Originally published in Loaves & Fishes, Clairvaux Farm, Elkton, MD.
1.
If each of us contemplates our ancestral line, we go back to a place and time where all of our people –and everybody else– were poor and working people originally. Of course, a just and modest society would offer us all a similar but better state: non-greed, needs met, useful work, time for self-development, and strong ties to one another. That is why many people say that the working class is the only class with a future.
Of course, a class of people, like a person, is not an unchanging identity, but a set of changing relations to its environment. In Here I Stand, Paul Robeson defended a life lived in pursuit of individual excellence, complete personal powerfulness, and full human solidarity. There is probably not a better homegrown United States model in this century-about-to-close than he. One passage describes his coming to fuller understanding of his African-ness through exposure to the English working class. I quote from the end of that passage:
“…I recall how a friend in Manchester deepened my understanding of the oneness of mankind as he explained how closely together the two of us were bound by the web of history and human suffering and aspiration. He told me of the life of bitter hardship and toil which his father and grandfather had known in the mills of that great textile center in England, and of how the cotton which his forefathers wove linked them with other toilers whose sweat and toil produced that cotton in faraway America — the Negro slaves, my own people, my own father. The workers of Manchester had supported the side of Abolition in the American Civil War, though the Union blockade of the South cut off the supply of cotton and resulted in greater hardship for them, while at the same time the mill-owners and their government had supported the side of Slavery. So here was a further insight and understanding of those forces in world life which make for common interests and make real the concept of international brotherhood.” 1Paul Robeson, Here I Stand (Boston: Beacon, 1988), 54.
This same generation of English textile workers welcomed Gandhi as a comrade and friend on his visit, despite his having led a campaign in India to produce homespun and woven cloth and to avoid the purchase of English-made dry goods. The working people of England were able to recognize themselves in the struggles of other peoples and to respond with generosity and compassion to them despite the cost which those struggles took on their own lives.
This is not what we usually think of when we speak of generosity, unfortunately; and it is the gulf between our usual notion of generosity and the generosity-in-solidarity of which Robeson and Gandhi were recipients that defines our situation. As Paulo Freire points out in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “The generosity of the oppressors is nourished by an unjust order, which must be maintained in order to justify that generosity.” 2Paul Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (NY: Continuum, 2001), 60. This is generosity at the moral and material expense of the recipient, generosity which, as Tolstoy pointed out, rides the back of the “recipient” and will do anything to “help” the recipient, except quit riding, all the while both patronizing that person for being in an inferior position and being on guard to detect signs of “ingratitude” and possible enmity from the person who is the object of the benevolence.
The generosity of the English workers was not so much the generosity of giving as it was the generosity of understanding. They knew the struggle from their own experience and accepted the cost associated with supporting the struggle of other peoples as the price of solidarity with them. They did not make the mistake of seeing their lives and their identities as free-standing, independent things but as interdependent parts of a greater whole from which they –rather than being diminished– took strength. They had opened to the great love and understanding that come from seeing shared ground, similar roots, and common aims.
Today, many poor people are looked at through an all-pervading economistic lens as being “dependent,” the newest variant on “undeserving.” What would happen if we were to regard them instead with the generosity of mind that the English textile workers displayed toward enslaved Africans in the United States or toward the khadi movement in India?
We would see through the very notion of “dependency,” as a value-laden and confused notion which not only does not do justice to the complexity of the situation of the poor but which serves as an oppressive instrument against them. We would reject the notion of “dependency,” because we would know that all that lives depends upon, and needs, all the rest in order to be, and that nothing stands independently of all else. We would recognize that being “independent” was not only an unrealistic goal, but also, seen from another viewpoint, too limited as a goal, since what human beings strive for is not an illusory” self-sufficiency,” but self-determination, self-motivation, or “self-agency,” as bell hooks has said. We would see at once that “dependency” is a misleading and subjective way to state the problem of the poor; it is rather the immediate problem of the managers of the political economy, not of the poor, who know that they and everyone is dependent upon other living things and the environment, and that even the wealthy are dependent on the economy and on tax breaks and subsidies from the public treasury, with only the poor held up to continual scrutiny for their “dependency.” In addition, we would see, since it is so subjectively used, and applied so partially and consistently to one group –the most vulnerable– that it is simply a pejorative term, a kind of name-calling, like “chiseler” or “pauper.” And, finally, we would recognize instantly that “dependency” serves as the basis for a faulty analysis of the situation of the poor and leads to bad social policy and incomplete social change. All of this would come to us as a rush of insight at the use of terms such as “dependency,” if we were steeped in a daily practice of generosity of spirit which recognized, rather than denied, our interdependence.
2.
“…the Buddhist religious life is exemplified by the monk, an alms mendicant who is totally dependent and defenseless…” ~ Ajahn Sumedho, The Mind and the Way. 3Ajahn Sumedho, The Mind and the Way: Buddhist Reflections on Life (Boston: Wisdom, 1995)
The Buddha saw society as based in a social contract, rather than divinely ordained, and as guided by the principle of mutual self-interest. He saw democratic guidance as the best way and developed the sangha, his religious fellowship of seekers of the Way, along such lines.
