- Changing the Way Society Changes:
Transposing Social Activism into a Dramatic Key
Peter D. Hershock
East-West Center Asian Studies Development Program
1601 East-West Road
Honolulu, Hawaii 96848-1601
Abstract: While many Buddhists are rightly committed to working in the public
sphere for the resolution of suffering, there are very real incompatibilities between the
axiomatic concepts and strategic biases of (the dominant strands of) both current human
rights discourse and social activism and such core Buddhist practices as seeing all things
as interdependent, impermanent, empty, and karmically configured. Indeed, the almost
startling successes of social activism have been ironic, hinging on its strategic and
conceptual indebtedness to core values shared with the technological and ideological
forces that have sponsored its own necessity. The above-mentioned Buddhist practices
provide a way around the critical blind spot instituted by the marriage of Western
rationalism, a technological bias toward control, and the axiomatic status of individual
human being, displaying the limits of social activism's institutional approach to change
and opening concrete possibilities for a dramatically Buddhist approach to changing the
way societies change.
Formally established tolerance of dissent and internal critique has become a mark of
distinction among contemporary societies. Indeed, with economic globalization and the
rhetoric of democracy acting in practically unassailable concert, the imperative to
establish and maintain the conditions under which political protest and social activism
are possible has become the keystone challenge to developing nations throughout Africa,
Asia, and Central and South America.
It is not my intention here to question the legitimacy of this challenge. The
possibility of dissent is crucial to realizing a truly responsive society capable of
correcting its own errors of judgement and organizational practice, and institutional
changes of the sort brought about by political protest and social activism have undeniably
been instrumental in this process. What I want to question are the prevalent strategies
for bringing about such corrections and the axiological presuppositions on which they
pivot. Although it may be true that "nothing succeeds like success," it is also
true that nothing more readily blinds us to inherent flaws in the means and meaning of our
successes than 'success' itself. Critical inattention to the strategic axioms underlying
the successful engineering of political and social change might, in other words, finally
render our best-intended efforts self-defeating.
My thesis, then, is a disquieting one: social activism's successes have hinged on its
strategic and conceptual indebtedness to core values shared with the technological and
ideological forces that have sponsored its own necessity. That is, the same conditions
that have made successful social activism possible have also made it necessary. With
potentially tragic irony, social activist practices -- and theory -- have been effectively
reproducing rather than truly reducing the conditions of institutionalized disadvantage
and dependence.
In a liberal democratic context, such a thesis verges on political and philosophical
heresy, and if we are hard pressed to take it seriously, it is only because the positive
and progressive nature of the changes wrought by social activism are so manifestly
self-evident. Unfortunately, if our prevailing standards of reason and critical inquiry
are not entirely neutral, the manifestly positive and progressive nature of social
activism's history might be the result of a critical blind-spot. In that case, the ironic
nature of social activist success would be effectively invisible.
As a way around any such critical lacunae, I will be appealing to such core Buddhist
practices as seeing all things as impermanent, as karmically configured, and as empty or
interdependent. These practices and the theories adduced in their support mark a radical
inversion of the critical and logical priorities constitutive of the philosophical,
religious, and political traditions that have governed our dominant conceptions of freedom
and civil society. By systematically challenging our bias for subordinating values to
facts, relationships to the related, uniqueness to universality, and contribution to
control, Buddhist practice makes possible a meaningful assessment and revision of social
activist strategy. Importantly, it also opens the possibility of critically evaluating the
phenomenon of "engaged Buddhism" and its ostensibly corrective relationship with
the root conditions of suffering.
Until now, social activists have been able to effectively contest institutionalized
disadvantage and dependence at the institutional level, securing basic civil and human
rights by using many of the same values and technologies employed in first establishing
and then maintaining structural inequity. To the extent that it has been noted, the shared
genealogy of social activist solutions and the problems they address has been subsumed
under the rubric of a pragmatically justified separation of means and ends. If the present
critique has any merit, our thankfulness for the apparent gains made by social activists
in promoting basic human dignities must not be allowed to distract us from appreciating
the rapidity with which we are approaching a point of no return beyond which fighting fire
with fire will no longer be an option.
Caution on the Tracks: Recognizing the Possibility of Technological Barriers to the
Meaning of Social Change
Andrew Kimbrell (in Mills, 1997, p. 105) has noted that if technology is "the
primary engine of social change…you can't promote social change without changing
technology." The corollary of this is that failing to change our technological bias
means failing to promote any shift in the direction or meaning of social change.
Absent such a shift, successful social activism will increasingly mean at once the
amplification and deepening subtlety of the problems it has ostensibly addressed and
solved.
We can begin sorting out the roots of this apparent paradox by noting some of the
common hallmarks of successful social activism. In contrast with most religious
eschatologies, the salvific efforts of social activism have been directed toward securing
the rights and freedoms, not of unique persons or communities, but of individuals sharing
membership in a particular class -- be it defined economically, ethnically, racially,
religiously, or by age or sexual orientation. While social activists do not deny the
importance and even necessity of uniquely personal forms of human development, they
typically maintain that these are not sufficient means of rectifying systemic or
structural injustice. Thus, while it is all well and good for a particular woman to break
through the glass ceiling of corporate management, it is the proper aim of social activism
to realize conditions under which all women will be guaranteed the possibility of
such success. Society, and not just the human beings it comprises, must change.
Presumably, this is not most "efficiently" done by changing individual minds
and habits, but by revising the structure of interactions obtaining among classes of
people. Changing societies in any usefully short period of time depends on the mass
reorganization of their structural features. Granted this, social activist success
necessarily pivots on leveraging the powers that organize a society by cultivating and
making incisive use of the power to organize. Social activism consists of consolidating
power to redistribute power, in this way undermining injustice and structural
inequity. Of course, relocating any controlling advantage -- either within or among
societies -- requires much more than good intentions. First and foremost it needs a
capacity for attracting and directing attention on a massive scale and an insider's
understanding of the prevailing culture of power. Without these, social activist efforts
are doomed from the point of conception onward to be exercises in mere wishful thinking.
A critical history of social activism is thus inseparable from the history of
technologies that make possible the widespread command of attention and the selective
biasing of power. Indeed, without the technologies that spawned the printing press, radio,
television, and now the Internet, social activism would have been restricted to the
charitable dreams of those already in power or both able and willing to violently usurp
them.
The inseparability of these histories has for the most part been considered natural and
unproblematic. But consider the complex political roles played by various forms of mass
media since the turn of the century -- from widely distributed print news, to radio,
television, and now the Internet. There is no denying that the media have provided an
indispensable means of promoting such social activist causes as the women's suffrage
movement, trade unionism, and civil rights, but they also served as a forum for the kind
of mass advertising essential to the constitution of a distinctively American consumer
culture, its expansion into global markets, and the corporate consolidation of economic
advantage worldwide.
