Orwell On Nationalism, Learning to Receive, And The Patheos Pagan Kerfuffle

Greetings and welcome to another Random Wednesday on The Zen Pagan. Again this week, three short bits.

Orwell on Nationalism

George Orwell’s 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism” is not just amazingly relevant to the resurgence of traditional nationalism we are experiencing, it shows how that phenomenon we now call “identity politics” rests on the same basis.

Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism. It does not necessarily mean loyalty to a government or a country, still less to one’s own country, and it is not even strictly necessary that the units in which it deals should actually exist. To name a few obvious examples, Jewry, Islam, Christendom, the Proletariat and the White Race are all of them objects of passionate nationalistic feeling: but their existence can be seriously questioned, and there is no definition of any one of them that would be universally accepted.

…A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist — that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating — but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations….The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right.

Orwell’s key point is that such passionate feelings make certain facts “intolerable, and so they have to be denied, and false theories constructed upon their denial.”

In other words, this is the root of “alternative facts.”

Learning to Receive

I’m going to be doing massage at a local wellness center one evening a week. Today I started my training there; they have a standard massage protocol they want me to learn, and in order to learn it, I have to see it done — i.e., receive it. So as part of my orientation, I had to get a massage. Definitely not the worst first day on the job I’ve had.

And it’s been a while — too long — since I’ve gotten a massage, in all the personal, professional, and political stress of the past several months.

But it reminded me of something from my training. When I was studying shiatsu and massage, we of course practiced each other to learn the techniques, which meant receiving a large amount of bodywork. And you might be surprised at what a challenge this is. We put our emotional garbage into our muscles, and letting someone clean it out for you can be a hard thing to accept.

You probably know the lines from eden ahbez’s song “Nature Boy”, made famous by Nat “King” Cole: “”The greatest thing you’ll ever learn / Is just to love and be loved in return”. For many of us, the second part of that, learning to be loved, can be the greater challenge.

The Patheos Pagan Kerfluffle

For those who don’t know, Patheos got new corporate overlords a few months ago when it was bought by Beliefnet.

Actually, the structure is that holding company BN Media is now the owner of both — as well as Affinity4, an affinity-based marketing company that is sort of a right-wing version of Working Assets/CREDO. It sells cell phone plans and other services, and lets customers direct a portion of their bill to various “charities and ministries”, which include groups ranging from Feed the Children to the NRA and the American Center for Law and Justice, a right-wing group that has been accused of backing homophobic policies in Africa.

Patheos recently sent its bloggers a new contract. It actually offers most of us more money — in the sense that we were usually making $0 a month before, and now might, if we draw a few thousand hits, make something like $6 a month. (Yes, even with this new and improved deal I will still get paid less than a dollar a post. So won’t you please support this blog?) But the new contract also included a clause in which we agreed to not disparage Patheos or any of it’s related companies.

Some bloggers were convinced that “related companies” could be stretched to include those non-profits that Affinity4 channels money to, that this contract would mean we were agreeing to not criticize these right-wing groups. Others — inaccurately, as far as I can tell — believed that ad revenue from Patheos was going to support those causes. And some were just surprised and upset to learn that Patheos’s new owned had ties to such groups. There were some other concerns as well, but those were the big ones.

So over the past few days there has been a shake-up. Patheos has offered a revised contract that clarifies some of the concerns, but a few bloggers have left. Some have done so after (in my opinion) flying off the handle and making questionable charges and conclusions, some have done so after thoughtful deliberation, though I don’t agree with their conclusions.

There has been a great deal of discussion behind the scenes. To make my position clear I’d like to publicly share something I posted there:

The world is full of people with horrible ideas. We should not directly support them, and I have a long list of companies I try to avoid, but the web of interaction and interdependency makes it inevitable that we do so indirectly. I pay my neighbor to cut my lawn, he sends money to the Trump campaign. I patronize my local vegetarian cafe to support local and organic agriculture, turns out its owner is ok with cops pepper-spraying handcuffed kids. If I were to do business only with people who agreed with me on all the big issues — well, since that’s the empty set. I’d have to go live off the land somewhere. (I’d have to squat, couldn’t rent and deal with landlords, couldn’t buy the land and have to do business with a government I don’t support.)

If Patheos wants to give me a tiny bit of money to keep doing what I’m doing, and Patheos itself is not advocating anything I find nasty, and I can use their platform to continue to advocate for what (I think) is right, and I can send that $6 a month to the ACLU, I don’t see that storming off in high dudgeon is going to produce a better outcome.

I’ve got no problem with using resources owned by right-wing people to undermine right-wing ideas. Audre Lorde’s metaphor, though well-intentioned, is wrong: the master’s tools will serve quite nicely to dismantle the master’s house.