Awake in This Life

Interesting op-ed from Van Jones in yesterday’s NYT. As with many, I was bummed by the knee-jerk responses so many had to the Shirley Sherrod situation. Jones offers some interesting insights relating her situation to his own.

The worst of the partisans will get their comeuppance and become cautionary tales for others. Public leaders will learn to be more transparent. We will teach our children not to rush to judgment. Technology will evolve to better expose fakers.

But the big breakthrough will come not when we are better able to spot the lies. It will come when we are better able to handle the truth about people. We are complex beings; no one is all good or all bad. And people do evolve into better people over their lives — just look at Senator Robert Byrd, who died this month and who entered politics as a segregationist and left as a statesman.

via Op-Ed Contributor – Shirley Sherrod and Me – NYTimes.com.

This is interesting. I’ve always thought that a commitment to social justice was at the core of Christian (as well as other) spiritual teaching. At least that’s what Thomas Aquinas seems to point out in his writing.

Perhaps Beck has something on Aquinas.

Money quote:

On his radio program, Fox News’ Glenn Beck encouraged listeners to leave their church if it proclaims a concern for social justice:

I’m begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words ’social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!”

You can listen for yourself here.

It’s hard to take much of this too seriously, but I still think two things are amazing:

1. Brit Hume’s views on what Buddhism does and doesn’t offer speaks to a significant lack of understanding, and
2. He does his best to play the martyr here even though an apology might have been the most “Christian” thing he could have done, allowing him to embody his faith.

I was asked recently after giving a talk on engaged politics, what I thought of peace as a political orientation.

What came out of my mouth made me laugh.

“I’m pro-peace,” I said.

The young man just stared.

I then went off a little bit on how an attachment to peace can be viewed in the same way as one might view an attachment to non-peace. Without going into great detail, the conversation was an interesting one.

Carter Phipps writes of this issue in a recent blog post. The issue of peace versus war

…it is one where the Left, with its nonviolent and pacifistic tendencies, too often cedes the wrong kind of ground to the Right, whose enthusiastic embrace of military might too often shows little of the subtlety, nuance, and complexity needed in this age of political self-determination.

He goes on,

for all the failures of war, peace hasn’t always been a good alternative. Krishna knew it 2500 years ago, and it is still true today. Witness the tragedy in the Balkans or Rwanda, or the slaughter in the Sudan, or World War II not that many decades ago. No one has yet convinced me that there is or was a nonviolent solution to those conflicts, as much as we would like there to be. In the long term, of course, anything is possible. But we can’t allow our dreams of peace tomorrow to cause us to make fatal and disastrous mistakes today. Obama spoke directly to this in his speech. And moreover, I’m convinced that the very idea that peace should be the goal of our human endeavors—politically, socially, and even spiritually—represents an outdated context for our moral and philosophical life. And this is where I would take a step, philosophically and theologically, beyond what the President offered.

via Peace Is Not Enough: Thoughts on Obama’s Nobel Speech.

And the tragedy continues for the elephants of Thailand:

Once the revered symbol of Thai culture, the backbone of industry and the protector of the country’s sovereignty during war, elephants now wander the streets of Bangkok, reduced to providing rides for tourists and helping their owners beg for their next meal.

With their drivers — mahouts, they are called — the elephants dodge Bangkok’s chaotic traffic and the feeble attempts of the government and the police to push them out of the city.

Many elephants were put out of work when logging became illegal in the 1980s, making it difficult for their owners to feed them. Wild ones have been hunted and driven from their natural habitat. It is estimated that there are now 2,500 domesticated and 1,500 wild elephants in Thailand, down from around 50,000 in 1950.

Bows, Tricycle

Harvard’s Stephen M. Walt suggests an “unattached” approach to Pyongyang’s recent nuclear tests.