Thus, although winning women's voting rights can be correlated with high circulation
print and photography media, so can the construction of the twentieth century's various
"ideal" body images and canons of beauty. These images and standards can be
further correlated with epidemic eating disorders, mass consumption of cosmetics and
quarterly fashions, the commodification of ethnic features, and the universal
standardization of body language. Similarly, although it was possible in 1968 for
African-American athletes to use worldwide television coverage of the Olympic track and
field events in Mexico City to protest the continued abuse of minority rights in the
United States, in 1998 the global cost of televised advertising well exceeded the
worldwide total of all national expenditures for primary and secondary education.
Television serves as an apparent forum for protest, but also as a means of schooling
consumers en masse for optimal market performance.
If the relationship between social activism and such means of influence as printing
presses and Internet-linked computers was a purely instrumental one, there might be little
cause for concern about these intertwined histories. Indeed, the illusion of such a
relationship is beautifully summed up in the image of a generation "turning swords
into plowshares" -- transforming, for example, the military-built Internet into a
tool for free self-expression. Unfortunately, it is only at great risk that technologies
can be reduced to the tools they spawn and evaluated on the basis of each tool's
individual utility. Doing so commits us to continuously rehearsing the central premise of
the widely prevailing myth that technologies as such are value-neutral. They are not.
Turning swords into plowshares does not finally mean the peaceful application of war
technologies, but the practical declaration of war on the earth and against its varied
plant and animal populations.
I have argued at some length (Hershock, 1999) that evaluating technologies on the basis
of the tools they generate commits us to taking individual users and not the dramatic
patterns of our lived interdependence as the primary locus of evaluation. In doing so, we
effectively exclude from consideration precisely that domain in which the values informing
our technological bias have the most direct bearing on the quality of our personal and
communal conduct -- the movement of our shared narration. This has led to a stubborn and
at times even righteous blindness regarding our slippage into a new era of colonization --
a colonization, not of lands or cultural spheres, but of consciousness as such. Indeed,
the disposition to ignore the critical space of interdependence has been so thoroughly
prevalent that the conditions of possibility for this new form of colonialism are widely
championed -- in both the "developed" and the "developing" world -- as
essential to establishing and safeguarding our individual and collective dignity, a
crucial component of our growing equality and autonomy.
By using the same information technologies employed by those individuals and
institutions perpetrating and perpetuating the inequitable distribution of power and
wealth, social activists may have enjoyed the opportunity to "beat them at their own
game." However, they have also insured that everyone remains on the same playing
field, playing the same game. Social activist successes have in this way blinded us to our
deepening submission to technologies of control and the consequent depletion of precisely
those attentive resources needed to meaningfully accord with our changing circumstances
and contribute to them as needed.
The costs of such blindness are practically limitless. The more "successful"
a technology is, the more indispensable it becomes. That is, all technologies are liable
to crossing thresholds beyond which they generate more new problems than they solve.
Because technologies arise as patterns of value-driven conduct, they function as ambient
amplifiers of our individual and cultural karma -- our experience-conditioning,
intentional activity. In crossing the threshold of their utility, technologies create the
karmic equivalent of a gravitational black hole, funneling all available attention-energy
into themselves. For the dominant technological lineage correlated with the rise of
liberal democracy and the imperative for social activism, this has meant an
intensification of our karma for both controlling and being controlled. The more
successfully we extend the limits of control, the more we extend the range of what can and
must be controlled. In capsule form: the better we get at getting what we want, the better
we get at wanting; but the better we get at wanting, the better we get at getting what we
want, though we won't want what we get. This karmic circularity is pernicious, and the
attention-energy invested in it to date has already brought about an epidemic depletion of
precisely those resources needed for realizing dramatically satisfying -- and not merely
factually sufficient -- solutions to our troubles, both personal and communal.
The methodological irony of social activism is that it does not free us from
dependence, but rather sustains its very possibility. This is not as paradoxical as it
might sound. Insuring our independence by means of restructuring the institutions that
mediate our contact with one another renders us dependent on those institutions -- on the
structure, and hence the technologies, of our mediation. In consequence, our freedom comes
to be increasingly dependent on the rationalization and regulation of our relationships
with one another -- the realization of secure and yet generic co-existence. Just as the
technology-driven transformation of societies in the industrial and post-industrial eras
has involved an ever more detailed refinement of class divisions and labor categories,
social activism advances through an ever more varied identification of populations in
need of guaranteed freedoms.
In valorizing both autonomy and equality, social activism denies our dramatic
interdependence and tacitly endorses not-seeing (avidyaa) or not-attending to the
full set of conditions sponsoring our present situation. Although unique and deeply local
patterns of injustice may be important in building a legal case, the work of social
activism is not to encourage our liberating intimacy with such patterns. Rather, it
consists of constructing legal mechanisms for exerting reformative control over
institutional structures and the processes by means of which (generically) given
individuals play or are forced to play particular roles therein.
Unfortunately, as generic 'women', 'children', 'workers', or 'minorities', the
beneficiaries of social activism are effectively cut off from precisely those aspects of
their circumstances, relationships, and self-understanding which provide them with the
resources necessary for locally realizing meaningful -- and not merely factual --
alternatives to the patterns of injustice in which they find themselves embedded. Among
the products of social activism are thus virtual communities of individuals having no
immediate and dramatically responsive relationship with one another -- individuals who
have relinquished or been deprived of intimate connection with the causes and conditions
of both their troubles and those troubles' meaningful resolution.
With no intended disregard of the passion many activists bring to their work, social
activism has aimed at globally re-engineering our political, economic and societal
environments in much the same way that our dominant technological lineage has been
committed to re-making our world -- progressively "humanizing" and
"rationalizing" the abundantly capricious natural circumstances into which we
human beings have found ourselves "thrown." This shared strategic genealogy is
particularly disturbing, suggesting that -- like all technologies oriented toward control
-- social activism is liable to rendering itself indispensable. If the history of social
activism is inseparable from the rise and spread of influential technologies and subject
to similar accelerating and retarding conditions, so is its future.
Social Activist Strategy: Legally Leveraging Institutional Change
While it has become common practice to decry the excessive legalism of contemporary
societies, the ramifications of strategic collusion between social activism and the way we
have technically and legally tooled our factual co-existence have remained largely
unattended. In part, this is because the legal bias of social activism has appeared so
incontestably "practical." Legislation allows for directly restructuring power
relations and negotiating justice at the "highest" possible levels. The
legislative process has also become the dominant technology for mediating divergent claims
about the facts of our (often troubled) co-existence and for preserving "fair"
definitions of 'being right' and 'being wronged'.
The trouble is that, like other technologies biased toward control, the more successful
legislation becomes, the more it renders itself necessary. Because it aims at rigorous
definition -- at establishing hard boundaries or limits -- crossing the threshold of
legislative utility means creating conditions under which the definition of freedom
becomes so complex as to be self-defeating. Taken to its logical end, legally-biased
social activism is thus liable to effect an infinite density of protocols for maintaining
autonomy, generating a matrix of limits on discrimination that would finally be conducive
to what might be called "axiological entropy" -- a state in which movement in
any direction is equally unobstructed and empty of dramatic potential. Contrary to
expectations, complete "freedom of choice" would not mean the elimination of all
impediments to meaningful improvisation, but rather an erasure of the latter's conditions
of possibility.
