Where do we go, if not back?
Seven ideas for a meaningful way forward.
Seven ideas for a meaningful way forward.
In the throes of quarantine, I wonder whether we can sense the tectonic forces that have begun to shift around us. Handshakes may be gone for good, and masks may regularly re-appear from now on. Big-ticket political discussions have gained new dimensions. And certainly for the more than twenty million Americans who have lost their jobs, life has changed irreversibly — and the scale of the larger recession implied will likely have ramifications for all of us.
It’s reasonable to speculate that we are passing through another epochal gate not unlike the one we passed through on 9/11. If so, like then, the full implications will only be seen in time.
And notably this particular crisis, and its impact, is nested within larger existential crisis. Human industry still threatens ecological catastrophe. The wealthy still greatly outpace the rest in possession and power. Major world powers cooperate less. Heated debates rage not only within nations between dominant political parties, but within parties between the establishment and high-pitched popular movements that desperately want change.
In the middle of it, an unexpected systemic shock has come and, eerily, we’ve all been sent home. It is like Yom Kippur for the planet — as though, in the midst of turmoil, God has sent us to our rooms to think about what we’ve done.
Perhaps it is worth us all seriously thinking about systemic change, now that the world has stopped. Do we want to change the world in big ways? Can we?
What does it mean for us as individuals to participate in changing the world, anyway? We are all so small. Can we actually make a difference where we are, as we are?
Here are some ideas. As they’ve emerged, they’ve come to orbit a central thesis: America is blocked from participating in a more beautiful world by an excessive focus on wealth and self. (Me, also.) America more fully contributes to a more beautiful world as Americans become more self-sacrificing and are able to work cooperatively for things greater than our own personal interest. (Me, also.)
But the process by which we get there is a complicated one. Materialism and self-involvement are often attempts to palliate symptoms of other phenomena. What appears to be disease is actually symptom, and so the exploration of the cure is a complex process. The suggestions here pertain to the twists and turns of this journey.
It’s been noted that having the leisure to look for the opportunities in a quarantine is indicative of significant privilege. So let’s acknowledge that, indeed, if you are choosing to read any portion of this essay at all, it suggests that you are likely a benefactor of privilege. The idea here is to make suggestions for how to use that privilege well.
1. See home life.
To no small extent, the quarantine has unplugged us and directed our attention to our homes. Telecommuting parents with younger children are now mixing their professional lives much more closely with their lives with their families. And families with adult children are also closer together, as many unmarried adult children head home, having drawn in in almost a basic, mammalian way.
In this shift we have the opportunity to rediscover the value of home life. We can re-discover the pleasure in preparing meals with others. We rediscover the triumph of (rationed, permissible) walking. See, too, somewhere in here, the invitation to start a garden.
With children home, we can rediscover that the lives of young people do not have to be neurotically planned to the minute. Some families area playing board games. Some children are even getting a little time in nature — or outside at least. Perhaps we can think about the implications of housing our youth in cinderblock fortresses most of every day for twelve to fourteen formative years (and giving roughly one-fifth of them psychoactives to make it work).
This opportunity to develop our home lives is also, unmistakably, an invitation to unplug. See the pleasures of reading books. Notice the ways that a book written by a benevolent, clear mind differs from material posted online. Yes, it’s worthwhile to read all the latest, right as it breaks. But also, a lot of it is fast food, too, isn’t it?
May the quarantine throw us back in time, to an era before modern media, consumer culture, and work culture so utterly saturated our lives, when life offered the enjoyment of simple, and often necessary activities.
One of the clear invitations of the coronavirus is the invitation to live in wholesome, simple, intelligent ways — by focusing more on our lives at home. It has profound implications for how we might structure life of the future. It’s good to be an aspirational society, and hopefully, we will continue to aspire. But how much of what we continue to really want can be gotten by more rushing in the world, by more mental clutter, by more tawdry media, by more consuming?
