Just Barely Tolerable

The news of the last week has put me in mind of a concept from Mayahana Buddhism (and indeed from the Judeo-Christian tradition as well) which holds that our earthly world in its present condition is “just barely tolerable” (I first heard this phase in a recent talk by Anbo Stuart Kutchins). The Buddhist term for this is “Saha world,” and it is a key element in the Buddhist understanding of suffering in human life. I will address this below, but for now, I am simply interested in the concept—that the world as we know it is “just barely tolerable.” An Italian writer named Mario Brelich has referred to a similar idea in a kind of novelized essay called The Holy Embrace. There, he writes about how humans, after being ejected by God from the bliss of Eden, had to live in another world that would be “just barely tolerable,” so long as they submitted to the divine will, that is. Whether or not Brelich knew of or had access to Buddhist philosophy is not clear, but since he wrote his book in 1972, it certainly seems possible. No matter. The takeaway here is the notion of our human world as one which is “just barely tolerable.” Anyone who has lived long enough and reflected deeply enough (Nietzsche apparently had a similar idea of his world) must surely agree that the world and life as we know it is almost, but not quite, insufferable. Intolerable. Almost, but not quite. 

            The way I think of this is that, considering the news of last week, those who usually thrive and rule in our world often seem bent on making the world intolerable for everyone else, especially the thinking person, the half-way compassionate person. Take the child abuse inflicted on Central American migrants seeking asylum in the United States. These are people who have suffered untold misery in their home countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras) from both corrupt authorities (usually enabled and supported by the United States) and out-of-control gangs. Indeed, it has been a truism for centuries that no one abandons home, relatives, neighbors, language and everything else that makes life worth living without enormous pressure either from violence or economic deprivation. So it is with people fleeing gangs in El Salvador or right-wing death squads and narco-traffickers in Guatemala or Honduras. To have even reached the Mexico/U.S. border requires an amazing odyssey that has subjected them to untold abuses. And yet, when they finally reach that dreamed-of border nearly mad with anxiety, these parents are met with the most unimaginable outrage of all: separation from their children. It is an obscenity that is all the more obscene because it is unnecessary: these are not criminals; they are refugees, asylum seekers. They want nothing more than safety for themselves and their young children. And yet, Trump and his Administration, almost gleefully (especially in describing the policy to their rabid supporters), have imposed criminal charges against them, charges of illegal entry for which they must answer in court. And this has necessitated their separation from their children. Now thousands of these children are caged and held separated without any indication of when, or whether they can ever be reunited with their parents, some of whom have already been deported. On its own, this is simply intolerable. 

            Then came the Supreme Court decision of June 26, which upheld the Trump administration’s third try at a travel ban against Muslims trying to immigrate. Through a transparent sleight of hand, the administration cosmeticized the original ban to include two countries that are notmajority Muslim—North Korea and Venezuela—so as to be able to claim innocence where religious animus is concerned, so as to be able to claim national security as its aim. And the conservative majority on the Supreme Court actually fell for this, or rather, has been slowly built over years to approve of such chicanery. And so they did, ruling that the President of the United States has near-unlimited authority to protect national security, though at the same time retroactively condemning the similar presidential order incarcerating Japanese Americans during WWII. It was a bravura performance of hypocrisy that would have pleased the 1857 court that wrote the Dredd-Scott decision. 

            But not satisfied with that, the Supremes followed that decision with two more decisions that put an exclamation mark upon their 2018 season: one reversing a Texas court’s ruling banning obviously racist gerrymandering, thus allowing racism to flourish in our voting system once again; and another granting a government-employed claimant the ‘right’ not to pay union dues, even though he benefits from union actions. This will bankrupt unions of much of the funding they need not only to protect their workers in the future, but also to help fund democratic candidates—the real point of the conservative decision. As if this were not enough, Justice Anthony Kennedy thereupon announced his retirement, thus paving the way for old Hog-Belly to nominate yet another hyper-conservative justice, this time to pollute the court for a generation, and probably dooming Roe v. Wade in the process. The triumph of vulgarity and stupidity and cruelty could not be more complete. Intolerable. 

