Why Do People Make Absurd Choices?

I’ve been thinking of this, to me, baffling problem: what induces people to believe a fraud like Donald Trump who enacts policies that show his contempt for them and actually damages them, and yet refuse to support someone like Bernie Sanders who is offering policies, like Medicare-for-all and action on climate change, that could measurably improve their lives? How do we make sense of this? It is similar to the problem that absorbed Tolstoy in War and Peace: how could someone like Napoleon induce hundreds of thousands of men to move from West to East and risk their lives in brutal wars, and likewise, more hundreds of thousands to follow the lead of Russia’s Emperor Alexander in a mass movement from East to West to war on that same Napoleon? Tolstoy concluded that it was not Napoleon’s so-called “genius” or Alexander’s noble aura that moved millions, but some larger global force that he likened to destiny or spirit. And that “great men” were merely swept along in these global movements. I’m not going to conclude here that a similar global or spiritual force drives Trump’s minions (or those of any other movement), but rather look to what we now know, or think we know, about psychology, culture and/or brain structure for my tentative answer. 

            When I was in the Army reserves many years ago, I was required to go for an annual two-week summer camp for ‘training.’ This one year we were in upstate New York, at a little-used base where the barracks we were housed in were in desperate shape. The latrines were filthy and the floors, covered in a kind of linoleum tile, were dirt-covered and deeply careworn. The sergeant of our barracks, a weekend warrior like the rest of us but rather gung-ho, decided that we should really spruce up those floors and outshine our co-warriors in neighboring barracks. But we had no real spit-polishing supplies. So he decided to take up a collection, and one trooper would be designated to go to town and buy things like wax or mop-&-glow or some such commercial cleaning product, and we’d have the shiniest floors on the base. To raise the necessary funds, everyone would chip in a dollar or less. All were enthusiastic about this chance to rise above our neighbors, and willingly contributed. I alone refused. I explained my reasons: why should we be responsible for buying supplies? If the Army wanted the floors to be shiny, then they should supply us with the goods; the military budget was ridiculous and bloated enough to be able to afford us basic supplies. My stance was met with surprise, dismay, and outright anger. ‘I was not going along with the program. I was not a team player.’ And it was true. I was not. The whole thing seemed like puerile pandering to the “bosses,” a vain attempt to prove how much we valued our training and the spirit of the military—which I did not. 

            Those two positions—obedience to current authority, as opposed to thinking something through and evaluating it—seem to me to mark the poles of this question. When faced with a choice, does a person accede to the constituted authority—be it Napoleon or my sergeant or a boss or some wannabe dictator like Trump—or think things through and come to a decision based on the information and conditions that pertain? How do people decide? What inclines some to go one way and some to go another? What motivated so many Frenchmen to defy authorities and opt for revolution in 1789, even agreeing to cut off the heads of the king and many of his nobles? Why did others refuse to take part? Surely it had to do with more than bread, though starvation must have been a major factor. And I am not here talking about heroics; I am wondering about average people who are either driven to take actions from which there is little hope of returning, or of opting to side with order and authority no matter how battered by that authority they may be. I suppose in the end it is a question of risk. What inclines some people to opt for some action that risks their very lives and way of life, or to refuse the action, fearing to take that risk?

            Social psychology has confronted this question extensively in recent years. The experiments may seem trivial, but they are nonetheless revealing. And they involve, in the classic experiments created by Nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman, presenting test subjects with a choice: how willing are you to risk $10 on a bet? Would you do it if the odds were even, that is, rewarding you with $10 for a win? Or would you need more potential winnings to risk your $10? The answer is that the majority of subjects required the chance of winning to be 2-1/2 times the chance of losing before they’d take the risk. If they were offered a potential $22.50 return for a $10 bet, most people would go for it. Less than that—say the possibility of winning only $15—and the fear of losing the $10 they already had loomed too large. In other words, average people most fear losing what they have, and will not risk it unless the possible gains are substantially greater than the loss. The pain of losing appears to be greater than the possible exhilaration of winning. This seems relevant to our discussion of people’s choices in a crisis. Many people will be reluctant to take a chance on some candidate like Bernie Sanders who promises revolutionary change—even if that change promises much-needed relief to them and theirs. The fear of losing what they have, or think they have, is much greater than the potential gains offered. By contrast, some of the people attracted to Trump are clearly attracted to his slogan, “Make America Great Again.” The promised gain here suggests that the America where they had good jobs, and were in solid control regarding their position in the social hierarchy—that is, as white Americans who were clearly in a superior position to Blacks and Hispanics and immigrants—would be restored, or at least preserved. And it was great enough to move them. There would be no left-wing social leveling with consequences that were unpredictable, if not dire to them. There was a risk—which they are now discovering thanks to a virus—but it must have seemed that the great potential rewards in revived social superiority were worth that risk.

