Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

A cultural cocoon

Michael Kahn reminded us recently of Arnold Toynbee’s conception of a “creative minority” culture, a cocoon that is woven beside and beyond a dominant and dying culture, nourishing the seeds of succession, life that accompanies and follows the dominant culture's failing and demise.

To speak or write of two contrasting cultures is caricature, as are the two images I sketch below. They may nonetheless be useful if they serve fairly to describe a challenge and an opportunity, as I hope they do.

Our still prevailing culture (or what I’m calling a culture) has been named the “industrial growth society” by Joanna Macy, “the military industrial complex” by Dwight Eisenhower, and just “the empire” by David Korten. Whatever its humane accomplishments, for 200 years it’s been relentlessly shutting down the essential life systems of the earth. One of those life systems is human development—the integrated growth of our bodies, hearts, minds and souls, our gifts of companionship and imagination.

Today’s dominant culture of industrial empire is pathologically adolescent rather than truly adult or mature, as if the developmental path was lost in the pre-transformative, pre-right of passage stage of adolescence. So the culture is largely egocentric, anthropocentric, hierarchical, materialistic, competitive, violent, conflict-driven, racist, sexist and ageist, riven by economic and social inequity, unsustainable and fundamentally unnatural because its relationship to the earth is instrumental or alienated, neither organic nor intimate. (I am particularly grateful here to the work of Bill Plotkin.)

The successor or alternative culture I have in mind—the cocoon or embodiment of Toynbee’s creative minority—is life-sustaining and life-nourishing. It is eco-centric (nature or earth centered) and soul-centric (let’s say imaginative, holistic, integrative, spiritual, conscious of the whole web of life). It is egalitarian and democratic, cooperative, community-based, just, compassionate and sustainable. We could call the movement, as David Korten has, a transition “from empire to earth community.”

The scope and vitality of that movement is the subject of Paul Hawken’s recent book, Blessed Unrest (2008). “Life is the most fundamental human right, and all of the movements within the movement are dedicated to creating the conditions for life, conditions that include livelihood, food, security, peace, a stable environment, and freedom from external tyranny. Whenever and wherever that right is violated, human beings rise up. Today they are rising up in record numbers, and in a collective body that is often as not more sophisticated than the corporate and governmental bodies they address" (p 67-68).

When I see compassion as describing and driving our mission and our practice, I am imagining our service to that alternative culture and that transition, and our membership in that community and movement.

A note on compassion

As many readers of Reckonings know, for many years - over 30 now - I have worked for The Christopher Reynolds Foundation. The focus of our attention has evolved during that time, but I think a spirit has remained constant. On the one hand, we of the Reynolds board have never sought to capture that spirit in words; and on the other, our conversations with each other and our dialogues with grantees during all that time are always trying to describe it in words.

During the past year, as our work on Cuba and Cuban-American relations has continued, we have begun anew to discuss our core values and our mission. This spring, as part of that ongoing dialogue, I began to take note of my own thoughts. The recent postings on Reckonings - ideas of Joanna Macy and Bill McKibben, and my responses to Paul Hawken's book Blessed Unrest - are part of that musing. So too are the following two postings, the first a suggestion that compassion is at the heart of our intention, the core substance of our gift and our practice; the second, indebted particularly to Paul Hawken and to Bill Plotkin's recent book, Nature and the Human Soul, is an effort briefly to describe the larger movement of which we experience ourselves as members.

I thought it might be useful to post abbreviated versions of these two reflections here on Reckonings, in the hope that they might provoke a discussion or elicit suggestions of additional resources we should explore. Thoughts can be added as comments here or addressed to john@reckonings.net.
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I have in mind a holistic conception of compassionate attention to healing suffering and nourishing the quality of lives, human and otherwise. At Spikenard Farm, for example, it’s a conception whose interactive components include education, the arts, farming and community building, with farm and apiary as organizational core. I can imagine other kinds of programs pursuing essentially the same conception of holistic growth and healing that aren’t on farms – they could be anywhere - schools, hospitals, libraries, churches, animal shelters and wildlife sanctuaries, penal colonies come to mind.

