{"id":3771,"date":"2020-12-25T08:07:54","date_gmt":"2020-12-25T08:07:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=143313"},"modified":"2020-12-25T08:07:54","modified_gmt":"2020-12-25T08:07:54","slug":"if-bad-fascists-foment-hate-should-we-foment-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/25\/if-bad-fascists-foment-hate-should-we-foment-love\/","title":{"rendered":"If Bad Fascists Foment Hate, Should We Foment Love?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cHello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It\u2019s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It\u2019s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you\u2019ve got about a hundred years here. There\u2019s only one rule that I know of, babies\u2014God damn it, you\u2019ve got to be kind.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013 Baptismal speech, Eliot Rosewater in Kurt Vonnegut\u2019s God Bless You Mr. Rosewater<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\u2018Robbers\u2019 [i.e., the parable of the Good Samaritan] usually find secret allies in those who \u2018pass by and look the other way.\u2019 There is a certain interplay between those who manipulate and cheat society and those who, while claiming to be detached and impartial critics, live off that system and its benefits\u2026The complaint that \u2018everything is broken\u2019 is answered by the claim that \u2018it can\u2019t be fixed.\u2019 or \u2018what can I do?\u2019 This feeds into disillusionment and despair, and hardly encourages a spirit of solidarity and generosity.<\/p>\n

\u2013 Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

One of the most celebrated and revered authors of my lifetime, Kurt Vonnegut famously called for kindness as the needed thing in the world. To me, or to the \u2018me\u2019 I was when I first read this in an interview decades ago, in contrast to his witty, ironical, socially critical fiction, his admonition seemed almost simple-minded. Be kind? Like how we behave towards kittens and other adorables? Or was he referring to something truly radical, so radical it was beyond the imaginations of anyone during his time or ours to do anything more than cause us to feel fondly toward old Kurt? Liberal thinker that I was, more comfortable with irony than with the indecent exposure of sincerity, his admonition reassured me he wasn\u2019t merely clever but had a heart with which \u2013 thank goodness \u2013 he refrained from treacling up his fiction!<\/p>\n

I no longer feel as I did then. Having followed through on the assignment I gave myself back in the 1990s, after a personal mental health crisis, I\u2019ve gradually come closer<\/em> to earth from the lofty liberal perch I occupied back then! No longer so fearful of my feelings, (for which fear of \u201cindecent exposure\u201d is useful cover), I\u2019m willing to defend their validity as guides from \u201cunderneath the skin.\u201d Moreover, the relevance of my feelings, I submit, extends out to the systemically unkind world under neoliberal rule that desperately needs the \u201cdown to earth,\u201d feeling-based values that can sustain and nurture human life, but which so far we seem intent upon shedding.<\/p>\n

Kindness, we can say is less intellectual and less prone to ambiguity than abstract love. It is the animal-soul level felt<\/em> experience of being included by love (traditionally imagined as Mother\u2019s love). Checking into feelings, you can tell<\/em> if someone has been kind or mean to you regardless of what they\u2019re saying. Vonnegut was tuned into this level of experience \u2013 how one honestly<\/em> feels, which is different from the words we say in public to each other \u2013 and expressed it in several ways. The ironical tone he perfected allowed him to get away with messages that were about as simple and basic as Christian love. (\u201cI urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, \u2018If this isn\u2019t nice, I don\u2019t know what is.\u2019\u201d<\/em>)<\/p>\n

In other words, in order to be kind, one must have experienced kindness as natural, as indigenous to the social environment. As wholesome food feeds the integrity of the body, kindness feeds the soul with trust in its feelings<\/em>. Losing that trust, the world becomes progressively harsher. To this crueler context the liberal world has adapted. It has not<\/em> gone against the grain to insist on kindness as a fundamental value over profits, and on the unmediated communality in which kindness (or its absence) can be felt, but has allowed those conditions to deteriorate, to be replaced with an iphone.<\/p>\n

