The natural may be as good as it is, but it disappears if it is not nurtured. Nurture will always determine us, whatever form it may take, and regardless of our nature.

                                                                        — Étienne de La Boétie (1530-1563)

Nature needs nurturing. That’s what we humans are good for: to nurture nature. That’s our proper usage. If we do not nurture nature as we are called to do, all that we do ceases any longer to be of any use. Indeed, it all comes to have purely negative, destructive worth. In the process, we lose our very humanity. Unnurtured, nature itself becomes denatured — and us along with it.

Not everything that has become customary properly accustoms. Indeed, what has become all too customary today radically dis-accustoms us for whom it has become customary, divorcing us from what surrounds us rather than uniting us with it.

That is especially true today, this endless day of global capitalist marketing, where the only worth granted anything is purely its “exchange-value,” as Marx wisely labelled it. In such an endless, dawn-less day, it never dawns on us collectively that what has only exchange value has no real worth of its own any longer. It is merely potential junk, destined eventually for the trash-heap.

It has long been customary, which is to say a matter of common usage, to use ‘customary’ and ‘a matter of common usage’ interchangeably. That is an abuse of language itself, rather than the a careful, care-filled cultivation of the linguistic field. It deprives language of all true worth and reduces its worth to nothing more than its value for exchanging “opinions.”

Nor is such customary usage conducive either to nature, or to humanity. When we follow the varied customs that customarily accompany such common usage, we cease to cultivate nature, and thereby lose our own humanity.

*     *     * 

As words, ‘custom’ and ‘costume’ share the same derivation: they root themselves in the same soil. What’s more, both customs and costumes are habits, each in its own way.

To have the habit of brushing one’s teeth first thing after one wakes up in the morning means regularly, which is to say barring special circumstances, to do just that right after one rises from a night’s sleep (which, of course, may take place during the daylight hours if one’s job requires one to work at night) without even having to think about it. If one has that habit, then that’s just what one does on a regular basis, day after day, barring something unforeseen happening to impede one in practicing that habit.

What is more, to acquire that teeth-brushing habit in the first place — or any other habit, for that matter — what one must do is deliberately act as if one already had it. Aristotle knew that; but one doesn’t need to be an ancient Greek tutor to Alexander the Great to know it, if only one will let oneself.

Letting oneself know such obvious truths is natural to us all, if only we have not been habituated to ignoring the obvious, as is all too common among us all today, above all in industrially advanced countries, where we have been habituated to ignoring what’s right in front of us.

May we break that habit of ignorance, and come to wear a very different mantel, which is to say a very different “habit,” now in the sense of “costume.” Let us accustom ourselves to such different costuming.

If we do, then we will find ourselves inhabiting what heretofore was uninhabitable for us. We will discover new possibilities that used to be impossible for anyone such we have all too long been habituated to being.   

*     *     *

Above all, what keeps the soul weighed down turns out to be its own self, or, rather, its preoccupation with itself. The practice of prayer as continuous withdrawal is the repetitious practice of breaking that preoccupation, of the soul’s turning away from itself and toward God.

— From my own book, God, Prayer, Suicide and Philosophy:Reflections on Some of the Issues of Life*

 

If the word ‘God’ at the end of my self-quotation above bothers you, don’t let the letter of what I am saying in those lines get in your way. Just attend to the spirit.

Indeed, right there could well be an excellent place to start to begin dis-accustoming yourself to denaturing, dehumanizing customs that have been imposed upon you. Instead of supposing, as our sorry excuse for a global society coerces us all to suppose, that you already know perfectly well what that word ‘God’ means, habituate yourself to listening attentively — which is to say praying — so that the spirit giving voice to itself in that word can give you the right orientation, pointing your prayer, your attention, in the right direction.

If you are not sure you understand how the word ‘spirit’ is speaking in the preceding sentence of this post, pray the same prayer for direction. What’s more, if you don’t understand how the word ‘prayer’ is being used in the preceding paragraph or in the main title of my own book, from which I have taken the lines at the beginning of this section of today’s post, just do the same there.

Thus will you habituate yourself to inhabiting regions that were hitherto uninhabitable for you, made so by the coercive powers at work in our global market society: thus will you accustom yourself to a very different costume.

* Available in the “Archive” at the top of this blogsite.