Date Published: 22/11/2001
Author: Rabbi Michael Lerner
Will love or hate will be the defining force of the next century?
It’s understandable why many of us, after grieving and consoling the mourners, feel anger. Unfortunately, demagogues in the White House and Congress have manipulated our legitimate outrage and channeled it into a new militarism and a revival of the view that the world is mostly a dangerous place and our lives must be based around protecting ourselves from the threatening others. In this case, terrorism provides a perfect base for this worldview – it can come from anywhere, we don’t really know who is the enemy, and so everyone can be suspect and everyone can be a target of our fear-induced rage. With this as a foundation, the Bush team has been able to turn this terrible and outrageous attack into a justification for massive military spending, a new war and the inevitable trappings: repression of civil liberties, denigration of ‘evil others’, and a new climate of fear and intimidation against anyone who doesn’t join this misuse of patriotism toward distorted ends.
Of course, the people who did this attack are evil and they are a real threat to the human race. The perpetrators deserve to be punished, and I personally would be happy if all the people involved in this act were to be imprisoned for the rest of their lives. But that is quite different from talk about ‘eliminating countries’ which we heard from Colin Powell in the days after the attack. Punishing the perpetrators is different from making war against whole populations.
The narrow focus on the perpetrators allows us to avoid dealing with the underlying issues. When violence becomes so prevalent throughout the planet, it’s too easy to simply talk of ‘deranged minds’. We need to ask ourselves, ‘What is it in the way that we are living, organising our societies, and treating each other that makes violence seem plausible to so many people?’ And why is it that our immediate response to violence is to use violence ourselves – thus reinforcing the cycle of violence in the world?
We may tell ourselves that the current violence has ‘nothing to do’ with the way that we’ve learned to close our ears when told that one out of every three people on this planet does not have enough food, and that one billion are literally starving. We may reassure ourselves that the hoarding of the world’s resources by the richest society in world history, and our frantic attempts to accelerate globalisation with its attendant inequalities of wealth, has nothing to do with the resentment that others feel toward us. We may tell ourselves that the suffering of refugees and the oppressed have nothing to do with us -that that’s a different story that is going on somewhere else.
I see this in Israel, where Israelis have taken to dismissing the entire Palestinian people as ‘terrorists’ but never ask themselves: ‘What have we done to make this seem to Palestinians to be a reasonable path of action today?’ Of course there were always some hateful people and some religious fundamentalists who want to act in hurtful ways against Israel, no matter what the circumstances. Yet, in the situation of 1993-96 when Israel under Yitzhak Rabin was pursuing a path of negotiations and peace, the fundamentalists had little following and there were few acts of violence. On the other hand, when Israel failed to withdraw from the West Bank, and instead expanded the number of its settlers, the fundamentalists and haters had a far easier time convincing many decent Palestinians that there might be no other alternative.
NARROW FOCUS
We have narrowed our own attention to ‘getting through’ or ‘doing well’ in our own personal lives, and who has time to focus on all the rest of this? Most of us are leading perfectly reasonable lives within the options that we have available to us--so why should others be angry at us, much less strike out against us? And the truth is, our anger is also understandable: the striking out by others in acts of terror against us is just as irrational as the world-system that it seeks to confront. Yet our acts of counter-terror will also be counter-productive. We should have learned from the current phase of the Israel/Palestinian struggle, responding to terror with more violence, rather than asking ourselves what we could do to change the conditions that generated it in the first place, will only ensure more violence against us in the future.
If we could encourage people to allow this part of themselves to come out, without having to wait for a disaster, we could empower a part of every human being which our social order marginalises. Americans have a deep goodness – and that needs to be affirmed. Indeed, the goodness that poured forth from so many Americans should not be allowed to be overshadowed by the subsequent shift toward militarism and anger. That same caring energy could have been given a more positive outlet--if we didn’t live in a society which normally teaches us that our ‘natural’ instinct is toward aggression and that the best we can hope for is a world which gives us protection. The central struggle going on in the world today is this one: between hope and fear, love or paranoia, generosity or trying to shore up one’s own portion. Our only hope is to revert to a consciousness of generosity and love. That’s not to go to a la-la-land where there are no forces like those who destroyed the World Trade Centre. But it is to refuse to allow that to become the shaping paradigm of the 21st century. Much better to make the shaping paradigm the story of the police and firemen who risked (and in many cases lost) their lives in order to save other human beings who they didn’t even know. Let the paradigm be the generosity and kindness of people when they are given a social sanction to be caring instead of self-protective. We cannot let war, hatred and fear become the power in this new century that it was in the last century. And it’s up to us.