            The notion of control is also an important factor here. Ray Lancaster, in a November 2018 post on quora.com, emphasized three factors—control, connection and consistency—that are crucial psychological needs for most people, relevant to decision making. The first of these, control, looms large both today, and in our evolutionary past. For hunter-gatherers, that is, it was crucial that they could control their access to food. This was not only the case in fair weather, but perhaps moreso in cold months when food was harder to come by. Thus, controlling food so that some was stored for winter would have been crucial to survival, and those who exerted such control would have better survived to pass on their genes (this goes mainly for groups in temperate climates with severe winters; those who live in the Amazon, for example, have been shown to be noticeably casual with food supplies that are almost always available). The fear of loss would operate here, too; those who refused to risk losing their food reserves—e.g. who maintained control of their food supplies—would have had a better chance at survival than those who were profligate with food. 

But for these same ancestors, maintaining connections to others in their group would have been no less important. Connection with others would have been crucial for access to females, always a negotiation where leaders tended to monopolize such access, but also for successful hunting and for finding and maintaining shelter. Connection—here shorthand for social and cooperating skills—thus was, and still is a key development for humans. Maintaining such connections, indeed, is what prompts much of our decision-making discussed above. Why do most people tend to obey authorities, even though they might really want to go off on their own and please themselves? Because they fear to lose that social connection that obedience assures them. They go along to get along. Indeed, many try not to stand out for the same reason: to maintain that social connection by conformity.  And the inhibition on refusing to go along in a social situation—like the one in my army barracks noted above—stems from this same fear of social exclusion. Which is why ostracism was such a dire punishment in ancient cultures like Greece and Rome, and even for Napoleon himself, exiled to Elba. The many eons when ostracism meant certain loss of the protection of the group, and often certain death, still resonates in our psyches. Finally, consistency would have been necessary, to remember what processes had been used to store food, and what to keep doing, not just for food preservation, but also for the relationship between signs and meanings. The rise of a certain phase of the moon, or star, or the appearance of a given plant would be always looked for to maintain the best chance of survival. So would ways of cooking or hunting or eating or a thousand other procedures, all of which become consistent parts of the group’s cultural heritage. And consistently maintaining these would, to a large degree, help ensure individual and group survival. We see this today in the thousands of ways that cultural groups conserve practices or rituals that, to us now, seem useless. We also see it in the reluctance of decision-makers to withdraw their support from a leader like Trump because of new evidence; such a switch of allegiance would make them seem inconsistent, not only to others, but to themselves.

            The above-cited conditions do not exhaust the list of factors that affect risk aversion in choice. Research has shown that three more factors—individualism, masculinity, and power—also seriously matter when it comes to taking risks. People from cultures that privilege the individual—like the United States—over the collective—like many Asian countries—tend to be more risk averse. The reasoning is simple: if your decisions are solely your responsibility, then the burden of that risk, and possible losses, are yours alone to bear. Conversely, if you have a family or group to share that burden, the risk of loss is more likely to be shared, and thus proportionately less onerous for you. All other things being equal, you can afford to take more risks. The relative masculinity of a culture likewise affects risk aversion. People from cultures that privilege masculine values such as aggression, that operate on fear, and which are highly goal-oriented toward wealth and career, also tend to be more risk averse. That is, where these things matter highly or even exclusively in the way people assess an individual’s worth, the loss of any of them figures to be critical to most of its members. The tendency is to be extra reluctant to risk whatever one has accumulated (money, property) because it means a loss of social position as well. On the other hand, those with power tend to be more willing to take risks. The obvious reason is that people with power have more confidence in their ability, and thus are more confident in their ability to win. They are also likely to have more wealth to fall back on, and more education, another factor that has been found to make such people willing to take more risks than those without education. 

