“The world rests on principles.” – Henry David Thoreau.
This weekend, I was reading the writings of two people I admire and have learned from, different as they might seem to be: Henry David Thoreau and Pope Francis.
On Sunday, I re-read “Laudato Si,” Francis’s stirring encyclical on the environment, and also the new and quite wonderful biography of Thoreau, “Thoreau: A Life,” by Laura Dassow Walls.
Our world often seems hostile and disconnected to me, and surely, to you. Reading these works, it seems to me that our political leaders are too narrow or too shallow to look at some of the larger and perhaps more spiritual problems that plague humanity and lead to so much violence, hate and conflict.
People are unmoored, it seems, they feel helpless or discarded, and are, at least according to our news, increasingly violent, paranoid and suspicious. Some are so damaged and ill they murder fellow humans for no reason at all, and then are branded as “monsters,” as if they made a rational decision to murder others and then destroy their own lives.
Our planet is sick, people are sick and lost, the spiritual grounding and underpinning of human beings seems lost, and we are adrift. This is a surprise to many people living in 2018, it is not a surprise to Pope Francis, it would not be a surprise to Thoreau.
In our corporate and polarized nation, our religion is money and security, and that is a frail package to hold so much weight and meaning. Our wisest and most compassionate people have been marginalized and dismissed, driven to the margins of life. Our “pundits” are mostly arguers and shouters, small people, they make a lot of noise but have nothing to say. Reading Francis and Thoreau is a tonic, it reminds me that there great minds in the world, it is a tragedy we don’t listen to them more carefully.
Trying to understand the horrific tragedy in Parkland, Florida, we can all see that violence and rage are no longer confined to the act of murder itself, but spread out in concentric and ever-widening theories, dark and heartless speeches from the NRA, conspiracy theories, fake news bots from Russia, accusations of child murder, proposals to turn schools into armed fortresses.
I am no pessimist, but I have lived long enough to understand ritual, and we are in the familiar stages of trauma: grief, finger-pointing, faux sympathy, a cowardly political structure that cannot and will not move. Yes, for things to improve, they will all have to be dragged out by the hair, screaming.
We can barely empathize with the loss and sadness before we are pulled into frothing whirlpools of hate, suspicion and recrimination. That is how they get away with it. We are so divided, nothing can happen.
Our media, which celebrates and feeds off of conflict, puts all life into the context of the left and the right, two narrow and unyielding ways of looking at the world. Everything flows from the eternal argument.
We all talk only to our base, we all live in our own echo chamber, we learn to hate anyone who disagrees, we can only hear ourselves and choke on our anger and helplessness.
Almost every rational human i know is ready for more sides than this. And there are more sides than this, that is the hope.
One would think that the unfathomable slaughter of 17 innocent school children would unite the country, if nothing else, at least for a few hours or days. What is there to argue about? This cannot happen again.
But no, it just becomes another debating point in the endless conflict about the national soul, another path to grievance and fury. Our short attention spans can no longer endure long and complex arguments, we will just move on to the next atrocity when it occurs.
Heartbroken children become “crisis actors,” law-abiding gun owners become demons and enablers.
Our leaders slime the marble halls like slugs with hemming and hawing, equivocations, rationales, excuses. Every parent in the world wonders if their children could be next, a truly unimaginable reality once but now something our leaders simply seem unable or unwilling to confront.
Our world has turned upside down. It is the children who shock us with truth, and inspire us with their fearlessness, it is the adults who lie and dissemble and hide from responsibility.
How do we live sanely and with meaning in a world like this?
More than any great mind i know, Pope Francis and Thoreau help me understand what is happening and what I can do about it.
Francis looks at the world around him, and sees it clearly and honestly. Unlike the politicians, he is a spiritual man who can look back and see a larger truth.
The social dimensions of global change include the effects of technological innovation on employment, social exclusion, and the inequitable distribution and consumption of energy and other services. They spawn social breakdown, increased violence and a rise in new forms of social aggression, polarization, drug trafficking, growing drug use by the young, and the nearly universal loss of identity. Hopelessness and helplessness are epidemic.
One by one, our workplaces and social and cultural institutions have been and are being corporatized, money is the national ideal, there is nothing more important than profit and loss.
The astonishing growth of the past two centuries, Francis writes, has not always led to an improvement in the quality of life.
