Pot Calling the Kettle Black

11/15/05  Hot Springs, NC

Kim and I like Hot Springs very much and have fantasized about living here, of Kim being the campground host, of me getting the 65 Dodge van and fixing it up like Mike’s, and of maybe me even being the sheriff. We have liked it enough here by our river, with the train tracks near, with the long trains going slowly by in the night, to want to stay and enjoy just a little more. We also enjoyed very much a visit from Seth, a former SCA from 1994, Trinity Alps, and to see him as a full-fledged man, with a nice scene and a good head on his shoulders, sharp on the ideas, hopeful for the future, and just generally impressive as a fine him human being. Kim made pesto and sweet potatoes roasted in the fire with fruits and butter and Seth and I shelled the pinon pine nuts sent by Nora and Mike, for the pesto and a good time was had by all.

We saw Gantz the other day and he has finished his thru-hike. We found out that Blaze is done as well, also Gills and Samoa, Little Debbie, Tugboat, LeeRoy, all finished. They are all still in the book as if they were going, like dead authors alive in the text and now they are gone, but not forgotten.

We’ve met a few nutrition freaks along the way and I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between the tone and approach there of literalists, evangelicals and fundamentalists. It’s another version of “if you’re a hammer, the whole world looks like nails.” As I walked over endless mountains, where the up and down becomes lost and you are just going, oblivious to whatever gains and losses might be coming, as I walked I thought of a Gnostic gospels Jesus saying “…it is not what goes into a man’s mouth that makes him unclean, it is what comes out of a man’s mouth that makes him unclean…” But for a nutrition freak or a dieter, what is going in the mouth takes priority. That star shines brighter to them than what is perhaps going into their hearts and minds, or their pocketbooks or whatever their thing happens to be. There is a sort of “we take these truths to be self-evident” factor, but not all is self-evident to all. I am in a house of mirrors trying to see out my friends.

This all becomes different versions of hiking your own hike. Can a human being even open their mouth without stepping on someone else’s hike? I’ll return to issues of freedom and liberty and possible abuse of the commons but for now I want to sew a few threads between previously mentioned topics such as stasis and dynamism, formula and spontaneous quality, virtue and sin, good and bad, hype, the unseen hand, hiking your own hike, hikers and other true believers. How’s that for a big bite?! Why monkey around with chicken feed when I might address the nature of reality itself! I’m either insane or really onto something, or perhaps neither and just another old dead horse beater.

OK, you could see any sort of literalism, i.e. that every word in the Bible is true, or that lightweight gear is clearly better, or that fat is bad, anything along those lines represents a kind of stasis of thought. It is perfect. It is stopped; you can go no further; the world has reached a state of being black and white. This sort of stasis is not wrong per se, it’s just safe; it just wants to be secure by delimitation i.e. they who take few points into consideration find it easy to pronounce judgment. Playing it safe and believing a particular formula is akin to deciding to stay on dry land rather than risk the danger of sailing on the ocean or soaring in the sky. And how then can a delimited literalism pronounce on life at sea? It can’t. The literal stasis fears the grays and shades of color, everything must be solid and known and secure. This accounts for the sort of broken record quality of discourse with those supporting any stasis; it always gets back to the same old thing because that’s all there is in the world of hammers: nails, nails, nails, nails, nails. Everyone, even my Quakers, has this same tension between static and dynamic, safe or not, stale or fresh. This is a basic fork in the road with our thought process.

In this analogy of safety on land and adventure into the unknown on the sea or in the sky, you end up with static formulae that then pretend to cover all of experience when in fact, these static pronouncements are so small as to be meaningless. What happens is various shepherds fence off territory and life then becomes delimited and made manageable. The shepherd and his sheep then find exactly what they are looking for, not seeing that there is a fence or a pen holding them all in. Fish don’t know they are in a tank because they can’t gain the perspective from outside the tank. Lines can’t understand circles; all they see is two points on the line. You can only find what you are looking for.

Within this natural impulse to be safe, to find ease, comes a masquerades that the stasis gained is the end of the line. Light is gained over darkness, sin is defined, quantified and known and all can sit around the fire with self-congratulatory proclamations of how great and incredible they are! In the end though all that has been found is to fence off life and then call it good. An in-group has been created and so therefore all who are not in are out. This is a pretty basic fork in the road, eh?

