DECEMBER 21, TUESDAY

I TAKE IT BACK

But in thinking about hypocrisy I am discovering that my confession yesterday to being a hypocrite leaves something out. And what follows is simply my own wrestling with hypocrisy, my own oddball way, so unless you are curious you might as well leave me here and concentrate on dealing with your own hypocrisy, which I am probably not much help with.

It starts, for me, with baptism and being born again although not necessarily in a religious way. Jesus preached and lived being born again. Being born again, in my mind, means leaving the accepted wisdom and traditions and often empty conventions of everyday life and starting over again. Jesus argued that when you give up everything and completely open up to the acceptance of other people, to love, that your life will be transformed. Baptism, being washed clean of the old ways, is symbolic of allowing you to open up fully and to be fully alive. It also makes you very vulnerable, as his crucifixion demonstrates.

To do the things that make me, personally, feel most alive means doing the following things. To be fully alive I need to be open to the intensity of the feminine erotic in paintings, music, photography and dance. But to do this a person needs to first be introduced to these things and then have time and freedom to revel in them. If you are on the edge of losing your job or your house and your identity is threatened you don’t have the time or the inclination to be listening to Mozart. To be open to being fully aware through wondering about your place and the place of others in the world you need to be living comfortably and to have time to wonder, you can’t be working a double shift. To be open to others and the needs of others you can’t be consumed with the need to pay for rent or electricity or medicine. To be able to do work that is satisfying you need education and a healthy economy which is, possibly, a capitalist economy, and possibly not.

To be born again in all of these ways you need first to have the necessities of life and free time to open up to what touches you most deeply. You don’t need to be rich, living simply may save you from being burdened with a huge house and endless possessions, but you do need a room of your own, enough to eat and if you are going to delight in everything an iPad offers you need to be able to afford an iPad or at least have access to one. And if you are going to travel, even travel in a Scott’s Cheap Flights and Airbnb way, you need to have money enough saved to travel this way.

It is not hypocrisy to have time to wonder; it is not hypocrisy to open up to music, art and literature; it is not hypocrisy to have time to listen to and care for others; it is not hypocrisy to be educated and to have a job that is satisfying. These are all things which everyone should have, ways of being fully alive that everyone should enjoy. And giving them up because others can’t afford them or imagine them doesn’t make me more alive. It makes me, any of us. less alive. So the way out is not to give everything to the poor and to be poor and without enthusiasm myself. It is finding a way to have a society in which everyone has the basics and is able to live fully without people being burdened with excess wealth and things. Capitalism is great at production and not so good at distribution, Socialism is good at distribution but not so good at production. So it seems, to this non economist, non political scientist, somewhat naive optimist, that the solution is somewhere in the middle but with absolutely no idea how to get there. But polarization between wide eyed progressives and no, no, no conservatives that leads only to shouting and violence, a recipe for civil war, seems to be no resolution at all.

Was it worth the ten minute digression or not? If not, skip it next time I offer it.