Hello there, biches,
Empathy.
In today's world, since the dawn of time, and since man is man, the possibility for empathy has been central to some people sometimes.
It's with this lame introduction that I would like to add my little contribution to our modern society's rediscovered interest in empathy.
Needless to say that I am regularly tearing my hair out when I see all the Mind and Life Institute's, or Mathieu Ricard's efforts to discuss empathy and meditation in a constructive, scientific, rational way. Not that what they say is not relevant or well-put, because it is, but OMG. I'm always wondering how on Earth have we become so completely dispassionate and mediated that we need to politely describe how a world of altruism, cooperation, renunciation to privileges maintained through violence, etc., would probably be best for everyone. OF COURSE! Stating the obvious has never required that many PhDs and/or footnotes.
Fortunately, I hereby propose to you the excessive completely subjective voice of dissent. Seriously, it actually gets back to one of the arguments Naomi Klein makes in her latest book, This changes everything. She underlines how the moderate liberal approach to climate change basically doesn't work because it never challenges the deep ideological assumptions that are at the root of climate change.
Ok I am now trembling with enthusiasm. Please consider reading for another 5 minutes.
Not to get too much into the details, but obviously, climate change is the global result of a worldview based on the idea of the isolated self - independent, trapped in a hostile world that it must dominate, etc. This type of worldview creates the fertile ground for the extreme neo-liberal capitalism that we've been blessed with for the past 30-35 years, with its share of war-mongering morons and irrational religious zealots. Not to mention that this has nurrished the exact opposite phaenomenon, radical islamism, as shown here and there. Isis is the chickpea emanating from Dick Cheney's rectal intercourse with Ayn Rand.
In France, most left-wing people are now discovering that their socialist government is much more right-winged than they would have expected. A lot of them are disillusioned, just like their uncles were under another socialist President, Mitterrand. It's always the same game of disillusion: O geez, I thought he would do this and that - close Guantanamo, end this war in Iraq, break the power of big corporations who have an interest in furthering this terrifying, destructive worldview that puts people in bullshit jobs and propagates war. But of course everyone would rather have a moderate, educated and compassionate leader, so it's not that bad.
What Klein's argument highlights is the kind of double standard that goes with any kind of political - social - philosophical radicalism (which is different from extremism). It's also underlined here, or in many other stories. It's basically this idea that you can change the system from within - a system that I can not describe but which takes its power in the need to report about reality. (See constructivism and the relationship between language, power and violence). However clever you are, again, it's based on the wrong understanding of ourselves (based also on the incomplete perception of what we are beyond the mere rational mind). We are not solipstic islands, impervious to whatever's happening around us. We get inside, and get more comfortable, as well as much tougher. We get it: that's the way it is, you can't just be radical, people don't want that (insert here the silent majority, as loud and proud as the invisible hand, all of them magical unmanifested phenomaenas that only a few are able to decipher and interpret), let's negotiate. Radicalism, the necessity of collective action, the affirmation that growth is the only standard (while the numbers make destruction invisible or profitable), the emphasis on collaboration, love, and belonging to nature, is actually not that radical. And it's necessary. It's also close to a question that is familiar to many in the afro-american / feminist / queer communities. How much integration should we strive for? How is this particular quest for approval going to erode the fundamental change that those under white privilege, patriarchy, heterosexuality, western dominance know to be necessary?
One of the deep defects of our worldview is that it keeps on entertaining the idea of looking outward for some validation. Even though many people know that what truly matters is how you feel, to follow your inner values, it still mostly works. Hence, whatever a human person holding a PhD will say, it will be held as "smarter" or more accurate than whatever someone else might say. It's just a power tool. A convention. As is debt, state sovereignty, law, etc. Not that I have anything against PhDs or rationality, I'm probably way too lazy to get one myself, but I really don't think that they make people smarter than what they already are. They just know more. And some of them know a lot on a particular subject, and don't really feel legitimate to get the whole picture. Integrative thinking is hardly possible - or expected - neither is honest talking.
Come to think about it, it seems that the worst thing that can happen to a normal conversation is uncalculated truth. We've become allergic to opposition, to dissent. It's inappropriate, or things are more complex than that. It's hard to hear people who do not satisfy our sense of expertise. They are too emotional, or, if they happen to be from other cultures, they are easily submitted to our imperialistic, orientalizing glaze: their cultural system of belief is underlined as "traditional", "religious", "magical". We are blind to the fact that the kind of scientific materialism which still prevails is also a cultural thing located in a particular cultural framework, in a particular time. Interestingly, if you turn your TV on, or read most newspapers, or look at conversations between people who talk about the world, you've got that weird feeling that you've somehow landed in a Swiss bourgeois family diner.
