All Together Now

The less than ideal outcome of the latest climate talks in Scotland reminds us of an inconvenient truth: as yet there is no human authority on Earth powerful enough to enforce the preservation of the commons. Would any country seriously consider military invasion to stop Brazilian deforestation, up 22 percent from last year, or India’s continuing addiction to coal, or the U.S. auctioning off new leases for oil production in the Gulf of Mexico?

 

This lack of authority to enforce global agreements necessary to human survival also sadly weakens the fragile international institutions that are intended to help us get beyond the scourge of war, especially nuclear war, and beyond our third great challenge, global pandemics. As the courageous Greta Thunberg bluntly put it, it’s mostly “blah blah blah,” rationalizing a status quo that isn’t working.

 

With nuclear weapons, military force has reached a level of destruction which contradicts its own professed goals. Let alone that the arms race has become grossly irrelevant to our environmental and health crises, though it can still extinguish us even more rapidly than eco-degradation or plague. The deterrence system represents the utter opposite of the universal Golden Rule of interdependence found in all the world’s great religions: if you try to destroy me you will die trying. 

 

The autocratic leadership of figures like Putin, Trump, Orban, Assad, or Erdogan demonstrates the limited conception of self-interest dominating our international cultural and economic structures from top to bottom, including polarized rivalries within democracies.

 

Sea level rise in Miami will flood gilded Mar-a-Lago as surely as the humble homes of hotel maids and fast-food laborers—giving a new meaning to the biblical “rain falling on the just and unjust.” If nuclear war ensues, prosperous arms manufacturers will be vaporized and irradiated and nuclear wintered along with the rest of us. And we have seen how Covid can infect presidents and humble front-line workers alike.

 

We’re either on track toward general hell on earth—or we are in a time of perturbation that heralds a paradigm shift. To what? To a world build upon the truth of our radical interdependence with each other and the living system.

 

We humans have so much more in common now than what divides us because our own security and health depend on the security and health of our adversaries. We can criticize the Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs and the Chinese can criticize our corporate prisons, but even the contest between autocracy and democracy now nests in the context of the threatened commons, requiring a level of cooperation that transcends our critiques of each other’s systems.

                                                                                       

Noah Harari estimates that we need invest only 2% of global G.D.P. to achieve full sustainability and head off the worst effects of climate. More and more countries are realizing how acute the need has become to prevent nuclear war, and they are ratifying the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, leaving the nine nuclear powers increasingly on the wrong side of history. And if we truly realized the urgency, the so-called “advanced” nations would mobilize our medical resources against Covid just as we mobilized for two world wars.

 

There are interesting proposals out of China for a super electrical grid that would connect continents, allowing wind and solar energy to be available even to the side of the earth turned nightly away from the sun. Would it be such a terrible thing for projects such as this to strengthen the bonds of interdependence—even between, especially between, adversaries?

 

Cynics and skeptics should check out indications showing that Americans are much more open than it might appear to innovations in global governance. But where deep change needs to happen, there’s no substitute for building agreement on principle. One principle that applies to all our challenges: our true self-interest lies in the common good, local and planetary. Whatever form our future takes, as a Peace Corps volunteer once wrote, ”the Earth is a sphere, and a sphere has only one side. We’re all on the same side.”

 

A Second Civil War?

 

 

I believe the Second Amendment, whatever the Founders meant by it, was never meant to result in a nation with more guns than there are people, and that it is common sense to license gun ownership in the same way we require a license to drive. You may believe that the Second Amendment is a fundamental bulwark against tyranny and reject any limits upon weapons.

 

You may believe that abortion is murder but capital punishment is not. I believe that abortion is serious and tragic, but still it is better that it be safe, legal and rare. I believe capital punishment is cruel and unusual and has been too capriciously and unjustly applied.

 

I believe that the scientific method, posing a hypothesis and testing it to see if it is true, indicates we are in the midst of a human-caused global climate emergency that will take a new level of cooperation among all the nations in the world. You may believe that the science of climate shows inconsistencies and that warming and cooling are natural cycles independent of human activity.

 

You may believe that wearing a mask during a pandemic is an intolerable encroachment on your freedom. I believe that freedom includes willingness to give up smaller freedoms for the greater freedom of the common good.

 

I believe that Donald Trump was the laziest, most self-serving and dangerously demagogic president in the history of our country, whose final tweet on January 7^th (“Remember this day forever!”) nailed his responsibility for the Capitol riot—or at least for not trying to stop it; you may believe he was authentic, tough-talking, good for our pocketbooks, and actually won re-election.

