Barbara Ehrenreich died a few months ago. She was brilliantly clear, wise, and funny. She was one of the very few people one encounters in life who seems to warrant the term genius.
In 2014 Barbara published a book, Living With A Wild God, that I didn’t know even existed until a close friend told me about it a few weeks ago. Much of the book recounts—as seen through young Barbara’s journal and older Barbara’s impressions of the journal—that Barbara endured horrible homelife circumstances. This took me by surprise in one way, but not in another.
It was a surprise because I had no idea Barbara’s past. It was not a surprise, because I had some years back come to understand at a gut level what I had long since known intellectually, which is the extent to which any random soul on the left, and indeed any random soul anywhere in the U.S., likely has a horrific backstory hidden away.
I was naive on the full meaning of such back stories until some experiences at the Z Media Institute, a once a year gathering that hosted from 50 to 80 new “students” each session. Attendees attended classes and learned as well from one another in an idyllic setting. The vibe was incredibly positive, owing mostly to Lydia Sargent’s role.
At any rate, about four nights into the first session, and again each subsequent year, we had a special evening get together. Those present, as they felt moved to speak, described what had happened in their lives that caused them to wind up at ZMI. One after another, often indicating that they had never before told anyone what they were revealing that night, the attendees recounted traumatic events that had bent them out of shape, and finally into a left curve. It was everything from violent parents to sexually invasive uncles, from drive-by shootings of friends who died before their eyes to personal betrayals, from crippling addictions to guilt-spawning criminality, and on and on. It had been one thing to abstractly know that trauma was nearly everywhere. It was another thing to have one after another of these wonderful participants graphically and emotively reveal the density and persistence of it.
When each such session ended, I wondered, good lord, how many people are carrying around this sort of incredible, formative, abiding hurt, this sort of violation and pain, and carrying it, no less, invisibly to all around them, and therefore receiving no explicit help from those around them? How about the person next to me on the bus? How about the author of the book I just read? How about my good friend of years? To what extent is this type trauma everywhere in U.S. life, and perhaps even more so in the U.S. left, not just abstractly, which I had long intellectually realized, but very greatly affecting how people process what they daily encounter?
I reacted similarly to Barbara’s book. How could I have not known that for years Barbara had been in a kind of dissociated state, her mind running wild with cosmic questions, worries, and depressions? How could no one have known that this totally brilliant, accomplished, caring, courageous, funny woman carried all that around? Who else is doing likewise?
The book recounts young Barbara’s thoughts over a bunch of years. They were thoughts I couldn’t imagine having had, and indeed I couldn’t imagine anyone that young having had, not just in passing, or as vague musings, which is not only imaginable but probably pretty common, but as central determinants of their being. It wasn’t that young Barbara wondered what’s going on? What does it all mean? No surprise there. And it wasn’t that young Barbara navigated traumatic living circumstances. Sadly, that’s also commonplace. It was that young Barbara described herself (and older Barbara verified) as a solipsist, which word I had to look up, and which is defined as “one who adheres to self-absorption and an ignorance of the views or needs of others.” Young Barbara perpetually thought of herself as the only conscious being. I am the source of all, she thought. If I die it all disappears. Are there really teenagers whose mind’s are full of solipsist belief? At thirteen? Solipsism isn’t just a philosophers’ plaything? This was news to me. I would never have guessed. I still find it hard to believe, even for a young genius like Barbara.
The young Barbara had some similarity to the older Barbara. She was curious, had boundless energy, unrelenting focus, and incredible smarts. But there was also this immense difference from the older Barbara that suddenly made the older Barbara even more impressive to me. It was not just learning of the angst and pain the older Barbara managed to at least largely escape. It was the fact that to go by the book, young Barbara had no empathy. Her attitude to others was at best dismissive, often instrumentalist. Yet the old Barbara, as best I could ever tell, was a fountain of empathy. That was the transformation that most impressed me. How did old Barbara emerge from young Barbara? The anti-war movement saved her she wrote, but it wasn’t clear how.
Most reviewers focused on an event that upended young Barbara—except she was the solipsist Barbara before the event happened. Was it mystical? Was it God? Barbara wondered that, too. She worried that it threatened the ground on which her unrelenting rationality and militant atheism rested. To me, even reading young Barbara’s account of the event and its impact, I couldn’t see why old Barbara had that worry. I couldn’t see why anything about what happened required, as old Barbara thought maybe it did, some kind of external cause from some kind of otherwise imperceptible sentient source. I saw no wild god in what I read. I just saw a brilliant, even too smart young girl, then woman, dealing with a violent repressive home life, going through dissociation, depression, and a particular experience that hung on, and finally finding a new home in movement commitment and camaraderie. The account of the event itself read like a typical LSD experience.
