Leaving Anhedonia

Behind the Curtain of Heartwarming Anecdotes

I recently attended a presentation in which the keynote speaker talked about various types of justice and how instructors could use his techniques to be more effective teachers. He used the word “space” too often--well over a hundred times in less than an hour. Moreover, he swore a lot and defended his swearing by saying that research shows that people who swear tend to be more honest. However, I found his gritty vernacular repetitive, off-putting, angry, and overly aggressive.

His presentation had some compelling and heartwarming anecdotes about feeding the hungry, but the bulk of his speech lacked coherence and cohesiveness. Much to my annoyance, he peppered his talk by having us do stretching and breathing exercises as part of “creating a better space.”

In spite of his talent as a passionate and energized speaker, I found his sermon-like presentation to be meandering, angry, repetitive, and prone to New Age quackery. I assume he was paid handsomely. There appears to be a market for these pseudo-spiritual presentations that preach about social justice, but their effectiveness is dubious at best and at their worst, they have the air of a grifter who is fond of emotional manipulation, cliches, and New Age tropes. In sum, his reliance on these cheap rhetorical strategies shows his contempt for the audience.  

Coming to Terms with the “Deacon Blues” Credo

This morning I was reading Peter Wehner’s The Atlantic article “The Moral Universe of Timothy Keller,” described as “one of the most consequential figures in American Christianity,” and I found myself ( in spite of reading many books skeptical of religion, notably books that argued that Paul was a fraud, a mountebank, and a self-serving “adventurer”) to be an evangelist with appeal. Keller seemed smart, decent and experienced in the nuances of religion, a pastor who gave his life in rural and urban communities. He also struck me as someone who after much arduous struggle became grounded and whole in his faith.  

Because one of my stumbling blocks of the Christian faith is the doctrine of eternal hell, I did a Google search: “Timothy Keller eternal hell,” and I came across one of Keller’s essays, “The Importance of Hell” in which Keller gives these following defenses of this controversial doctrine: 

One, Jesus warned us of hell over and over, and he described hell as the greatest catastrophe that could happen. Hell was separation from God’s love, and this separation was our own choosing. In this version of hell, we are not so much judged as we are victims of our own love of sin and our stubborn refusal to repent of our sins. 

Two, Keller asserts that understanding hell helps us understand our dependence on God. To disappear into hell is to stubbornly refuse that such dependence exists.

Three, hell teaches us the psychology of self-feeding blindness and self-feeding evil. The more we turn from God, the worse it gets. Separation from God is not a stagnant condition. It is progressive, or degenerative. 

Four, through hell we can understand the depth of Jesus’ love for us. 

As I read the essay, I felt condemned because in my heart I know I treasure living for myself. To illustrate what I mean by this, I need to refer to a beloved song from my teen years. It is the famous “Deacon Blues” by Steely Dan. I was sixteen when I first heard this song, and like many I was struck my beauty and melancholy of it. And like many, I identified with the sad sack narrator, a lonesome depressive who slithers through the streets in despair but consoles himself with his musical ability. As an amateur pianist, I was smitten with the Deacon Blues Credo: “I can’t make sense of this shitty world, so I’ll just be my own person, live my life with narcissistic indifference to the world’s problems, and glean whatever beauty I can from melancholy, sensuality, self-pity, and any other trinkets life has to offer.” We could categorize the narrator as a Sensual Nihilist, and I would be dishonest if I didn’t admit this orientation has a certain appeal to me. But let us bear in mind that according to a Wall Street Journal interview the writers, the narrator was not a hero of any kind, but a mediocrity imagining himself to be a tormented artist. Secondly, a selfish sensualist who abstains from responsibility will for a time feel like he is being “true to himself” and take comfort in his isolated routine, but over time, I have to imagine this person will rot into a state of depression and confront what Viktor Frankl calls the “existential vacuum.” 

My guess is that the sensual nihilist carves out what feels like his own personal paradise in the beginning, but that over time this paradise degenerates into a kind of hell. 

On a more general level, the idea of hell as being an accurate depiction of people’s moral and spiritual dissolution speaks to me. I see people all the time succumb to greed, self-aggrandizement, lust, and other addictions. I see this in myself with my own idolatry: wristwatches, gadgets, status, comfort, etc. 

I must say I have had dreams about my own spiritual dissolution and a withdrawal into my worst behaviors that have painted me as a man isolated inside my own hell. 

I can think of two dreams to be precise. One, which I had about five years ago, showed me looking at myself in the mirror. I barely recognized my face, a joyless, tired visage with lifeless eyes. I get like this after prying myself from my computer screen. 

A second dream, which I had about two years ago, was more explicit: I was in the depths of hell and trying to climb upward along a steep jagged gulley. It was dark, and I was holding a tablet, part primordial stone and part electronic iPad. One side of the tablet was a screen depiction of all my most depraved sins. The other side of the tablet was the face of Christ. If I focused on the Jesus side, I could climb out of the chasm. 

