Thompson at Large - author, journalist, blogger, and periodic talk radio host

For Sam Keen the philosophical life is all about asking questions

Sam Keen was passing through airport security a uniformed guard asked him to prove his identity. Keen complied by opening his wallet and showing his drivers license and other cards displaying his name. The guard nodded and waved Keen through to his flight. After taking his seat, Keen couldn’t resist taking a second look at the plastic contents of his wallet and saying half out loud: I fooled him, none of the cards in my wallet provide the slightest clue to my real identity.

That story pretty much nails Sam Keen. You talk with him for a couple of hours and it becomes clear he’s a philosopher at heart — though not in the sense of being more interested in Plato’s ideal republic than the ways of the actual world. Real people asking big questions about how to live authentic lives in the context of time and space has been the focus of his work for more than four decades.

Keen is also a philosopher by training — by his own admission "overeducated at Harvard and Princeton.” He worked as a professor of philosophy and religion at "various legitimate institutions" and as a contributing editor of Psychology Today for 20 years before setting out as a free-lance thinker, lecturer, seminar leader and consultant. He’s the author of more a baker’s dozen books, and a co-producer of an award winning PBS documentary, Faces of the Enemy, plus a book by the same name.

Above all, Sam Keen carries the “why” chromosome — he loves questions. “The practice of philosophy is a way of life that results from falling in love with questions, the great mythic questions that can never be given definitive answers,” he says. “Nothing shapes our lives so much as the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think of asking. What you ask is who you are. What you find depends on what you search for.” In short, he’s the kind of guy a judge might threaten with contempt for answering one question with a different one. Keen says it hasn’t happened yet, but it’s hard to avoid the impression he wouldn’t relish the experience.

I caught up with the prolific writer and lecturer at his farm in the hills above Sonoma, where Keen says he spends his days “writing, fiddling growing things and practicing the flying trapeze,” specifically the one that seems to fill a valley behind his house. A few years ago Keen wrote a book about his unexpected falling in love with the trapeze: Learning to Fly: Reflections on Fear, Trust, and the Joy of Letting Go.

I especially looked forward to talking with Keen because we had both conducted long published interviews with the reclusive anthropologist-author Carlos Castaneda, 22 years apart. I was curious about the pattern that connects Keen’s wide-ranging interests, from the nature of wonder and the varieties of love, to why humans are so prone to hate members of their own species and the joys of soaring on a trapeze. It all seems to come down this: “Philosophers ask questions.”

You went off to Ivy League schools to study philosophy and theology. What led you there, and why didn’t you stay?

I went first into theology, then philosophy, out of my own questions and anxieties. I was brought up in the pre-World War II south. I was 11 years old when World War II started. Since I lived in small southern towns, a lot of my experience was more like the nineteenth than the twentieth century — more Huckleberry Finn than Holden Caulfield. I was raised in fundamentalism: a very learned kind of Calvinist Presbyterianism. We had reasons for our faith; it wasn’t just our hearts that were strangely warm. When I began to break out of that — which I did progressively from the last semester in college, when I read Kierkegaard, all the way until I first came to Esalen in 1969 — I had a lot of answers from my upbringing and my graduate school education. But I still faced the agony of the questions.

What kinds of questions?

Who am I? Where am I from? Who are my people? What can I know? What ought I to do? For what may I hope? Why is there evil? How do I serve God? What happened during the big bang when the world was created? Who will love me? How do I get power? Where will happen to me at death — and afterwards? What surprised me most about graduate school was the general absence of these kinds of questions. I can still remember taking a seminar in Aristotle, who famously said philosophy begins in wonder. The professor’s lectures were entirely focused on the formal logic of Aristotle’s arguments rather than asking about Aristotle’s philosophical vision. I didn’t understand what was happening. Where was the wonder? I realized I would never make it as an academic philosopher. The world of academic philosophy was sterile and unrelated to the problems of contemporary society.

So you moved on.

Yes, and it was the right choice. What really changed me was when I moved away from Christian answers, even liberal Christian answers — and began to honor the questions themselves. I began to study mythology, which, like good theology, focused on the great existential questions. What was important to me was the questions.

To go on a quest is nothing more or less than to become an asker of questions. So I went back in a rather agonizing way to look at those questions: Where did I come from? Where am I going? What ought I to do? For what may I hope? What is death? How close should people be? That took me back to deep philosophical questions about origins, myths of origins. Do I just come from my mother and father of Scotch heritage? How far back do I go in the story? My reflections led me to crystallize an approach that I called “personal mythology.” So, like the wounded physician, I begin dispensing the medicine I used on myself—doing workshops in personal myth and narrative, composing an autobiography, which was wonderful for me because I got deep inside people’s lives.

