Living on the Outside
I live on the outside. I am a 5 on
the Enneagram. That means, among other things, that I am the outsider. I know
the Enneagram is right about that. For my entire life I’ve felt like the
outsider in nearly every environment I’ve ever been in. My natural inclination
is to stand on the outside of things and observe. I observe and analyze far
more than I participate. Maybe that’s why I enjoy photography. The photographer
is an observer of scenes not a participant in them. I don’t know why that’s how
it is with me, it just is. It’s an important part of who I am and of who I’ve
always been. I’ve always felt myself to be an outsider, but today in the land
of my birth I feel more the outsider than ever. In recent days I’ve found
myself wondering how I ever ended up living my life in a country with which I
am so out of touch. To use Myers-Briggs terminology for my condition, I’m an
INFP in an ESTJ culture. I’m pretty much the opposite of what most of American
culture is. I guess that’s always been true, but today it feels more true than
ever. Here are some of the ways that dominant American culture and I just don’t
fit:
1. I value spiritual things over
material things. I know that money can’t buy happiness. It can’t preserve
youth. It can’t prevent death. The dominant American culture of which I am a
part is all about making money. That old saying “the business of America is
business” is true, and I am no kind of businessman. I don’t value commercial
virtues. I can’t sell anything, and I don’t want to. Yet in my culture I cannot
avoid being bombarded by SELL SELL SELL.
It drives me nuts. The mute button on my TV remote helps, but of course
it can’t block out the selling altogether. In advertising I don’t typically see
useful information, I see people trying to get my money to benefit them not me.
The commercial world turns me off. I’ve always thought of business as what you
do when you can’t do anything else, anything more worthwhile, like practice a
profession (and contemporary usage to the contrary notwithstanding business is
not a profession), like be a doctor, or a teacher, or a pastor. Spirituality
has to do with relationships, and in true spirituality the other in your
relationship, be it God, or a spouse, or a child, or frankly anyone else, is
more important than you are. Spirituality is about losing yourself in
relationship. American culture is about aggrandizing yourself at the expense of
others. I suppose that’s a kind of relationship too, but it is relationship
that doesn’t value relationship. It only values the self.
I left the practice of law, which was
well on its way to killing me, to go to seminary and become a small church
Christian pastor. To my culture that move makes no sense at all. Law is
prestigious, ministry isn’t. You make a lot of money in law, or at least you
can. Small church pastors barely make enough to live on. Lawyers make headlines,
pastors don’t unless they’ve done something monumentally stupid like damning
gay people or predicting the end of the world or are saints of the faith like
Martin Luther King, Jr. Being a lawyer led me to burn out and depression. Being
a pastor led to deep personal satisfaction and a sense of fulfillment, and to
my culture that’s just wrong. It should work the other way around. For me it
didn’t.
2. I’m an intellectual in an
anti-intellectual culture. I’m far from the most erudite person in the world. I’m
not even the most erudite person I know. But I have always valued and to some
extent pursued the life of the mind. I have more advanced degrees than I know
what to do with—Ph.D., JD, M.Div. I know that ideas matter. I know that how we
act is grounded in how we think. I know that cultures change from the top down.
I’ve often said that in 1637 Rene Descartes said “Je pense, donc je suis,” I think, therefore I am, and the world
hasn’t been the same since. That’s how culture operates. Some lone person
sitting at a desk somewhere has some new insight, expresses it, and over the
following centuries it changes the world.
My culture is anti-intellectual. It
thinks generals are more important than philosophers. It doesn’t just not care
about ideas, it is deeply suspicious of people who have ideas and who think
ideas matter. At best it dismisses them because it doesn’t want to deal with
them. At worst it attacks them and their ideas because those ideas are new and
challenge the culture’s long-held beliefs and prejudices. Just look at who we
made president in 2016. Donald Trump is the least intellectual president we
have perhaps ever had. He doesn’t think, he reacts. He has no guiding ideas, no
concepts that ground his actions and give them form and direction. He has no
time for people who think. In his disdain for the workings of the mind he reflects
the anti-intellectualism of the people who elected him. He is a symptom of the
unthinking nature of mass American culture, and we are the worse off for having
elected him to the highest office in our land. Yet I shouldn’t be surprised
that we did that. Trump is symptom not cause. He is a symptom of a lot of
things about America, its anti-intellectualism being prime among them.
3. I teach and practice Christian
nonviolence in a violence mad culture. American culture is the most violence prone
mass culture of any so-called advanced nation in the world today. We solve
problems by shooting at them. When gun violence kills our school children we
say put more guns in schools. We maintain an enormous military that devours an
absurdly large amount of our national budget and keeps us from doing many far
more constructive things. We say everyone in the military is a hero whether
they have done anything heroic or not. We don’t call teachers, nurses, pastors,
musicians, or artists heroes, though they contribute to life in far more
constructive ways than the military does, or at least some of them do. Even our
progressive Christians are loath to list nonviolence as one of their values or
commitments. The Phoenix Affirmations, for example, don’t mention nonviolence
as a central precept. Yet there simply is no doubt that Jesus, the one we
Christians supposedly follow, taught and lived radical nonviolence. Not
passivity but nonviolence, which isn’t the same thing. When I preach
nonviolence I’m called unrealistic. I’m told nonviolence doesn’t work, never
mind that in my lifetime it ended British rule in India and apartheid in South
Africa. Our country is grounded in violence, violence against the British,
Native Americans, Mexico, and Black Americans from slavery on among others. We
are a frontier culture that worships the gun. Our popular entertainment
consists almost entirely of different versions of the myth of redemptive
violence.[1]
So does our foreign policy. My commitment to nonviolence perhaps more than
anything else about me puts me outside the American mainstream.
So I am an outsider in my own
country. I don’t fit. Most of what I see of dominant American culture repulses
me. I value the spiritual over the material, the intellectual over the unthinking,
and nonviolence over violence. My culture’s values are the reverse of mine.
Well, so be it. I’m not going to change American culture, and I sure can’t
change the history that gave rise to that culture. I’m never going to fit in,
so perhaps I need to stop letting that truth irritate me as much as it does and
look at the matter a different way. See, there is a crucial role for the
outsider in any culture. The outsider is the only one who can truly critique a
culture. Every culture needs outsiders who are willing and able to call it on
its failings. Who are willing and able to see through its defenses and its self-delusions
to its true essence and to name that essence for what it really is. Who can
identify its myths and see through them to its real identity. Who can and will identify
those myths as the idolatry that they truly are. I think that’s actually what I’ve
been doing for a long time. My audience is small, nearly nonexistent actually.
Again, so be it. I’ll keep writing. I’ll keep posting essays on my blog. They
will continue to be the essays of an outsider in American culture. Perhaps they
will serve some useful purpose precisely because come from where I live, on the
outside.
[1] If
you don’t know what the myth of redemptive violence is read The Powers That Be by the late Walter
Wink.
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