Rumi's Field

Winslow Myers

“Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
—Rumi

Keeping the biggest possible picture in mind, paradoxically, may give us the best lens through which to focus clearly upon the messy details of our lives at every level—internationally, nationally, locally, even personally.

How big a picture? Try: the whole earth and everything and everyone on it, through hundreds of millions of years of time.

What can this abstract immensity have to do with our own lives? More than we think, because we really are a product of the changes the earth has undergone over eons, and we are totally subject to the rules that dictated those changes. By rules we mean big processes, ones we are still trying to fully understand. Processes like evolution itself.

When a gigantic asteroid hit the earth in the Yucatan area 65 million years ago, the planetary changes that resulted were enough to wipe out the dinosaurs. New forms of life, ones that eventually evolved into our mammalian ancestors, were able to flourish in the post-asteroid conditions. The dinosaurs were swept aside forever. Organisms that do not adapt to the environment around them cannot survive. The environment determines the required change—no exceptions.

Now it is human planning and foresight that will determine the fate of all the other species on earth. The true economy is not connected to the health of the stock market, but to the health of the living system as a whole. Our brains are simply not wired to think and plan within this great context. Instead, we have constructed artificial contexts that we can get our minds around more easily: the morning headlines in the newspaper, the nightly news on TV, the latest stories on our Ipad, the quarterly profit-and-loss sheet—even all our diverse religious and cultural adherences.

The separating borders of nations themselves are artificial contexts that we hope will come “between too much and me”(Robert Frost), while at the same time we know very well that all our biggest challenges do not respect borders. The earth shakes, and the jet stream carries radiation across oceans with the speed of a tsunami.

As this is being written in March of 2011, the headlines are preoccupied with two issues of daunting moral complexity: autocratic suppression of non-violent revolution in the Middle East, and the Japanese effort to regain control of their devastated nuclear plants.

The airways are buzzing with discussion about the pros and cons of the intervention to help the Libyan rebels, and at the same time with the pros and cons of nuclear energy. Has the United States overextended itself? Is NATO in danger of getting bogged down in a civil war? Was it morally supportable to let Ghaddafy massacre his own people? Can nuclear energy ever be made safe? Have we no choice but to turn to it, because the risks of global climate change are even greater?

In the larger picture, we have gone in 60 years from one nation with nuclear weapons to nine nations. That means nine complex command and control systems with fallible human beings managing them, with all the potential for mistakes, misinterpretations, or accidents. If our technology, no matter how innovative, does not work in harmony with the larger systems that gave us life, we may all find ourselves in the kind of trouble visited upon Hiroshima in 1945.

The first nuclear powered electricity was generated in Idaho in 1951. Now there are 442 plants worldwide, again with fallible humans supposedly in total control. If our technology, no matter how innovative, does not work in harmony with the systems that gave us life, we may all find ourselves in the kind of trouble visited upon Japan in 2011.

That is our present “environment.” Can it help us to situate that environment in Rumi’s field, out beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing? The first thing this does is take us out of the realm of feeling righteous, right, morally pure, full of indignation and blame. In a state of mind that is inclusive of all, rather than our habitual mental condition of “us-and-them,” we can acknowledge our profound moral and physical interdependence as users of energy, creators of waste, payers of taxes, weighers of risk. We can turn toward each other humbly and “meet”—have an authentic, inclusive, responsible, open encounter. We can seek big-picture truth together, acknowledging our fallibility, our subjectivity, our default setting of short-term self-interest—and our common survival goals.

The U.N. sanctioned intervention in Libya certainly looks like a major step in the right direction compared to the unilateral U.S. intervention in Iraq. But its tragic violence is still symptomatic of a world where humans are very quick to turn to war and weapons as a “solution.” It is part of a dying paradigm, one that is not working in the many other civil wars around the world, including Afghanistan and Iraq—and the Congo. In fact all war has become civil war, fueled by an avalanche of weapons sales, never really resolving anything. What might replace it? Perhaps it is the spirit we saw in Tahrir Square, a demand for accountability that includes self-accountability: the great authority of the refusal of violence, a far more exacting discipline than the waging of war. Those courageous Egyptian citizens spoke for more than themselves when they peacefully demanded a freeing-up of their political system.

