[So, like everybody, last week’s election hit me hard. For reasons explicated below, I finally found a way last night of thinking about it, a lens to see it all through, that made it make sense for me . . . or, at least, the kind of sense that allows me to keep going. I came home from work this morning and wrote 30+ pages of philosophy, before what had started as a dirge became a rant. I liked the rant and I kept the dirge, but I jettisoned almost all the middling philosophy. I really hope everybody here can find whatever way allows them to deal with this nightmare.]
The last six days have been rough. I spent the first two days sleeping nearly all the time; I had no energy or drive even to wake up, let alone actually to get up and out of the bed. When I did briefly wake, my brain immediately started thinking about the parade of horribles we can anticipate and – almost certainly in a reflexive act of self-protection – I would fall back asleep.
I called up the hospital and quit my job. The message I left was something along the lines of “I took this job because I wanted to help people, but people are just not worth helping. You’ll have to find somebody to cover for me this weekend, because I will not be in.” (I called the next day and left another message: “Disregard the first, I’ll be there. I’ll be there this weekend.” People from the hospital called to find out if I was okay; they knew I was lying when I said I was fine.)
I realized again, on maybe Thursday or Friday, how important it is that we start thinking about the insane proliferation of guns in this country not just as an issue of “2nd Amendment rights,” or “home security,” or even “but I like guns,” but also as a public health threat. I realized this because there had been a brief period – no more than 5-6 hours, maybe, the day immediately after the election – when I was seriously thinking that if I had a handgun lying around the house I might decide to eat a bullet. I got over it, obviously, but the thing about guns is that their solution to every problem is so very, very final, and so easily obviates any possibility that things might eventually improve.
But things did not improve much when I finally did roust myself out of bed and reported for work this weekend. Still depressed, surly and mean to casual co-workers, I was not very good at my job. The ultimate reason for this remained the same, but there were some more immediately proximate reasons for my attitude as well. My head ached, an ache that did not go away. My stomach was in knots, it roiled and even though I got hungry I could not bring myself to eat. If I gave myself enough time to think about what had just happened, and what it undoubtedly means for us all, my chest started to hurt. I was surly and mean because I was depressed about the election, sure, but I was also surly and mean because I was in actual, physical pain.
It didn’t help that I was also at a loss as to what to do whenever I wasn’t at the hospital or asleep. My signature line at The DailyKos states that “Politics is the neverending story we tell ourselves about who we are as a people,” and I believe in that statement quite literally. I have never viewed political struggle in the United States as a sporting event, a contest of elections in which one’s team either wins or loses and then both sides get together to play again. Representative democracy is a complex, dynamic, iterative system of identity in which we decide who we are now and who we want to become in the future. With each election we change this story at least a little, and then the new story plays out for a bit and changes who we think we are, and thus modified we, in turn, get together to change our story again. Through politics we create the story of ourselves, and this story in turn creates us anew, endlessly.
Accordingly, over many years I’ve gotten into the habit of spending no small amount of spare time reading on-line news accounts, opinions, speculation, and analyses about what our political system is doing now and what effect those doings might have in the future. I think a lot about this stuff myself, and try to project where we are driving ourselves. But this last election soured me on all of that. That’s it, I said, I’m done. This experiment has failed. I give up. And I vowed to simply not pay attention any longer. Desperate for a replacement, I turned to the half-dozen or so books that I’ve kept idling the past few months whilst I devoured election news, and in one of them – the analytical and drily titled Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory: The Dharma of Natural Systems, by Joanna Macy – I found something that helped.
* * *
[Pages and pages of philosophic twiddle-twaddle, plus one cool photo
of an enormous ant colony site being excavated in Argentina.
Seriously, it’s, like, 30 feet across.]
Several of the latter chapters of Macy’s book discuss the co-arising of various concepts usually considered to be separable from one another. Chapter 9 is a general explication of what the term karma should be understood to mean, and I really, really liked Macy’s description of this concept because it very much accords with what I always have understood it to mean.
I have really never bought into what popular culture presents as the accepted view of karma: the idea that my actions now will determine what life I have after I die and am reincarnated. I’ve always understood karma to be a much more metaphorical concept. The idea is something like this:
I clearly am not the same person I was when I was 30, or when I was 20, or when I was 10. I look much different, just for starters. I also have different memories, and different ideas. My values are different in a lot of ways, some large and some small.
I can’t fix a point at which I stopped being the me of 10 or 20 or 30 years old, because the changes are so small and so gradual. In truth, every day of my life, every moment of my life, I am becoming someone new and am very often doing so in ways of which I am unaware.
But the things I did in my old lives affect me now. The things I learned and the things I experienced in my 20s and 30s are still with me, still shape me. I guess all those things, big and small, acknowledged and unknown, are the karma I’ve accumulated.
