LETTERS TO DAVE


PART THREE: SEEING MORALITY THROUGH A MICROSCOPE

Dear Dave,

In AA’s principles the tenth step says, “We continued to take a daily inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.” In step four, that inventory is described as a “moral” inventory. So that’s what I began to do on a regular basis after I got sober, for nine years or so, constantly taking a “moral inventory” and making apologies day to day as they became necessary. It’s what I was doing when I discovered my terrible lies about poor innocent Pete, and I wouldn’t blame you, Dave, if you pointed out that I might be slipping in my tenth step work in my dealings with the SR or you. Anyhow... you can immediately see where Bush, without AA, and I, with it, part company. It’s in the concept of promptly admitting it when we’re wrong. Bush is the original man for not wanting to admit a mistake. For sure, he could never be a Catholic. Imagine George in the confessional: “Forgive me, father, but god has sinned in putting that Saddam fellow in power in Iraq, I’ve corrected god’s mistake.”

But I don’t want to take Bush’s moral inventory any further in this third and last part; I mean to understand and write down my own slow march of consciousness from a religious/moral stance to a scientific stance with which to understand reality and improve my own character. And that brings me to the next and last tale of woe in this narrative.

Ten years into sobriety, my third divorce came to pass. Lo, did it come to pass, and I discovered that being sober and moral was just not enough to make marriages work. In fact, being judgmental was one of my problems all along, and my third divorce brought that home to me with another crash. Till then, there were only one right way and one wrong way. George’s way was the right way and others’ ways were the wrong ways. Recall—though that last sentence may sound like I’m trashing George Bush’s current way of life again, which I’ve said I wouldn’t do in this section, I’m really describing my own behavior. I was being a fundamentalist, Old Testament sort of guy. Even though I wasn’t a Christian, I was being what I didn’t want to be. I was being dishonest with myself; I was being my own worst enemy.

So—away flies wife number three and in flies a depression, suicidal in intensity. I could barely get to sleep most nights. I couldn’t go into the bedroom of my small apartment; I slept on the couch. I watched Monty Python’s Flying Circus every night at twelve and went to sleep with the TV on so that I wouldn’t have to face the silence. I awoke to the static of an empty screen. They were miserable times as my wife soon was dating the man who would become her husband. She rushed to divorce, and we fought over everything.

Eventually, from that early suicidal despair, I entered a period of painful growth, which, in retrospect, was the best thing to happen to me in my life. Swearing never to feel such pain again, I determined on a course of recovery which I hoped would make me a new person altogether.

I retreated to a ratty, barren farmhouse six miles outside of Cheney where I wintered two winters and enjoyed two summers in monkly splendor with coyotes as comrades while reading spiritual literature for two to four hours every morning (the Bible, the Psalms, Thomas Merton and etcetera), joined the Lutheran Church in Cheney with lessons and the tap of a rose, got into counseling, began to read and listen to the tapes of John Bradshaw, jogged the dirt roads thereabouts, associated myself with a small band of Catholic evangelicals in their Wednesday night conclave in the basement of St. Rose of Lima’s church in Cheney where we quietly prayed, talked and sang, took up training for and then a job as a Certified Nurse’s Aide at the Cheney Care Center where I humbly wiped withered butts and spoon-fed those who couldn’t feed themselves.

I went to every self-help workshop I could find and afford on CNA pay. Eventually I entered into five years of celibacy to see what that would bring while dating every woman who attracted my fancy. I discovered that many of the women I most wanted to fuck, bored me to tears when we conversed. And all the while, in AA meeting after AA meeting, and in 12 step meetings of Alanon, Sex and Love Addicts, Incest Survivors (who knew? maybe that too?), Adult Children of Alcoholics, and Codependents Anonymous, day in and day out, I confessed my sins, I took my “moral inventory” until I was tired of hearing it. I became acutely aware of the processes that led to self-flagellation.

During this period of recovery, I broke down many times into a sobbing heap of tears so intense I could barely catch my breath. One time I Iost it in the basement evangelical meeting. They were singing a hymn that was something about being brought to the water, about being naked and afraid, defenseless and poor, and, boy, that was certainly me. I couldn’t defend myself against that song and image. They tore into me. One of the songs I’d sung all my adult life, discovered in the folk tradition that came alive in the hippy daze, was “Motherless Child”. I knew that feeling backwards and forwards. Suddenly I was bent over in my church chair and sobbing helplessly. Snot dangled from my nose to the floor.

