Celebrating and Cultivating Our Better Angels

We have a lot to celebrate as we enter the New Year. The Iraq war is over for the United States; our troops have come home. I’m looking forward to a peaceful 2012.

Indeed, there’s now evidence that the world is getting more peaceful all the time. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has researched the past from 8000 BCE to the 1970’s and concludes that society has become less violent over the centuries. He’s written an 802-page book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, to prove his point. 

For starters, statistics released by the FBI show that violent crime in the United States has decreased by 13.4 percent over the last decade. To use a more visual example, today’s ads for gyms and exercise paraphernalia don’t “feature the use of fisticuffs,” as they did in the 1940’s “to restore manly honor.” Today, “bulging pectorals and rippling abdominals are shown in arty close-up for both sexes to admire. The advantage they promise is in beauty, not might.”

I skim the book; I don’t have to read every word to know I like it. His thesis of our evolving brains induces warm, fuzzy feelings of optimism in me.

Speaking of optimism, here’s a formula which elucidates one conundrum of our Human Condition and converts the Impossible to Possible, and even beyond to Joyous.

Negative Attachments, such as feeling like an outsider in society and/or within our own psyches, are best sublimated into artistic endeavors (activities like listening to music, writing poems, drawing and sketching, etc.). This will allow us to vent our negative feelings and externalize them in a healthy way.

If hostility and aggression are not acknowledged or sublimated, our dark or shadow side can create dissension and we have the tendency to externalize negativity on to others. In some cases this results in acts of violence.

(Extreme examples of this kind of projection include Hitler and other serial killers. Hitler’s own failure as a painter proves the importance of sublimating negative impulses through art. Because he failed to gain instantaneous fame through his painting, Hitler lashed out and externalized his anger by writing Mein Kampf.  His detachment from the positive within himself and humanity resulted in the devastating violence of the Holocaust  and WWII.)

 By contrast, we create Positive Attachments when we care and love ourselves – and when we care for others - as we do when we work toward positive thinking as mentioned in last week’s blog. (I cope with my shadow side/demons with exercise for the body and for the mind, I write a daily journal.)

Positive attachments increase optimism and energy. As we extend our care and love for people, places and things in our environment, we increase the possibilities of slouching toward and bringing about world peace. Amen.

Dear Reader: I welcome your comments. (jsimon145@gmail.com)