Greetings,
I particularly like this sentence from below: "There is a growing consensus
that we may understand ourselves and our world more deeply and fully if we
conceive of things in terms of interconnected patterns of relationships rather
than as reified entities existing somehow independently of their own
developmental history, their internally differentiated processes or their
enabling conditions."
---
"It is no small task to understand this vast, variegated world we humans have
carved out for ourselves on this small planet. How does one know where to
begin, what to interrogate, and to what end? Events, however, have a way of
imposing themselves. As the Cold War melts down and bitter ethnic and religious
conflicts heat up the world overi , as endless images of death and violence
flash daily across the globe, the multiple faces of human evil and suffering
stare steadfastly into our own, intimating, we fear, an inescapably inhumane
reality. Our task then, our moral imperative, is as urgent today as it was when
Albert Camus (1971, 11) expressed it nearly fifty years ago, just as many
millions of murders ago: “One might think that a period which, within fifty
years, uproots, enslaves, or kills seventy million human beings, should only,
and forthwith, be condemned. But its guilt must also be understood.” This essay
is an attempt to take this challenge seriously, an attempt to understand the
awful dynamics of human-inflicted suffering, of “man's inhumanity to man” in
traditional parlance, of—in a word—evil. Human beings make war and kill each
other in a way that no other species does, that no other species could, that no
other species would. Somehow, we must make sense of it all. We must be able to
discern some pattern, some common dynamic, behind behaviors that are repeated
so terribly often, in so many times, in so many places. As Camus suggests, such
an understanding—however repugnant its details, however unpleasant its
conclusions—is required to even begin preventing them.
"Understanding, however, is not only what we require, it is also what we must
interrogate. For, we shall see, it is understanding itself, imperfect,
wrong-headed understanding of our human condition, that lies deeply and
malignantly behind these unholy dynamics of human evil. It is this mistaken
understanding of ourselves—as individuals, as members of social groups, and as
a contingent, historical species—that we must address. We must understand not
only the passions that drive men to evil but the confusion over our condition
that makes such evil possible.ii The tenacity and pervasiveness of these tragic
strains in the human condition—our “fallen state” as it were—have been
recognized and addressed by nearly all religious traditions. In seeking to
understand these darker sides of human life, however, we shall draw upon the
conceptual resources of only one such tradition, Indian Buddhism,iii in
dialogue with comparable areas of inquiry from the biological and social
sciences. As with any dialogue, we appeal to no external or superordinate
authority; it is the cogency of the arguments that count, their compelling and
persuasive power, whatever their provenance.
"This dialogue is only possible because recent developments in Western thought
and science have begun to find common ground with traditional Buddhist
perspectives on the human condition, including the underlying conditions of
human evil. There is a growing consensus that we may understand ourselves and
our world more deeply and fully if we conceive of things in terms of
interconnected patterns of relationships rather than as reified entities
existing somehow independently of their own developmental history, their
internally differentiated processes or their enabling conditions. There exists,
that is, an increasing recognition that thinking in terms of unchanging
essences, entities and identities deeply misconstrues the human condition—a
misunderstanding that inadvertently leads to, rather than alleviates, human
evil and suffering.
"Although expressed differently in various fields, the relationship between our
misunderstanding of the human condition and its causal influences upon evil and
suffering have been articulated exceptionally clearly, directly and
comprehensively in the principles of classical Buddhist thought, which provide
the conceptual framework for this essay:
1. that all “conditioned phenomena” (saüskçta-dharma) are radically
dependent (pratītya-samutpāda) and hence lack any fixed or unchanging “essence”
(svabhāva);
2. that what we are, rather, are assemblages of dynamic yet wholly
conditioned “constructs” (saüskāra) that have been painstakingly carved out
(upādāna) of these contingent dependent relationships;
3. that we tend to construe these assembled constructs as substantial
“selves” or fixed identities (ātman);
4. that in our efforts to fashion and secure such an “identity” we
actively ignore and attempt to counteract its contingent, constructed nature;
and, finally,
5. that these efforts effectively channel human activities (karma) into
the repetitive behavioral patterns that actually bring about more evil and
suffering.
"These activities, in short, represent misguided and futile efforts to deny our
dependence, to counteract our impermanence and to attain lasting security for
this putative, substantial “self”—attempts, as the Buddhists would say, to
“turn reality on its head.” While the basic ideas of essencelessness,
contingency and construction of identity are straightforward enough, it
requires considerable thought—and sufficient specifics—to appreciate the
profound implications these have for our understanding of human life. We shall
therefore draw upon various Western sciences for many of the details to support
and flesh out this perspective, attaining in the process, we hope, a more
compelling understanding of the dynamics of human evil than either the
Buddhists or the sciences have yet to articulate on their own."
(William S. Waldron,'Common Ground, Common Cause: Buddhism and
Science on the Afflictions of Self-Identity')
Moq_Discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org/md/archives.html