In a world of different shepherds and fenced in sheep there is really no difference between one sheep and another. It is all the same dynamic. A Christian true believer is the same as a Muslim true believer; the records skip, they are in a pen. There is no truth then other than what people give to it. Sheep and domestic turkeys are about the same. If one wants to beyond the particulars and into the general, beyond the land and into the air, from black and white into color then it is hard to soar with eagles if you are talking with turkeys! There can’t be any discussion and this is what troubles me, I can’t talk; it is wall; there is nothing to say and it gets to be the same frustrating old argument that leads no where. But am I the same now? Am I just what I detest? If I am intolerant of intolerance where does that leave me? Why can’t I talk to these people!!!@%$@$@^@

Back to hiking your own hike: with hiking you end up with the same dynamic as religion and sin or with dieting and potato chips or with attitudes about processed and organic food. There comes a preoccupation with achieving goodness or cleanliness and a concomitant definition of the bad or evil from which to contrast the good. Are you ultra- light or too heavy? Are you on with the latest or are you a square? Have you caught on with the new dynamic gear or are you stuck in a hopelessly backward stasis? You get judged just like Hellfire. I propose that this has nothing to do at all with real good and evil, or what is even desirable or worthy but more in just what is inside or outside partial human generated perspectives. It’s just different, not something worth such judgment and friction. If we are all human there can be nothing other than human perspectives; we are all in the same boat. To pretend that WE somehow have or know something that YOU cannot is really ridiculous. We are all like that.

I see that it is a property of human thought to postulate as if Truth with a capitol T was known and owned. It is hard to let people pass without sizing them up. The nicest guys we have met talk not at all about gear or style but carry on with interacting at all other levels. Like Seth said last night, the people who proclaim so much about who is going to Hell, they are already in Hell themselves, their own private Hells, as Glen’s nephew Reid once said.

But without any contrast then we don’t get any definition. Without being able to compare then we don’t know where we stand. The trick is to stay in your own movie, realize it is your own movie and that it is also subject to change. Reality is not this iron armor to be owned and controlled; it is plastic and ever changing. Don’t make your little t into someone else’s big T. Allow all those people to do their own thing. Ease up dude. What kind of world would it really be if all hewed to your own line and were just like you? Wouldn’t that be boring to no end? Liberty may merely be the freedom to pretend we own our own truths without having some other truth with a capitol T forced down our throats by the powers that be, i.e. the State or the religion du jour.

In human evolution there has been a trend and trajectory from the primacy of the group to the ascendance of the individual. In societies where it is possible individuals can choose what memberships they want. Membership in different communities can become not so much an issue of unchallengeable inertia but of possible conscious choice. The motive force of freedom and liberty, fought for by so many people for so long, has led up to individuals having actual choice if they are conscious enough to make it.

So then, there are certain communities within the backpacking community over-all. As we all walk down the trail of life we eye each other with some suspicion and judgment, we size each other up for the visual signals of what membership we have or don’t have. Kim and I are the traditional, the heavy packers, with old gear, who face constant scorn from the younger set who have gone almost all ultra-light. Yet we are fun and light-hearted, sincere, somewhat thoughtful and engaging, generous, we are Team Caboose, the slow guys who dilly dally and enjoy things others blow by on their way to a date with destiny.

We can all hike our own hikes but it is hard not to stand in judgment of other’s hikes. Our own hikes may be compromised by lack of consciousness of the choices we have. We may be determined beyond any ability to choose. Freedom may be an illusion, for such a social animal as us. Peer pressure and social control may be stronger than we are willing to admit. It may be another propensity of human thought that in order for us to be GOOD others have to be BAD; we’re IN, they’re OUT; we see LIGHT, they are in the DARK, and all this may be all inside our own selves at the same time that we project it outward onto others and other groups. In terms of hikers though, there is no harm to any in all of our individual choices and theoretically we then don’t need to tear others down to build ourselves up. I know this is possible from meeting guys like Gantz and Slap Happy, people we just liked and who cares what your pack is.

In the currents of history and culture there was not so much choice in the past and our ancestors who did exercise choices were in many cases killed by Puritans and other intolerants. Even as things stand today there is the threat of constant regression to more barbarous and intolerant states of being. The veneer of civilization comes off fast and humanity then seems hardly better then a bunch of animals fighting over a carcass. The upshot is that people must belong to communities and cultures. There is a propensity and need to belong and to have some meaning which organizes the world. This impulse to belong and to own meaning is perhaps the unseen hand, which directs human behavior. It can come as inertia or by choice; can be content with stasis or with change. It is the ghost in our machine, the software set into our hardware. Why then cannot more than one way exist? Why does diversity of opinion have to be so threatening? Could it be that then all the pens would be seen for the illusion that they are and that would be just too scary, to have to work that hard to figure out our parameters?