That’s where it became clear that the idea of philosophy and the personal life, everyday life, wasn’t just my way but something the culture was immensely hungry for. I’d teach a seminar at Esalen on a Friday evening and everyone wanted to work until ten or eleven at night. Then they’d want three long sessions on both Saturday and Sunday, and at the end I’d get the same question over and over: Do we have to quit? It was all the idea that instead of coming at people with answers, it was questions about living that people wanted. And it became more clear to me than ever, that if philosophy was to be meaningful, ultimate questions could only be discussed in terms of their implications for everyday life, everyday concerns.

The church and the academy are a lot alike. Both are good at dispensing answers.

Exactly. You come to a church and they don’t ask, “Well, who are you? What’s your sacred experience, your religious experience?” Likewise, an academic philosopher doesn’t ask, “Where did you come from? Where did you get those stories?” Philosophy, like theology, had become a professional activity. And I don’t think philosophy, religion or lovemaking should be professional activities.

Don’t forget psychology. Even the Jungians, with their interest in creativity and deep identity, have ended up largely concerned with professional status, credentials, and all the rest.

To my way of thinking, the Jungian establishment has gotten awfully constricted. Jungians typically deal with everything except the body and the body politic. When I was doing research for my book about men and masculinity, Fire in the Belly, books began to appear about the four core archetypes that all men had to get in touch with: the warrior, the king, the lover and the magician. I think this was silly, historically nearsighted and politically ignorant. For one thing, the warrior was the hair of the dog that bit us. Just ask women how they feel about men getting in touch with their “kingly” energy. And “magician”? These books ignored the greatest archetype that came out of the classical world—the idea of “man as citizen.” That’s a pretty serious omission, if the goal is a unified life. Certainly, what we — men and women — need to become today is intelligent and compassionate participants in the political process. We need passionate citizens with a vision of how to make the world more just a lot more than we need magicians, warriors or kings. Well, I’ll keep the archetype of lover, which gives the books in question a grade of 25 percent out of a possible 100.

How did you find your way from personal mythology to the study of how cultures and nations create enemies? Seems a big shift in focus.

Actually, my interest in what I call the hostile imagination grew out of my study of love. I had written a book called The Passionate Life, which drew on psychology, philosophy, mythology, and personal experience to explain the five stages in becoming a lover — child, rebel, adult, outlaw, and mature lover. As I wrote that book I began to ask: Why is it we’re such an unloving species? By the time we get to be adults, we’re hardly allowed to love anybody: only someone of the opposite sex, same color, same religion, same tribe. Everybody else has been shoved off.

That leaves about 4 percent.

Maybe on a good day. I continued asking: Are we hostile animals by nature? No, we’re not. We’re trained, we’re educated and conditioned to hate. How does that happen? I realized most of it has to be unconscious. So I began to look at propaganda. I visited the Soviet Union and Nicaragua and studied various wars and looked at the ways the official propaganda of the culture makes enemies out of people and groups that have been chosen for that role. The Soviets had an official bureau of propaganda and used similar images to dehumanize different enemies, first the Nazis, then America. How do we do it here in America, I wondered? So I began to look at editorial cartoons. What’s strange is: nobody gets 20 cartoonists from “the free world” together and says, “Here’s the party line.” Even so, most of our cartoonists specialize in stereotypes. I wanted to understand that.

The problem of war lies not in our reason or our technology, but in the hardness of our hearts. We humans are Homo hostilis, the hostile species, the enemy-making animal. Generation after generation, we find ways to hate and dehumanize each other, always justified with the most mature-sounding political rhetoric. We’re driven to fabricate an enemy as scapegoat to bear the burden of our denied enmity.

In your new edition of Faces of the Enemy, you start with a wry apology for returning with a report on the latest players in this age-old game of enemy making. What’s new with Iraq, compared to the Cold War?

In the Cold War, we were fighting people we could characterize as atheists — not simply socialists but a-theistic, godless. Now suddenly we’re fighting a war with people who say we’re the atheists. They’re not only devout, but fanatically so; they’re willing to give their lives. The highest religious ideal is martyrdom. We don’t know what to do about that. In a strange way our fear during the Cold War created an agreed strategy of mutually assured destruction that kept us from a nuclear war.