He taught that we are more like the ripple of the water when a pebble hits it than we are like the pebble. We have our life in others. We find our identity, impermanent as it is, through our many ties to one another and to the earth and to all that lives and to all that does not. His was a gospel of interdependence, which left no room for an ultimate and omnipotent deity or even for a “lord.” In contrast to the predominant thought of his day, he discovered, upon examination, no transcendent entity, substance, or authority by which to measure, judge, and command. We are left to do our best by and with one another. He set little value on blind obedience, devotion, or faith; and he exhorted all to examine things for themselves and to be lights unto themselves.
He set himself the task of finding the Way to the overcoming of suffering. When he had found it, he proclaimed that he taught only two things: suffering and its cessation. The way to the overcoming of suffering he realized through the contemplation of the arising and ceasing of all phenomena and the discovery of a principle behind the arising and ceasing. Instead of a divine substance or eternal philosophical truth, he pointed to causal relationships: “This is because that is.” “I am because you are.” “Poverty is because wealth is.” His enlightenment came with his direct understanding of “dependent arising,” as it is called. Everything depends upon everything else. This was the basis of the liberation which he offered.
We are taught to live without questioning our aversion (or repulsion), on the one hand, and our desire (or greed), on the other. These are two of the Three Poisons, the other, and most potent being our ignorance. Through training and development, we may awake to the impermanent and ownerless nature of all that is. Nothing in experience is either abiding or leads, if I am aware, to the conclusion that it refers to, or belongs to, “me.” Our loathing or avoidance of some aspect of reality or our craving and pursuit of some other aspect are not based in understanding of the nature of things.
The Buddha spoke in one very important discourse (Cakkavatti Sihanada Sutta) about the path which a society takes when it neglects to make provision for the poor. Poverty leads to theft among the poor, who are dealt with harshly, since no other way seems to work.
“13. ‘Now when men heard, brethren, that those who committed theft were thus put to death, they thought: “Let us also now have sharp swords made ready for ourselves, and then, when we commit theft from people, we will ourselves also inflict on them the final penalty and put an end to them by cutting off their heads.”
‘So they got sharp swords, and started to sack village and town and city, and to commit highway robbery. And those whom they robbed they also finished off, by beheading them.
14. ‘Thus, because provision was not made for the poor, poverty became widespread, and from this stealing increased; from the spread of stealing violence grew, and from the growth of violence the destruction of life became common; from the frequency of murder the span of life became shorter and people became coarser…’” 4The Buddha’s Philosophy of Man, Trevor Ling, ed. (NY: Everyman, 1981), 119.
Because society is not organized on the principle of what is mutually beneficial, it eventually deteriorates to the point where human beings live solitary lives in caves far from one another out of fear. It is only then, when the society has “hit bottom,” that it begins to rebuild according to a way of understanding and love.
3.
Life has as one of its most important characteristics that it is self-organizing. This holds true on many different levels of organization. It holds true for the social sphere, as well, although we are less apt to notice, living as we do in a society which takes for granted the importance of control. This translates practically into a situation where I control you, and we control them. We tend to limit to “safe”places the opportunities for the people of the “wrong” kind to demonstrate their abilities to organize themselves. We are fearful of the risk of poor and working people becoming agents and creators on too significant a scale, of becoming too nearly our peers and our fellows. We secretly believe that it is better that they remain “recipients” and cases for social benevolence. Out of our greed for “more” and our aversion to what might result from equity, we allow our suffering to dictate our policy.
At the beginning of this century-about-to-close, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in John Brown of the struggle which the “wrong” kind of person has to wage, in the face of thoughts, words, and actions which are poured forth by the possessors and controllers of the world, the possessors and controllers in ourselves, by the illusion of ownership.
“The odds are overwhelming against you — wealth, tradition, learning and guns. Be reasonable. Accept the dole of charity and the cant of missionaries and sink contentedly to your place as humble servants and helpers of the white world.’ If this has not been effective, threats have been used: ‘If you continue to complain, we will withdraw all aid, boycott your labor, cease to help support your schools and let you die and disappear from the land in ignorance, crime and disease.’ Still the black man has pushed on, has continued to protest, has refused to die out and disappear, and to-day stands as physically the most virile element in America, intellectually among the most promising, and morally the most tremendous and insistent of the social problems of the New World. Not even the silence of his friends, or of those who ought to be the friends of struggling humanity, has silenced him.” 5W. E. B. DuBois, John Brown (NY: International, 1981).
If the world is ownerless, if there is no king and no lord either to obey or to be forced to emulate, if our model of what it is to be human is not the pebble but the ripple, if we are the lamps to lighten the way for one another, if we can live a little more continually in that generosity of mind and heart which does not forget where we come from, eventually we can realize the enlightened society, the realm of loving-kindness, the meeting of friends.
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Footnotes
- 1Paul Robeson, Here I Stand (Boston: Beacon, 1988), 54.
- 2Paul Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (NY: Continuum, 2001), 60.
- 3Ajahn Sumedho, The Mind and the Way: Buddhist Reflections on Life (Boston: Wisdom, 1995)
- 4The Buddha’s Philosophy of Man, Trevor Ling, ed. (NY: Everyman, 1981), 119.
- 5W. E. B. DuBois, John Brown (NY: International, 1981).