|
|
The Violence of Oneness 
It seems as if sincere spiritual practice leads with inevitability to a political passion. But it's a political passion, which is to say that it is different from ordinary politics. "Politics" is a tarnished word that now stands for the strategic activity of ensuring personal advantage in the everyday jockeying for position that goes with the territory of being a modern reflective human being who is necessarily ripped out of the fabric of any sort of natural life: of course we need to prove that we exist by making a name for ourselves, dominating someone or something, carving out turf. That's politics as usual, like they say, and wherever there are two of us—or perhaps we only need one!—we have to have it. But when there is genuine spiritual sensibility and intention I think you have something other than this, or at least something in addition to it, something that has more scope, more contradiction, and probably a lot more trouble.
In spiritually centered political circles there is, I think, an emerging consensus on a number of points: that social/political involvement is necessary as a part of spiritual endeavor, and that this involvement must come out of a compassionate motivation and a contemplative style, which is to say it must be marked by a sense of calmness, universality, openness, patience, and cooperation, even with opponents. While this may not always be the reality, sometimes it is, and it is always the aspiration. All of this is good, and it is nice. I believe it and I preach it myself to myself and to others.
But I often wonder about the deeper impulses behind it, and I sometimes imagine that I can hear underneath our political passions a deeper and darker music . I ask myself, what are we really after in our political hopes and dreams? What are the as yet unknown and unappreciated gropings that have given rise to our views and activities? In the specific case of Buddhism, it has been a persistent view of mine that socially and politically engaged Buddhism is something quite different from Buddhism as it has been practiced in Asia, where as far as I know the idea of a political Buddhism did not arise. As I see the Asian Buddhist teachings and the histories that arose in relation to them, the overwhelming impulse is in the direction of liberation from a suffering that is considered to be self induced. The practitioner is to, by his or her own heroic spiritual effort, achieve liberation eventually, and it is a long haul. Compassion and working for the benefit of others is a primary virtue in the Mahayana schools, but this is primarily from the standpoint of a recognition that to see others and one's self as separate is a misunderstanding of reality. In other words, one practices to benefit others in the service of and as a part of self liberation. The whole proposition of compassion is full of powerful feeling perhaps—but it is also oddly abstract, and it does not necessarily lead to what we would consider political or social action. While the compassion teachings certainly imply an engaged Buddhism, and legitimately provide a hook to hang it on, I do not believe that engagement as we now understand it would have come to Buddhism without an encounter with Judeo Christian religiosity, in which worldly social engagement is a main axis of practice. So when I want to look at the deeper motivations behind political or engaged Buddhism, or of any other form of spiritual politics in the West, I find myself looking to those Western ethical and religious traditions that have shaped our thinking over the generations.
And what I find is that our politics—my politics—is to a great extent emotional, romantic, and utopian. Messianic. Underneath the peaceful and quite reasonable desire for a fairer and more just world there is the powerful longing for a new world, a transfigured world, an ideal world in which everyone is equally valued, and humans live on the planet not as sovereigns but as stewards. The politically active spiritual practitioner is not a rationalist, not a strategist. He or she is committed deeply to a vision of the world that is the engine for all political activity, and requires that all political activity be conducted not for strategic advantage, but as a ritual enactment of this vision, as though the vision had already come to pass, as though living out this spirit, acting with integrity in consonance with it, would somehow magically bring it about. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, for all of us, in a tone of voice that seemed to come from the mountaintop: "I have a dream!" There is a deep and passionate sense of groping, almost of bewilderment, in this evocation of a dream, I think, particularly now, fifty years since Dr. King, a sense of longing for a return to a condition of wholeness that is a felt absence in modern life, which is so radically now a life of thingness and separation, in which each person is individuated and self-empowered almost to the point of disappearing completely into his aloneness. All of this as politics is a far cry from the simple desire to advance one's economic advantage, or even to protect one's family tribe or nation. Spiritual politics in the West springs from these deeper roots: the passionate desire for justice and oneness, the bringing about of the ideal world build upon the rock of what is right and good for all without exception .
I have sometimes tried to feel my way into the texture of this world of radical oneness for which we long. I think its actuality must be something far more thoroughgoing and terrible than we vaguely imagine it to be. As long as I am clinging to and living from the standpoint of my separate life I can't know or be oneness—so oneness must have to do with my going beyond that, with my renouncing my singularity and my identifying instead with something bigger than that—with my people, with my species, with the whole world. So it doesn't matter if I live or die. That is not so important. (Dr. King famously said so in his final speech). The world of animals is like this—although there is an instinct for self-preservation there isn't any real fear of death as we know it, and so there isn't any sense of the personal or of duration or continuity either, upon which the personal depends. Animal life is a kind of ideal and unified life, sharing and being shared in a timeless present, eating and being eaten in an ongoing celebration of life that actually doesn't see any difference between being born and dying, but accepts without question or wonder the round of existence just as it is given. In other words, the world of oneness we long for, the given natural world, is a world in which violence can either be said not to exist (because it is such an underlying and constant fact that there is nothing outside it) or to exist so thoroughly that the world is nothing but violence. In other words, violence and intimacy imply and interpenetrate each other. This is beginning to sound not so good.