2. Reconsider cooperation, and let it lead us to virtue.
In a great recent op-ed in The New York Times, political philosophy professor Michael Sandel opens, keenly:
Mobilizing to confront the pandemic and, eventually, to reconstruct the shattered economy, requires not only medical and economic expertise but moral and political renewal. We need to ask a basic question that we have evaded over these last decades: What do we owe one another as citizens?
In our individualistic society, we’ve come to think of virtue as a sort of extra credit. Really life can be mostly about about you, your family, and your friends. Do your job well enough to make the cut, then go home and be whoever you want, with whomever you want, doing whatever you want.
But our worlds have abruptly enlarged: at this moment especially, sensitive civic awareness and trustworthy, clear-minded institutions are saving lives, and where these mechanisms are faltering, quite simply, people are dying.
Suddenly, we can see why a reflexive devotion to maverick individualism has not been such a great idea: And as soon as we acknowledge that we belong to larger communities than friends and family, it’s easy to see that the health of our larger communities actually depends, very directly on the extent to which people cultivate virtue.
Virtues include both those qualities which make us effective, but they also include the qualities that allow us to subordinate our own interests for the sake of the welfare of the group. You simply cannot have healthy communities without intelligence, skill, self-discipline, and diligence; and, also, you simply cannot have healthy communities without honesty, humility, empathy, tolerance, cooperation, and the ability to listen.
This is particularly worth emphasizing when one takes into account the extent to which our society has been talking us out of virtue over time, a trend that is perhaps most easily illustrated by the media — in the rise of bad-guy-is-the-good guy TV and movies, for instance, in the “news” shows which are visibly corrupt and propagandistic, and also in the rise of whistleblower content which, if not sufficiently anchored in a conversation about virtue, can inadvertently lead us into cynical resignation.
We tell ourselves that we are virtuous, because we have a generic appreciation of virtue But does that make us virtous. we? I’m not sure whether we are as virtuous as we think. You might consider that what life asks of us is not a background, generic appreciation of virtue but, like those who have gone before us, a rigorous, deliberate daily practice and even study of it.
In a free society, you can’t force people to be virtuous. That’s clear, and has been a prevailing argument for decades. But also, maybe now we can recognize that for those who would generate a truly well-functioning society, virtue is definitely not optional.
And in the context of our newly unplugged, home-based lives if we seek deliberately to simplify we might see that what has been distracting us from life’s wholesome, simple pleasures has also often, frankly, been distracting us from goodness.
We must be free to choose virtue or not . . . and then we must choose virtue. In a generation or more, it’s never been more clear.
3. Reconsider “Original Teachings.”
In March, the Ceremonial Elders of Whapmagootsui in Northern Quebec published a message to the world about the pandemic. They say that the coronavirus is a dark Messenger sent to humanity:
The Messenger is relentless, and no one is immune. It will continue to spread, and it will take many innocent lives. The pandemic cannot be cured by medicine alone; it must be combined with good deeds, prayer, and humanity’s commitment to change its ways, most of all, its dedication to minimizing the damage it does to the Earth.
The Elders of Whapmagootsui speak directly to the ways the world’s nations have lost their way. They say we need to respect the Earth, to respect the world’s indigenous peoples, to respect women — when our current habits do not.
They also speak of the need to return to “original teachings.” As their message puts it, mythically:
At the beginning of time, like all other beings in the natural world, all nations of the world were given what our Elders call the “Original Teachings,” that if followed would help create and maintain balance and harmony in the world at all times. . . To fully restore global balance and harmony, all nations must return to their roots on the Tree of Life and seek this knowledge.
On on hand, we celebrate secular, rational humanist culture for having lifted us out of superstition, having made our lives more materially abundant and healthier, and for having liberated us from the ideological tyranny of organized religion, which we blame for an outsized portion of the world’s wars.
On the other hand, we celebrate innovative forms of spiritual exploration: new terminology, new formations that have also liberated us from the dusty mores of institutionalized religious traditions.
