Waving or Drowning?

Toward a Politics of Mutual Accountability

 

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This one may appear off-topic for me, but I kind of lost it the other day when I saw the image above. So, please forgive me.

 

PREFACE

My major way back in the day at the University of Toronto was Political Science. My main interest was in International Relations, although I dabbled in Canadian and American domestic stuff too. All that being said, my entire "working life" has been spent in finance, in the non-profit sector, and doing whatever it is I'm doing now. In other words, I left my interest in politics on campus.

However, I think our current system is broken. No, this isn't a "big vs. small government" thing. That argument, as a uniquely American phenomenon, is completely irrational.

In the United States it's clear that the voters are forgotten immediately following an election. Corporate interests have complete control over politicians. 

In Canada our issues are similar yet different. It seems that there has been an unspoken agreement between the electorate and the elected: We promise not to care too much what the government does, and in return our elected oficials promise not to change things very much. If the politicians don't screw that up they can be assured of being returned to power come election day. This agreement seems to have gone off the rails. The current Conservative government is using the catatonic state of the Canadian voter to shift the country to the right, based largely, it would seem, on the Prime MInister's personal ideology.

MY POINT

With that as background, here are some back-of-the-envelope ideas for a new politics of accountability. 

You The Elected Commit to the Following:

• To do what you said you would do
  If you said you would close Guantanamo Bay, then close it. If you said you would require GMO products to be labeled, then do it. 
  
  However,

• If you change your mind--and you can--then you must tell us why
  Maybe you now have a clearer vision. Maybe the facts have changed, or you now have more information. Great, that's why we are paying you - to lead. But you must tell us what has changed.
  
  In order to facilitate this,

• You must report to the nation weekly
  Yes, yes, I know. But what we have now is partisan, opposition-bashing crap. Keeping points 1 & 2 in mind, tell us what you have done this week and what is coming up. Think of it as a weekly performance review. And just so we're all clear on this, you work for us.

In Return we the Electorate Commit to the Following:

• We will vote
  This is a civic duty. More importantly, if it's true that we get the government we deserve, then we better start deserving a better one. Quickly.

• We will participate
  We will pay attention to the affairs of state. Each of us to a greater or lessor degree of course, but we will take an interest. And we will participate in new mechanisms to provide elected officials with feedback. You work for us, and like a good boss, we will let you know how you are doing on a regular basis. We'll keep surprises to a minimum and we will expect you to the do the same.

Does this sound naive? Simplistic? Of course it does. But looking on the bright side, it couldn't be any worse than what we have now.

We desperately need change.

AFTERWORD

There are obviously a lot of specifics that are needed for the above to work. A couple quickly come to mind, particularly around the issue of political contributions.

• A limit of $1,100 of personal political donations per individual per year
  This is the current Canadian limit.

• No corporate donations
  Corporate donations have been banned in Canada since 2004. There are ways to bend the rules slightly, but not to a great degree. The dominance of corporate money in American politics is truly mind-boggling. 

What's that you say? Under these rules there won't be enough money to run an effective campaign? Well for starters, cut out the attack adds. Then spend your time and money telling us what you will do, not what the other person will fail to do.

That's it for now. Feel free to make suggestions.

A New Axial Age

I had some thoughts yesterday as I started to listen to an audio file of Cynthia Bourgeault speaking in New Zealand a couple years ago. The file name was taken from a statement she made on the recording: "We are entering a new Axial Age."

Some long for a return to... Something. Some sort of imagined "good old days" of the faith. I'd like to respectfully suggest that those good old days never really existed.

I'm often drawn to my own imagined "Monty Python-esque" scene of Jesus with the disciples:

This is from the 3rd chapter of the Gospel of Mike, one of the more obscure gnostic works. Jesus has just finished speaking to a large crowd, and characteristically he has used metaphor, analogy, and parables to communicate his message.

Jesus is over by the well having a drink. The disciples are huddled together a few yards away, whispering together. Jesus is peering at them suspiciously over his ladle of water.

"You ask him!"
"I'm not going to ask him... You ask him!
"I asked him the last time!"
"We'll who's turn is it?!"

Eventually Thaddeus is more or less pushed out of the huddle, and he cautiously approaches the master.

"What can I do for you Thad?" Under his breath, Jesus adds, "As if I didn't know."
"What was that Jesus?"
"Nothing, nothing. What's up?"
"Well, you know that story you told the crowd?"
"Which one? I told a lot of stories today. I was on a bit of a roll."
"The one abut the Kingdom of Heaven being like the farmer who planted good seed."
"Oh yeah, that's one of my favorites. What about it?"

Jesus sighs. He knows what's coming.

"Well, um... Me and the boys were wondering... We really like that one Jesus, but...
"Yes?"
"Um. Whats it mean?"

Even those who were right there didn't really get it.

I'm more convince than ever that we as a species had to/have to grow into the message of Jesus. He was the archetypical human, fully enlightened. He was calling to us from our own future, calling us on to be what we are becoming.

Perhaps we are entering a new Axial Age. The first brought about some revolutionary religious thinking and the creation of several of the world's major religions. Maybe this one will usher in a greater, more integral understanding of those religions.