We should be cautious in this regard as well, however, for recent research has shown that leaders—presumably those with power—especially if they are men, tend to overvalue their decision-making abilities. Such men tend to be much less reflective, and hence ignore their actual ignorance and the downsides in a given situation (one again thinks of Trump). This means that such leaders often lead their countries or states or companies into highly risky and sometimes disastrous situations. We need only think of Napoleon and his ill-advised invasion of Russia in 1809, or Hitler doing the same thing in WWII. The results for both leaders and their nations was catastrophic: Napoleon lost almost his entire army of 600,000 men, while for Hitler’s forces, the punishing losses they suffered in the Russian winter marked the beginning of their total defeat by the Allies.  

There are certainly other factors that affect risk aversion and choice—such as the relative presence of the neurotransmitter dopamine, so important in the brains of addicts like compulsive gamblers. More dopamine apparently means more willingness to take risks. This does not cancel out the effects of fear—mediated mostly by the amygdala—but it tends to weaken the fear response. But enough said. We can see that numerous factors can affect how given individuals respond to risk in making decisions. Does this tell us anything about how people choose in a political situation? Perhaps not. But perhaps we can see that the dominance of certain factors over others will tend to shape decision-making. And perhaps what seems baffling can make more sense, as we take some of these factors into consideration.

Consider, for example, Trump voters. On the face of it, one might think that people whose lives have been decimated by the transfer of so much American manufacturing to foreign countries, by the ravages of climate change that promise more damage in the future, would be receptive to a political promise of government action and direct help. Such as a higher minimum wage. Or better protections for workers. Or the ‘Green new deal.’ Apparently not. All these were outweighed by Trump’s scapegoating of immigrants said to be “taking American jobs.” But most of those immigrants worked in jobs like farming or meat processing which American workers had abandoned years ago. What sense did that make? But perhaps if we consider that many of these voters come from cultures that place a high value on traditional masculinity, not to mention individualism, we can better understand their tendency to avoid the risk of “liberal” promises in favor of a candidate like Trump who gave them an easily-understood target to vent their anger and frustration upon. And perhaps the image of a confident, authoritarian leader induced them to place their bets on the man who appeared capable of taking charge and implementing policies that would favor white conservatives like themselves, rather than one making “pie-in-the-sky” promises for government action that was characterized as ‘socialism.’ Far better to pledge loyalty and obedience to a Big Daddy figure; and stay with what everyone around one appeared to favor as the cultural choice (action against abortion; action against ‘government handouts’ for those outsiders who ‘can’t take care of themselves.’) Stay within, that is, the collective judgment in their traditional communities. 

So what do we have? Just this. If people can be convinced that their choice will keep them within the protection of their own valued culture, the culture that has been handed down for generations (what’s good enough for my father is good enough for me), they appear willing to take a risk even on someone who resembles them hardly at all, but appears confident and powerful. Someone who inspires obedience to fatherhood and the flag and ‘one nation under (their) God.’ Conversely, they appear unwilling to take a risk on someone who seems to promise what they actually need, but whose credentials appear to align him/her with a central government that seems to favor those who do not deserve their consideration. The poor. The ones of a different color. The ones who fail to conform to what they consider acceptable sexual or social mores. Outsiders. Foreigners. Those who don’t belong. Why take a risk on them? Why risk losing one’s place—the place that one has come to believe one deserves? It makes no sense. Whereas taking a risk on someone who seems to promise to restore what one had and valued above all else, and to suppress those who seem to be eager to take it from you—that seems a risk worth taking. 

And yet, even given all these sound psycho-social reasons, I have to confess that the enduring support for this liar, this philanderer, this huckster and money launderer, this bankrupt several times over, still makes no sense to me. It continues to baffle me that people, no matter how disappointing their lives, no matter how in love with their supposed white supremacy, can be so deceived in their basic ability to evaluate another human being (and themselves). It is as if all their hard-won faculties take a vacation. As if they do not see, or don’t want to see the catastrophe bearing down on them. As if they are not just unconscious of what is happening to them, but actively courting disaster. And there is, in fact, some reason to think that at least some of them—the fundamentalists who believe literally in the biblical prophecy of the end times—really do want the whole society to come crashing down just as they are elevated at last into paradise. That would really ‘make (their) America great again.’ Make it the holy site of the great Rapture* so fervently desired by evangelicals. 