You don’t have to convince me that hell exists as both a metaphor and as a way of describing a damned psychological state.

Where the hell doctrine gets tricky is when we talk about the following:

One. Hell as judgement from God, a sentence imposed upon us against our will.

Two. Hell as eternal with no hope of redemption.

Three. Hell as a place that gives the saved fodder for their entertainment, an infamous notion popularized by Thomas Aquinas. 

Christian Universalists reject such notions of hell. I have read Christian universalist polemics by Bradley Jersak (Her Gates Will Never Be Shut), Sharon L. Baker (Razing Hell), David Bentley (That All Shall be Saved), and Jens Reuter (My Hope in Hell). 

There are two other books that I need to mention that tackle the doctrine of hell. I am somewhat obsessed with them. One is by Jerry L. Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory in which Walls lays out four types of Christian positions on hell:

One. Calvinism, predestination of a limited elect.

Two. Arminianism, free will with a limited number of saved and many who by their free will must go to eternal hell.

Three. “Arminianism Plus,”  a term I give to Jerry Walls' book: free will but the possibility of postmortem conversion and salvation evidencing God's more bountiful love and grace than evidenced in the two forms above. 

Four. Universalism, the belief that God's love makes it inevitable that all will be saved either in this world or the world to come. While Universalism is the most desirable, it is no panacea as many will feel nothing is at stake if they're going to be eventually to be saved "no matter what" and this can lead to problems as we can see in this City of God post about a pastor who ran into huge problems when he preached universalism. 

I went back to a blog post about my reading of Wall’s book, and I wrote the following, including a reference to “Deacon Blues.” I’ll include it here with some added headings:

Hell is a hardened heart, more than a judgment:

Walls suggests that we can acclimate to our self-made hell from our ever-hardening hearts.

Walls rejects the “penal substitutionary” theory of atonement:

Like Talbott, Bradley Jersak, Sharon Baker, and C.S. Lewis, Walls seems to reject the “penal substitutionary” theory of atonement, which I have always found so primitive and odious. As Walls explains it: “This is the view that Christ was punished in our place and thereby satisfied the justice and wrath of God, allowing us to be forgiven.”

The Death on the Cross, for C.S. Lewis, is more of a radical response to the human race’s propensity for digging a hole and going their own way. I’m thinking of the Steely Dan song “Deacon Blues” in which the narrator romanticizes a life of hedonism, drinking, depression, and nihilism( how I love that song).

But to be in the presence of God requires spiritual perfection:

For Lewis, only a perfect person like Christ could repent perfectly and this perfect repentance is what we need to unite with God. We can only go through the perfect surrender to God if God becomes a man.

This is a fascinating if not creative interpretation of the Death on the Cross. I’m sympathetic to it though it doesn’t cancel my understanding that the Cross is about a sacrifice to sacrifice a God who is compelled to burn us forever otherwise. But such imprinting inside me maybe, tragically, a Straw Man-God. I really struggle with this.

The other book that I am obsessed with Dale C. Allison’s Night Comes: Death, Imagination, and The Last Things. Here is a blog post I wrote a few years ago about my reading of Night Comes (new headings):

Struggling with Hell Doctrine

I’ve been afraid of hell since 1979. Part of my struggle, as someone who fears hell, is reconciling the God of unconditional love with the God of eternal wrath. Catholic comedian Stephen Colbert, whom I admire very much, defines hell as eternal separation from God’s unconditional love.

My problem is that I see God doing the separation. He gives us a chance to come to Him in this world, as orthodox Christianity tells us, and when we choose to go our own way, we choose the hell of our own aloneness. In this regard, hell isn’t the eternal blowtorch singing flesh for eternity as depicted in Medieval art, but a form of self-induced solipsism: We’re left alone inside our head, our Kingdom of the Self, and such a kingdom is in a constant state of rot.

In Chapter Five of Dale Allison’s Night Comes, he tackles the question of hell and his struggle to reconcile a belief in hell with a loving God. As I wrote in Part I, Allison is part of a growing number of liberal Christians who have an undying “antipathy” against the doctrine of eternal damnation.

One of the most devastating passages in Chapter 5 is how the hell doctrine upturned the lives of fifteenth-century Japanese converts to Christianity. These pious Japanese Christians, who converted at the hands of Jesuit missionaries, lived the rest of their lives obedient to Christ, but not in a state of joy; rather, they lived in torment and anguish over the belief that their relatives had perished in the bowels of hell. Their despair was recorded by Saint Francis Xavier. As Allison quotes:

“One of the things that most pains and torments these Japanese is, that we teach them that the prison of hell is irrevocably shut so that there is no egress therefrom. For they grieve over the fate of their departed children, of their parents, and relatives, and they often show their grief with their tears. So they ask us if there is any hope, any way to free them by prayer from that eternal misery, and I am obliged to answer that there is absolutely none. Their grief at this affects and torments them wonderfully; they almost pine away with sorrow. But there is this good thing about their trouble—it makes one hope that they will all be the more laborious for their own salvation, lest they, like their forefathers, should be condemned to everlasting punishment. They often ask if God cannot take their fathers out of hell, and why their punishment must never have an end. We gave them a satisfactory answer, but they did not cease to grieve over the misfortune of their relatives, and I can hardly restrain my tears sometimes at seeing men so dear to my heart suffer such intense pain about a thing that is already done with and can never be undone.”

