What’s Your Big Question? (VIDEO)

Comments (9)

• Patrick S. O'Donnell

  September 6, 2012 at 10:18 pm

  I can’t make a video, but do want to say (and with all due respect to the late Robert Aiken) how incredibly unhelpful I find expressions like “the system stinks.” There is no “big system” as such and we need to be far more discriminating and discerning about the particulars in our world (however interrelated or connected). For example, the US is a “capitalist democracy” characterized by a certain kind of capitalism, a certain kind of democracy (and ‘liberal welfare state), and a technocratic culture that flourishes under the conditions of same. Speaking the “the system” in this manner also obscure the various roles people play within these structures and institutions, with some of these folks involved in sincere efforts at reform and change from within (are they tainted with the stench of ‘the system’?).

  One should read several of the best historical and analytic accounts about the New Left and countercultural movements in the 1960s that frequently speak to the problems that follow in the wake of lumping everything together in this crudely totalizing fashion. It bespeaks, I think, a kind of intellectual lethargy if not laziness. Furthermore, it tends to create an unjustifiable distance between those who critique “the system” and “the system” itself, as if one can wash one’s hands of all responsibility for what is before us, in other words, for that which we participate in on a daily basis in sundry obvious and not-so-obvious ways. We are “the system,” however much we feign stances of moral purity or absolution.*

  * I wrote a bit about this here: http://www.religiousleftlaw.com/2012/07/the-contingency-of-dirty-hands-the-necessity-of-virtuous-politics-or-.html

• Ratana

  September 7, 2012 at 1:22 am

  Your question is: “How do we study nonviolence as more than a foregone moral conclusion, and investigate how people might choose to deploy it strategically in high-stakes situations?”
  I would suggest that we all begin with an in-dept study of the conflict and the situation or region involved. All too often we jump to conclusions, such as in the on-going case in Myanmar, without knowing the historical context.

• Katie Loncke

  September 7, 2012 at 3:53 pm

  Hi Patrick! Just wanna say I hella appreciate your attunement to the nuances and complexities of systemic problems. This is precisely one of the goals of the year-long dialogue series: to help us all share and develop more sophisticated understandings of the particular political problems and opportunities of our moment.

  As an example, lately in my own organizing work I’ve been confronting a tendency for fellow radicals (and sometimes myself) to lump all nonprofits in to a category of ‘uselessness’ or worse. I think this is in some ways a healthy disillusionment from a previous tendency on the Left to rely overmuch on nonprofits (a disillusionment nicely summarized in the title of the popular anthology, “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded”). So, while it’s not accurate (nor necessarily all that helpful) to write off all nonprofits as conservatizing forces that encourage dependency on the state and wealthy donors, at the same time I think it can represent a healthy *impulse* toward awakening from the delusion of NGOs as chiefly positive, or the primary vehicles for the movement-based changes we want to build.

  So kind of similarly to “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded,” in Buddhist political circles we hope to use “The System Stinks” not as a conclusion but as a *beginning* for a conversation. The kind of conversation it seems like you might have a lot to contribute to!

  I’m curious if it’s been your experience, in your Buddhist community/communities, that there’s a lot of emphasis on personal /behavioral/ service-based solutions to world problems like climate change or poverty, but not a lot of discussion on systemic analyses of these? If you do have frequent conversations at the systemic level, I hope your groups will consider contributing resources to (and participating in!) next year’s dialogues! And if you don’t, then maybe, like me, Dawn, and others, you might feel excited to help build such a space. Or not! :) But I’m curious whether you often find Buddhist folks to talk to about systemic Lefty stuff.

  And on the tip about we-are-the-system & no-separation, I think in some ways I agree with you, though it might require some more specific conversation to get into where we agree and disagree. But one of the examples we’ve been talking about a lot at BPF these days is the fact that for those of us who pay taxes to the US government, we are directly helping to fund the military-industrial complex whose activities we (may) wish to oppose or neutralize. Is that the kind of dynamic you’re thinking of? Or is it something else?

  Thanks a lot! Looking forward to reading your blog post this weekend. :)

  -katie

• Patrick S. O'Donnell

  September 7, 2012 at 11:10 pm

  Dear Katie,

  I appreciate your attentive and thoughtful reply to my comment and concerns.

