UnMind 28. CitiZenship Quartet 4: Globalism

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06 memorialday.jpg — Here on Spaceship Earth
We are running out of room —
Slamming gates won’t help.

In the short run, we can enter the castle and pull up the drawbridge, fence in the local community and close the gate. In the long run, the walls will come a-tumbling down. O sinner man, where you gonna run to? All on that day.

We finally turn our attention to the current meme of globalism, after considering the history of tribalism and nationalism, along with certain implications of conspiracyism, a term coined to include conspiracy-mongering in the panoply of theories of government, shared by coteries of those who believe in government and those who do not.

This is another one of those “two kinds of people in the world” tropes, the fundamental one being those who believe that there are two kinds of people in the world and those who do not. And, a bit like the thesis that atheism is the strongest form of theism, those who claim not to believe in government (shout out to Reagan) are pretty obviously the ones who believe in it the most, if in a negative way. It is easy to forget that, on the granular level, there is no such thing as government, only people slogging away in bureaucracies, and those running for or currently occupying elected or appointed office. Government of, by, and for the people, means that government in the broadest sense of the word is people governing people. What could go wrong?

The case against globalism is, massively simplified, that if such a world government comes about, it completes the trend, or evolution, toward the end of those doing the governing to be more and more distant, geographically, from those being governed, the local hoi polloi. Thus Brexit: one of the oldest perpetrators of remote governing, England, leaving the European Union so as not to be governed by someone in Brussels, a stone’s-throw away. It takes one to know one, I suppose.

The relatively new, but in our 24-hour news cycle now qualifying as old, trope — “Think globally — act locally” suggests the kind of balanced approach required to resolve the dilemma. We cannot but act locally, with the exception being the power to impose sanctions and ultimately, wage war. Which needless to say resides in the hands of very few people on Earth, though one may be one too many.

The world as a global entity is often mentioned in Zen and Buddhist literature. The one that comes to mind most often is Master Dogen’s vow, Eihei Kosohotsuganmon. The first section is appropriate here:

We vow with all beings from this life on throughout countless lives to hear the true dharma. That upon hearing it no doubt will arise in us nor will we lack in faith. That upon meeting it we shall renounce worldly affairs and maintain the buddhadharma. And that in doing so the great Earth with all beings together will attain the buddha way.

Note that the idea of rebirth is simply assumed, not made a big deal of, and that the vow is to hear the true dharma. We are certainly subject to hear dharma that is not true, then. Dharma has many meanings, among them the “truth,” the “law,” the “teaching,” and being itself. All beings are dharma beings, and all enjoy a dharma-location in reality, however temporary the occupancy agreement.

So in that sense, all nations are also dharma-beings, but only in the sense that we agree that they exist, and to whatever degree honor that mutual agreement. Language can be said to be an agreement — we agree to call the color red “red” in English; other peoples call it something else in conformance with their native tongue. As Sokei-an, and early American Rinzai advocate of Zen, pointed out in one of his early teachings, even the sensory experience of the color red as a reality is called into question in Zen.

He uses the example of a fire hydrant, presumably a red one. A person, a chicken and a dog all see the fire hydrant, but only the person sees the red. So where does the red reside? What is the actual dharma-location of the color? If it were truly in the paint coating the fire hydrant, all three beings would see it. It exists somewhere between the human being and the object, a frequency of reflected light triggering a resonance on the optic nerve and visual cortex that is interpreted by the brain as “red.” It is not clear that even any two people see the same color, probably an impossibility. Yet we all agree that that fire hydrant, and other items similarly colored, are all red.

Sokei-an goes on to explain that this is an example of two kinds of dharma-beings, the fire hydrant itself being a real and existent dharma, the red being a “real” but non-existent dharma. In other words, when we try to find the red, we cannot locate it precisely, but when we kick the hydrant with our toe, it hurts. This is the general understanding of two types of reality in Zen, as I understand it. Things are real but in different ways.

Nations are real but non-existent dharma-beings, and as such can take corporate action and generate shared karmic actions, and the sometimes harmful, sometimes beneficial, consequences thereof. The political consolidation of nation states from inchoate village and city governing bodies has had the unintended consequence that the consolidation of power in fewer hands has meant that an increasingly smaller group of people, and even individuals, can do increasingly greater damage, the so-called checks and balances supposedly built into government structures notwithstanding. Hide the red button.

Buddhism’s admonishment to renounce worldly affairs does not mean the wholesale abandonment of our responsibilities to others, from close friends and families to neighbors and other denizens of the world. It suggests instead that if and when individuals turn their attention to their own proximate causes and conditions, rather than entertaining the distractions of blaming others, and speculating upon more self-serving, if effective and humane solutions for the world’s problems, they are more likely to come up with ways of maintaining right livelihood that are compassionate and less dependent upon others having to lose in order for us to gain.

If we together with all beings hear the true dharma, it is likely to be telling us that we can trust in our own mind, that we already have pretty much all that we need, and that we do not, in any case, need to take it by force or deception from others. For the planet and all its human occupants to attain the buddha way, means that we can finally wake up to that necessary human condition that will promote world peace. The buddha way — note the lower-case “b” — is nothing other than the fully awakened way, the essential meaning of “buddha.”

Fully awakening to the truth of living in cooperative, collaborative and mutually advantageous harmony with each other requires that all human beings individually wake up to this reality, fostering the possibility of world peace through personal effort made in meditation. This is the demon-cave of darkness lurking at the hollow center of our fear of others, who are more like us than different. Only if we are at peace with ourselves can we hope to be at peace with all other beings. Then corporate welfare of the spiritual kind can at last be made manifest in the world. This is the great conspiracy of Buddhism and Zen.