C.G. Jung Institute of Santa Fe
Here we are in the fall again, and the only thing that seems certain is that
the sun sets further south along the rim of the Jemez, already the
geese are flying, staying only a few days at the high lakes, moving
with the seasons as they have done for millennia. Autumn is regular,
more or less, but that is pretty much the end of regularity. Kennedy,
the one man in the Senate who knew his mind, absolutely, is dead;
pundits write off Obama as too little of this and too much of that,
health care reform is uncertain; Pakistan is nearly as divided as
Afghanistan, pinned by ancient Islam like a butterfly to the wall of
its feudal past. Israel, which was awarded its homeland by a
self-conscious and guilty Europe is holding onto territory taken by
force and is locked into a title search tracing back nearly 3,000
years. Here at home the jobless are wallowing in the collapse of middle
class expectations, and the rich are seeking protection behind slogans
of outrage against socialism. Government gives to the wealthy secure
patents, secures their local advantage with tariff barriers, protects
their trade secrets, grants tax credits for drilling and subsidies for
start ups, creates limited liability corporations to insulate them from
failure, but this does not keep those who enjoy these protections from
attacking government that might protect the health, education and jobs
for those who are not rich. Government assistance to the poor is
socialism they say while government assistance to the rich is
capitalism.
Hypocrisy was the point of attack for Jesus. “You are like whitened
sepulchers!” he cried. I love the image. The Pharisees were like faded
old sarcophagi, whitened in the sun, as if the old dogma could provide
the inspiration for a new day.
Hypocrisy is perhaps the cardinal sin and it dogs us still. Television
advertises with tongue in cheek that it will make us sexually
satisfied, prominent, safe and into real Americans. A million songs on
our I-pods, our gateway to the internet and to all kinds of free
speech, celebrate violence and rage far more than beauty and truth.
This is a kind of social and intellectual chaos that the formulations
of our past seem ill equipped to explain. A theory, if we had one,
should sort out all these elements, organize them and make sense of
them. But no scientific theory can today explain the rage in the
Republicans in congress against social change, or greed in our banks,
or despair in our songs, or failure in our marriages, or drop outs
above 45% at Santa Fe High. We are in a stage in the evolution of our
story when we seem to lurch from pillar to post, for war and against
war; for any measures including torture, and for the rule of law to
abolish torture; for a black man for president but only if he lifts the
white man’s burdens, and since he does not, then for someone else who
will destroy government altogether.
In a profound sense, perhaps more than at any time in history, this
generation lacks ideological orientation. Chaos does that, of course.
We are overwhelmed with information and unable to organize it; deluged
with opinion and unable to plumb the depths of it; heartsick at a
thousand losses and sufferings and unable to pray. We are uncertain in
which direction Mecca may lie.
And what are the stories upon which we have relied, in the past, to
make sense of all this, to point us toward a god or a truth or the rib
structure of what is, upon which we could place our faith?
Let us imagine that the story of western civilization begins with the
principle of glorious power and that power alone establishes right:
right with one’s fellows and right with God. This would be the
principle organizing Sumarians, Egyptians, Hittites and Mycenaeans in
the second millennium BC that we now call pre-history. It would be the
principle of patriarchal survival at the foundation of western culture.
Parenthetically, lest one think that that principle is extinct, know
that if you were to go tomorrow to a local playground in Armenia or
Azerbaijan, Georgia or Kazakhstan, and watch children play together on
a basketball court you would see that it is accepted and parentally
approved that older children systematically, as a matter of course,
drive younger children from the game ; the stronger ones are expected
to rip the ball away from the hands of the weaker ones. There is no,
“Oh, let little Arzu have a chance.” Power is still the principle of
survival on the children’s playground and one cannot be surprised when
it dominates political leadership of those countries. The attitude
does not change when ministers are negotiating.
So let us go back to the beginning of this.
Organization of societies in the second millennium BC would have
depended upon force, violence, dominance and clan hierarchy. Tribal
leaders, Hittite kings, Greek heroes, would promote subordination of
the weak, of women and female irrationality, and control of property
would be achieved through the control of women’s sexuality. Patriarchy
required that there be no breeding outside the patriarchal line. To
keep kings and princes in power the heroes of the time would be
warriors and pirates, like Achilles and Odysseus who go off to Troy to
insure the sexual restraint of the beautiful queen Helen. For Achilles
and Odysseus, violence, lying to strangers, and patriarchal loyalty all
rank above rationality, competence in trade, peace making, or—Lord help
us—fairness or equality.