Perhaps more than anything I’ve ever read, these words by St. Francis, quoted in Chapter 5 of Dale Allison’s Night Comes, explain my sorrow and despair at learning about Christianity at 17, converting, and then grieving over my Jewish grandmother who had recently passed away of leukemia. You will read numerous such accounts of Christians in such despair, chronicled in universalist Christian Sharon Baker’s book Razing Hell (reviewed here) or orthodox Christian and comedian Thor Ramsey’s The Most Encouraging Book on Hell Ever. In the latter book, Ramsey explains he doesn’t know if his deceased mother made it to heaven or not, but regardless the doctrine of eternal hell is essential for honoring and glorifying God.

I struggle to find any glory or honor here. Reading about those pious Japanese converts forever grieving, I see no joy in Christianity, no good news. The only purpose in life is to escape hell. All the good things to be said about Christianity get eclipsed by the horrors of perdition, and I share the sadness of those Japanese converts. This sadness is so great in magnitude the only word I can think of is anhedonia, the name in this blog. 

Christ calls us to preach the gospel to the ends of the Earth. In obedience, I could preach, but there would be no joy to share, only sorrow for living in a universe created by the God who does the things described in Xavier Francis’ letter quoted above.

As a college student, I joined Campus Crusade for Christ and shared biblical tracts with other students, but I had no joy in me. I was miserable, and my misery made me feel guilty. I grieved too much like those Japanese converts.

For me, the crisis of faith behind this grieving is the crisis of trust. We are called to trust in God. But this grief is accompanied by intense distrust. As I read on a liberal Christian's blog many months ago, the relationship between a believer and the Hell God is too often like that of an abused child and an abusive parent. One can be submissive in these circumstances, but there is no trust, and there is no love.

What is left is a term I learned reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning when you feel trapped and boxed in. The word is meetzrayim. My biggest prayer is to experience God not as the entity who traps me and boxes me in, not as the oppressor, but as the liberator. I long to experience God the way Viktor Frankl did. As he writes after being liberated from the concentration camp and watching some of his comrades succumb to nihilism:

"One day, a few days after the liberation, I walked through the country past flowering meadows, for miles and miles, toward the market town near the camp. Larks rose to the sky and I could hear their joyous song. There was no one to be seen for miles around; there was nothing but the wide earth and sky and the larks' jubilation and freedom of space. I stopped, looked around, and up to the sky--and then I went down on my knees. At that moment there was very little I knew of myself or of the world--I had but one sentence in mind--always the same: 'I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space.'

How long I knelt there and repeated this sentence memory can no longer recall. But I know that on that day, in that hour, my new life started. Step for step I progressed, until again became a human being."

Frankl does not lament, like those Japanese converts, that his wife and family who perished in the Holocaust were in eternal hell. Such a scenario does not exist in his theology. Frankl experiences God without that noose of hell around his God's neck. 

This is my struggle. This is my impetus for reading books such as the brilliant Night Comes, by Dale Allison.

Timothy Keller’s words challenge us:

But I’m back to Timothy Keller’s defense of hell. The process of “going to hell” is accurate as Jesus says. I’ve seen it in my life. I’ve seen it in my dreams.

The struggle continues. 

How to Overcome Writer's Block

If you approached me for advice on overcoming writer’s block, I would tell you to sit down and brainstorm a list of low-point events, brief incidents that uncovered weaknesses in you that cut you so deep that to mention them causes you to do more than blush. They cause you to cringe with shame and embarrassment and, in extreme cases, fall to your knees, and be resolved to reinvent yourself. I have one such incident on my mind. This would be 1989. I had not quite turned 28 and I had broken up with my girlfriend JP after an agonizing 16 months. She saw earlier in our courtship than I did that we were not a good couple. I was fearful, needy, suffocating, depressive, pessimistic, and incapable of spontaneity. Exasperated, she would often call me out on my weaknesses and I would become defensive and not admit my shortcomings to her or to myself. When after 16 months she told me that being my girlfriend had made her dead inside, I knew that she was right--that I was bad for her, and to my relief, I let go of her and set her free. Even though I lost 20 pounds after the breakup and sunk into a deep depression, I was a good sport afterward and about once a month JP and I would talk on the phone to catch up. We seemed to like each other as friends and I was relieved that I no longer had to make her happy or, more precisely, I no longer had to observe myself make her unhappy. 