But it’s hard to deny that our secular, rational approach has created problems that now seem to exceed our capacity to solve, and it’s hard to deny, too, that new spiritual movements can be prone to a lack of groundedness that sometimes prevents them from meaningfully bringing leverage to larger cultural concerns in deep, mature ways. We know we are going to need new ideas. But maybe we need old ones just as badly?
Traditional religious forms are often fossilized and dull, but my experience is that innovative movements that are not sufficiently rooted in “original teachings” are also not truly life-giving, either — they are often either too shallow, too inauthentic, or too unkind. We might consider that the most vibrant forms are those which embrace the new while being solidly rooted in the fertile soil of old.
Perhaps most basically, this is an invitation to long, uninterrupted time with God. But it is also an invitation to make our communion with the truer courses in ourselves and in the universe more vital by harkening to ancient wisdom: Confucius, Buddha, the Vedas, the Gita. The Biblical stories of the patriarchs, kings, and prophets. Proverbs, Psalms. The Gospels. (These are the original teachings with which I am most familiar.) The wisdom of the Koran. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The accumulated knowledge of indigenous peoples, both in oral traditions and in that which has found its way into other media. There are many sources.
What qualities inhere in teachings that people have preserved for thousands of years, built nations around? Maybe we should go looking for ourselves.
In his 1976 essay, “The Fate of Empires,” Sir John Glubb, career military officer and historian, posited a six-phase stage theory of the rise and fall of civilizations. From the patterns of past empires, he made uncanny predictions about our own society, and he talks about the role of spirituality in the archetypal arc of decline — and, if a society is lucky, its renewal.
Some of the greatest saints in history lived in times of national decadence, raising the banner of duty and service against the flood of depravity and despair.
In this manner, at the height of vice and frivolity the seeds of religious revival are quietly sown. After, perhaps, several generations (or even centuries) of suffering, the impoverished nation has been purged of its selfishness and its love of money, religion regains its sway and a new era sets in. ‘It is good for me that I have been afflicted,’ said the psalmist, ‘that I might learn Thy Statutes.’
Through sincere religious revival, the peoples of previous empires have renewed themselves. Who might be the great saints in our revival?
This is not an invitation to regressive fundamentalism, though that is happening when people go back to scripture. If you seek out original teachings, though, go ahead and take your brain with you.
But also consider, perhaps, that to read these teachings in their original form is a more transformative encounter than you might expect, both for reasons that aren’t hard to explain, and for reasons that aren’t easy to explain.
If this point generates resistance, if you have not done a deep dive with original teachings recently, but you know just don’t want to try them because you just don’t like them, no matter how they come, then I would suggest you might start with this book of original teaching.
4. See exploitation.
As we consider that there may be more fulfilling ways to live, it would be great if we could say that these were bonus options, to crown the essentially blameless ways we have already been doing things. But unfortunately, that’s not the case.
Our most essential workers are often the least paid. And they are doing things you need them to do. You. Notice that these semi-visible workers are only the tip of an iceberg of a less-visible network of labor here and abroad: systems that often appropriate people’s lives totally, in order to serve us.
Also, our consumption habits are putting such stresses on vital species, like bees, and perhaps most of the fish that we eat, and vital ecological systems, like the Amazon, that this life may be approaching collapse, to the peril of us all.
When people are making substantial contributions, but they are denied basic access to a secure life that is afforded to others, then it’s hard to get around the idea that they are being exploited.
When living systems go into irreversible decline for the sake of our industry, to the point that major systems may be approaching collapse, then it’s hard to get around the idea that they are being exploited, too.
It’s not particularly hard to understand that there is exploitation; pretty much everyone knows that. What’s harder is to really internalize the fact that pretty much everyone who would read this is contributing to it. Bluntly, we are all benefactors, and sometimes victims, of a system that exploits others. But make no mistake: we are all culpable. (To bring the point home, you might consider doing this ecological footprint calculator, which estimates how many Earths’ worth of land would be needed if everyone on the planet lived as you do.)