The Soviets didn’t want to die and neither did we. That’s a deal you can leverage.

MAD told us what to be afraid of. I remember the Cuban missile crisis. We knew where the danger was coming from, or we believed we did. It was manageable, in a psychological sense. On September 11, we shifted from a culture of fear to a culture of anxiety. Fear requires a object like the neighbor’s vicious dog. You can call the animal control people about the dog and the police about the neighbor and reduce your level of fear. With anxiety, everything can be a signal that they’re after you — whoever “they” may be, spiders or terrorists. Anxiety is an unfocused state. You don’t know where the danger is coming from. Largely symbolic rituals like confiscating fingernail clippers and frisking little old ladies in tennis shoes before they board airplanes make us feel more secure but they don’t protect us against a myriad of unanticipated dangers. We are unable to make a rational assessment of the danger and respond in a rational way.

But by the same token, rational risk assessment requires visualizing real enemies in accurate ways that may strike some as politically incorrect. For instance, not all Muslims are terrorists; but most global terrorists are Muslims. Not all efforts to profile real enemies are necessarily “scapegoating.”

Exactly. There are dangerous and evil people against whom a nation must sometimes fight. Think of the Nazis or Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, or any of the mega-murdering dictators. The question is, how do we respond to evil without creating an even worse evil?

So would President Sam Keen have gone after Osama bin Laden — and if so, what would you have done?

I would have made every effort to make the punishment fit the crime. Rather than a massive bombing campaign that killed more civilians than combatants, I would have used multiple groups of special forces who were trained in guerilla warfare and infiltration techniques. I would also have given massive hands-on foreign aid to clinics, schools, agricultural experts, to help the dispossessed peoples of the Arab world gain a greater measure of prosperity and hope. I would have ended our cozy relationships with the tyrannical leaders in the oil rich nations. We should have learned from the Vietnam war that there is no way to defeat an “insurgency” unless you win the hearts and minds of the common people.

And above all, I would set about to make the U.S. energy independent. My first executive order would be to mandate that within five years every automobile must get double the current gas mileage. Our lack of imagination, leadership and courage to transition out of the petroleum economy is very nearly evil. Need I say that everyone who drives a car is complicit. I feel a little overly self-righteous because I drive a Prius.

You said death and dying were among your early questions. More of us are living longer than ever, staying healthier in the process, but death shows no signs of going on holiday. What does everyday philosophy have to say about the Big D?

The question of death is the bass note in the symphony of questions. Many years ago, our Jack Russell terrier gave birth. Four puppies lived, one died. I watched with a heart disciplined to the acceptance of mortality as my then thirteen-year-old daughter Jessamyn grieved and prepared the perfect small body for burial. She knew the puppy’s death was final, yet she was unbelieving: “Daddy, can’t we bring him back to life?” The fact that each mortal being exists only for a brief moment in time is baffling and unacceptable. Yet every spiritual tradition advises the same: Keep the thought of death near. Don’t run from it. Embrace the knowledge of your own death early in life, and you’ll avoid many illusions.

On the other hand, I think the Sharper Image’s “Personal Life Clock” — $99.95, with a ninety-day warranty — that “reminds you to live life to the fullest by displaying the time and actual hours, minutes, and seconds remaining in your statistical lifetime,” goes too far in the right direction.

What’s next for Sam Keen? What are you working on these days?

I’m still at the old craft, writing, lecturing and doing workshops, and doing some flying trapeze when I’m not traveling. I mess around on my farm, play with family, feast with my friends, and travel back and forth to Berkley to spend time with the Rev. Patricia de Jong, who I married in September. And wonder how I can do a little something to make this world less bloody, less poor, less mad for power, less captive to the quest for more toys. I have just finished a remake of all of the elements in the Faces of the Enemy project: a new edition of the book with an illustrated chapter on The New Enemy; a new study guide; a DVD of the PBS documentary with a director’s cut and a DVD with three power point lectures: Enemy Making, The New Enemy and Beyond Enmity. I consider this part of my political yoga in this troubled time. At the moment I’m joyfully possessed by a book I am writing called Sightings, which is about birds and the sacred. I hope it will be short and beautiful. As I write I watch the nuthatches, finches, towhees, doves and jays that crowd around my bird feeder. Very entertaining.

Sam Keen’s books and other learning materials can be ordered through his Web site: www.samkeen.com . He can also be contacted there to schedule lectures or workshops on a variety of themes.