Public policy, social issues, gender politics, religion, civitas, and other taboo topics fall under the hammer of Shava's iconoclasmic force of natural philosophy.
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Sunday, February 23, 2003
12:33 PM
Why this is a religious war
Sometime back, my friend Chris wrote this on a mailing list I'm on:
> Every religion has
> it's warriors that are supposed to kill and destroy to force their opinions
> down the throats of their perceived enemy.
To the best of my knowledge, though the Tibetans have had armies of conquest in their time, they have never imposed buddhism on anyone. The wars they have fought have been either defensive, or an attempt to seize lands primarily inhabited by ethnic Tibetans -- to protect them from people who were not allowing them to keep their own culture.
To the best of my knowledge, most stateless cultures war openly to seize resources, but rarely to spread their beliefs to others. They may *enslave* and *kill* others, but usually assimilation (forced or otherwise) is a cultural artifact of civilized organized states and religions.
Since all cultures have spiritual traditions, we can show that not every religion has warriors with this purpose.
However, we are raised to believe that war is natural to human culture, and that it is the right and prerogative of states to organize forces (bunches of young men usually) to war on Others. These wars usually involve seizing resources, and assimilating land by assimilating the people, or as often by forced or voluntary relocation of the original cultures' people into the "new" land as settlers. The original inhabitants who are not killed are sometimes assimilated, or else killed, relocated, or made impoverished refugees. (Israel comes to mind, or Northern Ireland, or South Africa, or the US...)
I personally believe that wars are fought over resources, with religion, paternalistic patriotism, and various tactics used as propaganda to rally support from the masses. Taking sons and as much as half of the wealth of the homeland and diverting it into war concentrates wealth in the ruling warrior/statesman/industrial class, and keeps the poor city and farm folks from having enough resources to consider their general plight.
Derrida (oh, gods, am I now ever revealing my fringe left-y pull) describes the current push of globalism as being a basic extension of the cultural machine built for that purpose by the Catholic Church in the Renaissance. However, he is not the only person with this view. In fact just about every non-Christian power and culture sees the blatantly Christian-imperial world view inherent in globalism. It's actually hard for us to see those assumptions, because we grew up with them like fish in water.
I would like every one of you, for example, to examine the concept of Progress. The word implies that "change is good," "technology is liberating." Progressives (and to some extent I'll include myself) believe that the current generation's understanding of the world is the best, the most evolved, and the best bet for survival. This is a concept that is not shared by most of the individuals in the world, if you get past surface beliefs. In fact, we are very cognitively dissonant in our own progressive beliefs.
Our beliefs about ecology are progressive, but the beliefs of our parents in better living through chemistry, while progressive at the time, are not progressive anymore.
Our parents' beliefs that creating nuclear weapons (or other weapons of great destruction) will mean the end to all wars, proved to be hardly progressive. However, if you read the source material around the two WW's you will find that people believed that if war proved horrific and wasteful enough, we'd end up with peace. Even the Cold War (that promised "utopia????") was never peaceful.
What of our progressive beliefs are merely new ways to insult the intelligence of our own children?
But in Central Asia, much as they may suffer under the despotic rule of Modern dictators, much of the populace still embraces non-progressive views, in the sense that they wish that they could live as their people did a hundred years ago, perhaps adopting a few new things as they are proven in the overly eager West.
Alas, Progress competes unfairly. Much as a business that is willing to pollute can generally be more successful in the long term than a business that works for sustainability, Western(ized) nations that adopt the mondialatinisation (roman catholic derived empire building globalization model per Derrida) will be able to overcome non-Progress-enthusiastic nations in the short term, where our short term is measured in years or decades, and others are still used to thinking in centuries.
WE ARE THE FORCES OF CHAOS, people. Our idea that this chaos is good, bad or indifferent is almost beside the point. Ours is a world where there is no time for thoughtful consideration, where our recent ancestors are inherently idiots and we never consider that it might be inheritable. We are bringing our idea of productivity and progress into cultures where a month used to be considered a short time, and sending their children into time warps such that their parents can no longer talk to them. These children adopt western views, and "realize" that their parents are inherently idiots, and begin to frantically and blindly change everything in a mad rush to reach internet time and save their nations.
No wonder they hate us. They hate us because religion is something that spans generations, that allows us to listen to something older and be patient, and in fact, we have none.
