Nature within her inmost self divides
To trouble men with having to take sides.
—Robert Frost
The single most powerful idea that needs to be seeded into
world culture as rapidly as possible is that we are one interdependent whole on
this planet. Difficult as the implications may be for us to grasp, it will have
only a salutary effect upon world politics, economics, cultural diversity, and
religious practice.
Going further, it could be asserted that the internalization
in the human mind and heart of this idea is the way evolution itself will
manifest itself at this unfolding moment of history.
For relief from such headache-inducing abstractions, I often
walk a path that takes me along a tidal river to a midden, a cliff-high mound
of oyster shells left from the summer gatherings of indigenous Americans over millennia.
The midden slopes to a beach where horseshoe crabs forage along the sandy
shallows—a species so resilient that it has sustained itself unchanged for 445
million years.
The process that has allowed horseshoe crabs to flourish for
so long has operated instinctually, on “automatic,” in a roller coaster ride up
into breathtaking diversity and down into five vertiginous moments of mass
extinction, as life-forms jostled for their place in the ecosystem. Those forms
that adapted survived. Those that did not disappeared, leaving only their
fossil remains. Scientists tell us we are into a sixth dizzying plunge as
thousands of species go extinct around us. Natural selection continues to
operate at full throttle.
Meanwhile an “unnatural” factor, human consciousness, entered
the scene. In what has been only an instant of evolutionary time, it became
dominant—rather, it has assumed dominance over the system while in reality remaining
totally subject to the system’s every law and principle. The “other” in the
twoness of self and other is not only the perceived enemy or opposing
viewpoint. The other is also the natural world that until now we have perceived
as an infinite resource subject to our command and exploitation, rather than as
the ground of our own sustained vitality. We can be no healthier than it.
If the Chinese continue to operate their coal-fired power
plants, the largest single source of carbon emissions in the world, the
military-economic competition between China and the United States will become
at best irrelevant and at worst a potential disaster. If the United States
continues to use up a third of all global resources, it will matter little whether
Iran produces a nuclear weapon or not.
These ecological realities behind our conflicts rarely
surface in political campaigns because we are entranced by obsolete competitive
metaphors: our politics are not the civil contribution of workable ideas based
in interdependency. Instead they are a Superbowl contest.
Superbowl twoness is the obsolete thought-paradigm that
informs everything we do. We compete from birth to death. We compare ourselves
endlessly with others. We envy
those who are wealthier or better looking or apparently happier, and look down
upon those less fortunate than ourselves with a distancing pity or contempt. In
a thousand daily ways, we take sides. Especially in the United States our
politics, our legislatures and courts, executive leaders, and mass-media
discourse are dominated by polarized allegiance to conservative or progressive opinion.
A Republican president and vice-president administer a
torture program of global reach, a program that would subject them to potential
criminal trial by Nuremburg standards, but they have enough support among both
Republicans and Democrats—given our fear of the terrorist “other”—to receive a
pass. A Democratic president supervises a drone program that violates the
sovereignty of other nations and kills innocents at his personal command, also
a program that could arguably subject him to potential criminal trial by
Nuremburg standards. But he too enjoys enough support to receive a pass. We
citizens whose collective will our leaders are sworn to enact continue in our
moral ambivalence—our troubled twoness. Instead of the practical imperative of
the Golden Rule, that bow toward the truth of interdependence found in all the
major world religions, we live by the half-truth of “you’re either with us or
against us.”
At the fateful moment in October 1962 when superpower
competition, in the form of the Cuban Missile Crisis, brought the planet as
close as it has been to thermonuclear annihilation, who was the enemy? Who was
the “other”? Was it not war itself? Was it not ignorance itself? Why is this
not equally true in every competitive confrontation from the international to
the intimately personal?
We humans emerged from a uni-verse.
This is the single context out of which came all our religions, all our
cultural and ethnic diversity, our constantly calibrated sense of twoness. The
great next step of the evolutionary process is from twoness to oneness, not as
a New Age bromide but as an evolutionary necessity. This step can only take
place in the way individual humans feel and think, as we, we upon whose
decisions rests the fate of all life-forms on the planet, mature into
willingness to look into how we can contribute to the health of the whole
system.
Frost’s couplet distills the depth to which competition is
structured into evolution. But we are awakening to the fundamental unity behind
our twoness. As a Peace Corps volunteer once said, “The earth is a sphere, and
a sphere has only one side. We are all on the same side.” Muslims, Christians,
Alawites, Sunnis, Iranians, Jews, fans of Limbaugh, fans of Maddow, horseshoe
crabs—we’re all in this together.