To make the story brief: the evangelicals gathered around to lay hands on and pray over me. They prayed and they prayed, then, as my tears stopped and my snot grew manageable, they withdrew to their chairs, and the leader of the group asked me if I was ready “... to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.” I recalled Joanne Woodward in the movie, “Rachel, Rachel” and told him, tremulously, “No.” At this point he suggested they get up again and pray some more, but a good friend among them said, “No, Charlie”, and Charlie was saved the embarrassment of another futile try.

I was just not about to be moved by emotional extremity into the Christian camp it seems. Dave, if that breakdown didn’t do it, when I was surrounded by hosts of praying Christians, then no breakdown could do it, could make me accept some invisible presence to be my aide and comforter. I couldn’t have been more defenseless against Christian attacks than at that moment in the church basement. Many give up on themselves during those breakdowns and find Jesus, that mythological authority outside themselves to become their father, ruler and secret playmate, but I think I knew their tricks too well.

From the days of our earliest awareness, America’s Christianized culture beats at you, trying to wear you down, and shames the psyche until, eventually, in your unprotected youth, in fear and trembling, you give your self up and your freedom away, and you slink back into blind obedience under the pitiless gaze of an angry god. Then they give you Jesus to replace your authentic self so your shamed obedience doesn’t seem so bad when compared to his mindless self-sacrifice, but the frightening part is that no one can become so abject without retaining a powerful potion of hatred for anyone outside the Christian camp who reminds them that they are no longer free. Terrible things have been done to anyone who reminds them of the freedom they gave away in their fear.

Actually, though I couldn’t see it at the time, all my breakdowns were helping me immensely. I just didn’t understand the natural power of grieving one’s losses. I was, unknown to myself, gaining confidence in the process I was embarked upon and learning that if you don’t die of grief, then, eventually, grieving builds up an inner strength one can rely on. One doesn’t have to surrender their autonomy to a being outside themselves to find strength. The tricky part is that loss feels just like real death and is scary as hell. You cry out for someone to help you. You look to others and they shun you if you’ve gone too mad, but—here’s the secret—grief never does kill you even though you fear it will as you enter into its grip of terror and pain before your tears buy relief from it. Eventually, I learned to trust the process. This was the lesson I was learning unawares in my secret limbic system of limbic systems about gods and morality and about human frailty and the pain and suffering the human animal is heir to. Then one last experience diverted me into a science-based answer to my human travails.

I was in a noon twelve step meeting, and, as usual, I was doing a great job of taking my own inventory. The program says that the drunk must be tough on himself and gentle on the other. The drunk must assume that when he’s having a problem with another human being, it’s his fault. He must somehow adjust his vision to accept the problem that is confronting him. He must ruthlessly take his own inventory! Can there be anything more moral and right than that? Many religious people can’t even do that, but I was doing a good job of it.

I finished my little monologue after a lengthy process of tearing myself down and admitting to everyone that the divorce was all my fault. I told them in no uncertain terms what a lousy son-of-bitch husband I was. I was a “... no good, lousy, manipulative, controlling asshole type of male, incapable of being kind and gentle to anyone in the whole world”. Yep—I was just plain no good and rotten to the core, I informed the group. They’d heard it many times before.

When I finished, I felt terrible. What a shock. Usually, such a rant gave me some temporary relief from my pain. This time it didn’t. Something was hanging on. I’d confessed my sins to the group but something still was not right. The meeting went on around me. I sank into myself and my pain. I heard no one else speak. I was off in a world of my own, scrunched around my pain, like a gargoyle around a bright, rich jewel hoard and suffering terribly. Then the final, awful truth bore in upon me. O, shit, it hurt. It was obvious that I could no longer hide the truth from myself. Indeed... I really was a lousy, selfish son-of-a-bitch. No hiding from it. (I laugh, now, aloud, in the coffee shop as I admit it once more in my narrative. It’s a fresh truth always and forever, how we fool ourselves with our imagined innocence.) I was selfish, selfish, selfish.... I couldn’t escape the truth! There it was. I… was… selfish.

My guilty pain was horrible. You see, like the lie about Pete, there are many forms and levels of truth. There’s the telling of the truth, the words that can be said repeatedly, then there’s the accepting of the truth and the final seeing through the lie! What I didn’t realize just quite then, but which had to follow upon my discovery, was that I was going to have to take full responsibility for my path out of this pain. I’d already, in that basement debacle, shed forever the chance to put my suffering off on someone else’s bloody, disjointed shoulders. Now what the hell would I do? What a quandary was upon me! Then a scientific moment came upon me, though, even here, I would not fully realize for some years that it was a scientific moment.

I heard myself ask, “Okay, admit it, you are selfish. So, if you really are selfish, how did you come to be this way? Why are you selfish? What made you this way?”