  There has indeed been what I believe an inordinate “emphasis on personal /behavioral/ service-based solutions to world problems like climate change or poverty, but not a lot of discussion on systemic analyses of these” among Buddhists and others of differing spiritual orientations I’ve come to be loosely associated with over the years. Don’t get me wrong, I believe social change does begin, as Gandhi stressed, with the individual, but that hardly means, as you no doubt appreciate, that we need be naïve or simple-minded about the nature, possibilities, and prospects of progressive social change, about the nature and necessity of collective action, about the nature and mechanisms of (suppressive, creative, what have you) power, or about the nature, dynamics, and inertia of institutions, structures, and systems at the local, regional, and global levels.

  One of the reasons I accepted an invitation to blog at “Religious Left Law” (an unwieldy name, to be sure) had to do with the fact that these were largely law professors who had fairly sophisticated conceptions of much of the aforementioned phenomena owing to their immersion in the study of law and the social sciences, all the while remaining spiritually grounded and committed in an exemplary and inspiring manner (most of them are Christian, while I describe myself as an ‘aspiring Buddhist’). My perhaps limited experience with Buddhists in Santa Barbara has not been very satisfying in this regard, but that may be due largely to unrealistic expectations as well as idiosyncratic and not representative experiences. Indeed, at this point I’m not formally or informally associated with any practicing group of local Buddhists. Be that as it may, the irony is that those few individuals I know who are self-described “Buddhists” and are, at the same time, of knowledgeable Left background or orientation (their worldviews were often predominantly Leftist before being colored by Buddhist doctrines and practices), qualify their Buddhist commitments as “secular” in the sense of “physicalist” or “naturalist” or “materialist,” in other words, their Buddhism is shorn of any conventional or traditional religious, spiritual, or metaphysical beliefs (e.g., in karma, rebirth, nirvana, the ‘unconditioned,’ etc.). I trust you’re familiar with these “secular Buddhists,” and perhaps not a few are associated with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. To put it blandly, I’m not too fond of this development if only because I believe their views are deeply mistaken and in fact misrepresent Buddhism, in its origins and development. I’m especially put off by the occasional insinuations and polemics against those of an avowed spiritual orientation (i.e., one that by definition transcends physicalism or naturalism), polemics similar if not identical in both substance and tone to the so-called New Atheists (notably, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens). Of course these differing views need not preclude some degree of coordination and cooperation in our efforts for progressive social transformation, but it explains my own sense of isolation betwixt and between what I’ll call “New Age” Buddhists on the one hand, and Naturalist Buddhists on the other. It’s a divide reminiscent of one that for a time afflicted the Green movement in this country: the division between “Deep Ecologists” and “Social Ecologists” respectively. Neither of these Buddhist orientations are identical to the reasons the Dalai Lama invoked to explain why he thought of himself as “half-Marxist, half-Buddhist,” a formulation I find cogent and compelling, and not just because it was uttered by the Dalai Lama (I thought of my own worldview along these lines long before I read this transcribed remark from an interview with His Holiness). (The triune Buddhist emphasis on wisdom, ethics or morality, and mindfulness and meditation, is not, after all, in the first instance about matters economic and political, or directly about phenomena studied by political thinkers, social scientists, and legal theorists.) It reminds me of Liberation Theology before the Church officially chastised those who lived and practiced this unique form of Christian spirituality and praxis.

  As to the question of the military-industrial complex, of course you are right that a significant portion of our taxes contribute to this, although a refusal to pay any or all taxes is self-defeating, given the fact that our taxes also contribute to solving collective action problems and thus funding necessary government functions and services (our collective welfare and well-being), including those that sustain individuals in our society who are poor and vulnerable in one way or another. Refusal to pay some portion of one’s taxes by way of not supporting the military-industrial complex has of course been one tactic used in the arsenal of non-violent techniques and strategies, although one might historically examine the effectiveness of this tactic (as to what counts as ‘effective’ is yet another complicated matter), at least when practiced by a fairly small number of individuals (to date, such tax refusal has not inspired a significant number of others to do likewise, while other means of nonviolent struggle have, for sundry reasons, motivated others to become more politically informed and involved; this does not at all suffice by way of a decisive argument against such refusal: it is merely illustrative of the kind of things we should take into consideration when contemplating such a tactic). The government has several punitive methods it may call upon in response, all of which can be quite disabling and some of which can land one in prison. In such cases, our actions take on the quality of “bearing witness,” which may be necessary or salutary for some purposes but innocuous or ineffective for others. There are a variety of means we might call upon to begin dismantling military-industrial complex, which is part of what Lewis Mumford memorably termed the Megamachine (a description on the order of ‘the system’). Part of this involves de-mystifying the National Security State and re-thinking the nature of national defense and security in the context of the ongoing transformation of the society of nation-states and the global geo-political and economic order (one in which the U.S. is losing its hegemonic status). Some of the later writings of the former East German Marxist dissident and Green political theorist Rudolf Bahro helpfully address these topics.