If you try to imagine what you know about Afghanistan today, you can
imagine these values in a package. Afghan society has not changed much
in the last four thousand years. If you imagine the 13th century BC
society of the Mycenaeans described in Homer’s Odyssey, you will have
the earliest western literature that describes the same thing. When
Odysseus kills the 11 servant girls at the end of his story, he is
fulfilling the needs of clan, murdering the last of the sexually active
women, and promoting Penelope’s chastity without which patriarchy
cannot survive. Homer sets all this down as an instruction for Greek
culture and, as it turns out, the rest of the western world for nearly
3000 years. Lie to strangers, kill when useful, dominate the weak and
survive.
These would have been the ordinary values throughout the patriarchal
world from Sumaria and Babylon, to Egypt, to the Hittites and Assyrians
and Persians and they would persist down to Rome and the Caesars and
even down into feudal times. In some places, positioned away and
distant the trade routes, these values linger into modern times. Today,
society in both Afghanistan and Russia can be explained substantially
by the degree to which they lay off the historic trade routes.
The key fact to note is that when trade began to expand in the
Mediterranean in the middle of the second century BC, three contrary
impulses were awakened and grew to gradually and increasingly contest
the Homeric values.
The first of these contrary impulses was Judaism with its insistence on
one God, meaning (at least) a common god for strangers as well as
Israelites, and justice, meaning a common justice for those inside and
outside the tribes. This is a breakthrough of gigantic proportion.
Justice and truth telling to strangers is new; Achilles and Odysseus
would have considered it childlike, naive. But honesty is foundational
to trade and without truth in commercial transactions trade contracts
are unreliable, unenforceable, and trade slows to a halt. Corruption
becomes the norm. Of all the great contributions to western culture,
none is more significant than this Hebrew attention to justice for the
stranger trader as well as within the family.
The second great modifier to the original principle was unexpected,
arising out of Greek civilization: it was the claim to discover what is
rational and true through the use of the mind. Rationality, the search
for atoms, the search for geometry, or the science of the anatomy, or
the true, the good and the beautiful, did not always benefit clan, or
power. Truth and beauty can be quite corrosive of power. Socrates gave
his life because of that conflict between his search and the
requirements of those men who ruled Athens.
The third great modifier, challenging the power of patriarchal clans
and the effectiveness of Homeric violence, was the Jesus teaching of
compassion for the underdog, the outsider, the non-clan member, and by
his time, the non-elite in the Jewish hierarchy. This was as great a
challenge to the power of kings as had been the idea of justice. Power
and right had always been bound together in the codes of Hammurabi of
1728 BC and in the world of Homer, where Agamemnon gets the girl, and
the girl has no say. Power was the ability to determine right by the
wave of the sword and there was no right outside of power. So it was
said until Jewish justice, and then Christian compassion.
Ever since, running through the struggles for supremacy in the West,
century after century, these themes have been in conflict. When
Alexander Hamilton railed against democracy in the constitutional
debates of 1789 and Thomas Jefferson fought for the First Ten
Amendments to the Constitution to give rights to men without property,
the right to be free from search and seizure to people without
property, the right to trial by jury, the right to habeas corpus, these
ancient themes were in direct conflict. Hamilton argued for a permanent
place in government for the wealthy. Jefferson argued for a place for
those outside the powerful and established propertied aristocracy.
When Susan B. Anthony argued for women’s rights in the 19th century,
she was arguing against the patriarchal code of Odysseus, for justice,
with the just mind of the Hebrew prophets, and when Florence
Nightingale argued that women should be allowed to enter the field of
medicine she was countering those other parts of the Bible and of Greek
philosophy that held women as beings of unlimited sexual passion,
irrational and uncontrollable except by force. She was arguing for the
part of the Bible that lauded justice and that women could be rational,
could be compassionate at the same time. It was a revolutionary thought
for which many women before her had given their lives. Susan B.
Anthony did not lose her life or her freedom in part because of
Jefferson’s demand for free speech in the First Amendment when he won
that battle against Hamilton.
In our times, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, all worked
to reestablish the permanent place for the wealthy, or the oligarchs of
great and magnificent wealth, the modern day equivalents of Agamemnon,
or Caesar or the English aristocracy. The weak response from the
today’s left has shown the degree to which the dominant feudal, Homeric
values are creeping back into even this culture, even this one that
attempted to embody outright the dissent of ancient Hebraic codes and
Christian compassion.
Today, then, these four themes are still in conflict. And, to add to
the confusion, not one of these ancient themes organizes our chaos or
gives us a solution to today’s needs. Neither justice, nor rationality,
nor compassion, nor power clears the way, in religious terms, on the
long road to see God.
In secular terms, the old stories do not resolve the chaos of today’s daily lives.
It used to be, in my younger years practicing law, venturing into
politics and civil rights, lawyering and suing, negotiating with the
Soviets, when I lay sleeping, my dreams were often dreams of warfare. I
would lie behind a parapet and hold a rifle, sighting in on an
advancing enemy hoard. I dreamt those dreams most uncomfortably and
often awoke drenched in sweat and afraid. Looking back, it is not hard
to see the connection between those dreams and my daily life,
especially during the years in court.
