The Nature of Belief

2023

Last May I applied for admission to San Francisco State University’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program. I started in mid-August and completed my first four courses in mid-December.

In 15 weeks I wrote three short stories, a dozen poems, and an evening-length play.

Grades are posted, and I’ve established that I can be a top-notch Creative Writing student. I’m aware that isn’t the same as being a writer.

Along with passion and discipline, writing requires an individual voice, and that requires (for me, anyway) some deep digging into my own psyche—a search for self, for authenticity.

I spent the holiday with my kid and her mom, road tripping in California, and during that time I read The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate (just out late last year). I’ve been helped by much of what he has to say. In particular I’ve benefitted particularly from his framework posing a tension, in the course of childhood development, between attachment and authenticity—and how this plays out throughout our lives when the Self becomes lost or buried as we struggle to ensure our safety and survival.

Nancy

It’s hard to express how much I admire Nancy Pelosi in this moment.

Her supporters—Democrats—have been divided and unreliable, summer soldiers, the kind of allies that are quick with a savage criticism, and who were often clueless about her accomplishments and what it took to achieve them.

Her detractors—Republicans—are fascists so extreme that, when one of them invaded her home to attack her, and maimed her husband, the others, united in their hatred (and being, as Republicans, quite uniform in personal character and ethics) could not find it in themselves to convincingly condemn the act.

So I regard Ms. Pelosi from that perspective, as a person who found herself called to service, and served, and did so almost solely by drawing on personal strength and commitment. The most public of public figures, she stood alone in the arena, and the least the rest of us can do is to credit her accomplishments fairly.

I will see a doctor when I need to, and she deserves my gratitude for that, as she does for getting me and all of us the aid we needed to survive the pandemic. And for renewing our nation’s infrastructure over the next decade. And for turning the tide in the effort to save the planet from climate disaster.

Go ahead, condition my praise, and criticize. Just take a moment to consider how that reflects on you, rather than her.

November 17, 2022 by dan The Nature of Belief 0

Divides and Illusions

Chris Ware’s drawing for the cover of the July 4 edition of the New Yorker promotes a illusory view of our politics. However, the drawing’s title shows the truth–perhaps unwittingly.

The drawing would have it that we are two tribes or subcultures, with our different slogans and clashing preferences in front-yard landscaping. This is illusion.

Consider that Black people, nationally, oppose Republican policies and Republican leaders by about 10 to 1. The divide is not among Americans generally, but among white Americans. The divide is not about slogans or landscaping; it is about whether Black people should have political power.

The drawing’s title, “House Divided” reveals the truth. The reference is to Lincoln:

“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”

Indeed. In the coming months or years, we become a multiracial democracy–or regress into an authoritarian state based on white supremacy. That is the divide represented, and hidden, in the drawing.

July 13, 2022 by dan The Nature of Belief 0

Love and Work

I picked up Zoe from her day camp. She could have walked, but I was feeling kind of parental after taking her to a doctor’s appointment this morning, and so when I dropped her off, I agreed I’d be there at the end of her day.

On the way back home, she was showing me various fashion looks on her phone. I parked in the driveway, and we were having a nice conversation, but soon I noticed I had a work email and another email about planning an upcoming trip. Then I got antsy and felt I needed to get back to what I felt I needed to be doing.

She wasn’t feeling what I was feeling, and kept talking and not getting out the car, the way teenagers do, and finally I told her: Look, I have responsibilities, and you’re keeping me from getting to what I need to do.

As I was headed inside, I was musing about what Freud said, or might have said, about love and work being the cornerstone of our humanness, and it occurred to me: The man probably didn’t do much caregiving. And if he had, our whole understanding of human psychology might be different.

Because our humanness is really about taking care of babies and old people, and this applies to most of humanity over its entire history–with the notable exception of well-to-do men in Freud’s circumstances.

Caregiving, which has been the cornerstone of my own developing humanness, has its own satisfactions and frustrations, and these are different from Love (in the genital sense I think Freud was referring to, even if the quote itself is apocryphal).

And, as I found today, as I have found many times before, caregiving is antithetical to Work.

