Elitism

If we spend more time looking up to loftier goals and less time looking down in criticism of others, our species will be doing a much better job as citizens of the planet.

I observe an innate tendency in myself to classify. I know this has been explored by neuroscience and found to be a way of the brain helps me to survive. But, my better self is getting quite tired of struggling with it.

I have been criticized throughout my life for being "a loner", as opposed to "a joiner". It started most horribly when my height superseded normal limits for a prepubescent boy. I was immediately labeled as a "basketballer" by everyone, including my father, who had played minor-league professional basketball in the 1930s and 1940s.

I was useless with air-inflated spheres and mini-blimps of all kinds. Really useless and potentially dangerous. I seemed to unintentionally injure as many of my own teammates as members of the opposing team. While experiencing subjective panic, I exhibited the external behaviors of a rogue elephant on crack. Bodies littered the courts and fields upon which I played. I was usually left standing, unbruised, quizzically observing the damage, while a red-faced coach pulled madly at his hair and screamed invectives at me.

This led me to the personal discovery that earlier observations about me were quite right: Loner, not joiner. Perhaps this discovery, as I trudged grimly into adolescence, saved me psychologically, since I discovered rather quickly that I am homosexual. 'Ah,' I thought in a deep, inexplicable way, 'so this is what it's all about. I am different. And, I'm the kind of different they don't want around. Well, why bother to join anyway?'

Voila! A natural dissident and dissenter emerged from the hive of working-class America.

So, as a solo dancer, I have been able to observe, and often struggle with, the dynamics of group behavior personally and professionally for nearly five decades. It all boils down to some basics: There are leaders and followers; there are in-groupers and out-groupers; there are perpetrators and victims; there are better-thans and worse-thans; there are better-offs and worse-offs; there are smarter-thans and dumber-thans; there are parental favorites and black sheep...and so on.

As a nurse and a social activist, I have often had to insert myself between these various subgroups of humanity in various situations. I have chosen to protect the abused from the abusers. I have chosen to defend the effeminate from the tyranny of the butch. I have chosen to protect the dying from the callously living.

The propensity for people in groups to form in-groups is a cancer that defeats the ethical energy of many good causes. The urge for control and domination lives in every human being, I believe. It is animal, instinctual, a left-over from life in caves. The sad fact is that those with the strongest and least self-examined aggression in groups usually lead them. This propagates both the genetic and cultural transmission of aggressive behavior in groups. Unfortunately, the same genes which are probably linkable to aggression in groups are also apparently linked to appealing looks, the ability to hoard capital and reproductive potency.

I believe this is how elites are formed and become entrenched in social structures across the planet. Once established, it takes a French Revolution of effort and horrors to expunge them.

My choice has been to dance alone within groups. This is must be done gingerly. The seduction of elitism is very enticing indeed. Just look at the American celebrity obsession for evidence. American Idol...need I say more? Keeping one's own rhythm in the symphony of conformity to the us-them dichotomy, the core of elitism, is tricky business. It doesn't earn a person testimonials, awards or sinecures.

Ah, but it is so rewarding in itself! I have learned something by being a death-watcher. I have seen over a thousand individual deaths as a hospice nurse during an epidemic. I have seen the deaths of the elite. I have seen the deaths of the confused conformists. I have seen the deaths of the solo dancers, like myself. I will simply say that I feel the way a person dies of aging or prolonged illness can indicate the true core of how they have lived. Dying slowly is the greatest solo dance of them all. Those who have practiced the dance in life are the most adept at doing it with peace to its inevitable end.

Arrogance

Whatever a fool learns,

It only makes him duller.

Knowledge cleaves his head.

For then he wants recognition,

A place before other people,

A place over other people.

"Let them know my work,

Let everyone look to me for direction."

Such are his desires,

Such is his swelling pride.

---Dhammapada

The challenge of secular humanist practice in the 21st century is the double edged sword of knowledge which comes with education. I believe it takes a considerable amount of formal or informal education to progress from ritualistic religion to humanism. Academia or School of Life, either or both bring the thinker, the awakened, to humanism in name and/or practice.

Class consciousness is corrosive to humanist practice. Education and its socioeconomic benefits can lead to an unconscious and poisonous elitism in the humanist, as it has in the religious for centuries. The intentional denial of classism in the U.S. presents a particularly difficult challenge to humanist awareness in practice. The veneer of political correctness and superficial diversity, based in race and ethnicity, covers an entrenched socioeconomic class system, which is becoming more and more destructive to the democratic ideals of the U.S..

Within humanist communities, often centered in cosmopolitan centers, which in themselves are becoming economically gated communities for the wealthy, the challenge of elitism can often be ignored and minimized. It may be fashionable in some circles to scoff at the concept that simplicity, modesty and even poverty can lead to greater mindfulness, liberation and compassion. The secular cult of materialism and greed may be seen as acceptable and even honorable among "Sunday humanists" as it has been for centuries among "Sunday Christians", for example.

Arrogance leads to prescriptive moralism. The elite bolster their own holiness, their own superiority, in endless, subtle ways. Before long, a jewel-encrusted Hierophant is dispensing indulgences within a gated, vaulted cathedral, while the great mass of humanity starves on its steps.

The solution is simple to see and difficult to master. This is the middle way. This is the true meaning of practice. Practice is lived on the ground with the people in every situation of every day. This is humanist practice, as I see it and attempt to live it.

Elitism

I am currently reading Gore Vidal's memoir, "Palimpsest, A Memoir". I appreciate Mr. Vidal's wit, educated cynicism and downright wickedness. I think he is funny. Always have. However, I am mystified by the evolutionary failure of men like Mr. Vidal, who are raised among the elite, see their failings and persist in becoming elitists themselves. Power indeed corrupts. The point of this blog, this part of my practice, is to do what the elite do not wish to do. That is to simply share what I know, think, hope and do in an effort to both learn and perhaps inspire. This blog is not a competitive enterprise, or a means to engrandize myself. My real motivation, which I cherish in my own being and becoming, is woefully absent in the elite, as I read them. I find that absence terribly discouraging of my hopes for human evolution. I read the writing of the elite to try to understand what, other than power, they have to offer. So far, I have been disappointed to find that many, although exposed to a vast diversity of life experience, avoid basic human truth. A wise man two millennia ago, as the legend goes, spoke of the eye of a needle and a camel in this respect. And, if entering what he called heaven means what I consider the evolution of being human, I have to agree with him.