|
|
KJ
Selections
SIVA
AND HERMES
Philip
Grant (from KJ#36)
There is a famous
story in Buddhist lore of how Gautama taught a mother who refused to
accept the death of her only child. When, half-mad with grief, the woman
begged the sage to resurrect the tiny corpse placed before him, he replied:
"Find me a mustard seed from a house that has not known death and I
will do as you ask." In desperation the poor wretch picked up her dead
infant and rushed off in the direction of the nearest house. Several
days later, haggard but now sane, the woman returned and asked forgiveness
for having forgotten that no living thing can escape death. While the
Buddha explained to her the four noble truths, tradition records she
experienced a kind of epiphany and entered the path.
Today's world is
in sore need of this kind of wisdom, irrespective of the tradition from
which it comes. Without it we seem doomed to perpetuate the denial of
death that lies at the core of our current economic and social thinking.
This denial, however, is not of the death of individuals. It consists,
rather, of a refusal to admit that our social institutions are governed
by the inevitable cycle of birth, growth and death that govern every
other phenomena of which we have knowledge. Nowhere is this kind of
thinking more apparent than in the way we have imbued the market economy
with an aura of invulnerability and immortality. Once sorely challenged
by Marxism's vision of the market as a relative, historical and eventually
obsolete social institution, the market has responded to the collapse
of communism by proclaiming, in an almost evangelical fashion, that
it is the only one and true deity who will suffer no other gods before
it. It is perhaps only a slight exaggeration to claim, as I will, that
since 1989, the world has returned to a worship of the old Carthaginian
god: Moloch-Mammon-Market.
Moloch reigns supreme
by promising eternal life (never-ending growth), while actually delivering
death to all forms of life that stand in its way. As economic globalization
proceeds with unrelenting ferocity across the length and breadth of
our planet, bringing in its train the destruction of the global ecosystem,
indigenous communities, traditional societies, and indeed everything
not underwritten by the mechanisms of finance capitalism, Moloch proclaims,
like Shelley's Ozymandias, "Look on my works O ye mighty, and despair!"
And so, the peasants in the Philippines who paste pictures of refrigerators
next to those of the Madonna are often the very ones driven into debt
and disease by the practices of global companies that destroy communal
land, air and water as the price of the development needed to
provide the desired goods.
Moloch-market economics
simply ignores this kind of destruction. The only things considered
measureable by the latter-day priests of Moloch are functions of privatized
production and use. The massive pollution of the environment
caused by industrial production, the decay and disposal of the products
it creates, the exhaustion of natural resources, the takeover of local
and regional economies by multi-nationals, the disappearance of self-reliance,
and with it the self-respect necessary for a vital communal life, are
just a few of the casualties that cannot be recorded in the hieroglyphics
used by the high priests of supply and demand. As a result, the pleas
of the victims of globalization are not so much ignored as simply not
heard.
*
* *
Given that all social
and political ideals must today be expressed in the language of the market,
is any meaningful change conceivable? Without the impetus of man-made
and natural catastrophes, have human beings ever voluntarily pulled back
from the abyss and adopted modes of thinking and living based on considerations
of fairness, equality and compassion? The Russian writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
once said that a close study of history reveals two contradictory trends.
There are ages and eras when people will put up with the most cruel and
inhumane living conditions imaginable. Even worse, they will compound
their plight by thinking up the most clever and ingenious ways of justifying
the miserable systems under which they live. But that is only one-half
of the human cycle. There are other times and epochs when people will
undergo the most brutal and violent persecution in order to change their
systems. Almost nothing, even death, will deter them from attempting to
fufill their appointed work. Solzhenitsyn thought that historical periods
alternated between these two poles of moral contraction and expansion,
social stagnation and reform. He believed there was no reliable way of
predicting when the wheel would turn, prompting darkness to give way to
light, and vice versa.