July 13, 2022 by dan Personal Status The Nature of Belief 0

Nine Words in Warsaw

Biden, at the end of his speech in Warsaw: “For god’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

It was so transgressive. There are very good reasons to avoid calling for regime change in another country—reasons like respecting national sovereignty, like avoiding WWIII, like not stirring up recollections of how the U.S. habitually, over its entire history, has dictated to other peoples who should be running their affairs.

But Biden is a master of transgressive speech, and I admire when he uses it.

Remember when passing the Affordable Care Act was a Big Fuckin’ Deal? Biden’s whispered “gaffe” was “accidentally” picked up by the microphones. His F-bomb moved the headlines about the event to above the fold and put then-VP Biden at the center of the news. A very effective “gaffe” indeed.

Biden knows state protocol, and he knows history, and there is no way he didn’t get the import and significance of what he said yesterday in the very moment he was saying it.

So it was deliberate, and to what intended effect?

Well, what’s the point of being transgressive?

One, in attracts attention.

Two, it is a way of protesting business as usual. In this case, it is a way of saying that speechifying and diplomacy and supplying humanitarian aid and even supplying weapons are all together not enough, and we all know it.

Three, it’s doing a threatening dance, and I don’t mean that in a bad sense—this is high-stakes communication. It’s saying I’m a little crazy; I break rules; you don’t know what I might do next. It’s for sure scary to play that game between nuclear powers, but along with the first two points, that’s why it needs to be done. You have to break through the mundane, and more to the point, you have to break through the fear and the self-repression that comes from fear.

Of course his aides walked it back. They had to, and they needed to play that role. But for the figure in charge, at the center, for the man in the arena, the transgression is a key part of what he needed to do: Hold the world’s attention, convey that he knows what we’re doing isn’t enough, and break through the fear.

I doubt he gave his aides any warning.

March 27, 2022 by dan The Nature of Belief 0

There were eight men waiting for me

when I arrived at the construction site. They were standing in a small parking lot in front of what had been, some weeks ago, an expanse of four tennis courts. Now a smooth field of dirt was there, overlooking a private lake, in a country club, in the kind of suburb that is synonymous with country clubs.

All of us were white and middle-aged, some maybe a few years older or younger than that. There was me, and my client, who represented the suburban local government, a couple of managers of the country club, the project engineer, the project landscape architect, and some guys from the construction company hired to build new and improved tennis courts where the old ones used to be. They needed to hear my advice on a regulatory matter pertaining to the construction.

One guy was wearing a MAGA hat.

I took a moment to focus on my breathing and on the pleasant surroundings. Then I turned to the matter at hand.

I asked some questions, discussed some options, and summarized some next steps. I still like being a consultant. I conferred with my client as we walked back toward my car. I was glad to get on the freeway and head back to the home office.

While driving, I thought about the guy with the hat. He was being deliberately offensive, of course. I didn’t mind that. I also flout social convention, sometimes. Besides, Mr. MAGA hat had proposed what I thought was the best engineering solution for solving the country club’s problem with their tennis courts. Mr. MAGA hat had a bad leg, most likely crushed my some accident–I guessed a construction accident many years ago–and the game way he limped along with the group, keeping up with us as we walked around, prodded my sympathy for him.

At the same time, I was aware of something very wrong.

The nine of us white men–all well-paid and enjoying the morning lakeside air while on the clock–were benefitting from the subtle and not-so-subtle mechanisms that keep white privilege and male privilege going.

Thinking about those mechanisms, I mused that maybe it wasn’t only about the hat or the guy wearing it. Maybe it’s really about him being allowed to wear the hat to the meeting.

It sure wouldn’t have been very comfortable for somebody Black to be walking up to eight white men, one wearing a MAGA hat, in a parking lot.

Which is a kind of key to the way the MAGA thing and the country club thing work together. By allowing the MAGA hat, the country club folks get to have their liberal let’s-all-just-get-along tolerance, and they get their racial exclusivity too. The threat of mayhem and racial violence suggested by a MAGA hat is one thing; the nod and free pass given to it is worse.

