Haggling as a road to divine behavior

Behavior. What do you have in keeping to it? A shared identity, a history to look back on, a sense of momentum? Behavior, integrity, consistency, a language of connection, a band of followers or enemies. One's behavior sets the lights and darks, warms and cools, the texture of one's days.

From this position, behavioral patterns also have the ability to replace human will. There is no choice involved in being faithful to a single identity. Self-composition gives way to exercise. For example, when an ice cream truck dives into the neighborhood on a summer night five minutes after you brush your teeth, behavioral consistency will cause you to pull the covers over your head and run your tongue over youth baking soda-washed enamel. The flicker of imagination tugging you to a happy break has no chance. The art of living expires in a cloudy refrigeration of impulse. And one misses out on ice cream.

But isn't there reason to brush your teeth aside from that you do it every night? It's not as noble as taking a political stance, but practicing a behavior is a path away from submission and into self-initiated social discipline. Behavior can be a cure to boredom and to interpersonal power imbalances.

Instead of being bored, the behaving person takes up a new behavior. Or, instead of following what his friends do, he acts* characteristically spontaneous. Adhering to a chosen set of behaviors allow one to escape the state of mind in which the future stretches out as a numbing and inevitable win.

I am not talking about the "sit, stay, come" kind of behavior. That animal types poses no threat to choice or calling into discipline. The only choice in the obedience-reward dynamic is between effort and apathy. It is not a moral relationship, but a transaction with determined terms. It doesn't say anything about a person that they pay a cashier $5.21 for a $5.21 pair of sunglasses. What else would they have done in order to arrive at the desired outcome of owning the sunglasses? Yet morally-questioning conversations are more often seen as haggling than as purposeful discussions in our culture.

This kind of behavioral haggling opens up relationship from the predicable to the creatively contractual. I'll behave this way if you behave that. I'll follow these rules if you follow these too. Maybe this time if you tell me to sit, I'll turn in a circle - that's good too, right?

This bargaining doesn't necessarily get you an object of desire, but does offer a delicious social thrill. It takes some daring to enter into a thing that might lead to a stubborn debacle. An unearthed disagreement might prove impassable, and then spread from the two who happened upon it to several others, and then more, and more people until it is a source of widespread anguish. All eyes then point back to the two who thought it would be fun to play around with the price and reward of relationship.

Religious texts are arguably the world's source of authority on how to arrive at good behavioral contracts, often called covenants. The Qu'ran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible all contain guidelines to what kind of social agreements have made human community work. But if when judgment day comes, we as humans have only read these books and not looked elsewhere for shared spiritual truth, might not any God be tempted to say something like "You kiss by th' book?"

Depending on which religion you follow, you could be condemned for getting amorous with anything outside of a husband or wife, so I'm keeping my kissing on hold for now. There is a person for whom the religious canons have chosen for you. Not an immaterial being, a way of life, or an ideology. It is the human task to find the person made by God for her and love them forever.

It's been proven, though, that life is good at getting in the way of forever. Each day, week, month year, decade, presents new ways to behave in ways that are more pleasing to oneself than to God. At sixteen, one may love Shakespeare, but at forty-five, hate it. It is in a person's freedom to chose how to spend their time at each age. Maybe at sixteen, you also promised yourself to read all of Shakespeare's plays once a year for the rest of your life. No holy book mandated this promise, but it supported and gave you hope to go forward at the time you made it. What other reason is there to make a sacred vow? And what flimsier?

It allows one to haggle. Kisses, sunglasses, television, books, husbands, girlfriends, career pats, friendships - each asks for its own commitment. When one is able to commit himself to certain behaviors toward the people and situation about which he cares, it allows the embrace of life outside of those behaviors as an ongoing haggle. It promotes fidelity toward his own nature, and gratitude for the freedom to play into a living relationship with that which (or they who) counters it.

The basic problem with this sorting of religious and living commitments is that the human will is loathe to commit to anything. Religion especially. If you switch from an active to an observational experience of behavior, however, you only have to behave as you will and then keep the stuff that works for you. A religious behavior does not please or necessarily get noticed by others, but has the ability to quietly blow one's mind. A haggling behavior draws attention and provides a succinct feeling of satisfaction.

Religion's traditional counterpoint to the allure of unchecked human haggling has been that people, in their semi-knowledge, usually choose to destroy their relationships. There is evidence of this; humanity's choices have resulted in a broken world economy, mass wildlife extinction, and multi-billion dollar global drug and sex trades. People choose their behavior, institutional religion says, creation starts circling the drain, and God groans and shuts the door to brood - over and over again throughout human history.