I would add to Solzhenitsyn's observation the comment
by Tom Paine, the great proponent of global revolution, who wrote that
his own considerable study of history had convinced him that there is
always enough wisdom and common sense in the world to reveal a way out
of even the deepest of life's predicaments. The tragic problem of social
life, was that the individuals with this knowledge are just not listened
to when their counsel is most needed. Yet in every age, in even the
darkest moments, a sensitive student of history can detect the attempts
of philanthropists in every center of civilization to remedy the most
intractable problems and set their respective civilizations on the proper
course. While the effectiveness of their efforts is a function of their
community's willingness to learn from them, sometimes messages ignored
when they are first given are resurrected by future generations and
used to initiate subsequent cultural renaissances and reforms.
There is some evidence, for example, that a great global
reform was attempted about seven centuries ago in four of the major
centers of civilization that existed at the time. At the end of the
fourteenth century, Central Asia, China, India and Western Europe were
either in or about to enter a state of extreme social paralysis. What
the Spanish philosopher, Ortega Y Gasset, wrote about Europe holds true
for the other civilizations as well: "In the fourteenth century man
disappeared beneath his social role. Everything was syndicates, guilds,
corporations, states. Everybody wore the uniform of his office, even
to the cut of his clothing. Everything was conventional form, preordained
and settled; everything was ritual, and infinitely complicated."
In a similiar vein, Amaury de Riencort writes in The
Soul of China, that the colossal splendor of the Ming dynasty had
provoked a social reaction in which: "Real cultural growth was out of
the question . . . Original thought could no longer emerge. Basic energy
and vitality ebbed . . ." To the west of China, Tibetan society also
had become extremely rigid with almost the entire religious establishment
of Central Asia having degenerated into a money-making machine for providing
spells, potions and incantations to propitiate the dead. An analogous
condition prevailed across the Himalayas, in India, where a hardening
caste system strangled any attempt to deviate from the detailed rituals
and ceremonies prescribed by the Brahmins for their own enrichment.
In response to this social ice age, a thaw was attempted
by four very different and, as far as we know, totally unconnected individuals.
Each attempted to introduce into his society some element of the creativity,
autonomy and responsibility that we today associate with the individuality
of modernism. In Central Asia, Tsong-kapa was the most triumphant. Against
fantastic odds, his Buddhist reform movement, later institutionalized
as the Gelukpa monastic order, successfully exiled the rich and
powerful class of sorcerers and necromancers to the furthermost borders
of Tibet. In its place he introduced monastic reforms that lasted over
five centuries and put again at the heart of Buddhist discipline the
last words of Gautama: "All conditioned things are perishable. Work
out your own salvation with diligence." Tsong-kapa's system of
spiritual emancipation started with a strict textual analysis in which
the monks collectively participated but ended in a tantra yoga practice
that was uniquely individualized for each practitioner.
Similarly, in Ming China, Wang Yang-ming challenged
the state ideology of Neo-Confucianism with his version of individuality,
later known as the mad Ch'an school. In an almost secular counterpart
to the Gelukpa Annuttara tantra yoga, Wang counseled his followers
to find the true principles of things as existing within their own minds
and then, once intuitively grasped, test this knowledge by immediate
translation into practice. While his profound and very modern understanding
of the relationship between thought and action was ultimately rejected
by the Mandarin establishment, Wang, called Oyomei in Japan,
eventually inspired the architects of the Meiji reform several centuries
later.
Similar assertions of the moral and rational autonomy
of the individual were attempted in Europe and India. In the late fifteenth
century, about the time of Wang, Pico della Mirandola put forth his
great restatement of the medieval idea of the great chain of being
in his Oration to the Dignity of Man. Here, for the first time,
was the claim that humanity was a species essentially unfinished,
and that through the exercise of will, the individual could connect
himself with the entire universe and rise above any limited conception
of god. The key to this self-transformation, Pico believed, lay in finding
the common thread that linked Judaism, Islam and Christianity, a kind
of oral tradition or Kaballah, that had been transmitted by the
wisest practitioners of each faith, including Moses, Jesus and the Prophet.