Our existing energy systems are also part of a dying paradigm, a kind of civil war with the earth. It may be that humans can design a fail-safe nuclear power plant, even figure out what to do with the wastes. So far we haven’t come close. But with the biggest context in mind, we can meet together “out beyond” and focus upon our energy challenge the great lens of our earth’s story over millions of years. Maybe we will create some entirely new form of energy that is unambiguously life enhancing. Perhaps we will learn a new non-violence toward the planet that has given us so much, just as those in Tahrir Square modeled the treatment of others as they themselves wished to be treated. I’ll meet you there.

The Unconquerable Authority

The Unconquerable Authority

Winslow Myers

Muhammar Khaddafy’s brutal reaction to the aspirations of his own people has become a textbook case in the futility of opposing the citizens from whose consent a leader’s political authority derives, however illegitimately. Instead, his stubborness has led to absurd violence, even civil war.

We can still hope that the Khaddafy case will he an exception in the region generally. The non-violent invincibility of people power, the argument of Jonathan Schell’s underrated masterpiece of political philosophy, The Unconquerable World, may be coming true before our eyes again as it did in the Philippines in 1986 and Czechoslovakia in 1989. We do not yet know which model will dominate in the Middle East and Northern Africa, the violence of state power, or the non-violence of citizens seeking their rights and discredited leaders abdicating peacefully. Citizen invincibility may not prevail without additional tragic sacrifice to the callous will of dictators. But in the end it will prevail.

Meanwhile we Americans need to acknowledge our own role in the stagnation and double standards pervading desert autocracies. Our subtle oppression has been as abundant as the oil underneath those sands that we covet and even assume is rightfully ours, obtainable by any means necessary. As we condemn Khaddafy’s brutality, let’s not forget our own over-reliance on military “solutions”—rationalized by our own desperate conviction that we can only fight fire with fire, only prevail with raw power, with drones over Pakistan or million-dollar-a-year soldiers attempting to kill people and win their hearts and minds at the same time. On a small planet, all war is civil war.

The subversive and hopeful message of Egypt’s Tahrir Square is that change does not have to come by violence, just as the message from Tripoli—or Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq—is that violence only cycles into worse violence. If unarmed citizens in Tahrir Square can create positive change, why can’t the most powerful democracy on earth choose to bring about change not with military violence, but with magnanimous humanitarian aid and adherence to international laws and institutions?

From what source does civil authority ultimately flow, if not from the consent of the governed to join together non-violently to meet common needs? Isn't this an expression of the golden rule—with variants found in most of the world's philosophies and belief systems?

We have already come close, with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, to the polar opposite of this universal rule: if you try to destroy me totally, I will destroy you totally, and if we really let fly with everything we have, we will all be dead ten times over.

Enough Egyptian citizens understood that as they wished to be done to, so should they do. In this they demonstrated that the Ghandis and Kings of this world are not some idealistic exception. The strategies of non-violent change have become just as realistic and practical as the notion that dictators can deny their citizens’ aspirations by brute force has become unrealistic and impractical—just as building schools for girls in Afghanistan is not only a more realistic way to increase U.S. security than 800 foreign bases; without so many bases we could afford to pay our own teachers and civil servants in Wisconsin and elsewhere a living wage.

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable,” asserted President Kennedy in a resonant aphorism. This applies universally, to protestors and the governments trying to appease or oppose them, to near-failed states and to great powers. Non-violent alternatives are available to all governments as well as all protestors. Autocrats can capitulate peacefully and fly into exile, and free and fair elections can, with forbearance and hard work, fill the power vacuum. The mother of all might-have-beens comes to mind—what is happening now in the region could eventually have happened in Iraq without disastrous U.S. meddling.

