“Always the assumption is that we can first set demons at large and then, somehow, become smart enough to control them.” Wendell Berry. 1)
Trump’s Reality TV Show has moved to the White House. He now has a global audience. Early morning tweets, ill -considered executive orders, personal insults to judges and foreign leaders who disagree with him, and insistence on the truth of easily dis-credited lies, creates an explosive, consciousness draining toxic media environment. While even his admirers acknowledge his hypersensitivity to criticism, his aggressiveness, ignorance of the issues and his inability to confess error, we all- together with the media-continue to attend to him, and diminish ourselves, by hanging on his every word.2)
Trump supporters feel that he is really doing what he said during the campaign while the rest of us cannot believe he is putting a ban on Muslims from 7 countries, planning to build a wall at the Mexican border, currying favor with Putin’s Russia, and deporting immigrants in record numbers.
Remarkably, given his quixotic nature, Trump has been quite consistent in his statements, beliefs and actions from the start of the presidential campaign through his present four- week old presidency. He has promised to put America first, to alter or cancel unfavorable or ineffective trade deals, to force American companies to keep or bring jobs home, to strengthen the military, and to weaken governmental regulation, especially in regard to energy and the environment. He will also vigorously pursue the war against terror, limit immigration from Mexico and most Latin countries and halt it entirely from many Muslim countries. Trump has also aligned himself with most of the traditional goals of the Republican Party and its evangelical Christian base. He doubts climate change and plans to withdraw the U.S. from climate change agreements while also cancelling many E.P.A. goals and guidelines. He supports overturning Obamacare, de-funding Planned Parenthood, weakening LGBT. rights, improving decaying U.S. infrastructure, and plans to appoint one or more conservative Supreme Court Justices.
For a person concerned about human rights, race relations, peace prospects and the environment this frightening agenda is made worse by Trump’s actual and planned Cabinet appointments, which primarily consist of older white men from the conservative wing of the military industrial complex. With his appointments, Medicare and Social Security are at risk, public lands will be sold to private interests, Wall Street again has its fingers in the pot of the Treasury Department , agricultural interests will have a field day through an industrial agriculture champion in Sonny Purdue, and public education can be stripped of resources by Betsy de Vos of the Amway fortune.
This is the country’s wealthiest cabinet in history, and an administration that makes a mockery of separating private financial interests from public goals and actions. The Trump Presidency makes fully visible to all American citizens and indeed to the world the truth of the old adage that what is good for General Motors is good for America; it cements corporate influence and control over both American government and much of American culture.
Basic Concerns
When I subdue my outrage at the new Administration and its goals and think more deeply I have to acknowledge a set of quite basic existential, human and moral concerns. The first of these has already been alluded to, namely that the Trump Presidency Reality TV Show is absorbing a great deal of the world’s attention and consciousness. This means that millions of people’s psychic and spiritual energy is fearfully focused on him. Does this give him greater power and the ability to unduly influence the psyche of humanity ? I certainly think so and know that his many threats and ongoing lies enhance the distraction, unease and fear living in my soul and that of many others. So we all need to learn to disinfect ourselves daily, to clean our souls of Trumpitis, by not rushing to the media to see the latest insult or outrage, and by learning to look with quietness and discernment at what is transpiring in Washington and around the world. Otherwise Trump blocks our creativity and insight, sows confusion in our soul, and lames our will for doing the good.
A second concern has to do with undermining the truth, through the outright lying and the creation of “alternative facts “by Trump and the spokespeople of his administration. If he can persuade enough people that there are conservative facts and liberal facts, one no better than the other, then civilization is lost because the possibility of dialogue, of distinction between facts and interpretations is gone, and objective science and knowledge denied. As a recent columnist noted, the effort to negate truth, to discredit the press and to call into question scientific university research, “poisons the well of democratic discourse.” 3)
The Trump Presidency also represents a threat to our constitution and to our democracy, and to not acknowledge this is to be blind to a danger that many Germans denied in the 1930’s to their later dismay. As Hannah Arendt, the political thinker and authority on totalitarian regimes noted, a culture of fear, the militarization of society, the abridgement of human rights, the undermining of independent courts are all characteristics of authoritarian, totalitarian regimes. So is the stifling of dissent, the curtailment of a free press, the demonization of the other, the attack on the rights of labor, and the glorification of the nation.4) Trump and his administration unfortunately manifest these tendencies to a marked degree leading me to question all efforts to accommodate or normalize relationships with the present Administration or the Republican Congress which supports it.
Underlying these concerns is the worry about the stability, health and maturity of Trump’s personality. When I watch and listen to him I get the impression of an extremely wounded, insecure bully who always has to be the biggest, the best, the wealthiest, the most handsome, an all around winner who can never admit weakness and who has to attack anyone who challenges him.
In addition to the worry about the authoritarian tendencies of the administration I fear the threat to world peace posed by our new chief executive. How easy it is to move from a war of words to acts of war when the White House is occupied by an insecure psychologically challenged person supported by advisors such as Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller, acknowledged provocateurs, or “bomb throwers”, from the conspiracy laden alt-right movement.
I also have a concern about whether the divisive nature of the election will play itself out in an actual impeachment process, for which calls are already being made on the internet , possibly leading to a military take-over of our government by a threatened Trump Presidency. If Bill Clinton can be subjected to impeachment proceedings by lying about an affair with a White House intern, then the Trump White House is infinitely more vulnerable with its hidden relations with Putin’s Russia and its many conflicts of interest, crony capitalism and sleazy deals.