Perhaps novelists don\u2019t write with an expectation of changing peoples\u2019 hearts, but if Vonnegut harbored such a hope, he was relying on a perspicacity in his readers many of us likely lacked. The sophisticated ironic tone of which he was a master, endearing to the educated class, was way too subtle and distanced to speak unambiguously to hearts conditioned in liberal reality. On the other hand, unlike novelists, preachers (the group to which I more or less belong) are professionally called to stoop to the indecent exposure of a non-subtle, non-ironic message explicitly in order to influence hearts in the direction of love. But preachers too must pick their way carefully in a context that\u2019s obedient to capitalism. Like other public figures \u2013 they must follow the crowd and the money, doing the job for which they\u2019re paid, coloring inside the lines drawn for them by their constituents and their organization. Tolerated but discounted by the liberal class, liberal ministers do indisputably good works. But they manage still to be following an implicit rule: \u201cDo good but don\u2019t mention the radical evil of capitalism; that\u2019s a turn-off.\u201d \u201cBe as jokey as possible, but Will Rogers-style, not George Carlin.\u201d Thus Christ\u2019s message of the rule of loving kindness is whitewashed, its radical threat to neoliberal complacency removed.<\/p>\n

Only a few preachers \u2013 not all of them officially ordained, or even speaking for an established religion \u2013 serve the genuinely insurgent, non-deferential creative spirit. So accustomed are we, since the preaching days of Martin Luther King, Jr., to holding low-to-no expectations for church voices \u201con the left\u201d we can hardly believe our ears when we hear Pope Francis\u2019s social pronouncements, spoken from the very pinnacle of the spiritual mainstream. Preachers that aren\u2019t on the media\u2019s A-list who \u2013 like Francis \u2013 believe in love\u2019s absolute authority are left, like jazz improvisers, to preach outside the established lines, their indecent exposure making them as discardable in mainstream mediated reality as loving kindness itself.<\/p>\n

In an extraordinary way, Rev. King proclaimed Christian love to its full overturning extent, while not only keeping people in the pews but also getting them \u2013 all kinds and colors, including white liberals \u2013 out on the streets insisting the reign of God\u2019s love begins now, not tomorrow. Today\u2019s Black Lives Matter movement, understandably having no patience to wait for the church to find again its prophetic message, is not explicitly church or love and reconciliation-centered. Perhaps this role, redeeming the inclusivity of love, now falls to those whose vanity assures them \u201clove is fine, but in its time and place<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

For better or worse, revolutionary, bottom-up movements like BLM begin in the felt needs and real experiences of social beings; they begin in the most fundamental soul needs of people, with their different histories and cultures. A preacher who aims at liberal, educated, mainly white hearts, that have weaned themselves off the needs of the soul, has to break through the mighty fortress of liberal vanity \u2013 the assumptions and defenses of a privileged group \u2013 to reach the heart. Thanks to its privilege, and in order to retain it, the liberal class is conditioned to forget or forsake the needs they share in common with all people, a capacity gained by denying\/repressing one\u2019s own painful experiences. This sacrifice is rewarded by inclusion in liberalism\u2019s lifestyle benefits, but it makes liberal \u201cgoodness\u201d conditional, tepid and banal.<\/p>\n

A genuine critique of liberal vanity is so off-the-table, so social pariah-izing, it can be done only<\/em> on the basis of obedience to the rule of love that does not contend or blame, but does not waiver in opposing cruelty in all its forms. That is, the eye of compassion looks past liberal vanity and denial to the fear-dominated, repudiated reality of the soul underneath. Only standing in spiritual certainty can one face such fiercely defended unconsciousness (the liberal\u2019s sin). (Am I the only one who hears the love in prophetic author Chris Hedges\u2019 relentless battering of liberal pretensions?)<\/p>\n

Good Heavens!<\/em> \u2013 suddenly it occurs to me: Am I writing about loving liberals? Anti-war folksinger Phil Ochs (\u201cLove Me I\u2019m A Liberal\u201d) will turn over in his grave! Busted, I guess. But wait! There\u2019s method in my madness. It is neoliberal conditions (Not Trump!) \u2013 that make the ground friendly for fascism. To uproot those conditions depends, simply, upon a change of the liberal heart. Thus, the thankless effort to \u201ctough love\u201d liberals \u2013 who lest we forget, since the Enlightenment, is all of us<\/em> \u2013 must be undertaken if the goal is transformation, not mere regime change. For the powerful liberal class to switch its allegiance from the rule of capitalism to the rule of love such a change is individual. It begins within, in the dutiful care, tending, and serving of the creative soul\u2019s absolute need for its voice, that has been repressed.<\/em> Without knowing their duty to the soul\u2019s imagination, liberals have no choice but to reinforce and condone the same conditions of meanness and cruel inequality they impose on their souls. Where fascism thrives, liberals are not innocent, only without inspiration!<\/em> Therefore \u201ctough love\u201d starts within our liberal selves, inside those of us who\u2019ve cruelly hardened against our imagination-starved hearts in obedience to the liberal, materialist, class-based, rationalist reality that comprises all we know.<\/p>\n