After 9/11, stereotypes of a mysterious, unknowable ‘other,’ an other who hates us for our freedoms, quickly took over. The “enemy image” gripping the collective American psyche morphed from Soviet communists who (almost) made peaceful revolution impossible in Eastern Europe, into suicidal Islamic martyrs who tried and failed to make violent revolution inevitable.

Now these Arab and Persian and Sunni and Shia and Coptic Christian ‘others’ not only have faces and names, they are martyring themselves for the same liberties we ourselves hold dear. On a planet so small that that the news flashes instantly from Wisconsin to Bahrain, Tripoli to Jerusalem, isn’t it time we gave up enemy-images altogether? We are one human family. In the spirit of Tahrir Square, isn’t it time to reject the illusory authority of violence and embrace the unconquerable authority of non-violence?

Ground Hog Blog

Groundhog Blog

Groundhog Day brings to mind various associations, including the fervent hope of this snow-buried Bostonian that Punxsutawney Phil will not see his shadow this year and spring will come early. This may be the one good thing about global warming.

My primary association, however, is with Bill Murray as the lead in the most philosophical yet commercial comedy-romance movie ever made. For those who have been living in caves or remote mountain cabins, the plot assigns a cynical and egotistical reporter, played by Murray, to cover the Groundhog Day doings in Punxsutawney PA. He finds himself trapped in time, waking up on the same day over and over and over and over . . . which at first he experiences as a kind of hellish torment. As each identical 24 hours repeats itself in all its banality (though he alone is free to do within it whatever he wishes), it slowly dawns on him that his condition is not a torment, but an opportunity to practice getting life, and love, right. By the end he is forced into an empathy beyond ego that he is grateful to have learned, and in the process—it is after all a mainstream Hollywood production in spite of its art-house profundity—wins the heart of Andie MacDowell.

The film is such an obvious metaphor for ordinary life as we live it in day after day of trial and error, that little interpretation is required. At the same time it does illumine the opportunity that each new day presents to think or act or be a little bit more creatively. It has been said that life is not a dress rehearsal, but that is not altogether true. While there are many moments in every life when something happens that is irreversible, there are also even more moments when we are given the opportunity to try again—to be kinder, to listen more intently, to be more present to the wonder of what is passing by us and through us. Life is at the same time a one-directional arrow and a repetition of cycles, days and nights and weeks and seasons and years. As a teacher for three decades, I was particularly grateful for such repetition. I needed the privilege of trying again with each new crop of students to be more rigorous and compelling, friendly and fair.

On the international scene, the cycle of violent conflict can seem banally inevitable. Vietnam becomes a rehearsal for Afghanistan becomes a rehearsal for . . .? But time is not only cyclical, it is an arrow that contains the potential for two possible directions—descending toward the ultimate irreversible threat of nuclear holocaust, or rising toward some new possibility that we humans can make irreversible as well. We can learn from the Cuban Missile Crisis. India and Pakistan do not have to repeat the cold war cycle of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. with all its hideous risk and red ink. We can decide to abolish all nuclear weapons. The Middle East, like Middle Europe, can have its own non-violent Velvet Revolution.

Both whirled in cycles and carried forward on the stream of time toward the unknown, we do not have the luxury of Bill Murray’s reporter to practice our creativity within a narrow frame over and over, in a cycle of repeating time without its directional arrow. But like him we are caught in the imperative to evolve and change, not toward some perfect romantic outcome of boy gets girl, but simply toward survival. As Jonas Salk put it, “If we look at evolution as an error-making and an error-correcting process, if we are ever so much slightly better at error-correction than at error-making, we’ll make it.”

“How seldom,” said Emerson, “the present hour is seized upon as a new moment.” But sometimes a Gorbachev or a Mandela comes along, dynamically seizing the new moment and turning the miraculously improbable into the obviously possible. Within our own small compass of repeated days, we can each do the same. “All history,” Emerson also said, “is but the lengthened shadow of a great man.” What shadow might we ourselves cast, a sign of some new spring that, sooner or later, must come?