At this time, I had moved to the California desert to teach at a university in a relatively small town while she was living with her mother in the San Francisco Bay Area. One afternoon when I called, her mother answered the phone to tell me that JP wasn’t home but the mother politely asked me how I was doing, and here is where I hit my low point: I complained that I was isolated and lacked a circle of friends. JP’s mom resisted my self-pity and told me it was my responsibility to make an effort to make friends: to join bike, camping, and reading clubs. In other words, it was my choice to be lonely or not. I thanked her for her advice and felt sick afterward. I was sick with humiliation for having JP’s mom essentially mother me because I was acting like a helpless child. Receiving friendship advice from my ex-girlfriend’s mother remains one of the most salient low points of my existence and regardless of my achievements, I am always humbled and abased by that chapter of my life. 

The Spectacle of WWE Is Analogous to the Spectacle on Cable News

I’ve been knocking my brain trying to figure out why the Fox News audience is hanging on to the very Fox personalities who have insulted them on tape. Then I found an explanation in Abraham Riesman’s book Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America. American politics is an extension of Vince McMahon’s WWE. The Fox personalities are creating a hippodrome spectacle in which everyone suspends belief and enjoys the spectacle of their favorite politicians as stand-ins in a wrestling match. For them, politics is a form of tribalism and entertainment. The “sin” of Tucker Carlson and others for getting caught telling their true feelings on tape is that they violated the code of kayfabe, the code in wrestling that both your public and private life sustain the persona of your theatrical character. As I read Riesman’s compelling book, I am reminded of a similar subject explored thirty years ago: James Twitchell’s book Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America. 

 

Why I Teach Jim Crow in My College Composition Class

In today’s political polarization and troll culture, there is a popular thought propagated by political opportunists that teaching about racism, slavery, and Jim Crow is in all its forms is Critical Race Theory: radical indoctrination into the wrong-headed belief that America is a hellscape and the CRT minions are obsessed with rubbing our faces in the racist stains of American history. Such a grotesque oversimplification and caricature of what it means to teach racism is a Straw Man, a misrepresentation of the aims of teaching racism in a classroom. For example, for the last decade in my college composition class, we have a unit on Jim Crow. I do not teach Jim Crow to rub people’s faces in exaggerated notions of America’s original sin or to promote some radical political agenda. I teach Jim Crow as a countervailing measure to the revisionist mythologies that replace its real history. Such revisionism leads to immoral acts. For example, the revisionist history of The Lost Cause, which outlandishly claims slavery was a good thing, results in over 200 public schools being named after America's worst racist Jefferson Davis, and today revisionism has caused millions of Americans to praise the criminals involved with the January 6 Insurrection as "American Patriots." I teach Jim Crow because the racist ideas that fueled Jim Crow are alive today in the form of social media white nationalists who are spreading weaponized misinformation. I teach Jim Crow because Jim Crow gave inspiration and instruction to racists throughout the world, for example, Hitler learned segregation techniques from America’s Confederacy creator Jefferson Davis. Finally, I teach Jim Crow because a moral inventory is essential for society’s moral reform, a process that the post-World War II Germans have successfully done in a form of soul-searching and atonement for the sins of the past, a process they call Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. 

A Defense of My Writing Class

I’ve taught writing at El Camino College in Southern California for nearly thirty years. One of the welcome surprises of my job is that the overwhelming majority of you are kind and affable. This surprises me because you must feel like fish out of water for several reasons. For one, my writing courses are not electives; they’re requirements, so you have to be here the way someone with a speeding ticket is forced to attend traffic school. Secondly, most of you are on some kind of financial aid and work full- or part-time jobs, so you are not exactly showing up to class with a surplus of sleep and free time. A small number of you are international students who often don’t work but have serious challenges with the English language. As a result, you come to class with an understandable amount of anxiety. 

Another factor that makes you feel out of place is that you have spent most of your lives on smartphones. A life of texting, looking at video clips, and reading only writing fragments, never book-length works, makes your brains maladapted to dissecting a nonfiction book, a novel, and a 5,000-word argumentative essay. 

To add to the strain on your brains, you are being asked to learn a brand new language to help you conceptualize argumentation and informed opinions such as ethos, logos, pathos, counterargument, rebuttal, irony, bias, active voice, passive voice, correlation, causation, inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning, and ad hominem. The way a beginning piano student has to learn chords, scales, and arpeggios, you have to learn the basic pillars of logic and argumentation.  

English majors in my composition classes were rare in previous decades. Now with the popularity of STEM majors in our hypercompetitive job market and underpaid teaching careers about as appealing as steak gristle, I don’t get English majors anymore. 

I would be remiss not to mention the cost of education. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, a college education when I attended in 1980 has skyrocketed 173% today. I didn’t live in an age when college debt and living with my parents well into my thirties was a serious possibility. 

