Getting to know war…

A friend of mine was an editor on a new book, essentially a memoir of a photographer’s experiences in Afghanistan during the Soviet war there. It’s a cross between a graphic novel and a photo journal.   This book comes highly recommended by the New York times; I think the best thing they said about it is this:

It is impossible to know war if you do not stand with the mass of the powerless caught in its maw. All narratives of war told through the lens of the com batants carry with them the seduction of violence. But once you cross to the other side, to stand in fear with the helpless and the weak, you confront the moral depravity of industrial slaughter and the scourge that is war itself. Few books achieve this clarity. “The Photographer” is one.

This speaks to me of one of the sad truths of war that I have such trouble wrapping my mind around: how people can honestly sit back and say “sure, let’s just go kill some people” when confronted with a problem.   I hope this book succeeds in communicating the foolishness of such an attitude to some people who currently suffer from it.

 

while my retreat continues: five foundational moral impulses

Conservatives Live in a Different Moral Universe — And Here’s Why It Matters | | AlterNet

Haidt identified five foundational moral impulses. As succinctly defined by Northwestern University’s McAdams, they are:

• Harm/care. It is wrong to hurt people; it is good to relieve suffering.

• Fairness/reciprocity. Justice and fairness are good; people have certain rights that need to be upheld in social interactions.

• In-group loyalty. People should be true to their group and be wary of threats from the outside. Allegiance, loyalty and patriotism are virtues; betrayal is bad.

• Authority/respect. People should respect social hierarchy; social order is necessary for human life.

• Purity/sanctity. The body and certain aspects of life are sacred. Cleanliness and health, as well as their derivatives of chastity and piety, are all good. Pollution, contamination and the associated character traits of lust and greed are all bad.

Haidt’s research reveals that liberals feel strongly about the first two dimensions — preventing harm and ensuring fairness — but often feel little, or even feel negatively, about the other three. Conservatives, on the other hand, are drawn to loyalty, authority and purity, which liberals tend to think of as backward or outdated.

 

while I’m on a web retreat

Two Three posts that seem pertinent to peace, to me. (And apologies to Dan if he was hoping to use his on this site soon!)

Yet Another Unitarian Universalist » Blog Archive » American Left with a sense of humor?

Inspirations and Creative Thoughts: Ignorant Addiction to Transcendence

ETA: Celestial Lands » Blog Archive » Why I Don’t Carry or Handle Firearms Anymore

 

Lashing out

Today Andrea and I went to have lunch at our favorite Indian buffet. There was a guy hanging out in front of the H&R block next door to the restaurant, sitting on a milk crate. There’s a tendency for there to be aggressive panhandlers there, and the only available parking spot was right in front of the guy. So when I got out of the car, I walked around the back of the car because I didn’t really feel like interacting with the guy.

Maybe this sounds pretty craven, I don’t know. The guy wouldn’t be there if he had a better place to be. I don’t know why he’s there. But obviously he needs help. And at the same time, I don’t feel like I can really help him. For example, he might be there to buy drugs (we witnessed a drug buy there a little later on). I don’t know. He might just be hungry, and want some food.

Avoiding him didn’t work. He came after me, and pretty forcefully demanded to know if I wanted my windows washed. I was feeling beset, and I responded with a pretty forceful “no” while hastening away from him. Not something I’m proud of, but there it is – it was my natural reaction in the moment. I didn’t want to connect with the guy. Yes, in principle I want to help him, but in practice I wanted him to leave me the hell alone.

So now I’ve been unkind to someone who’s so much worse off than me that it scarcely bears contemplation. Why? Because I felt put-upon. Not exactly threatened, but sort of threatened. My space invaded. Lies told to me (the guy didn’t have window-washing equipment that I noticed, although I wasn’t looking that closely).

Why do I mention this here? Well, obviously I don’t feel that my behavior was constructive or appropriate. But what does that have to do with war? This.

