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          An old friend of mine came out to visit me Up Nort’ last year, flying into Marquette from his academic enclave in Martha’s Vineyard, and gave me a rather remarkable story about coastal Indians in pre-Columbian Connecticut. He told me that there had been such abundance there that the natives had not even bothered to build villages. They moved from place to place like carefree hippies in a VW Microbus, digging clams and spearing fish and holding free music festivals – OK, I made that last one up – and, with the exception of those spears, owned nothing. Further, all remains found were absent any signs of violence – that is, broken skulls, slash marks on arm and leg bones and so on. The conclusion was, as he put it mimicking Claus Schwab, “They owned nothing and were happy.”
 
            “Neo-Marxist propaganda!,” I shouted, losing my cool before rationally arguing against such a point. “This makes it all about materialism. If this is true, there is no need for God!” Meaning I got to the ultimate point while skipping the explanation, which I did get around to eventually, but the momentum was gone. I had been blindsided and ended up not convincing anyone to the contrary. Claus Schwab still undoubtedly reigns in Martha’s Vineyard.
 
            I will not detail the counter argument here, which really should not be necessary anyway. Nowhere else in the world has any society, whether they be the Shoshone and Australian nomads or the wealthy chiefdoms of Hawaii and our North West coast, been free of violence. In Connecticut, the individuals of such wandering peoples were gone before they could be studied and the material evidence of their lives was by definition thin. They left almost nothing, as said, including organized grave yards. To form a Schwab-like conclusion from such scraps of evidence is more a wishful bit of propaganda than useful science.  
 
            More to the point, people have always had something to fight about, and in most cases these fights have had little to do with material possessions. Our neo-Marxist friends may not find the story of Cain and Abel convincing, but it does give us a window into an ancient mind-set. Taking place in the early post-Edenic world where there were few people and an abundance of resources, this story is about a man who killed his brother over jealousy, not stuff.  This remains the case with peoples throughout the world. The resource-rich Yanomamo of the Amazon acknowledged killing primarily for women, and before the rise of drug gangs in post-60’s America, the great majority of murders were committed by jealous boyfriends or husbands.
 
            To the latter point, sexual matters have always been at the focal point of social control and loss of personal control. Freud and a host of psychologists have long known this, although their solution to the problem has usually been to encourage the expression of sexual feelings before repression can begin. Such remedies have not met with overall success. The present state of sexual happiness among young people is at a low point even as sexual permissiveness has never been greater. What is wrong? With even the poorest among us struggling with obesity from our abundance, and with all free to walk around in many cities wearing sadomasochistic butt chaps and dog collars, why are we not content?
 
            Sex is a very strange thing, especially among men. Practically speaking, it should not be. Animals typically go through their mating rituals on their pre-determined schedules and then move on with their lives. Not so human men. As one man from a small tribe in southern Brazil said, “Our wives are manioc (a bland carbohydrate) while other men’s wives are meat.” One does not have to guess that among these people, women are almost always the reason for violence. So it is that, while men might be temporarily satisfied with what is prescribed to them by social norms, they will not be for long. They will want other sexual partners and other ways of doing it with various sexual partners. Hugh Heffner was not a freak, but a norm writ large. Without a sense of scruples, most men’s goals would be to live the life of Heff.
 
            Without even mentioning what such a lifestyle would do to the family, we could not all live that way for more reasons than I want to go into here, including the fact that most women would not like to live their lives as mere sexual commodities. But it is worse than that. If we men could have every woman we wanted, we would still want more. Like the sultans of the Ottoman Empire, even if we lived in a beautiful garden with hundreds of young women available to us, we would either become depressed or go insane – or get a nice war going to relieve our frustrations: our frustrations over having everything we want and feeling worse for it.
 
            Such is sex, a microcosm of the futility of complete and permanent fulfillment in this world. And such is sex as to show us to what horrors such lack of fulfillment can lead to if we allow for it.
 
            My wife and I have recently finished watching the series Mindhunters on Netflix, and have come away shaken from this mostly factual investigation of sex-based serial killers through the eyes of the FBI @ 1980. The FBI at that time was beginning to profile such killers as Charley Manson and Son of Sam David Berkowitz, usually with a Freudian slant. Often, it would go like this: one killer had a prostitute mother and an absent father, another had a domineering and berating mother, and so on and on with histories of broken and aberrant social backgrounds. But it was, and is not, always so easy. One man in the series had a very decent home life, was intelligent, and had access to avenues of success. And yet, as far as was determined, he temporarily fulfilled his sexual needs by abducting and torturing to death adolescent boys. What the….?
 
