Gap

What is so hard to understand?  Why can't I get you to understand?  Do you understand that you don't understand?

A long discussion tonight about the justification of human values--kindness and awe, for instance--in a world dominated in the social realm by economic darwinism, and in the scientific realm by 'atoms and void'.

The occasion was an article by Michael Lerner of Tikkun about the need for a 'spiritual progressivism.'  He writes in Salon: 'Liberals and progressives need to be advocating A New Bottom Line which focuses on how much any given institution or economic or social policy or practices tends to maximize our capacities to be loving and caring, kind and generous, environmentally responsible and capable of transcending a narrow utilitarian attitude toward other human beings and capable of responding to the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur and beauty of all that is.'

My thought at the dinner table was:  Well and good, but what comprehensive conceptual scheme provides the warrant for hoping such a program is possible, much less likely?

Your response was to acknowledge we do act as if human values were mere arbitrary considerations ancillary to the main business of running the world or the universe, but that they are irrepressible and self-justifying (in fact, 'divine') enough to provide, if not a strategic, at least a tactical alternative to the prevalent ideologies.

Not good enough, I argued. That just leads to a dualism of matter and spirit, two distinct realms neither of which explains or illuminates the other.

Not so, you responded. The 'spirit' keeps irrupting in affairs and attitudes such that the supremacy of the orthodoxies is continually undermined or qualified.

But isn't what we need some big picture of the way things are and work that includes all that history and science have confirmed as well as reasonable answers to the question why?

'Why' is what each person has to discover or be taught on his or her own. No one has an answer for anyone else.

But, I said, reasons can be conceived of, articulated, argued, and actually convince. Good reasons like any other good ideas are rare enough to deserve circulation and debate. And if they survive ready refutation, I said, pressing my point, they can be used to construct some framework within which all that we value and trust to be true can actually coexist (indeed, mutually benefit)?

Some framework, you said, with impatience. An exoskeleton enclosing a dynamic world. Can it adapt? Can it remain relevant? No, the spirit takes us by surprise, keeps things cooking.

But what is this spirit? What is the agenda?

Be alert, listen, and you'll hear.

But can't we listen, and, at the same time, have an idea about why what we're listening for might actually exist and matter?

So it went. A dozen different ways of presenting our ideas laid out for the Other. Why don't you just get it? I demand. What is it you are still trying to convince me of? you retort.  The gap between us yawned. How is communication possible? Are we really separates?

I sat to write; you came and kissed my head. No, we're not.