digital lives, we find that we are trying over and over again to solve these problems through the current rhetorical offering as displayed by he 24/7 news cycle. Bu it is not yielding anything more than divisiveness & confusion if not outright cynicism that will lead to nihilism. Divergent thinking, coined by J.P Guilford, a psychiatrist well known for his research on creativity posited that a prime component of creativity is the capacity to arrive at unique and original solutions by considering problems in terms of multiple solutions. Convergent thinking narrows all options to one solution: it is orderly, step-by-step, and logical. Example…Cruz…”Shut down the government to kill Obama’s ill-advised health care law.” This kind of divergent thinking unfortunately always empowers & appropriates opposites. For Cruz or Pelosi, it is either “shut it down” or “keep the bill as is.” Let’s go back to the musical metaphor for a moment. If one stays in this oppositional state of idea generation & exchange very long & it is like one band member playing a blues riff while another band mate plays some kind of extended jazz voicing. Kind of like BB King meets Keith Jarrett. It just doesn’t sound right. Why? They are not listening nor are they imagining a new song emerging via the musical conversation, one in which they both can follow & retain their own musical inclinations. If you have ever been in a band that is attempting to learn or write a song, you generally have some core members who come to the creative process with some natural talent (Nancy Pelosi and Ted Cruz). They come into the creativity session & musical engagement with some firm musical ideas and inclinations. I have produced a few albums in my day (“Why in my day we called em albums!”-sorry Dana Carvey js jumping out at me). Anyway, I would often have to come between seeming opposing forces that felt a song or portion of song should go a certain way & offer up a perspective on the seeming dilemma. If I were to do away with qualitative differences, the song or band would become a mere reflection of one of the members. But, if it was going to be a group effort then qualitative musical difference is what would ultimately make the song or band different…unique. Point in this rant. Much of our seemingly incompatibility is due to inadequate binary thinking. Through this “way of thinking” it appears that many of the problems our world and nation are facing are merely a matter of missing one of the 10 Commandments or not being tolerant, or by offering more freedom or more control. Justice, however, is a different way of knowing my ideas. Am I really up for justice? How does God see justice? Can I actually think that being just is even a viable concept in this “modern” day & age? It is so hard to do is it not? And that is the point of E.F. Schumacher’s book Small is Beautiful. If we would see our arguments more like songs & the processes of assessing & solving more like jamming, we might discover some amazingly powerful & compelling riffs. Listen to the songs of tradition. Listen to the melodies of innovation. Listen to the grooves of the human heart & passion. Play heartily the harmonies of conflict & resolution. Let me see… a name for Pelosi and Cruz’s band. Any takers???
Posted on: Tue, 27 Aug 2013 14:04:56 +0000
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