February 15, 2022 by dan The Nature of Belief Work Status 0

Democracy and Environment

Four months ago, this week, a host of elected officials showed up at a San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board hearing to appeal to Board members regarding the forthcoming reissuance of their Municipal Regional Stormwater Permit.

Water Board staff permit writers effectively create policies on which neighborhoods get trash abatement, what types of housing are built, and where and how municipal budgets get spent. The social policies in the permit inevitably reflect the biases inherent to the status and milieu in which the staff writers operate.

The mayors and councilmembers asked, most of all, that the Board members consider their local, real-world experience working for better water quality in our streams and the Bay/Delta. What’s effective and ineffective? Which permit requirements dovetail with the municipalities’ related efforts to combat climate change, reduce homelessness, clean up trash, pave streets, and improve air quality–and which new requirements would unnecessarily conflict with those efforts?

At the October hearing, Board members seemed to give the nod to considering this real-world experience in a forthcoming final draft of the permit.

But in the ensuing four months, their staff hasn’t set a meeting, or even inquired to clarify oral or written comments. Time has run out. Board staff has to issue the final draft within a few weeks to meet their already-long-delayed current deadline.

Real environmental progress depends on public participation, decision-making based on experience and evidence, and a fair and transparent process to continuously improve what we do and how we do it.

It’s up to Board members to require accountability to such a process. Otherwise key municipal programs and policies, intended to serve the Bay Area’s diverse public, are effectively directed by a handful of men with limited work experience outside the insular bureaucracy in which they have spent their careers.

February 3, 2022 by dan Stormwater Pollution Prevention The Nature of Belief 0

Revelations

I’m ready to let 2021 go, with some sadness and some gratitude. It’s been a season of loss and a time of revelation.

I’m thinking first of all of January 6, 2021, a date which now signifies the attempted coup against democracy that started well before that date and is continuing.

The important revelation of January 6 is not about the former guy or his minions—the important revelation is that a majority of white Americans seek to end democracy and support an authoritarian dictatorship, as long as that dictatorship guarantees their white privilege.

I don’t buy it that these same white Americans are fooled or misinformed about the integrity of the 2020 election. I’ve spent a lifetime among white Americans, and I know that among them, Truth and belief are fungible. Group acceptance and belonging alone are sacred. Within the group, individuals use their mental energies to recast and retell their group narrative. They know the narrative is untrue. And they know the group dynamic rewards them for lying, because lying is a demonstration of loyalty to the group.

Lying is the basis of white identity, and the stronger the need for that identity, the more unhinged and extreme the lies become.

This lying has both inventiveness and continuity, so that it is entirely possible for white Americans to passionately advocate things that make no sense or are contradictory to each other—guns, abortion, social welfare, etc.—because the actual content of the purported beliefs don’t matter,. It is the group advocacy of the beliefs that matters. A thing can be argued today, and the opposite thing argued tomorrow, as long as the act of arguing serves the cohesiveness of white identity.

Again, this is my experience of living among white Americans. Those who support democracy, which is to say multiracial democracy, will do well to consider this dynamic of lying and belief. Our side should be focused on getting and maintaining democratic power. Once we crush the institutional and economic power of white supremacy, hearts and minds of white people will follow in time. But we shouldn’t waste time trying to make sense of their beliefs, or arguing with them.

I am grateful that 2021 kicked off with a powerful lesson regarding this dynamic, as professional agitators carefully organized the January 6 attempt based on an obvious lie, and the vast majority of Republican elected officials then endorsed the lie, and a substantial majority of white Americans, as we enter 2022, say they believe the lie and are ready to act violently to support the lie. Could we ask for a more clear revelation of what being white in America is all about?

On a personal level, I started 2021 in a different place from where I find myself now.

I was deeply in love, in a relationship then seven months old, and had few if any dissatisfactions in it. I thought the barriers to our intimacy and closeness—and they were clearly present—would be overcome as we slowly intertwined our lives.

Five months into the year that relationship ended suddenly, unexpectedly. I got thin and conflicting explanations as to why. I’m still working through it.

