“Utopia and Dissent” (Part 2)

We have many different ways that our senses guide us. Seeing, hearing, touch: these guide us. We also have intuition which rises out of a combination of experience and our innate development of skill in pattern recognition.

For myself, I have a specialized version of intuition. When I am filled with an absolute sense of certainty about any idea, a light goes off and I realize that I am certainly wrong. This, by no means, implies that another idea has been revealed to me. What I recognized as an absolute truth might be altogether false, but more likely is only flawed, partial or limited in its applicability.

This acceptance of uncertainty is a central quality of the avant garde art in California in the mid-20th Century as Richard Candida Smith discussed in “Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California.” In one of the final chapters he discusses the poetry and philosophy of the poet Robert Duncan, a deeply contrarian personality.

Duncan, like Wallace Berman, valued domesticity and personal relations above public political action as a means. However, he was more flexible in responding to the demands from others that he take a public role, at least in part of his tenure as a poet. He was scheduled to speak at the October 20, 1967, March on the Pentagon, a protest against the Vietnam War. Right before he was to begin speaking, the National Guard and police charged, attacking the protesters. Smith writes:

“Duncan, at the front of the line, found himself caught between the soldiers and the crowd behind him, in which there were many prepared to fight back. Monitors from the march organization advised people to sit down and confront the military with nonviolent, passive resistance instead.

‘Look into their eyes,’ the doctor’s wife tells me [Smith quotes Duncan from Duncan’s collection “Bending the Bow”]. To my right the onlookers call out, the soldiers are kicking the body of a woman who is everything that they despise: they kick her rich clothes; they kick her cultured tone… they kick her meekness that, courageous to lie there, confronts their victorious movement forward. ‘I am all right,’ she calls back to us.

… The speech that he had planned to give seemed futile, for the soldiers ‘were under a command that meant to overcome us or to terrify us, a force aroused in the refusal to even give the beginnings of a hearing.’ In this confrontation, Duncan sensed that a new ‘we’ was in formation, a ‘we’ that at first seemed to be the demonstrators separating politically and morally from the bankrupt authority of the United States. Yet as soon as he suggested that a schism was sundering the American polity, Duncan threw out a second and surprising idea. The soldiers and the police were also his readers. By being part of the same drama, they had formed a community with the demonstrators: ‘We were, in turn, members of a company of men, moving forward, violently, to overcome in themselves the little company of others kneeling and striving to speak to them.’

The protesters had come ‘to fulfill their humanity,’ but so had the soldiers. Each had a poem to read to each other: one involving a testimony of opposition in hopefully nonviolent action; the other to express rage, fear, and the ‘shock of what they were to encounter.’ Without the order, each ‘poem’ was meaningless. Yet there was a tendency, coming from the highest office of the land, to erect boundaries so that the poems of others were no longer recognized. To think of a community as a group with common goals is actually to sunder the community and seek isolation from contamination. The existence of other human beings as historical actors fell into the dark and churning mass of the repressed [in the Freudian sense]. When confronted by external evidence of interior chaos, one reaction was a sense of defilement. ‘And the people who feel that,’ Duncan thought, ‘-and they certainly are to be found in the dominant, ruling majority and in lots of little minorities – want authenticity within their group [group think] and then everything else is experienced as corrupting…. One feels a challenge and wants it to be eliminated. Those things are there to be eliminated… Or not even thought of which is the worst pattern of all… The characteristic of the totalitarian is that they can’t repropose themselves.’” [Brackets contain my own comments.]

What Duncan means by “repropose,” is to be able to imagine oneself otherwise, to be able to imagine potentialities of what one might become. This can be a positive experience. Afro-Futurism is a kind of prompt from Black Americans to build the skills to repropose themselves in positive ways, not in regards to ideology, but in terms of experience. However, Duncan understood, the protesters needed to include in their ability to repropose themselves honestly to realize that only circumstance put them in their role, and not in the role of the soldiers who were attacking them. Uncertainty played a positive role in one’s efforts to live well.