The Mughul emperor, Akbar, attempted an analogous reform
in early sixteenth century India. From his new capital of Fatepuhr-sikri,
outside of Agra, Akbar tried for over half a century to transform the
opposing faiths of his kingdom and break the stranglehold of the caste
system, by introducing a new religion based on the best in all the world's
religious traditions. As might have been expected, both Pico and Akbar
were fanatically opposed by the religious establishments in their home
countries. But, while Brahmin opposition doomed to failure most of Akbar's
efforts, the Vatican suppression of Pico's ideas actually stimulated
their study by most of the Renaissance humanists including Erasmus and
More.
However much they differed, these proponents of fundamental
moral and social reform were united in their belief that the great problems
confronting their respective societies required a change in consciousness
in order to be properly understood. To begin the process of such a perceptual
and intellectual re-orientation, people must first develop the capacity
to interpret their own personal experience from not one or two or three,
but from a multiplicity of standpoints, perspectives and conceptual
frameworks. The common thread in these diverse programs to stimulate
moral and intellectual individuation, was the personal development
of the power to perform what might be called acts of simultaneous
translations in consciousness. This is a method that theoretical
physicists now routinely practice, moving as they do between alternative
models of matter-energy, and it seems a key that could be used to unlock
every subject worthy of study.
*
* *
The fourteenth century
attempt at global reform presupposed that once any limited set of ideas,
no matter how noble or progressive, becomes accepted as the totality of
truth, such a faith or ideology will predispose most people
to cling to it long after it has ceased to be useful in confronting social
problems. The result of such an divergence between thought and life, if
not corrected, would then produce grotesque exaggerations in our social
practices, assuring the inevitability of great collective suffering and
eventual social collapse. If we exclude the great success of Tibet, (which
eventually failed, as the Dalai Lama has admitted, after half a millennium—still
a pretty good run), we can see that this kind of ideological thinking
reasserted itself throughout the world in the seventeenth century, causing
the rapid decline of India, China, Persia and Turkey. In Western Europe
the great religious wars almost destroyed that civilization and it only
survived by transferring its faith-ridden ideologies to first the political
and then the economic spheres of life. This transformed economics, which
used to be thought of as only part of an integrated science of humanity,
into what I have been calling the religion of Moloch.
The chief victim of the spread of this ideological influenza
in the West was the concept of individuality itself. Originally conceived
as a means of transcending all intellectual and social systems that
arbitrarily limited human growth and aspiration, Pico's idea of human
beings as divine chameleons, capable of ceaseless self-transformation,
was replaced with an ideal of individuality that resembled the Old Testament
tyrant named Jehovah, a close cousin in the history of religions
to his Carthaginian neighbor, Moloch-Mammon. The results of this curse
on the thinking of the entire Western world was succinctly expressed
by the social prophet, Henri Saint-Simon, in the eighteenth century:
"Every man, every grouping of men, whatever its character, tends toward
the increase of power. The warrior with the saber, the diplomat with
his wiles, the geometer with his compass, the chemist with his retorts,
the physiologist with his scapel, the hero by his deeds, the philosopher
by his combinations, all struggle to achieve command. From different
sides they scale the plateau on whose height stands the fantastic
being who rules all of nature and whom every man who has a strong constitution
tries to replace."(My italics)
That Freud took this idea and used it to formulate his
theory of the super-ego, only supports its central insight. We
can rise no higher than the highest being we can imagine, and in the
case of the West this supreme role model has turned out to be a jealous,
vindictive, authoritarian patriarch (Blake's Nobodaddy) who can do whatever
he damn well pleases. With the advent of secularization and the mass
society the pervasiveness of this conception has proved lethal. Nowhere
is this better expressed than in the USA where the delusion that everybody
can be Number One has assumed the dimensions of a national psychosis.