Why the need to vilify others who are exercising choice in harmless dimensions of experience? No one knows what the hell God may be thinking yet we fight viciously as if we did or could know. This is just stupid to war over questions that have no possible answer. It is actual hatred, bitterness, bile and ignorance to inflame differences as do people like Rush Limbaugh or Joseph Goebbels. Can you tell I don’t like Rush?

It could get back to that stasis is comfort and as long as most things are generally OK then this stasis is fine. Sleepy Hollow is fine. The trouble is: people are so smart and diverse there gets to be whole worlds of difference that can’t be seen out of. We are trapped in endless dimensions of Towers of Babel; we can’t talk yet we can’t keep our mouths shut either. Harmless cultural configurations can be blown into mistrust and hatred. It seems like diversity can’t exist comfortably and without condemnation. These days stasis in the US is reduced to as simple terms as possible, red and blue, each perhaps seeking to impose it’s will on the other; it is war, the Civil War all over again, and whatever we have now seems boiling to be torn asunder.

There is a pining away for reason, common sense, the good old days, for a sense of safety and meaning, for freedom too, yet this is made into a sort of war between essentially harmless positions. Why? Why the sense of absolutism that guards it’s safety against the wild wolves of change and dynamism? This hearkening back to simple formulae, of setting the world as if black and white, is the antithesis of travel in muddy river country where relativists like me howl at the moon and shout at the folly of sheep. Yet for all my howling I must be seeking to delimit here myself. I impose my order, my Truth on the masses. I need to have stand and not be mush, I need ground to stand on, I create solidity where there may be none, and by taking my stand, I make a fence, corral sheep, etc. I do just what I rail against.

It is easy to see the folly of others because their operating principles are different. If the principles are similar then you get intimate enemy type friction as between Mormons and other Christians or as between Baptists and Methodists. It looks like folly because number one, you don’t buy it; you are not in that pen, you see the stricture for what it is, yet you see not your own strictures well enough to cast them off and soar with new eagles. When the falconer can no longer draw us back on his leash, then we will no longer be human and will be free of these strictures.

With evangelicals and other true believers, if we are all sinners what is the sense then for the pot to call the kettle black? If we are all still on the stove and in the kitchen where do these guys get off posing with the truth when their pot is as black as any? Are not spiritual pride and arrogance as sinful as any human failings? Why would one flawed human have access to any answers or insights any more than any other person? Where do people like Rush Limbaugh get off assuming that “liberals” are all idiots when in reality it is all folly. Me too!!!!! It is the pot calling the kettle black again. I see this as boiling down to that all have only a partial understanding, necessarily, which seems to be how our perceptive apparatus works.

We have a tendency to rest in stasis and partiality, out of ease and then out of boredom and unbridled creativity we break out into muddy river country only to be Brigham Young again and say “this is it” and we then start a new stasis. We are all in our Salt Lake Cities of the mind and heart. The wide-open range of relativism is perhaps too muddy for most and a partial clarity is preferable, even if it’s light shines only on a small area. Salt Lake City baby.  

Our understanding gravitates towards the partial but then grandiosely wants this delimited clarity to be true for all of experience. Sorry, that doesn’t work. We can only have truth with a small t. The big T is out of our hands, out of our capacity as humans to know. To put our understanding at the same level as any creator of the universe is arrogant folly, not possible, this is what my Dad said, a thoughtful, intelligent man.

This all ends up putting me squarely in the arena of pots calling the kettle black. I merely illustrate how others are delimited while I am myself limited in the same way. (“And why should others worms complain to me when they are trodden on, since I am myself lying crushed and writhing under the chariot wheel?”) The best I can hope for is to reach for an explanation of HOW human perception and belief works, not to proclaim anything about the actual content, the actual truth of the matter.

How does it work then? You have the primary metaphysical assumptions, that are all completely unprovable, and then everything is architecture upon that. I am saying that we cannot know anything for certain; what we see may all be an illusion of our own making. Even the most absolutist, strict belief sits on shifting sand, the unprovable primary assumptions. How it works is that we make the meaning and then get on our knees and pray to it, forgetting somewhere that we are the masters.

And now the French Broad River rolls by, swooooosh, the droning of big water over small falls and I have been back beating this same old dead horse that has fascinated me for years, the same game and different props. The river is running to the sea and I hope that all of my own meanderings will also lead me to a larger understanding, although now, as the day dawns, it is time to go back to the business of life, the practical and as I move therein I’m glad to be with Kim as she can show me real tolerance and openness, that comes naturally to her, without all this messy beating of dead horses, Towers of Babel and pots calling the kettles black.