We are, as a species and a global community, in the midst of a profound malaise. We are caught in a kind of pre-diluvian limbo, a sense of suspension and prelude. Conflict, natural disaster, military chaos and ethnic tension seethe in pockets sealed away from a general inertia. In the quiet deadness are those of us who fear, when we allow ourselves to think of it, the one-by-one exploding of these bubbles, and the absorption of us all into some kind of universal calamity. Do you think I am exaggerating? Consider the terrible and myriad realities we are faced with today. Consider the thunder of their immediacy.
Take, to start, the climate. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, the Earth is in the midst of its sixth period of mass extinction. Our current epoch, which climate scientists have begun to refer to as the “Anthropocene,” represents the worst of these in 65 million years, since the wave that sent the dinosaurs, and innumerable of their subordinates, to complete annihilation. Some estimates predict that by the middle of the 21st century, 30 -50% of all species on earth will have been wiped out, numbers that far exceed what might be expected from “natural” or “background” rates of extinction. What separates this present death-wave from all those that have come before it, aside from its enormity, is that we, the human race, are responsible for bringing it on (hence the moniker “Anthropocene”). Sea levels are rising at catastrophic rates. The atmosphere is warming at a pace anywhere between 100 and 1,000 times faster than any period we have the ability to record. In India, hundreds of millions of people are without enough water for their daily needs, owing to the rapid melting of the Himalayan glaciers. Meanwhile, humanity continues to pollute indiscriminately and guzzle oil like ever-thirsting camels at a trough of pitch. The President-elect of the United States is stocking his cabinet with climate deniers and fossil fuel lobbyists, pledging to abolish the EPA, and urging us all to race to the precipice.
And what is perhaps even more troubling is that our environmental crises are intertwined with our societal ones. We can't even "divide and conquer," or, to use the terminology of global planners, "compartmentalize and contain." Fossil fuels and the oil from which they derive, alongside the companies that obtain, produce, and distribute them, are the main culprits in the skyrocketing of atmospheric CO2 levels, one of the primary contributors to global warming, and the commodity also helps to fuel much of the global conflict that has characterized the 21st century thus far; a ubiquitous, bloody, and crowded imbroglio with no end in sight, and one that finds its besieged center in the Middle East, where despots are installed and deposed with brutal regularity. Things are most dire in Iraq and Syria, where the rogue Islamist caliphate ISIS (or IS or ISIL) is vying for increased control of oil production, even as they inspire outbursts of terror in Western cities from Paris to Orlando. In the past decade alone, entire states (most notably Syria) have, for all intents and purposes, dissolved. Meanwhile, the spread of nuclear weapons continues virtually unchecked, even as tensions flare between the nations who wield them. Terrifyingly, it is only by blind luck that nuclear war has not erupted already.
The geopolitical environment is uncertain, to put it mildly. With the rise of China and the resurgence of Russia under Vladimir Putin, the West and its assumed hegemony are on the decline. Nearly all of the Western nations feature stark wealth inequality, with income disparities between the top 1% and the legions on the bottom widening by the year, sparking riots in countries like Greece and the United Kingdom and political upheaval nearly everywhere else. England, for its part, shocked the world by exiting the European Union after a nationwide referendum, an act spearheaded by right-populist figures like Nigel Farage (whose party, UKIP, is rapidly building a formidable presence in Parliament) and one whose global consequences are murky at best. In France, Farage’s double, Marine Le Pen, is similarly gaining influence. Seizing on the momentum of Brexit, and feeding off the brutal attacks that have beset her own nation and killed scores of innocents, she has promised a “Frexit” should she be elected president. In Germany, the far right, anti-refugee party Alternative für Deutschland swept the most recent regional elections, sending shockwaves through the German government and prompting Chancellor Angela Merkel to sound the alarm, and beg for the mainstream parties to band together and stamp out the burgeoning revolt. Voices that have been excluded from public discourse in Europe since the end of the Second World War are again lending their throats to the general din. Tensions between native Europeans and refugees are at a fever pitch. The Western liberal democracies are, as the ABBA song goes, “facing their Waterloo.”