It is no help to justify the hallucination by restating it to claim
that everyone can be Number One in her or his own way. A world of seven
billion Jehovahs is only another way of describing hell.
Yet this is precisely the image that the priests of
Moloch are trying to push on the underdeveloped world with their media-generated
vision of the earth as Planet Hollywood. The package of advanced technology
used to perpetuate this fraud does not, however, disguise the fact that
humanity has once again returned to the ritualism characteristic of
the fourteenth century. Only this time it is not uniforms and banners
that separate portions of humanity from each other in ritualistic ways,
but credit lines, consumption patterns, urban life-styles and possession
of financial instruments. While these are promised to all by the priests
of Moloch, there is simply no way, even under the most optimistic scenarios
of global development, that they can be enjoyed except as purchased
privileges, available only to the wealthy (by world standards) few.
Meanwhile the media's self-celebration of its "star-making machinery"
grinds on, condemning much of the world's population to endure by living
vicariously the lives of celebrities.
Acceptance of the religion of the global marketplace
commits its adherents to the assumption that its laws are unerring and
its institutions immortal. We have endowed the system that produces
capital with the omnipotence, supreme intelligence and invulnerability
previously allowed only to Jehovah. This is why the most fervent proponents
of globalization are also the ones who blame the weak, the poor and
the disadvantaged for not being able to take advantage of the great
opportunity the market offers them. Under this system of economic
predestination, the perfect justice of Jehovah-Moloch-Market dictates
that only those who deserve to could possibly fail. Failure to own financial
instruments has thus become the global system's scarlet letter, a sure
sign of inherent depravity and sin.
*
* *
Any religion based
on faith in omnipotent idols is sure to fail. Its most vulnerable point
is its own logic of irresponsibility. Salvation can only be guaranteed
to individuals, not systems. Hence there is no inducement in Moloch's
universe to provide an equitable distribution of the wealth it produces.
In fact most of the key players look for ways they can accumulate more
and more, and thus become, in terms of the system, invulnerable and immortal.
Once in such a position they can violate the laws of the market at will,
even to point of endangering the system which allowed them to accumulate
their wealth. Like Jehovah, who has no reason to obey the laws he has
created, there is always the overwhelming temptation in this religion
for the big winners to take the money and run. (Masters of the market,
however, sometimes take great pains to conceal this logic of irresponsibility.
The billionaire Henry Kravis was recently reported as telling his ex-wife
that the mega-rich must make a well-publicized show of contributing to
well-known charities in order to avoid unsettling the minds of the masses
who have little or nothing, and always will.)
The collapse of communism has provided the religion
of Moloch with billions of new converts, most of whom will end up living
in the soul-destroying slums ringing the soaring glass towers that serve
as the market's main centers of worship. Fortunately, some of the wealth
of Moloch that is ever concentrating itself in the most industrialized
countries has funded an increasing number of converts to a counter religion
that bases its worship not on faith but on direct, personal experience
of the cruel, inhumane and irrational practices of the dominant system.
This is the vanguard of what I think represents a new attempt at global
reform, a movement that can only grow in numbers and influence. Its
adherents include all those who want to move towards a society more
in keeping with a community of creativity and responsibility, autonomy
and interdependence, individuality and the recognition that the human
species must act as a custodian to all the forms of life that support
it.
*
* *
The symbols of this
new movement are many, but foremost among them must be placed the mythological
figures of Siva and Hermes. Classical Indian iconography
always represented Siva, the god of death and regeneration as a graceful
youth. Alternatively, in the Mediterranean mythologies, Hermes was a winged
youth bearing in his hands the caduceus, symbol of the power to create
and destroy. In these images is contained a great truth about the importance
of the idea of generations in understanding how civilizations are
to be renewed. As Ortega explained in his forgotten classic, Man and
Crisis: "Culture, the purest product of the live and genuine, since
it comes out of the fact that man feels with an awful anguish and a burning
enthusiasm the relentless needs of which his life is made up, ends by
becoming a falsification of that life. Man's genuine self is swallowed
up by his cultured, conventional, social self." It is the natural task
of the young, Ortega claims, those who feel the "awful anguish" and the
"burning enthusiasm" of life's problems most keenly, to correct the tendency
towards unthinking ritualism and restore to their culture the vitality
that is always lost when institutions, however enlightened, become well
established.