The United States is a rich country. We have powerful weapons. Not necessarily the right weapons, but powerful weapons nonetheless. If someone comes at us, we can answer them. The force behind our answer might not be appropriate, but we can definitely answer them. In fact, because we are so rich and powerful, the force behind our answer almost has to be disproportionate. Right now we’re in trouble off the coast of Somalia because we are using cannons to swat gnats.

We see this kind of response at every level of our society. I lash out inappropriately at the homeless guy. The police lash out inappropriately at petty criminals and legitimate protestors. Corporations lash out inappropriately at people who they feel are cutting into their bottom line. The People lash out, possibly inappropriately, at financial workers. And when three thousand of our countrymen and women were killed, we lashed out inappropriately in Afghanistan, first, and later Iraq.

Were we beset by foes? Sure. Did we have a right to respond? Maybe so. Was our response constructive? Not in the slightest.

I was trying to avoid being hassled. I was hassled anyway. I feel like a jerk for what I did. Not only did I not accomplish what I hoped to accomplish by avoiding that guy who was hassling me, I made things worse – I made him feel worse, and I made myself feel worse. Was it okay for him to hassle me? No. Did my response work? No.

I think the analogy holds all the way up the spectrum, from me, to the cops, to corporations with lawyers, to the people, to our military response to 9/11. There was a stimulus, and it triggered a response. The stimulus and the response were completely disproportionate. And the outcome was not in any way satisfactory or useful.

 

Living with Disagreement

I’m still thinking how best to write about this, but it’s coming.

 

Three Acts of Peace…

I didn’t really have time to do a blog this week. I had to travel to work on something I think is really important for peace—keeping the Internet alive and working as we outgrow the original design. So instead, I wanted to call your attention to something really cool a friend of mine is doing—she has a web site called One Thousand Acts of Peace.

If you want to know what it means to live a life dedicated to peace, I think this is one example of what it might look like.

Another friend of mine who is a school teacher has been working on training children to integrate actively peaceful behavior into their lives. There’s a shorter version of the video as well.

We don’t see stories like this on the news, but they are happening all around us.

 

If we are in a downward spiral, what can we do?

A friend of mine whose father survived the Nazis has been observing some trends recently that he finds deeply disturbing.   We are in a world economic downturn that is reminding people of the Great Depression; one of the results of the Great Depression was the rise of a bunch of different kinds of scary regimes – for example, the Nazis and the Fascists.   This led to war in Europe.   There were similar groups in the U.S., although they never gained the kind of foothold here that they did in Europe.   My command of Depression history is probably better than average, but some of this stuff is controversial, so I’m not asking you to accept my view of how it was; simply pointing out that quite a few governments spun out of control during that period, and that this was probably related to the hard times brought on by the Depression.

My response to my friend was basically something along the lines of “chill, dude.”   But suppose he’s right.   Suppose we are in a downward spiral.   Is my friend’s answer—getting ready to run for high ground—really our only, or at least our best, option? That is, are we helpless?   Or can we do something to slow, stop, or deflect the downward spiral?   If this downturn could lead to war, can we do something about it?

I’ve been pushing this notion that peace is something that happens by consensus.   We avoid war because we don’t want war.   We avoid living in repressive regimes because, en masse, we reject them.   So what can we do to avoid a consensus that leads us to war and totalitarianism and repression?

I hate to be pollyannaish, but I think there is something we can do.   I would say there are a number of things we should try to do:

• Don’t feed the angst and paranoia.   If people are panicking around you, don’t join in. Have a little faith.   I don’t care in what—God, human goodness, your own personal strength of character, whatever.
• Be a rock.   Try to inspire the people around you who are feeling uncertain or panicky to have a little faith too. If you don’t feel any inspiration, go looking for some.
• Look for positive aspects to the current crisis.   Ways that things can improve as a result of the destruction that is going on around us.
• Offer people your smile.
• Thank people when they do things for you, even if you paid them to do those things.   Try to reach down deep and find some genuine gratitude—don’t just do it by rote.
• Leave good tips, if you can afford to.
• Be brave, and offer people help when they need it.   You can’t bail them out – don’t put that on yourself.   Offer them the kind of help you do have to offer instead.
• Pay close attention to proposed laws that restrict freedom of speech, and oppose them.   The easiest way for totalitarianism, oppression and war to fester is by suppressing communication—by preventing people from seeing clearly what is going on, and getting them to panic because they lack the knowledge that would let them find a sane way forward.

