It’s hardly surprising that so many citizens, unable to find wisdom in the political sphere (which, almost by definition, thrives on either/ors), look to religious figures for a more inclusive vision. Pope Francis, in Wim Wenders’s glorious documentary “A Man of His Word,” stresses the importance of not imposing our views on others and never thinking in terms of simplistic us-versus-thems: Would God, Francis asks, love Gandhi any less than he does a priest or a nun simply because the Mahatma wasn’t a Christian? The Dalai Lama, for his part, points out that to be pro-Tibetan is not to be anti-Chinese, not least because Tibet and China will always be neighbors; the welfare of either depends on the other. He begins his days by praying for the health of his “Chinese brothers and sisters.”
Traveling across Japan with the Dalai Lama a year before the pandemic, I heard him say often that after watching the planet up close as a leader of his people for what was then 79 years, he felt the world was suffering through an “emotional crisis.” The cure, he said, was “emotional disarmament.” What he meant by the striking phrase was that we can see beyond panic and rage and confusion only by using our minds, and that part of the mind that doesn’t deal in binaries. Emotional disarmament might prove even more feasible than the nuclear type, insofar as most of us can reform our minds more easily than we can move a huge and intractable government. By opening our minds, we begin to change the world.
I love the metaphor of emotional disarmament. So long as we respond to hate and anger with hate and anger, there is no path back from the brink. Only by stepping away from our own negative feelings can we take a step toward a better world.
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"I love the metaphor of emotional disarmament. So long as we respond to hate and anger with hate and anger, there is no path back from the brink. Only by stepping away from our own negative feelings can we take a step toward a better world."
It's an incredibly Buddhist sentiment, as old as the philosophy itself. (And arguably even older, ostensibly having roots in Hinduism and Jainism.)
The Buddha achieves enlightenment, but the demon Mara jealously claims enlightenment should belong to him, not a mortal. So Mara sends his armies to assail the Buddha, but his peace, serenity, and compassion turn aside their weapons, and disperse the attackers / make them disappear / transform them into flower petals / et cetera.
All very noble and inspiring, and a potent symbol of the potential for peaceful actions to combat violent ones...
...but at the same time we must remember that Buddhism is fundamentally a philosophy of inaction and ultimate erasure from existence - the literal goal of the entire religion is to sever one's attachment to all things, allowing one to die without being reincarnated. It's effectively a metaphysical suicide cult, in which life is ultimately not worth living, and the world is not worth caring about, except to wish it well as it passes you by. "We can't fix things, so just accept them."
We have to balance this kind of thinking with a certain amount of realism. Peaceful protest has limits. It works well in situations like the American Civil Rights Movement or The Indian Independence movement.
But there are certain evils that simply don't care about peaceful protest, and require violent actions to defeat.
The Dalai Lama lost his homeland to Mao's armies, and effectively his entire way of life has been erased forever, despite 79 years of semi-enlightened peaceful resistance. The Jews who peacefully submitted to the Holocaust were nearly wiped out by the Third Reich. The Tutsi of Rwanda were butchered and raped by the hundreds of thousands, and no amount of enlightenment and compassion could have saved them.
By all mean, embrace enlightenment and peace as useful tools of improving the world. But also recognize that all tools have limits, and only really work in the proper contexts and situations they are suited to. Sometimes, you need a different tool.
We aren't going to emotionally disarm people like white supremacists.
"You really only need to hang mean bastards. But mean bastards, you need to hang."
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