            But we are assured that our world is “just barely tolerable.” Is there anything, in the face of all this horror, that makes it so? We can all count the ways. There are flowers that bloom, regardless of the hostility emanating from human poisons. There are also vegetables and trees and fish (barely holding on, it is true) and deer and rabbits and bear and mice and foxes (I  just saw one scratching in my yard) and sharks and whales and hawks and coyotes that appear periodically to assure us that nature cannot be so easily suppressed, no matter how much glyphosate or fossil fuel we spray on it and over it and through it. Or how much carbon and plastic we inject into its air and oceans. And we know in our bones that once the human stain is gone from this earth, the natural world will rebound with unalloyed joy. Salmon will again thicken rivers and bears will feast on them as they journey upstream to spawn past rejuvenated forests and meadows and purefied air. Then there are our grandchildren, eager and beautiful and energetic in their innocent anticipation of growing up so they can taste the world that seems so appealing to them if only they could be adult and free. And as we watch, we can only hope that there will still be a world, “barely tolerable” though it might be, for them to fill out as we did. And then there are those courageous types everywhere who refuse to be threatened or deterred, who let their compassion and their fire drive them to relieve the suffering of those at the border or those under the boot or those fleeing global warming or those attempting to find a way to live on the streets. They are there, they are many, and they are models and inspiration for us all. 

            Which brings me back to the start of this essay. The Saha world is a concept made vivid in the branch of Buddhism known as Mahayana. And what it points out is that, though there are said to be other wonderful realms with names like the Pure Land or the Perfume Universe where everything is perfectly lovely (akin to Christian Heaven, perhaps), the Saha world is really best for us humans not just because it’s what we’ve got, but more precisely because of the struggle and hardship we find here. Struggle and hardship are beneficial for us, we are told; or rather, they are beneficial for those who adopt the ideal of the “bodhisattva”—the being who vows to eschew the personal liberation that he or she might obtain in favor of waiting until all beings are liberated. No thank you, says the bodhisattva when his own personal liberation is at hand; I prefer to remain here and help others. For such an ideal being, in short, the struggles and hardships and sufferings endemic to the Saha world are precisely what is needed for her development; development of the great compassion that keeps her here in the thick of things helping all others. In other words, the world just as it is seems perfectly designed for the development of that which the world itself needs to, eventually, wake up. And it becomes plain to such a being that no one, not even the most advanced of beings, can actually wake up alone. No one. Waking up is exactly that which is done together with all beings. 

            So, though in our more desperate moments (like now), we would, if we could, wipe out all the troubles and problems of the world by whatever means necessary to try to bring about some utopia or other, in our more comprehensive, our wiser moments, perhaps, we realize that the “just barely tolerable” world we have, doing its deluded thing as always, provides us with the right combination of horror and solace to keep us honest, and human, and, we hope, compassionate enough to never turn our backs on its “slings and arrows.” Because it is precisely those slings and arrows, along with a little bit of proper nourishment, that make us who and what we are. 

Lawrence DiStasi 

Fatally Flawed?