The effectiveness and efficiency of "hard," control-biased technologies
depend on our using natural laws -- horizons of possibility -- as fulcrums for leveraging
or dictating changes in the structure of our circumstances. Unlike improvised
contributions to changes taking place in our situation, dictating the terms of change
effectively silences our situational partners. Technological authority thus renders our
circumstances mute and justifies ignoring the contributions that might be made by the
seasons or the spiritual force of the mountains to the meaning -- the direction of
movement -- of our ongoing patterns of interdependence. With the "perfection" of
technically-mediated control, our wills would know no limit. We would be as gods, existing
with no imperatives, no external compulsions, and no priorities. We would have no reason
to do one thing first or hold one thing, and not another, as most sacred or dear.
Such "perfection" is, perhaps, as fabulous and unattainable as it is finally
depressing. Yet the vast energies of global capital are committed to moving in its
direction, for the most part quite uncritically. The consequences -- as revealed in the
desecration and impoverishing of both 'external' and 'internal' wilderness (for instance,
the rainforests and our imaginations) -- are every day more evident. The critical question
we must answer is whether the "soft" technologies of legally-biased and
controlled social change commit us to an equivalent impoverishment and desecration.
The analogy between the dependence of technological progress on natural laws and that
of social activism on societal laws is by no means perfect. Except among a scattering of
philosophers and historians of science, for example, the laws of nature are not viewed as
changeable artifacts of human culture. But for present purposes, the analogy need only
focus our attention on the way legal institutions -- like natural laws -- do not
prescriptively determine the shape of all things to come, but rather establish generic
limits for what relationships or states of affairs are factually admissible. Laws that
guarantee certain "freedoms" necessarily also prohibit others. Without the
fulcrums of unallowable acts, the work of changing a society would remain as purely
idealistic as using wishful thinking to move mountains. Changing legal institutions at
once forces and enforces societal reform.
By affirming and safeguarding those freedoms or modes of autonomy that have come to be
seen as generically essential to 'being human', a legally-biased social activism cannot
avoid selectively limiting the ways we engage with one another. The absence of coercion
may be a basic aim of social activism, but if our autonomy is to be guaranteed both fair
and just, its basic strategy must be one of establishing non-negotiable constraints on how
we co-exist. Social activism is thus in the business of striking structural compromises
between its ends and its means -- between particular freedoms and general equality, and
between practical autonomy and legal anonymity. By shifting the locus of freedoms from
unique persons to generic citizens -- and in substantial sympathy with both the Platonic
renunciation of particularity and the scientific discounting of the exceptional and
extraordinary -- social activist methodology promotes dramatic anonymity in order to
universally realize the operation of 'blind justice'.
Much as hard technologies of control silence the contributions of wilderness and turn
us away from the rewards of a truly joint improvisation of order, the process of social
activism reduces the relevance of the always unique and unprecedented terrain of our
interdependence. This is no small loss. The institutions that guarantee our generic
independence effectively pave over those vernacular relationships through which our own
contributory virtuosity might be developed and shared -- relationships out of which the
exceptional meaning of our immediate situation might be continuously realized. In contrast
with Buddhist emptiness -- a practice that entails attending to the mutual relevance of
all things -- both the aims and strategies of social activism are conducive to an
evacuation of the conditions of dramatic virtuosity, a societal depletion of our resources
for meaningfully improvised and liberating intimacy with all things.
Giving up the Ghost and the Machine: A Buddhist Critique of the Technologies
of Autonomous Selfhood
For the social activist, independence and freedom are inconceivable without secure
boundaries between who we 'are' and who and what we 'are-not'. The rhetoric of Western
liberalism is that we must be free to resist subordinating, institutional definition --
free, that is, to assert or claim boundaries that are finally self-willed, even
idiosyncratic. Freedom, so construed, depends on limited responsibility, limited demands
on our time and attention. As the Platonic analogy above suggests, regulation is essential
to identity precisely because we are essentially rational beings -- beings who measure and
who can be measured; who divide the world into near and far, private and public; who
thrive on distinctions of every sort, in fact. Securing the integrity of the individual
members of a given class of people in a given society is at bottom a process of legal
rationalization -- the creation of an anonymously ordered and yet autonomy-supporting
domain. The aims of social activism may be ostensibly 'selfless', but in practice social
activism directs us toward the increasing regulation and generic preservation of
selfishness.
But what if there are no truly individual selves to preserve? What if interdependence
and the unprecedented are basic, and not -- as presumed by social activism's philosophical
and religious parent traditions -- the competitive dichotomies of 'self' and 'other',
'independence' and 'dependence', 'free will' and 'determinism', 'order' and 'chaos',
'permanence' and 'change', 'universality' and 'particularity', 'fact' and 'value',
'subject' and 'object', or 'agent' and 'acted-upon'? Quite clearly, it is the tension
between the members of these axial pairings that has largely compelled political, social,
and spiritual revolution in the Western tradition. If these should turn out to be wholly
contingent cultural artifacts and not 'natural features' of our world, can a social
activism presuming them ever truly avoid replicating the conditions of their continued
possibility?
By linking freedom and equality, and by associating the former with individual autonomy
and the latter with legal anonymity, social activism both reflects and works in concert
with the conditions sponsoring our intensifying sense of a tension between the personal
and communal, between each one of us and our situation. It is this tension -- and the
threat it poses to our identification of who we 'are' and 'are-not' -- that disposes us
toward legally, if only generically, securing our boundaries. The logic of social activist
freedom -- like the logic of classical scientific discourse -- is based on the
inviolability of the law of the excluded middle, the necessity of instituting a clear
space of demarcation between 'is' and 'is-not'. That is, freedom is won by means of a
process that closes off attention to the unprecedented and intimate middle ground of our
dramatic interdependence and any meaningful contributions we might otherwise have been
able to offer or receive from it.
Granted the Buddha's unequivocal injunction to see 'is' and 'is-not' as the "twin
barbs" on which all humankind is impaled, the pursuit of freedom so defined cannot
but institute the root conditions for conflict and a preoccupation with security. The
valorization of anonymity and autonomy institutionalizes ignorance and thus at once
shadows and ensures the continued possibility of authoritarianism and coercion. Because
the world of autonomy is, at bottom, an Hegelian one in which all masters of their
circumstances are the antitheses of 'others' who are thereby enslaved, the most carefully
wrought legal institutions -- the products of successful social activism -- may
effectively soften the modalities of our bondage, but will never entirely dissolve them.
Secure borders not only keep threats from coming in, they prohibit free expression or
movement outward.
