Entheogenesis Australis

One for the diary: I’ll be speaking about some older research regarding psychedelic spirituality at Entheogenesis Australis to be held at The University of Melbourne on 4-5 December 2010.

There will be two streams to the lecture. First, I’ll be presenting some findings from a previously published paper:

Towards a Sacramental Understanding of Dextromethorphan

Dextromethorphan (DXM) is an ingredient of some cough suppressants which, when consumed in large amounts, can have dissociative and psychedelic effects. Some people within the DXM-user community use DXM to facilitate what they perceive to be spiritual experiences. This paper argues that DXM can therefore be understood within the DXM-user community as a sacrament, and its use located within the neo-shamanic tradition.

Second, I’ll be telling a story about the formation and academic reception of the research.

Other speakers include Rick Doblin of MAPS and Alex Wodak of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation.

That’s Not How We Do Things Here

I’m working on a new article called “That’s Not How We Do Things Here”: American Men’s Ministries in an Australasian Context. In short, most men’s ministries are based in North America. For some years I have been talking about these in Australia and New Zealand, and have met a common complaint from both academics and clergy: “that’s not how we do things here.” Their argument is twofold: First, I present a caricature of evangelicalism that does not bear witness to its diversity; second, I do not acknowledge that evangelicalism (and therefore evangelical men’s ministries) looks different in Australasia compared to North America.

Australasian men’s ministries, these critics claim, are more subtle: less prone to soft patriarchy, less prone to appealing to sport and military images to entice men, and consequently less prone to the problematic masculinities they promote.

My counter-argument is that while it is true that North American evangelicalism in general is not the conservative monolith once identified by progressive critics, within the context of men’s ministry the evangelical caricature holds firm. Furthermore, while Australasian evangelicalism has its own particular flavor, Australasian men’s ministries show a striking resemblance to their North American counterparts.

A great example of this popped into my inbox just this morning from Promise Keepers, who have teamed up with NASCAR to offer the Victory Weekend. As you can see, the graphic used is a classic masculine signifier of sports cars in which participants are asked to “rev up your family and faith”:

Compare this to the most recent men’s ministry conference in Australia:

Again, men are appealed to via sporty cars (the site also refers to a “‘show & shine’ car & bike competition”!), and instead of being asked to “rev up,” the conference is called “Full Throttle”.

‘Nuff said.

2012 conference paper

Next week, on Monday 30 August, I’ll be presenting a paper at the Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe conference in Melbourne, which explores some interesting slippage between prophetic and science fictional narratives around 2012 in ANZ.

2012: Fantasy Futures in Australia and New Zealand

December 21 2012 is believed to mark the end of the thirteenth B’ak’tun cycle in the Long Count of the Mayan calendar. A growing number of people believe this date to mark the end of the world or, at the very least, the end of the world as we know it: a shift to a new form of global consciousness. While predominantly a North American phenomenon, 2012 also has a significant following in Australia and New Zealand. Via a textual analysis of a range of prophetic narratives and science fiction, this paper shows how the future-orientated imagination of the 2012 phenomenon in Australia and New Zealand oscillates between utopian and dystopian outcomes—the utopian largely framed by a transcendent vision of the New Age, the dystopian by immanent environmental destruction.

For a change, there will even be some “real” writers speaking, such as Kim Stanley Robinson.

Feminist Theology article

My article, Evangelical and Catholic Masculinities in Two Fatherhood Ministries is now published in the latest issue of Feminist Theology. Remember, if you don’t have an institutional subscription to this journal you can read my original non-peer reviewed version of the article as a pre-print right here (a slightly shorter but equally useful version). In the editorial Janet Wootten describes the article like this:

In what I found a deeply disturbing article, Joseph Gelfer considers the ways in which evangelical and Catholic theologies are developing ways of describing masculine roles, particularly within the family.

Gelfer looks at two ‘fatherhood ministries’: ‘Dad the Family Shepherd’, which is evangelical, and ‘Fathers for Good’ which is Catholic. Both have been developed to counter the perceived crisis of masculinity in the Church as evidenced by a decline in male attendance, and the feminization of the Church environment.

