Welcome to the first installment of the new DailyKos Reading Club!
Update [2005-7-16 12:52:44 by dKos Reading Club]: The poll for next month's reading has been posted here. Please take a moment to vote.
Club Background
This "club" is just forming and all are welcome to participate -- even people who have not yet read this month's reading. (In future months, though, we will encourage people to have at least read some of the assignment prior to participating... but this month is special!)
For this first month, we will try to follow the tentative procedures set forth by shock in a diary proposal about the club last month.
Reading to be discussed this month: The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness by Karen Armstrong.
This month's discussant: shock
Please, come on in and join the discussion!
(Good, I'm glad you decided to stick around.)
I should start by introducing myself. I am just a person who loves to read. I have no special training related to literature or the topic of today's discussion. In fact, I feel very inadequate to be "leading" this here, given the wealth of knowledge, experience and wisdom I've encountered here at DailyKos whenever readings on just about any topic are brought up! (Indeed, this was one of my motivations for proposing the club.) But since I proposed it and since I don't want it to die out in the first month, I am going to do my best! (My hope is that in future months, others, more knowledgeable than me, will step up to lead the discussion.)
If you are here because you saw the original diaries about this, you know that the proposal was made in the context of an excellent diary by teacherken in which he described and recommended our current reading. I believe it was his wonderful recommendation (along with Karen Armstrong's reputation) that encouraged the rest of us to vote on this selection. So I'm hoping that he'll show up here. (In fact, I'll be glad if anyone shows up!)
Last month, having not yet read the book, I still thought that teacherken's diary about it was excellent. Reading the book this month just reinforced this feeling and increased my respect for teacherken! In his diary, I think he summarized the main theme of the book very well, and also pulled in many of the important passages related to spirituality and compassion. Instead of trying to compete with that, I'll just tip my hat to him and refer you to his diary for starters. (Please come back here though after you read it!) Since teacherken focused on the main theme of the book (Armstrong's spiritual quest and eventual conclusions), here I will try to compliment this by picking out some passages that are perhaps more directly relevant (at least on the surface) to our liberal politics. (The one thing I will say about this here -- and I may come back to it in the comments -- is that I have been on a very similar staircase in my life and my spiritual quest has been very similar to hers. In her description of her feelings during different periods, she very accurately described what I had gone through and felt.)
It is noteworthy that, despite her wonderful insights on both her own spirituality and growth, Armstrong rarely discussed blatantly political issues directly in this book. In fact, given the rich detail into which she went into just about all other aspects of her life, I thought this absence was striking. However, at a deeper level, I believe it is fair to say that you can consider all of the issues with which she dealt "political" issues. Personally, I see spirituality as a desire to understand our place in the world -- our relationship to it and to ourselves. And I see politics as one way we can express our spirituality (our concern for others -- our compassion, our desire for justice, security, purpose, meaning and belonging, etc.). In the course of my life, I have undergone both an extreme political shift (from hard-core republican to radical leftist) and a severe spiritual shift (from fundamentalist, evangelical Christian to something I can't easily describe with a label now, but definitely not a fundamentalist), and these shifts went hand-in-hand, each informing and driving the other. I'm not claiming this is always how it is though, but I think to deny that there is a spiritual component to politics is naive (even for atheists). As an example, I believe this passage (also pulled out by teacherken) from page 272 is directly applicable to my political views:
All the world faiths put suffering at the top of their agenda, because it is an inescapable fact of human life, and unless you see things as they really are, you cannot live correctly. But even more important, if we deny our own pain, it is all too easy to dismiss the suffering of others. ...
Probably the most obvious theme in Armstrong's spiritual search relating to politics was her treatment of certainty, which she links to religious fundamentalism and also to the politics of people like Margaret Thatcher. For example:
As far as I could see, certainty made people heartless, cruel, and inhuman. It closed their minds to new possibilities, it made them complacent and pleased with themselves. It also did not work. The new regime in Iran seemed just as oppressive as that of the shah, the murder of Sadat did not lead to a new era in Egypt, and Thatcherism too would prove to be an expensive mistake. This type of certainty was unrealistic, and out of step with the way things really worked. Religious people seemed particularly prone to this dogmatism, and even though there was nothing remotely religious or Christian about Mrs. Thatcher's regime, the experience of living in "Maggie's Britain" made me even more leery of faith, dogmatism, and orthodoxy, which so often---even in a good cause---made people ride roughshod over other people's sensitivities. That kind of certainty had damaged me in the past, and I wanted no more of it.