… the best response is to remain calm, and stop talking as if this event is a test of Obama’s resolve or a fundamental challenge to U.S. policy. In fact, the tests are just “business as usual” for North Korea, and it would better if the United States “under-reacts” rather than overreacts. Instead of giving Pyongyang the attention it wants, the United States should use this incident as an opportunity to build consensus among the main interested parties China, Russia, South Korea, Japan and let China take the lead in addressing it. Above all, the Obama administration should avoid making a lot of sweeping statements about how it will not “tolerate” a North Korean nuclear capability. The fact is that we’ve tolerated it for some time now, and since we don’t have good options for dealing with it, that’s precisely what we will continue to do.

via Less is more: Why we should not react to pyongyang’s provocations

Anderson Cooper writes:

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new analysis.

Check out Pew’s full survey here.

What would Buddha do? Would Jesus do the same?

“We have to say no to same-sex marriage,” said the Rev. George Gilbert, pastor of Holy Trinity United Baptist Church in Northeast Washington, who concluded his remarks by leading a chant: “Not on our watch! Not on our watch! Not on our watch!”

Sounds like attachment to me.
(via washingtonpost.com)

Okay, not really, but over at EnlightenNext, Tom Huston points to Howard Bloom’s vision of how we need to mend rather than end capitalism.

In the midst of our current financial crisis, it may seem natural to cast doubt on the entire enterprise of Western capitalism and wonder if its basic tenets of progress and production have led humanity astray. But according to avant-garde cultural theorist Howard Bloom, writing in EnlightenNext back in 2005, such dismissals tend to overlook the true evolutionary significance of our economic system:
The problem does not lie in the turbines of the Western way of life—industrialism, capitalism, pluralism, free speech, and democracy. The problem lies in the lens through which we see. Capitalism works. It works clumsily, awkwardly, sometimes brilliantly, and sometimes savagely. So we need to dig down to find out why. We need to reveal the deeper meaning beneath what we’ve been told is crass materialism and see how profoundly our obsessive making and exchanging of goods and services has upgraded the nature of our species.

This is a topic I’ve touched on several times in this blog. It’s also fascinating that these basic ideas of retooling capitalism were hinted at by a German named Friedrich List way back in his 1837 book, The Natural System of Political Economy. For those interested, James Fallows covers this topic extensively in his Atlantic article, “How the World Works” .

Fallows writes that List’s alternative economic view offers a way through the obvious “market failures” that old-school, Adam Smith-style capitalism can foster. Could any of us say that Friedrich List was Buddhist in his leanings? Probably not. But as opposed to the dominant Anglo view of economic reality, List’s alternative rests on interdependence rather than what Adam Smith referred to as an invisible hand. Once List’s style of interdependence begins to influence policy, the market can’t be mistakenly seen as God. Furthermore, like Howard Bloom’s some 170 years later, List’s version of economic reality shows us that markets are merely reflections of how we cooperatively meet each other and meet ourselves.

Barbara O’Brien posts a great piece on Fritz Schumacher’s paper, Buddhist Economics:

The economic models and theories that prevailed through the 20th century are rapidly falling apart. Economists scramble to offer explanations and solutions. However, much of what has gone wrong was anticipated years ago by E. F. Schumacher, who proposed a theory of “Buddhist Economics.”

The actual text is worth the read. One of my favorite assertions:

While the materialist is mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation. But Buddhism is “The Middle Way” and therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things but the craving for them. The keynote of Buddhist economics, therefore, is simplicity and non-violence. From an economist’s point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern—amazingly small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results.

May all beings enjoy “extraordinarily satisfactory results.”

Jurrian Kamp at Ode Magazine offers an interview with Ken Wilber that addresses, among other things, how to use the most effective language in dealing with the issue of global warming:

Other cultures, Wilber argues, may respond to the threat of global warming from different values. African cultures are dominated by feudal clans, he says, so they may adopt environmental and energy policies when these are phrased in a language that relates to how they may benefit their clans. Similarly, Hindus may change their behavior to honor Gaia rather than in response to rational self-interest. “Al Gore has to ‘language’ his message in at least four different value structures to get, say, 80 percent of the world behind him,” Wilber says. “Anything less than that will simply not work.”