We are at the movies. We see what the world is becoming, we hear about injustice, war, environmental depletion, but all of that is too much to be felt, so many of us have developed this capacity for distanciation that clearly works well in TV shows (for the ambitious career lady who won't take any of your bullshit), but doesn't that much IRL. We hide behind monotonous sentences like "we can't host all of the world's misery", or "they should deal with their own problems (ie get developed and get some democratic thing going)", or "everyone suffers, but suffering, as well as pleasure, are impermanent" (or any other pseudo-religious fatalism). In fact, if we truly paused to accept what is - inside of us, and in the world, we would probably feel the anger, the pain, the sadness, all emotions which are there but become repressed because we just want to numb ourselves. I'm astonished to see how many people experience panic attacks these days - or anxiety attacks. When they describe it, the most striking thing is that they basically have to deal with some strong emotions. But instead of saying "you know, my life is shitty right now because of this and that and I feel terrible / sad / angry", they tend to be acting like everything's fine, and then become all shattered by a NATURAL emotional manifestation.
Because mostly, when you look at it, things - and our lives - are not fine. Fine, as well as interesting, are these markers for "please don't make me take position in whatever's happening right now" that I find so depressing with us sometimes.
Because, to be honest, in the end, it isn't that bad. It actually gets much better once you decide to really accept what is. Accepting is not agreeing with. Accepting means being with, patiently, taming the wilderness inside, softening ourselves, and getting back to the engaging, proactive peacefulness that is needed to say: WHAT THE WHAT?
For that, we have to face the years, habits, reflexes of avoidance that we might have developed. Sure, it gets messy and our make up might suffer, as well as our daily life and certainties, but really, who cares? How has this personality of ours become everything that we can be? How did we become cowards? Fear has a hold on us makes us believe that if we do that - if we pause and accept what we desperately try to bury - we might die. And it's true. But whatever comes out of this humbling process is likely to be more encompassing, greater, more empathetic, more courageous, and finally, much more human. And then only can you really go to the movies.
Empathy.
In today's world, since the dawn of time, and since man is man, the possibility for empathy has been central to some people sometimes.
It's with this lame introduction that I would like to add my little contribution to our modern society's rediscovered interest in empathy.
Needless to say that I am regularly tearing my hair out when I see all the Mind and Life Institute's, or Mathieu Ricard's efforts to discuss empathy and meditation in a constructive, scientific, rational way. Not that what they say is not relevant or well-put, because it is, but OMG. I'm always wondering how on Earth have we become so completely dispassionate and mediated that we need to politely describe how a world of altruism, cooperation, renunciation to privileges maintained through violence, etc., would probably be best for everyone. OF COURSE! Stating the obvious has never required that many PhDs and/or footnotes.
Fortunately, I hereby propose to you the excessive completely subjective voice of dissent. Seriously, it actually gets back to one of the arguments Naomi Klein makes in her latest book, This changes everything. She underlines how the moderate liberal approach to climate change basically doesn't work because it never challenges the deep ideological assumptions that are at the root of climate change.
Ok I am now trembling with enthusiasm. Please consider reading for another 5 minutes.
Not to get too much into the details, but obviously, climate change is the global result of a worldview based on the idea of the isolated self - independent, trapped in a hostile world that it must dominate, etc. This type of worldview creates the fertile ground for the extreme neo-liberal capitalism that we've been blessed with for the past 30-35 years, with its share of war-mongering morons and irrational religious zealots. Not to mention that this has nurrished the exact opposite phaenomenon, radical islamism, as shown here and there. Isis is the chickpea emanating from Dick Cheney's rectal intercourse with Ayn Rand.
In France, most left-wing people are now discovering that their socialist government is much more right-winged than they would have expected. A lot of them are disillusioned, just like their uncles were under another socialist President, Mitterrand. It's always the same game of disillusion: O geez, I thought he would do this and that - close Guantanamo, end this war in Iraq, break the power of big corporations who have an interest in furthering this terrifying, destructive worldview that puts people in bullshit jobs and propagates war. But of course everyone would rather have a moderate, educated and compassionate leader, so it's not that bad.