There is no disputing that social activist movements have led to dismantling such
degrading and highly partial institutions as slavery, segregated schooling, and
sex-specific hiring practices. But because many of the teleological and strategic building
blocks -- that is, the foundational concepts -- of these institutions have been salvaged
in the process of legally managing our 'fair' and 'just' co-existence, our progress has
been in the direction of more complex, global, and invisible institutions for our
regulated mediation. New powers certainly reign, but it is still a reign of power in which
every instance of factual independence is purchased at the cost of increasing dependence
on those (largely legal, but also technological and cultural) institutions that
generically insure our collective right to be left alone and to dictate the tenor of our
circumstances. Degradation has not been abolished. Instead, by virtue of our bias for
dealing with conflicts or social malaise through control, degradation has been woven ever
more finely and essentially into the fabric of our shared narration. The locus of
structurally compromised dignity is, however, not primarily 'you' and 'me' as individuals,
but our relationships as such -- the interpersonal body of our conduct. Thus, although
each one of us is on average better off and freer than ever before, we -- our
marriages, our families, our communities -- are not.
From a Buddhist perspective, this "unexpected" consequence of social activist
success -- like the broken promises of technological salvation -- pivots on our critical
inattention to the karmic nature of the world in which we live. By wrongly assuming that
relationships are logically and ontologically posterior to whatever 'is' related, and by
asserting the "natural" existence of persons as individuals possessing
transcendent rights to autonomy in an essentially impersonal and objective world, we have
tacitly granted an invisible and highly valorized status to a critical blind spot. Hence
the impossibility of mounting a discussion of freedom without invoking determinism and the
perennial divergence of what is good for 'me' and what is good for 'us'.[1] At the same time, since placing too weighty an emphasis on either 'good'
necessarily upsets the ground of our co-existence, and since the control of any situation
can never be truly shared, such existential upsets are from the outset guaranteed. Blind
to our karmic or dramatically interdependent nature and firmly holding to the either/or
logic of the excluded middle, we have developed a notion of freedom that is contradictory
and self-defeating. The very 'freedom' that legally instituted human rights are intended
to secure and preserve is what makes these rights necessary in the first place.[2]
It was insight into precisely this auto-generative pattern of upset or trouble (dukkha)
that occasioned the Buddha's injunction to see all things as empty of any essential
self-nature -- to relinquish not only our individual habits of self-identification, but
also the security of our cultural inheritance of axiomatic "facts" about the way
things really are and should be. Attending to the emptiness of all things -- ourselves
included -- promises nothing short of a new "Copernican" revolution by means of
which the self-other and freedom-determinism dichotomies are effectively undermined and
concrete avenues opened for the practice of a truly social activism aimed at dissolving
the dramatic conditions of (especially chronic) suffering.
Emptiness as Horizonless Interconnection and Mutual Relevance: Freeing Ourselves
from the Ideal of Factual Autonomy and the Costs of Dramatic Anonymity
It is a common misconception that the Buddhist practice of seeing all things as empty
involves a nihilistic detachment from our circumstances. In fact, it entails carefully
freeing things from the univocal assertion of their existence in keeping with our own,
often quite prejudiced, importances. Practicing emptiness makes it possible for the
horizonless and always reciprocal relevance of all things to freely manifest.
As an attribute, the emptiness of all things consists of their unique ways of arising only
as patterns of interdependence or mutual contribution, having neither fixed and
defining essences nor hard boundaries segregating them from one another. Because such
'essences' and 'boundaries' arise as functions of projected horizons for relevance,
relinquishing these horizons through the practice of emptiness is to relinquish our
own fixed positions, our own segregated identities and limiting perspectives. The
liberation of things from the imposition of identities based on our own fixed categories
is thus inseparable from our own liberation from both the arrogant illusion of autonomy
and the tragic alienation of anonymity. Finally, Buddhist emptiness does not mean vacuity,
but an infinite depth of meaningful interrelationship. Fully practiced, it occasions
horizonless, responsive, and dramatic community -- the elision of any conceptual,
perceptual, or emotional blockages we have to appreciating the uniqueness, value, and
contributory depth of all things.
As epitomized in the attainment of upaaya (unlimited skill-in-means) by those bodhisattvas
(enlightening beings) who have realized non-reliance and the art of responding without any
fixed perspective, fully appreciating the emptiness of all things is associated with
horizonless virtuosity in improvising meaningful resolutions to trouble. Contrary to the
biases of our technological lineage and legalistic activism, this is not accomplished by
controlling circumstances, but through contributory appreciation; not by means of
leveraging power in order to get what is wanted, but by dedicating unlimited
attention-energy to realizing dramatic partnership with all things. The bodhisattva does
not heal through accumulating and wielding power, but through daanapaaramitaa or
the perfection of offering.
Granted this, the ironic nature of the successes of liberal democratic social activism
can be traced to its legal and generic definition of what everyone has a right to expect
or possess. Protecting the rights of a particular class of individuals -- at least for the
purposes of protest and legal change -- depends on first establishing these individuals'
essential and identifying characteristics and what they presently lack or want. But that
is also to ignore their emptiness. It is to exclude the always surprising middle ground on
which we find ourselves most intimately related and thus most capable of meaningfully
contributing to -- not getting something from -- our community. Karmically, rights
discourse legitimates the atrophy of those attentive resources needed to revise the
dramatic -- and not just the institutional -- structure of society.
The now common practice of 'settling' of disputes between neighbors through the filing
of lawsuits is a good example of how our dramatic interdependence in conflict resolution
is marginalized. A more structural example is the way in which winning workers' rights in
developing countries typically legitimates further development along already
existing lines, and reinforces -- rather than challenges -- the hierarchy of power,
skewing the benefits of commerce toward those controlling capital and not toward those
contributing labor. Far from liberating workers in any meaningful way, this finally
stifles local creativity and eliminates alternatives to a globalization of the economy and
the commodification of culture.
"People" may be materially assisted through legally securing their
"universal" rights, but they are not thereby helped to more fully offer
themselves to realizing meaningful and corrective intimacy with the conditions that have
been subordinating their own unique interests and creativity. In the absence of such
dramatic intimacy, the only recourse is to change the overt facts of the prevailing
situation -- a course of action in which progress is always correlated with the exercise
of power. This tends to be shortsighted and focused on treating common symptoms of
oppression rather than the network of conditions sponsoring the poverty of a community's
narration. Successfully undermining and then rebuilding the factual institutions of a
society can indeed secure generic freedoms for ultimately generic individuals, but it
cannot cultivate or conserve locally responsive and dramatic creativity. Universal
solutions solve universal problems -- never the unique ones in which alone we find
ourselves personally implicated.
In keeping with the Buddhist teaching of emptiness, Gustavo Esteva (1987) has argued,
for example, that development is not an answer to the needs of "the poor," but
rather a substantial threat to their present and future well-being. In fact, development
thinking manufactures and "benignly" exports "poverty." It creates
classes of sometimes millions of people who must be given assistance "because"
they are powerless to help themselves. As an alternative, Esteva suggests that strenuous
effort must be made to reclaim the commons, displacing the economics of development, and
cultivating instead an ethos of hospitality. In the absence of such a turn toward
meaningfully intimate relationships and away from generic legalism, the influx of new
goods and services will not be conducive to the realization of vibrant and resilient
community, but only increasing dependence on these services and slavery to the living
standards they implicitly impose.