As with everything that Barbara wrote, she gets to you with it. You don’t just move on, unmoved, unenlightened. My final confusion and unsettledness with the book was wondering why in 2014, after a half century, Barbara wrote it. She recounts being afraid of how it would be taken. Would she be dismissed as insane? Would it undercut her credibility as a journalist, writer, activist, and staunch advocate of evidence and reason? Those were reasons she hesitated to even to look at her youthful journal for decades. I wondered why she stopped hesitating. She said she wrote it partly to fulfill a responsibility to her young self, but also to make the point that when something comes along that we don’t understand, something that we can’t explain, something we can’t even vocalize, instead of donning sneakers and running to hide from it, we should face it, acknowledge it, and don a thinking cap to try to learn from it. But did that fine message, need this book? Barbara’s whole life, and her other books too, taught that lesson.
For that matter what does her account reveal that we should face, acknowledge, and try to learn from, instead of donning sneakers and running to hide from it? The book seems to say and was certainly taken by reviewers to say, it is people reporting feeling touched by something beyond themselves, whether they call it spirit, God, or whatever. This situation, older Barbara points out, is too prevalent to ignore. So far, so good. But now comes a leap. Such events feel to the people who experience them like products of some kind of communication, or intervention, or just some kind of nudge from outside. So older Barbara suggests that we should take such widespread testimony not only as honestly reporting the impressions of those involved, but as at least potentially valid judgments about what actually happened, so we should try to figure out what, outside people, could be communicating, intervening, or nudging people. This leap is where older Barbara lost me. Why didn’t old Barbara see it is a giant and unjustified leap to think such events derive from sentient intervention from outside ourselves?
Sometimes we talk out loud. Sometimes we talk to ourselves. At such times, we are conscious, or we at least feel conscious, about what we are doing. But, consider a poet or song writer who says her lyrics just came unbidden. The lyrics just flowed. I grabbed the words out of nowhere, says the poet. It was born of something beyond myself. Is that feeling felt? Yes. But should we look for an external sentient being as source of the lyrics?
For that matter consider me, right now, as I write these words. I haven’t consciously prepared them before typing them. As far as my conscious awareness of them, it commences when each word gets typed. When, then, did I actually generate the thoughts? When did I formulate the sentences that each word becomes part of? Did it come from without? Those who investigate such things suggest an answer.
I take my glasses off. I rub my eye. I put them back on. Before I removed the glasses—just a very short time before—neuroscientists suggest that my brain had already decided on the action. I became conscious of it and thus consciously felt like I decided to do it, only after I had actually unconsciously decided to do it. It turns out that a whole lot, indeed almost everything happens in our heads unconsciously, before we do things and are aware of doing them. That doesn’t mean it isn’t me or you behind the screen, so to speak. It just means we are more than what we perceive ourselves to be. Our unconscious is part of us and very very active.
In our inaccessible brains, things can arise and play out, and only then we experience them consciously, and we have no reason I can see to think that doesn’t include the kind of things young Barbara experienced. When ineffable events happen to someone, it is always that person’s experience. Other people don’t see or hear what that person sees or hears. There is a change in one person’s mind, that only that person experiences. Why do we need to posit an external cause. There is no external entity feeding me the words that appear here as I type, or feeding a great song writer the words she jots down, even if she wonders, where did that come from? It came from within, just not from conscious thought.
But if finding an external communicator isn’t something we need to take seriously, what about the prevalence of trauma and its effects on so many lives and personalities? That is widespread. And it matters. The left sometimes ignores and other times tries to address the debilitating back stories that often molds peoples’ perceptions and judgements. It isn’t clear which has been worse, over the years, ignoring the accumulated trauma or addressing it poorly. Can movements help, as the anti-war movement helped Barbara?
Ignoring baggage is bad enough. It preserves and even at times intensifies the associated pain, suffering, and other detrimental impacts. But sometimes paying attention can also do harm. It can unintentionally scrutinize, victimize, stigmatize, or subtly coerce. It can highlight but not aid and even drain energy from all those in the vicinity. Is this a Catch-22? Or is there a way to collectively deal that would benefit all? For me the lesson of Barbara’s book that bears strongly on the pursuit of a better world has nothing to do with wild gods or external forces. It has to do, instead, with movements finding productive ways to understand the extent of soul crushing trauma people carry, and to address it helpfully and not harmfully.
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