It sort of feels like I’m giving opposing advice, because I’m saying on the one hand not to panic, and on the other to be watchful of government.   But that’s precisely what we need to do.   This is not a struggle between good and evil—it’s a struggle for balance. Our part in that balance is to let our elected representatives know that we are paying attention, and that we are thinking critically, and that we care more about content than appearance. This is the only thing that can ever give them the courage to resist unjust laws that sound good on paper, because they know that in the absence of an informed electorate (that’s us!), they will be judged on the basis of what the justification for the law is, not on the basis of what the law would actually do.

Oh, I guess there’s one more bullet point:

• Be a citizen, not a consumer.

What I mean here is that we hardly ever hear the word “citizen” anymore – when people talk about us on the news, they call us “consumers.”   This is a deep bit of psychological misdirection.   If we are consumers, then we are the customers of the government.   If we are citizens, our role is to operate the government.   This second role is the only one that can prevent the downward spiral my friend is worried about—we have to take responsibility, and not leave it up to someone else.

 

Why are people such jerks, and how can we get them to stop?

Whoever we are, there are people around us who are behaving badly.   Treating each other unfairly, defending positions that are indefensible.   People of bad character, who, even if they are on the right side of some issue, just have the wrong attitude, and consequently tend to screw things up.   You know the type.   There are probably dozens of them in your life.   There certainly are in mine.   And the world really can’t be a better place until they stop.   So we have to get them to stop, or else things can’t possibly get better.

So how can we make people stop doing bad things?   There are a lot of ways.   One of my favorite is arguing.    When I explain my position carefully, they can’t help but get it.   Because my logic is unassailable, and their own positions are weak, with only the feeblest of justifications.   It works every time.

Threats work pretty well too.   They’re especially effective with politicians – if enough people tell them that they are being idiots, they change their minds and start doing the right thing.   This is why, for instance, the Republicans are starting to change their tune recently – why you hear about their efforts to form a bipartisan team and try to do the right thing for the country in our time of need.

Another really effective way of getting people to stop being wrong is to chastise them.   Just the other day I got some email from a friend of mine asking for help with something I didn’t agree with, and so I gave her a piece of my mind – I really let her have it.   Problem solved – her organization is back on the straight and narrow, doing what I thought they should be doing all along.

As if.

It’s a bit frustrating to post here because I feel like a lot of the time I’m just asserting things.   And that’s really what I’m arguing against here.   You can’t convert people by asserting things.   I can’t either.   So I guess I’m speaking to the people who are reading this and who already agree that the problem I’m talking about is a real problem, and that solving it will make a difference.

There will always be people we can’t convince.  They aren’t necessarily bad people.   They just see things differently enough that we can’t figure out how to communicate with them.   We have to live with them anyway.   We can’t make them stop.   If making the world a better place requires us to make them stop, or convince them to stop, we are out of luck.   I guess that’s another assertion.   But if you think it’s not true, how are you going to make them stop?   Is making them stop even consistent with peace?   And if you aren’t going to force them, how are they going to stop?   Are you really going to convince them?   Has it ever worked before?   Are your arguments so much better than those others have tried in the past?

This is why I have such trouble with the idea of peace being something imposed, something that comes from stopping other people from doing things we think are bad.   I think if peace comes from that, there is no hope, because the very act of stopping them is not a peaceful act.  And am I really so all-knowing that every wrong thing ever done is obvious to me, and every opportunity to do right unmistakeable?   And yet I think peace is possible.