Even (if not especially) in the behemoth of their tribe, the United States, society seems lately on the verge of irredeemable polarization, if not complete disintegration. The U.S. economy is limping out of recession, and incomes have continued to decline, a trend that began as far back as the 1970’s. Police brutality toward (and often murder of) African-Americans sparks both protests and, occasionally, retaliatory violence. The white-working class is dying at younger and younger ages and using drugs (often heroin) at higher and higher rates. Whatever authentic democracy the nation once practiced has become a distant memory, with billions of dollars in campaign donations pouring into the coffers of Congressional candidates, and, as demonstrated in a recent study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern, only a tiny sliver of the wealthy elite exercising any discernible political influence whatsoever. Disillusionment is widespread, incarceration rates are surging (with absurdly disproportionate application to African-Americans), and a populist wave has erupted, one which has succeeded in taking over the Republican Party and nearly captured the Democratic Party as well.
The Republicans, for their part, have long abandoned the interests of their constituents in favor of the whims of the oligarchs in the fossil fuel industry and the international business sector. This quiet contempt for the base (i.e., the people supposedly represented by the Party in a democratic system) has led to their own destruction at the hands of a brash billionaire whose actions no one, not even the most sophisticated of commentators, has been able to predict. On the "other side of the aisle," as the misleading saying goes (as the parties are not as different as their standard-bearers would have us all believe), the equally compromised (and perhaps even more corporatist) Democratic Party has been hemorrhaging local offices for years and appears all but buried in the wake of the 2016 Presidential election. Now that the extent of their corruption has been exposed (thanks to WikiLeaks), even former paragons like our sitting President and the party's failed nominee, Hillary Clinton, are viewed among growing numbers of the left-leaning populace as having long been bought and sold. The Democrats have lost the Presidency and both wings of Congress, and with them the surety of their dominance of "demographics." This last chess piece they've leveraged to keep up their appearance as the party of the downtrodden, while routinely demonstrating their disinterest in real reform.
In response, America's middle and lower classes have, with the rise of Bernie Sanders, and, more significantly, the election of Donald Trump, blackened the eye of the conservative and liberal elite (i.e., Wall Street, the mainstream print and television media, the Puritans of identity politics, the dynastic lines of Bush and Clinton, the Hollywood class and their cohorts). With the latter's election, fueled as it was (in part) by xenophobia and proto-fascist chauvinism, has come significant unrest. Protests have erupted in America's cities. A wave of hate crimes is cascading from coast to coast, and white nationalists have infiltrated the White House. Meanwhile, liberals denigrate their Trump-supporting neighbors, even those who harbor no racial hatred or misognyst views, but merely saw in Trump a way to get back at the political class who has for so long displayed their contempt for the American people. In turn, those who voted for Trump often see their neighbors (sometimes justifiably) as petty traffickers in vapid celebrity and baseless moral superiority. Americans of all backgrounds eye each other, and the rest of the world, with suspicion, nervous caution, and, sometimes, unabashed malice. This is a grim horizon, to be sure.
So, the question is, what can we do about all this?
I won't pretend to have any easy answers. Merely protesting does not seem to be enough. Certainly, it has its value. Indeed, mass demonstrations have led to significant victories in the United States, particularly for African-Americans and women. But protesting did not bring an end to the Vietnam War. It did not prevent the U.S. from invading Iraq. It has yet to halt the warming of our climate. As one of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut, said of the 60's:
"Every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high."
I do not take quite so pessimistic a view as Vonnegut, but he has a point. Protests are like storms. At their best, they are hurricanes, and leave lasting impacts. But more often, they are fleeting, transient. As such, on their own, they are not capable of re-directing the course of humankind. And make no mistake, such a re-direction is profoundly, existentially, necessary.
Don't get me wrong. I sincerely hope that the indigenous people and their allies in Standing Rock triumph in their struggle. With all my heart, I hope that peace comes to the war-ravaged limbos of the globe, to Palestine and to Syria, to the streets of Colombia and the hollowed out cities of the United States. But merely hoping is not enough. All the Facebook likes and petition signatures in the world won't sate the world's thirst for blood and oil. No amount of marching or chanting will pull us back from the precipice. Nothing but a profound, world-wide alteration of what it means to be human, of what a human is to strive to become, and what world humanity seeks to inhabit, is sufficient to, perhaps, wrest us from this road to perdition.