I keep thinking these days about the terrible facts that confront us as humans. We have, at the head of our so-called democracy, a man so obviously unfit for the office he holds that it would have beggared belief to imagine him lasting a year. And yet he has. How could this be? How could Trump have even won, which is to say, how could millions of adults have actually voted for such a boorish, vulgar, criminal fraud? And that is the question I’m really interested in here. We Americans are a putative democracy, but our people are not alone in displaying a preference for demagogues who promise to revive a narrow nationalism that will seal us off behind ridiculous walls to exclude the rising number of migrants flooding the world. Hungary has made the same kinds of moves against migrants. So has Germany. And there are even rumblings of discontent in those bastions of tolerance, Sweden and Denmark and Norway, with France, Italy and Spain following suit, and the nations from whom we expect such policies not disappointing in this regard either: India has a right-wing Hindu nationalist in Narendra Modi; Japan has one too; and even the Buddhists in Myanmar are implementing one of the most vicious campaigns of ethnic cleansing ever seen against the Muslim minority known as the Rohingya. More than half a million of these Rohingya migrants have now decamped for refugee misery in a nation, Bangladesh, that can barely keep its own people alive. In fact, a recent article about authorities in Bangladesh considering a sterilization program for Rohingya refugees (“Bangladesh Eyes Sterilization” by Shafiqul Alam, Agence France Presse, reprinted on Reader Supported News) is an indication of how serious the problem is, how much, because Rohingya Muslims reject the idea of birth control and purposely have large families to ‘secure their survival,’ it is a harbinger of the future. And worse, for all the signs indicate that this massive global movement, sure to be exacerbated by global warming and its attendant disasters, has only just begun.

            With a world population of 7 billion threatening to increase to 9 billion (one of the Rohingya women interviewed admitted to having 19 children, for security), and 14 million additional migrants each year roaming the globe without a place to live and survive, what are we to imagine? (See the Lancet of October 31, 2017: “Lancet Study warns of Global Health Crisis and 1 Billion Climate Refugees by 2050,” reprinted in Reader Supported News.) With more and more nations closing their borders and shutting down their empathic responses to these desperate millions, and with ever greater signs that artificial intelligence and robotics will be decreasing rather than increasing jobs normally done by such workers, what are we to conclude?

            I have to tell you, I begin to wonder if humanity, if all life, isn’t somehow constructed amiss. This is no idle exercise of the imagination. A recent book I’ve been reading, Why Buddhism Is True, by Robert Wright, outlines a conflict that puts the burden on evolution itself. Very briefly, what Wright tries to emphasize (and many others agree) is that human behavior is driven by natural selection to perceive and behave in the way that best ensures the survival of its particular gene pool, regardless of its validity. In short, our brains have evolved feelings to drive us to find desirable that which best guarantees the procreation and survival of our genes, and, at the other end, to consider as hostile any outside entity that would appear to threaten the survival of ourselves and/or our progeny. Here is one of the ways he puts it:

Good and bad feelings are what natural selection used to goad animals into, respectively, approaching things or avoiding things, acquiring things or rejecting things; good feelings were assigned to things like eating and bad feelings to things like being eaten…Feelings tell us what to think about, and then after all the thinking is done, they tell us what to do (Wright, p. 124).

In this way, we are emotionally driven to perceive eating, sex and the like as good, and to perceive those outside our group competing for such things as fearful and bad (actually, as Beau Lotto points out in a recent book, Deviate, our perception is even more solipsistic than that: “All perception is just your brain’s construction of past utility… our senses rely very little on the external world, but more on our internal world of interpretation” [p. 110]). It should also be noted that the neural system that rewards our desires, the dopaminergic system, rewards (with dopamine) our anticipation of a goal such as sex more robustly than its achievement. In this way, we are kept always slightly unsatisfied, and hence always hoping for the next hit. The corollary is that we are prone to cast our vote for demagogues who promise to a) expand our chances of thriving (make our businesses less regulated and more profitable, even if it means polluting the air we breathe and the soil we need to grow our food) and b) lessen the danger from predation or competition by outside “others” (even if that means risking nuclear holocaust for our enemies or ourselves or whole sections of the planet). For Robert Wright, this means that Buddhism represents the chance to objectively examine these feeling-driven impulse-perceptions and to see, eventually, that they are illusory. To see that there is mostly suffering (the Sanskrit word dukkha is also translated as “dissatisfaction”) and nothing substantial or essential at the heart of this protective reactionism; that the responses it initiates are often premature and unnecessary; and that, ultimately, there is no separate, enduring self to really protect, no separate “other” to revile or destroy. But I do not here intend to get into the details about whether such insights would “solve” the problems we are facing in our world. What I am interested in is the analysis of natural selection and its logical outcome with respect to homo sapiens in general.