In the century just past we have seen two remarkable and horrifying experiments in the spiritual politics of oneness. The Nazis were fairly clear about their efforts to create a new human perspective, one that would eliminate all intransigent elements and unite the human race in a glory of transcendence. It was a compelling dream that many embraced not only in Germany but all over the world as an alternative to a decadent modernism, and it was no accident that the Nazis looked to India for their symbol of transformation and the unification of all differentiation (the swastika). No less idealistic, and no less religious in outlook, was the great experiment in Communism conducted in Russia, China and many other countries for three quarters of the last century. Again the dream was a dream of unity, the final ending of injustice that would inevitably come when classes and distinctions between people would have ceased to exist, and the natural harmony that would come of a unified and intimate perspective would spontaneously arise. (Marx's passages about the wonderful world that would come to be once the contentiousness of history inevitably came to an end are among his most inspiring). For both the Communists and the Nazis it was rational and axiomatic that since we were all as one, the greater goal of ultimate justice and belonging was certainly worth the destruction of lives. Because lives as such, as atomized alienated fallen units, did not matter nearly so much as the good of the whole and the ultimate connection that would come about in the end, when human existence would be a constant celebration. It is rather startling to think of the vision of Naziism and Communism in this way; it seems almost blasphemous to depict their world views as positive in any sense, now that we know what has happened. And yet the fact is that what happened could not have happened only by virtue of political terror or brute force, formidable as these are. The fact is that at least in the time of the original coming to power there were enough people everywhere whose deeply human and spiritual aspirations were satisfied by these visions to have made it all possible. Hitler, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot and others may have been madmen, but they were also certainly tapping into something powerful and true in the human heart.
Seen in this light the present shocking fixation on and playing out of violence in our own culture begins to make some sense. In a social and psychological situation in which intimacy is so far from possible that it almost can't even be mentioned, what could be more seductive than the enormous sense of connection that comes with violent acts. When at mid-century Ernest Hemingway and following him Norman Mailer wrote love letters to the great American Male Dreams of hunting, war, and murder, most of us failed to understand the appeal, but it is now enacted in real life to our utter fascination and dismay as we follow our serial killers, our sudden boilings over of mayhem or terrorism in public places, and everyday school violence. This too is oneness and intimacy in action. Contemplation of all of this certainly gives one pause as to the efficacy of a spiritually based politics that sources from our longing for unity and belonging. Yet the alternative isn't good either, a world of unmitigated difference in which misunderstanding and proliferating conflict is inevitable, and can only be staved off by endless confusing negotiation. If we don't strive for oneness but instead take our stand on diversity aren't we back to square one, in the midst of a bunch of squabbling nations, ethnic groups, or identity clans? It is obvious and tempting to fall back on the logical move that any of us would make here: "well then isn't it a matter of finding the balance between the two? Of combining unity/intimacy with diversity/separation in such a way as to honor both sides appropriately?" Well this is logical and furthermore it is the main road of many Buddhist and other spiritual teachings, such as those we have in Zen, in which the merging of oneness and diversity in a dynamic and unnameable dance is taken to be the essence of what we are trying to learn. So it would be natural to seek cover in that, but I won't do it because although I have a certainty that those teachings are true and valuable, and probably our salvation in the end, it is simply too easy to take refuge in them too quickly, to use them as solutions to problems that simply have to be appreciated and suffered over before we are done with them. An easy certainty may be more comfortable than bewilderment, but in the end it does not serve us as well. (Remember that Marx, with some justice I think, told us that religion was a distraction, and Freud thought of religion as a childhood fixation, a child's dream-story in which thanks to daddy everything turns out all right in the end).
No, the problem of the world as it really is is too important to be dismissed by religious ideology, even good religious ideology. It ought to bewilder us, put us in a horrible muddle, rock us to the roots of who we are. It is a fact that civilization has always advanced (if this is the word) by violent upheavals, and is there any reason to expect that this will not be the case in the future? It is a fact that civilization has always thrived on injustice and economic terrorism and there is no reason at all to expect any end in sight. In fact with globalization, kamikaze science, and huge and proliferating establishments of wealth, it will only get worse, as the rich will be able to afford not only material advantages, but also much longer lives, much wider minds, and boutique families. Suppose that violence and injustice were inevitable and integral aspects of humanity, and so could never be eliminated, or even appreciably reduced, and that the fight against injustice and violence were itself an inevitable constellation of the original injustice and violence, operating in tandem with it in an endless human dance that would go on as long as the species existed. And suppose further that this was not a tragedy, not a disaster, but that it had a purpose, some trajectory of unfolding that none of us could understand, and that our various points of view, spiritual and otherwise, did not touch and would never touch. I do not say that this is so, because how would I know? But suppose it were. Where would it leave us? What would we do and how would we feel?