Conversely, if the young are not given the chance to
perform their allotted role in life the results can be socially suicidal.
First-generation immigrant parents often witness this if their children
fail to appreciate the heightened sense of meaning that the struggle
to establish the family in their new homeland has given to their lives.
Often by the third generation, the young cannot even remotely grasp
the intensity with which their forebears imbued even the most commonplace
of experiences in the new country. As countless studies have suggested,
unless the descendants of immigrants somehow find a way to recapitulate
the initial stage of creativity that allowed their families to flourish,
they will often take the social system into which they are born with
a measure of boredom, then contempt, and, if opportunities are denied,
eventual hostility and self-destruction.
What makes the alienation of the young a natural part
of the process of socialization, is that only rarely are they allowed
to take an active role in creating their own identities. Moreover, the
problem increases almost proportionately to the success of the social
institutions they inherit. In any culture in which the immediate problems
of life have been met, the social system, the complex of rules, roles
and relationships into which the young are socialized, becomes almost
irresistibly seductive. The smoothly lubricated machinery of life makes
it too easy to accept the sense of self that the culture thrusts upon
them, without thinking any of it through. And by abdicating responsibility
for fashioning their own identities, undeniably the most creative act
any human being can undertake, it is just another short step to the
observation of Thoreau that "most people live lives of quiet desperation."
The most famous representation of Siva in Indian art
shows the youth dancing within a ring of fire upon the body of an ugly
dwarf. This last image could very well represent the constricted, twisted
sense of identity that socialization into any highly defined culture
conditions us to take for granted. This symbol might also mean that
the flourishing of any civilization depends on the ability of the young
of each generation to mirror the heroic cycle of withdrawal, assimilation
and return to which Joseph Campbell so tirelessly worked at drawing
our attention. Ortega also believed that a society remains flexible,
versatile and creative when social conditions allow the young to complete
this cycle of withdrawal and return.
Young people who have as yet no stake in the existing
system of social relations are more likely to see through its failures
and betrayals. They are driven by a real desire to act authentically
and discover who they really are. Youth does not like compromise and
tries to live life on its own terms. It often looks with contempt on
older generations who take society so much for granted that they will
comprise almost any ideal to avoid disrupting their habitual routine.
Since the middle generations, on average, continually counsel young
people to grow up, accept the system and enjoy its fruits, often the
only allies of youth are the very old who have passed beyond the spell
society once cast over them and gained a detachment not attainable when
they were in the midst of their active careers. Like the young they
can see through the posturing and the pretense of those who take the
current system of rules, roles and social relationships too seriously.
This natural alliance between those who are just entering life and those
who are getting ready to leave it, is one more meaning of the iconography
of depicting the god of death as a dancing youth.
An associated meaning was also contained in the symbol
of Hermes’ caduceus, now familiar to us as the physician's staff: a
pair of intertwined cobras gliding up a central wooden pole or axis.
The two serpents represented life and death with the axis emblematic
of stability, or stasis. At the top of the pole is a circular ornament
suggestive of the perfection towards which the two reptiles are climbing
but will never reach—an ever receding goal. Try to separate the two
serpents, the ancient Greeks believed, and they will both bite you.
Life will become a kind of perpetual fever which we can never shake;
death will assume the form of a vast negation, a darkness from which
we must continually flee, while the staff of life, the great tree of
knowledge itself, will wither and die. When the three elements are in
balance, however, upward movement is assured through a spiral-like process
that is simultaneously steady and dynamic, expanding and contracting,
living and dying. While originally conceived as an image representing
perfectly balanced physical and moral health, the idea can also be fruitfully
applied to social and environmental health, and the relationship between
generations, as well.