Too bad their choice rather ensures that they’re more likely to find themselves proceeding rapidly in the other direction.

Lawrence DiStasi

* After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever (1 Thessalonians).

Jesus to Christology

Here we are in the Christmas season again and, as always, there are the usual calls to “put the Christ back in Christmas.” This seems like a reasonable request—until that is, we begin to look into words and ideas and their histories. For me, this means looking into the history that made a radical Jewish preacher named Jesus of Nazareth into a divine figure called “Christ.” And as we learn from lexicons, the English word “Christ” comes from a Greek word, Khristos, which means “anointed;” and this, in turn, turns Jesus into the Christ, or anointed one, which in Hebrew is masiah (also mashiah and mashiach) or Messiah. In Jewish tradition, the coming of the masiah or anointed one was eagerly anticipated as the event that would unify the twelve tribes into one nation, and revive the Temple in Jerusalem. According to Reza Aslan (Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth), there were many, many figures around the time of Jesus claiming to be messiahs, mainly because Jerusalem and its temple were being profaned by the Roman occupation. The traditional job of all of these messiahs, including Jesus of Nazareth, would have been to defeat or eject the Romans from Jewish land and restore the Temple and Jerusalem to Jewish rule. That was in fact, according to Aslan, the announced purpose of Jesus himself and all Zealots: to kick out the Romans and restore the Temple in Jerusalem to its seat of worship for the one Hebraic God, Jahweh.

            This leads us to the idea of Christ. How did a radical, impoverished and probably-illiterate preacher named Jesus, who called himself the Son of Man, become the Son of God with a Greek name, Khristos? How did a strictly Jewish zealot with a mission to restore Jewish worship in its central temple become the leader of a world religion that preached not to the Jews alone, but moreso to the Romans and other “pagans” of the time who were their mortal enemies?

            Of course, these are questions that neither I—growing up Roman Catholic—nor anyone I knew even thought of, much less asked. Jesus Christ was God, the second person, the Son, part of the one but tripartite God, all of them equally God, and that was that. Always had been God. Always would be God. And it was our job not to question but to worship this mystery. The Bible—at least the Bible we were exposed to—said it and repeated it in ways that left no doubt. And for all we knew, there never had been any doubt. But once again, history informs us that there had been from the beginning quite a bit of doubt about these central tenets of our faith. And the main question related to this business of Jesus, or rather Christ, being the God-man. Simultaneously God and Man. Born of a woman, Mary, and with a father, Joseph, who, it turned out, wasn’t quite a father as we know fathers to be. Nor was Mary a woman in the conventional sense either. She was pregnant, that was for sure. That’s why the story tells us that she and Joseph were desperate to find a place to rest their weary heads for her to give birth, finally settling on this “manger”—a kind of Bethlehem stable which they occupied in the company of farm animals: sheep, goats, cows, donkeys and so on. A very humble place for a man-God. Very humble beginnings, indeed. Which is what we celebrate, supposedly, on Christmas Day: the birth of God taking on humble human flesh in the manger.

            So, what we learned was not only that this baby was divine, but that he was born in the normal way, from the womb of Mary. BUT (and this was a big ‘but’) not with the help of poor old Joseph (whose role, in the folk tradition in Italy, is humorously referred to as cornuto, a cuckold). No, poor old Joe the carpenter had no role in this begetting; rather, it was God, or the third person of God, the Holy Spirit, who surreptitiously impregnated Mary without anything so animalistic as copulation to sully the man-God’s begetting (we were never told if Mary felt the impregnation, but we were quite sure she never enjoyed it).

            Now this story, the one we celebrate at Christmas (even though most early scholars calculated that Jesus was born in March; which didn’t dissuade the Roman Church from making his official birth conform to several pagan holidays that fell on December 25, in accordance with St. Paul’s very influential notion of winning over those Romans Jesus actually hated by blending their rituals with what became his proselytizing Christian Church), begins to take on the familiar lines. Somewhere between the death of Jesus of Nazareth (and Reza Aslan, again, points out that crucifixion was reserved by the Romans for only the most dangerous rebels against their rule) and the now-familiar celebration of Christmas, something big happened to change the story. And the figure who is mainly credited with the major changing of that story is St. Paul (known in his lifetime as Saul of Tarsus).