Both start from the headship or dominant role of the husband and father in the family, but try to model this in ways that are more socially acceptable today. Thus, ‘Dad the Family Shepherd’ is promoted in its eponymous website and in two books, Dad the Family Coach, and Dad the Family Counselor. The language is drawn from the sports field and care industries, but still embraces traditional masculinity. If ‘Dad’ is a shepherd, Gelfer points out, mum and the children are non-humans, sheep.

‘Fathers for Good’ puts forward a ‘softer’ and less traditional model of masculinity. This is also promoted through a website and series of books, this time looking at a variety of contexts for the exercise of the ‘gifts’ of fatherhood.

However, Gelfer in the end questions how far either of these ministries is actually about fatherhood, or how much we learn about their views on fathers, as opposed to their theologies of masculinity. He comes to the conclusion that they are really both about men, and fatherhood is co-opted into the process.

Needless to say, Feminist Theology publishes some interesting articles. This issue alone includes reflections on “the deployment of ritual magick and kabbalistic ritual” in Kate Bush’s album The Red Shoes (by Deborah Withers) and “a fleshy Christology” of “the fat Jesus” (by Lisa Isherwood).  For all you Men’s Rights Advocates fighting against the feminist conspiracy to exclude men, there’s even another man in this issue, with an article from Jacob Waschenfelder about Sallie McFague.

Brother Keepers

A quick plug for Harry Brod and Shawn Zevit’s new book Brother Keepers: New Perspectives on Jewish Masculinity, which I was happy to provide an endorsement for over at Men’s Studies Press:

Harry Brod, Shawn Zevit and their contributors do an excellent job of further unpacking the broad spectrum of Jewish masculinities. Through both academic and personal voices we hear from young and old, gay and straight; we revisit familiar Jewish masculinities, and meet some that are new. Importantly, though, it’s not just a book for Jewish men, but anyone with an interest in how faith and cultural traditions shape the gendered self.

The Masculinity Conspiracy and Appropriate Complexity

A small but persistent number of readers of The Masculinity Conspiracy complain that the style of writing is too complex and “intellectual.” On various occasions I have been asked to cut out the jargon, make it easier to read, provide allegedly “real life examples” and so on, which would all bring the text more into line with the kind of self-help books many folks seem to have become conditioned to expect.

The impression seems to be that The Masculinity Conspiracy is an “academic” book trying to pass itself off a something altogether different. But this is genuinely not the case. If you think The Masculinity Conspiracy is academic, you clearly have not read much academic writing lately (which often I can’t figure out either). In particular, in The Masculinity Conspiracy I:

• summarize with bullet points, just like this: and I hate freakin’ bullet points;
• provide numerous signposts in the text reminding readers about the chapter structures and points made elsewhere;
• strip out all unnecessary jargon and academic terminology unless it is genuinely useful;
• cut paragraphs down to approximately one third of what is grammatically reasonable;
• use the occasional emoticon and have the occasional chuckle.

Now in part this just goes to show that you can’t please all of the people all of the time. Most readers don’t find the text too complicated: I have asked numerous people who are not “academic” (whatever that means) precisely this question. If I made it “simpler” I may pick up a few readers, but would probably also drop a few off.

But there is something else going on here. The demand for ever-simpler writing, bullet points, instant insights, micro-summaries and so forth render books incapable of addressing the complexity of the issues at hand. Masculinity is a complex issue: you might think some of the popular writers are writing about it with “clarity,” but they are simply stripping it of all subtlety and nuance. It’s certainly desirable to aim for clarity, but at some point compromise becomes fatal: it might result in a slot on Oprah’s couch, but it will not result in anything useful. Complex issues require appropriately complex handling.

More than this, the status quo critiqued in The Masculinity Conspiracy requires people not to think with appropriate complexity, subtlety and nuance in order to perpetuate its nonsense agenda. So when I hear complaints about the book being too complex, my immediate thought is not that I’ve failed in my task to clearly communicate, rather the reader is showing how far they are conditioned into the conspiracy (a classic example of conspiratorial logic, if ever there was one!).

Instead of meeting the reader behind such complaints fully on their ground, I ask them to meet me half way (as I have already moved from my natural domain into the middle ground). In doing so we collectively claw back some of the critical thinking ground lost in our dumbed-down world. And more than this, I pay those readers the respect they deserve in assuming they are capable of understanding complex issues: an important but increasingly rare gesture.