What I’m left with is an appreciation of how difficult it really is, in this time, to completely feel one’s feelings—in a word, to be authentic. Yet authenticity is what we need and crave. I started dating again, perhaps too soon, with this notion of authenticity in mind, both for myself and for my dating partners. I redoubled my introspection and my search for insight through meditation. After a while, I stopped looking at authenticity as a prerequisite and qualification in my search for a new partner, and began to look at authenticity instead as something precious, difficult to attain, and to be celebrated when it appears. And I have high hopes.

January 1, 2022 by dan Personal Status The Nature of Belief 0

Beware of Darkness

It’s a long, cold, and rainy solstice night. It’s late, and I’ve got the blinds open in case some passerby might notice our Christmas tree in the window and be warmed by the sight.

I love darkness. It is sacred and beautiful; it’s the fount of mystery and creativity and newness.

And confusion.

I’m thinking of the difference between acceptance and ambivalence.

Accepting the darkness is a path to peacefulness, to appreciation of who we are and what we are in this moment. It’s been a long season of loss, with more loss likely to come, and loss is part of life.

But we mustn’t be ambivalent. Everything isn’t all the same, and we have to give a damn and choose sides.

I’m thinking about Joe Manchin, and the Joe Manchin in all of us.

Because what I see in Joe Manchin is ambivalence, an un-commitment. He’s a politician; he reflects some gestalt of what he feels by communicating with his constituents.

Joe Manchin is in a position to tip the balance among greater forces, forces arising on an historical scale. None of us asked to have to choose, in this moment, in these dark months, between two paths, both of which are abrupt and consequential. The first path is toward multiracial democracy. The other path is toward authoritarianism, perhaps outright fascism.

Joe Manchin can’t make up his mind, but a lot of white Americans can’t make up their mind either. It’s dark, and they are confused.

The confusion, the ambivalence, among white people generally, in this moment, comes from what feels like an abrupt shift, a shift from the presumption that advancing social equality would feel easy, that it would be along the lines of opening doors, that it would be akin to having more people allowed in to the party, but with the music and refreshments staying pretty much the same.

It’s not working out that way.

Part of it is demographics: we are marching inexorably toward an America in which whites are a minority among other minorities. But more than that, globalization and technological change have already undermined the economic basis of whiteness—undermined the whole purpose of the privilege, the protection, the not-so-secret favoritism that white people enjoy. The parochialism of America’s native white culture is simply outmoded; it has been superseded by a cosmopolitan culture that leaves us, perhaps all of us, less sure of our place in the world.

In consequence, the music has changed, the culture has changed. Every aspect of white privilege, and especially white male privilege, is suddenly subject to harsh reappraisal, not because of the rise of radicalism or division, but because it no longer fits in to a changed world.

What might it take to maintain and restore white supremacy even in the face of the overwhelming forces undermining it? Republicans—from party leaders down to registered members—have long known what it would take, and have dedicated themselves to the task. When it was adequate to use the built-in anti-democratic bias of the system (the Senate and Electoral College, just for starters), main line Republicans were satisfied with that. As democracy itself has come to threaten white supremacy, Republicans—all Republicans—have just as happy to dispense with democracy and resort to gerrymandering, voter suppression, packing the Supreme Court, and now, tacit support for physical threats and attacks against their political adversaries. For Republicans of all stripes, white supremacy is the end that justifies the means.

Given the stark choice, Joe Manchin is firmly in the middle, and shifting with the breeze. When he meets with President Biden—formerly Barack Obama’s Vice President—Manchin is committed to democratic social uplift, but when he’s on Fox News the next day, he’s blowing the age-old racist dog whistle about becoming an “entitlement society.”

Although Manchin is no doubt keeping his coal investments in mind as he speaks, he’s not really so different from most white people. When it comes to the battle for multiracial democracy vs. a harsh and racist authoritarianism, he’s bipartisan and a moderate. We see the same equivocation in pundits like George Packer, David Brooks, and James Carville, all of who tut-tut the slide toward fascism, but also feel impelled to trash “wokeness.” They may want their democracy, but they want their white privilege too.

Which brings me to the ambivalence I perceive within my own tribe.

The now-stymied Build Back Better bill represents, to a significant degree, the values and aims for which I’ve long advocated: Free universal preschool. Cut child poverty. Expand access to health care. Most of all, push technology and economic development forward as fast as we can—to alleviate suffering, achieve more equity, and save the planet.