 

You may believe that Black Lives Matter is an incendiary and exclusionist movement. I believe that what Blacks have suffered here through slavery, Jim Crow, lynch mobs, and unfair treatment in housing, education, business and the law makes race the central theme of American politics and the ultimate measure of our failure as a country so far—and also of our future success if whites can finally acknowledge their privilege.

 

I believe that structural racism built into our culture by our history infects all our institutions, including the police, and deep police reform is required—not defunding, but more funding for training and mission clarification. You may believe that the police are only trying to do an almost impossible job as best they can and deserve uncritical praise for keeping us safe from extremists on both the left and the right.

 

You may believe that easy voting methods such as mail-in ballots will lead to fraud and put the Republican Party at a disadvantage. I believe not only that current technology can make voting convenient and safe from fraud but also that voting in national elections should be required.

 

I believe that the U.S. Senate as currently structured is flawed, paralyzed, and a hotbed of the rankest hypocrisy and corruption by special interests. You may believe that a few powerful senators are holding the line so that the nation gets the judges it needs to hold the line against widespread cultural decadence.

 

You may believe that Rush Limbaugh is a beacon of light in a gathering darkness of chaos and change. I believe that it was a travesty for a sneering hatemonger to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

 

I believe that nuclear weapons, far from keeping us safe, are a useless abomination and our country ought to lead the world in negotiating them out of existence. You may believe that nuclear weapons are an efficient way to prevent further war and the more we possess the stronger we are.

 

You may believe that because living expenses are different in different parts of the country, a universal minimum wage doesn’t make sense.

I believe that a national $15. minimum wage is the very least we can do for millions of people struggling to make ends meet. We can even subsidize it to make life easier for small business owners—for example with money we save by not renewing our nuclear arsenal.

 

I believe that sustainable energy is already proving how it will reinvigorate capitalism, put more people to work, and mitigate climate change all at once. You may believe that plans like the Green New Deal will result in unwanted “socialist” government control and the loss of jobs and profits in the fossil fuel sector.

 

You may believe that I am going to burn in eternal hell fire because I believe Jesus was a profound teacher, but don’t believe that I must believe in him to be “saved.” I believe that the Universe is in itself a dynamic, intelligent, unfolding process in which we humans are still trying to find our place, to figure out what it means to be mature and loving, and to learn to work together in harmony with each other and the system which produced us. I believe that all the great religions have more in common than not, first of all the Golden Rule.

 

Yes, such disagreements indicate a wide gap, even separate realities. But are they worth the agony and futility of a second Civil War? Are we wholly defined merely by our opinions? The great Sufic poet Rumi said: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” Kate Johnson, a Buddhist teacher, writes: “The Buddha said that friendship is the whole of holy life. To accomplish it, we need only overcome our fear of reaching out to one another.”

 

 

The Hill We Can Climb Together

 

 

The rhythmic recitation of the poet Amanda Gorman at the inauguration, her words counterpointed by her twirling hands, awoke a pleasant rush of what the Buddhists call sympathetic joy.

 

Even though Biden followed Obama, January 2021 may be even more of a Black lives moment. The primary in South Carolina that resuscitated Biden’s candidacy was followed by the crucial wins of Ossoff and Warnock in Georgia engendered by grueling hard work by Stacey Abrams and her volunteers.

 

As a classic white liberal (I’m even O.K. with calling myself a recovering unconscious white supremacist—there, that wasn’t so hard), I lived through the speeches and the tragic assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. My awakening was slow and remains unfinished. I learned a lot reading Jill Lepore’s history of the United States, “These Truths,” in which race becomes the inescapable theme of our whole national project. Black hopes were dashed in phase after phase of hideous reaction on the part of white people threatened by Black equality.

  

The Black writer who helped me begin to understand race as a white problem was James Baldwin, who urged me to question my white innocence—innocence, a.k.a. denial. The innocence of not being watched in stores, or not being mistaken for a congressional aide when you are the congressperson yourself, or not feeling mortal threat when a policeman stops your car, or not having to give “the talk” to your children about American bias. The innocence of an institutionalized privilege so profound and all-encompassing that it is the invisible taken-for-granted ocean in which we whites swim.

 

The departure of our bigot-in-chief is one more opportunity to confront our racist past and present. Our story is just not a simple feel good tale, like Trump’s anodyne propaganda piece “1776”—a perfect example of what Baldwin meant by white innocence. Instead it is a grand interweaving of love and hope and fear and hypocrisy and unimaginable cruelty. It begins with our founding fathers’ slave ownership at the same time they wrote that all are created equal, and extends forward to the extremist takeover of the Capitol a few weeks ago. When will we whites start to own up to both the light and the shadow, not just the nice bits?