(I should probably start thinking a bit about the kind of karma I’ll have when I turn 50.)
(That was me; still haven’t got the hang of the editing buttons. How does one simply indent?)
Macy argues precisely this understanding of karma, explaining that the Buddhist conception of karma is one of identity – that our actions (defined to include what we do and what we say and what we think) – shape who we are and, in turn, who we are then shapes our actions again in an endless cycle of becoming. The Buddhist conception of karma, then, is an expression of the co-arising of identity via deed. There is no “us” that exists independently of the deeds we perform, just as there is no “deed” that takes place independently of us. We are, ultimately, what we do, and what we do is who we are. Karma is not the consequence of our actions so much as the inescapable flip-side of those actions.
And this leads to a consideration of the importance of choice, which we always have, which we cannot escape. What becomes important, what can affect our karma is not the actual choices themselves – the deeds, thoughts, or words that we manifest – but the motivation behind each choice.
* * *
And, honestly, I just love this formulation. At first blush it seems facile, it seems as if all that counts in the Buddhist conception of karma is that – no matter what one does – one should do so “with good intentions.”
Oh no.
No, it’s a lot more interesting and much more complex than something as simple as “it’s the thought that counts.” You probably won’t see it, not at first. But if you just tug on the strings a little and consider the implications, the Buddhist conception of choice in the formation of karma both imposes an awesome responsibility and venerates the (evolutionarily speaking, relatively new) virtue of rationality:
According to the texts, karma is qualified by the nature of such choice. Harmful consequences devolve from akusala (unskilled) acts, which are motivated by any of the three roots of suffering: greed, hatred, and delusion. Their opposites, nonattachment, loving-kindness, and wisdom motivate kusala (skillful) acts and provide the conditions for beneficial and pleasurable results. There are also those acts, called avyakata, which are unmotivated by any of the above and are effectively neutral.
(That was Macy.)
Do you see it yet?
Let’s just review. Karma is a way of understanding how the things we do help to shape us, and how we then, in turn, shape the things we do. It is a co-arising of identity. But this co-arising is not determinative of our future, it is only influential; it shapes us, but we still have the ability at any moment to choose a path different than the one favored by our own karmic tendencies. And even then, the actions that shape us are not the actions themselves, but the motivations that underlie those actions. Random chance does not affect one’s karma at all.
So . . . who we are depends to a large but not a determinative degree on the motivations we exercise when we choose our actions. Moreover, most of the motivations we have for choosing to do something do not affect our karmic identity. The passage above cites only 6 possible motivations that can affect our karma – three are “unskilled” motivations that generate bad karma (harmful consequences) and three are “skilled” motivations that generate good karma (beneficial consequences). The entirety of all the rest of the possible motives we might have for choosing to do anything at all are “karma-neutral.”
* * *
I promise, I’m going to get to the election and you may already have sussed out where I’m heading with this, but I really want to make a slight digression because I think it will be important to the final conclusion.
This discussion about “skillful” and “unskillful” motivations reminds me why I think Buddhism provides a much more useful framework for thinking about human conflict than do the traditional concepts of Judeo-Christian thought, which tend to cast conflict in terms of “good” and “evil,” “right” and “wrong,” “crime” and “punishment.” Especially in our culture, those terms are very good at getting an emotional rise out of people, they are very good at whipping people up into a froth, but they are extremely counterproductive at trying to arrive at any kind of non-violent resolution.
Calling somebody you’re in an argument with “evil” has the same effect as calling them “crazy”: you basically are announcing that you intend to kill them, or at least beat them into submission. I’ve been watching this political dynamic play out domestically for going on 20 years now, and it is one of the ancillary reasons I’m a liberal.
Oh, I’m a liberal for good substantive reasons too. Ask me to defend my liberal economic policies, my liberal social policies, my liberal foreign relations policies, I’ve thought ‘em all out and I like to think I can discuss these issues intelligently and rationally. But policy discussion seems to have gone away in my country.
For years I watched conservatives as they stopped disagreeing with me and started demonizing me. Literally. Ann Coulter publishes books about liberals with titles like “Godless,” and “Treason,” and “Mugged,” and “Demonic.” Oh, wait . . . let me give you the full title: Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America. It’s not that Coulter disagrees with any of those well thought-out ideas that I’d actually enjoy discussing with her, it’s that I’m a demon from hell out to destroy everything that good Americans hold dear.
Got it.
