Genius and Fear

Alright, you ask, how does one connect those two concepts? Well, this is one of those times when the only relation between the two are that ideas that I've toyed with for a long time have been very powerfully articulated in print!

First, what is genius? I won't try to rewrite the article linked below, but I would highly recommend it for us "late bloomers." I remember feeling very let down that by the time I had turned 45, I hadn't really done anything great. (Now keeping a marriage together, raising a couple of very interesting young men and several other rather interesting accomplishments don't count, because they are personal and private. I'll discuss that in more detail in another post.)

David Galenson wrestled with the same viewpoint in the academic world. 24 year-old geniuses make a huge splash, but are they the only real geniuses? Galenson used sophisticated economics data analysis tools and came to a very interesting conclusion. Those of us approaching 60? Well, we still may have it in us!

What Kind of Genius Are You?

Ok, on to the next. . . FEAR!

Previously I mentioned that I was reading "The Left Hand of God" by Michael Learner. The deeper I've gotten into the book, the more I'm liking the way this guy thinks.

His viewpoint of how fears drives so much of our culture and world view is extremely compelling.

"There is a powerful tendency inside us all toward fear. When our consciousness moves in that direction, we believe that the Other is a serious threat that needs to be dominated and controlled before it does likewise to us. The Bible describes Pharoah's fear of the Isrealites in these terms--they had to be enslaved lest they potentially ally with the enemy. His next step was to attempt to kill every firstborn Jewish male. So the genocidal tendency was there at the very beginning of Jewish history--and yet the thrust of biblical religions is a countermessage that we don't have to act out of fear. There is a different and more powerful possiblity: to respond to the voice of God who commands us to 'love your neighbor as yourself'and to not 'oppress the stranger' but to 'remember that you were strangers in the land of Egypt.'

"Understandably overwhelmed by the level of carnage during the twentieth century, religious leaders all too often abandoned the hope that love and kindness and generosity and nonviolence could ultimately triumph."

In another powerful discussion, he looks at the remarkable inconsistency of anti-abortion, pro-lifers who support capital punishment and the militaristic, imperialistic world view that seeks to make the world safe by dominating it!

"Part of the energy of the antiabortion movement. . . comes from its ability to symbolically address this desire (My Note: This desire is the deep need for human connection so missing in this culture.) The fetus is a symbol of an idealized, innocent being, actually the little child within us who is not being adequately loved and accepted in our daily experience. The desire to be loved and accepted as human beings--a completely rational desire--is split off by these antiabortionists, in part because they themselves (like so many of the rest of us in this society) have been taught to view that part of themselves as scary, unobtainable, and narcissitic. . . So. . . we project this desire onto the fetus. . .Those who felt conflicted about standing up for themselves when, as children, they did not receive the love and affection they badly needed, and deeply wounded because no one stood up for them when they were vulnerable as children, can now stand up for the beautiful part of themselves, which was underappreciated, by standing up for the fetus.

"It may have been a similar dynamic that made possible in the spring of 2005 a sudden explosion of concern to save the life of Terri Schiavo, a woman who had been in a vegetative state for fifteen years and hence could be experienced as both pure and helpless, by people who had shown no similar interest in saving the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed over the previous six months as "collateral damage" during the American invasion and occupation. . ."

Well, enough quoting. Hopefully this wets your appetite because his arguments are powerful and persuasive.



Finally, the picture for the day is interesting. It's an oldy but goody.