Sex in the Forbidden Zone

Recently, the Integral Options blog turned my attention to a paper planned for the Integral Theory Conference by Marc Gafni called Spiritually Incorrect; Sex, Ethics and Injury. As some people know, Integral Friend Gafni has been accused of sexual misconduct with his students in the past. Gafni denies these allegations and uses the paper in question to discuss and defend his position on the subject.

This isn’t a post about Gafni’s paper, although I hope someone with the right inclination will do a thorough job of critiquing it, as both the content and the style are shockingly bad and does no favors to the integral community leaders who continue to rally around him while expecting to be taken seriously. This is a post about an excellent book that Gafni attempts to critique in his paper which I had not come across before called Sex in the Forbidden Zone: When Men in Power—Therapists, Doctors, Clergy, Teachers, and Others—Betray Women’s Trust by Peter Rutter.

As the title suggests, Rutter’s book is all about why men in power should not overstep sexual boundaries with women over whom they hold power. It stems from the author’s experience where he was close to overstepping the boundary himself (Rutter is a therapist), which he describes below:

I was overcome by an intoxicating mixture of the timeless freedom, and the timeless danger, that men feel when a forbidden woman’s sexuality becomes available to them. The freedom stems from the illusion of such moments in which a man can convince himself that nothing but sexual merger with the female body and spirit seems real. He shuts himself off from past and future, contemplating neither the motivation nor the consequences of his acts. The feeling of danger balances the one of freedom, for within this danger is the intuition that the act he is so strongly fantasizing may be wrong, that it may bring catastrophe on both himself and the woman. In the moment of deciding whether to cross the line, I felt all at once extremely powerful—and very, very vulnerable.

What I like about this book is that Rutter does a good job of showing how overstepping sexual boundaries is profoundly wrong, but nevertheless a temptation experienced by (and frequently acted upon) even very decent and ethically-centered men. He also does a good job of explaining how the massive cover-up of such wide-spread activities by other very decent and ethically-centered men is due to the secret envy of those men who have transgressed such boundaries, and that by allowing such transgressions to go unchecked the potential for future fantasy transgressions remains open to all. In doing so, Rutter navigates a very difficult middle way between critiquing his subject of enquiry without demonizing it.

While there may be some issues about broadly referring to “men” or “masculinity” in such a singular way, Rutter nevertheless provides one of the better accounts I’ve read about how “men” think. I don’t say this often, but I recommend this book.

The Masculinity Conspiracy: Chapter 3 now online

Chapter 3 (Sexuality) of The Masculinity Conspiracy is now online.

This chapter examines how the theme of sexuality is mobilized in the conspiracy via two books: Earth Honoring: The New Male Sexuality by Robert Lawlor and The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work and Sexual Desire by David Deida.

It shows how these books promote a masculine sexuality of fixed characteristics.

It then offers some different ways of thinking about masculine sexuality in order to counter the conspiracy.

Taking Down the Cross

There’s an interesting headline on this week’s Integral Life newsletter that points to the story Taking Down the Cross. In it, we are told about Ian Lawton who has “been inspired by the work of Ken Wilber since 2005, as well as a student of Genpo Roshi.” Lawton and his ostensibly Christian C3 Exchange community have made the “controversial decision to remove the cross from their church, [with] the intent to create a more inclusive and inspirational Christianity.”

Sounds positive doesn’t it? The story offers a Fox News excerpt in which Lawton speaks about people of differing religions and values who find the cross alienating on their spiritual journey. The news excerpt also offers a critical alternative opinion from International Aid CEO David Wisen who agrees that taking down the cross is a good idea, as one cannot honestly claim to be Christian while suggesting there are others ways than Christ to God.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for progressive Christianity, and I have no desire to align myself with Wisen’s position about salvation only being found through Christ. However, there are often other things chugging away in the background with integrally-aligned strategies. As I point out in Numen, Old Men, “Leon Schlamm (2001) and George Adams (2002) argue that Wilber’s focus on a particular type of highest-consciousness non-dualism requires the distortion of what other people (the transcended and included) mean when talking about their own traditions; in a sense, their meaning is denied.”