Could we describe a mission as informed and inspired most deeply by a spirit of compassion, expressive of the Buddhist commitment to metta or loving-kindness , or the Judeo-Christian tradition’s grounding in love of God and neighbor? The Christian contemplative Thomas Merton wrote, beautifully I think, “Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things." The word’s origin, I learn, is Middle English : via Old French from ecclesiastical Latin compassio(n-), from compati ‘suffer with.’ We could as well use the word love, or mercy, working to diminish the suffering of all sentient beings.

Nourishing compassion for self and for others is the core of mindfulness and the Buddhist practice of meditation. Compassion is essentially relational, synergistic, holistic. Empathy for others and for oneself are naturally and necessarily integrated, extensions of one another.   And in turn, psychologist Christopher Germer writes, “… as mindfulness begins to dissolve the artificial boundaries that define our separateness, we begin to experience our innate affinity with all beings.” (Germer, et al, Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, Guilford, 2005) 

Compassion can describe and comprise a mission and a practice: what we seek to embody and to nourish with our grant-making and what we might call our field work, our ongoing learning and companionship with grantees and their other companions and beneficiaries, who become then our fellows in compassionate practice.

We ourselves and our grantee-fellows-in-compassionate-practice may not use that language, but if it is our mission and our practice, and we take the time to learn about and truly know our grantee companions’ world and their practice, we can choose essentially to be in the business of nourishing the compassionate practice – and diminishing the suffering - of others. 

Some wise words from Joanna Macy

“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world—we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.”

Paul Hawken's book "Blessed Unrest," Part 2

Hawken’s central organizing theme in Blessed Unrest is the emergence, interaction and merging of three developments in American culture and history, an environmental movement, a movement for social justice, and specifically a movement for social and environmental justice for indigenous peoples and cultures. He is an especially skillful and informed student of that branch of 19th century American environmentalism for which the classic texts are Emerson’s Nature and Thoreau’s Walden, a perspective in which humankind and the natural world are of a piece, “with all divisions between them arbitrary and dangerous.” As his friend Bronson Alcott wrote, “Thoreau is himself a wood, and its inhabitants. There is more in him of sod and shade and sky lights, of the genuine mold and moistures of the green grey earth, than in any person I know.”

It is wisdom that has its deepest spiritual roots in the traditions of indigenous cultures, and that has survived and taken on new richness in the scientific world of modern ecology. Rachel Carson said in 1963 that the time has come for human beings to “admit their kinship with other forms of life… We must never forget the wholeness of that relationship. We cannot think of the living organism alone; nor can we think of the physical environment as a separate entity.”

Hawken is at his best in writing of the interconnectedness, the integrity of the strands of environmental and social activism, whether in his discussion of the Mi’kmaq people’s knowledge of the world through sound and the cycles of the moon, the environmental and human disaster in Bhopal, or a network of NGOs taking on the world’s biggest beverage company, Coca-Cola, over concerns about water pollution, toxicity, product safety and worker rights.

Paul Hawken’s concluding paragraph – introducing a preliminary collection of organizations and programs working on behalf of social, economic and environmental justice and human rights, the first embodiment of a larger database gathering on Wiser Earth (www.WiserEarth.org) is worth quoting in full.

“It is axiomatic that we are at a threshold in human existence, a fundamental change in understanding about our relationship to nature and each other. We are moving from a world created by privilege to a world created by community. The current thrust of history is too supple to be labeled, but global themes are emerging in response to cascading ecological crises and human suffering. These ideas include the need for radical social change, the reinvention of market-based economies, the empowerment of women, activism on all levels, and the need for localized economic control. There are insistent calls for autonomy, appeals for a new resource ethic based on the tradition of the commons, demands for the reinstatement of cultural primacy over corporate hegemony, and a rising demand for radical transparency in politics and corporate decision making… Everyone on earth will be an environmentalist in the not too distant future, driven there by necessity and experience… The world is a system, and it will soon be a very different world, driven by millions of communities who believe that democracy and restoration are grassroots movements that connect us to values that we hold in common.”