What I am suggesting is a radical shift in consciousness in their hearts of the world's people. And by the people, I mean everyone, no matter how at odds they seem currently to be. I mean those in the United States whose jobs have gone overseas and whose communities have been devastated, whose hope has eroded and whose freedom has been tread upon. And alongside them, I also mean the refugees of desolate Syria, the children shuddering with dreams of fire and bombs, reaching as they awake for the absent hand of their obliterated parent. And with these, too, I mean the multitudes in China marching to put an end to the degradation of the atmosphere, those persistent scores who've pressed their authoritarian government into significant investment in solar and wind power. I mean the Buddhists and Muslims clashing in Myanmar. I mean the people of Somalia. I mean the priests of Latin America, the imams of Indonesia. I mean the Europeans eyeing their immigrant neighbors with suspicion and nervousness borne not of, in my own optimistic view, the hatred in their hearts but from an uneasiness breathed from the general chaos. I mean the marchers in Greece, the Berniecrats on U.S. college campuses, the "deplorables" in the Deep South and the Rust Belt, feminists and Tea Partiers, the fiercely brave members of the Movement for Black Lives, and even those who, in Britain, voted Leave, as well as those who voted Remain. All these, and all the rest, must undergo a change of soul and heart if we are to survive.
What does such a shift entail?
In my mind, it means an uncompromising embrace of compassion. To put it another way, we must awaken to compassion.
Compassion is among the most sublime qualities that a human being can embody. A compassionate soul does not desire to kill, does not fear its neighbors, does not thirst to oppress. A compassionate soul does not keep others in hunger and poverty, but rather feeds, provides shelter, offers solidarity. The compassionate soul does not judge another, but recognizes the inconceivable complexity of the individual, and, recognizing this, practices understanding. And most importantly, and as the word itself suggests, the compassionate soul sees suffering and joins the sufferer in co-passion. By extension, to borrow from Hindu terminology, a compassionate world-soul has no need for nuclear weapons, is conscious of the Earth's condition, is not content to let the huddled masses languish, starve and suffocate. A compassionate world-soul is not content to let its members annihilate each other.
There might be a way, I propose, to realize such a world-soul. We may yet, together, construct such a gleaming edifice.
But it starts small. One by one, community by community, city by city, nation by nation, we must cultivate compassion. We must let it permeate our beings, let it spread like a viral blessing of the soul.
This is nonsense, you might be thinking. New-Age drivel, or else the vacant moralizing of a deluded Millennial. If that's what you're thinking right now, I would humbly ask that you keep reading. I would ask that you consider how compassion is innate to the human psyche. Indeed, the religions of the world are, at their core, founded on the ideal of compassion. "The highest love on earth," Christ said, "is the love that compels you to lay down your life for your friends." In other words, the willingness to devote your life to the betterment of those around you. The kind of love that compelled the Samaritan to tend to the beleaguered wayfarer, though he came from the nation of his oppressors. The kind of love that looks not at points of divergence, not at ugliness (though it is ALWAYS present), not at geography, skin color, religion, gender or occupation, but rather at consciousness itself. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, in his analysis of Judeo-Christian ethics, describes the "love for one's neighbor" espoused by Christ and his Hebrew forbears as the love that embraces the "abyss," as it were, of the interiority of one's neighbor (or, to use the parlance of psychoanalysis, the Other). Compassion for the Other (or love for one's neighbor) embraces the vastness, the variability and the imperfection of the interiority of one's neighbor, as well as the futility of ever knowing, fully, the heart of a fellow human. It means embracing humanity, not specific humans or specific qualities in humans. It means unconditional love, unwavering kinship.
