For Me, That Meant Resigning From the State Department and Now Resisting Our New President’s Vision of America.
My life was not short enough for me to not do the things I wanted not to do,” is the lament playwright Tom Stoppard puts in the mouth of the hero, British poet A. E. Housman, in The Invention of Love. That bleakness resonates for me. The storybooks of my childhood were infused with the idea that people should be honorable. But that honor was always deeply tinged in self-denial. Its cloud of meaning, which includes pride, dignity, legitimacy, satisfaction, and happiness, is inseparable from the self-loathing that wracks me when I yield to impulse and violate rules of behavior I impose on myself. Desire to protect my fragile honor, not fear of punishment, drives me to conduct myself as a good citizen and not grab at every pussy within reach.
Honor is thus a very fine thing, if a humane philosophy is the basis of our self-restraint. Without it, squeamishness, vanity, or the prevailing fashion gets exalted into a code of ethics. The ancient Greeks and Israelites were more concerned with rules of ritual purity than with rules of good conduct. It was okay to rape your slave, for example, but not during her menstrual period. Proof of personal honor in many traditional societies even today is the brutal control exercised over the reproductive behavior of members of the household.
Darker still, often, are the class implications of many of our rules of honor. For 19th-century Christian gentlemen, an alleged lack of self-restraint among the “dark races” and the “lower orders” justified ruthless economic exploitation and the imposition of a strict, punitive religion. Fear of an angry god (crafted in the image of angry human masters) would control subordinates who supposedly lacked the internal code to control themselves.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der May/June 2017-Ausgabe von Spirituality & Health.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der May/June 2017-Ausgabe von Spirituality & Health.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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ONE WORD TO BEAT WINTER BLUES: BIOMIMICRY
CREATURELY REFLECTIONS
THINKING ABOUT RESTITUTION
THE HEART OF HAPPINESS
WAITING IN LINE
OUR WALK IN THE WORLD
ENTER THE SAUNA
Journalist Emily O’Kelly shares some uplifting research on the benefits of sweat bathing, a global healing practice not just limited to Northern climes.
the trail of ATONEMENT
One Ashkenazi Jewish family escaped pogroms in Russia and then flourished in South Dakota, but the “free land” of their new homestead had been unfairly taken from the Lakota by the United States. Generations later, a celebrated investigative journalist set out to tell the truth of the Lakota and her family, calculate The Cost of Free Land—and pay it back.
STALKING YOUR Mind
Stalking the Mind is part of an ancient Indigenous American Medicine Way to tame your guilt, fears, and shame. What we’re “stalking” are our thought patterns and beliefs that seem to create the opposite of happiness and wellbeing. It’s a powerful psychotherapeutic journey of healing without the diagnosis or labels.
LEAVING MESA VERDE
After 21 years of service at Mesa Verde National Park, RANGER DAVID FRANKS recently guided his last tour of the pueblos and cliff dwellings. He says he was fortunate to assist the archeologists with a variety of work and never lost his amazement with their ability to figure out how and when things happened. The question he still wrestles with is much deeper: Why they left?
BECOMING YOUR OWN LEAD RESEARCHER IN HEALTHCARE
PEGGY LA CERRA, PHD, downloaded a health app to aggregate her medical records and was stunned to see the phrase \"aortic atherosclerosis.\" What she did next is a helpful model for all of us.
ARCHETYPAL ASTROLOGY
\"Is astrology true?\" is the wrong question, writes RABBI RAMI SHAPIRO. He suggests that the truth is out there, but out there is really in here.
WELLNESS IN THE WILD
Spa aficionado MARY BEMIS takes the [cold] plunge at Mohonk Mountain House.