The criticism here is not, however, only that care must be taken not to help others for
the sake of condescension. The teaching of emptiness insists that equal care be exercised
in avoiding the temptation to rationalize doing nothing for others or to argue that we all
have to "pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps." Such rationales and arguments
are possible only on the condition that we ignore the meaningful interdependence of all
things. Pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps is impossible for the simple reason
that none of us are -- or could ever be -- fully independent. But neither are we ever
fully dependent. From a Buddhist perspective, we are not, have never been, and could never
be simply-located, atomic individuals existing or "standing apart" from one
another in objective and purely factual time and space. The prejudice for taking ourselves
most fundamentally to be 'this' and not 'that' -- to be privileged or not, to be in
control or not -- is, at bottom, a culturally sanctioned form of ignorance that induces
both our factual segregation and our relational or narrative poverty.
As an antidote for such dramatic prejudice, the Buddhist practice of emptiness is
conducive to realizing our horizonless continuity with all things in patterns of
meaningful relationship that arise in a cosmos that is irreducibly karmic -- a cosmos in
which the topography of our individual and shared experience meticulously conforms with
our own values, and in which conflicts and their full resolution are always dramatic.
In a karmic world, there are no clear horizons of responsibility, no objective warrants
for disengagement, and no possibility of abstaining from involvement. In the absence of
any absolute or non-contingent boundaries, the root, moral question can never be whether
we are implicated, but only "in exactly what way, and why?" In the absence of
clear and ontologically fundamental boundaries between self and other, or between 'this'
situation and 'that' one, any tensions between them must be seen as artifacts -- albeit
ones with often quite long and convoluted histories. The perennial conflict of freedom and
duty -- like that between the 'good' of persons and that of communities -- is not an
absolute given, but our own doing: a construct or product of our karma. Quite fortunately,
our karma is always subject to revision.
Activism in Buddhist Perspective: The Disparate Karma of Social and Societal
Strategies
Such a "Copernican" revolution in understanding ourselves has profound
ramifications for how we understand and evaluate social activism. Because securing the
rights of individuals pivots on abstract forms of segregation, it necessarily institutes
an exclusionary middle ground that divorces facts from meaning and that occasions
practical ignorance of the interdependent origination of all things. In consequence, we
fail to see that solving our problems by controlling or managing our situation necessarily
means finding ourselves in controlled or managed relationships. To compound matters, if we
are originally given as relationships, persistently interacting through the veiling
medium of legal anonymity and excluding our dramatic interdependence from consideration
will invariably mean not only our steady alienation from one another, but our own
fragmentation.
Unless corrected, the rationalizing discourse of contemporary life will carry in
opposite directions and place in eventual conflict those 'parts' of ourselves we refer to
as "self" and "other," as "personal" and
"communal," as "emotion" and "reason," as "body"
and "mind," as "conscious" and "unconscious," and as
"spirit" and "flesh." Such a discourse institutionalizes a lack of
compassion and canonizes our critical blind spot as the hallmark of proper reason and
objectivity. Only if we reject the axiom that we are given as individuals will we see that
our most basic right cannot and should not be -- as one United States
Supreme Court justice remarked -- to be "left alone" in well-managed
co-existence with one another, but rather to develop truly virtuosic and meaningful
relationships.[3]
An immediate rejoinder to this is that -- aside from being "politically
naïve" -- such an inversion of the priority of structural facticity over meaning is
liable to induce an acceptance of the inequalities of the status quo rather than a
strenuous effort to challenge them. But like the specter of (epistemic or cultural)
relativism that troubles most theorists of postmodern liberalism, this worry is a
rhetorical consequence of the dialectic of independence and dependence. The Buddhist
teachings of the interdependence and impermanence of all things direct us toward seeing
any fixed status or view (d.r.sti) as evidence of ignorance and error, never as an
absolute fact or ideal. Buddhist practice is thus resolutely counter-cultural or critical
of the status quo, demonstrating that all things and situations -- from our most hallowed
institutions to "reality" itself -- are always negotiable. Since no situation is
or could ever be dramatically intractable, there are no excuses for repeated errors or
omissions, no excuses for sitting on our hands waiting for things to get better. The only
relevant question is one of strategy.
I have argued elsewhere (1996, chapter three) for the heuristic value of drawing a
contrast between sociality (an orientation of conduct toward realizing improvised,
increasingly dramatic, and virtuosic interrelationship) and societality (an orientation of
conduct toward bringing about our regulated and factual co-existence through predictably
role-mediated patterns of interaction). To the extent that our conduct or dramatic
"middle ground" is social, it means increasing intimacy and creative
vulnerability; to the extent that it is societal, we find ourselves disposed in thought,
feeling, speech, and action toward developing relatively fixed identities or institutions
and promoting factual security. Sociality fosters the conditions of uniquely meaningful
contribution to our dramatic interdependence; societality, the conditions of generically
controlling the structure of our managed co-existence. All societies, of course, arise
through the patterned complexion or interweaving of sociality and societality.
According to this distinction, much of what has been called "social activism"
has been correlated with and promoted an increasingly societal movement of our narration
-- the realization of an increasingly rational life-world, globalizing economic
"development," the fragmentation of community and family, and the legal
consolidation of individual and class rights. As such, it has ably secured and managed the
interests of factually subordinate but ideally autonomous 'individuals' who are themselves
the end products of both a technological lineage biased toward control and those
political, philosophical, and religions institutions that have systematized this bias.
A truly social form of activism would by contrast be oriented toward enhancing our
capacity for uniquely responsive contribution, not increasing capacities for living
"as we want." It would express an ethics of responsibility, not one of protest
or refusal; a bias toward improvisation and the unprecedented, not regulation and
predictability; a focus on realizing what it means to have no-self and to refrain from
discharging blame. Rather than legally ignoring our uniqueness, by aiming at dramatically
satisfying interdependence, truly social activism would facilitate improvising creative
and surprising communities in which our differences always and thankfully make a
difference.
The karmic implications of these two forms of activism are profoundly disparate. Like
technologies oriented toward control, to the extent that societal activism is successful,
it brings about the conditions of its continued necessity and success. In much the same
way that our technological tradition has promised, but not delivered, a life of ease and
leisure,[4]societal activism promises an end of
inequality and imposition while instituting a need for ever finer institutional
distinctions, definitions, and constraints. Societal activism produces legal horizons.
That is its business. And the more effective it is, the more effective it must be.
Just as getting better at getting what we want invariably means getting better at
wanting, getting better at legally insuring rights and freedoms for generic populations
will mean developing further legal mechanisms for specifying and enforcing those legally
defined rights and freedoms. But if regulated freedom stands in need of
"external" enforcement -- that is, new patterns of policing and not just new
policies -- it establishes fertile ground for new hierarchies of control. Those
institutions which police the enforcement of legally won rights and freedoms will also
need policing. The circle is, again, finally a vicious one. Freedom becomes an
end-in-itself -- an abstract status -- that in an irreducibly dynamic world can only be
maintained by dramatic disengagement or the loss of meaning.