We are indeed “at a threshold in human existence” of the kind Hawken describes. We – and the entire natural world of which we are inextricably members – are experiencing that cascade of ecological crisis and destruction, that suffering and extinction to which he refers. I wish, at the end of such an admirable book, he was not offering such an anthropocentric vision, but he is surely right that humankind is the source of such suffering and extinction and will, as it is ameliorated and reversed, bear virtually the entire responsibility for succeeding in that creative and restorative process.

I suspect the momentum of that process will undergo a qualitative acceleration only when our largely western world of wealth and privilege is palpably, obviously in decline, only when the human suffering reaches those who still possess the wealth, the comfort and the power to compound the world’s illness or redeem it. The record thus far, for all the creativity and inspired resistance Hawken describes, is still predominately one of growing inequity and destruction. Bill McKibben, Paul Hawken and yes, millions of others are working to tip that balance, to create and restore the kind of world they so well describe. Morally and practically, I believe there is no viable alternative. In that sense we can embrace, as Hawken clearly does, those words of Joanna Macy:

“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world—we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.”

__________________________

Hawken’s central organizing theme in Blessed Unrest is the emergence, interaction and merging of three developments in American culture and history, an environmental movement, a movement for social justice, and specifically a movement for social and environmental justice for indigenous peoples and cultures. He is an especially skillful and informed student of that branch of 19th century American environmentalism for which the classic texts are Emerson’s Nature and Thoreau’s Walden, a perspective in which humankind and the natural world are of a piece, “with all divisions between them arbitrary and dangerous.” As his friend Bronson Alcott wrote, “Thoreau is himself a wood, and its inhabitants. There is more in him of sod and shade and sky lights, of the genuine mold and moistures of the green grey earth, than in any person I know.”

It is wisdom that has its deepest spiritual roots in the traditions of indigenous cultures, and that has survived and taken on new richness in the scientific world of modern ecology. Rachel Carson said in 1963 that the time has come for human beings to “admit their kinship with other forms of life… We must never forget the wholeness of that relationship. We cannot think of the living organism alone; nor can we think of the physical environment as a separate entity.”

Hawken is at his best in writing of the interconnectedness, the integrity of the strands of environmental and social activism, whether in his discussion of the Mi’kmaq people’s knowledge of the world through sound and the cycles of the moon, the environmental and human disaster in Bhopal, or a network of NGOs taking on the world’s biggest beverage company, Coca-Cola, over concerns about water pollution, toxicity, product safety and worker rights.

Paul Hawken’s concluding paragraph – introducing a preliminary collection of organizations and programs working on behalf of social, economic and environmental justice and human rights, the first embodiment of a larger database gathering on Wiser Earth (www.WiserEarth.org) is worth quoting in full.

“It is axiomatic that we are at a threshold in human existence, a fundamental change in understanding about our relationship to nature and each other. We are moving from a world created by privilege to a world created by community. The current thrust of history is too supple to be labeled, but global themes are emerging in response to cascading ecological crises and human suffering. These ideas include the need for radical social change, the reinvention of market-based economies, the empowerment of women, activism on all levels, and the need for localized economic control. There are insistent calls for autonomy, appeals for a new resource ethic based on the tradition of the commons, demands for the reinstatement of cultural primacy over corporate hegemony, and a rising demand for radical transparency in politics and corporate decision making… Everyone on earth will be an environmentalist in the not too distant future, driven there by necessity and experience… The world is a system, and it will soon be a very different world, driven by millions of communities who believe that democracy and restoration are grassroots movements that connect us to values that we hold in common.”