What Klein's argument highlights is the kind of double standard that goes with any kind of political - social - philosophical radicalism (which is different from extremism). It's also underlined here, or in many other stories. It's basically this idea that you can change the system from within - a system that I can not describe but which takes its power in the need to report about reality. (See constructivism and the relationship between language, power and violence). However clever you are, again, it's based on the wrong understanding of ourselves (based also on the incomplete perception of what we are beyond the mere rational mind). We are not solipstic islands, impervious to whatever's happening around us. We get inside, and get more comfortable, as well as much tougher. We get it: that's the way it is, you can't just be radical, people don't want that (insert here the silent majority, as loud and proud as the invisible hand, all of them magical unmanifested phenomaenas that only a few are able to decipher and interpret), let's negotiate. Radicalism, the necessity of collective action, the affirmation that growth is the only standard (while the numbers make destruction invisible or profitable), the emphasis on collaboration, love, and belonging to nature, is actually not that radical. And it's necessary. It's also close to a question that is familiar to many in the afro-american / feminist / queer communities. How much integration should we strive for? How is this particular quest for approval going to erode the fundamental change that those under white privilege, patriarchy, heterosexuality, western dominance know to be necessary?
One of the deep defects of our worldview is that it keeps on entertaining the idea of looking outward for some validation. Even though many people know that what truly matters is how you feel, to follow your inner values, it still mostly works. Hence, whatever a human person holding a PhD will say, it will be held as "smarter" or more accurate than whatever someone else might say. It's just a power tool. A convention. As is debt, state sovereignty, law, etc. Not that I have anything against PhDs or rationality, I'm probably way too lazy to get one myself, but I really don't think that they make people smarter than what they already are. They just know more. And some of them know a lot on a particular subject, and don't really feel legitimate to get the whole picture. Integrative thinking is hardly possible - or expected - neither is honest talking.
Come to think about it, it seems that the worst thing that can happen to a normal conversation is uncalculated truth. We've become allergic to opposition, to dissent. It's inappropriate, or things are more complex than that. It's hard to hear people who do not satisfy our sense of expertise. They are too emotional, or, if they happen to be from other cultures, they are easily submitted to our imperialistic, orientalizing glaze: their cultural system of belief is underlined as "traditional", "religious", "magical". We are blind to the fact that the kind of scientific materialism which still prevails is also a cultural thing located in a particular cultural framework, in a particular time. Interestingly, if you turn your TV on, or read most newspapers, or look at conversations between people who talk about the world, you've got that weird feeling that you've somehow landed in a Swiss bourgeois family diner.
We are at the movies. We see what the world is becoming, we hear about injustice, war, environmental depletion, but all of that is too much to be felt, so many of us have developed this capacity for distanciation that clearly works well in TV shows (for the ambitious career lady who won't take any of your bullshit), but doesn't that much IRL. We hide behind monotonous sentences like "we can't host all of the world's misery", or "they should deal with their own problems (ie get developed and get some democratic thing going)", or "everyone suffers, but suffering, as well as pleasure, are impermanent" (or any other pseudo-religious fatalism). In fact, if we truly paused to accept what is - inside of us, and in the world, we would probably feel the anger, the pain, the sadness, all emotions which are there but become repressed because we just want to numb ourselves. I'm astonished to see how many people experience panic attacks these days - or anxiety attacks. When they describe it, the most striking thing is that they basically have to deal with some strong emotions. But instead of saying "you know, my life is shitty right now because of this and that and I feel terrible / sad / angry", they tend to be acting like everything's fine, and then become all shattered by a NATURAL emotional manifestation.
Because mostly, when you look at it, things - and our lives - are not fine. Fine, as well as interesting, are these markers for "please don't make me take position in whatever's happening right now" that I find so depressing with us sometimes.
Because, to be honest, in the end, it isn't that bad. It actually gets much better once you decide to really accept what is. Accepting is not agreeing with. Accepting means being with, patiently, taming the wilderness inside, softening ourselves, and getting back to the engaging, proactive peacefulness that is needed to say: WHAT THE WHAT?
For that, we have to face the years, habits, reflexes of avoidance that we might have developed. Sure, it gets messy and our make up might suffer, as well as our daily life and certainties, but really, who cares? How has this personality of ours become everything that we can be? How did we become cowards? Fear has a hold on us makes us believe that if we do that - if we pause and accept what we desperately try to bury - we might die. And it's true. But whatever comes out of this humbling process is likely to be more encompassing, greater, more empathetic, more courageous, and finally, much more human. And then only can you really go to the movies.
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