“Some of these signs,” he cautions, “are also symptomatic of real social decline, the silent rupture of the bonds of integration and social cohesion.”
Thoreau also warned about the consequences of humans becoming disconnected from nature, animals and the natural world. This would, he foresaw, bring political conflict, destroy the earth, and the unravel the bonds that connected human beings to one another. Both men understood the importance of a spiritual life, and the sacred bond between humans and their environment.
“I would remind my countrymen,” wrote Thoreau, “that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour. No matter how valuable law may be to protect your property, even to keep soul and body together, if it do not keep you and humanity together.”
If slavery was the moral issue of Thoreau’s day, guns and children are the moral issue of ours. They both saw the problem as being much larger than the issue itself.
In addition, writes Francis, when the media and the digital world become omnipresent, their influence can stop people from learning how to live wisely, act rationally, find truth, tor to think deeply and love generously.
Could this insight ever be seen more clearly than in the aftermath of Parkland? There is little charity or empathy, no common agreement on responsibility, morality or humanity. Our media and new technology has created parallel and distinct universes, each with their own ideas about truth, facts and morality.
The great sages of the past run the risk of going unheard amid the noise and distractions of an information overload. True wisdom, as the fruit of self-examination, dialogue and generous encounter between people, is not acquired by argument and data, or by labeling and endless and unbending argument. Data along leads to overload, conflict and paralysis.
Data is everybody’s master, and that’s where we are, trapped in this dark and sorrowful bubble of arguments without end, carried by people who can’t learn or listen.
Pope Francis is a truth-teller. I believe he is correct when he says that today’s media enable us to communicate and share information. But they also shield us from direct contact with pain, fear, joys and sensitivities of others, we each use our own newspaper or cable channel or website as a proxy, a way of avoiding human interaction.
Historically, human-to-human dialogue has been the only way to resolve conflict among people We see every day the result, a deep, angry and melancholic dissatisfaction with different opinions – we are learning to hate the other side – and a poisonous sense of isolation and fragmentation.
There is hardly a single great thinker in the world from Plato to St. Augustine to Thoreau and Einstein and the Dalai Lama who did not believe that a connection with nature is essential to human growth and survival. When we are disconnected from the animal world, from the natural world, we are broken, we lose our grounding and stability. Animals are not just something to rescue, they are our partners and guides through life. We have lost not our connection to them, and we turn a blind eye to the wounds and cries of Earth, our Mother. We sacrifice her for more money, there is never enough money.
So here we are, most of us, crammed into cities, working in jobs we hate, living only for money, with no common spiritual or moral ethos to live by.. We can’t even agree that the murder of young children in their schoolrooms is not acceptable in a civil society.
It was striking to me to see how similar Thoreau’s views are to Francis’s, it is almost as if each spoke with the other.
Thoreau believe civility and empathy were essential to humanity. He believed that living in nature, and understanding the natural world was essential to personal health and fulfillment and to a functioning political environment. Thoreau believed that great conflict s- slavery, guns and violence, the corruption of money in politics – were not single causes whose cure would solve our problems but symptoms of a much larger sickness preying on a broad universe of beings, not all of them human.
The two men have also shared the view that society cannot be healthy if the Earth, our Mother, is sick, dying or forgotten. And the animals driven away. If people feel helpless and ignored, they will inevitably find destructive ways to regain power and control. They give power to demagogues and dictators.
In a very limited way, I did the same thing Thoreau did. I left the wasteland that my community had become (and my life) and moved to the country, to live in nature and re-connect with the natural world.It has, as Francis and Thoreau both suggested, helped to heal me, to return meaning and compassion to my life.
Here, I have begun to think deeply and love generously. I am not yet where I want to be, but I am on the road. This year, I am learning to re-connect to people, to speak to them and listen to them. To love generously and continuously.
“Love is our most unifying and empowering common spiritual denominator,” wrote Aberjhani “Quotations From A Life In Poetry.”
“The more we ignore its potential to bring greater balance and deeper meaning to human existence, “he write,” the more likely we are to continue to define history as one long inglorious record of man’s inhumanity to man.”
Reading my history, it is not lost on me that the most fearsome armies in human history were not led by warriors, but by preachers of love: Mandela, Dr. King, Jesus Christ, Gandhi. Theirs are the legacies that endure, that capture our hearts and soul. I learned a while ago that cruelty is easy, compassion is hard, Thoreau and Pope Francis said so.