You Can't Get There From Here

"Once you have found the center
and achieve harmony,
heaven and earth will take their proper places
and all things are fully nourished."

The Second Book of the Tao, by Stephen Mitchell.  

Who can disagree with this? Certainly not anyone I know. And there are good reasons for our welcome and acceptance of such wisdom. At its best, Eastern wisdom like this encourages us to unflinchingly look at ourselves and how we interact with the world, with the eye of developing within us the ability to flow with the world and not against it---the essence of Taoism.  

This short passage emphasizes the importance of harmony, a state that most of us surely aspire to achieve, but which relatively few of us actually achieve. Disharmony is clearly visible in individuals, families, offices, churches, governments, and nations. Simple observations of what is happening today point to a profound sense of dis-ease among people in Western societies, especially the US. Structures and moral systems that provided some sense of certainty and support have been uprooted. Young people seem lost and without much sense of reality, often living in social media and looking for continued affirmation as they struggle with their identities. Civility is disappearing and dis-respect on the ascendance. Violence is increasing. Poverty and racism remain disturbing aspects, as does hunger. 

Many well-intentioned people want very much to solve these problems, and often are active in efforts to remediate them. Unfortunately, despite all their efforts, and those of the government as well, progress has been spotty at best. Why the intractability?  

Clearly there are many reasons why we have not eliminated poverty or racism, for just two of many societal problems---from entrenched attitudes or beliefs to inadequately designed or implemented governmental programs. Important though those may be, I am going to suggest another causal factor, one that perhaps gets at the root of intractability for at least some of these large challenges. 

The Tao quote seems to be referring to us as individuals---to our own personal harmony. And it is fair to read it that way, but there is more to it than that. “Heaven and earth will take their proper places” also says that harmony can be about more than just us. If our actions are in accord with the Tao, “all things will be fully nourished,” meaning that aspects of the world beyond our immediate existence can be positively impacted. The quote permits a linkage between the personal and the general, or the societal, and this is the key to my suggestion. 

The idea is very simple: a person or group will have little luck transforming certain societal problems if he has failed to first transform himself. In other words, making a true impact on societal problems often depends on a pre-existing condition in which the person is working on his own tendency to misbehave. My belief is that all greater (local, national, international) dis-harmony arises from each individual’s disharmony. Large-scale socially detrimental things such as racism, homo-phobia, incivility, intolerance and violence will not be successfully addressed until individuals heal their own malfunctions. I believe that the origins of all these distressing and very challenging societal problems are in each of us, not in the large-scale society, which only picks them up after the fact as we collectivize our dis-harmony. 

What matters most are not the grand, mega-societal efforts to change people or solve problems, although those can be useful, but the day-to-day way in which we interact with those we don’t like or with whom we disagree. Before we can truly help with the large-scale societal challenges, we must do a bit of work on ourselves. As David R. Loy says in his fine book, A New Buddhist Path “…we cannot expect either the economic or the ecological transformations we need to succeed without personal transformations as well,…” Failing to make the fundamental personal change means our intentions and motives are open to serious question. In our minds, unfortunately, we are paragons of virtue when in reality we are acting at cross-purposes.  

An example involves the decline in civility and the efforts good people want to make to improve it. But a person who has not mastered his own incivility, and yes plenty of well-intentioned folks have failed, will be fostering good at one level---the societal---and diminishing it at another level---the personal. That is not in sync with the Tao and will mean that the person is actually sabotaging his own efforts. This self-defeating aspect is also vividly evident in the idea of tolerance, a subject I have mentioned a number of times. Just like the civility issue, we cannot be tolerant of some and intolerant of others and expect that our efforts to improve tolerance overall will succeed.  

This post addresses the challenge of getting from “here” (our current personal condition) to “there” (correction of a social problem) when the “here” is flawed by our own less-desirable behavior. Essentially, you can’t get “there” without a changed “here.” Thinking so is an illusion, and results in little to no good coming from considerable effort. 

A further problem is that work done at the societal level is often that of form, as opposed to substance, or outcome. Committees are formed, debates are held, admonishments are tendered, bills are passed, celebrities add their names, and administrative structures are constructed. Well-intentioned people admirably commit their energies to these activities.  

Yet if even well-intentioned people fail to hold themselves and others who group with them accountable for inappropriate behavior, it is clear that the inputs, as good as they might be, will prove essentially useless. Political discourse, for one arena, is a disgrace today (each side often arguing maniacally, and uncivily, that it is the other side that is uncivil---I have earlier discussed illusory existences). And the reason for this disgrace is very simple. For politically prominent people (anyone, really) to change their awful tactics they have to be held accountable by their very own. How useful is it for a Republican to hold a Democrat accountable, or the reverse? Not at all. But when both Democrats and Republicans hold their own members and partisans accountable, well then we might have some action. Unfortunately, given the wildly irrational state of our society, don’t count on much on any large scale. But as individuals, we can take up the effort, both to reform our own mis-behavior and to hold our friends and associates accountable for their unpleasant and undesirable behavior. It all starts at home, and that is where the leverage for large-scale social change is.