  The means, methods, strategies, and tactics we might call upon in our struggles for progressive social change are multifarious, and some of these may be particularly suited or specific to some individuals or groups while others may be better fitted to yet different individuals or groups, in other words, we should be careful about any sort of righteousness, rigidity, dogmatism, sectarian posturing, or insidious power politics infecting our discussion or choices and thus unduly circumscribing the universe of possibilities in a way that detracts from our potential to communicate with, let alone the possibility to persuade, various and wider publics. Forms of non-cooperation and civil disobedience in a constitutionally democratic society should be means of last resort and contemplated in conjunction with what Gandhi called a “constructive program.” A spirit of toleration alongside a willingness to courageously and patiently experiment in this regard is, I think, very important, however difficult or elusive. At all times we should be clear as to the difference between a principled and merely strategic choice for nonviolence as well as the significance that follows from taking seriously the proposition that means and ends may be, as Gandhi believed, convertible terms, such that “as the means so the end,” at least from the vantage point of actual conduct. From a Buddhist perspective, for instance, this could be seen as expressing a metaphysical belief in the law of karma, under which there is a precise causal connection between the extent or degree of our non-attachment, detachment, disinterestedness, or moral and spiritual awareness (the purity of our intention or motivation as it were) with regard to an act or actions and the measure of individual and collective effectiveness in promoting or securing a morally worthy end. So much more needs to be said, so needless to say I look forward to the discussion.

• Katie Loncke

  September 8, 2012 at 12:18 pm

  Good point, Ratana! And since we can’t all be everywhere studying everything at once, it seems to me we also need to forms coöperative networks of trustworthy people looking deeply into situations of conflict, and communicating what they see out to a larger group. That’s just one idea of how to learn more about what’s going on. How do you imagine the “in-depth study of the conflict” happening?

• Ed Rippy

  September 8, 2012 at 11:51 pm

  Wow — too much really good stuff to reply to @ once. Thank y’all!

  I’m reminded of a workshop somebody recently did called “Who Gets to Speak?” My first response is the same question. Unless I’ve missed something, only those w/ access to vid eqpt get to speak here — altho’ that just means they’re on good terms w/ someone who has a vidphone. I don’t mean to “disqualify” the project, but this awareness should be part of it. Anyway, as I have fairly decent A/V + editing eqpt, I will volunteer it, altho’ timing & transportation will be tough — I live in Concord 6 miles from BART (there is a bus). I can meet people in Berk/Oak, but it’s tough. Whatever works.

  A few other points: I agree the system stinks — and we are the system. I see the “system” as a web of relations (or from the human potential movement perspective, a set of agreements, many unconscious, about power relations). I am *painfully* aware of my participation in the mass murder machine. It goes far beyond my taxes — even the paltry amount in my bank acct gets loaned out to the bank’s profit & does its tiny bit to help globalize neofascism. I work in a grocery store, & my labor helps market the GM “foods” that (if their plan works) will ultimately enable Monsanto et al. to decide who eats. I have learned to live w/ lots of grief, pain, & horror.

  Nonprofits: Agree must not tar all w/ same brush. Also agree that the realities of funding place limits on what they can do; in fact many noprofits are deliberate fronts for the right wing to co-opt issues. Tiny grassroots nonprofits w/ a large community of nickle & dime donors can be more honest, but don’t have many resources.

  In-depth study: Yes. Having done many, I can say the most urgent need is to eliminate the secrecy in gov’t. This means protecting whistleblowers. We also need to support a truly independent press, which means we have to *be* the independent press in large measure, because a) we can’t afford to pay enough of them, & b) without the experience of doing news ourselves, we won’t know enough to keep the others honest. Commercial news is 75-100% funded by advertising, so when people buy what’s advertised, they wind up paying the press to print what the *advertiser* wants them to print. Hmm.

  Thanks,
  Ed

• Ed Rippy

  September 11, 2012 at 2:46 pm

  OK, have filmed my 17-sec vid & uploaded. Did not find any place for text so here is what I said:

  “Hi, I’m Ed; I’m a Nichiren Buddhist. I want to talk about power-over and power-with, or we may say, dominance and submission compared with willing co-operation. Society is full of power relations; I want to talk about the nature of that power and what it does to us.”

  Cheers,
  Ed

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