Or, maybe He puts his reading glasses on for a closer look at the planet earth. While one is beating oneself up for making another stupid move, maybe God is calculating a better contract, a new proposal for what these strange humans could be to His creation, if we wanted to. A human and God might then observe each other in a cantankerous but real desire to discover a relationship of mutual input. Talk about revolutionizing the workplace!

In that case the only task left would be to let go of the idea that humanity is too selfish to understand how God would prefer that we behave. Instead of grumbling about hopes thwarted by the world God has created, we could then lay out our terms as informed by experience. To a God who seeks to participate fully in life on earth, isn't it more selfish to fake peace than to fight for another chance to reveal ourselves as temporarily up in arms about the best way into the future?

Behaviors. There is a lot to gain n keeping to those one chooses, so long as they come at a fair price. I'm not sure whether that price is measured more in religious or experiential currency, but I wouldn't turn down a deep conversation about this beautifully confused world - or a divine kiss while still here.

*Acting is a type of behaving that can lead away from discipline rather than toward it. If one acts a certain way uncharacteristically, it could be out of a need for self expression rather than out of an aspiration to self-possession. Acting becomes behavior when one does it in the hope of giving some kind of shape to one's character.

How I Met the Man in the Arena

Last night, I discovered the text of Theodore Roosevelt’s speech, “Man in the Arena,” given on April 23, 1910 to an audience at the Sorbonne in France. About halfway through the speech, Roosevelt states, “The homely virtues of the household, the ordinary workaday virtues which make the woman a good housewife and housemother, which make the man a hard worker, a good husband and father, a good soldier at need, stand at the bottom of character.”

While the “homely virtues of the household” are now carried out in more complex forms than those of woman, housewife and housemother; and man, worker, husband and soldier-at-need, Roosevelt’s point applies today. In essence, the above statement is a key to how the United States can approach the civic reconstruction it now needs to move forward.

Most people I know have committed themselves to the causes they have in response to the conditions of their own lives. One friend entered a social work career after going to a religiously affiliated college and observing there the social numbness that dogmatic religious practice can engender. Another who is recovering from emotional trauma works at a community farm - an environment to which she can contribute without being exposed to direct interpersonal conflict.

I am passionate about connecting individuals with the healing arts as a result of my frustration with creative silence. As a shy middle child of three, I've always struggled to voice my inner experience. In high school, I came up against my own silence more concretely; the leadership of the school denied funding for and stifled my and a female friend's effort to start a school newspaper. More recently, a professional writing mentor twice my age made a advance upon me. I don't put faith in creative authority as I did before these events, and my community work - at a puppet theater, as an ESL tutor, with an arts and community service organization - centers around getting people to tear down the artistic and linguistic barriers that keep them from asserting themselves in public.

In 2005 and 2007 respectively, I studied abroad in England and Spain. This time outside of the US allowed me a deeper appreciation for the receptivity the US offers to individual humanity. While being in Europe demonstrated that loyalty to cultural tradition makes room for self expression, it also opened my awareness to American citizenship's distinct quality of shared exploration.

The United States has throughout its history grown stronger by rejecting tradition in favor of the dignity of self expression. In no particular order, Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, women, children, Hispanic Americans, Irish Americans, the LGBT community, the physically and mentally handicapped, and others have all experienced shame, social exclusion and labor enslavement to an established upper class.

They have not, however, accepted these limitations, and neither did the founders of the country accept the social and religious restrictions placed upon them by the European establishment. In the place of tradition, the US responds to identity dissent with an invitation into the legal discussion that is democracy. Each person changes the ideals of the country by being in it.

Roosevelt also said in his address at the Sorbonne, “We should abhor the so-called ‘practical’ men whose practicality assumes the shape of that peculiar baseness which finds its expression in disbelief in morality and decency, in disregard of high standards of living and conduct...only less desirable as a citizen is the man of fantastic vision who makes the impossible better forever the enemy of the possible good.” With a shared, and therefore constantly changing, concept of “ideal citizen” after which to model him or herself, the average American might understandably get lost in the intertia of an obscure desire to serve the public; a fantastic and untouched vision is attractive when it prolongs a comfortable, isolating realism.

As the United States seeks to redefine itself in the global eye, its citizens should ally themselves with homely virtues as well as possible good. Let’s not follow patriotic cynics into taking action before having developed tolerance for failure, but instead realize that service - and this country’s character - are an experiential dialogue with emerging moral definitions. If everyone voices their convictions through action at the same time, there will be chaos but also a revival of our best tradition: social evolution.