That’s actually quite a scientific question, but most people think it’s a moral question, and they try to answer it with ineffective moral replies. Thousands of years of philosophers and moralizers, millions of theologians keep asking the “selfishness” question about humans as if it’s a moral problem, when, actually, it’s a scientific question with a scientific answer.

I did get an immediate answer, however, and the answer for some time appeared to be a moral answer because I was able to shift blame for a while. My answer was a lie, but a necessary lie along the path to mental health. It gave me some breathing room from the Jesus people who, I feared, like all cults, wanted to use my human frailty and guilt and shame to enslave me in their religion.

I suddenly understood why I was selfish. It was a matter of survival. I was doing what I had been doing all my life in order to survive my less than satisfactory childhood. I saw that I was a product of my childhood. I was being who I had to be, not feeling what I had to not feel, and doing what I had to do in order to survive. Another piece of my puzzle was in place. I saw myself as both abuser and abused, victim and victimizer. At last, I could see both sides of the coin: I had been controlling, fearful, manipulative, mean at times and loving at times, whatever it took to get my way, because that’s how children survive. I could see it clear as hell. Love and cruelty were both tools in getting what I needed from others. If one doesn’t work, try the other. Whimper, plead, scream and threaten, whatever works. I could see that I was completely selfish and living at the level of a damaged four year old, throwing tantrums and offering hugs to control others. At the same time, I would love no one because they could hurt me if I did. No wonder marriage didn’t work with me.

Great benefits immediately flowed from my new insight. Not only did the pain I was feeling in the meeting go away, I could see my dilemma with unflinching clarity, Soon, quite naturally, I no longer blamed myself so harshly for all my shortcomings that my daily inventories constantly rubbed in my face. I really saw that I made mistakes and could let myself make mistakes. Before that, I could say the concept of human equality, but I couldn’t feel it in the bones of my understanding. Now I could try to let others make mistakes without piling on, but not all the time.

Once I started to take it easy on myself, I found I could take it easier on others. Love and liking for myself metamorphosed into liking and love for others. In fact, I have a principle now which I should always pay attention to but don’t. When I’m being miserable and picking on someone else, when the world seems lousy and dangerous, when I’m being badly argumentative, that’s a sign I’ve started to beat up on myself again, to be moralistic rather than naturalistic and logical. Pain and anguish are signs to slow down and smell the roses.

Still… I’m not perfect, and I keep slipping in and out of conscious mindfulness about those inner realities. Even with that leveling insight that showed me that I was just like my fellow man, I still must feel superior from time to time because I continue to let morality dominate my view of human behavior, and I get distressed that people continue to hurt one another. Me too. I still want to blame humans for everything they do. I just don’t want to let go of being judgmental, I guess. There must be some safety in judging my fellow humans that I don’t quite understand.

However, finally, more of the puzzle fell into place in my 60s when I began to read in the science of evolutionary psychology and socio-biology and to read about the development of consciousness and, through them, to think more clearly about the human animal and its evolutionary past as revealed in it’s developing consciousness. Science shows me that selfishness is just the way the human animal constructed itself to survive. Selfishness is necessary for survival. One who is completely selfless will not survive the sharks out there. At last, through science, I’m moving from, I hope, “came to believe that a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity” (the third principle of AA) to “came to believe that science can restore me to sanity.” Science gives perfectly adequate answers to most of my more troubling concerns. I don’t need to look outside myself or beyond the realm of the material to perfectly understand what’s going on with the human race, and, you know, if I’m honest with myself, I’m not all that concerned with afterlives and imaginary worlds. Let others have what they need as long as they leave me alone to my own meditations.

I can’t make much of a big deal out of this final part of my story. It’s all intellectual and unemotional, all about the expansion of my rational capacities as I learn more from my studies of biology and consciousness. I am reading and enjoying, learning to meditate. Slowly and surely, I hope my studies will help take me out of myself and into the intellectual world where I can see why everything in the world is exactly as it has to be. There’s no magic here, nothing transcendental or mythical. Science can answer so many things right now and more soon. We are as we are because we are still animals. We hurt one another, squabble like monkeys, show affection and fuck just like animals, so why deny the truth still? Once you start seeing the world that way, it’s amazing the things you see.

The other day, I watched a mother and daughter cross a parking lot outside the Starbuck’s I was feeding in. The genetic similarities were obvious, the way their hips moved and the way they held their backs and shoulders. Yes, unconsciously they were accenting their breasts too, like two proud animals unawares of their animalism. I knew I was observing two animals in our modern jungle cross a dangerous place warily on the look out for the danger of autos that surrounded them. They were so much animals that a joy filled me as I saw myself in those other beings so much like myself in the thick of the material world.

THE END