Wilber’s integral approach can also be used to address political issues:

Take the classic conflict between conservatives and liberals over welfare. Liberals argue that people are poor because of lack of government support; conservatives argue that people are poor because of lack of family values and work ethic. In Wilber’s vision, both are right. It isn’t “either/or” but “both/and.” His ideal government approach: “‘We will do everything to help you but at the same time we want you to do everything to help yourselves.’ We need to find the way to reach out to touch all dimensions, interior capacity and external capacity. We need to recognize where you can help yourselves and where you need help.”

Readers of this blog will probably find this entry to be ultra-familiar stuff. But the fact remains that using skillful means, or upaya as Buddhists might say, in order to effectively communicate with others is perhaps one of the greatest gifts we might ever offer to human kind. Of course practicing this kind of expression is no easy task. And yet it might be easier than clinging to our personal notions of what is right and what is wrong.

Bows, elephant journal.

Here’s a very thoughtful post by James Wellman on Christianity’s misplaced cheerleading:

One of the questions that plagues my study of American religion is why there is such a frequent close correspondence between American Christianity and war making. This question displays my own liberal Protestant belief that violence should always be a last resort, and that churches and religious leaders should not be in the business of cheerleading for war. After studying American religion for two decades, I should know better—liberal, mainline, and conservative Protestants have all done it, and yet, I keep asking why.

Read on.

Matthew Yglesias offers an interesting find. It seems that Republican political operative and former Press Secretary to U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) Matt Mackowiak says in an op-ed for the Austin American-Statesman:

The coming revolution is akin to “Fight Club,” the 1999 film that follows the struggles of day to day life for a regular guy who starts an underground fight club as radical and not terribly productive psychotherapy.

As Brad Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden, says in the movie, “Fight Club was the beginning, now it’s moved out of the basement, it’s called Project Mayhem.”

I find “Fight Club” to be a great film. But in it, Dissociative Identity Disorder combined with charisma and confusion result in a terrorist organization… called Project Mahem. Are we to assume that Mr. Mackowiak’s idea of a new, reinvented Republican Revolution will be the development of misdirected and fragmented terrorist cells? Will the New Right be a collection of people attached to non-attachment?

Sounds a little fundamentalist to me, but it would be interesting to see guys like Senators McCain and Hatch rip off their shirts and start beating on each other until someone taps out.

I recently had a conversation with a person about the practice of stillness and how one reconciles non-attachment with things like, say, personal wealth.

It only took a few words to provoke an interestingly vehement response from this person. He argued that despite abundant wealth, he and others like him, were paying too much in taxes; carrying too much of the burden.

His sentiments were echoed yesterday in the WSJ by former Bush press secretary, Ari Fleischer, and while I tend to leave political and economic blogging to professionals, I thought it might be a nice stretch to offer something about this here.

Anyway, so I let this person rant a little. Then after he stopped for air I countered that as a proportion of income, his argument falls flat if we divide a household’s federal tax liability by its income. Doing so we get the following graph:

Ezra Klein writes about this in The American Prospect:

When you look at percentage of total tax liabilities, the rich do in fact bear a heavier burden. But it’s because they have so much more money. They are not bearing a heavier burden as a percentage of their incomes. They’re bearing it in relation to everyone else’s incomes. Indeed, it’s only because the sheer levels of income inequality in this country are frankly unintuitive that Fleischer can even write this sort of dreck. People hear that the top 20 percent pay almost 70 percent of the country’s income taxes and nod their head. That’s unfair! But it mainly seems unfair because people don’t know the top 20 percent accounts for almost 60 percent of the national income.

More time on the cushion. Breathe in, breathe out. Money in, money out.

___

Update: My old friend, Justin Fox (aka: the Curious Capitalist), has offered a far more sophisticated (and interesting) slam of Ari Fleischer’s argument. Like I said, I should leave the econo-blogging to the professionals.

Damon Linker makes an interesting series of observations regarding the dominance of Christianity in America:

Somewhat fewer Americans are identifying as Christians; somewhat more are identifying as secular. And even those who remain religiously traditionalist are a bit less likely to believe that they should work for the transformation of the nation through the medium of electoral politics.