Limbaugh's Limbo

Limbaugh’s Limbo

Winslow Myers

I tuned in Rush Limbaugh’s radio show because I was interested in his response to the question of whether he shared some responsibility for leading the deluded young assassin in Arizona over the edge—on the face of it an unanswerable question, though many on the left have been very quick to answer yes, in thunder.

Limbaugh’s first line of defense was to aggressively deflect blame onto others, including the sheriff in charge of the investigation into the killings, Clarence Dupnik. Sheriff Dupnik came across, to me anyway, as the absolute best of America, an official who spoke authoritatively about how he sees the present sorry state of civility in this country. Dupnik reminded me a little of the lawman in Cormac McCarthy’s novel “No Country for Old Men,” almost overwhelmed by new forms of evil but still willing to stand and deliver.

The day I listened, Limbaugh immediately went on the attack against the sheriff and others he perceives as adversaries with hardly a nod to the victims of the Arizona tragedy. It was an oddly self-centered display. The parents of the little girl who was killed provided an instructive contrast. Holding themselves together with heroic composure, they made sure the story was not their own pain and loss, but what a remarkable person their daughter had been.

It is difficult, maybe impossible, to write about Limbaugh without being sucked into the battle dynamic which Limbaugh is paid multi-millions to sustain. No doubt Rush Limbaugh has some good ideas about how to improve our political, economic and cultural institutions. But they are drowned out by one meta-idea that thoroughly undermines his effectiveness as a conservative change-agent—his desire to preserve at all costs an oppositional modality, “us against them.” That’s what keeps his loyal supporters coming back for more and his advertising sponsors underwriting his mega-riches.

While there is no causal line to be drawn between Limbaugh and the tragic schizoid alienation of Jared Loughner, it is not unfair to assert that Limbaugh contributes to the general degradation of civic discourse in our nation.

What is clear is that this very talented broadcaster is paid to be a panderer. The Encarta dictionary defines the verb “to pander” as “to indulge someone’s weakness or questionable wishes and tastes.” In this case the weakness is the jumble of helplessness, fear, and anger that many citizens feel in the face of huge powers that they perceive to be stealing their autonomy. The questionable wish is the desire to fix blame on an “other” and lash out. This is a further paradox of Limbaugh’s oppositional spirit, what is sometimes called a performative contradiction: it cries at the same time for taking responsibility and for the irresponsible helplessness of blaming someone else.

Limbaugh’s universe is very similar in its narrowness to another seductive universe of pandering, pornography, where the complex and deep encounter of sexuality is reduced to the simple dimension of scratching a fantasy itch.

Limbaugh remains stuck in a frozen limbo of self-defined authority and radio-booth isolation, where the price of admission is toadying agreement—from which authentic relationship can never come. Real relationship includes respectful listening, acknowledgement of the validity of other points of view, openness to multiple perspectives. There is a poignant irony in the fact that Limbaugh has become totally deaf in both ears.

Can Progressives and Conservatives Speak Each Other's Language?

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Sat, 01/30/2010 - 10:44am.

• Guest Commentary

BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

By Winslow Myers

There is big money in polarization, as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and
other media kingpins understand all too well. But one of the many
tragic by-products of our polarized political culture is the
demonization of conservatives by progressives. Left-leaners are often
convinced that those on the right are all greedy, fearful militarists
without consciousness or conscience—a grotesque and insulting
distortion.

My late father was a lifelong Republican who delighted in undermining
the conservative stereotype. He once returned from a trip to Nicaragua
and scandalized his Rotary group by asserting that he hadn’t met a
single communist down there, just a lot of farmers who wanted some
land to cultivate peacefully.

