Kissing the chaos

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Heard on the radio:

Marco Werman: The line ‘French kiss the chaos’. What do you mean by that?

Roots Manuva: Oh, literally what it says. We live in the chaos, and here I am with my tongue hanging out, and my wet lips, kissing the chaos.

Isn’t that a nightmare for good people the world over? A brilliant musician, the sort likely to be listened to by your children, embraces the abyss.

What abyss? If you are a parent, you have your own idea of it, however liberal and modern you may be. Maybe you personally have made your peace with the confusion of moralities and faiths in the modern world. Perhaps you had your acid trips, benders, dark-soul nights and despair, but you survived by luck, will power, or the help of good people. Maybe you just never saw the problem, you embraced freedom of thought like a happy bacteria in a petri dish. Or maybe you rejected the chaos of individualism and found a strong framework of received morality and belief, in which you thrived, or at least survived.

But however you made it to this point, you have read stories of kids gone astray. You have been afraid for your own.

Of course many of your fears are as old as society: will my son be killed in war; my daughter raped; will she end up with a cruel husband, poor, starving. But some fears are peculiar to worlds in flux, like ours.

In a more fixed world, where morality and belief are as little questioned as the air and landscape, anyone might fear that their child will fail to live up to a minimum of the basic received standards. He or she may choose the bad. But there is no doubt he or she will know what is good.

In our world, there is no such confidence. Eminem admits he hopes his daughter, upon whom he dotes, will not hear the tracks in which he vows to kill her mother. But our children hear them. And see the man get his Grammys. He said: ‘When I say I’ll murder my baby’s mother, maybe I wanted to do it but I didn’t do it. Anybody who takes it literally is a bigger idiot and ten times sicker than I am.’ Fox news host Bill O’Reilly says: ‘I don’t think anybody could take him seriously except the dopey 15-year-olds who buy his album.’ But the promoter of Eminem’s Australian tour would not allow his own teenage daughter to attend the two concerts. We are afraid our own fifteen-year-olds may be the dopey ones.

Does a Camel cigarettes executive think his daughter is cool, or dopey, the first time he sees her light up? Are any daughters of Vogue editors dopey enough to get eating disorders?

Will our kids be dopey enough to fall for all the seductions of the materialistic modern world? How do you help your kid grow up into a moderate drinker, a moderate shopper, a moderate user of drugs (legal or illegal)? How do you help them feel good about themselves when the media bombards them with images of slim beautiful people, and fast fattening foods? Isn’t it easier just to reject the whole damn thing?

Parents see different culprits. Free-thinking liberals blame greedy corporations and media, and the politicians in their pockets. Old-fashioned Christians may blame free-thinking liberals. Or liberals and corporations, as in ‘Abercrombie and Porn’, an article on a Christian family website:

‘Your teenage daughter probably learned much of her fashion sense from them. She probably picked up a good bit of her taste for hip hugging Capri pants, skimpy tank tops, slouchy cargo khakis, high riding plaid boxers, form fitting and midriff baring t-shirts, and frayed nylon surf wear from them as well. Now, if the doyens of cool at Abercrombie and Fitch have their way, she’ll also be learning all the joys of group sex, homoeroticism, exhibitionism, pornography, and gang rape from them as well.’

Strategies differ accordingly. In the US now, it is just about possible to go from cradle to grave in fundamentalist institutions – daycare, school, college, corporation, megachurch, hospital – while catching only Christian TV channels, websites, radio stations. In our rural area, it’s the Christian stations that come in loudest. A smart young woman interning in my office was off to study biology at a Christian college, where you can get a four-year biology degree minus evolution: a pretzel baked by a magician.

But before criticising fundamentalists, feel your own fear, if you are a parent.

I know liberal parents who home-school their kids, partly to remain in control of the values they will encounter. A feminist mother I know won’t let her son play Vice City, one of the most popular video games, because of the killing of prostitutes that can be chosen as a strategy. We had major discussions with my fourteen-year-old son about that game, its values, and his, and ours. We have our own line of what is forbidden, and it moves as he grows, and as we talk; but we have it.

What’s your strategy for helping your child navigate drugs, sex, shopping, poverty, wealth, hate, and belief? A common view of liberal parents is that protecting your child from all the garbage is not the answer, because when they go out alone into the world, they will not know how to deal with it. It’s the child who was never allowed to drink moderately at home, who goes on benders at college. That argument.

