Why They Hate Us - Rejecting 'The Modern'

And it isn't because Mom always loved us more

I've been sporadically listening to Ethan Nichtern's podcast lectures these last several months. Ethan teaches Buddhist meditation in New York, New York ("it's one hell of a town") and the lectures are interesting enough for me to return a couple of times a month to spend an hour or so and tag along with him and his students while I do chores around the house. I have about 24 hours of his lecture podcasts that I haven't listened to and several individual ones that I've listened to four or five times. A recent lecture called Discipline and Being too Busy to Practice (January 19, 2007) brought up the condition of being 'too busy' as a form of laziness. The gist of his argument was that hectic and frenetic behaviour is a form of avoidance of doing the heavy work of mindfulness, the condition of being aware. Busyness, if you stop and consider it, is something that we're all struggling with. I know very few people (if any) who are not busy, who's lives are not filled with an increasing workload. Even the drunks I know are frantically drinking. We're like beasts of burden laden with gold, silver, spices, silk, and wines carrying it for our masters to trade for gold, silver, spices, silk, and wines which we then carry back for our master's masters.

This year my resolution has been to meditate and work on compassion for other beings (and incidently for myself). I came to this decision after reading several chapters of Jeffrey Hopkin's book (mentioned in an earlier post). I started a notebook in which I've written down the people upon whom I wish to meditate (using the techniques in Hopkin's book); some people are easy as a matter of course (family, friends), some I've included because of their prominence as social leaders, some are troublesome to me because I have an active antagonism towards them and do not easily wish them well.

Early in the mornings I start with a few moments of silent preparation and then I meditate and pray.

These few moments a day in solitude have lead me to seek more solitude in my life in general. I've not been going out at night, nor have I been taking on new projects; I've generally declined spending time with friends; I've been more contemplative and outside of work more likely to be alone than not.

The quietness hasn't been of a brooding nature. I've read a lot, including a couple of detective novels (Boris Akunin, Simenon), gone for contemplative walks, and puttered about the house or napped with two cats curled up on my stomach and chest with Ravi Shankar on the CD player.

But brooding has entered into it as well. You see, it appears I hate my life.

I hate the urgency, the violent agitation and emotions, the striving, the general lack of scruples I see absent around me in everyday life, business as world politics, national and local politics that seem to worship that golden calf we all agree isn't really a god (and we've all been in agreement on that point for at least four thousand years). I'm bothered by people's incessant complaints (when Moses brought the Jews out of Egypt they still complained; they were slaves under the whip but they whined, "were there not enough graves in Egpyt, Moses, you had to bring us to the desert to die?")

Scruple is a good word to consider. It means, "hesitation or uncertainty about doing something because it might be wrong." It comes ultimately from the latin for "rough stone", meaning figuratively "anxiety". That hesitation and uncertainty should play a major role in our lives since we are in the midst of a turbulent cultural upheaval called 'globalization'. It used to be called 'modernization' and 'colonization'. It's almost always involved uprooting people and cultures and destroying their way of life.

The war in Vietnam (1954 - 1974) was created in part by uprooting a whole culture and moving it down river. By disrupting the lives of these Vietnamese they now found they couldn't earn a living and all of their cultural tools and systems no longer worked. Inevitably dissatisfaction entered into life and from that anger and a striking out at the 'enemy'.

The modernization of Japan in the 1850's happened at such a breakneck speed that many felt they threw out the baby with the bathwater. The ancient and established systems of honour and dignity, the higher values and morals of the Samurai society were eliminated as useless. And all this to avoid an unwanted American invasion. Click here for the story of Commodore Perry (I haven't read the website thoroughly but it seems to contain the gist of that history). Eventually, by 1930's a backlash occurred and Japanese intellectuals brooded on how to 'overcome the modern'. And by modern they meant the West. They railed against the West's specialization of knowledge splintering Oriental wholeness. They viewed the West as rootless, faithless, money grubbing, unfeeling, decadent parasites. (source: Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies

In Kabul today, in Tehran, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Palestine and a dozen other places where the lives of men and women have been disrupted by economic decisions (and Antonia Juhasz' book The Bush Agenda: Invading the World One Economy at a Time can leave no doubt that is the primary motive for these disruptions) where what is good about their cultures has been thrown out along with what is bad and where it has been all replaced by the rootless, faithless, money grabbing, unfeeling urgency we all feel in the West - and anger erupts.

But it doesn't just erupt as a cultural war between fundamentalist Muslims and easy-going Western Christians. It happens in South America, in the Pacific Islands, everywhere 'the modern' uproots the traditional. Soygal Rinpoche writes, "I think the greatest achievement of modern culture is its brilliant selling of samsara and its barren distractions." And he's being kind.

Free Trade Areas are no replacement for community. Broadcasts of Ultimate Fighting on Spike TV are no replacement for community. Conspicuous consumption is no replacement for conversation and contemplation. Caring truly about another is not the same as 'throwing in the rims' when you sell them an SUV for $35,000.

I think that's why they hate us. When we actually stop and think about it, it's the same reason we hate ourselves.

xoxo

MVL