Wednesday, September 23, 2015

The Wrong Side of History


          One of the more interesting things about history is that it seems to be changing all the time. I live in the United States a country which seems to have become in the last 20 years  extraordinarily polarized.  One of the more irritating facets of American society is that we let individuals and newsroom reporters and so called think tanks tell us who and what we are and what we are supposed to think. They are constantly applying labels to everyone and everything.  Probably the two most irritating labels that I’ve run across of late are the terms conservative and liberal.   The primary quality that’s assigned to the term conservative seems to be a strong fear of and resistance to change.  The primary quality assigned to being liberal is to encourage change, usually concerning social and political behavior.
                 One of the more fascinating qualities that distinguishes Buddhism from the three other major religions on the planet right now is each groups attitude toward change. Christianity, Islam and Judaism all seem to have at their core a basic quality that seems to align them with the term or a label we call conservative. That is to say they seem to be extremely fearful of and resistant to change. Buddhism on the other hand has at its core the teaching that change is the very nature of reality.  Perhaps this is one of the reasons that modern Buddhist are more often than not considered liberals while members of the other three religions seem to be conservative at their core and only liberal around the edges.

            I am I think a member of a class of people in the west  and especially in the United States,  that usually makes up the core of the conservative groupings, both politically and religiously. That is to say I am male, white, moderately educated, and pretty much in the middle of the middle class economically .  Change very often means for my group a lessening of respect, a lessening of power both socially and politically as well as a deepening anxiety that this lessening will increase in crescendo to an all-out collapse of our privileged  status in society. Whether this is true or not is really irrelevant because it’s what is perceived to be true by most of the members of my group. And one of the things I’ve noticed is that it doesn’t really matter if it’s actually happening or not. The fear that this is what’s going on is more than sufficient to drive members of my class to become more and more afraid of change and of the future, and of other people.

            A short synopsis of recent history in the west I think can be illustrated here to explain this fear. For several hundred years members of my cast group told themselves and everyone else that God had appointed certain people to be our rulers, these people usually looked and acted just like me. Many people in my group historically made their living’s by exploiting other people. While this is not true of our group as a whole there certainly were sufficient numbers of people who believe this way to create thousands of years of misery and Empire going from Genghis Khan to the British Empire.  My groups belief in their own natural superiority allowed them to own slaves, have children work in their coal mines in their factories for 12 to 18 hours a day, and conquer and destroy  the cultures of just about everybody in the world who wasn’t white.  In almost every society regardless oof race or religion for thousands of years males have dominated females in just about every way imaginable. The conservative white male opposed women’s suffrage and still to this day many oppose women receiving equal pay for equal work. Hell we even told people, and ourselves  that animals couldn’t feel pain so when we worked them to death we wouldn't feel guilty about it. I am not joking about this I’ve actually read historical papers were so-called scientists argued that animals couldn’t feel pain or suffer like humans do. To me that’s just mind-boggling.

            The United States of America was started by some people that believed that the citizens of a nation should have control over how that nation was run. I think people forget that good old King George believed in the divine right of kings. This was an unheard of idea, at least for the last thousand years.  America has a lot of guilt on its doorstep, hundreds of thousands of Americans killed each other because about half of us wanted to own slaves. The Supreme Court of the United States upheld the right for corporations to have 10 and 12-year-old children work themselves to death in their factories and actually saying that this was good for their character. We  all but wiped out the native Americans that were here before we were. The men that started our country were of course both practical and more than a little bit hypocritical.  They wrote wonderful poetry about the quality of man while upholding slavery and basically consigning women to the status of property. But that in no way changes what a great and wonderful idea America was and is. Politician's like Donald Trump harken back to the days when people like him were the undisputed ruling  class of every one else here. This he says will make America "Great Again". He is unable to see that America is now greater than it has ever been, closer to the dream that it was founded upon than it has ever been.

            Right about now most of the members of my class are calling me a traitor and saying that I hate my nation, that I am un-American to my core. That I don’t love my country because I’m willing to admit that in the past my country did things that I don’t think were very nice. This is an outrageous argument and untrue. America started as an experiment in equality and liberty and that experiment is still ongoing. It is a dream that has just begun to unfold.  We Americans are a very young group of people as a nation. For that matter nationalism itself is a fairly new concept on the stage of history. There is no way to go back and undo what’s been done, and certainly when  at some point there has to  come an end to dwelling over it birth pangs. I really don’t think that if women get equal pay I’m going to be somehow made to suffer for it.  I don’t think that if people of different colors and races and religions all have an equal say in how our government is run.that I have any great thing to fear from that.  Of course when you look back on history and you see what my  own group has done to the other folks in the world you certainly do have a valid reason to fear that they might do the same thing to you that was done to them, even expect it to be so. . But the  goal here, the hope and the dream is progress not history repeating itself, a nightmare with each group taking it's turn to exploit the other. The simple fact is all those issues that arose leading to a Civil War in the United States are still playing themselves out,  not only in our country but all over the world. 
            All of the economic and social class issues that led to the French Revolution, the Marxist revolution in Russia and class war across the world are  still playing themselves out on the world stage.  The opposing  ideas of a theocracy verse a secular government are still killing thousands. The amazing  thing is that almost everyone in the United States at least really believes in that wonderful poetry that the founding fathers wrote about liberty and equality.  But  all of them have their own blind spots, areas in which they just can’t see what the real problem is. That applies to both conservatives and liberals and to Christians, Muslims, and Jewish people. There is this horrible mental and emotional disease that humans have that tells them that if everyone doesn’t act look and behave the way they do they are under threat and that fear blinds us.

            There has been more change in the world in the last hundred years then there was in the last 10,000 years of human history.  Scientists tell us that as the environment changes those species that learned to change with the environment and to adapt to it survive and those that don’t become extinct. It’s really fascinating and horrifying to see  an entire race of people almost 7,000,000,000 strong constantly at war with each other when at their core they all want the same thing or at least  the same thing for themselves,  if not for those others they perceive as "different". I have no answer to this nor do I have any explanation for it. But I do believe it is a fact. It is this fact that may well kill us all.

            But I do have an opinion, just as I’m sure you do. My opinion is that any religion or society or  a nation that isn’t willing to accept and adapt to change is going to go extinct and perhaps take everyone else on the planet with it. Of all the religions on earth the only one that I know of that embraces change is Buddhism. I think we all accept that the thing that we call Buddhism is going to change that this change is inevitable. The other religions must adapt to change or parish.  But if I were to pick a survivor, that is to say pick out which set of beliefs will still be around in a  1000 years my bet is on Buddhism.  I think our fundamental belief in change will put us on the right side of history.

            

1 comment:

  1. We live in this plains of duality: good and bad, light and dark, hot and cold… You're focusing on the negative is telling only half the story. Ignoring the positive can lead to a real skewed outlook on life.

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