And yet in spite of all these hurdles you face, you are for the most part kind, intellectually curious, and eager to learn. In spite of all the doomsday prophets who say America is turning into the movie Idiocracy, you have always been a living rebuttal of that claim.  

Not only are you eager to learn, but you are also as tough as nails. Many of you drive great distances to get to class, work long hours, take care of children, live on a modest income, and claw your way up the economic ladder. Your courage and fortitude humble me. 

But being humble before you is not enough. I feel compelled to persuade you, with the zeal of a hungry vacuum cleaner salesman, why learning the tools to develop informed opinions and credible arguments requires an overall metamorphosis of your personality, a moral core, and a strongly-defined identity that is essential to success and happiness. So indeed, that is precisely what I will do. 

Trying to persuade you that my required writing class is as vital as the oxygen you breathe and likely one of the best things that ever happened to you is not an easy task. There are several challenges I face when presenting such an argument. The first challenge is that of sanctimonious cliches. When people defend writing classes and the humanities in general, they too often rely on lazy cliches: The humanities enrich your soul, make you cultured, make you literate, give you critical thinking skills, and help you find a life purpose. Even if all these cliches are true, they are so overused, pompous, saccharine, self-indulgent, and vague as to be useless. 

The second challenge is the absence of objective measurement. In the sciences, you can objectively show your proficiency in calculus, computer coding, chemistry, biology, and physics. In contrast, in a writing class, we don’t have objective measures for things like “enrichment of the soul,” “meaning,” “purpose,” “literacy,” “linguistic acquisition,” “self-expression,” and “authorial presence.” We can all agree that well-articulated self-expression, literacy, and life purpose are essential and desirable; however, there is disagreement over whether or not college is the place to develop these qualities. There is a sentiment that says, “Find meaning and self-expression in your own free time but don’t waste your time and money in college developing those qualities. College is for real subject matter, and we all know the only real subject matter that counts is STEM.”

This sentiment speaks to the third challenge about my writing class and that is the charge that my writing class is irrelevant. Whereas STEM courses can be tested objectively and result in financially-rewarding careers, humanities courses such as my writing classes are considered at best luxuries for the privileged class and deadends for careers. Many will say, “If you want to improve your writing and grammar, study a few YouTube videos, but meanwhile, take real college courses that will be worth your time and money.”

This sentiment speaks to my fourth challenge: The subtle or flagrant contempt for writing and humanities courses. When students tell people they’re majoring in a humanities subject, they are often looked upon as second-class college students and fakers. “Real students major in STEM. The pretend students major in everything else, and the proof is in the kind of jobs they land after they graduate.”  

This adulation of STEM majors combined with a disdain for humanities majors speaks to my fifth challenge: The notion that studying writing and humanities is not cost-effective. “Why waste your time working on the intangibles of writing when you can focus your energy on the STEM courses that will bring you real money?”

So my writing class appears to have much against it. Champions of the humanities may feebly defend my class with lazy cliches, a lack of objective ways to measure literacy, an inability to prove my course’s relevance, powerlessness in the face of mass disdain for humanities courses in general, and what looks like a failed cost-benefit analysis. But this perception of my writing class as a Loser Course is rooted in ignorance and a superficial grasp of what my writing course truly is. To grasp the essence of my writing class and the very way I teach it, we must look to perhaps the greatest American in American history--Frederick Douglass. By studying the arduous literacy, writing, and oratory journey Douglass embarked upon, we can see that Douglass embodies the kind of person who undergoes a dramatic metamorphosis from his exceptional literacy and intellectual prowess. Even if we don’t come close to attaining the literary genius of Frederick Douglass, we can look to him as the correct path to developing an appropriate orientation and philosophy that life’s conflicts demand. To study the kind of intellect Frederick Douglass became is to understand the benefits of a humanities course such as my writing class. 

Born a slave and forbidden to read and write, Frederick Douglass was a genius who saw that the white man was withholding literacy from him as a weapon to deny him his humanity. He would have none of it. As a child, he taught himself to read and write by studying scraps of discarded newspapers and magazines from trash bins. He was so committed to developing literacy, he preferred to starve, giving his food to poor white children in exchange for reading and writing lessons. Even as a child, he was a living lesson of the principle that it is wiser to enjoy long-term gain over short-term gratification.

Over time, Douglass became the country’s greatest orator, traveled the world, and became an international hero for championing human rights. As a writer, orator, and abolitionist, Douglass lived from the beginning to the end of the 19th century, a span that made him a witness to slavery, Reconstruction, Redemption, and Jim Crow. The forces that would enslave, emasculate, and dehumanize him were from a cesspool of bad ideas. Douglass realized that he had to counteract these malignant forces with the only power he had--language and his power of persuasion. For Frederick Douglass, learning to read and write and to give his communication the highest levels of oratory and rhetoric was not a luxury or an indulgence; it was a matter of life and death, not just for him but for all the oppressed people he represented.  

