Originally published in Loaves & Fishes, Clairvaux Farm, Elkton, MD.
Where are all the schools and clinics?
Where are all the jobs and homes?
Where are all that people need
to really stand up on their own?
— “Our Mothers Built This City,” Tom Chapin & Si Kahn
This is the age of the self-made man.
Do unto others before others can.
— “The Guilts,” Jez Lowe and the Bad Pennies
In The Questions of King Milinda, a work written approximately 150 b.c., the Greek King Milinda seeks a discussion with Bhante Nagasena, a Buddhist monk. Before engaging the king, Nagasena makes a distinction between the discourse of kings and the discourse of the wise, asking Milinda which discussion he would like to have. When asked the difference, Nagasena replies that when the wise discourse, “…there is a turning over and an unravelling of the subject; then there is a refutation and an acknowledgement of a mistake; distinctions and contra-distinctions are drawn; yet, thereby, they are not angered.” However, “When kings are conversing, sire, they approve of some matter and order punishment for anyone who disagrees with that matter, saying: ‘Inflict a punishment on him.’…” Understanding Nagasena’s point, the king chooses the wise discourse and tells the monk to proceed and speak without fear.
The kingly discourse still prevails much more often than we would like to think. In my meetings with groups of all kinds of people, their discussion of common problems and how to resolve them is often circumscribed by their fear of what someone in power will think of the suggested solution, even though that someone is not there in the room with them. Whether it is a group of housing advocates or a gathering of tenants, the perception, that someone may “order punishment for anyone who disagrees,” pervades their deliberations and limits not only their actions, but their speech and their thought.
What is sobering, if not surprising, is to see a housing advocate who, in a gathering of colleagues, would resent the merest hint of deception or control, yet in another setting, will lead a group to ignore or to dismiss the opinion of his or her “clients.” Lapsing into a kingly frame of mind, s/he influences group opinion and decision-making by an exercise of power of which s/he would be angered and humiliated to be the victim. S/he is now the one who “knows” and who is outraged at any question of his or her decision. S/he has the years of experience. S/he has the reputation. S/he does not need to listen and does not have anything to learn. And s/he has the power to punish. The kingly discourse is always authored by s/he who knows better than you. It is spoken for your own good, as they say.
What is even more confusing about such behavior is that this same advocate may be a strong supporter of his or her clients becoming “self-sufficient.” As Friedrich Engels noted in The Condition of the Working Class in England, ruling class crusades against “dependency” go hand in hand with periods of social meannness.
All poverty and oppression are relationships in which there are differentials of power and wealth. A relationship cannot be improved by “correcting” only the disadvantaged end of it, although this is precisely the conventional wisdom –from therapy to welfare repeal– when it comes to fixing poor people.
There is a saying: “The life you ordered has arrived.” It is a reminder that I create consequences for myself by my thoughts, words, and deeds. Well, the world we ordered has arrived.
We seem to be in an era when we are satisfied, instead of building community, to feed on it, weakening it, sucking the life out of it , and spitting out the bones. We are encouraged to live heedlessly, and we take that for permission: our consumption, our mobility, our de facto acceptance of ourselves as consumers and taxpayers first and only then as citizens and neighbors and family members. Our impulse-oriented environment offers our restless, untrained minds endless opportunity to be diverted and distracted. Citizenship has become effectively synonymous with short attention span, lack of political memory, and consumer “choice.”
We used to be appalled at the disinvestment of neighborhoods and fought to correct it. Now whole cities are becoming corporate franchises, and the disinvestment is on a transnational scale.
We spent huge sums out-arming the “central command economies.” We spent almost as much making sure that their bad examples did not infect the Third World, even (or especially) when democratically chosen. For the time being, the world is safe for corporations to prowl and pillage, to patent all the life-forms in the biosphere, and to reach for one big corporate culture.
Real wages continue to fall. Unions as a whole are weathering too many attacks to be able to protect themselves, much less organize the unorganized. Worker displacement has become the rule rather than the exception. The sweatshops that we tolerated, and even funded with tax dollars, abroad have come home to roost. The role of the worker is to take his or her place in a low-wage economy and work more hours per week for less, regardless of the effect on his or her family and of whether he or she can escape poverty.