Later on in life, however, living through the mindless self-interest
promoted by Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, and Bill Clinton, feeling as if
our country were adrift, my dreams have changed. Now the most recurrent
dream is of myself in some foreign city, on the way to an assembly or
an airport, being temporarily diverted from the way by some unexpected
event and then, knowing the way back, knowing the landmarks, finding
none of them to be where I thought they should be. I turn left,
remembering the corner, and the ticket counter is not where it should
be. Or I return for my suitcase and it is no longer there.
What I knew to be true before is no longer true and I have lost my
way. Night after night, this will be the dream, in one form or another.
I tell you this because I think it has profound implications for not only me, but perhaps also for our culture.
No hunger is greater, I believe, no need in the human is greater, no
pull toward sexual fulfillment, or a life of meaning, or a life of
material prosperity, or great power, or fame, none of these is greater
than our desire for orientation.
Above all, we have a need to know which way we are going. We don’t mind
being poor so much if we know we are on the road to prosperity. We
don’t mind being without meaning if we think we are doing the things
that take us toward meaning. We don’t hunger for love more than we
hunger to know how to get it, what we must do, or that is, to find our
road map to happiness.
That is where story comes in. The story is the roadmap.
The awful dream is that the road map is not working; things are not
where they are supposed to be. We turn the corner and the ticket office
is not there; the flight is not leaving. The president is not leading;
the congress is not legislating.
The American psyche is now dealing with this nightmare.
I have a friend who one day gave a lecture at the Unitarian Forum here
in Santa Fe tracing the origins of Israel’s claim to the Holy Land
taking his listeners back to the shards and ruins of the sixth century
BC.. He was creating a story that would be for his co-religionists a
road map to safety. Once later, in a small group in which he and I both
participated he said he was at bottom, personally, deeply worried about
the return, in some form, some day, of the holocaust. Israel’s survival
therefore represented to him the way to insure against that return, and
to make Israel’s claim incontestable he would begin the story with
shards of pottery found in the layers of dust of 2,600 years and
perhaps 500 wars ago.
That is the influence of story. More than any scientific theory; more
than any song; more than any form of government or law, the adhesive of
any culture is the narrative it follows to tell in which direction it
is heading, and why it is going there.
It is what we do; it is what stories do.
When I was negotiating in the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the
Vice President of Armenia explained the justice of the Armenian
position by recounting details of that country’s history beginning with
their resistance to the Romans in 340 AD. That was a lot of centuries
ago and the conversation went on for about three hours. My friend here
in Santa Fe could have gone on for at least three hours about the
history of the Jewish people. Stories explain where we came from and
where we are going to and we all have them.
The Vice President of Azerbaijan’s story began only in about the 18th
century, when the Russians invaded the Turks. Like the Armenian and
Israeli story it was also a narrative of prosecution and
victimization. In that case, the very white empress Katherine the
Great forced the much darker Azeri people into perpetual servitude and
disrespect from which they have not yet recovered. Justice and revenge
are still today smothered somewhere down deep in their unconscious.
Tonight, let us begin our conversation with the premise that stories
are not truths. They are just stories. They are a selection of some
certain set of facts and the neglect of other facts. Until now, it is
true, we have thought as a people that we have survived through the
successes of power and violence, from the wars of Agamemnon, to the
Caesars, to El Cid and Charlemagne to George Patton. But that is a
narrative selecting only some facts and neglecting others. That is a
narrative that neglects the human’s capacity for cooperation; our utter
and complete dependence upon collaboration in science, in medicine, in
education, in building successful businesses; that is neglecting our
natural tendency, day after day, to bind together, to put a common
shoulder to the wheel, to raise the children and build everything from
parks to giant corporations in a common enterprise. We do this because
we have always done this, and it is absolutely necessary because none
of us makes it alone. And we do this much more of the time, every day,
than we do violence, or aggression, or make war. The truer story that
we are now ready to piece together is the hitherto unremarked tale of
our natural and innate capacity to get along. That story has been
underreported, not because it was not there in the facts but, to the
contrary, precisely because it is everywhere in the facts; it is not
newsworthy. It is not newsworthy because it is the dominant story of
every day. It is so ordinary that it does not make the news because it
is not news. But that does not make it less true.
In these last years, that the ancient efforts to ameliorate the violent
or military story by insisting upon justice, rationality, and
compassion has left us a long way from any narrative that in some way
also encompasses beauty and truth, fairness and generosity. To fashion
that story we might well begin again, this time to extract from the
centuries in our past not only the wars and brutality but also that
something else, something undeniable if we have eyes to see it, the
ineffable compassion, decency and need to cooperate in us all.
Thank you.