A Journey to Epiphany (that still requires more analysis)

The end of January got busy. I want to get my epiphany out then take a short hiatus to address a few things. If my Twittervism remains active, I’ll post them. I also might post something if I get worked up. Other than that, though, I plan to focus on home and family stuff that needs attention.

After getting home from the "Int'l Solidarity First! Honduras; Philippines, Antiwar Movement" forum, I got into some research that lasted on and off throughout the rest of the weekend then peaked in The Epiphany on Sunday. It revolved around my wondering why people do horribly divisive greedy behavior in the face that more fellowship with other humans has more potential for happiness and my mulling over the image of neo-mercantilist colonialist neoliberalism painted at the forum.

For the life of me, I won't accept greed or power hungriness as enough of a reason. If I did, it wouldn't support people out there that seek good to blossom in the world because it makes things better. Though I may crticize the guy from Answer! who presented at the forum of vanguardism, I have to believe that not everyone in the world seeks power, money, and influence for the sake of those things, as a primary driver. Using this argument against those in power logically leads to even those who seek good would eventually fall into evil when they do come into power (which we do have examples of in the world).

But what about those selfless examples in the world and throughout history that engage in action out of the goodness of their hearts and even seek to do so without any gain for themselves or even at great cost? We have numerous examples of such people throughout history and, dare I say it, in our stories.

I also don't follow the dictum of "doing good for the sake of doing good" or "because it's the right thing to do." I don't believe we have an amazing inborn moral compass inside us that pings us if we do bad. I remain fairly agnostic about a divine authority or permanence of morality. These dictums feel too simple to me.

I may argue against motivations for greed, power, and selfishness, but I believe, on some level, doing good benefits us, and it does benefit us through social and biological awards because doing good for the world outside us will motivate the outside world to give us pleasant and agreeable feedback in the proper circumstances. Even in less than ideal circumstances in which greed, selfishness, and power mongering have dominance, I believe consistent, longer term rewards can come to the person doing good, even for a martyr that ends up being sacrificed or disgraced.

But before striking out for the good, though, and to try taking action to help against the powers of greed, selfishness, and powermongering, I feel the need to understand what can possibly motivate humans to go there, especially in the case of an essay that I've been working on for more than ten years going. A lot of the difficulty for this essay has been to understand the social environment of this one guy who went from minister of 10 or so years then turned activist socialist reformer that went as far as to settle his own utopian community that failed about 5 years later.

This man was George Ripley, a Unitarian minister and also a member of the Transcendentalist Club with Ralph Waldo Emerson back in the 1830's. He could have had a pretty cushy life as a minister. His congregation liked him. The Unitarian ministry had a pretty good hold of the religious communities in Boston and Cambridge. Even with immigrants coming in, Catholicism and other religions making inroads into the two cities, and poltical tides of government making decisions that didn't necessarily put the "religious establishment" as prime anymore, the Unitarian church wouldn't lose their influence of those cities within a decade or two.

In some ways, Ripley saw this evolution and argued for initiatives to make Unitarianism more attractive to potential congregants, considering his heated pamphlet wars with the "Unitarian pope", Andrews Norton. These pamphlet wars instead came more from his disposition to better society for the common people rather than solely seeking to increase the number of worshippers and the footprint of the Unitarian church.

If anything, Ripley saw that the Unitarian church should have the goal of bettering society for the common people as part of its makeup, not as a vehicle for individual powermongering and influence building. This motivation of his becomes apparent when reading his later sermons, whether the one in which he urges his congregants to help the poor because the burdens and hardships of others around the church represents the state of the congregants, society, and their souls, especially since the congregants had fairly good lives and didn't do anything to spread the good state of things.

Ripley eventually resigned his post as minister because his congregation didn't have the motivation to do better. The congregation liked him and felt that he challenged them in a good way, and they wanted him to stay on as minister. His congregation had no desire to help those who had true material needs that the needy couldn't meet through their own efforts. Despite the fact that he could have led a good life as their minister, at least for probably another decade or two, his conscience would not let him stand aside while society and nations ground down the lives and souls of people.

