Greg Leake emails: Hi Luke,
A few days ago you had an interesting post called “The Apprenticeship of Luke Ford.” I always appreciate the insight into yourself, and at the same time I asked myself, “Has Luke missed some of the American experience?’
Let’s start with your religious background in California. You mentioned to Rabbs not long ago that you had been close to a religious community most of your life, in the early days with the Seventh Day Adventist Church and more recently with Judaism. You lived in the Napa Valley in the Seventh Day Adventist community, went to their schools a while, and had a sort of unaffiliated time when you fell harder than most, which is to be expected for a preacher’s kid. (Preacher’s kids are notorious for being wild, non-conformist, and independent.) And then Judaism.
I would like to tell you that when you leave the coasts, left and east, you find yourself in flyover country. And flyover country is different in some ways.
You’ve talked about how cloistered and unearthly the Seventh Day Adventist church is as a denomination.
In flyover country, take, say, big metropolitan Baptist and Methodist churches are basically part of the WASP power structure. You have talked about being impressed by the doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs in the Jewish world.
In flyover country, the big Protestant denomination metropolitan churches are filled with well-to-do upward-mobile power couples, climbers, and politically-connected professionals. the difference in flyover country is that the doctors and lawyers do not have any more authority than the guy who owns a car dealership or the guy who is a VP in an insurance company or the CFO of a franchise business. The guy who has made some money from a string of gas stations may have more dough than the doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs. Remember, George and Laura Bush are Methodists. You should see the well-heeled church they go to. You should see the church that Jerry Jones attends. You know, John Wesley once said when asked about money, “Get all you can, give all you can.”
One needs to keep in mind that the US was basically started by Protestants and their work ethic. Surveys have demonstrated that wherever you have state-supported religion, belief in God diminishes. Protestantism is almost always been outside the bounds of state control. I live next door to a Pentecostal minister, and know whereof I speak. Remember George H. W. Bush was an Episcopalian before that church put its foot in it.
In Protestantism, especially in the South, it’s almost synonymous with rugged individualism, independence, and a distrust of government control.
So my basic point is that in your cloistered spiritual community associated with your early days with the Seventh Day Adventists is not really characteristic of being in a hard-charging Protestant community in flyover country. It is curious in this regard to wonder why rick Santorum, very thoughtful and devout Catholic, is getting most of his support from evangelical Christians. The Catholic vote seems to be going to Romney.
You also discussed the dichotomy between the part of you that wants to be a highly moral, solid citizen and another part that enjoys the seamier side of life. and as a Jew you chew on this dichotomy and wonder what should be done and what perspective this should be seen from.
In flyover country you’re just a guy with high ideals and some low appetites. The authentic Luke is a guy who is a mixture of both qualities. Outside of these cloistered religious environments, this would not be unusual, but just a fairly normal human condition. Carl Jung, a psychologist I prefer to Freud, said, “The more light you have, the more darkness you have. Someone with a lot of light casts a very large shadow. The “Shadow” was a way that Jung discussed all of the negative traits that each of us has that others see but we do not see in ourselves.
All of the psychotherapy you have done has made your own shadow very visible to you. As a consequence you are ahead of the game, because your deleterious factors are not operating unconsciously, and they present you with a moral dilemma just as Jung said. Because you know your shadow so well, you have an opportunity to consciously correct some of your misguided inclinations, and this is how one becomes a better person.
In flyover country, this is automatically assumed to be true for most people without any of the knowledge of Jungian psychology. As a consequence, we spend a lot fewer hours chewing on it and just try to correct it as best we can.
Professionalism is important in flyover country, but less so than in the Jewish world. In flyover country there is less appreciation for people who seem to have affectations. Our model of desirability is more someone who appears to be a regular guy despite their profession or success. I’ll mention George Bush again. If you did not know who he was, and you drove by him raking leaves and struck up a conversation, you might think he was a guy who owned a construction company or a couple of feed stores. You’ve listened to Rick Perry, and you might get the same idea about him if you saw him outside his role as governor. The whole idea of being a doctor, lawyer, or Indian chief does have some prestige in flyover country, but not as much as you find in your community. I used to live next door to a lawyer. He was a nice guy and played up being a lawyer a little bit, but we both understood that while he had professional status, he was just a guy I might hire.
so in flyover country, whether it’s ion Dallas, Phoenix, Kansas City, Denver, Indianapolis, there is a whole different social ethos when it comes to presenting yourself as a professional or the sort of respect that one gives to a professional. And in the small towns and small cities, the professional is just a guy pumping gas at the next pump.
Ultimately my point is that your descriptions of your lives and dilemmas are illuminating, and there is a certain part of the American fabric that you seem to have missed. What I have been describing is ordinary life away from the coasts and out in the big middle where most Americans live the American way of life outside of a bunch of cultural influences imported from elsewhere.
I think you have done a remarkable job of gaining insight into the workings of your own psyche. And your desire to improve deleterious parts of your own character is very respectable.