We are indeed “at a threshold in human existence” of the kind Hawken describes. We – and the entire natural world of which we are inextricably members – are experiencing that cascade of ecological crisis and destruction, that suffering and extinction to which he refers. I wish, at the end of such an admirable book, he was not offering such an anthropocentric vision, but he is surely right that humankind is the source of such suffering and extinction and will, as it is ameliorated and reversed, bear virtually the entire responsibility for succeeding in that creative and restorative process.

I suspect the momentum of that process will undergo a qualitative acceleration only when our largely western world of wealth and privilege is palpably, obviously in decline, only when the human suffering reaches those who still possess the wealth, the comfort and the power to compound the world’s illness or redeem it. The record thus far, for all the creativity and inspired resistance Hawken describes, is still predominately one of growing inequity and destruction. Bill McKibben, Paul Hawken and yes, millions of others are working to tip that balance, to create and restore the kind of world they so well describe. Morally and practically, I believe there is no viable alternative. In that sense we can embrace, as Hawken clearly does, those words of Joanna Macy:

“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world—we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.”

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A short bulletin from Bill McKibben on the old culture and the new

I've put together below some brief excerpts from Bill McKibben's current work, the first from his book Deep Economy (2008), a critique of the concept of economic growth and persuasive case for a new economic model based upon sustainable local economies. The second - in a sense the expression of need to which Paul Hawken in Blessed Unrest offers at least an interim response - is drawn from an essay McKibben contributed to the current issue of Yes Magazine. Bill McKibben teaches at Middlebury College and is a much admired journalist whose writing focuses primarily upon environmental issues. One of his current movement-building projects, attentive particularly to global warming, is described at 1sky.org. He has also suggested need for a vision of generosity bearing similarity to the Marshall Plan concept of Michael Lerner and the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and intriguingly, to the Christopher Reynolds Foundation's early focus on the US and China.

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"The old realism—an endless More—is morphing into a dangerous fantasy…In the face of energy shortage, of global warming, and of the vague but growing sense that we are not as alive and connected as we want to be, I think we’ve started to grope for what might come next. And just in time… [T]he new, deeper economy will be built, in pieces and from below. It’s a quiet revolution begun by ordinary people with the stuff of our daily lives.”

...............

"We need a movement. We need a political swell larger than the civil rights movement—as passionate and as willing to sacrifice. Without it, we’re not going to best the fossil fuel companies and the automakers and the rest of the vested interests that are keeping us from change."

..............

"The kind of extreme independence that derived from cheap fossil fuel—the fact that we need our neighbors for nothing at all—can’t last. Either we build real community, of the kind that lets us embrace mass transit and local food and co-housing and you name it, or we will go down clinging to the wreckage of our privatized society.

"Which leaves us with the one piece of undeniably good news: we were built for community. Everything we know about human beings, from the state of our immune systems to the state of our psyches, testifies to our desire for real connection of just the kind that an advanced consumer society makes so difficult. We need that kind of community to slow down the environmental changes coming at us, and we need that kind of community to survive the changes we can’t prevent. And we need that kind of community because it’s what makes us fully human.

"This is our final exam, and so far we’re failing. But we don’t have to put our pencils down quite yet. We’ll see."

Pause for a political imperative

I want to pause in my review of Paul Hawken's book on environmental and social justice to note that the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania occurred yesterday with a solid victory for Hillary Clinton, but hardly the margin of victory that would have altered the likelihood that Barack Obama is moving toward nomination and a battle for the presidency with John McCain.

Still, with every day that the two Democrats undermine each other, revealing weaknesses in each other's plausibility as standard bearer, a McCain victory in November becomes more likely.

As the Times lead editorial put it this morning, "The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it." Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee said last night, “This is exactly what I was afraid was going to happen. They are going to just keep standing there and pounding each other and bloodying each other, and no one is winning. It underlines the need to find some way to bring this to conclusion.” The Times added, "At a time when the Democratic Party would dearly like to turn its attention to Mr. McCain, it now faces continued damage to the images of both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama."

