Self-Inquiry, Knowledge Bubbles, Echo Chambers and ConSpirituality
ConSpirituality is not taking a stand against Religion or Spirituality. It is a subconscious bias (denial) against including all biases as legitimate candidates for inquiry, particularly pet social and political views. It is bias toward explaining only the upside of a particular tendency. Self inquiry neutralizes both the upside and downside of particular tendencies. The opposite thought brings biases to equilibrium.
The Seven Deadly Sins
All biases are some variation of the Seven Deadly Sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth.
Envy: Jane Coaston Opinion Piece
Let me be clear: I strenuously dislike golf. The sport began as a Scottish pastime. It was so popular that it was banned by the Scottish parliament in 1457 because too many people were distracted from preparing for war with England by the wonders of hitting balls with sticks over dunes.
The only time I attempted to play golf, I was in high school, and I chucked a club into a bush in rage. Golf is a sport that requires quiet, calm and carefully controlled movements. (sattva) That is not for me. I sometimes need to take dance breaks in the middle of performing normal tasks, and I had variations of “she talks too much and is very loud” written on many a childhood report card. Golf is a sport that is narrated in whispers. I do not whisper. (rajas)
And, truth be told, I have never been a huge fan of golfers, or golf culture, rife as it is with pastel polo shirts, pricey golf shoes and handshakes at the club over scotch. As a child, I understood that golfing was something a very specific group of people did. It is an expensive sport, after all, and the only people I knew who golfed were the people who would drive out to Hyde Park Golf and Country Club (which reportedly requires new members to pay a $55,000 initiation fee) in my hometown, Cincinnati. Or people who would hit the links when they vacationed in the Bahamas.
The Tell
Even though the sport is really not my thing I do wonder if I was irredeemably biased against it because of my not-altogether-kind feelings about the people I most frequently saw playing it.
Its association with the elite — In the United States, golf is, of course, the sport of presidents, Republican and Democrat alike — made the game a target of the socialist former president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. In televised remarks in 2009, he railed against golf as “bourgeois,” and asked, “Can someone tell me, is this a sport of the people?” to which his audience responded with a vigorous “No!” Threatening to seize two major golf courses and use the land for housing, he seemed to argue that the very playing of golf while people endured poverty was offensive.
It may be, but it is inevitable, zero-sum gunas being what they are.
“That’s an injustice,” he said, “that someone should have the luxury of having I don’t know how many hectares to play golf and drink whiskey, and next door there’s misery and children dying when there are landslides.”
Injustice is supported by justice.
Chavez’s problem, or what he wanted people to believe was his problem, was that wealthy elites were thriving while others suffered. Obviously, there were issues with Chavez as a leader but I kind of see his point about golf.
Point the Finger at Yourself
And maybe that’s my problem. Because I also realize that golf was, and is, an easy scapegoat. (the Lamestream Media, for instance.) I’ve written before about the problem with the idea of “elites” — I think it’s often a straw man wielded by people who are elite themselves. And I think the way we talk about elites is complicated by simultaneous envy and loathing, aimed particularly at those who gain immense wealth. (It needn’t be immense wealth or even wealth. It can be envy of beauty, power, security, fame, etc.)
Still, it’s easy to be angry at the rich (read famous, beautiful, smart, successful, you-name-it people) because, as my colleague Farhad Manjoo argued in 2019, “At some level of extreme wealth, money inevitably corrupts.”
My anger could be viewed as sensible by some — the overconcentration of wealth among the very few has not led to more income for the many. And I come from a faith tradition with a long history of lifting up the poor and repudiating those who do not use their wealth for good. “In the letters of the apostles” in the Bible, “frequent warnings are made about the perils of wealth and also of the way that elites can dismiss or persecute the poor,” Russell Moore, a theologian and the director of the Public Theology Project at Christianity Today, told me.
James, for instance, cautioned the landowners that God saw the way they mistreated their workers. And Paul wrote that the crucifixion reframed the nature of power itself. It is Easter weekend, after all, and on Good Friday, Christians remember that Christ died on a cross, next to criminals, while Roman soldiers gambled for his clothing.
But my faith also condemns the sin of envy, and as Moore reminded me, “One of the problems with envy is that it is quite easy to feel as though it is rooted in righteous indignation.” He said this is how the envy of wealth can disguise itself as virtue, allowing those who wish they were rich themselves to think that “they are standing against the love of money as the root of all kinds of evil.” (“The Almighty Dollar”)
I don’t think my problem is wishing I were spectacularly rich, but I do think that my anger lies in old envies — about being a kid for whom golf was an unimaginable expense. (I might as well have suggested buying a yacht.) My feelings were never really about golf as a sport. They were about golf as a stand-in for the things I wanted to do, but couldn’t afford. What I see now is that my anger at the excesses of the wealthy — on the golf course or anywhere — does not ease the burdens of the poor, nor does my envy.
(Bridge of Spies – Does it help?)
Virtue Signaling
It’s performative, almost as performative as joining a ritzy golf club that costs thousands of dollars a year. And to dismiss an entire class of people is the very definition of prejudice.
(Virtue signaling, not virtue. Virtue is humility, keeping one’s head down and pointing the finger at oneself, in so far as it needs to be pointed at all. Vanity supports the delusion that I am a virtuous person. The delusion that I am virtuous justifies my anger, which is always anger at myself for some sin of omission or commission. The belief that I am virtuous generates pride, which is ownership of something that belongs to God.)
So while I do not wish to try playing golf again, I’m not going to let myself be prejudiced against golfers. The truth is that judging golfers doesn’t do anything to benefit the people I wish to help, and only serves to hurt me, the person holding the hate. I can do better. If not as a golfer, then as a person.
A Healthy Contempt for One’s Impurities
I hate elites, because I’m a champion of X, for instance. I’m perversely contrarian.
Personal List – A fearless Moral Inventory
I’m greedy, lusty, manipulative, violent, etc. But resist the tendency to claim virtue because of my integrity and humility; I don’t get credit for what is God-given i.e. natural because it is the default. (“The proof my enlightenment is that I am a simple ordinary person. He who says doesn’t know and he who knows doesn’t say. I’m putting off my enlightenment until the whole world is enlightened. Etc.”)