            Saul of Tarsus was a highly religious Jew living in what is now Syria, who started out as a zealous persecutor of the early Christians. But he suffered a miracle on the road to Damascus and, realizing the error of his ways, transformed himself into the chief writer and progenitor of Christianity. It was Saul, not Jesus, who invented most of the big ideas of Christianity, what scholars now refer to as Christology. Saul/Paul wrote a lot of letters, and in these epistles (I always tuned out when the priest read the dull epistles of Paul) he really gave shape to the entire edifice that became the Christian Church (and that includes the Eastern Orthodox Churches, the Roman Church, and the Protestant ones that broke away starting with Martin Luther). His basic idea was that the Christ had existed before he took the human form of Jesus, and that He was not some itinerant no-account radical preacher but the Lord or Kyrios. And the reason he was Lord and superior to all other pretend earthly Lords was that he was literally the Son of God. Remember, Jesus of Nazareth always referred to himself as the Son of Man. Not Saul/Paul. His Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, the true Lord of all Creation; or rather, the One who had introduced a whole new dispensation, a new creation, in which he redeemed humans from the sin of Adam which had separated them from God their Creator, and, simply by confessing their allegiance to Him, united all professing humans in the new, liberated creation. More specifically, Christ’s death on the cross had accomplished this. It was not a defeat at the hands of the Romans, not a humiliating punishment by crucifixion as it seemed, but rather a victory over the world and its rulers. And by uniting with this cross-nailed cosmic Christ, Christians also were united in their redemption and victory not over the Romans, but over Death.

            Again, this is all Saul’s theology. It has little to do with what Jesus of Nazareth apparently preached. It has more to do with persuading Romans and other goyim to join this new church (as does Paul’s decree that neither circumcision nor adhering to Jewish dietary laws were necessary to become Christian, causing Peter himself to refuse to share a meal with Paul’s new Christians). And the interesting thing is that there were several sects in the early church who simply did not agree with Saul/Paul’s theology. Among these, the most prominent (they were called “heresies” by the reigning Christian Church) were those following Arianism (Arians did not believe in the equality of the three persons in God, but rather believed that God the Father was supreme and primary, and had begotten Jesus Christ as his only Son); and adherents of Ebionism (which maintained that Jesus was an ordinary man born of a woman, a mortal). In a similar but opposite vein, Gnosticism’s disagreement with the man-God idea was the Gnostic insistence that the physical body of Christ was a mere appearance that disguised his real nature, which was spiritual. All of these diverse views are understandable, given the Pauline doctrine that maintained what, to most mortals, was the irrationality of a God who was simultaneously a man born of a woman who was a virgin. The Church’s resolution of these conflicts may be even harder to understand: in 451, something called the “hypostatic union” was advanced as dogma: the proposition that “Christ has one human nature [physis] and one divine nature [physis], united with neither confusion nor division,” which is a sort of ex-cathedra pronouncement that explains nothing. Finally, according to Reza Aslan, the idea that Christ was a divine being, a God-man united with Jahweh, would’ve been anathema to any orthodox Jew, as it was to several of the original disciples who had actually lived with Jesus (unlike Paul who had never met him).

            What we are left with, then, is a Christianity that seems to have departed radically from the message, and the intentions behind it, that Jesus himself preached when he was alive. No less a genius than Leo Tolstoy seems to have come to a similar conclusion in his radical analysis of Russian Orthodox Christianity.  And what Tolstoy tried to do was promote a more or less originalist Christianity that centered on the Sermon on the Mount:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: 

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right 

cheek, turn to him the other also. 

This nonviolent and rational ideal was what Christianity should have focused on, according to Tolstoy, and he wrote stirringly about its importance when compared to the rituals and miracles and mysteries that have come down through Paul and the rest of the orthodox Christian Churches, and which he dismissed as deceptive frosting for the masses.