Brook Farm, Ripley's utopian community, didn't amount too much more than a historical community and a really good memory for some young students that took its curriculum and some other community members that enjoyed the company of others. Brook Farm can also provide some level of instance of a utopian experiment for someone like me to try drawing some useful meaning or lesson from it (with much frustration). For Ripley, though, it broke him and destroyed much of his faith in humanity. He led a comfortable life afterward and engaged in literary jobs that he enjoyed, but he lived mostly a private life that didn't feel too concerned about the welfare of society and the people that made it up.

I don't know the personal histories or situations of the people in Ripley's congregation, but I assume that Ripley did. He likely had a good idea of how much time and resources they had to spare for the relief of the burdens and hardship of those less well off. As minister, I bet he knew a good many of them well. Despite his belief in their ability to do more, they refused to do so. They chose friendly complacency (though the church was near South Boston around the time that the Irish began to settle into Boston, including Catholic churches, so I have little problem believing that their complacency came from some prejudice and xenophobia).

The "more contemporaneous" social activist, Martin Luther King Jr., had a couple things to say about this kind of inaction that strikes a little more closer to the heart:

"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it."

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"First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;' who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a 'more convenient season.'

Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

Another example in the historical time of George Ripley and Massachusetts that touches upon my difficulty with trying to understand greedy evil or good fellowship comes from Massachusetts politicians. The Federalists than the Whigs held the power in Massachusetts during that time, and they did a lot to build up industries and trade in Massachusetts while many others in the United States focused on agriculture.

Politicians and intelligentsia that supported industry tended to believe in what we'd consider "trickle down economics" these days. By building up total wealth, it would drop down to workers and others without a ton of wealth just by virtue of the vast amounts of wealth. It would grow industry, and with industry comes work, and with work comes wealth for all. Sound familiar? Another water-based metaphor: raising the water level will lift everyone up.

A couple weeks ago or so, I learned that Rockefeller pushed hard for Prohibition. He believed that alcohol contributed a lot to keeping people from being industrious while increasing crime. Only after Prohibition did he and many others with power see that restricting alcohol increased crime even further and in savagery. And if crime and smuggling can be seen as industry, then I guess Rockefeller had his finger on the pulse of the People. . .but I don't think that's the case.

Rockefeller and the many others that railed against alcohol and pushed for Prohibition didn't take an original stance. The Massachusetts clergy and politicians in the first half the 1800's often blamed the laziness and drinking habits of the laborers and common people for industry not being strong. They even argued that by making laborers work long hours, it would instill better morals because it would keep the laborers busy and not allow them the time to be idle and engage in drinking, being abusive to their families, and other things detrimental to society. After all, "idle hands are the devil's workshop."

Who cares that the wealthy could engage in such horrible behavior and argue that they pretty much lived on a different moral plane (their reputation would be hurt by such behavior rather than they should just be good)? Who cares that the wealthy would erect private libraries, put up colleges like Harvard, support hospitals, and other "altrustic," charitable activities, but the common people couldn't benefit from them. Instead, they received and recriminations that they should work long hours and don't do all these horrible things because it's causing them to be poor.

Not to say that such horrible things aren't horrible, but Boston and Cambridge didn't have much social mobility back then. Andrews Norton, the Unitarian pope, even argued with Ripley that the common people shouldn't question or learn to think because it would lead to acting immorally. What did it even matter, anyway, because their boss's made them work instead of going to church where the Unitarian ministry supposedly preached self culture and that if someone worked hard, remained attentive, and tried to learn when they could, they could make something of themselves.