On the face of it, this is something we should welcome. Granted, as he points out, these are only trends, and it’s likely that a resurgence of collective fear might push things in another direction. Still, he asks a great question:

What will provide the theological content of the nation’s civil religion now that the “mere orthodoxy” of the evangelical-Catholic alliance has proven unsuitable for a pluralistic nation of 300 million people? To my mind, the most likely and salutary option is moralistic therapeutic deism. Here is the core of its (Rousseauian) catechism, in the words of sociologist Christian Smith:

1. “A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.”

2. “God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.”

3. “The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.”

4. “God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.”

5. “Good people go to heaven when they die.”

Assuming Smith’s kind of Christianity were to reestablish a foothold in our constitutional democracy, whether you subscribe to it or not, we might be in far better shape. I say this because it would allow for a deeper tolerance and more accurately reflect Christ’s teachings.

Of course Smith’s Christianity doesn’t do much to integrate the various teachings of enlightenment, nor does it come close to uprooting the seeds of egoic attachment. But it does offer a chance for deeper listening.

For some reason I’ve been having several discussions lately with some of my more rightward leaning friends about how Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is a must (re)read. I guess fear of the unknown, fear of losing livelihoods, fear of losing minds, fear of losing anything and everything has led to a resurgence of psychological ossification.

Kung Fu Monkey says it beautifully:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Orcs aside, many of my less spiritually engaged friends have found that the loss of significant wealth has forced them to reconsider and re-prioritize their lives based on two criteria: what is needed versus what is wanted. This realization might be a gift to us all. Continually checking to see if horrible potential outcomes close us down or do they open us to what is always prior to the arising of any situation, positive or negative? Do we, in other words, fall prey to the hardened egoic tendency to “Go Galt” as a way of dealing with our fear and concommitant anger, or do we surrender to the reality that we are all interconnected, like it or not, and that we have an adventure that we are being forced to share together… for the good of all beings.

I’ve been wondering a lot recently how print media will survive in the years ahead. How, for instance, might newspapers integrate relevance, utility, and innovation as various circumstances pressure them into finding greater sales through lowest common denominator content.

Of course the same applies for the Dharma.

Anyway, it looks as if my smart and innovative brother, Matt, may have come up with what looks to my eye to be something powerful. It’s called The Guardian Open Platform and to my untrained eye, it appears this “open API” allows for something truly remarkable.

The newspaper has just announced a new suite of online services that some go as far to suggest may be the future of distribution. It’s no printing press 2.0, and won’t be printing money just yet, but it’s the sort of courageous innovation crucial to the news-industry’s survival.

Imagine this…

The Guardian aren’t purely in it for profit; their composition assures that they don’t intend to seek profit for shareholders benefit. Instead, their motivation is independence and conformity to their trust’s founding values. They can afford to be innovative and take risks in order to lead the way: being courageous, as their values state, is important. Indeed, shareholders “would normally have a heart attack at such a move.”

Does this make them “socialists” by American standards? Or are they simply being integral in their thinking and practice?

Bows, guardian.co.uk.

Nate Silver posts this interesting, and comprehensive, collection of data. I found his comments on religion particularly fascinating:

Confidence in organized religion … fell significantly under Bush’s watch, although most of the decline came between 2000 and 2002, when the rating dropped from 29 percent to 19 percent. I’m not sure whether that was the result of the Catholic priest scandals, some odd kind of ricochet from 9/11, or something else, but the scores have yet to really recover.

Bows, FiveThirtyEight.

Jon Stewart’s ribbing of all the clinging that went on at CPAC:

Bows, elephant journal.

Arun Gandhi asks the question: are we a nation of individuals…

… in the United States, individualism is highly rated and independence is cherished with such zeal that one could conclude that the United States is a nation of individuals, each striving to reach his or her own goals by any means possible. I believe this attitude has resulted in making us selfish and greedy and led us to the financial crisis that the whole nation faces.

Bows, washingtonpost.com.