 

“Black Lives Matter” is neither an exclusionary nor even a threatening assertion. To insist that it is confirms our devastating innocence—our denial. As President Kennedy asserted, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."

 

This is not only a political Black lives moment, but also a moment of flourishing for Black writers and artists. Many new films (“Moonlight,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “Thirteenth”), novels, and paintings open a window into the Black soul. Through Black art we whites can peel away a few layers of our own defensiveness if we’re open to it. Here’s a link to the powerful work by the immensely talented artist Kadir Nelson. His image of a Black man and his children on the beach crystallizes the realizable hope for a post-racial society. Amanda Gorman, who wants to be a president as well as a poet, seemed like a Kadir Nelson painting come to vibrant life.

 

At some point in the not-so-distant future, whites will become the racial minority in the United States. Why is that so terrifying to some of us— why must we see it as a win-lose? Black culture, tempered in the fires of slavery and Jim Crow and by myriad forms of rural and urban, Southern and Northern, discrimination, has deeply enriched our national life. In the face of repeated exclusion and abuse, Blacks have chosen to keep faith with the core promises of our Constitution. Their leaders, like the late John Lewis, are therefore in a position to make what Lewis called “good trouble”—holding our collective feet ever closer to the fire of our professed principles. Ms. Gorman will be of legal age to run for president in 2033. If I’m still around, I would joyfully vote to put myself in her capable hands.

 

 

The Ever-Changing Shape of Love

 

Ongoing events urge us to redefine and refresh that tired old used-up word—love.

 

Love is the only force strong enough to be the unifying energy that ties our broken country back together. Hate can’t do it. Hate and fear have polarized us. We need to choose: we can’t love and hate at the same time.

 

Love is difficult and takes effort. It is easy to love our children, because that is built into us, just as the fear which can lead to hate is built into us. But the consistent, firm love that gives us the patience to set limits on children that will help them grow into good citizens and good parents in their turn—and learn in their turn not to give into hate and fear and exasperated impatience—is not instinctive. It must be learned as we go.

 

Love is self-reflecting. It admits mistakes and learns from them. It’s no fun to realize we have been wrong or done something hurtful—just as it is no fun to be hurt. Love is about interdependence, the Golden Rule, the reality that I am not the center of the universe, that others and their needs are as real as me and my needs, and that we are all more alike than different. The tragedy of Donald Trump is that he still hasn’t realized these basic elements of being human.

 

Love is non-violent, by definition. Violence can never be loving. Period. Self-defense may be necessary, but it isn’t love, it’s self-defense. The mob in the Capitol hurting and even killing policemen was not defending itself, nor was it defending liberty or democracy. It rationalized its violence on the basis of misinformation about the results of an election that were proven false in ninety court cases.

 

Love does not preoccupy with enemies. If we are loving, we define ourselves by what we are for, not what we are against. If we are sufficiently against something or someone it can mistakenly justify violence. Instead love calls us to be constructive and look for common ground with adversaries as creatively as we can. Hate dehumanizes the other; love identifies with the other.

 

That means inclusivity is part of love. Hate separates into parts; love sees the big picture. To say we are one humanity on one planet is a statement of love–and also a demonstration of how the meaning of love really does evolve over time, because a hundred years ago we had not seen the earth from space. Back then only religious seers were motivated by this aspect of love; now it is accessible to all. Every day the news carries new proof that we’re all in the same boat.

 

So love inevitably puts us in a mode of learning and discovery. We’re in a place we’ve never been before. Love is self-education. What is the truth in any given situation? Love is honest and authentic in its longing for truth. So love overlaps with science—it searches for what works, what leads to life, to goodness, to truth, to beauty.

 

Self-education in love means learning to work cooperatively with other people toward whatever larger goal we can agree is important or even necessary for survival. Many in the U.S. House and Senate have demonstrated over the past weeks, and months and years, that they have much to learn about working together.

 

Love is conservative—it conserves life with responsible care. Love is progressive—it hopes for a better world.

 

Finally, love takes the larger perspective. It is aware that we are here for only an instant in all time, that others before us sacrificed that we could be here, and that we are the gateway to all the future. Love is acceptance of this condition, a willingness not to resist it. As David Attenborough keeps saying, what we do in the next few years will affect the next two thousand years of life on earth. That is a statement of how much we need to discover how to love.