            It seems that it goes back to the earlier statement, that ‘enough’ is never enough, and with the energy behind the sexual urge in men, this lack of fulfillment can lead to extreme perversion and danger. It is my bet that none of us had perfect childhoods regarding sex or anything else, and that few of us are fully satisfied with the sexual aspects of our lives – yet almost none of us commits acts of violence or murder. At this point in our (American) history, I would bet that most of us do not even depend on multiple partners or sex toys to achieve those ever-brief moments of fulfillment.  Obviously, some have had worse lives than others, but most with uncomfortable or even horrible backgrounds are not violent sex offenders. In other words, there is something else that the FBI files did not delve into that makes a sexual predator, and oddly, it contradicts the modern viewpoint of the experts. It points to a lack of self-control that is grounded in extreme narcissism.
 
            In his book, Beheading Hydra, Fr Dwight Longenecker preaches the tried and true doctrine of moral certitude while countering the modern psychological narrative of sexual permissiveness. For him, such permissiveness is a key component in the modern de-Spiritualizing of the world, and he is right: with the “if it feels good, do it,” attitude, we are directed inward towards ourselves, not outward for the love of spouse, family, and God. We become lone actors. Cruelly, as mentioned, we are being led to believe that this path will lead to happiness – which it has not and will not – while disregarding the greater world of both other people and its spiritual aspects.  His analysis amounts to this: we must control impulses that eventually will plunge us into an endless and depressing search for permanent physical happiness and instead follow a disciplined life that will deny immediate satisfaction in exchange for permanent spiritual happiness.
 
             I must add that I don’t particularly like this conclusion. As an East Coast baby boomer, doing what feels good was what life was all about. I would love it if we could all live in mobile communes, like those supposed coastal Connecticut tribes, and live out our inner desires in perfect harmony with everyone else. But it doesn’t work out that way. The lizard mind is only part of our mind. The other has its foot in eternity and will never be satisfied with the momentary fragments of compelled pleasure that rules the animal kingdom. Having a higher kingdom – and we all know deep down that we do, from the fathomless well of our arts to the mountain tops of our inspirations – directs us towards controlling the lizard mind to achieve eternal cosmic bliss. Some have tried to have it both ways, but the followers of Jim Jones and Charley Manson learned too late what the wise have always known.
 
 
                  
 

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          I came late to the series “The Day” on Netflix, as I was in the hinterlands selling books. The form of selling was new to me: set up a table and an umbrella and give customers the thrill of actually meeting the author of the wonderful, fantastic novel Hurricane River, a fiction thriller that takes place in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. I was in Seney, just 25 miles south of the park, so it seemed like selling there might be a good idea. On the other hand, it was to be at the annual Lumberjack Fest, something known more for the beard contest, ax throwing, and the beer pavilion than for connoisseurs of literature.
 
            Beer – huh! I saw large jugs of whiskey passing hands, so one might expect a little more than gentle buzzes from the day-drinking that began at 11:00 AM. My wife suggested through texting that I stay under my umbrella until closing at 6:00, catching people who had been made generous by alcohol, but I declined. After 4 hours of watching a small and lackluster crowd wander by on their way to the Elephant Ear tent (deep-fried bread), I had had enough. I had sold 3 books in 4 hours – that’s a 45$ take minus expenses – and it was time to head back to the cabin for a nap.
 
            On the following day, Sunday, I made it home to Wisconsin cow country to find my wife exclaiming excitedly about the series mentioned above. “The Day” was the Japanese telling of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, taken from a long account written by the plant manager. My wife had already seen the first 3 of 8 parts and quickly briefed me on those first three. We delved into part 4 that night, with me willing to accept the value of the series while still retaining doubts. I had found that Japanese productions are so different from our own that they border on the bizarre – and often the boring. But maybe…
 
            Alas, no such luck – at first. It was like an episode of the old Star Trek without light travel and space monsters, what with cheap production and endless talks on radiation risks. I could almost hear Captain Kirk yelling at Scotty to change the laws of physics.  Boring. But then I began to see something else.
 
