A Father's Thoughts

Celebrate everyone's radical uniqueness

This is my article published in the Spectrum on April 17, 2012

Marilynne Robinson, novelist and essayist won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her second novel Gilead. Her most recent book, When I Was a Child I Read Books, is a collection of essays to which she brings her life experience, her intelligence, and her profound religious understanding and faith. Much of her language resonated with me as I responded to her eloquent articulation and clarification of ideas.

Robinson grabbed my attention in the preface quoting Walt Whitman honoring the “radical uniqueness” of each individual; a uniqueness and complexity that we obscure by assigning ideologically based labels that simplify or categorize ourselves and others, e.g., conservative/liberal, Republican/Democrat, rich/poor and so forth. This reductionism threatens the core of our democracy as what passes for public discourse loses “the character of generosity, and the largeness of spirit that has created and supported the best of our institutions”.

At the center of this collection is her essay, When I Was a Child, in which she writes very personally of growing up in the West. Robinson learned of an individualism, devoid of ideological self-interest, that empowers each person to contribute to the diversity and wholeness of the community, a community that validates and honors its members.

In the first essay, Freedom of Thought, she encourages us to push against the limitations and constraints too often found in our religions, our education, and our economically driven society and to expand our thinking while exploring the mysteries of the sacred, the opportunities we have to love, and the beauty in our world.

Robinson cites multiple passages from the Bible unambiguously admonishing us to care for the poor with a spirit of generosity and gratitude. How do we view the poor among us? She notes that today we hear harsh judgments of the plight of poor and a growing resistance to providing help that is consistent with the message of Jesus.

Robinson writes of the essential nature of gratitude. It is “more stabilizing, more gratifying in every way, especially in dark times” and in spite of our contemporary challenges, she argues that we have much to be grateful for living in a nation blessed by God.

As I write I am aware that I may be guilty of that which Robinson argues against by simplifying the beautiful and the wondrous complexity of her work.

She writes of the importance of “imaginative love” for those other than our family in a healthy community, the role of ideology in capitalism and austerity, the fate of ideas, the understanding of human nature, the complexity of the human brain, and much more.

The scope of her essays extends well beyond what I can address in this short column. These few ideas may provide a taste or sip of the richness within this artful book.

Some books amply reward the time and thought spent reading and pondering. This is one.

George Stoddard is an Ivins resident and a member of The Spectrum & Daily News Writers Group. His email is gstoddard1@me.com

 

 

Book looks at story of economics

This was my writers' group column in the Spectrum on November 2, 2011

F. S. Michaels in her thought provoking book The Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything examines the influence that a predominant story or narrative has on a culture. She traces different periods in history in which for example there was a religious, scientific, machine, or mathematics monoculture.

She presents evidence showing that we are currently living the “economic story” and that story whether we are aware of it or not determines to a large extent our societal worldview. In the economic story spending and the accumulation of “stuff” becomes our priority. Michaels probes more deeply the reasons that the economic story distracts us from living in a way that satisfies our deeper human needs.

The author describes how six areas of our lives are changing because of the rise of the economic story. “How you think about your work, your relationships with others and the natural world, your community, your physical and spiritual health, your education, and your creativity are being shaped by economic values and assumptions,”

For example it is evident that the economic story influences our relationships with others and the world. Recently Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser to President Carter, while discussing the complexity of the challenges we face in Iraq, Iran, and the Middle East observed that we have become so preoccupied with greed, financial success, with having to make a living, with just surviving that we are unaware of the painful consequences of what we are doing in the world.

Our preoccupation with the economic story enables us to engage in two costly wars content with allowing the burden of those wars to be carried by less than one percent of our population. How many of us ever come in contact with those whose lives are forever changed because of the sacrifices they make on the battlefield and the impact of those sacrifices on their families?

In the economic story American health care has experienced a transformation “from compassionate relief of suffering to a profit-orientated business.” During this transformation, given the growing emphasis on the business of health care, our costs exceed those of other developed nations while outcomes rank us no better that thirty- seventh among those nations.

Is the growing awareness of this “economic story” and the increasing inequalities in our nation driving the actions of the Tea Party movement and now the Occupy Wall Street protests? Perhaps the public is beginning to confront the inability of our political system to deal with the pain and challenges being experienced by so many.

Michaels invites us to become more introspective and thoughtful about the possibility of making different and more meaningful choices in our lives as we realize that our focus on money and economics saps our ability to appreciate and live by values such as “nurturing human dignity regardless of someone’s economic situation.”