Part of his resistance to the dark forces of dehumanization was the cultivation of his persona. This cultivation was largely achieved through his use of language. Language is the mother of invention. We read in David W. Blight’s magisterial biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom that as a child hanging out with the master’s son on the plantation, Douglass used his wits and insights to grasp that he could use words to transform himself. In the words of Blight: “In afternoon competitive repartee, the future Douglass may have first experimented with the magic of words and unwittingly wielded the tools by which he would invent his life.” 

Most people sleepwalk through life, but Douglass had no such luxury. He learned at a young age that invention and reinvention were essential to survival and that the bricks of invention were words, language, rhetoric, and argumentation. Word by word, Douglass began to use language to create his persona. 

His cultivated persona was not limited to his linguistic acquisition. He was also photogenic, handsome, and by many accounts the most photographed man of his time. It is also true that Douglass had no illusions about the power of image and he refused to let white people “touch up” his photographs, for fear that they would distort his features to make his visage conform to ugly Jim Crow stereotypes. What’s most true of all is that Douglass knew the power of media long before the age of social media, and he used his language, his strong identity, and his image to create what in today’s parlance is called “a brand.” While the term is too often crassly used, the word brand is an accurate way to describe the maturity we go through by embarking upon an intellectual journey and refining our notion of self the way a machinist uses molten metal to refine steel. 

How important is language when it comes to forming and defining the self? Douglass’ biographer David Blight observed that slaves owned nothing: tools, clothes, beds, not even their own children, but they did own one thing: language. The slaves could create rhythms of speech, certain tonalities in their speaking and singing, and idiosyncratic expressions that belonged to them. Their use of language, poetry, and song became who they were at their very essence. They had nothing else to define them. Frederick Douglass grasped the importance of language as a child and embarked upon an obsessive quest to develop his own and to use it as a sword against the forces of injustice. 

If you admire Frederick Douglass and you think his attributes are worth emulating, then you will be motivated to learn reading and writing to be like him: To have a strong personality, to have strong writing and oratory skills, have a strong moral core that hungers for justice, and a desire to make a lasting impact on this world. 

But let us not have any delusions. Not everyone wants to be like Frederick Douglass. Some people just want to get by and live a provisional, self-insulated existence. They want to make enough money and live a life of fine eating and fine entertainment, what the ancient Romans called a life of bread and circuses. If we want to distract ourselves with tasty morsels and scintillating entertainment, then all we need is enough money to quench those appetites. In that case, we will define our existence by the quality of our consumerism. To devote our lives to consumerism is to eventually become Philistines. 

It is very likely that the Philistine Mindset is in direct opposition to the Frederick Douglass mindset. It is also very likely that the pressures of society to conform to lifestyles that appeal to others so that we are popular and attractive to others will create a gravitational pull to the Philistine Mindset and repel us from the Frederick Douglass Mindset.  

In a writing class like mine, it is not my place to tell you which mindset to embrace. I can only give you the lay of the land, so to speak, define the landscape, and argue that the Frederick Douglass Way is the True Way, but ultimately let you decide which path to take. 

Having said that, I would be less than honest if I didn’t make the case that if you reject the Frederick Douglass mindset, it is most likely that you will choose the alternative--the Philistine’s Mindset. And here I must make a warning: Even if you find materialistic success, if you adopt the Philistine’s Mindset, as most people do, you’ll find that such an orientation will result in misery, self-complacent mediocrity, low self-regard, self-induced bondage, and moral entropy. 

What is so dangerous about the Philistine Mindset? Such a mindset rests on mindless consumerism, which leads to addictive behavior. We eventually become attenuated to the pleasures of consumerism until we become numb. Psychologists call this the “anhedonic response” or the “anhedonic treadmill.” 

A life of consumerism is a life built on short-term gratification. Feeding on confectionary pleasures, we will always be malnourished and hungry, waiting for the next shiny object. 

A life of meaning and struggle, the kind of life embodied by perhaps the greatest American, Frederick Douglass, is a life that looks at the long game, is more mature, more philosophical, and more rooted in language, philosophy, and history. It is the more desirable life, but I can’t force you to believe that. The choice is for you to make. 

The Brawler Vs. the Peacemaker

I tell my college writing students that we achieve an emotional connection with the reader by having a strong tone or voice. This tone or voice is often called a rhetorical style. 

We adopt a writing style the way a musician adopts a musical genre: jazz, classical baroque, rock, pop, bossa nova, hip hop, country, folk, psychedelic, underground, rave, indie dream pop, etc. 

However, if we are beginning writers, the above analogy doesn't work because we don't have expertise in all the writing genres. 

What is the solution? Be yourself. If you don't know who you are as a writer, I suggest you look at two basic writing tones: The Brawler and the Peacemaker. 