As a self-defined progressive, I am mightily tired of preaching to the
choir, my small circle of all-too-like-minded liberal friends. I am
eager for dialogue with thoughtful people who still carry the same
torch my father did for fiscal prudence, smaller government,
incremental change—and caution in our international adventures.

As Kevin Zeese writes in his article “The Anti-War Peace Movement
Needs a Restart”: “There is a long history of
opposition to war among traditional conservatives. Their philosophy
goes back to President Washington's Farewell Address where he urged
America to avoid ‘foreign entanglements.’ It has showed itself
throughout American history. The Anti-Imperialist League opposed the
colonialism of the Philippines in the 1890s. The largest antiwar
movement in history, the America First Committee, opposed World War II
and had a strong Middle America conservative foundation in its makeup.
The strongest speech of an American president against militarism was
President Eisenhower's 1961 final speech from the White House warning
America against the growing military-industrial complex.”

For twenty-five years I have volunteered for an organization called
Beyond War, which began with the assumption that preventing the world
from blowing up just might be an issue of equal interest across the
political spectrum. Some of us were Democrats and some were
Republicans. In 1988 we even gave our annual Beyond War Award to
Ronald Reagan (and Mikhail Gorbachev)—not because we assented to
everything Reagan did, but because Reagan had bravely taken the
political risk of changing his mind about the “evil empire,”
responding positively to Gorbachev’s ”new thinking.”

Liberal members of our organization peeled away in droves after that
award, demonstrating among other things that they hadn’t
understood—stood under, or stood behind—what the organization stood
for: thinking big enough to transcend polarization.

The opportunity is to cut through the foggy distraction of polarized
stereotyping to a common vision of enlightened self-interest. One
conservative thinker who has done this effectively is Andrew Bacevich,
an ex-marine and Professor of International Relations at Boston
University. His book “The Limits of Power: The End of American
Exceptionalism,” should be required reading for left- and
right-leaners alike. Bacevich argues that American military adventures
are directly related to our domestic culture of over-extension, our
desire to have it all and put off paying the economic and military and
environmental bills that inevitably come due.

Progressives have an opportunity to get off their high horses and
reach out to mainstream Americans who are perfectly capable of seeing
that it is hardly in their interest to saddle their children with
trillion dollar deficits caused by dubious wars without end—wars which
create more terrorists than they kill.

Winslow Myers, the author of “Living Beyond War, A Citizen’s Guide,”
lives in Boston and serves on the Board of Beyond War, a non-profit
educational foundation.

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Seeing Ourselves in Others

Seeing Ourselves In Others

Winslow Myers

In one of the more painful ironies of World War II, the Nagasaki bomb, having been blessed at take-off by Catholic and Lutheran chaplains, obliterated the largest Christian church in the Orient and vaporized most of its adherents. Today urban populations worldwide are so diverse that a terrorist who detonated a suitcase WMD in a major city would kill thousands of his co-religionists and their children. On a small planet where “friends” can no longer be clearly delineated from “foes,” it is time to think new about global security.

Since the beginning of the atomic age in 1945, everything to do with war—security, strength, survival, and power—has changed irrevocably. Only our thinking, based in an obsolete “us and them” conception of our world, remains the same, rooted in millennia of violent conflict.

In the nuclear age “us and them” has taken the form of President Reagan’s cold war characterization of the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire” or President Bush’s “Axis of Evil.” President Obama is already in danger of entrapment in the same unworkable paradigm because of our understandable nuclear fears about Al Quaeda and its Taliban supporters.

The military strategies of the “enlightened” West and of Osama bin Laden’s brand of Islamic nihilism possess one thing in common: they are both based on the premise that it is possible for “us” to stamp out evil, ignorance and error in “them.” No matter what the conflict, Iran vs. Israel, India vs. Pakistan, the U.S. vs. Al-Quaeda, the true face of evil may lie in the mutual assumption of opposing parties that evil can be exterminated. This dynamic now possesses an unavoidable nuclear dimension. 60 years after the allies raced to get the bomb before Hitler, whose insane project it was to stamp out evil on the basis of race, potentially anyone can build a weapon of mass destruction.