* * *
Anyway . . . the point is that calling someone “evil” ends the discussion, and requires you to do nothing less than flat-out destroy that person. That’s why I like “skillful” and “unskillful” when it comes to critiquing somebody else’s conduct. I’m sure that if I told someone what they just did was “unskillful” they wouldn’t be really happy with me, but at least I’m not labeling them “evil,” which would mean I’d have no choice but to kill them. An “unskillful action” at least holds at the promise that the actor can improve.
Now, what are the three motivations that the Buddha identified as rendering one’s actions “unskillful”? Oh, yeah. They were (i) greed, (ii) hatred, and (iii) delusion. I have to say that when I first read that list my immediate thought was: Aren’t those pretty much the only reasons anyone would ever vote for Donald Trump?
I mean, let’s take them one at a time.
Greed – okay, I guess that makes sense. Trump’s tax plan has been publicly available for a while now and he has promised to cut the taxes of the super wealthy. I suppose there are some Trump voters who are already very, very wealthy and who decided to vote for him because they figured, Hey, a little more wouldn’t hurt, right?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there weren’t a lot of those voters. Trump’s plan helps only a very small fraction of the country so most of his voters couldn’t be motivated by simple greed, but I assume at least a few of them were.
(By the way, those who were motivated because they thought they were going to get money if he was the President don’t count here; they are addressed a little bit later, below.)
Hatred – yeah, yeah . . . I know what you’re thinking and you’re mostly right – I’m sure the vast majority of the Trump votes were cast out of hatred. But I also think the hatred vote is a little more nuanced than we liberals are inclined to credit it with.
First, I cannot begin to tell you how tired I am of reading the same argument repurposed over and over again in a plaintive screed that won’t someone please, please think of the poor disrespected Trump voter? These are the articles that tell us that because someone voted for Trump this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are a racist (heaven forfend!). No, they just voted because they feel their lives are being overlooked and they wanted to give a big, fat middle-finger to the educated professionals they believe are looking down on them.
To which I say . . . that is fucking hate, you idiot ink-wranglers. Hate doesn’t become less hate because it’s directed at bleeding-heart liberal white college-educated male do-gooders like myself as opposed to black or brown or immigrant or female workers. If you voted for Trump because you’re pissed off and you wanted to throw a pissy-hissy-shit-fit, then you voted for hate and I’ll come back to you in just a moment.
But, of course, there’s the other, rather more vocal contingent of the hate-voters. The racists, the bigots, the xenophobes, the Islamaphobes, the people who are now chanting “build that wall” at Latino middle-school kids, the people who caused college students to complain to my female, Indian-born, college professor friend that they had been subjected to racist slurs (and I’m guessing they went to her because they had identified her as one of their own, someone who might now, like them, be in danger because of the election, and even the thought of her in danger worries me to no end and makes me feel like raging hard against something that I cannot find) . . . . If you are one of the people who voted because “Trump is gonna put those people back in their places,” then you are a member of the hate vote.
The Deluded – these people. These fucking people. These people get my special scorn, not least because every member of my family (except, surprisingly, my extremely racist grandmother, who voted for Hillary) fall into this category.
These are the people who object when you say that Donald Trump ran a campaign of hatred and fear and bigotry and bile. No, he didn’t, they will tell you, he was just running against ‘the Establishment.’ He’s not really a racist.
To which I say: Okay, let’s take a vote. You don’t think he’s a racist, I think he is. Hhhmmmmm . . . . who will we pick for the tie-breaker? Hey, I know! How about the Ku Klux Klan! They’re fucking experts at racism and – guess what? – they think he’s a fucking racist! And you lied down with him!
Seriously, if anybody is asking me to take their assessment about Trump’s racism over that of the Ku Klux Fucking Klan . . . well, you just better be ready to come at me hard with your own bad-ass racism. You’d better be four times as racist as the KKK if you want me to believe that you know more about racism than they do. What you can not do is tell me (i) Sean, I’m not a racist myself, but (ii) that guy that the Ku Klux Klan really likes? . . . take it from me, he’s not a racist either.
(Seriously, Mom, fuck you.)
But just as with the Hatred votes, the Deluded votes have nuance. Let’s discuss a couple subsets. We already covered the people who voted for Trump but insist he’s not a racist, or that they’re not, or that it doesn’t really matter. The bottom line is, if you think that you can vote for a racist and it doesn’t make you a racist, then you are deluded. (And seriously . . . just what kind of a message do you think you are sending when you vote for an obvious racist? How is it not “Racism: Not a Deal-Breaker in America!” And how is that not a deal-breaker for you?)
But I have to admit, I think an even larger contingent of the deluded are the people who voted for Trump either because (i) they think terrible things about Hillary Clinton, or (ii) they don’t know anything about either candidate, and they picked the guy they knew from TeeVee, or (iii) they paid attention, they listened to Trump, and they really do think he’s going to make America white great again. The first group were deluded because they got bad information. The second group were deluded because they didn’t get any information. The third group were deluded because they got the information they needed, but they failed to think it through correctly.