            And homo sapiens is really the problem. For most other species, any over-development that results in its overwhelming domination of a given environment, and hence an explosion in its population, generally runs up against natural laws (as lemmings or locusts do). The population in question consumes too much of its prey, outruns its vegetal or animal resources, and sooner or later must retract or collapse for lack of food and habitat, or due to balancing outside pressures from expanding predators responding to its own expansion. For humans, however, the capacity our species has evolved to alter the environment itself to the point where it can overcome natural limits and the normal feedback threats, has led, as everyone knows, to a population explosion of alarming proportions. At the time of the Buddha in about 500 BCE, for example, there were an estimated 800,000 to 1 million humans on the entire planet. And that population, driven by early agriculture, was already a substantial increase over what had been able to survive previously; disease, starvation, and natural shocks, including the vulnerability of children starting with their birth, cooperated to keep the population of hunter-gatherers well below half a million for millennia. But in the years of our era, and especially in the years around 1750 beginning with fossil-fuel-driven machines and industrialization and modern medicine, the human population has expanded so rapidly as to cover even what had previously been uninhabitable parts of the globe. Human population, in short, has been doubling every few years, and that can only mean—even with advances in agricultural productivity, which, ironically, tend to increase population even more—more conflict over resources and habitat. Which is to say, increased use of what natural selection has equipped us with: emotion-driven desire for increase of our kind, and aversion to the increase of others. And, perhaps most important, a tendency to view these imperatives in the short term: it is always “good” to increase our gene pool, and to do whatever is necessary to decrease the gene pool of “others,” no matter what we are told or see in our rational moments about the dangers in the long run. The long run is always discounted. The long run always loses out to short-term survival. And that is why we choose a demagogic imbecile to lead us: he promises those irresistible short-term advantages (fewer regulations; more coal jobs; more oil jobs; more pesticides; more mining and fishing and tax breaks to benefit ‘our’ businesses) that natural selection predisposes us to feel as favorable to “us” and unfavorable to “them.” And there seems no help for it. The appeal to the “fast” parts of the brain that do most of the decision-making, such as the amygdala, simply overpowers (in sufficient numbers to make the difference) the inhibitions that under favorable circumstances can come from the pre-frontal cortex—those parts of the brain dubbed “slow” by Daniel Kahneman, parts which can carefully consider things from a more rational perspective (does it make sense to elect a lying racist? to further poison our air and water and soil?).

            To be sure, this is over-simplified. But the population figures, and the projections about the coming damage to planetary resources like oceans depleted of fish, and forests shrinking to make way for cattle or crops, and the fast-developing resistances of natural pests and bacteria to our best efforts to destroy them, leave us little room for doubt. Our stone-age brains have not had time to evolve more rational responses (we are, after all, only a few thousand years from hunter-gatherer ways and ethics). Short of an unexpected neuro-shift in huge portions of the population, our emotion-thoughts seem well on the way to driving us to irreversible disaster.

            This is not to say, of course, that the project of life on earth will fail. The planet will survive our best efforts to fuck it up as it has survived countless times in the past. Yes, the earth will survive until, several billion years hence, the dying sun expands to engulf it in a fiery end. Indeed, life itself will survive, having no particular need of a brainy ape to continue. And even the brainy ape will probably survive in some form or other, in some quantity or other—perhaps less driven by its short-term good/bad centers, perhaps more chastened with an expanded cortex that will be more adept at seeing long-term consequences. But the civilization that we have created in the last 10,000 years, and the industrial-electronic-agricultural complex we have forged in the last few centuries—that may well be doomed. And perhaps that is as it should be. We have come, like many civilizations in the past, to expect our inevitable progression as the “crown of creation” to continue forever. But we may soon discover that nothing is forever, not even so supremely-adapted a gaggle of primates as we think we are. One wonders, though, if there will be an aware one like Ozymandias in Shelley’s poem, to provide our epitaph:

                        My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

                        Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

                        Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

                        Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

                        The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Lawrence DiStasi