Submission
Submission may seem like an odd topic for the Taxonomist to tackle. The word carries social, interpersonal, religious and even sexual baggage. But if we strip that all away we can see the important role it plays in our lives and see if there is anything we can learn from it.
Socially, submission seems at odds with Enlightenment values and today we rebel against the once commonplace assertion that one person, or group, should naturally submit to the will of another. Slaves submit to masters, serfs to lords, prisoners to their captors, and, historically, wives to their husbands. Submission goes hand-in-hand with oppression and we like to think of ourselves as beyond all that. Even the idea that children should submit to their parents, uncontroversial not so long ago, is contentious today.
Interpersonally, submission is what you are forced to do when you lose a conflict. We fight hard not to have to submit to our co-workers, our friends, our parents, our spouses. Submission implies giving up the fight, quitting, giving in. And we will pay a high cost to avoid it in our interpersonal relationships.
Religiously, submission refers to the will of God. But too often, demands to submit to God’s will are just barely disguised demands to submit to the will of a certain group of people. We may be able to get comfortable with an individual’s personal commitment to submit to God’s will, but our alarm bells go off when we start to hear that, actually, we all should. Because exactly whose God are we talking about here? And who interprets this will?
And finally, sexually, submission seems deviant, a fetish, something that, at best, can be difficult to comprehend or empathize with and, at worst, can cause one to write off a person as perverted or broken or a joke – especially a man.
But if we can put aside that baggage for a moment and look a bit closer, we might see that submission is closely tied to an understanding and acceptance of things as they are rather than things as we’d like them to be. And this is where the concept can recover its value for us humans trying to make our way in the world.
The Stoics placed a great deal of emphasis on the correct discernment of those things that are in your control and those things that are not. (The astute reader might recognize this as an essentially taxonomic task.). They contended that the former category was much, much smaller than the latter, containing, ultimately, only your own thoughts, feelings and actions. A large part of the practice of Stoicism revolved around improving your perception, so that you could clearly see which category events and situations fell into.
They emphasized this skill because they believed that people, by nature, almost always get it wrong – we think we control, or can control, much more than we do. We put things in the wrong category, over and over again, never learning from our mistakes. And they believed that much of the pain and suffering we face as human beings is caused by this failure of classification. By our fight to control things we have no control over, by the ways we deceive ourselves into thinking we do control them or that we must control them to be safe or happy, by the blame we shoulder or credit we take for things outside our control, by the ways we ignore the things we do control and waste our power on things we don’t.
This ancient concept has echoes in the Serenity Prayer from the 1930’s:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
But this serene acceptance is another way of saying submission to things as they are. When you truly have no control over something, the sane response is to give up trying to control it. Accept it. Submit. And focus your powers on those things that are in your control.
Once you realize this, the question naturally becomes, what is the area under my control and how should I exercise my power there? I’ll have more to say on that in future posts, but you can see why correct discernment becomes so important. Accepting things, submitting to circumstances you could change is almost as bad as railing against things you can’t.
But if we assume for now that proper categorization is possible, that, as the Stoics believed, it is something you can practice and improve at, then we might be able to also see that submission to the things we cannot control is freeing. We don’t have to carry regret for not changing them or stress that we will be required to. We don’t have to exhaust ourselves in futile fights to control the uncontrollable. And we don’t have to lie, to ourselves and others, to maintain the illusion of control.
This can definitely be scary. The big lie that we are in control of most things that matter makes us feel safe. It banishes uncertainty and the anxiety it causes. If we have grown accustomed to thinking we have power that we don’t, taking the fiction of it away can make us feel defenseless, helpless, powerless. But seeing through the lie is how we begin to see the power that we do have – to decide how we feel about things, to be the author of our own character, and to act with authority within our limited domain.
Another poem, recently shared with me, captures not just the fact that we deceive ourselves about this, but also the sublime joy we can feel when we finally give up the ghost and surrender. It casts it in religious terms, but it works as metaphor even if that’s not your personal framework.
Tripping Over Joy What is the difference Between your experience of Existence And that of a saint? The saint knows That the spiritual path Is a sublime chess game with God And that the Beloved Has just made such a Fantastic Move That the saint is now continually Tripping over Joy And bursting out in Laughter And saying, “I Surrender!” Whereas, my dear, I am afraid you still think You have a thousand serious moves. Hafez, I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy
Here, surrender brings not only relief at not having to counter the uncounterable, but also the freedom to appreciate the Fantastic Move itself. If we stop fighting against things we cannot beat, we have the opportunity to see the beauty, or logic, or wonder, or meaning in the thing that is no longer our opponent.
So practice your perception, categorize things correctly, and allow yourself to submit.
Because that, at least, is in your control.