For the time being, it is a block grant world for the poor and a tax break world for the rich. It would seem that the wealthy do not need to be improved or made less dependent. It seems that corporations are in no need of doing more of their share.
What does self-sufficiency mean in such a context? Can it mean anything other than a narrow, shallow preparation of people to take the place assigned them in the global workforce?
Confucius said that a human being is an opportunity for kindness. The first virtue taught by the Buddha was that of generosity to the poor and needy and the homeless, mendicant monk. The sanitization of city centers through anti-panhandling, anti-sleeping, and loitering and vagrancy ordinances denies our most human impulses and our most basic spiritual truths.
What these ordinances affirm is that we really do not want any creative, individual acts of self-sufficiency. Being self-reliant enough to live hand-to-mouth publicly is not, apparently, part of the plan for the world we are building.
We seem to be reconciled to, even happy with, professional helpers who beg on behalf of “their” people in need. They can even do this on the street and draw attention to themselves doing it. But begging that eliminates the middle man is discouraged. It seems that we feel the giver should not be placed too close to the fellow citizen at risk. D.H. Lawrence said that when the heart breaks in a society, people lose their compassion for one another and develop social benevolence. The Buddha said that compassion –one of the four great Unlimited Minds– has a near enemy, which is pity.
It is a principle of Buddhism that the world is beginningless and endless. It was never created. But it is constantly in the process of co-creation. This is especially, but not exclusively, true of the social world.
The world we ordered has arrived. But it is already passing out of existence, and we can rebuild more skillfully. Both modern science and the wisdom literature of the world’s spiritual traditions tell us we are nothing but relationships. Unravel the skein of wool and there is no skein there. This is the principle of Inherent Comradeship. We are only relationships. And relationships which need transforming need to be mutually transformed.
The great Thai spiritual leader, Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, expressed the heart of the Buddha’s message as this:
‘Nothing whatsoever should be clung to as “I” or “mine.”’
“I think therefore I am” is considered by many to be the essence of Western philosophy. But “I want therefore I am” is closer to the way things take place. Our normal existence is a play of appetites. Untrained, we tend to be subject to the three poisons: greed (or lust), hatred (or aversion), and delusion (or ignorance). Unless we undertake a process of self-development which allows us to approach every moment with greater equanimity, we remain completely subject to the poisons. But through this development, we can come to understand more and more clearly reality as it is, and to take a wise approach to it: “I am not this. This is not mine. This is not myself.”
An important discourse of the Buddha concerns government, in this case, the “Wheel-Turning Monarch,” an ideal ruler. This particular king observed all of the principles of ideal kingship except one, for “…he did not give property to the needy, and as a result poverty became rife.” This lead to theft, capital punishment, the arming of the citizenry, murder, and the deterioration of society.
“Thus, from the not giving of property to the needy, poverty became rife, from the growth of poverty, the taking of what was not given increased, from the increase of theft, the use of weapons increased, from the increased use of weapons, the taking of life increased — and from the increase in the taking of life, people’s life-span decreased, their beauty decreased…” – The Lion’s Roar on the Turning of the Wheel
The society unravels to the point where people are living in caves and mistake one another for wild beasts. But then the rebuilding of society begins when a small group of people decides to abstain from the taking of life. Society progresses from strength to strength until the entire land is populated by prosperous, happy, long-lived human beings. The stage is set for the coming of the next Buddha, Metteya.
“Then King Sankha will re-erect the palace once built by King Maha-Panada and, having lived in it, will give it up and present it to the ascetics and Brahmins, the beggars, the wayfarers, the destitute.”
I do not think that we will have to fall so far. I think that we are ready to rebuild from the foundation of loving-kindness and wise discourse. Many have already begun. We will open our arms to one another. We will link arms. We will realize our Inherent Comradeship. We will renounce evil, unskillful ways. And we will rebuild “with room for all.” Do not be afraid to speak.