Instead of concentrating on patterns of conduct oriented toward the institutional
guarantee of generic rights and statuses, the basic strategy of a truly social
activism is to foster appreciative and contributory virtuosity -- primarily through
encouraging practices for continuously relinquishing our horizons for relevance,
responsibility, and readiness.[5] The karmic
ramifications of this shift away from institutional control are both radical and profound.
First, if consciousness is understood as irreducibly relational, appreciation cannot be
reduced to an emotionally decorative and dramatically superfluous acceptance of things as
they are. To the contrary, appreciation means attending to or relating with things in such
a way the value of our situation continuously increases or appreciates. Karmically, this
not only develops the conditions for living in circumstances that are increasingly
valuable, but being more and more valuably placed within them. Moreover, because our
situation is always dramatic, the practice of appreciation is inseparable from discerning
and attuning ourselves to our situation's potential for superlative meaning -- the
realization of dramatic and contributory creativity. That is, in sharp contrast with the
karma of control–oriented conduct, the better we get at contributing to our situation
in a dramatically satisfying way, the more opportunity we will have to do so. Truly social
activism means realizing our situation as one of horizonless value and opportunity through
amplifying the unique capacities each of us has for sui-shih-ying-yung or
"according with our situation, responding as needed." The result of radically
social activism is a dramatic revision of our present circumstances as the bodhima.n.dala
or "place of enlightenment."
As implied in this four-character narrative of Ch'an Buddhist enlightenment, increasing
virtuosity in contribution (daanapaaramitaa, or perfection of offering) is
inseparable from increasing virtuosity in appreciation (praj~naapaaramitaa, or the
perfection of wisdom). If appreciation is not a subjective decoration of our
circumstances, neither is it an attainment that comes -- as is sometimes maintained --
only after we have established sufficiently comfortable and edifying circumstances for
"serious" meditative discipline and the exercise of compassion to be
"really" possible. Again, if consciousness consists of patterns of
interdependence from which we abstract such things as 'individual beings' and their
'environments', there is no precedent for assuming that the perfection of wisdom depends
on the realization of certain material comforts or that factually altering our
circumstances is more effective or basic than changing minds. In a thoroughly karmic
world, attention and responsive activity are separable -- if at all -- only on heuristic
grounds, not ontological ones. Changing how we place ourselves in attending a situation is
already to transform it. Appreciative virtuosity directly alters the complexion of our
interdependence with all things -- changing at once our 'world' and 'who we are within
it'.
Societal activism begins with a recognition of the "poverty" attendant on
membership in one or another class of "oppressed" or "structurally
subordinated" people. On this basis, it works to secure rights to pursue redress --
rights, that is, to command a factual change of status or circumstance. When a society has
decayed to the point that adequate food, shelter, education, and medicine are no longer
readily available, such factual corrections are imperative. That is, they should no
longer be considered matters of choice. But for karmic reasons, settling for strictly
factual solutions should be seen as a last resort. Consider, for example, the effect of
stepping in to correct the systematically unjust treatment of a child by a playground
bully or a female worker by her sexually predatory male supervisor. Physically intervening
may effectively halt a given instance of bullying or harassment, but it is unlikely to dramatically
alter the relationship between the persons involved -- the actual site of the conflict in
its dramatic sense. If anything, outside intervention by an ultimate or transcendent
"authority" is likely to drive the "bully" into either greater
brutality when unmonitored or increasingly insidious subtlety. Either way, the unique
contributions the bullied child or co-worker might make to the creative life of the
situation and the dramatic reform of the "bully" will likely remain marginal.
Structurally, an analogy can be made to all instances where some group of people is
subordinated, silenced, or dramatically impoverished by those with greater access to power
and control. Karmically, unintended changes in our situation -- changes that, like those
legislated from "above," do not require us to express our own creativity -- cannot
lead to meaningfully addressing the conflicting values and presuppositions that have
sponsored our present trouble. While changing a society's legal institutions to prohibit
certain forms of overt oppression may alter the factual complexion of that society, this
is no guarantee that the expression of prejudicial discrimination and subordination will
be curtailed. Indeed, a more typical outcome is that the bases of oppression will shift
and become both more varied and less ostensive.
Truly social activism must be rooted in recognizing the contributory potential, the
creativity, of the "oppressed." That is, its first step must be to stop moving
in the direction of attending to one or another form of 'poverty' or 'want' and
establishing legal precedents for its factual redress. Rather than placing limits on
conduct and effectively discouraging horizonless responsibility while leaving the
presuppositions of the status quo essentially unquestioned, social activism must refrain
from accepting the current definition of the situation, the current "facts"
about exactly what is wrong or conflicted.
Karmically, the "facts" of our experience invariably correspond to what we
have meant in the past -- the direction in which we have conducted or guided
ourselves together.[6] Like a mango which is both the
final product of a tree and the occasion of its generational continuity, meaning in a
Buddhist sense is artha -- at once the fruit or result of our value-informed
activity and a precedent or further condition thereof. That is, meaning expresses
the recursive relationship through which our intentional activity feeds back into our
'experience' and conduct as an initial 'environmental' condition. Far from being either a
subjective reading of a text or situation, or an objective and essential content thereof,
meaning consists of the dramatic furtherance of our narration -- the valuing of our
interdependence.
Thus, our factual status at any given time should not be seen as the primary
cause of our suffering or troubles. Rather, it is through our inability to improvise a
viable and meaningful path around or through our situation that suffering arises.
Suffering is not a fact about the way things are, but the announcement of narrative
impasse. It consists of the blockage, truncation, or repetitive frustration of our
dramatic furtherance due to a scarcity of dramatic resources -- those attentive capacities
required for virtuosically according with our situation and responding as needed. In
Buddhist terms, suffering signals our inability to shift the meaning of things away from samsaara
(a world narration characterized by repeated conflict, trouble, and disappointment) toward
nirvaa.na (a world narration in which the conditions of ignorance, conflict,
trouble, and wanting are continuously and thoroughly uprooted).
Seeing meaning as dramatic furtherance challenges both the self-centered bias of
consequentialism and our control-biased disposition for seeing causation as a
fundamentally linear process of influence. For the realization of a truly social form of
activism, this is a crucial move -- one that allows us to see beyond the no-win dichotomy
of either re-organizing or ordering society person by person or doing so through
generically altering the structure of the interpersonal as such. What we begin seeing
instead is the possibility of changing society through directly and jointly revising the
valence of our dramatic interdependence or karma as such. Although the analogy has limits,
just as shifts between the "two women" and "vase" views of the
standard gestalt drawing do not require redrawing the picture line by line, dramatic
changes in the structure of society need not depend on rebuilding its institutional
structures brick by brick or law by law.