In short, taking down the cross may be done in the spirit of inclusivity, but can have the effect of erasing the Christianity that it seeks to transcend and include. Just imagine the stink that would be caused if we started stripping away the symbols of Islam in order to make it “more inclusive” to non-Muslims.

References:

Adams, George. “A Theistic Perspective on Ken Wilber’s Transpersonal Psychology.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 17, no. 2 (2002): 165-79.

Schlamm, Leon. “Ken Wilber’s Spectrum Model: Identifying Alternative Soteriological Perspectives.” Religion 31, no. 1 (2001): 19-39.

Inception as Typology for Gender Theory (and Almost Everything Else)

For years, the “blue pill, red pill” option of The Matrix has served us well as a metaphor for pretty much anything that requires waking up from one illusory reality to another—more real—reality. As Morpheus says to Neo, “You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”

But the problem with this scenario is that it offers only two choices, and the world is rarely that simple. Today I saw Inception, the new Christopher Nolan movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio (otherwise known as The Bastard Who Annoyingly Gets Better And Better). According to Wikipedia’s synopsis, Inception is:

A variant on the heist genre, [and] centers on Dom Cobb, an “extractor”, who enters the dreams of others to obtain information that is otherwise inaccessible. His abilities have cost him his family and his nationality, but a chance at redemption and regaining his old life is promised when Cobb and his team of specialists are hired to plant an idea in a target’s subconscious.  This process of planting of an idea, known as “inception”, is less familiar and far more difficult than Cobb’s usual job of “extraction”.

Like The Matrix, Inception offers alternate (albeit “waking” and “dream”) realities. But unlike The Matrix we are not left with two choices: instead, we have five. Mobilizing five realities is less convenient than two in a world of black-and-white (or red-and-blue) arguments, so it will never surpass the “blue pill, red pill” metaphor; however, those with a taste for nuance may find it more useful. My immediate thought was that it maps quite nicely on to a gender theory typology. The five layered realities of Inception are:

• The Flight. The first reality takes place on a first-class flight from Australia to Los Angeles. This represents the waking reality of most people: gender normativity. Everything is in its order: power is allocated unevenly, but there are “natural” reasons for this.
• The Raining City. The second reality takes place in the raining city where Fischer is kidnapped. This represents various constituencies among the men’s movement. Something is adrift, but no one is quite sure what. Fingers are pointed and blame allocated, but almost randomly.
• The Hotel. The third reality takes places in the hotel where Fischer is partially informed that some kind of alternate reality is unfolding. He now knows there are things going on behind the scenes and is looking for answers, akin to those offered by feminism and hegemonic masculinities.
• The Snowbound Fortress. The fourth reality takes place in the assault on the snowbound fortress in which lies Fischer’s dying father, the source of the “positive” thought-virus: the “inception.” This represents the multiple identity-becomings of queer theory.
• Limbo. The fifth reality takes places in the almost timeless domain of limbo where the “I” dissolves into the subconscious, in this case created by Cobb and Mal’s regrets. This is a kind of pre-individuated Lacanian Real (even if the Inception narrative requires individuated agency for momentum); gender-wise it is Ettinger’s matrixial borderspace. There are lessons here that take a lifetime to learn: literally so for Cobb and Saito, as a minute in the first reality can be a decade in the fifth.

By moving through the five realities we hit the irreducible. But while the last is in some ways the most stripped back and honest, it is also the most bleak. We need to take the lessons learned there and bring them back to the surface. The device Inception uses for this is “the kick”: a sensory jolt that pulls us back up the reality ladder to the first-class flight, while retaining the full knowledge and memories of the lower rungs. Once returned, the test for the characters is to maintain a grasp on which is the “real” reality, or at least acknowledge that they must hold multiple realities in tension.

I find that with gender it is quite easy for the curious and open-minded individual to consciously descend the reality ladder. However, there remain two difficulties. First, “the kick”: finding the right device to pull us back to the surface unscathed. Second, the “inception”: how to successfully plant those positive gender thoughts in the mind of the unsuspecting first-class traveler in such a way as they perceive it to be their own doing. Both are elusive.

Anyhow, some rough initial thoughts which point to something far more elegant than they actually articulate. I’m sure over the coming months both film philosophers and psychonauts will offer some very sophisticated readings of this thoroughly enjoyable movie.