The Earth, The Sky and Everything In Between

Let me say up front that pop-articles must be taken with a dose of discernment, because articles are, among other things, a compressed and buffed angle on the subject at hand. Such as with news reports or other compressed forms of media which, in interest of their cash flows, must maintain your attention so as to plug advertisements. Ad revenue is not the sole purpose of New Media, but it is the way they make money, and such influences cannot be ignored.

I say that to disclaim that the article I reference below is certainly one take on the author, but it just-as-certainly not representative of the whole person. So, when I evaluate this person, her actions, and the trend in thinking she represents, I must distinguish my reaction as only that which is possible in the context of this compressed and buffed pop-article. The link is below, and I recommend you read it before continuing:

http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/parenting/the-opposite-of-a-tiger-mother-leaving-your-children-behind-2460982/

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I recently completed the book, War and Peace. I hope you read it some day. Tolstoy is a master storyteller, and connects right into the gooey center of the human soul. His philosophy holds relevant 150 years after he wrote it down on paper. I've copied below a section of the book that I believe serves as an acute counterpoint to the article above.



"We know that man has the faculty of becoming completely absorbed in a subject however trivial it may be, and that there is no subject so trivial that it will not grow to infinite proportions if one's entire attention is devoted to it.

The subject which wholly engrossed Natasha's attention was her family: that is, her husband whom she had to keep so that he should belong entirely to her and to the home, and the children whom she had to bear, bring into the world, nurse, and bring up.

And the deeper she penetrated, not with her mind only but with her whole soul, her whole being, into the subject that absorbed her, the larger did that subject grow and the weaker and more inadequate did her powers appear, so that she concentrated them wholly on that one thing and yet was unable to accomplish all that she considered necessary.

There were then as now conversations and discussions about women's rights, the relations of husband and wife and their freedom and rights, though these themes were not yet termed questions as they are now; but these topics were not merely uninteresting to Natasha, she positively did not understand them.

These questions, then as now, existed only for those who see nothing in marriage but the pleasure married people get from one another, that is, only the beginnings of marriage and not its whole significance, which lies in the family.

Discussions and questions of that kind, which are like the question of how to get the greatest gratification from one's dinner, did not then and do not now exist for those for whom the purpose of a dinner is the nourishment it affords; and the purpose of marriage is
the family.

If the purpose of dinner is to nourish the body, a man who eats two dinners at once may perhaps get more enjoyment but will not attain his purpose, for his stomach will not digest the two dinners.

If the purpose of marriage is the family, the person who wishes to have many wives or husbands may perhaps obtain much pleasure, but in that case will not have a family.

If the purpose of food is nourishment and the purpose of marriage is the family, the whole question resolves itself into not eating more
than one can digest, and not having more wives or husbands than are needed for the family- that is, one wife or one husband. Natasha needed a husband. A husband was given her and he gave her a family. And she not only saw no need of any other or better husband, but as all the powers of her soul were intent on serving that husband and family, she could not imagine and saw no interest in imagining how it would be if things were different. "



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Now, what do you think of Leo Tolstoy? Having read the full book, and his philosophical confession at the end, I can assure the reader that the quotation above is, of his philosophy, an accurate reflection.

The reader's perception of Tostoy, or of Ms. Rizzuto, is a question of paradigm.

Each profile focuses on marriage. I do not mean to focus exclusively on the purpose of marriage, nor do I mean to diminish the importance of that question. The paradigm each has adopted guides their commentary on marriage, but also addresses the broader question: by what paradigm should men live? For the sake of the following comparison, I will label Rizzuto's paradigm as 'Independence', and Tolstoy's as 'Interdependence'.

Both paradigms are simple to digest in their basic forms, illustrated here in the topic of marriage:

Tolstoy:  In marriage, on forgoes independence, and binds themselves to the provision and nourishment of their spouse and the family they together produce.
Rizzuto: Marriage is a component of life, one of many engagements selected which, together, represent one's best effort to maximize life satisfaction.

Between the two, the primary distinction is this question of independence.

Rizzuto's philosophy is that independence is the governing virtue; the choice fruit of life. She has a lot of support. The word and concept of independence is ingrained in American culture. The modern liturgy are movies and music, and the common anthem is the virtue of blazing one's own trail and breaking free from oppression, adversity, or status-quo. My cabinet is lined with such movies. Out of this liturgy, independence is lionized. The natural logical progression, then, is that life activities must be balanced such as to preserve independence.

I can relate. I don't prefer having a mortgage payment and many of the things that fill up the house. They make me feel immobile, and something about that doesn't sit well with me; never has. Many people feel that way and few do anything about it, which is in part why the few that do are celebrated, such as the lady from 'Eat, Pray, Love'. Like Rizzuto, she left her dull, stuck life to embark on a grand adventure. She did so in order to more completely embrace her chief aim: independence.

And yet, we have in our liturgy stories of grand adventures that are not born out of an independent spirit. What of the reluctant heroes? What of the Baggins' or, as was just recently celebrated, King George VI? In both cases, the heroes are drawn into an adventure against their will, propelled forward by forces they did not choose or fully understand but could not deny. Each triumphed by embracing their role and abilities to function within the circumstances placed upon their heads or, in the former, fingers.

Just this morning I began reading '7 Habits of Highly Effective People'. Among Dr. Covey's introduction is his effort to distinguish 'dependence' from 'independence' from 'interdependence'. He says that progressing through these stages is the path of maturity and of leadership. A person should progress through depending on others for nourishment and identity, to becoming self-sufficient to nourish and identify ourselves, and finally, learning to move past self-identity as the chief aim, but to submit our independent desires to the interdependent reality set before us. I might prefer the flexibility to drift as I please, but to be an effective husband, father, worker, and leader, some sort of inflexibility is required. I can submit to that requirement or I can remove the people and circumstances that force that requirement upon me, but stability is required of me for where I am, and it is that way whether I like it or not.



Covey illuminates this point quite well:

"Independent thinking alone is not suited to interdependent reality. Independent people who do not have the maturity to think and act interdependently may be good individual producers, but they won't be good leaders or team players. They're not coming from the paradigm of interdependence necessary to succeed in marriage, family, or organizational reality."


Now, compare this with Tolstoy's conclusion to 'War and Peace':

"As with astronomy the difficulty of recognizing the motion of the earth lay in abandoning the immediate sensation of the earth's fixity and of the motion of the planets, so in history the difficulty of recognizing the subjection of personality to the laws of space, time, and cause lies in renouncing the direct feeling of the independence of one's own personality. But as in astronomy the new view said: "It is true that we do not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting its motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at laws," so also in history the new view says: "It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws."

In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of
which we are not conscious."



As in the comparison of liturgical heroes, the guiding difference between the philosophies of Tolstoy and Rizzuto is acceptance of unconcious forces, apart from our experience and will, whose governance of our lives we cannot escape or circumvent. Once accepted, the remaining question is whether one will submit and productively behave within that contra-independent reality.

There still remains, then, the question of which paradigm leads to greater maturity in a man? Often, a good place to begin that journey is by examining the credibility of each paradigm's present and historical champions, and the credibility of each's liturgy. There may well be no new beliefs, but instead many liturgies, traditions, and well-trodden paths that we knowingly or unknowingly walk. Examining the histories and paths of those who have walked before us is akin to widening the scope of our viewpoint. In doing so, perhaps we can then discover if our path is clean, or if on the margins of the pavement lay the dead and the dying.