Will we continue to focus the energy of our fears toward the “stamping out” paradigm, or will we go the way the Buddha suggested: “See yourself in others. Then what harm can you do?”

Seeing ourselves in others is not idealistic. Instead it is pragmatic, because it is the only way we are ever going to de-cock the nuclear gun that we assume is pointed at others but is really pointed at everyone, ourselves included. For thousands of years we have chosen to pay lip service at best to the revolutionary instruction to love our enemies. In the nuclear age, creative good will and offers of humanitarian help to those who oppose us have become enlightened, hardheaded self-interest.

Winslow Myers, a retired teacher, writes on global issues. He serves on the Board of Directors of Beyond War, an educational foundation, and is the author of “Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide.”

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Hubris

Hubris

Winslow Myers

As I write, a plume of crude oil from the Deepwater Horizon explosion is moving toward Cuba, our purported enemy—but an enemy surrounded by the healthiest coral reefs in the Caribbean, a breeding ground for fish that eventually come to populate vast reaches of the single interconnected ocean that surrounds all continents.

It is hard not to think, during these tense weeks of waiting and hoping for the capping of the well, about human technological hubris in all its brightness and darkness.

The engineers who designed and built that oil rig must have taken great pride in the remarkable achievement of successfully pumping oil from such an incredible depth.

And yet at the same time that our great deeds amaze us, our total technological infrastructure has become larger than us. We, or it, can unleash powers that can affect the earth on a geophysical scale.

There was a moment back in 1945 when physicists were preparing for the first test of an atomic weapon at Los Alamos. A few scientists predicted that there was a tiny chance that the bomb could actually light the atmosphere on fire and incinerate the planet. We went ahead regardless.

Hundreds of tests by a number of nations later, we still have our atmosphere, but the very cells of every living thing, including us, are permeated with subtle radioactive compounds. We went ahead regardless.

The pervasive illusion was that the humans who are in charge of oil rigs would never let an accident of this magnitude happen. But it did.

The pervasive illusion is that the humans who are in charge of nuclear weapons will not let an accident happen. But it may.

Because our minds are currently focused upon the possibility of a terrorist getting hold of one nuclear weapon, we do not give much thought to the 10,000-odd weapons in the charge of fallible human citizens from nine nuclear nations.

For everything nuclear to continue “fail-safe” down through the decades ahead, every one of those thousands of humans must never, not once, misinterpret a mistaken signal coming in from another nation as a sign of actual hostility. All the electronics connected to the weapons must function perfectly. Is that realistic? Is that possible?

What do we do? First, we tell it like it is. There is a difference between, say, upping the threat level against the government of Iran to try to get them to behave in a certain way—and admitting that all nations have the nuclear problem in common. This problem will not even be fully solved even when all nations have abolished nuclear weapons. Why? Because weapons can be rebuilt and the whole spiral toward Armageddon can begin again. We have changed the conditions for our survival—forever—and our minds and hearts must change in response.

We are a remarkable species. If we have the engineering capacity to go to the moon or build a space station or pull oil from below the ocean floor, surely we have the capacity to look down the time-stream and take humble and prudent action to prevent catastrophe.

We need a much deeper, more pervasive realization that we are radically interdependent, that we are all in this together, not only all human “allies” and “enemies,” but also coral reefs and infant fish. It hardly matters whether the momentum of our technological advance is driven by wonder, possibility, and the thrill of risk, or by greed and fear, or a mix of all these. Absent a deep ethical reorientation toward what is best for the whole planet, that momentum will—will, not may—end in disaster. When might this realization begin to influence decisions taken by corporate boards, or supreme courts, or adversarial diplomats jockeying for national advantage?

Winslow Myers, the author o “Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide,” serves on the board of Beyond War, a non-profit educational foundation working to end all war.