Wanted to see what y'all think of this one. I recommend reading the last paragraph first, since that's almost certainly their thesis statement.
…philosophy must re-establish the original truth of the mythological nature of human consciousness. Even philosophy freely recognizes that the world is knowable only mythologically. Plato considered myth the highest form of knowledge.
–Nicolai Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act
…you must know, my dear ones, that each of us is undoubtedly guilty on behalf of all and for all on earth, not only because of the common guilt of the world, but personally, each one of us, for all people and for each person on this earth. This knowledge is the crown of the monk’s path and of every man’s path on earth…for all men on earth ought to be [like monks]. Only then will our hearts be moved to a love that is infinite, universal and that knows no satiety.
– The elder Zosima, in Dosteyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
Boston had….made two martyrs. Mystic beings with supernatural virtues, destined to become a legend; to expand like the genii released from the bottle, until they spread over the sky…No more would Boston be the place of the tea-party and Bunker Hill; Boston would be the place where Sacco and Vanzetti were put to death.
–Upton Sinclair, Boston: A Documentary Novel
It’s safe for me to say I spend more time thinking on the subject of religion than any liberals I know, most of whom are not religious, but also I include religious liberals. An odd preoccupation, because there is absolutely nobody to discuss it with philosophically! I think of religion especially in relation to the ongoing multi-faceted horrific crises facing us now – i.e. Gaza, Venezuela, ICE, climate disaster, that are certainly moral matters. These subjects, too, seem to have passed beyond the discussable. Perhaps, as Chris Hedges writes, self-delusions, such as – “Maybe they don’t mean it. Maybe they are incompetent. Maybe the courts will save us. Maybe the next elections will end this nightmare… Maybe the worst is over, etc. – prevent us from resisting while the gallows are being constructed in front of us.”
What we can do in the face of catastrophe is exactly why I think about religion so much. Religion for me is about how to keep my mind connected with my heart, which is to say how to keep it clear of the bamboozlement that is the very air we breathe in liberal reality. It seems to me, the more peoples’ history I imbibe – something I’m able to do regularly now that we have a young socialist-leaning teacher holding Peoples’ Classrooms at our arts space in Utica – the most dangerous thing one can be, no matter what era of history you are in, is either the underclass, or, one who takes up seriously being on the side of the underclass, that is, being on the side of society’s most vulnerable which usually means the side of those without a voice. Today the definition of most vulnerable surely must include children, especially infants – this alone is a formidable task, considering how caring for infants requires constant holding, feeding, reassurance of perfect safety and unconditional love, behaviors that do not agree with the lives of separate striving called for in bourgeois reality. It has to be expanded also to old people, who we now take care of by proxy in nursing homes. And to animals and to the earth, its soil and water, entities we have done a terrible job defending.
Most importantly, and here is where religion comes in, the definition of the most vulnerable must be extended to defending the soul’s real existence, a constant effort to stay with the knowing of the heart against the constant wheedling allurement of bamboozling, lying bourgeois reality. This effort, while by no means arguing against socialism, has to go beyond a socialist-type critique; it has to go “beyond history” for the soul also has no voice unless I give it one by means of creative expression.
When I use the word anarchism, a word the very utterance of which can feel dangerous, what I mean is this obligation of defending the most vulnerable. Given my definition – with which the most famous anarchists, from Jesus to Emma Goldman to Bartolomeo Vanzetti would not disagree – can we not see it would take a religious conviction to go all the way with it? To me the word is not separable from religion, or what religion has to be in this world. However, use ofthe word anarchism does not tell me what kind of work I should be doing, other than my writing, or what the world is that I want, as the socialists can do so well. For me, anarchism is precisely a location outside of bourgeois consumerist 24-7 screen-fascinated reality that allows the distinct values of the heart to come into focus. The location is imagination, and for this one must have a creative work.
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How difficult the path can be to authentic religious experience for one raised in liberal America can be seen in my own story. My lifelong attraction, I guess you could say to God propelled most of my major “career”-type decisions, which, looking at them now, were clearly more “anti-career,” more like choices as to what I can do that is not like a career! This secret God-yearning led me to philosophy, to Unitarianism, and to divinity school, in none of which places, as I’ve written elsewhere, could God be found. When I did eventually find God for myself directly, by means of psycho-spiritual crisis, the discovery was of a capacity I’d had all along, within myself! It is this compelling truth of all-connected, attainable only personally and experientially, that can change the person raised in liberal bourgeois society such that no matter her specific life circumstances, she, in grateful obedience, forever defends that grace-inspired truth that exists and is expressed in vulnerability, in that which must be defended! That is, she is in consciousness forever anarchist.
This God realization included the discovery that to maintain that contact, my own creativity was demanded of me. That is – that I must express myself was the deal made between God and me that allowed and still allows me to sneak past my vigilant and jealous ego . Ever since through my writing I have practiced something – I was never sure what it was. Somewhere between essay and sermon, Emerson and James Baldwin. Only recently I learned to call what I do, thanks to philosopher-theologian-mystic Nicolas Berdyaev, “creative philosophy.” My writing is unauthorized except by my soul. It is practiced religiously out of the primary obligation to protect the most vulnerable, which is my soul that needs me to be the vehicle of its expression. This is why it is painful not to follow its urging; as poet Mary Oliver writes, “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” But one must think about it carefully as one moves into dangerous opposition to the existing power arrangements of Empire which depend upon oppressing and exploiting the most vulnerable.