Variations of that argument are being used to explain everything from Islamic fundamentalism to paedophilia in the Catholic Church, for example:

‘Modern Islamic extremism saw its moment of birth, according to almost every history of the subject, in 1952, when an Egyptian writer named Sayid Qtub was studying in Greeley, Mont. He was attending a church dance when the pastor dimmed the lights and put on the jazzy seduction number Baby, It’s Cold Outside, a tune that had become a hit in the MGM film Neptune’s Daughter. “The room became a confusion of feet and legs: arms twisted around hips; lips met lips; chests pressed together,” Qtub famously wrote. He hated it, and vowed to devote his life to Islamic fundamentalism. He was almost single-handedly responsible, according to most historians, for the ideology behind both Hezbollah and al-Qaida. He was probably listening to the Johnny Mercer–Margaret Whiting version; if he had stuck around a couple years to hear the racier Louis Armstrong–Ella Fitzgerald version, the jihad might have begun much earlier.’

To baby boomers one can only say, you didn’t know your parents were kicking up such a sexual storm with their old-timey music, did you? It’s all in the point of view. If Qtub had only been raised with exposure to more lips and hips, like you or I, the argument goes, he would have seen how little spiritual danger there really was in that church dance.

The New York Times (NYT) in a recent survey (which costs $2.95 on line) of the sexual abuse scandal in the US Catholic Church, identified the 1970s and 1980s as the worst decades for abuse of minors by priests. This may reflect a delay in 1990s victims coming forward. Or, and the NYT seems to cautiously prefer this argument, it may be that the priests most likely to become abusers were those overly protected in seminaries in the 1960s, who were suddenly let loose on the world by Vatican II and related changes. ‘Here you are developmentally somewhere between 13 and 16,’ says a priest ordained in 1965, ‘never having looked at your own sexuality, never having asked the question, gay or straight? – you didn’t even know the words. And so you find yourself with the teen club, and father is taking the students on a ski trip overnight. If he is emotionally still a teenager, very inappropriate things can happen.’

It was the sudden flux that did them in.

I am given an image that keeps recurring in my mind when I think of these issues. In this image, the modern world is a pit, an abyss of chaos – dark, swirling, bottomless, frightening. Think Paradise Lost and the angels falling downwards. There is no one truth, no one authority, no firm land. But there is a shore around the abyss. We gather on the shore, having come from our various little worlds, like country bumpkins on the edge of the frightening city. We look into the swirl of chaos and are afraid.

Around the shore, people like us have built castles. These fortresses of belief promise to save us from the chaos. Each castle has its one truth, one authority. But none accepts the truth or authority of another. None even really engages with the others in open dialogue. Each has its favourite culprits to blame for the existence of the abyss. Some castles are religious. Some are political – cults that explain everything that is wrong and what we must do to be saved. Some are just wealthy. You can live cradle to grave in them without doubt, or at least with effective means to manage and mitigate doubt. They protect your purity. Some are happy places. Some crumble and visibly fall into the chaos, often enough sending their inmates scurrying for other castles they once despised.

But some people have chosen a different tactic. They launch little boats out on to the chaos. They want to see if they can float. They don’t think the chaos is so bad. Some drown in the inevitable storms and accidents, and each incident sends boats paddling for the castles.

But many float. These sailors meet, they talk. They form flotillas sometimes, and have carnivals, seminars, swimming lessons. They navigate by many partial truths, by inner intuitions, by trial and error, by listening and learning. They discover what is hurtful and what is helpful to their fellow sailors by asking them and listening. Some are religious, some political, some wealthy, some poor. They are at home in the chaos. It starts to look beautiful to them, even safe in a delightfully risky way. They discover that what looked like chaos has structures, patterns, after all; and they find that they can get together and change these habitual ways of doing things, even imagine and create new ones. Some of them are happy, even joyful, especially after they have got comfortable with the chaos – although the first months may be hard. But happy or not, few would trade the largeness of what they have found, for the confines of a castle.

The religious castles claim to have the most faith. Some people think it takes even more faith to launch their frail boats on to the abyss, keep their eyes open, and learn how to survive there, without a fixed belief system.

They think they are kissing the chaos, and it is OK.

What do you think?