Albeit, the economics of that time gets complicated. On the federal level, Andrew Jackson played games with the fiscal system, dismantled the Second Bank of the United States (pretty much the Fed at that time), and other things that caused a lot of economic turmoil. Tariffs, which were used to pay for debts from the Revolutionary War, ended at some point. Tariffs had actually bolstered wages since tariffs encouraged consumers to purchase goods and products from domestic sources rather than cheaper ones from foreign sources. Since the end of tariffs caused foreign goods to go down in price, people bought from foreign sources. To more agrarian parts of the country, it probably helped them, but in a region of the country that depended on industry, the pain of a recession from these activities would hit eastern Massachusetts especially hard.

Massachusetts had a labor movement soon after industry came to the state, and probably even before that. For some time, though, when industry first came or before that, Massachusetts didn't have a big population while it had plenty of work, whether in an internal agrarian economy or for industrial factories. The labor market benefited workers. At one point, workers could switch between factories or even come and go as they pleased and get paid a lot, simply because their was more work than laborers. If an industrialist or business owner wanted to get something made to sell, they needed to keep the labor pool happy enough and paid enough to make the wares.

With the cotton gin, other industrial innovations, immigration, other forms of population growth, and the federal-level politics, labor conditions got worse and the labor movements fought to better those conditions, whether to increase safety, reduce the amount of hours of work (can you imagine working in a factory for 12-14 hours per week?), fight against child labor, and for many other reasons I'm probably not aware of, tensions grew between common people/labor movements and the wealthy/industrialists, politicians supported by the wealthy, and the intelligentsia that supported them, including the Unitarian establishment that mingled with the upper classes.

I remember that one or two of the books I've read to accumulate this knowledge had plenty to say about the perspective of the upper classes and politicians of Massachusetts at that time. A political speech quoted at the end of it especially sticks in my head. It had something to do with the lower classes not having enough gratitude and weren't thankful enough to just work and accept the "good things" that they were getting in life. They had to agitate and had to protest and strike to try improving their side of the labor deal, when they should be happy with what they had and feel grateful (sounds familiar, doesn't it? (skip ahead to the 2 minute mark if you don't want to see everything before that)). The quoted part especially struck me because it came from a politician that other people at that point in history from many walks of life praised.

Unfortunately, I can't name that politician because I don't have the book that has the quote. I must have borrowed it from the library. I forget the title of the book and everything. At this point, I wouldn't even know how to start finding the book. . ..

The memory remains strong, though, and I latched onto it that Sunday. I combed through what books I have from that time years ago when I engaged in intense research because they had some bits about the two politicians from that time that stick in my head, Daniel Webster and Edward Everett.

In my heart, I believe that Webster made the speech quoted in that book. That Sunday, I tried finding things by the both of them in relation to labor because the books in my current inventory mentioned them quite a bit in connection with the establishment views of labor. With Webster, I found some interesting texts, but one struck out in which he praised the working class then in the last quarter page, last few paragraphs took a sudden change of tone in which he struck out at lazy people who got drunk all the time and that it was BAD! I have the feeling he wanted to paint an ugly picture of the labor movement.

I read Edward Everett's "A Lecture on the Working Men's Party". The text of the lecture didn't really stick in my head, but the characterization of the lecture in William Hartford's Money, Morals, and Politics: Massachusetts in the Age of the Boston Associates strikes me as accurate as to how I feel about the lecture. Everett pretty much All Lives Mattered labor and work. To him, everyone but the immoral and indolent work, so the Working Men's Party shouldn't exist to separate themselves from everyone else because it's an insult to everyone else. To go a little further, though, I guess it also felt like an attempt to appease agitators and get them to calm down from the all the agitation, just trying to calm them down in a nice way.

Suffice to say, I couldn't find any deep dive into either the politicians to present what they really believed, their justifications for believing, and how they could believe that they stood up for the common person, the laborer. The lack of anything useful from them or any other writer about them left me back at square one, except a little bit more angry. It frustrated me that I couldn't figure things out.