I have met people with profound religious connections from traditional societies, and one of the most amazing things I learned is that the sense of time, both as experienced and as it is thought of historically, and as the lessons of history are respected, all of that is profoundly different.
I would never be the historian I am, if my parents had not come from tribal people, and if I had not had my brain turned inside out by a Tibetan lama at 20.
Our culture has stolen our time, and handed us desire and lust and righteousness and self-determination and individuality to blind us to the loss.
There may be peace in the world if we can learn to change time, yet learn to keep flexible. But anyone in this world will be destroyed by the time vampires, who do not let anyone survive who will not enslave their people to the clock. So I doubt there will be peace. I have little doubt that the old ideas of time will only be preserved on the fringe. Among the Tibetans, and the monastics of some cultures, and the people who still will live on the marginal lands of the Gobi and other deserts where they can't get orange trees to grow.
I do not, I find, fundamentally believe in world peace. I believe we are a generation of vipers devouring our past, and the past of every other culture.
I believe that a few of us will try to remember, and pass some of the old ideas to our children. And some places they will land on the stones and regrew.
The old world, some parts of it, actually had something approaching honorable wars, but we lost that scale ages ago. Now we have only suffering, but as a Buddhist I believe that is what we had already.
There are a few of us, and of us I only know one beside myself, who see this as an end time for the world in some ways. People have been awaiting Armageddon, yet for myself, I think that this is the Kali Yuga, and that it's waiting for some phase change into something we can't even anticipate, as we destroy our ancestor's ideas of time and faith and tradition and generational cohesion.
But ye GODS people, stop looking at religion as something handed down by priests. Yes that is an aspect of it, and the aspect that is on most of the war flags. But religion is about the subtle and deep connection of generations, and those are being ravaged and destroyed by Progress and Modernism.
So if you want the religious flag of this war, the belief system it is waged under, PICK THOSE:
Progress
Modernism
Those are our religions, and no other. There is hardly a Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, or anyone in this country who has an iota of a chance to preserve their faith in anything but Progress and Modernism as the rules around which they organize their lives. And *THAT*, my friends, is what religion is.
The rules around which we organize our lives may as well have nothing to do with our personal spirituality, or professed religion, or where we find our religious community. They have to do with the minimal trappings of our lives. That we live in dense cities unable to support themselves without so much technology and so many tons of toilet paper per week. That 75% of us would not know how to feed ourselves without refrigeration and electricity once the canned goods ran out. That most of our children have never seen an animal slain for food. That most of our children grow up without a feeling that old people are important, nor that anything before maybe Vietnam was historically pertinent to them. That Darth Vader is as eternal a figure as the images from any mythos (most of which they've been introduced to by Disney).
We are immolating the world of our parents and washing the brains of the world's children in pervasive media, and we wonder why people are willing to die to symbolically give us the finger.
Like the Star Trek "Genesis Effect" we are cleansing the world of old slow thoughtful ossified reactionary sexist (and I'll admit to all the negatives too) cultures. I just don't think we're replacing it with a garden.
And unless you believe that progress and modernism are a religion, I'd say we're doing this DESPITE all the old valuable lessons of mystical genuine religion -- those "I love Jesus but it's Christians I can't stand" levels. But I'd say that this is not a fight against Islam. This is a fight against the values of traditional spirituality with all the beauty and warts involved.
It's inexorable, and unstoppable, and swift on an historical scale.
I am not a Luddite. In fact, I think the only way to hope to "save" anything valuable in the world is for the people of good character and faith to get *ahead* of the technology somehow, to surf on top of the wave rather than get crushed beneath it. But I do not see that invisible revolution working very well. To do this, you need to keep the old values while competing with individuals with the new values in the environment created to favor them.
I don't believe that going back to the earth will help anyone for more than a couple years.
But what I do -- I teach young people to crochet, so they can take control of the concept that they can make their own clothes, and that is a valuable and peaceful and meditative skill. I encourage DIY where I can find it. I live reasonably simply as I may, and try to reduce the chaos around my son, while giving him frank preparation for this brave new world.
I don't give up hope, even though I see no good short term outcomes, but I try to lend a long perspective to conversations I'm in. I see hope in the long future, just as I draw strength from a long past.
Namaste!
Shava
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