(pp. 204-205)
In my opinion, this is (and has been) one of the big differences between the right and left in American politics . (I know I'm generalizing here, but..) The right -- even the non-religious parts -- craves certainty and loathes moral ambiguity. They think categorically, and value clarity and decisiveness. Meanwhile, liberals place more value on tolerance and diversity of opinion, Crucially, we value diversity not so we can keep people from unifying, nor so we can categorize/label people to make inferences about them (stereotypes, like the one I'm presenting right now,
can be useful), but for precisely the opposite of these two reasons, namely so we can better understand
ourselves as humans, so we
can unify based on a better understanding of what it means to be human through the ability to take the perspective of others.
There are, of course, many other "spiritual" dimensions on which right and left differ as well. One of them with which she deals specifically is that of individuality vs. conformity as a personality trait. At the risk of caricature, in the convent Armstrong "failed at" achieving the necessary level of conformity, in academia she "failed at" achieving the necessary level of individualism: the spiral staircase which she is ascending revolves around the notion of "self" in the center. (Should it be there or not?) I don't have an "answer" to this non-question, but I think it also marks a (perhaps less-acknowledged) difference between left and right. This is something I have struggled with as my politics have shifted and I've fought both to "find myself" and against my urge to conform! As Armstrong notes in the first half of the book (in particular the section about her undergrad days just out of the convent), I've found it is very hard to become an authentic individual -- to be "born again" -- after a long period of conformity.
Wow! I see I am going to be late in posting this. As I read the book, I marked passages that were significant or especially meaningful to me. Unfortunately, now as I go back through them, I see I marked way too many!! There is no way I am going to do this book justice. Thankfully, this is a book discussion so I don't have to do it all myself here! In that spirit, I'm going to turn this over to the discussion phase very soon and allow you all to go at it.
I want to close with a quote about this "meta-topic" that made me laugh as I read it a couple of days ago:
Yet again, in the spirit of Ash Wednesday, I found that relinquishing hope had released something within me. My love for reading came back in full. Even though I had started to respond to literature again, there had still been something rather dutiful and anxious in this approach. I would read a new novel desperately casting around for a clever thing to say about it that would impress my colleagues [or blog-mates]. But now that I had been ejected from academia so publicly, I no longer needed to impress anybody. It didn't matter whether I came up with any brilliant insights or not. When I read a novel or a poem now, I no longer had an ulterior motive; I was no longer trying to use literature to promote myself, but was simply immersing myself in the text for its own sake---as, of course, I should have been doing all along. As a result, I found myself inundated with ideas and with the words to express them. ...
(pp. 176-177)
The irony was that I realized I was reading her book in exactly the wrong way because of this reading club. (
"Teach us to care and not to care...") I hope you all enjoyed the book and, what's more, find yourselves "inundated with ideas and with the words to express them" here. But, rest assured, it doesn't matter to me if you come up with any "brilliant insights" or not. Instead, I just hope that here we can share the experience of climbing towards the light together.
With that, I'll open up the floor. Here are some questions I though might stimulate useful discussion (but feel free to ignore these):
- Why do some people seem to need "certainty" more than others? How can we construct a (possibly therapeutic?) liberal message that appeals to people like this without compromising our integrity?
- Is it necessary to go through an ego-destroying experience as Armstrong did (more than once) to reach the spiritual enlightenment she does?
- While Armstrong presented her account as a brutally-honest sort of soul searching, do you think she was truly being honest? If not, why? (Obviously, a loaded question. But not as political.)
- How has your "quest" been similar or different to Armstrong's?
- What should we read for next month? (See the table at the end of this diary for some things that have already been suggested.)