Like other great prophetic outsider voices, Berdyaev got into trouble for his views. In his case, he was twice imprisoned, once for his Marxism and then by the Bolsheviks for his religious philosophy, and finally exiled to France. Dostoyevsky, too, who was Berdyaev’s great inspiration, faced such a life/death turning point; miraculously reprieved by the tsar at the very moment of execution for revolutionary activities . The point to be made out of this is the life changing opportunity that comes with catastrophe and only with catastrophe, as it came for me. Not to wish for it, but the fact that as theologian James Cone wrote in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, when the future is closed off for people as it was for black people by slavery and lynching, a meaning must be found beyond history. This alone gives the people faced with catastrophe the strength to keep up struggle this-worldly world. Further he writes “one has to have a powerful religious imagination to discover life in death and hope in tragedy.”
I have just fished reading the book Boston, by Upton Sinclair, a fictionalized documentary about the two famous anarchists who were imprisoned and executed by the state of Massachusetts based upon patently false charges. During his long incarceration, Vanzetti, an atheist, had believed that the millions of workers for whom he had labored devotedly would rise up by the millions in his defense. But by the time of his arrest and conviction, American workers were not so radical, not so interested in the call to act upon an injury to one is injury to all, but chose rather to hope for the best working through the existing labor unions. The workers were not the ones who joined the clamor and the protests and got their heads bashed by the police to have Sacco and Vanzetti released. The largest clamor came from artists and intellectuals, New York socialists and radicals, who took up the cause which became worldwide.
Vanzetti considered his life had been a success: “it is victory like we never have dream.” That is, in martyrdom, “speaking to all the world,” how many “poor wops” could say the same? their names would be written across the sky forever. In the execution chamber, the innocent man Vanzetti shook hands with everyone and forgave his executioners.
I believe the message from events like this, even though this did not become the event Boston became known for, as Sinclair predicted, was sent far and wide to be embedded deeply in the consciousness of the people: be afraid; stay away from any threat to the power status quo which in this country is capitalism. The Salem witch trials sent a similar message, a point that was made in the moving eulogy given at the Sacco and Vanzetti funeral by a woman named Mary Donovan. Don’t be weird, was that message. This, I say, is why opposition now must come from deep, authentic, religious creativity.
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The 1960’s, the period of my early adult years, brought a great challenge to capitalist and puritanist orthodoxy. For a brief time it was safe to be anti-war, anti-capitalist, civil rights sit-down activists, and downright weird, long hair, bare feet, dirt, beads, poetry, and all. A major cause for the wonderful emergence of that culture-making energy was that so many people had taken hallucinogens and so had personally experienced the great inclusive, ecstatic divine reality and were altered by it. Many became Jesus freaks because they’d had the same visionary experience as he, and like him were peace and love advocates. But Jesus was also an anarchist; that is, he was so uncompromisignly on the side of the underclass that he was executed for it, like Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
So then, what happened to that brief not-quite-anarchist uprising of spirit? I would say that the establishment reestablished itself with a vengeance. People got careers. Became successful. Some became trillionnaires. War and militarism once again normalized. Wealth inequality, destruction of the environment, racism, all back. Gone was the anarchist sensibility of not only being on the side of the underclass but being that underclass in counterculture, being weird outsiders because there lay the only freedom from capitalist bourgeois society.
As someone said about us in its early years, our Cafe was what happens when “two old hippies start a coffeeshop.” It did not owe allegiance to capitalist principles, but to the spirit of creativity and art. This is why people trusted it, loved it and why they miss it still today. Its message to people was from that inclusive reality in which all are connected, all need each other, the underclass not discardables because we are the underclass in our creative work. This is a message that speaks to peoples’ souls, as Jesus’s message did, as Vanzetti’s message did. The Cafe is gone, but the next door space called The Other Side, set apart as a space for art, art-making and celebration of the humanities tradition, still exists. As our hosting of Peoples’ Classrooms attests, “creative anarchism” makes us not unafraid, but less dictated to by fear than other left-leaning organizations here; its standard of truth is the heart.
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What happened to America after that burst of love energy in the 1960’s was, besides the rightwing backlash, the abortion of the spiritual revolution. After so much relativization of religious values, there could be no culture rebirth – culture needs “cult.” It is reborn in individuals, not collectively. The Hippie movement was fun, being morally superior was exhilarating, but there was work left for individuals to do if they were to hold steadfastly to that discovered truth of all-connected, inclusive love. In one way of saying it, people had to make their inward way to mythic truth, i.e., to those true energies embodied in stories that are beyond history, energies potential in each soul, and which cannot be bypassed in order to be more pleasing to everybody.
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Reading The Brothers Karamazov for the second time with our book club comes at a good time as I wrestle with my post-Cafe reality. Very far from being in Dostoyevsky’s exalted league, I, like him, wrestle in my writing with matters of the soul of humankind which is that which connects us anarchistically to all others. Living somewhat monkishly in this decaying urban milieu I feel intuitively the upward, progressive, free lifestyle sanctioned in bourgeois reality is the opposite of what is needed for renewal of spiritual energy and rebirth of culture.
Some final somewhat random thoughts: Religion without anarchism is a sect. Anarchism without poetry is heartless. Secularism is a forced starvation of the human soul. Separated from cult, culture is a stagnation; popular culture cannot substitute for making your own Eternity. Religion is art-making religiously.
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