These two politicians made me even more angry, though, because they believed they knew better and entitled about everything, and, if anything, they felt that they just had to explain to the non-activist laborers and working class that they just needed to find pride and enjoyment through their labor. Heck, these two politicians didn't sound that different from today's Republicans just telling people that if they stick to their morals, everything will turn out well and people can find fulfillment in their character, enough so that their physical state won't matter. "Let us run things, and we'll get you good jobs!"

And at some point, in the depths of frustration, the epiphany hit me: Humans are still territorial creatures, maybe not territory over land, but territory over power, influence, money, and people. Humans are still animals. One of the most universal features of the wildlife shows is animals protecting territory and fighting over reproductive domains. Animals of the same species will generally leave each other alone and might even work together but once they threaten each other's domains, the teeth and claws come out, the fighting starts, and the fight ends when one of the adversaries surrenders and retreats or one of them dies. And sometimes, that fight happens with the potential mate.

This epiphany really struck me. Look at the sexual improprieties that have run wild throughout human history, White Supremacy, especially in the time after the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement (a time span when they took pictures of lynchings and sold them as postcards!), mercantilism, colonialism, neoliberalism, political leaders gaining and keeping power, corporate leaders building and building, cults, corporate politics, Gamergate, Puppies in science fiction pissing all over awards because SJW's are taking away eyeballs, police killing black men and woman, black people representing a disproportionate amount of the prison population, the current government of the United States fighting amongst itself, giving the rich massive tax cuts while doing very little for the middle and lower classes, Charlottesville, dictators like Stalin, Hitler and World War II.

The list goes on and on and on, but a natural, animal instinct for gaining domain over territories of power, money, influence, and people feels like one of the most intuitive factors for explaining why people can choose the evil of greedy, selfish power instead of using their influence to bring people together and have them grow stronger, more fulfilling bonds. Part of my theory relies on oxytocin, the brain chemical that can pretty much strengthen the power of other neurochemicals that influence and are influence by social interaction.

In the weeks since then, I've tempered this hypothesis and have looked to inject more nuance into it. Having that animal territorial instinct feels like a good stand in for larger, background arguments, especially for those who demonstrate this disposition or become dictators, whether of their states, corporations, or home. The epiphany, however, doesn't seem to address the masses of people who follow along or who are just happy with the middling that they're doing and don't engage in some mass battle to try reaching the top. Vying for power happens to some amount, but I feel like the fabric of all societies would be torn apart by the seams and wouldn't have gotten as "civilized" as they have and whole races of humanity would have been fully destroyed if that were the case. In some other words, I can't find enough intertextual evidence to show territorial pissings as a universal enough manifest or latent primary function of humanity.

I'm finding myself fall back onto terms like moral contagion, moral transference, affirmation. I've experienced the revulsion of seeing someone I couldn't do anything for, someone that did something stupid, or someone facing much hardship. A podcast I listened to once talked about how people try to distance themselves from such things, as if they feared a contagion.

Having such a phenomenon also seems to make some sense to the texts of Ethan Frome's about Hitler and why the German people had followed him at the time along with some understanding as to why people in the US support Trump and the Republicans, though if you look at their policies and actions, they don't help the common people that vote for them. I don't get it, but these common people can feel like they're experiencing the 'success" and "power" as if they had it themselves, much like how I might experience the stresses and pain of someone going through hardship and burdens. Whereas I might shy away from the bad, the supporters of Trump and the Republicans lean in toward the euphoric and confident feelings that Trump and the Republicans try to put out there.

I don't have it all figured out yet. And unfortunately, as I mentioned from the top, I've got a lot of day-to-day personal and home stuff that needs to get addressed. Work has gotten even busier than it had been in December. I don't plan to write much over the next few weeks or months. I might post some Twittervism or if I get some sudden inspiration or anger, but I don't expect to do much. Just too much to do! Until then, I hope I've left enough hearty thought to chew on. Enjoy!

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