The same goes for the Freedom to Vote Act, and even most aspects of Biden’s foreign policy, including the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Sure, there have been some missteps, and some compromises I didn’t see the need for, but the direction has been very much where I’ve long thought the country should go.

Yet I’m feeling a lack of energy, an ambivalence, among friends and allies. It concerns me. Not just because there is an urgent need to get behind the Democratic Party and try to keep the House and Senate next year. There is such a need.

It’s that I’m feeling that many of us aren’t deeply examining the changes before us and our gut reactions to those changes.

The changes of globalization, technological advancement, and social equity go hand-in-hand. What unfolds is all of a piece, and that whole is, in its very nature, disruptive and confusing. And when we experienced our own resistance to those changes, and look at that resistance, we often see that we fear a loss of our own privilege, including our security that we’ll keep on living in the old ways that are familiar to us. Sometimes, in our professional or political work, we experience challenges that are embarrassing and threatening to our egos.

I’m feeling that this discomfort with rapid change translates into a less-than-wholehearted support for the progressive initiatives Biden and the Democratic Party have on the table now, today. We should challenge ourselves to better understand the scope and impact of those initiatives. Moreover, we must understand that what is being put forward responds, in large part, to the needs and demands of a younger, ethnically diverse majority—a majority that disrupts everything we thought we knew since the time we’ve grown up.

We can embrace the loss of the old way of doing things and revel in the darkness, which gives birth to the new. We can drop our ambivalence, which arises from defensiveness, and commit to a practice of helping.

December 22, 2021 by dan Personal Status The Nature of Belief 0

February 5, 2003

So Colin Powell died, and among the inhabitants of our planet, for just a moment, there was one fewer cynical liars. Good.

Powell’s famed UN speech led directly to the disastrous US invasion and occupation of Iraq–and the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis.

Later, he lied about his lying, blaming it on bad intelligence.

Crapola. For the occasion today I looked up what I wrote as I watched his speech that morning 18+ years ago.

. . .

February 5, 2003

I’m dubious about Truth. People talk about it the most when they’re giving you it the least.

Our grasp of what is depends, most of all, on the quality of the narrative we read to ourselves. Truth is a characteristic of language, of rhetoric.

I tried to apply this insight, this morning, as I watched Colin Powell on the TV. Where was Truth in the Secretary’s speech to the UN?

The murky photos marked with damning arrows. The mysterious fragments of wiretapped conversation. These seemed like dimestore props for the familiar rhetorical devices of a deceiver: escalating hyperbole, breathless speculation, and using the accused’s denial as further evidence of his guilt.

Add to this Powell’s science-fair speech about what can be done with just a teaspoon of anthrax.

And then there was the truck-mounted chemical weapons laboratory. Hans Blix says there’s no evidence that such a thing exists, but of course Channel 4’s reporters were soon breaking in to refer to Powell’s computer-generated images of the mocked-up model as “photos.” We’re led to conclude that the trucks could be out there, because, you know, they could be moving ’em around, the sneaky devils, and they haven’t shown us that they don’t have one.

I did sense, within all this foofahrah, bits of narrative that did ring True. Did the Iraqis clean up a little before the inspectors arrived? Who doesn’t? Of course, you want to show the inspector a clean site with nothing on it. Otherwise they just hang around and ask a bunch of questions, making you late to get home for dinner and potentially embarassing you in front of the boss. Anyone who’s operated an corporation yard or a commercial kitchen can relate to that story. I thought that part was True.

Or the tape of the two guys talking over on the phone. It’s got a bad connection, and they’re trying to make sure they got the instructions straight. It could have been an Abbott and Costello routine. So that seemed True as well.

Maybe these guys’ job is part of an evil plot to blow up the world. What I heard was, whatever they’re doing on the tapes or in the satellite photos, they’re doing it in the same confused chaos we all descend into every working day. That confusion and chaos and earnestness sounded real, and it contrasted, in my mind, with the ridiculous artifice of the U.S. Secretary of State.

October 18, 2021 by dan The Nature of Belief 0