If you've posted in forums you might remember writing some decent responses. I usually spend a lot of time polishing my discussion forum responses depending on the subject or who I am talking to. Often I want to remember what I said about something, but finding the original post can be difficult. So it makes sense to capture the better responses for later review. Welcome to Clint's Reposts.Monday, March 22, 2004
The Buddha meets bin Laden on the road one day... (Guest Response - Politics forum - David Beers)
The Buddha meets bin Laden on the road one day...
Response to The problem with historical analysis
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I agree that human emotion carries the day, but to me that's half of what historical analysis is about. I don't think the emotions that motivate people to kill others have changed that much since mankind's prehistory. In fact, I think that the reason war persists today probably has more to do with the instincts cultivated during the hundreds of thousands of years that humans lived in small tribal bands than it does with anything that's happened in the last decades or centuries. Our culture and technology evolve so much faster than our genes that it's interesting to speculate whether our deepest emotional makeup is suited at all to cope with the complex civilization we now live in. After working for a while in Washington DC I came away with the feeling that political parties act very much like rival bands of hunters fighting over a hunting ground. As humans we have a huge emotional need for vilification and this drives a lot of our institutions.
Interesting that you mention Tao's description of Buddhism in this connection. I certainly agree that the ultimate determinate of "politics and public policy" is how people cope with rapid social change, and an awful lot of that coping capacity is seated in how we conceive ourselves in relation to the Eternal and Unchanging. I see fundamentalism--both the militant Islamism that feeds the terrorist psyche and the hawkish Christian or Jewish variety that seems to underpin the "neo-conservative" outlook--to be premised on the idea that absolute Truth is not just knowable, but known with the unshakeable certainty of revelation. That a certain group of people has been anointed by God (perhaps by a particular spiritual experience) to know this Truth and that for the anointed all doubts and fears can be removed by trusting this revelation. This state of mind results in attitudes that are tremendously rigid and frequently forces individuals into dilemmas where the only alternative to denying that uncertainty is a dangerous kind of extremism. Put two groups of fundamentalists with opposing views of absolute Truth on the same planet and give them access to a lot of destructive technology and you have a very scary world indeed.
The Buddhists have an interesting view that belief is actually a hindrance to understanding reality. It's interesting that we use the word "grasp" to describe the action of the mind since that's in a more literal sense what it tries to do when it believes: it tries to hold on tight to conceptions of a universe that is in constant flux--and to reject as "wrong" or "bad" changes that seem to threaten our beliefs. Even if God is permanent and unchanging, I wonder if our attempts to fix him in our minds (those minds so fearful of the unknown) don't do as much to bring us closer through faith as they do to keep us from knowing him at all. Are we so certain we can discriminate true religious experience from the limited mind's instinctive demand to impose certainty on the universe? What kind of proof should we demand of our beliefs before we accept that our seeking is over and we've arrived at Truth?
I'm not advocating atheism or even agnosticism as the antidote to the perilous tide of fundamentalism that seems to have risen both abroad and here at home in recent decades. I guess I'm just saying we need to cultivate the ability to accept, even embrace uncertainty about what God demands of us. Perhaps if we were able to take a more humble view of our capacity to know Him (or to even know ourselves) we could learn to release some of our fears about other uncertainties of life. The odds of being the victim--or even knowing a victim of a terrorist attack on US soil are still vanishingly small compared to other perils that could readily be avoided with a much smaller expenditure of resources and human life. It would be great if we could let our sense of terror at the name of "Al Qaeda" rise and fall like a deep breath, see that like everything else in this life that knot in our stomach is temporary, and then respond from a quieter place in thought.
I don't know if it's the realization of nothingness, or the acceptance of a "positionless position," or what that frees us from that instinctive pre-rational fear of the "other" and the uncertain. I agree that our language probably isn't adequate to describe the way to that freedom, after all, language presumably embodies the same limitations as the rest of our thinking, right? But I think we're on the same wavelength as far as seeing that questions about things like terrorism may demand a level of self-realization that many of us aren't even considering right now. Without that self-realization, we're likely to keep falling (confidently) into old ruts over and over, both individually and as a civilization. Perhaps that's the real reason that history repeats itself, eh?