Similarly, Buddhism teaches that we must recognize that the consciousness of our neighbor (or the Other) is always changing, that no action they take, no wrong they do to you, no words that they say can ever truly define who they are. The cutting word of an enemy is not a droplet of their immutable essence. It does not speak to the nature of their soul. It is, in the Buddhist point of view, merely a twig; a twig whirled from the branch of a tree caught in an unending storm. This storm is called in Buddhism samsara. We Westerners would call it simply life. Buddhism urges us to grasp the hands of our neighbors and take refuge, together, from this storm. Buddhist meditation on loving kindness, or metta, can train one and help to cultivate this compassionate disposition, can help one to, throughout their lives, be mindful of their thoughts, and to sow kindness with their deeds instead of discord. The emphasis in Buddhist practice is on changing first the individual, and then sending him or her back out into the world to impact their neighbors. Buddhism is often accused of a mute passivity for this, but I think that is unfair. Compassion can only spread from person to person. It cannot be mandated. It cannot be legislated.
So, for Buddhism, there is the person to person dissemination of metta. For Christians, there is the Savior, crucified for the salvation of us all, arms spread in beckoning, in universal embrace. In Islam, there is Allah, often called in the Qu'ran the Most Merciful, who commanded not wanton violence, as those who would divide humankind would have us believe, but rather equanimity among the world's peoples, and compassion toward all. I could go on and on. The point is that compassion has always been one of the chief goals of humankind. It is at the foundation of our great spiritual traditions. It's time we re-awakened to this ideal, and pursued it not in the hope of salvation in an afterlife or for divine blessing, but for the very survival of our world.
You may still accuse me of naiveté, of youthful idealism, or worse, of deliberate, cowardly evasion. If that is so, consider this. Increasingly, biologists and naturalists are discovering that the key to a species' survival in the evolutionary gauntlet is not, as was once thought, dogged, brutal individualism, but rather empathy, co-operation, and a (however advanced or primitive) sense of goodwill between members of a species. We did not ascend the tree of life through the manic ambitions of a few warmongering alpha humans. We made it this far because of our togetherness. We fashioned shelters from the mountainside and hid within them our harried companions. We settled in villages, in towns, in cities, and collaboratively created rich, diverse cultures. Without thinking, we care for the sick. We feel sympathy for the needy, for the poor, for the war-ravaged. This is instinctual. We are genetically programmed to have compassion for our neighbors. In our DNA is a desire to guide, comfort and shepherd one another. If it is indeed the case, as scientific inquiries into human ancestry are beginning to show, that compassion has gotten us this far, perhaps it can get us a little farther.
Imagine what would become of the world if there erupted a ground-swell of compassion and mutual empathy throughout the entire human family. Certainly, it would require a world-wide softening of countless gnarled and war-weary hearts. It would entail the relinquishing of prejudice. It would entail humility, it would entail the recognition of one's own shortcomings. It would also entail a degree of resistance, a pushing back against those who would turn race against race, nation against nation, culture against culture, individual against individual. For there will always be those who will seek to enervate our baser impulses, and use them for their own gain. It will take courage, perseverance, and togetherness to resist the powers of the world.
And it would be a slow process. To be open with you, I'll say that much of the inspiration for this article came from my wondering, "what am I to do?" I am certainly not saying that we should stop organizing. We must keep organizing. I'm not saying we should stop protesting. We must keep protesting. But what I am saying is that the best place to start is a place where each and everyone of us can start: by opening our hearts. We must dispense with post-modern cynicism, and instead embrace sincerity. Shirk apathy, and embrace love. Forego indifference, and embrace daily kindness. Small deeds will be the vessels of our deliverance, kind words and generous outlooks, belief and a willingness to assume goodness, not depravity, on the part of our neighbors.
Yet even if we were to succeed in awaking, world-wide, unto compassion, what would follow might be difficult to navigate. There might come a halt in the breathless pace of human civilization. An uncertain standstill. A window of silence broken only by the sound of weapons being dropped to the ground and the faraway weeping of those relieved of their unnatural hatred, hatred that has for so long plagued their psyche. There might come a lull, yes, and with it, there may come a fleeting uncertainty, a murky suspension, as we shed our long, anguished slumber. But what sort of dawn might we wake to?