            For one, over time it became clear what was at stake here. An earthquake and subsequent tsunami had damaged the nuclear plant to such an extent that it was threatening to go full nuclear. As it turned out, by the last of the series everyone expected it to go nuclear. It was out of control and the nuclear material could not be adequately cooled. It was goin’ ta blow, Captain. In an aside from the plant, we saw an expert approach the prime minister and tell him that 1/3 of Japan, including Tokyo, was about to become uninhabitable. 50 million of their 120 million citizens would have to be moved. In addition, all corporate entities were about to pull out, leaving Japan a ruined nation, worse off than after WWII because they would not have the territory to rebuild. What Japan was facing was the end of what Japan had once been and the beginning of a tortuous future of poverty and weakness.
 
            More importantly on the minute-by-minute action of the series, I began to understand how Japanese tell stories. This truly was closer to Star Trek the Original than I had thought, but the tone was very somber on this very serious subject. What was important to the creators of the series, and I suspect to the intended Japanese audience, was the moral aspect of the reactions of the plant personnel. The event of nuclear devastation was backdrop to a celestial lesson that was being given to Japan by their amorphous god (the Zen Buddhist approach to the Supreme Will can only be explained as being amorphous. I will capitalize the word God from here on out anyway). What they were being told was this: they had built a Tower of Babble, something contrary to the Will of Heaven, and through nature, this Will had tipped it over. That was the first and foremost lesson. But Japan was gifted with many more lessons, several hundred and several million more on a smaller scale, and it is on these where the show focused.
 
            How does one behave under the pressure of death? This is truly where character is tested. Were Man not foolish and ignorant, this would not be so. All are going to die anyway. We know this and should live our lives accordingly, adhering to the good in which our culture(s) has imbued us. We should do our duty, live selflessly for others, and not forsake dangerous or difficult tasks. These rules should be taken for granted and followed universally and flawlessly. Yet for those who live as if they are immortal, this is astonishingly difficult to do. This often includes most of us, and we cower, run and hide, and make excuses.
 
            Not so the engineers and management at the power plant. Risking hideous death by radiation, the workers fought to stay at their posts regardless. A group of young men asked to be released, but were taught a lesson by their elders: remain steadfast and do your duty. And they did. As the disaster expanded and hope diminished, the chief in charge told his subordinates that he would die there in honor of those who already had. He was the captain who would go down with the ship. Others who may have been unsteady with this sacrifice took courage by this example. The entire series, then, revealed itself to be a morality play involving actors both powerful and humble. Of the latter, their ordinariness spoke to the viewers: this is how YOU should behave; this courage and sacrifice is what it means to be Japanese and fully human.
 
            At the end, we are returned to the big picture: Man’s Tower of Babble. Through the words of the station chief, we are treated to his own exquisite poetry that tells of our place in the universe. Clearly, he opines, nature is God’s creation, and we should always remain subordinate to its health and its ways. Greed for power – literally, in the case of the nuclear plant – will always end in ruin. We should always remain humble before God, who has displayed himself in nature - both the nature of the natural world and in humanity’s purest self. We must be content with what is enough; we must limit our disruption of Mother (and God’s) Nature.
 
            In the end, the plant mysteriously cools on its own accord. No one understands completely, even to this day, how this was done and Japan was saved. This is fact. Why this happened is left to our spiritual conjecture. But the lesson of the near end of a nation should be learned well, for Japan and humanity at large may not be given a second chance. Even today, the area around the plant is poisoned, and will remain so for decades. Even today, the experts are still trying to work out a plan to dispose of the irradiated materials. A solution is not guaranteed, and Fukushima stands as a warning to all who believe they can play at will with God’s creation.
 
            As a postscript in the manager’s own writings, we learn that he contracted lung cancer within a few years after the incidence. Shortly afterward, he died from his disease at the age of 58. Staying brave and loyal to his company to the end, he blamed the stress of the situation and his smoking habit for his cancer. Of course we know better, but the lessons we must learn can only be done when carried out to the end. Once at this end and taking his last gasps, our manager left this world protecting his people and giving the young a lesson about smoking.
 
            Still, the production is ultimately about God through nature. We are not in charge, but are instead only temporary caretakers. Like the stewards in the Parable of the Talents (Mathew, 25:14-30) we are here to invest our gifts for the love of God and our fellow man, not for our personal glorification and power. All life is imbued with ‘The Way’ which courses invisibly through all existence. In light of the Fukushima disaster, we are reminded that we must always follow this divine way in everything we do, flowing selflessly within the currents of the natural and social world. Doing anything less takes us out of our natural selves, where folly and destruction are sure to follow. In the end, not even Captain Kirk can defy the laws of God’s physics.