So how could the Democratic party turn its attention to McCain, the catastrophically bloody and unwinnable war in Iraq and the dire need for economic and environmental turnabout at home? 

John Edwards or Al Gore or a significant number of still undecided superdelegates could make a difference if they endorsed Obama. But there is opportunity in another idea. Consider: if Obama now makes the turn that is publicly anticipated later--in May or June or July when it may or may not be too late. Preempt the high ground, declare the need, in the country's best interests, that starting now he will turn from damaging conflict with Clinton and focus on confronting the awful legacy of the Bush administration and the fact that a McCain presidency will be if possible more catastrophic.

Obama cannot forego the need to defend himself if Clinton continues her increasingly shrill and and vacuous attacks. But he can put the burden of such attacks squarely on Clinton, publicly and prominently declare the preeminent necessity to turn to Bush and McCain, to Iraq and the economy, and then do it, and do it now, in a series of highly publicized addresses.

Earth Day Reflections on Paul Hawken's "Blessed Unrest" - Part 1

It is Earth Day, an appropriate occasion to begin a review of Paul Hawken's new book.

Hawken begins Blessed Unrest with an overview of the world-wide movement devoted to re-imagining and recovering social justice and environmental sustainability, in his view an organic and sacred web of tasks entailing "deep listening" as well as activism, essentially "restoring grace, justice and beauty to the world." They are ancient tasks of compassion possessed of an entirely new urgency, for "the planet has a life-threatening disease, marked by massive ecological degradation and rapid climate change," fueled by thoughtless consumption and the rapaciousness of a capitalist fundamentalism devoted not to true sustenance but to a narrow conception of economic growth.

It is fundamentally a movement based not only on human rights but the rights of all sentient beings - all life, as we are essentially one collective and interactive being. As John Muir wrote, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." It is a perspective common to the world's religions - especially Buddhism's conception of co-evolution and the sacred traditions of indigenous cultures. Like evolution and hope, it arises from the bottom up.

Whether such a diverse collectivity of creative and resistant organizations deserves the name movement may be a matter of personal judgement; but with Hawken I think it is more than that. It surely embodies one dictionary definition--"a change in policy or general attitudes seen as positive." It is, as Hawken realizes, not a singular enterprise, nor is it driven by a singular ideology. I am drawn to one use of the word--the progressive development of a poem or story. It is coextant with the regenerative character of life itself.

Paul Hawken's extraordinary new book

Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice and Beauty to the World (Penguin 2008) is Paul Hawken's remarkable new book, a sweeping portrait of the environmental and social justice movements, which together are "addressing two sides of a single larger dilemma. The way we harm the earth affects all people, and how we treat one another is reflected in how we treat the earth."

Hawken has also been instrumental in establishing a database of the astonishing number--one or two million he says--of organizations now working toward ecological sustainability and social justice in every corner of the earth. The database may be found at www.wiserearth.com, and is an open-source, user created and edited "community directory and networking forum that maps and connects non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and individuals addressing the central issues of our day: climate change, poverty, the environment, peace, water, hunger, social justice, conservation, human rights and more."

Over the next month or so I want to address and assess Hawken's portrait and analysis of that vital community, including his persuasive argument that for all its dispersed, local to international, tiny to worldwide, determinedly independent, and largely bottom-up organizations, it is indeed a movement, in Hawken's view the largest in human history.

Look for a series of postings here in Reckonings over the next few weeks, beginning here.

- John Boettiger

Chris Hedges: “The war in Iraq is about to get worse—much worse.”

No one has said it as compellingly, as plainly and persuasively, as Chris Hedges.

Beyond Disaster

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070806_beyond_disaster/ 

Posted on Aug 6, 2007

By Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, spent seven years in the Middle East.  He was part of the paper's team of reporters who won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of global terrorism.  He is the author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning." His latest book is "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America."