And so I think that peace comes from two things.   It comes from stopping myself from doing things that aren’t consistent with peace, and it comes from acts of creation that build a peaceful world.   It comes from those people I was trying to make stop come into that peaceful world of their own accord, because they choose to, because it is a better world than the one they are creating with their control and their hatred and their anger and their violence.

And this is why practices like the one Andrea described on Friday are so important.   Because I am really more like the people whose actions I wish would stop than I am different from them.   And those differences are in my mind.   So if I really want to change the world, I need to change my mind.

 

On Love and Forgiveness

We can all agree that war is an expression of anger and hatred. But whose anger and hatred? We can’t control the way other people think, but we can try to change our own mind, and sow seeds of love and compassion where we know they can grow and thrive.

During the Bush presidency, I struggled hard with feelings of hatred for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. As a Buddhist, I tried (and mostly failed) to see them the way the Buddha or Jesus or Martin Luther King, Jr., would — as people who are deeply misguided and therefore deserving of compassion — rather than seeing them as villains who deserve only my contempt.

My hatred for Bush and Cheney has dissipated quite a bit since Obama was inaugurated — I tend to most actively despise those who are at the summit of their powers of evil, and now that Bush and Cheney are relatively contained, I am directing my un-Buddhist ire at other targets. (Wall Street chiefs: I’m looking at you!)

But I honestly don’t want to hate anyone. Buddhism teaches that all the war and evil I see in the world has its root in my own heart. Likewise, all the war and evil you see in the world has its root in your own heart. My point here isn’t to try to convert anyone to Buddhism (when was the last time a Buddhist handed you a tract?), but simply to share a method for working at this basic level, to cultivate outer peace through inner peace.

As it happens, I learned a new meditation this week for chipping away at my hatred (well, not exactly new — it was taught over a thousand years ago by an Indian yogi named Virupa):

1. Start by focusing for a few minutes on your breath flowing out of your nostrils and then back in. This is a good way simply to gather all your thoughts into one place.
2. Imagine yourself as a person who is infinitely kind and wise, and no longer able to be hurt by the harmful people you see around you. A sort of spiritual superhero, if you will.
   
   It’s good to even picture yourself differently. The sky’s the limit, but I usually just imagine myself with the world’s kindest eyes and smile — the sort of person who can make anyone feel better just by looking at them.
3. Think now about your “enemy”. This could be a person who’s actively and directly making you miserable, like an awful boss or ex-spouse. Or it could be someone you’ve never met, like a politician or media figure whose public deeds you see as harmful. You could even choose someone from the past, like Hitler or Pol Pot.
   
   The key is that it’s someone who makes your blood boil.
4. Look at that person, in your mind’s eye, the way you would if you were infinitely loving and kind. Think about them the way Jesus would think about George W. Bush. Or if that’s too abstract, imagine that they are your beloved parent or child who has gone temporarily insane and has come after you with a knife. Would you really hate them? Or would you just love them deeply and want only for them to stop hurting themselves and others?
5. Expand on this feeling of love and compassion, and just repeat again and again in your mind, “I love you. I love you.” Let them struggle and rage. “I love you. I love you.” You are perfectly wise and compassionate, and they can never hurt you. “I love you. I love you.” Feel your heart open and sing, as you replace hatred with love.

Can you change them this way? Maybe not. But you can change yourself, by working to eradicate the hostility in your own heart. And you can’t prove that it doesn’t work unless you try it yourself, over and over, until you no longer have to imagine that you are infinitely wise and kind.

 

What would peace look like?

I asked this question in a comment the other day, and didn’t get any clear answer, probably because it’s a difficult question. Naturally I have my own ideas, which I will share here, but I’m not claiming I’m right – just throwing out ideas.