Including Christianity. I have little remaining interest in a religion about Jesus, and want only to pursue the religion of Jesus.

The Cosmic Christ

An incredible 12 minutes with Richard Rohr, brought to you by the guys at The Work of The People.

Here's my suggestion. Watch the video, then:

1. Spend the rest of the day trying to forget what you heard, and go on with life as you know it.

or...

2. Reorient everything you thought you ever knew and believed.

Easy, right?

(Click image for the video)

The Final and Big Picture

I first read Richard Rohr's Jesus' Plan for a New World: The Sermon on the Mount several years ago now, and it blew me away. It helped reorient everything I believed. At the time I hadn't yet considered an evolutionary worldview, but when I read it now it positively drips with an integral message.

Here's a taste for you from one of the good Father's daily emails this week:

Jesus announced, lived, and inaugurated for history a new social order based on grace and not on merit. He called it the Reign or Kingdom of God. It is without doubt his most common message and metaphor, so it must be very important. Maybe we should just call his Kingdom “the final and big picture.” Many of us would put it this way: “In the end it all comes down to . . .” There we believe that all will be found and revealed inside of the love and mercy of God—for everyone without exception—and for all of creation. All of our little divisions and dramas will be revealed to be just that. All smaller kingdoms and criteria will pass away and mean very little. To live with that final consciousness today is to live in the Reign of God.

This now and not-yet Reign of God is the foundation for both our personal hope and our cosmic optimism, but it is also the source of our deepest alienation from the world as it is, which is all based on largely meaningless merit badges, and various forms of win or lose (at which almost all lose!).

I must warn you that living in this Big Picture of God will leave you in many ways as a “stranger and pilgrim” on this earth (Hebrews 11:13). It is not a popular position, because you can no longer easily fit into ordinary superficial conversations and anti-any group jokes. Nevertheless, our task is to learn how to live lovingly in both worlds until they become one world—at least in us. True Kingdom people bridge worlds and do not again create separate or superior little kingdoms. This is a common mistake.

The Known and the Unknown

A commentor on the previous post Our Images of God was concerned with my quoting of Alan Watts specifically, and the apparent direction of my spiritual journey in general. It was a great exercise to go through to craft a reply, and it took some time to think it through. You can still see the comment on the post, but I thought I'd put it up on it's own here as it's a reasonable and short explanation of where my head is at these days. As always, feedback and input is welcomed and appreciated. (I've added a couple of links in this version.)

The overarching theme which I have been trying for some time to communicate here is that I am now embracing an evolutionary worldview. Everything changes, all the time. Everything is in process. The challenge and the fascination for me has been in applying that to my own faith. I can see how to some it could appear that I may be "embracing the unknown at the expense of the known" but in fact what I am doing is exploring what comes next.

One of the central tenets of such a worldview is to include and transcend. I am incredibly grateful for where I have been, how I was raised, what I believed, etc. Now those things need to be reviewed somewhat critically. As I learn and grow, what still makes sense? What is helpful? Most importantly (yes, I said "most") what is proving itself through my own experience? Those I include. Other beliefs I transcend. That's an important word. I don't reject them them, I don't dismiss them. In fact, I celebrate them as being helpful for a certain part of my journey, then I move on. This is a very important distinction.

The way I see it there are at least two forces at play here - mystery and change. The first part is easy... That's the stuff we don't know. I do appreciate that Catholic theology makes a lot of room for this. Richard Rohr (a Franciscan) and Pierre Tielhard de Chardin (the late Jesuit anthropologist) are two of my biggest influences these days. Granted they'll never be mistaken for good conservative Catholics, but hey, they're Catholic nonetheless! Change is a little harder to nail down; this is where evolution comes in. As I've described above, the "transcend" act may require me to leave behind certain thoughts and beliefs. It may also result in moving some things I once thought I knew back over to the mystery side of the ledger.

A final word on critical thinking. I used to have a real problem with this important skill. I'd come to respect someone's thinking and soak it all up. Inevitably if I kept listening and reading long enough I'm come across something that didn't quite resonate, or with which I completely disagreed. I'd end up profoundly disappointed and feel like I needed to throw out everything I had learned from that person. Now I firmly believe I can learn from absolutely anyone. I also believe we are all flawed, so if we look long enough we'll find a reason to reject anyone's thinking.

Our Images of God

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Philosopher and self-described Spiritual Entertainer Alan Watts accompanied me on a nice walk in the rain this morning, via my iPod. Today I listened to him wax eloquently on our images of God, and how any image of God is in fact an idol. We've spent some time here discussing our tendency to "put God in a box", and I've gone on about the twin errors of anthropomorphizing and "deifying" God, but this is the first time I've heard it described as idolatrous.

As Watts points out, God is:

"...beyond all conception whatsoever.

And you see, this is not atheism in the formal sense of the word. It is a profoundly religious attitude. Because what it corresponds to practically is an attitude to life of total trust, of letting go. When we form images of God they're all really exhibitions of our lack of faith. Something to hold onto. Something to grasp.