Importantly, if changing our patterns of attention necessarily changes the pattern of
our interdependence as such, and if all things are dynamic or irreducibly characterized by
impermanence, nothing can be more deleterious in our effort to relieve suffering or end
conflict than inflexible habits of thought, speech, and action. Meaningful -- that is,
karmically effective -- solutions to our personal and communal troubles can never be
imposed or universally legislated. They must be improvised.
If this much can be said about the first step of truly social engagement, about the
second it is possible only to affirm that it must be taken locally, and in a direction
compatible with eliciting the meaningful participation of all concerned in realizing an
increasingly valuable situation -- not the institution of a new "state of
affairs," but the improvisation of a new direction for our dramatic interdependence.
Good examples of the face of truly social activism can be seen in the Sarvodaya Shramadana
movement begun by A. T. Ariyaratne in rural Sri Lanka and the work of the Thai activist
Sulak Sivaraksa.
Responding to the devastating decay forced upon Sri Lanka's rural communities by
centuries of colonialism followed by various "development" schemes designed to
forward the ends of global capitalism, Ariyaratne began working with villagers to help
them amplify their own creative resources and through these reverse the conditions of
personal and communal decay. Emerging from the crucible of shared physical labor on
locally determined public works projects have been a diverse range of truly local and
non-sectarian movements toward answering particular village needs by appreciating each
village's unique situation and eliciting its indigenous, dramatic resources.[7]
Sivaraksa's approach has been to radically apply the teachings of emptiness and karma
in the context of critically evaluating the effects of Western, individual-biased
development and political ideals. Sivaraksa has thus insisted (1992) that a first
responsibility in any viable form of activism is attending to the quality of our dramatic
interdependence and taking full account of our communal karma -- the karma being created,
for instance, by the unchecked proliferation of technologies which are marketed as
value-neutral or morally-transparent and are not.
In different contexts, Ariyaratne and Sivaraksa both exhort the "oppressed"
seekers of rights to challenge this "disadvantaged" status and direct their
attention to the collusion of values between the rhetoric of development and liberal
democracy and the conditions of their present oppression. In neither case does this entail
refusing to recognize the value of democracy in its broadest sense or the importance of
carefully integrating local, national, and international economies. But as would be
expected in the context of (Buddhist) social activism, greatest emphasis is placed on
discerning the patterns of attention and value that have been conducive to trouble or
conflict and then redirecting these toward liberation -- not freedom from some abstract
form of poverty or merely material want, but uniquely realized and meaningful virtuosity.
So thoroughly ingrained is our prejudice toward the efficiency of control-biased
strategies for change that talk of amplifying dramatic resources can only seem
disastrously naïve. From the perspective of scientific and technological realism, we must
first and foremost alter the facts of our co-existence. Any changes in the meaning of our
present situation and how we are interdependent will -- if necessary -- follow. The
Buddhist rejoinder is that the fact/value distinction -- like that between 'reality' and
'appearance', or 'truth' and 'belief' -- is an artifact with very particular precedents
and uses. For most "oppressed" people, accepting the "facts" of their
'poverty' or 'subordination' is to capitulate to the definitions imposed by those who
oppress through an exclusive super-ordination of their own values and interests. Half the
battle is then already lost. Given our irreducible interdependence, any truly viable form
of liberation must mean dissolving the conditions of oppression and liberating all
those bound by them -- the 'oppressors' as well as the 'oppressed'. If this is to be
possible, there is a strong sense in which the "facts" must be denied.
Opening the Borders: Taking Responsibility for What Society Means
What we call the "facts" of our situation -- the way things 'objectively'
have been, are now, and are likely to remain or become -- are best seen as commitments to
particular patterns of intentional activity or dramatic interdependence. That is, they
reveal our karma. Facts -- and, indeed, what we typically refer to as "matter"
-- consist of continuously reinforced definitions of a particular point of view. Facts
announce the status of things, their mode of existing within the hierarchy of our
values, but they also announce our own status -- the particular way in which we take a
stand on things being either 'this' or 'that' for us. Granted the Buddha's claim
that 'is' and 'is-not' are the twin barbs on which all humankind is impaled, the world of
facts is -- among other things -- the primordial medium of conflict.
But if all things are truly impermanent and empty, no "state of affairs"
(even a state of consciousness) is naturally occurring. What we refer to as "states
of affairs," "individuals," and the "conflicts" they suffer are
not natural events, but rather announcements of horizons peculiar to the point of view we
have adopted -- horizons or boundaries that, like all artifacts, can only be established
and maintained through fixing our own position and thus limiting the free flow of
attention and energy. The facts of our situation define the specific -- and typically
habitual -- ways our attention energy is bound.[8]
The practice of emptiness -- relinquishing those horizons of relevance through which
are constituted both our 'selves' and the 'things' we experience -- thus occasions the
release of previously bound attention-energy. Practicing emptiness means letting go of our
karma. It means freeing dramatic resources that would otherwise be devoted to rehearsing
the various identities essential to defining the recursive topography of our narration.
Doing so is, in the most immediate way possible, to extirpate the conditions for narrative
impasse or suffering. From a Buddhist perspective, power is not needed to induce
change, but only to stop, retard, or define it in the ways needed to
set up and maintain some status or form of (self)existence. Power is not needed to erase
boundaries or end suffering, but only to render them chronic and apparently intractable.
History would seem to tell us otherwise. Even allowing for the caution that historical
narratives are themselves woven in the liminal space of empowerment, the evidence would
seem incontrovertible: power may never have been sufficient for engineering social change,
but it has always been necessary. In the present context, for example, how could one
possibly deny the crucial reliance of activists on the power of the media in successfully
engineering the manifestly positive institutional reforms needed to lobby for and secure
basic human rights around the globe? Then again, the deeper the shadows in which we stand,
the less visible is the ground between us.
Consider the issue or outcome of rights legislation. Legally instituted rights
guarantee everyone a generic share of society's resources and a role in negotiating its
structural organization. Property rights, for instance, allow peasants to claim ownership
of land. Some human rights guarantee minimum standards for working conditions; others
guarantee access to public media for the expression of dissenting views. These are
significant gains for all affected individuals. But at the same time, property rights held
by corporate individuals guarantee the possibility of establishing monopolies on
seed production, the patenting of plant and animal species, and the operation of
"farms" of titanic scale. The entirely legal exercise of these rights by
corporations has been correlated with the demise of the family farm, the eradication of
locally managed seed stock, the flight of rural 'poor' into the city, and the apparent
irrationality of truly vernacular economies. Similarly, rights of access to media have
allowed for both organizing activist movements and organizing "advertising"
campaigns of such magnitude that consumption has reached epidemic proportions and now very
seriously threatens the planet's ecological health.
The technologies used in gathering and wielding power on a globally significant scale
do not create a level playing field. On the contrary, they were developed to realize and
maintain extremely steep hierarchies of advantage in an economy of privilege -- an economy
in which the most powerful will always be able to dispose any prevailing "states of
affairs" to their advantage.[9] Like technologies
that secure their indispensability by becoming more "user friendly," those in
power will insure their advantages by listening to and accommodating activist lobbies as
needed. The powerful may even undergo personnel changes from time to time. But the overall
imbalance of power will remain unchallenged. In spite of any appearances to the
contrary, the game of power is thoroughly rigged.