And here’s why Buddhism rocks. Because none of these people – no, not even the people who voted for him because they were deluded into thinking he would make them rich (I told you I’d come back for you fuckwits) – get a pass. None of them escape the consequences of their actions. Acting under a delusion isn’t okay because you lack critical thinking skills, or you couldn’t bother to get better information, or because you didn’t think it mattered, or because you lack basic reasoning . . . acting in a deluded manner is unskillful.
That, of course, is how the Buddhists would put it. And, personally, I think that is glorious for what it asserts: the primacy of rational thought. Not tribalism, not instinct, but rational thought – to act skillfully (i.e., “not evil”) – you have to think.
One of the mantras that’s been repeating in my brain, over and over, for days now, goes something like this: Two thousand years of Christian teachings. Twenty-five hundred years of Western Ethics. Five hundred years of valorizing Rationality and the Enlightenment. And none of it – none of it – could compare to a screed of hatred and fear and loathing and bigotry. We are only chimpanzees, screeching at each other and flinging poo. But, in our case, the ‘poo’ is machine gun bullets and nuclear weapons and the ability to poison our entire fucking planet.
Of those three things – the Christian thought, the Western ethics, the Rationality and Enlightenment – it might be unsurprising that I value the Rationality and Enlightenment the most. It hurts me to see it defeated by fear and anger and hate. Which is one of the reasons I picked up a bit when I realized, reading Macy’s book, that 2500 years ago it wasn’t just “Western Ethics” (i.e., the Greeks) that got started, it was Buddhism too, which connected even then the “good” with the “rational.”
We don’t tend to conflate the good with the rational here in the Judeo-Christian West – shit, we’ve got an entire popular culture dedicated to telling us that the “heart,” or the “gut,” or the “soul,” or “basic common sense,” is much, much better than any kind of sophistication or expertise or carefully, thought-out logic, or “book learnin’.”
But that idea, popular though it may be, is fucking wrong. Rationality and reason are the only things that make us humans different from all the other fucking monkeys, and we dishonor ourselves and our birthright when we forget that.
So let me put into words something I want to say directly to all Trump’s supporters: what you did, when you voted for Trump, no matter how much you might claim you “thought you were making the right call” was a sin. I would call it “unskillful” because I think that is a better word for moving forward. But if you want the closest approximation of the meaning I am trying to get to, the closest approximately people in the Judeo-Christian Western culture can get: it was evil. You committed evil. And you always will have done, for the rest of your days.
Actually, let me be even clearer about what I need to say. We heard from a lot of people this election who all had the same message: Donald Trump is not a difference in degree, Donald Trump is a difference in kind. That is an important distinction. I want it made clear that I do not think that voting for Republicans is evil, I do not think that voting for even hard-core conservatives is evil.
I did not have this same reaction when my family members (several of whom I used to love) voted for George W. Bush. I thought they were incorrect in their assessments, but I could see that how they were acting was not clearly delusional, it was merely misguided.
But Donald Trump ran a campaign with no ideas, with no policies, with no purpose other than to elect himself president. He ran because he wanted all the rest of us to validate him. He offered literally, absolutely nothing. Choosing Trump over Clinton was not an exercise of rational choice, it was the affirmative decision not to act rationally. (Always assuming, of course, you weren’t one of those many, many, many other Trump voters motivated primarily by hatred and, oh yes, greed.)
* * *
I am not a good Buddhist. I am, as I always have claimed to be, only an aspiring Buddhist. Ultimately, I realize now that what has brought me a bit of mental peace was the understanding, finally, that I could look at all those millions and millions of Americans, at my own family, at all those people who let me down and who told me last Tuesday that your idea of America isn’t welcome here, that I could view them not as evil, but as unskillful; their vote was a sin, but it doesn’t have to define them. We can all of us, together, still make this country what it is supposed to be. We just gotta be a little better.
But in the back of my little southern Christian-inherited mind, what makes me want to reach for that with them is the assurance, vouchsafed by the Buddhist notion of karma as the mutual conditioning of action and identity, that they ultimately will bear the consequences of their votes. The rest of us will too, of course, and that seems unfair, but after the Horrors To Come these people will be worse off by far because – in their heart of hearts – they will know that both misery and theirs will be their fault, and you and I will not bear that burden.
So, yeah . . . turns out I’m not particularly skillful, either; dress it up however I like, I still find that the easiest way to find a reason to go on is to trust that the wicked will be punished and that I will get to gloat. But still I can work until then – for myself and for them, too, the great deluded and the vastly unskilled – to get just a little bit better along the way.
What else am I gonna do?