            It may well be that Tolstoy was right in his analysis—or rather, closer to what Jesus of Nazareth actually preached and ultimately intended. Even as a Zealot, that is, Jesus may have realized that the Jews simply could not match the power of Imperial Rome in a conventional battle designed to eject them from Jerusalem, and so would have to invent a kind of spiritual/moral jiu-jitsu to do the job (the Sermon on the Mount, which if really followed, if humans related to one another with love and forgiveness rather than violence, would lead to the irrelevance of government and churches, too). As it turned out, however, it was Saul of Tarsus who invented the distortions cum adornments of Jesus’ message that would eventually appeal to Romans and turn Imperial Rome into the center of Christianity. Not, to be sure, as Jesus might have intended it, but with the divine trappings designed to appeal to Paul’s Roman converts. All of which may be something to keep in mind as we sing our Hosannas, light our lights, and eat our puddings in this dark but celebratory season of the year.

Lawrence DiStasi

The Temple Veil

Anyone who’s been following the world scene in recent years knows that a great deal of attention is being paid to “the system” and what might be done to heal or supersede it. Capitalism has had free rein since the dissolution of communism in the late 1980s, but with its recurrent crises, especially the financial collapse that struck in 2007, growing numbers of economists and thinkers have been questioning whether the capitalist system that brought such a disaster to so many is viable any longer; and if it isn’t, what can replace it and by what means. These questions are of course reinforced by the increasing fears about global warming, ecological disasters, the depletion and acidification of the oceans, overpopulation, and other seemingly inevitable products of an out-of-control system which considers disasters like pesticide poisoning “externalities,” of no account to those who profit by it.

These questions have been amplified for me by two books I’ve read recently—Zealot, by Reza Aslan, and Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy—and by the pronouncements of Pope Francis about the need for the Roman Catholic Church to not only focus on the poor, but also take on a global system that has made money its god. Though not obviously related, the convergence of Aslan’s conclusions about the historical Jesus of Nazareth, Tolstoy’s late life obsessions about how to change a system in Russia that cruelly exploited the masses, and Francis’ concern about the dominance of Mammon all speak to a single issue: the difficulty and perhaps impossibility of changing the world, reality, life as it usually is, i.e. skewed to the immense advantage of a few at the expense of the many. How is this to be done? And is it worth trying to do, given the continual failure of all historical attempts at it; and, crucially, without adopting the very practices of those in control—violence and murder and vicious repression that always lead to the replacement of an existing hierarchy with even more repressive hierarchies?

In truth, I have been thinking a lot, lately, about the appeal of just such violence: fantasizing about some assassin or group of assassins who can be dispatched to pick off heads of corporations, the CEOs of Goldman Sachs or Chase or Monsanto, Tea Party frauds fronting for the Koch brothers to cripple government, and so on. It often seems the only way to deliver some sort of justice to the pigs and murderers who always manage to slip away.

Thankfully, these thoughts, though they recur often, don’t last very long. Because I am mostly a pacifist to begin with; and because such violence rarely accomplishes anything but repression more savage than what pertained before. So what then? Is one to simply tend to one’s own garden, take up practices that ease the pain and/or insulate one from daily outrages, and let the world go on its merry way? In short, the options for revolutionaries—and Reza Aslan insists that Jesus of Nazareth was, indeed, a revolutionary, an adherent of the sect called “zealots” whose constant aim was to rid Jerusalem of Roman occupation and the Temple of mercenary high priests in order to literally restore the Kingdom of the Jewish God in the Holy Land—have always been basically twofold: either take up arms and fight the oppressors with the same weapons they use, i.e. revolutionary violence; or, provide the masses with both insulation against this basically corrupt and insignificant life, and a consolation prize in the next, i.e. the kingdom of heaven in which justice will finally be done and the blessed will reign in peaceful, perpetual joy.