Author: Rabbi Michael Lerner
Will love or hate will be the defining force of the next century?
It’s understandable why many of us, after grieving and consoling the mourners, feel anger. Unfortunately, demagogues in the White House and Congress have manipulated our legitimate outrage and channeled it into a new militarism and a revival of the view that the world is mostly a dangerous place and our lives must be based around protecting ourselves from the threatening others. In this case, terrorism provides a perfect base for this worldview – it can come from anywhere, we don’t really know who is the enemy, and so everyone can be suspect and everyone can be a target of our fear-induced rage. With this as a foundation, the Bush team has been able to turn this terrible and outrageous attack into a justification for massive military spending, a new war and the inevitable trappings: repression of civil liberties, denigration of ‘evil others’, and a new climate of fear and intimidation against anyone who doesn’t join this misuse of patriotism toward distorted ends.
Of course, the people who did this attack are evil and they are a real threat to the human race. The perpetrators deserve to be punished, and I personally would be happy if all the people involved in this act were to be imprisoned for the rest of their lives. But that is quite different from talk about ‘eliminating countries’ which we heard from Colin Powell in the days after the attack. Punishing the perpetrators is different from making war against whole populations.
The narrow focus on the perpetrators allows us to avoid dealing with the underlying issues. When violence becomes so prevalent throughout the planet, it’s too easy to simply talk of ‘deranged minds’. We need to ask ourselves, ‘What is it in the way that we are living, organising our societies, and treating each other that makes violence seem plausible to so many people?’ And why is it that our immediate response to violence is to use violence ourselves – thus reinforcing the cycle of violence in the world?
We may tell ourselves that the current violence has ‘nothing to do’ with the way that we’ve learned to close our ears when told that one out of every three people on this planet does not have enough food, and that one billion are literally starving. We may reassure ourselves that the hoarding of the world’s resources by the richest society in world history, and our frantic attempts to accelerate globalisation with its attendant inequalities of wealth, has nothing to do with the resentment that others feel toward us. We may tell ourselves that the suffering of refugees and the oppressed have nothing to do with us -that that’s a different story that is going on somewhere else.
I see this in Israel, where Israelis have taken to dismissing the entire Palestinian people as ‘terrorists’ but never ask themselves: ‘What have we done to make this seem to Palestinians to be a reasonable path of action today?’ Of course there were always some hateful people and some religious fundamentalists who want to act in hurtful ways against Israel, no matter what the circumstances. Yet, in the situation of 1993-96 when Israel under Yitzhak Rabin was pursuing a path of negotiations and peace, the fundamentalists had little following and there were few acts of violence. On the other hand, when Israel failed to withdraw from the West Bank, and instead expanded the number of its settlers, the fundamentalists and haters had a far easier time convincing many decent Palestinians that there might be no other alternative.
NARROW FOCUS
We have narrowed our own attention to ‘getting through’ or ‘doing well’ in our own personal lives, and who has time to focus on all the rest of this? Most of us are leading perfectly reasonable lives within the options that we have available to us--so why should others be angry at us, much less strike out against us? And the truth is, our anger is also understandable: the striking out by others in acts of terror against us is just as irrational as the world-system that it seeks to confront. Yet our acts of counter-terror will also be counter-productive. We should have learned from the current phase of the Israel/Palestinian struggle, responding to terror with more violence, rather than asking ourselves what we could do to change the conditions that generated it in the first place, will only ensure more violence against us in the future.
If we could encourage people to allow this part of themselves to come out, without having to wait for a disaster, we could empower a part of every human being which our social order marginalises. Americans have a deep goodness – and that needs to be affirmed. Indeed, the goodness that poured forth from so many Americans should not be allowed to be overshadowed by the subsequent shift toward militarism and anger. That same caring energy could have been given a more positive outlet--if we didn’t live in a society which normally teaches us that our ‘natural’ instinct is toward aggression and that the best we can hope for is a world which gives us protection. The central struggle going on in the world today is this one: between hope and fear, love or paranoia, generosity or trying to shore up one’s own portion. Our only hope is to revert to a consciousness of generosity and love. That’s not to go to a la-la-land where there are no forces like those who destroyed the World Trade Centre. But it is to refuse to allow that to become the shaping paradigm of the 21st century. Much better to make the shaping paradigm the story of the police and firemen who risked (and in many cases lost) their lives in order to save other human beings who they didn’t even know. Let the paradigm be the generosity and kindness of people when they are given a social sanction to be caring instead of self-protective. We cannot let war, hatred and fear become the power in this new century that it was in the last century. And it’s up to us.
