Welcome – TKM Connect

Welcome! This initial post is to introduce myself and give some background on what I’m intending with this blog.

I’m writing this in July, 2020—during this plague year, the year of Trump, police brutality, George Floyd as the latest victim of the police, capitalist brutality, the general collapse of the old world order, environmental calamities now unleashed—because it’s time and because to remain silent really is a crime like a knee on the neck, that does not allow the body politic to breathe, preventing life-giving oxygen to the system.

While I teach and write books and therefore have those public platforms for speaking and contributing, it seems that this crisis time has put a point on what I have come to see as the purpose of my generation with reference to the younger one. That is, it’s clear the world is in a profound transformation, all the usual systems collapsing or being altered to the point at which we can acknowledge a new world must be born out of the ashes of the old.

It’s in that spirit that I now write, with the notion that as now having backed into becoming an elder, I can offer one more voice of experience and perspective, one more node in the network of life. I often tell my students I’m not smarter than they, but what I do have that they don’t is greater perspective—that gift that is bestowed on us by virtue of living ongoing decades—and by thinking about life. It becomes clear after a time that life moves in patterns of experience and behavior and that we can after a time begin to recognize these patterns. One becomes, so to speak, an initiate into life. So that right there—perspective, is what I want to offer in this blog, first to anyone younger and then expanding outward to all of us, speaking as one more node in the network.

The defining image of our time is, of course, connectedness. We see its images everywhere in life, in paradoxical ways: on the one hand, all those things that connect us—the internet, the plague, globalization—and on the other, those that split us—surveillance, income disparity, and all the isms that are signs of separation—racism, sexism, nationalism. This is the underlying and driving principle of this blog: to talk about the ways we may be better connected and how to bear the divisions without them killing us, the animals and the plants.

A little more background before I begin: I’ve taught a course on Love at Boston College for the past twenty-five years, and if you’d like to pursue more directly what that course is all about, see the link here on this blog for A Little Course in Love. There’s so much sentimental and confused information about love out there these days that some clarity seems to be in order.

I’ve also taught a course on Love and Indoctrination, with the notion that love, as the Principle of Connectedness (my own definition derived from various readings), is the cure for indoctrinated thinking and systems. We see this today everywhere, from Trump the Great Divider to his fans split off from their own best interests, shooting themselves as it were in the foot; to capitalism and its emphasis on competition as opposed to cooperation. The Great Lie of capitalism is the supposed fact that humans are essentially competitive creatures. We’ve all so ingested that notion that spending time alone in quarantine during the virus has turned into a competition to see how we can out-compete ourselves or one another in proving that mere isolation cannot make us falter. Be our better selves! is the watchword of the day.

While I do believe capitalism is the way of thinking that is destroying the planet and us, I admit I’m a capitalist; I’m not standing outside the system and critiquing it from some external or superior position. Quite the contrary; I, like you, am suffering its depredations. I’m not sure if the system is inherently flawed or evil, but I don’t know of any examples of it where it does not eventually lead to a constant speeding up, a delusion that resources are infinite, and a casual cruelty visited upon future generations, because in essence it’s a system always projected into the future and never focused on the moment before us.

Love, because it’s been the main concern of my life, whether teaching, writing or building, will therefore remain front and center in everything I have to talk about. I’ll refer to the writers and thinkers below to help flesh out various ideas about love and other matters. But beware: this is not the soft vulnerable love of lots of voices out there (which is at best half the picture of love), but instead a more complete limning of the various aspects of Love as we actually experience it.

I’m thinking of this blog’s stepping off point as the community of my students and former students with whom I’ve interacted over the years, some of whom have become friends, I’m delighted to say. I receive a fair number of emails with excellent ideas in them, and I’m hoping with this blog to relay those ideas to you, Readers, radiating them outward for everyone to contemplate—ideas being the common currency of humanity. In this way the thoughts you send whether to me via emails or left here on this blog as comments will become the seed material of new ways of thinking and doing in the world.

If you’d like to know where I’m coming from and why I think the way I do, here are some various sources of thinking and inspiration I’ve learned from over the years—the tree as it were upon which I am a small branch. That is, these are the human and not-so-human inspirations that have made it possible for me to speak. In other words, to understand as fully as possible the ideas I’ll be articulating here, go read up on the following (in no particular order):