In dialogues about uncertainty in our contemporary political discourse, conservative commentators critique the liberal worldview’s advocacy for uncertainty and tolerance by placing it as the cause of social anxieties. Jonathan Haidt emphasizes the greater degree of disgust with impurity as a characteristic of religiously conservative societies (implicitly critiquing liberal tolerance of the other). In his scientific writing he says the quiet part quietly, but in his popular discourse he says the quiet part loudly. Haidt’s thought is what Duncan is referring to when he says, “The characteristic of the totalitarian is that they can’t repropose themselves.”

Within Judaism we have a range of approaches to certainty. Orthodoxy is an umbrella term that we apply to Jewish fundamentalists, those who believe that Torah was given by God at Mount Sinai. This unifying characteristic encompasses a broad array of variation in beliefs and understanding as well a broad variety of socially distinct groups. On the surface it seems to value certainty very highly. Ask your Rabbi and do what he tells you to do. He is inerrant. However, that inerrancy is dependent on your social affiliation. The Satmar Rav may disagree with the Chabad rebbe. The Satmar Rav’s answer is correct if you are a Satmar and incorrect if you follow Chabad. Within these communities some people may be incapable of reproposing themselves as a member of the other, but I think many would not.

Maimonides has some detractors within the Orthodox world, but is still widely revered. The negative theology of Maimonides, the belief that we can only know what God is not, but not what God is, reflects a deeply held traditional Jewish belief attached to uncertainty.

Reform theology stresses that Jewish law as derived from the Torah was not given at Sinai, and that Torah law is not binding. The Reform theologian Eugene believed that it was the responsibility of the Reform Jew to examine Jewish law and take up or discard Jewish legal practices based on one's own carefully examined understanding. Borowitz was uncomfortable with the casual way that many Reform Jews expressed a certainty that Torah law was a matter of entirely free choice. Oddly, Reform Judaism, referred to as Liberal Judaism in Great Britain, could be less liberal and less open to allowing its adherents to repropose themselves due to the sociology that forms its social make-up.

Conservative sociology includes a narrower sociological range than Orthodoxy, but varies more in terms of theology. While it is non-fundamentalist, its beliefs about the binding nature of Torah law and the sources of that law are varied (to the degree that Mordechai Kaplan, the father of Reconstructionist Judaism, felt that a break with the Conservative movement was unnecessary). It created a different method for determining how Torah law should be interpreted in cases where questions were raised anew. The work is done through a committee that make a decision that is considered binding on all Conservative Jews, or one of two or more possibilities that are all considered valid. Certainty is a possible solution, but not the obligatory one. The current head to the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, Pamela Barmash, has begun to bring in stakeholders in debated rulings to speak directly to those Rabbis considering matters of Jewish law, a largely unknown practice previously. Although Duncan would have expressed qualms about the success of the domestic and individual trying to impact the government, Jewish legal decision making stands in a mid-point between a government and the domestic sphere (outside the State of Israel).

There is reason to fear the threat that “progressive” dogma expresses towards religion and traditional religious practice in particular precisely where it condemns those who would repropose themselves and insists on the interpretive voice over the honest narrative of experience. I have some anxiety about the way that modern artistic and poetic practices problematize Jewish life and practice. Duncan’s reconciliation of his contrariness seems helpful.

I include today a poem that arose out of one of my own personal confrontations with certainty that has some imperfect relationship with subject above:

Ideolect
(For Elizabeth Strong-Cantrell)

We speak the same language
and our words fall like snow
We have the same sorts of bodies
enough to say, “this is my species,”
and perhaps a little more
We are made of the same stuff
most of which we try to keep inside us,
mysterious bodies of water,
mysterious bodies of land,
our faces the farther shore
when we gaze into the mirror
In the distance between us
a vastness, a wonder
the other not over the horizon
visible in surprising detail
It is a miracle that we can be heard
We speak like every other animal
code-breakers spinning
through infinite codes
to say, “I need,” “I want,” “please,”
We are lock-pickers turning the tumblers
with variable delicacy
which I hope you hear when I say
I mean to apologize
I was too confident that I had broken the code
Words fall like snow
beautiful snow
until someone hands you a shovel
and you have to dig your way out.