Prior to the above-mentioned personal crisis, I had been well-conditioned by my upbringing in conventional educated liberal bourgeois secular reality. But I was also always at odds with it in a way that left me tense and unsettled, my intense confusion heading me for that disaster that did eventually come, but brought with it unexpected consequences.<\/p>\n

Though I did not know it and nobody in the cluelessly rationalist social environment could tell me, my crisis was not reducible to mental illness. Resolution of the crisis would not come with the \u201cdivinity\u201d professionalization I attained in my effort to legitimize my existence according to the feminist paradigm (YDS \u201979). It came through undergoing the psycho-spiritual crisis that brought with it \u201ctranspersonal\u201d verification of my right to exist in my otherness<\/em> that had so long eluded me. At bottom, such existential crisis is not from gender oppression or gender confusion, but the absence of assurance of fully inclusive<\/em> love and kindness. In the general meanness and me-firstism that must be mastered for survival in liberal society, leaving people in a near-constant state of anxiety, kindness is a luxury. It is this crisis of our liberal bourgeois society that calls me to advocate sincerely for \u201cfratelli e sorelle tutti.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Somewhat by chance, certainly against my will, but guided secretly by innermost desire, I had found the reality (Eureka!) most damning to the inevitability of liberal bourgeois society. In order to defend the marvelous truth of \u201cOneness\u201d I\u2019d experienced (otherwise how could I call it real, and who would care if it were<\/em>?) I use my creativity to oppose or critique that liberal world \u2013 without irony. To critique on behalf of the heart allies me with the long presumed dead \u2013 or brain-dead \u2013 rule of love, considered relevant, if at all, only to the most simple-minded. So here I am, exposing myself \u201cindecently\u201d in the neoliberal wilderness on behalf of my sentient soul-body that requires kindness as daily bread, not as luxury.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Exacerbated by nine months of pandemic social deprivation, my imagination, particularly at night, too often runs to vivid enactments of fascist takeovers. Such horrific fantasies are perhaps fed by Orin\u2019s habit of conveying to me the divisive hate talk coming from talk radio hosts like Hannity and Limbaugh (broadcasts that should have been shutdown years ago). My fear of fascism, its power to pollute and to infect, has intensified as its expression in society proliferates, and with every action Trump takes to appeal to the lowest impulses of his \u201cbase.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, I\u2019m clear the radical fascist haters on the political extreme Right are opportunists, not \u201cinventors.\u201d The opportunity they seize is an enormous window left enticingly open for them by the self-satisfied good people on the left who are content believing hate is bad, but will take no steps to oppose hate with love. Love is not a contending belief but an alternative reality that can be felt and entered by any human being. It requires for its attainment a personal transformation (yes, kind of like Scrooge after his 3 ghostly visitations) such that the heart becomes authoritative, its values of relatedness and interdependence supreme, bringing one to say I can perpetrate lesser-evilism no longer.<\/p>\n

The fact that few liberals do transform into love activists suggests they are content with the fractious, and meaningless contentiousness of neoliberalism and its radical evil that negates the intrinsic value of human beings. Antifa activism, though admirable, comes too late in the gestation of hate. Only complete obedience to love and relearning all of its attendant behaviors and qualities: forgiveness, reconciliation, loyalty, patience, understanding, wisdom, kindness and healing can make a new soil to replace the fertile ground in which hate grows.<\/p>\n

We are as potentially haters as lovers. In order to raise generations who will direct their wills, Samaritan-like, to enact love, not merely speak it, who will assure each human and non-human \u201cother\u201d of her\/his value and worth, demands the customs of bottom-up, communal, face-to-face living in place, where love \u2013 and its absence \u2013 can be felt<\/em>, conditions which liberal vanity has deemed unnecessary and has abdicated its duty to preserve.<\/p>\n

To contain the plague of fascism, not to mention being able to unify to stop a pandemic, or to act on behalf of the earth\u2019s ecosystems, halt global warming, etc., will require abandonment of the liberal project with its thinly disguised supremicism and classism, it\u2019s dressed up hate, its ongoing exploitation, colonialism, destruction of people and cultures. It will demand active, not feigned, practice of the Christian love long forsaken by the educated elites that abandon souls in order to make the world safe for capitalism. And, it will demand art \u2013 the kindness of attending to each soul\u2019s need for expression \u2013 of everyone.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cHello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It\u2019s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It\u2019s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you\u2019ve got about\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":203,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3771"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/203"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3771"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3772,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3771\/revisions\/3772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}