According to Aslan, the followers of Jesus, most specifically St. Paul (Saul of Tarsus), chose the second option. Along with the evangelists who wrote the four accepted gospels years after Jesus’s death without ever seeing him, Paul (who never saw him either) changed the mission of Jesus to one aimed not at fellow Jews but at gentiles, at Romans—the very imperialists who occupied and then destroyed Jerusalem—who were to become the core followers of Christ. And the message became one that imaged Jesus as the literal Son of God (he always referred to himself as the Son of Man) who had come to save all people and provide them with direct access to God, and the promise of eternal life to come. One way or the other, the message of Jesus the revolutionary who strove to overturn the existing political and religious order became the message of Jesus the Christ whose defeat of death pronounced the Kingdom of God not on earth, but in heaven. One of the major symbols of this transformation, according to Aslan and the New Testament itself, was the tearing of the veil in the Jerusalem Temple at the very moment that Christ died on the cross. This veil, in the Holy of Holies, traditionally separated God from his people, and could only be breached by the High Priest on the Day of Atonement, when he would sacrifice specific animals as a way of atoning for the sins of humanity. Pauline Christianity claimed that this separation of humans from God had been bridged by Christ’s death, by his sacrifice. Through him, all humanity now had direct access to God through the regular re-enactment of his sacrifice. That enactment, in the Catholic mass, is called “communion.” The word is critical, for in my opinion, it speaks to a central problem of humanity and this essay: how to heal the rift, that all of us feel, between our normally functioning selves, and what we might call godhead, or Mind, or Nature, or the Cosmos. Revolution is really about this. So is art. So is the act of love. So are such mundane delights as singing in a choir, going crazy in a crowded stadium over a sports contest, or demonstrating en masse for peace and justice. All are attempts to find a way to heal the conditions in the world so that human reality is not so focused on looking out for number one, so divorced from compassion for others, so apparently separate and alienated from all existence (the veil, or parochet, in the Temple of Jerusalem was “a constant reminder that sin separated people from the presence of God.”) And though it does not seem so at first, the healing of the separation felt by individuals is roughly equivalent to healing the economic and political crisis in the world. For if the inequalities in the world could be healed, it would bring about the same “kingdom” as would healing the separation each of us feels from that world.

Count Leo Tolstoy was obsessed with this problem. In a Russia that was seething with the unrest of recently-liberated serfs who still lived lives of absolute misery and subjection as peasants, Tolstoy tried to find a way to transform the injustices perpetrated by his own class—whose lives of obscene luxury were based on the slavery of the masses. Though he was the world-renowned author of two of the greatest novels ever penned—War and Peace and Anna Karenina—Tolstoy could not accept his inherited privilege while so many lived in misery. He wrote Resurrection to address this issue, and in it—the story of a Russian prince who, serving on a jury, recognizes one of the accused, who turns out to have been the servant whom he seduced as a youth and abandoned, thus turning her into a prostitute—he writes savage critiques of the members of his own class who collude in a system of punishment and exploitation that violates every principle of the Christianity they purport to live by. He has Prince Nekhlyudov try to amend his life and compensate for his youthful sin by accompanying the woman, Maslova, to her hard labor in Siberia where he vows to marry her. But in the end, she refuses him, and marries another, and he is left deprived of his ‘noble’ sacrifice and condemned to return to his not-so-noble life, chastened mainly in the realization that no one has the right to condemn others. In sum, Tolstoy doesn’t provide any easy answers to the problem of class exploitation or the suffering of the world. He didn’t find easy answers in real life either, for although he renounced his rights to his books, and renounced violence and organized government as well—inspiring Gandhi himself—he never could really solve the problem noted above: without using violence, how overturn a corrupt system? How find one’s true self when that self is indelibly shaped by and thus alienated by selfish concern? The imminent Russian revolution, of course, did use violence and did overturn the corrupt system Tolstoy hated; but for many, the system it substituted for the ancien regime was more corrupt, violent and self-destroying than what it replaced.