Can we imagine social structures, economic systems,
and political institutions that reflect these profound ideas of the
proper relationship between creation, preservation, death and regeneration?
Can we design schools that teach versatility and self-education; work
that allows periods of daily withdrawal and contemplation as well as
longer periods of travel, study and retraining; pricing systems that
recognize disposal as part of the cost of production; health care systems
that give equal attention to promoting health as well as treating illness;
flexible leadership that provides guidance but also empowers the led?
More immediately, can our knowledge that life and death are inseparable
reveal ways of living based on a sense of the sacredness of the sphere,
Gaia, that supports us all? And most important of all, can we
allow the young to ask questions that we cannot, at present, even remotely
conceive?
*
* *
What the young require
most is the conviction that a substantial part of the world they are about
to inherit will remain plastic to the impress of their touch. Tom Paine
recognized this when he proposed to the U.S. Congress that upon reaching
the age of adulthood, every adolescent should be given a portion of the
national wealth equivalent to the value of the natural resources that
had been consumed by an average member of the preceding generations. Paine,
whose motto, "My country is the world, my religion is to do good" inspired
the young of his day, felt keenly that the great promise of the American
revolution was also the promise of the whole world. For this global revolution
to succeed, he wrote, every youth must be made to feel that he or she
will enter life on equal terms with those who went before. Any social
system that allows its members to squander what properly belongs to future
generations should therefore be torn down and replaced. This idea so impressed
Jefferson that he proposed in turn that each generation should create
its own Constitution to ensure the social system would reflect its own
vital needs.
All of these ideas reflect the importance of providing
the young with a living matrix of possibility within which they can
dream and experiment with their own lives. This cannot be done if the
very vehicle that supports life, the global ecosystem, is irreparably
damaged through the irresponsible acts of the proponents of economic
globalization. The destruction of the environment represents the death
of all of youth’s dreams. More than that, it robs youth of the very
ability to dream by depriving them of hope. Much like the nuclear threat
of the cold war was shown to have a devastating effect on the moral
lives of children, so the looming specter of ecological collapse works
in countless ways to poison the imaginations of those who are born "trailing
clouds of glory."
Adults can only respond to this crisis in creativity
by working to replace the religion of Moloch, which in ancient Carthage
was practiced through the mass sacrifice of children, with the new religions
of responsibility that celebrate the logic of possibility. As the current
series of international conferences on global warming was designed to
apply the best knowledge we have available of the effects of our patterns
of living on the biosphere, so must the nations of the world hold similar
conclaves on the consequences of all aspects of economic globalization
for increasing opportunities for the young. If so, like the recent experience
by twenty-one children of twenty-one countries and ages at the COP3
conference in Kyoto (see back cover), these meetings might slowly push
us into recognizing that the young can act responsibly if they are convinced
that what they do will make a difference. For the youth of the world
to be socially reborn we must allow them to play their appointed role
in helping the current system to die a natural death. Then perhaps we
can answer with some sincerity the question posed by that now forgotten
New Age pioneer and spokesman for the young, Cat Stevens, when he sang:
"We've come a long way, we're changing day to day, but tell me, where
do the children play?"
Philip
Grant received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of
California at Santa Barbara. He has taught in the U.S, the Middle East,
and the South Pacific, and currently lives and teaches in Kyoto. He
is the co-editor of and a contributor to Arab Non-violent Political
Struggle (Lynne Rienner, 1990), and also authored "Toynbee and Buddhism"
(KJ#35), "O Stay Brief Moment" (on Francis Fukumura's Trust)
(KJ#31), and "The New World Order and a Culture of Nonviolence" (KJ#22).
Copyright
held by the author
Back to Selections
Subscriptions
|
