The Trouble We’re In

Buddhist thinker and eco-activist David Loy writes persuasively in his book Ecodharma: Buddhist Teachings for the Ecological Crisis about the need for new ways of thinking about what we’re doing here on this planet. He points out, as many others have, that what is required is not simply for us all to take slightly shorter showers and ask for paper bags instead of plastic at the grocery store but rather a fundamental shift in the stories we collectively tell about the meaning of life and about our relationship to each other, this fragile planet, and the cosmos itself.

Loy quotes Loyal Rue who observed that the Axial Age religions (which include Buddhism, Vedanta, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam) all emphasize cosmological dualism and individual salvation. Cosmological dualism refers to the belief that there is another higher or better world someplace else. Embedded in the notion of a heaven where we go if we fulfill certain requirements here on earth, it places God above and earth below. Some traditional Buddhist teachings explicitly say that the point of life is to go beyond life in escaping the world of birth and death. Even the Mahayana (Zen) notions of enlightenment can be interpreted as transcending worldly concerns to live in a world beyond this painful world of suffering.

Cosmological dualism is part of what has created the worldview where we forget that we fully enmeshed and dependent on the so-called inanimate things around us. From this place of separation we see the earth and even each other as merely a means to an end. Our attention is on getting to some better place rather than realizing that our non-separation requires us to include not only each other, but the trees and the earth and the water and the sky in our calculations of self-interest.

Individual salvation is the idea, that though we live in community, each of us works toward salvation (or awakening) on our own. We each, we are told, must work out our own salvation in fear and trembling. We each must do the individual work to cut through our delusion and wake up to life itself. Every man, woman and child for themselves.

These two core ideas do not, however, represent the fullness of any religious tradition. In Ecodharma Loy goes on to illuminate the teachings of Buddhist traditions that could be the basis for a realization of the oneness of the sacred and the profane (non-dual teachings) as well as the teachings that no one individual awakens until everyone awakens. I have Christian friends who are doing this same work within their tradition—seeking new interpretations that will allow us to use our faith traditions to energize us in meeting this unprecedented challenge of global ecological collapse.

I’m reminded of Marx’s remark that ‘Religion is the opiate of the masses.’ And certainly religion has been used to justify centuries of cruelty in our economic and social systems. Systems that are focused on maximizing profit with no thought of the human consequences nor the unaccounted for cost to the earth, water and sky on which we all depend. Good Christian ministers preached centuries of justification for slavery and unspeakable cruelty to those with brown and black skins. Not to mention Christianity’s muscular support for the accumulation of vast wealth and the exploitation of workers of all colors and ethnic backgrounds.

Donald Trump, though he doesn’t appear to be any kind of Christian except in photo-ops, is the perfect exemplar of this strain of impoverished radical individualism. Winning is everything. Money is all that counts. Laugh at the losers. Take what you can get. Protect what you have against all comers. Compassion, sacrifice and collaboration are for those who are not strong enough to defend their true and solitary interests.

I was, however, deeply heartened last week by the images and the rhetoric coming out of the Democratic National Convention. The idea of at least beginning from a place that stresses we are all in this together, that we need each other, that we have a responsibility to the earth that supports us is refreshing, to say the least.

In Ecodharma, Loy makes a clear and unhysterical case that our immanent environmental collapse is part of a larger way of thinking that is also manifested in the violence of racial injustice, economic oppression and rising rates of depression and drug use in almost every (over)developed country. To make the changes we need to avoid the potential annihilation of life as we know it, we must work at this level as well as every other available to us.

Now for the cheery and clever ending. Hmmmm…..

It’s a cool morning. The sky is blue and the sound of a nearby fan is loud. I breathe in and out. I take a sip of tea. I suppose to look into the social and environmental suffering that surrounds us, we have to make sure to come back again and again to the ongoing miracle that is who we are. We are, each one of us, fully embedded in the most astonishing fabric of stars and crickets—of whales and nasturtiums.

Don’t forget.