This brings us to the question at hand. How do we heal the gulf between what we feel we truly are and the separation and objectification of all else that daily life seems to demand? This is really what the word ‘religion’ tries to get at: it derives from the Latin religare, meaning to tie back, or re-bind, thus making ‘religion’ the re-linking or re-connecting of humans with God, with all else, and ultimately with what we are. This is the task of Christianity, though as anyone who has ever taken communion knows, the alleged re-connection it provides rarely works and never lasts—as attested to by how quickly I and everyone I knew, right after imbibing the holy host, relapsed right back into the same sins we had just confessed. Buddhism takes on this same task, and though it is not a religion that commands belief in a god (the standard definition of religion), nor with the idea that humans exist in a fallen state due to some original sin that requires a re-uniting, its prescription for this problem still involves the idea of separation. That is, according to Buddhism, our felt separation from the world is not the fault of the world, or even of sin, but of our misperception. All of us. It is a delusion; a product of ignorance, of our small, self-absorbed brains taking the world for an object outside us, to be controlled or conquered in our short-term interest, rather than as the ground of our being from which we are not separate at all, or ever have been. What Buddhism offers are practices designed to help us realize that we are not truly separate, never have been, never could be. Though our brains are geared to create this sense of separation to enhance our survival, it is not the whole story or even the most important one. This realization itself, when it comes, or rather when it is yielded to, constitutes the re-connection.

Of course, some would argue that this is nothing more than the same old promise of a future state—realization or enlightenment—which solves the problem by ignoring the world and its trials and tribulations. And for some, it no doubt is: an attempt to escape from the problems of the world rather than confront them; a solution for the wealthy, high-minded few, leaving the rest of humanity to itself, praying for it, perhaps, sending it good vibes, but in truth placing the hope for a solution in the gradual and necessarily distant transformation of all, one by one, into a future, more compassionate world. For others, though, it could mean that the realization of non-separation leads not to quietism but to militant, non-violent resistance—the determination to alleviate the mass objectification of others, but without resorting to violence or putting it off till the millenium. Still, the record of such resistance is not encouraging and, particularly in our time, where governments have less hesitation than ever about murdering or jailing protesters no matter how peaceful, not likely to provide much solace.

In short, there seems no effective, much less lasting solution to the problem of the world. Which, in the end, may be a solution in itself. The world, that is, if seen aright, is not something to be solved; human nature is not something to be solved; cruelty and injustice and death are not aberrations to be corrected. They are the conditions that we know and accept as living beings. So long as we living beings are alive, we will be driven by the conditions of life—the fears, deeply embedded by evolution in our brains, of being consumed or absorbed or defeated or getting the short end of life’s stick. And all we can do is become ever more aware of these drives, and try to avoid both poles of the apparent solution: killing or eliminating those with whom we disagree; or withdrawing our commitment to the living and putting our hopes in some future, more pleasant state. Neither will do. Both are ultimately fantasies. So is the idea that something, somewhere back in prehistory or some imagined garden, went wrong, and thus can be put right. The chan master Huang Po had a great metaphor for this search for what went wrong, what is wrong, and what we can do to right it. ‘You are like a man,’ he said to his students once, ‘who has a precious jewel on his forehead, and who exhausts his life searching for it, longing for it, fighting for it, none of which does a bit of good. For all along, this precious jewel has been there for all to see, for you to enjoy, only you didn’t know it.’ Huang Po’s apparently lost jewel is like our feeling of alienation from the world, of separation: we think we are separate, we feel the discomfort of being so, and so use all our powers to find its cause and divert it or bridge it, and it has been nothing but our illusion all along. We are not separate; the world is not fallen; we are not sinful beings separate from a fallen world. We are precisely that world and it is us. Which means that it is only in this world, with all its apparent flaws, that we find ourselves. Not by trying to destroy it or those who screw it up; or by ignoring it for some pie-in-the-sky to come; but by coming to see it as it is in all its fullness—sometimes glorious and sometimes wretched, sometimes needing our neglect and sometimes needing our help—but never distant, never separate at all; rather as identical to who and what we are.

This is not easy. Nor is it necessarily lasting, or proof against despair. Criminals and charlatans always arise; banksters always get away with murder because their money buys them influence and immunity; and because the public swallows their diversions eagerly. But sooner or later, the world produces a reaction, the whole corrupt charade is exposed to view, the system begins to fail, the empire begins to disintegrate. Something like that seems to be happening now, and it is that unpredictable natural reaction, the response of the world—as for a brief moment, the Occupy Wall Street movement responded—to unsustainable excess and over-reaching that we can count on. Take part or not take part, the reaction will sooner or later do its work. And though it may not be comfortable, even for those who have predicted it, wished for it, the destruction too will have to be accepted as part and parcel of the whole. Of that continually changing process that we all, individually and collectively, are.

Lawrence DiStasi