The Brawler is dramatic, bold, bombastic, and powerful. They "take no prisoners." The advantages of being a Brawler are that you will be more entertaining and you are more likely to win the readers' attention. Some famous Brawlers over the last several decades are H.L. Mencken, Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, Stanley Crouch, and Molly Ivins. 

However, there are disadvantages. You may come across as pompous and arrogant. Your writing may lack fairness and nuance, and your ego may cause your self-aggrandizement to eclipse clarity and attention to the subject at hand. A Brawler can too often become a needy navel-gazer, a grenade-thrower thirsty for attention. You find that many on Twitter and other social media platforms are attention-addicted Brawlers. Over time, their act wears thin. 

On balance, a disciplined expression of the Brawler can make for effective, entertaining writing. 

The Peacemaker is a writer who is self-possessed, demure, calm, clear-eyed, reasonable, polite, and fairminded. Their security and confidence prevent them from lobbing bombs and grenades at others and this self-confidence gives them quiet power and wins our credibility. 

However, the Peacemakers have their own traps: They can come across as meek, mealy-mouthed, insipid, prevaricating, inscrutable, and cagey. Their calm and reserve can make their arguments come across as weak tea. We may lose patience with the Peacemaker whose politeness strikes us as just plain boring. 

On balance, a writer who combines cogent insights with calm reason and nuance can be a persuasive Peacemaker.  Notable writers of the Peacemaker variety include A.N. Wilson, Hua Hsu, Jill Lepore, and Elizabeth Kolbert. 

Which style is better, the Brawler or the Peacemaker? Neither. What’s important is that your style is an authentic expression of self. Brawlers shouldn’t bend themselves out of shape to be Peacemakers and vice versa. In a world teeming with BS and chicanery, finding your authentic voice will go a long way with the reader. 

 

George Packer Warns Against Being Seduced by the New Fatalism

George Packer has written a wise and instructive essay, “A View of American History That Leads to One Conclusion,” published in The Atlantic. 

He remembers as a child learning that history was “taught as a series of triumphs over wrongs that belonged to the past.” Racism was bad, a sinful stain on America’s past, but racist institutions were abolished as America marched forward. Additionally, America was worthy of exceptionalism with its spread of democracy throughout the world. Its “mistakes” didn’t disqualify America from being the Shining City on a Hill. 

But this story of America’s progress has been replaced with a new narrative, Packer argues, a gloomy narrative mired in fatalism. 

The “golden age of fatalism” is welcomed with the fervor of virtue signaling and self-flagellation. There is a publishing industry devoted to it.

What’s most striking about this type of fatalism is that it “draws a straight line from the past to present.” 

Packer argues that fatalism is a claim against the idea of change. Nothing really changes. The sins of racism persist. Jim Crow lives on in different iterations. America is not a “flawed experiment.” It is an irredeemable hellscape. 

Packer concedes that there are understandable causes of this fatalism: inequality, police brutality, and Trumpist authoritarianism, to name a few. 

What Packer will not concede, though, is the eagerness and zeal that fuels this fatalism, which “crosses from empiricism into metaphysics.” Such zeal compromises the search for truth. Historians search for facts that support their preconceived biases. 

Packer gives us an example of such zealous fatalism in Jefferson Cowie’s book Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power. The book is “a gem of the new fatalism,” and I interpret rebuke in Packer’s praise. The book is a chronicle of white racism and greed from the 19th century to the current day. Packer writes: “Cowie’s theme is how the sacred American creed of freedom serves to justify racial domination.” The very tissue of America is saturated with racial sin to the point that redemption is impossible or if it is, mountains would have to be moved. 

Packer is skeptical of this damning of America. Cowie chose or cherry-picked, the most virulently racist and brutal area on the United States map to rub evil in our faces.  Cowie could have chosen a cosmopolitan or diverse city where there are examples of the American experiment working well, but to do so would be an inconvenient cog thrown into Cowie’s fatalist mythology. 

Packer reminds us that “Politics is a competition between stories--and it’s as politics that the new fatalism leads to a dead end.” Cowie is painting an ugly moral identity to push his fatalist mythology. He wants us to experience shame, but Packer writes: “Shame is a shaky foundation for any project of renewal. You can’t tell someone that he’s made a mess of his life because of his own bad character and then expect him to change.” Quoting the philosopher Richard Rorty, Packer reminds us that we need self-respect for self-improvement. 

But the danger of the new fatalism, Packer argues, is that there is no self-improvement, only hopelessness. The new fatalist writers are earning relevance and fanfare for their gloomy dives into America’s original sin and the price we pay is one of learned helplessness and stagnation.

Packer wisely wants us to go through the slow process of redeeming ourselves from our past sins, not through a masochistic deep diver into fatalism but through “organization and persuasion.” We need to see the tangled web of American history. Packer cites Timothy Shenk, author of Realigners. America is a place of contradictions. There are no easy mythologies that can ascribe America as good or evil. We must neither be cheerleaders for American exceptionalism nor champions of the new fatalism. We must look forward. The new fatalism is a step backward. 