We do this this for the sake of wearing a hair shirt. Rather, we should do it to begin to be pro-active. Because as Lene Rachel Andersen and Thomas Björkman, scholars on the value of character in free societies, have put it, “We do not solve the problems we have, we solve the problems that we understand.
If we accept that we are directly involved in activities that do harm, it is harder to go the further step, to trace the actual lines of exploitation, so that our own habits will contribute less and less. It is hard, and it is also what we must to do. Once we begin this journey, though, we can make surprisingly definite changes surprisingly quickly — preparing us for more serious heavy lifting ahead, as people come into the conversation collectively more and more.
5. Learn about the shareholder-to-stakeholder conversation.
This may seem like an oddly specific thing to put in this list. But in this time of crisis nested within crisis, there is increasing talk about companies transitioning from an emphasis on shareholder profit into a model wherein it is essential and non-negotiable that businesses take stock of all stakeholders that they affect — and that they be accountable to all of them.
When we talk about systemic transformation, it is easy to get bogged down in the obstacles and, from there, it’s easy to begin to perceive the world as being dominated by powerful cabals that stand in opposition to anything good at all. But as political leaders are beginning to make stakeholder value a matter of national policy, as Jacinda Ardern begins to do in New Zealand, it becomes clear the degree that the conversation is steadily gaining traction.
It can’t be stressed enough that the shareholder-to-stakeholder conversation is invaluable to the overall movement of systemic change. So learn about the shareholder-to-stakeholder conversation, and then get past your disappointment that it isn’t further along enough to believe in it. It is a gateway by which the powerful become the Good Guys, and you have a role in getting them there.
6. Practice self-sacrifice.
Virtue in general has already been discussed, but here simple habit is emphasized: when your interests and somebody else’s interests are both on the table and you are sure your interests should go first, instead put the other person’s interests first and really make an effort to put yourself, empathetically, in their shoes.
Do it maybe one extra time per week. Do it no matter how good you think you are at doing this anyway.
When you do this with others, and you don’t have the feeling of the air going out of the room, and you don’t have the feeling of the light going out of your body, then consider that those are your true friends.
That’s it. It’s possible that this whole essay is largely just a lengthy preamble to this point.
7. Join something.
Right now it’s easier than ever before to join a full-bodied conversation about change. Many conversations of any sort have moved online, so if you are reading this essay, you have everything that you need literally at your fingertips to find a group through which, frankly, you can transform your life and participate in the renewal of the world.
If you were to join a group of other people doing something life-giving and new, what might you choose? A group that is gardening? A group that is exploring some original teaching? A group that is organizing for local environmental action? Or working to fortify local businesses? How about a group like Rodrigo Nino’s Great Change Conversation on Tuesday nights, or the GAIA initiative of MIT’s Presencing Institute, where people are talking about movements to change the world altogether?
Is there even time, maybe, for more than one group?
How about it?
Sources suggest that the number of new covid-19 cases may be leveling off in many parts of the country and as they do, the end of quarantine at least begins to come plausibly into view. We don’t know when, exactly, but someday, foreseeably, these peculiar circumstances will be over.
How shall we come out of our houses? Shall we just shake out our stiffness, and go back to the way things were? I sense many of us won’t want to.
Let’s mind the advice to rest and to be accommodating to ourselves during this period of disruption. But also, let’s not miss the opportunity to pay attention and to meditate on our lives. Let’s not miss the potential of what we can now incubate.
When we emerge, we could passively drift back to things as they were. We could come out tentative and tender-footed, thinking that it would be nice if things don’t entirely go back to normal, but having no clear sense of what to do.
Or, we could emerge more one-pointed, having used this time unplugged and indoors to think. When we meet each other again, we could say, “Oh, good. There you are. You know what I’ve been thinking?
“Oh, you too, huh?”
To no small extent, the choice is yours.
Really it’s up to you.
It’s up to all of us.