First of all, I’d like to point out that one kind of “peace” that we’ve seen in the past is the total extermination of one side of the conflict. There is historical evidence of quite a few aboriginal cultures in Europe that have perished this way. Many Native American tribes were wiped out in this way. It’s what made Stalin and Pol Pot famous.

I mention extermination because I think that many of the wars that we see nowadays are silently predicated on the idea of total extermination of the enemy. I don’t mean that this is a deliberate goal – I just mean that these wars don’t make sense when viewed any other way.

What I mean is that there is no exit strategy for the conflict – no set of end conditions that would mean that it was time to stop fighting – other than that everyone is dead. I’m aware of at least one conflict that looks this way to me that’s going on right now, and I’d be surprised if there weren’t more. Interestingly, it needn’t be the case that both sides be fighting on this basis – it’s only necessary for one side to have no exit strategy, and I think you have an extermination-oriented conflict.

So suppose that such a conflict comes to a conclusion. Do we now have peace? History would suggest otherwise. What actually happens is that you wind up with an empire, and then that empire eventually crashes. And then you have conflict again.

So what about getting rid of the people who are in control, who are instigating the conflict? Does that work? I ask this question because I think this is the model most people who want peace actually believe in. Get rid of the aggressors, and the conflict will stop.

Let’s consider two examples – mid-seventies Iran, and the U.S. this year, 2009. Iran is a questionable example because they were not really at war in a technical sense, but I think only in a technical sense. Really, Iran was an occupied country. The leaders of the occupation were Iranian, but they were in power because of an occupation begun by the British, and continued by the Americans.

When Iran’s occupation ended, intellectuals in Iran who supported its end were hopeful. They wanted to build a new government that was just and peaceful. This was not an unreasonable hope – nowadays we tend to think of the Middle East as a place where everyone wants war, but this isn’t really true now, and in fact historically the Middle East has been a cradle of civilization.

Unfortunately, Iran was not ripe for a peaceful government when the old government fell. Consequently, what rose up in its place was something even worse. No longer occupied by a foreign power, Iran fell into chaos and repression. War with Iraq killed more Iranians than the Shah ever did.

In the U.S., in 2009, we are tired of war. I think the old government here fell because of this. Lucky us. Unfortunately, although I think we are ripe for improvement, we are not yet ripe for peace. We want an end to the war in Iraq, but not today. So the war is currently projected to continue until 2011, and the war in Afghanistan is ramping up.

There’s an argument, and I think a legitimate one, to be made for staying in Iraq. We allowed the war to start there, and if we just leave, the chaos that follows will be our chaos. But nevertheless, if we were ready for peace, I have trouble believing that the word would be that we would stay until 2011.

So this leads to what I think peace is. I think peace is what happens when most people not only are not interested in war, but are actively interested in peace. I say most because there will always be sociopaths, and there will always be people who feel unfairly done-by, and there will always be criminals. But for peace to exist, it must be the case that those people are not in control, and that their bad behavior is completely and successfully moderated by the intentions and actions of the people who do actively want peace.

I think that people who want peace sometimes imagine that in the absence of aggression, peace would happen naturally, and would remain indefinitely. I think this is unrealistic. We don’t expect the leaves in our roof gutters to clean themselves out. We don’t expect that, once painted, our houses will remain just as bright, forever. Why would we expect peace to emerge on its own out of the ashes of oppression?

Peace, when it comes, will be the result of a very careful and deliberate effort to create the habits that perpetuate peace. We have never seen what this looks like. Perhaps it’s naive to think it’s even possible.

The reason I think it is possible is because this is actually how societies work. Societies have police forces, but it is not the police force that keeps the peace. The police force is just there for the people who can’t restrain themselves. The reason the peace is kept is that the overwhelming majority wants it kept.

And so I think it is possible for there to be peace on earth. But it will not happen because we get rid of someone, or stop someone, or something like that. It will be because we figure out what our world culture needs to be in order for peace to be possible, and because we work, over probably a very long time, to foster the birth of that culture, and to nurture it once it’s been born.