Fortunately, it is not a game we must play. Accumulating and wielding power is not a
prerequisite of meaningful social change. But we will not quit the contest of power
until we place highest priority on attending to the quality of our interdependence as
such. We must first see, that is, the fallacy in claiming that "if something is good
for each and every one of us, it must be good for all of us." In a dramatic cosmos,
placing a priority on using power to leverage changes in the facts of our circumstances is
like trying to write a new song by altering either the fingerings of already-playing
guitarists (the dispositions of the powerful) or the structure of their guitar necks
(society's institutional structure). It is much better to try improvising along with them
in such a way that the music shifts harmonic and melodic focus directly and of its own
accord. In the same way that skillful contributions to an ongoing musical event allow its
meaning to be revised smoothly and directly, bringing about social change through
attending directly to the quality and disposition of our dramatic interdependence is not
only more efficient than doing so by exerting control over the factual conditions of our
situation, it opens possibilities for contributory and creative parity that would
otherwise be quite literally inconceivable.[10]
Like the benefits of extensive, but entirely "passive," martial arts training
-- made possible, say, by wearing a properly programmed robotic suit -- the benefits of
societal activism are quantifiably real, but limited. Objectively and individually
assessed, such training will undeniably improve our range of motion -- our degrees of
freedom. But in situational crisis, having repeatedly gone through the motions of either tai
chi ch'uan or the exercise of a legally-enacted civil society will prove to have been
of little if any help. Instead of virtuosically according with the unique character of the
present crisis and responding as needed to improvise its meaningful resolution, we will
find ourselves just as likely as ever to freeze, not knowing what to do, or reverting to
old patterns of victimization. If our practices do not transform how well we appreciate
our situation, they will never enhance our capacity for contributing to the
meaningful resolution of our troubles. On the contrary, we will continue repeating and not
truly revising our karma.
In shifting our attention from the controlled redress of factual oppression and
structural inequity to improvising novel conditions for meaningful contribution, we
initiate a decisive return to dramatic immediacy and the disciplines of responsive
creativity. Doing so, we are no longer obliged (in tragic imitation of Zeno and his
paradoxes of motion) to carry society across the dramatic "dead spot" between
disparate states of (political, social, or economic) affairs in an infinite regress that
demands all our available attention and energy to no meaningful effect. It also frees us
from the contradictory logic of either rebuilding society one person at a time or by way
of mass movements organized and granted effective power by control-biased technologies.
With the globalization of the economy and the ubiquitous spread of information
technologies, finding a middle path between these logical contraries is absolutely
crucial. We are now at the point of crossing a critical threshold of utility for using
societal strategies to bring about meaningful changes in the way we structure our
narration -- a threshold beyond which these structures will become increasingly conducive
to the atrophy of our capacities for both appreciation and meaningful contribution. In the
"global village," fighting fire with fire is not a viable option.
This is not, however, to justify withdrawing into a shell of self-concern and ignoring
the extremely disadvantaged factual status of various peoples around the world. It is not
to justify the perverse belief that the teaching of karma entails seeing disadvantaged
people as simply "deserving" what they've got. Nor is it to justify the claim
that since the topography of anyone's experience is a function of their past and
present values and intentions, there is finally not much we can do for them. The
difference between our karma and their karma depends on establishing fixed
horizons of relevance, responsibility, and readiness that do not encourage, but prohibit,
the realization of appreciative and contributory virtuosity.
In spite of its apparent successes, what has been called "social activism"
has not promoted such virtuosity. The United Nations' Declaration on Human Rights and
other institutions like it can be therapeutic in a limited sense, but they will never
bring about the kind of dramatic healing needed in order to realize increasingly
meaningful lives in truly liberating and harmonious community. To the contrary, it has
encouraged a continuing focus on changing the facts of our situation from a sa.msaaric
perspective -- a perspective from which the best we can hope to achieve is the enjoyment
of relatively equal degrees of anonymity and autonomy within the limits of universally
regulated co-existence. The task of any truly social form of activism must be to improvise
new and dramatically satisfying paths across the continually renewed borders of sa.msaara
and beyond the attachments we develop to our varied statuses within them.
It will be objected that there is nothing more liable to contest than the definition of
an "increasingly meaningful or dramatically satisfying life." And without a
doubt, we cannot say with any precision what meaning is. We cannot even
conclusively determine what the meaning of a given situation is or is-not.
Meaning simply does not exist. And yet, in the context of the Buddhist practice of
emptiness, that is all well and good. The original nature of all things is to be
meaningfully related or relevant to one another. Contrary to popular opinion, the meaning
of life is not "something" to be found or discovered -- a pre-existing and
transcendent order that makes sense out of the vicissitudes of our day-to-day affairs.
Rather, the meaning of life is given directly in the movement of our narration, in our
unique ways of participating in irreducibly dramatic interdependence with all the specific
partners we have in these affairs -- our homes, neighborhoods, and cities; our
country-sides and wildernesses and those with whom we share them. We can ignore the
meaning of our lives, but only if we are willing to walk backward into our future
together.
According to the Mahaayaana teaching of emptiness, there is no way of ultimately
separating either our sufferings or our liberation from those of others. Our most basic
right is not to be left alone or to individually prosper. Rather, it is to
contribute ever more fully to our dramatic and liberating interdependence, freeing
ourselves from all chronic suffering and wants as they arise. In spite of any apparent
naivete involved in doing so, we should neither aim at nor settle for less.
Notes
1. It is no coincidence that where persons have been understood
as patterns of relationship (classical Chinese culture comes to mind as a prime example)
and not as simply existing-in or standing-apart within them, the free will/determinism
dichotomy has been either entirely absent or of extremely marginal currency. In such
cultural contexts, liberal democratic human rights discourse has often been seen as
somewhat misplaced. See Ames (1988) and Rosemont (1988) for a discussion, for example, of
contemporary Confucian perspectives on human rights discourse. Return to
text
2. This is not to suggest, of course, that a cultural bias for
seeing persons as relational in nature can be strictly correlated with an absence of
structural inequities and abusive denials of dignity. In both traditional China and
Buddhist Thailand, for example, personal freedoms have by no means been unlimited. All
societies are self-regulating in one degree and fashion or another -- whether by law or by
ritual. The point is to recognize the regulative fertility of conceiving freedom as
located in individual and autonomous existence rather than in meaningful relationship.
Freedom associated with individual autonomy tends to be more abstract than not, even when
most "real." Thus, while Americans can vacation "wherever they want,"
they readily allow profit-seeking advertisers to direct their wants. Return
to text
3. See Hershock (2000) for a discussion of the distinction
between dramatic and factual human rights, and their diverse relationship to the problem
of alienation. Return to text
4. For more on the dishonored promises of technology, see
Hershock (1999), especially chapters three and four. Return to text