...

You can't grasp it - of course not. Why would you need to? Supposing you could. What would you do with it? You can never get at it.

So there's that profound central mystery, and the attitude of faith is to stop chasing it. Stop grabbing it. Because when that happens, the most amazing things follow.

That is brilliant, encouraging, and hopeful.

Learning To See

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In reading through Seth Godin's book The Icarus Deception I came across this line:

The difficult part of seeing is setting aside what you are sure you already know.

That's a deeply profound and spiritual thought that stands on its own and is worthy of deep meditation. That being said, I want to expropriate it for my own purposes and say that the difficult part of evolving is setting aside what you're sure is permanent, unchanging reality.

As I've implied before, now that I am looking back along the arc of human history with an evolutionary worldview things look very different to me. In fact, many things make more sense.

Add to that my current fascination with the interconnectedness of all things, which is something that has really come to light for me since coming to China. If you track with my often rambling Facebook updates you'll know that this experience has been very profound for me. The act of coming to a place where I didn't know the culture or the language has given me a deep sense of being "the other" - something I have referred to as a sacred privilege.

Now I want to combine those two thoughts and take them further.

Lets go back in history to the Law. I want to suggest that the introduction of the Law ushered in a new era, identified by a couple of important principles:

• An eye for an eye, and
• Love your neighbour (and at least be civil to the strangers in your mix).

Because the bible doesn't spend a lot of time on the eons of human history prior to Israel, it can sometime be difficult to imagine that "an eye for an eye" was an improvement over the way things were. But it was.

Before the Law vengeance was swift, and it was not always commensurate. Poke my eye out and I'd likely kill you in retaliation. With the Law, vengeance was limited to some act of equal violence. This was new.

I summarize the situation like this:

First, we had to learn to see the Other.

 Fast forward one thousand to two thousand years when Jesus arrived on the scene and raised the game again. 

• An eye for an eye became turn the other cheek, and
• Love your neighbour became love your enemies. (In other words, love everyone.)

We could go on about how much of Jesus' ministry supported these two points, but let's sum it up like this:

Then, we had to learn to love the Other.

In no way do I mean to suggest that we have accomplished that little task. Two thousand years later we're still struggling with the assignment. As individuals and as a species we have our good days and bad days of course, but it's not easy.

Despite that ongoing struggle I want to push the envelope further and suggest that we are at the leading edge of what comes next for creation.

But how can that be? We're still having a tough time with loving our neighbours, never mind our enemies. Don't we need to pass the final exam at one level before we move on to the next?

I don't think so.

It seems to me that the Divine is always pulling us into the future from just inside of what's next.

Think about the state of Judaism when Jesus entered the story. Was The Law ticking along smoothly, perfectly executed by every adherent, every day? Not by my reading of the Bible. If anything it was starting to fracture, with different camps arguing over meaning and priorities. But there were apparently some who were ready to at least listen to the notion of loving their enemies, as evidenced by the fact that Jesus attracted followers. 

So don't let the fact that the world seems like a bit of a mess and we don't appear to be very good at loving enemies discourage you. As in Jesus' time, there are some who are ready to hear about what comes next.

And this is where it really gets interesting.

At this stage I hope you can see how we can overlay what I've said in previous posts about the evolution of human consciousness. After all, we're talking here about the same thing. There is no sacred/secular dichotomy, no distinction between the evolution of faith and the evolution of consciousness. There is only Divine reality.

Remember this pattern?

Create a problem
    Outgrow it
Create a problem
    Outgrow it

Now think of it this way:

Extreme violence among "our people"
    The Law, love your neighbour, an eye for an eye
Too insular (and still too violent) for a growing world
    Jesus, love your enemies, turn the other cheek
Too self-absorbed (and yes, still too violent) for an intimately interconnected world
    ???

Let me very briefly make some suggestions for how we fill in the line above.

Exhibit A: Empathy as an emergent human quality. Sympathy was feeling sorry for someone else's plight. Empathy is feeling it as if it is our plight.

Exhibit B: Breakthroughs in neuroscience that, among other things, support Exhibit A. Mirror neurons, neuroplasticity, etc.

We are not just connected.

Now, we have to learn that there is no Other. There is just us.

Mahatma Gandhi once said, "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind." What if poking your eye out leaves me blinded?

The Dalai Lama has said, "If you want to make others happy, practice compassion. If you want to make yourself happy, practice compassion." What if that's true?

Jesus has told us to "turn the other cheek." What if he said that because in his enlightened state he knew that striking out in anger at someone else is actually striking at ourselves? He also said, "whatever you do to the least of these you do to me." What if that's true? What if whatever I do for or to someone else, I do for or to Jesus? And for or to you? And for or to my Chinese neighbour? And for or to every other soul on this planet?

Finally, Jesus also said, "Do to others what you would have them do to you." It seems every major religion has it's own version of The Golden Rule. What if that isn't just a nice coincidence or just a decent way to behave? What if it's because doing unto others is doing to ourselves?

I'm obviously painting with some very broad strokes here and just roughly outlining my current thoughts. I'd like to know what you think about all this.