David
Response to The problem with historical analysis
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I agree that human emotion carries the day, but to me that's half of what historical analysis is about. I don't think the emotions that motivate people to kill others have changed that much since mankind's prehistory. In fact, I think that the reason war persists today probably has more to do with the instincts cultivated during the hundreds of thousands of years that humans lived in small tribal bands than it does with anything that's happened in the last decades or centuries. Our culture and technology evolve so much faster than our genes that it's interesting to speculate whether our deepest emotional makeup is suited at all to cope with the complex civilization we now live in. After working for a while in Washington DC I came away with the feeling that political parties act very much like rival bands of hunters fighting over a hunting ground. As humans we have a huge emotional need for vilification and this drives a lot of our institutions.
Interesting that you mention Tao's description of Buddhism in this connection. I certainly agree that the ultimate determinate of "politics and public policy" is how people cope with rapid social change, and an awful lot of that coping capacity is seated in how we conceive ourselves in relation to the Eternal and Unchanging. I see fundamentalism--both the militant Islamism that feeds the terrorist psyche and the hawkish Christian or Jewish variety that seems to underpin the "neo-conservative" outlook--to be premised on the idea that absolute Truth is not just knowable, but known with the unshakeable certainty of revelation. That a certain group of people has been anointed by God (perhaps by a particular spiritual experience) to know this Truth and that for the anointed all doubts and fears can be removed by trusting this revelation. This state of mind results in attitudes that are tremendously rigid and frequently forces individuals into dilemmas where the only alternative to denying that uncertainty is a dangerous kind of extremism. Put two groups of fundamentalists with opposing views of absolute Truth on the same planet and give them access to a lot of destructive technology and you have a very scary world indeed.
The Buddhists have an interesting view that belief is actually a hindrance to understanding reality. It's interesting that we use the word "grasp" to describe the action of the mind since that's in a more literal sense what it tries to do when it believes: it tries to hold on tight to conceptions of a universe that is in constant flux--and to reject as "wrong" or "bad" changes that seem to threaten our beliefs. Even if God is permanent and unchanging, I wonder if our attempts to fix him in our minds (those minds so fearful of the unknown) don't do as much to bring us closer through faith as they do to keep us from knowing him at all. Are we so certain we can discriminate true religious experience from the limited mind's instinctive demand to impose certainty on the universe? What kind of proof should we demand of our beliefs before we accept that our seeking is over and we've arrived at Truth?
I'm not advocating atheism or even agnosticism as the antidote to the perilous tide of fundamentalism that seems to have risen both abroad and here at home in recent decades. I guess I'm just saying we need to cultivate the ability to accept, even embrace uncertainty about what God demands of us. Perhaps if we were able to take a more humble view of our capacity to know Him (or to even know ourselves) we could learn to release some of our fears about other uncertainties of life. The odds of being the victim--or even knowing a victim of a terrorist attack on US soil are still vanishingly small compared to other perils that could readily be avoided with a much smaller expenditure of resources and human life. It would be great if we could let our sense of terror at the name of "Al Qaeda" rise and fall like a deep breath, see that like everything else in this life that knot in our stomach is temporary, and then respond from a quieter place in thought.
I don't know if it's the realization of nothingness, or the acceptance of a "positionless position," or what that frees us from that instinctive pre-rational fear of the "other" and the uncertain. I agree that our language probably isn't adequate to describe the way to that freedom, after all, language presumably embodies the same limitations as the rest of our thinking, right? But I think we're on the same wavelength as far as seeing that questions about things like terrorism may demand a level of self-realization that many of us aren't even considering right now. Without that self-realization, we're likely to keep falling (confidently) into old ruts over and over, both individually and as a civilization. Perhaps that's the real reason that history repeats itself, eh?
David
