Living lovingly in hypernormal times

Piqiang Fault, China (source)

 

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation

 

(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)

—o0o—

Last week, drawing on a poem by Mary Oliver, in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, I brought to you a single, religious naturalist thought to consider, namely, that the earthquake must not be thought of as the sharp sword of God but, instead, as simply another wild body loving its life. As a whole, my piece was directed at encouraging us to continue to display a love of life through the material movements of our own wild bodies. 

And, despite how it initially develops, this short piece also concludes by centring once again on the importance of love.

So, this week, as the news, and our heads and hearts, continue to be filled with distressing reports about how people are attempting to cope with the terrible destruction all around them, I want to consider how fault lines affect all of us whether or not we live in earthquake prone areas of the world. To introduce the basic idea I have in mind here is Robert Walsh’s (1937-2016) poem, “Fault Line.”

Did you ever think there might be a fault line
passing underneath your living room:
A place in which your life is lived in meeting
and in separating, wondering
and telling, unaware that just beneath
you is the unseen seam of great plates
that strain through time? And that your life,
already spilling over the brim, could be invaded,
sent off in a new direction, turned
aside by forces you were warned about
but not prepared for? Shelves could be spilled out,
the level floor set at an angle in
some seconds’ shaking. You would have to take
your losses, do whatever must be done next.

When the great plates slip
and the earth shivers and the flaw is seen
to lie in what you trusted most, look not
to more solidity, to weighty slabs
of concrete poured or strength of cantilevered
beam to save the fractured order. Trust
more the tensile strands of love that bend
and stretch to hold you in the web of life
that’s often torn but always healing. There’s
your strength. The shifting plates, the restive earth,
your room, your precious life, they all proceed
from love, the ground on which we walk together.

(From “Noisy Stones: A Meditation Manual”, Skinner House Books, 1992)

Although, as always, I recognise you may disagree, it seems incontrovertible to me one of the major fault lines upon which all we’re living today is that which runs straight down the middle of the neoliberal project that has utterly dominated our lives since the late 1970s. As many of you will already know, promoters of the project claim that by relying solely on market mechanisms, by promoting individual over collective rights, and by reducing the role of the state to the absolute minimum, it is possible to create a society that both maximises individual freedoms and radically improves economic growth and prosperity. It’s important to realise that a key, central idea of the project is that all that is good and valuable in society is somehow calculable in monetary/numeric terms and, in turn, this has meant that our civic discourses are often framed almost entirely in terms of commercialisation, privatisation, and deregulation.

It is this latter idea, by the way, that makes this a subject entirely appropriate for a liberal minister of religion like me to speak about. This is because in liberal religious circles the basic measure of all that is good and valuable in society is not money or numbers—important though they may be at times—but love and compassion. Also, in liberal religious circles, civic discourse is primarily to be framed, not in terms of commercialisation, privatisation, and deregulation, but in terms of community development, mutual benefit, and solidarity with and accountability to each other through the wise employment of regulation, whether expressed through formal, legal standards or locally agreed, informal by-laws.
 
Anyway, as all of us can now see—and many of us are now also viscerally feeling through our squeezed wages and pensions, poor employment conditions, the rising cost of food and energy, the collapse of key public services such as social and health care, public transport and so on — the neoliberal project is beginning to judder very disturbingly. To some of us, these judders have long suggested that they may be the foreshocks alerting us to a potential, major mainshock from that neoliberal fault line running right underneath all our rooms.

But, despite the warning judders, it remains astonishing to me how so many people within our society continue to carry on as if nothing is amiss at all. This ability has a name: “hypernormalization.” But, you may ask, what, precisely, does that word mean? Well, here’s Brandon Harris introducing the word to readers of the New Yorker magazine on November 3rd, 2016:

“The anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, in his 2005 book, ‘Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation,’ argues that, during the final days of Russian communism, the Soviet system had been so successful at propagandizing itself, at restricting the consideration of possible alternatives, that no one within Russian society, be they politicians or journalists, academics or citizens, could conceive of anything but the status quo until it was far too late to avoid the collapse of the old order. The system was unsustainable; this was obvious to anyone waiting in line for bread or gasoline, to anyone fighting in Afghanistan or working in the halls of the Kremlin. But in official, public life, such thoughts went unexpressed. The end of the Soviet Union was, among Russians, both unsurprising and unforeseen. Yurchak coined the term “hypernormalization” to describe this process — an entropic acceptance and false belief in a clearly broken polity and the myths that undergird it.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but this seems to be speaking loudly and clearly to our present situation here in the UK.

Of course, if I’m right about this, I cannot stop the mainshock coming even though, since 2007/8, I have consistently tried to alert my own local community to what have always seemed to me to be warning foreshocks—just browse through my blog if you want to find them. However, despite being unable to do anything about any coming mainshock, I do feel able to conclude this piece by saying something positive, practical and hopeful that I think can help all of us survive both fore- and mainshocks. To do this all I need do here is simply reread the second stanza of Walsh’s poem, the relevance of which, in these hypernormal times, I hope, you will now be able to hear more clearly and powerfully than before:

When the great plates slip
and the earth shivers and the flaw is seen
to lie in what you trusted most, look not
to more solidity, to weighty slabs
of concrete poured or strength of cantilevered
beam to save the fractured order. Trust
more the tensile strands of love that bend
and stretch to hold you in the web of life
that’s often torn but always healing. There’s
your strength. The shifting plates, the restive earth,
your room, your precious life, they all proceed
from love, the ground on which we walk together.