Who Stole My Smiths Poster?

Who Stole My Smiths Poster?

Today I received an email from my twelve-year-old daughter’s teacher in which he is pleading with “no questions asked” to all the parents to get his Spiderman doll, which was recently stolen from his classroom, returned to him. My wife teaches the same level at a different middle school and she gets things stolen in her classroom or there is vandalism like some kid or other putting chewing gum in the pencil sharpener or tearing out pages from the young adult fiction collection. When I receive an email about a stolen Spiderman doll or hear my wife tell some barbaric tale of students defacing her classroom property, I find myself imagining the kind of kid who does these types of acts. What does he look like? What kind of malevolent spirit animates him? How does he treat other people and animals in general? Is he decent in most regards of his life but finds himself becoming an impish fiend when he’s at school? Do people compartmentalize, being good in some roles and evil in others, or does evil have the kind of integrity that makes its evil known in all endeavors? 

 The email about the stolen Spiderman doll reminded me of when I got my Smith’s “How Soon Is Now” poster stolen from the front of my office door at the university in 1990. I was less depressed about the stolen poster and more depressed that a Smiths fan could commit such an act and still nourish himself on the beautiful melancholic music of Morrissey and Johnny Marr. I thought such nourishment required some baseline of morality and learning that my assumption was an erroneous one created a deep injury inside me that of course will never heal and somehow seems appropriate for a Smiths song. 

Over thirty years have passed since my Smiths poster was stolen, and I still find myself asking what became of the thief. Was he a fraudulent Smiths fan who repented of his thievery and in the process became an authentic lover of The Smiths? Was his 1990 thievery an evil seed that grew worse over time and now he rots in some squalid apartment somewhere succumbing to his own moral disintegration? Is he now a successful, well-groomed businessman living a conventional life in the suburbs with both his conscience and memory free of any guilt for having stolen my Smiths poster? 

This last scenario bugs me a lot--the idea that he did something that wounded me and not only did he take something that wasn’t his, but he also left me with an emotional scar while he gets to go on with his life in a state of grace and impunity. 

But that is the nature of evil--hurting others and not caring about it. That I could be so naive as to obsess over this obvious state of affairs speaks to my unreasonable expectations about this world. 

 

A War I Could Not Win

On January 21, 2023, I was sixty-one years old and inside my garage doing my kettlebell workout. I was trying to perform kettlebell exercises with as heavy weight as I could. I figured the more strength and muscle I had, the more I could defy old age. Aging pisses me off. I find it insulting that I’ve been an Olympic Weightlifter and a bodybuilder since my teens and that I’ve relied on muscle-building exercise as a free form of psychotherapy for all these years and soon I’ll either have to cut down or stop altogether. Entering my sixties threatens my hold on this happy workout arrangement I’ve enjoyed for decades. I work out and I feel good. That’s the deal. I don’t work out and I fall into a rabbit hole of anxiety and depression. That’s part of the deal, too. In other words, weightlifting of some sort has been my therapist and faithful companion all these years. You take away my therapist and where does that leave me? And who or what is going to take away my faithful companion? Old age. That’s why I have to fight it by putting myself in the garage to hit the kettlebells rain or shine. 

I was in the garage that winter morning. It was a cool sixty degrees, but the workout had heated me up. I was assessing my condition. My back, knees, and shoulders felt good. I was waging war with old age. It’s a stupid war on my part because I know old age is going to win, but I’m both stubborn and stupid. I’m so dumb to think I can win the battle against age through sheer will and effort. 

In this spirit of kicking old age in the balls, I was doing deep-knee goblet squats with an eighty-pound kettlebell. My thighs, quads, glutes, and knees felt strong. I figured I’d get at least twenty reps, but coming up I felt my inguinal abdominal area in my lower left side cave in. I collapsed to the mat and knew I was in trouble. I was thinking I had a hernia or had torn a muscle. I remember professional athletes with torn groins and abdominals missing entire seasons. I had attempted to kick old age in the balls, but instead, the opposite had happened; old age had kicked me in the balls and I was writhing on the workout mat in intense abdominal pain. 

The rest of the day I obsessed over my pain, popped Motrin, and worried that just getting up from the couch would cause my guts to spill out of my torn muscles. 

The next day I awoke to helicopters flying overhead. The seventy-two-year-old person being pursued by police for the mass killing in Monterey Park dance studio was inside his van about two blocks from my home. With helicopters roaring overhead and my abdominal wall hurting, I couldn’t sit around the house. I called Urgent Care and drove to Harbor City Kaiser to get an ultrasound. The good news is that it was negative. The bad news is that I had elevated blood pressure. I am now forbidden to eat kimchi and turkey jerky. And my kettlebell workouts are lighter and no longer performed every day. I alternate my kettlebell days with yoga. I lost the war against old age, but I’m smarter today than I was less than two weeks ago.