The war in Iraq is about to get worse—much worse.  The Democrats' decision to let the war run its course, while they frantically wash their hands of responsibility, means that it will sputter and stagger forward until the mission collapses.  This will be sudden.  The security of the Green Zone, our imperial city, will be increasingly breached.  Command and control will disintegrate.  And we will back out of Iraq humiliated and defeated.  But this will not be the end of the conflict.  It will, in fact, signal a phase of the war far deadlier and more dangerous to American interests. 

Iraq no longer exists as a unified country.  The experiment that was Iraq, the cobbling together of disparate and antagonistic patches of the Ottoman Empire by the victorious powers in the wake of World War I, belongs to the history books.  It will never come back.  The Kurds have set up a de facto state in the north, the Shiites control most of the south and the center of the country is a battleground.  There are 2 million Iraqis who have fled their homes and are internally displaced. Another 2 million have left the country, most to Syria and Jordan, which now has the largest number of refugees per capita of any country on Earth. An Oxfam report estimates that one in three Iraqis are in need of emergency aid, but the chaos and violence is so widespread that assistance is impossible.  Iraq is in a state of anarchy.  The American occupation forces are one more source of terror tossed into the caldron of suicide bombings, mercenary armies, militias, massive explosions, ambushes, kidnappings and mass executions.  But wait until we leave.

It was not supposed to turn out like this.  Remember all those visions of a democratic Iraq, visions peddled by the White House and fatuous pundits like Thomas Friedman and the gravel-voiced morons who pollute our airwaves on CNN and Fox News?  They assured us that the war would be a cakewalk.  We would be greeted as liberators.  Democracy would seep out over the borders of Iraq to usher in a new Middle East.  Now, struggling to salvage their own credibility, they blame the debacle on poor planning and mismanagement.

There are probably about 10,000 Arabists in the United States—people who have lived for prolonged periods in the Middle East and speak Arabic.  At the inception of the war you could not have rounded up more than about a dozen who thought this was a good idea.  And I include all the Arabists in the State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence community.  Anyone who had spent significant time in Iraq knew this would not work.  The war was not doomed because Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz did not do sufficient planning for the occupation.  The war was doomed, period.  It never had a chance.  And even a cursory knowledge of Iraqi history and politics made this apparent.

This is not to deny the stupidity of the occupation.  The disbanding of the Iraqi army; the ham-fisted attempt to install the crook and, it now turns out, Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi in power; the firing of all Baathist public officials, including university professors, primary school teachers, nurses and doctors; the failure to secure Baghdad and the vast weapons depots from looters; allowing heavily armed American units to blast their way through densely populated neighborhoods, giving the insurgency its most potent recruiting tool—all ensured a swift descent into chaos.  But Iraq would not have held together even if we had been spared the gross incompetence of the Bush administration.  Saddam Hussein, like the more benign dictator Josip Broz Tito in the former Yugoslavia, understood that the glue that held the country together was the secret police. 

Iraq, however, is different from Yugoslavia.  Iraq has oil—lots of it.  It also has water in a part of the world that is running out of water.  And the dismemberment of Iraq will unleash a mad scramble for dwindling resources that will include the involvement of neighboring states.  The Kurds, like the Shiites and the Sunnis, know that if they do not get their hands on water resources and oil they cannot survive.  But Turkey, Syria and Iran have no intention of allowing the Kurds to create a viable enclave.  A functioning Kurdistan in northern Iraq means rebellion by the repressed Kurdish minorities in these countries. The Kurds, orphans of the 20th century who have been repeatedly sold out by every ally they ever had, including the United States, will be crushed.  The possibility that Iraq will become a Shiite state, run by clerics allied with Iran, terrifies the Arab world.  Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel, would most likely keep the conflict going by arming Sunni militias.  This anarchy could end with foreign forces, including Iran and Turkey, carving up the battered carcass of Iraq.  No matter what happens, many, many Iraqis are going to die.  And it is our fault. 

The neoconservatives—and the liberal interventionists, who still serve as the neocons' useful idiots when it comes to Iran—have learned nothing.  They talk about hitting Iran and maybe even Pakistan with airstrikes.  Strikes on Iran would ensure a regional conflict.  Such an action has the potential of drawing Israel into war—especially if Iran retaliates for any airstrikes by hitting Israel, as I would expect Tehran to do.  There are still many in the U.S. who cling to the doctrine of pre-emptive war, a doctrine that the post-World War II Nuremberg laws define as a criminal "war of aggression."

The occupation of Iraq, along with the Afghanistan occupation, has only furthered the spread of failed states and increased authoritarianism, savage violence, instability and anarchy.  It has swelled the ranks of our real enemies—the Islamic terrorists—and opened up voids of lawlessness where they can operate and plot against us.  It has scuttled the art of diplomacy.  It has left us an outlaw state intent on creating more outlaw states.  It has empowered Iran, as well as Russia and China, which sit on the sidelines gleefully watching our self-immolation.  This is what George W. Bush and all those "reluctant hawks" who supported him have bequeathed us. 

What is terrifying is not that the architects and numerous apologists of the Iraq war have learned nothing, but that they may not yet be finished.

 

The Parable of the Mountain

I have been moved over the years by the writing of John S. Dunne, a theologian at the University of Notre Dame. In his many books (perhaps most richly in The Way of All the Earth), Dunne has been engaged in what he has called "passing over" and "coming back," passing over into the lives, the spiritual stories and traditions, of others, and then coming back again, with new insight, into one's own. The spirit of such journeying is that of pilgrimage, and, less obviously, that of Sabbath. For it is in the natural rhythms of movement and rest, speech and silence, action and contemplation, that one finds (and gives) the greatest nourishment. Dunne writes of "the homing spirit," of his own pilgrimage: "I realized I had to find a point of rest in myself where I could rest in God, where God dwells in me, and let that be my point of origin and of return. I had to pass over to God in others and come back again to God in myself."

In the following parable, Dunne is contemplating a related pair of journeys, ours toward God and God's toward us. In doing so, he helps us to understand the inescapability and the holiness of the mundane world.

Man, let us say, is climbing a mountain. At the top of the mountain, he thinks, is God. Down in the valley are the cares and concerns of human life, all the troubles of love and war. By climbing the mountain and reaching the top, man hopes to escape from all these miseries. God, on the other hand, is coming down the mountain, let us say, his desire being to plunge himself into the very things that man wishes to escape. Man's desire is to be God, God's is to be man. God and man pass one another going in opposite directions. When man reaches the top of the mountain he is going to find nothing. God is not there. Let us suppose that man does reach the top and does make this discovery. Or suppose that that he passes God on the way, or finds God's tracks leading downwards, or hears a rumor that God is descending the mountain. One way or another, man learns that climbing was a mistake and that what he seeks is to be found only by going down into the valley. He turns around, therefore, and starts going down the mountain. He sets his face towards love and war, where before he had turned his back upon them.

Martin Buber, in a small gem of a book called The Way of Man, writes in a complementary vein of the teachings of the Baal-Shem Tov, legendary founder of the 18th century Hasidic movement in Eastern European Jewry. The Baal-Shem Tov taught about "the cares and concerns of human life" that

...no encounter with a being or a thing in the course of our life lacks a hidden significance. The people we live with or meet with, the animals that help us with our farmwork, the soil we till, the materials we shape, the tools we use, they all contain a mysterious spiritual substance which depends on us for helping it towards its pure form, its perfection. If we neglect this spiritual substance sent across our path, if we think only in terms of momentary purposes, without developing a genuine relationship to the beings and things in whose life we ought to take part, as they in ours, then we shall ourselves be debarred from true, fulfilled existence. It is my conviction that this doctrine is essentially true. The highest culture of the soul remains basically arid and barren unless, day by day, waters of life pour forth into the soul from those little encounters to which we give their due; the most formidable power is intrinsically powerlessness until it maintains a secret covenant with these contacts, both humble and helpful, with strange, yet near, being.