The taint of the Trump Presidency being illegitimate is already quite strong, with James Comey, the director of the F.B.I. illegally announcing a renewed investigation of Clinton’s e-mail server 11 days before the election, and Russian intelligence operatives attempting to influence the election through releasing strategic leaks and fake news. The recent forced resignation of General Flynn and the inappropriate, if not illegal contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian leadership further undermines the legitimacy of the Trump Presidency. 5) Also people are aware that Republicans deleted thousands of inner city residents, as well as Latinos and Asians from the voting rolls in North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan through operation Crosscheck, a computer program which deletes voters from rolls when duplicate or similar names appear in other states but often without comparing social security numbers or middle initials.6) If this becomes front page news beware the backlash of angry liberals who already feel that two elections were stolen from them.
Many Americans remember the strange election of G.W. Bush in 2000, when a conservative Supreme Court blocked a recount in Florida which according to knowledgeable observers would have given Gore enough votes to swing the election as over 50,000 African American voters had been removed from voter rolls in Dade County. As it was Gore won the popular vote, and so did Hilary Clinton by close to 3 million votes in the recent election. Perhaps as one observer noted, we need to add 11/09, ( the election result), to 9/11 as an important marker in our history. The call for “regime change”, which the war on terror unleashed in other countries fifteen years ago has now come home to haunt us in a media manipulated and fear based election. 7) I was surprised by the Democratic Party’s quiet and quick acquiescence to the election results in both cases.
If this election is a harbinger of what we have to face as citizens of a “democratic society” in the future then I fear for our children and grandchildren. Fake news and the marketing of lies, the existence of the omnipresent national security state monitoring our daily communications, the promotion of fear and aggressive nationalism, and the selling of empty personalities as leaders through specialized, personalized Facebook programs and other social media evokes what Trump ally and former Fox chairman Roger Ailes already stated in 1968;” This is a whole new concept. This is it. This is the way they will be elected forevermore. The next guys will have to be performers. “ 8) And so a populace which watches television an average of 5 hours a day or 39 hours a week and in addition spends many hours on the internet, elects a reality show TV star to become president, confirming that our national political reality reflects the dynamics and false images created by the media. It is as philosopher and Social Critic Jean Baudrillard predicted: in the post-modern age, the representation, the simulacrum, precedes, shapes and now determines ( political) reality. 9)
Inner and Outer Discernment
So what is it that we can do as concerned Americans and citizens of a world in crisis? Clearly we can be politically and socially active in many domains, from protesting to political organizing to running for local office. The liberal media is full of specific and often insightful recommendations on what can be done to resist including Michael Moore’s ten actions that will limit the power of the Trump Presidency.10) Also in our towns and neighborhoods there are many inspiring initiatives and leaders who are busy improving our communities as Sarah van Gelder describes in her new book, The Revolution Where You Live, and we can join and support such efforts.11)
But there is much we can and need to do at an inner level as well. One thing is to monitor our soul state, to avoid the excesses of withdrawal and disengagement, or of hyperactivity and possible violence. In the one instance we retreat into our private world of favorite pastimes or we contemplate moving to New Zealand or we descend into brooding and depression. With the other, the danger is to be so outraged and obsessed that we feverishly engage in every possible demonstration and activity and are haunted by the constant stream of bad news. With either of these extremes we risk losing ourselves and our equilibrium, just what our lesser selves and the negative working forces in the world are wanting. 12)
Can we instead practice being active witnesses to that which lives in our soul and to that which lives in the world? To do so means creating moments of inner and outer quiet, taking time out from the busy stream of our lives to sit, to reflect, to engage in mindfulness activities and to pray or meditate for guidance and insight in order to serve that which is good, that which is life enhancing in the world. And if we feel down-caste or fearful we can remember Thich Nhat Hanh’s advice,” Around us life bursts forth with miracles-a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, ” 13) Or ,” we can discover that in reality no single day passes without a miracle happening in our life, “as Rudolf Steiner suggested .” 14) And then we can note what Rebecca Solnit wisely adds “… when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of resurrection.” 15)
When we take the time to quiet down, to stop the incessant chattering that goes on in our mind we can also come to an experience that “ a sense for truth is the silent language of the soul.” 16) Whether we are pondering a question of our life’s direction, or of a relationship or of politics and economics, if we remove the external admonition that it is all too complex for us to understand anyway or that the experts say this or that and instead rely on our own common sense, we can come to our own sound judgements. If we give an issue or a question time, it will reveal its truth to us because in the quiet of our soul there is a sense for truth, for fairness , for community, and for life. We need to allow it to speak.
I think it is truly the case that “affairs are now soul size” as the English poet and playwright Christopher Frye said many years ago.17) If we cannot really trust government to speak the truth and we know that many professions have been captured by corporate interests and that the media is invariably biased in one direction or the other, we must learn to rely on our own, hopefully informed judgement, on our soul. I knew instinctively that the second invasion of Iraq was based on a lie despite the support for the invasion provided by the New York Times. I felt my stomach turn and I became very uneasy about the coming election the moment Comey said he was renewing Clinton’s e-mail server investigation. I also do know when I have told a lie or have not done my best for a client, or a friend eventhough I may try hard to block such an awareness A sense for truth becomes the language of the soul only if we give it the time and attention to shape our thoughts, feelings and actions. And it will speak in diverse ways, sometimes as a feeling or a thought and sometimes from the outside through a song, an article or a chance comment from a stranger. We need to practice listening to it, and to give it our attention for I believe it is our essential being that is then speaking in our soul, helping us to deeper discernment.
Our View of Good and Evil
We cannot avoid the need to make moral judgements about ourselves and the world. The source of such judgements and our conceptions of good and evil are nurtured in our childhood, in our upbringing and education. The question is whether our criteria of judgment are conscious or can be made conscious, or whether our judgments are so automatic that they have captured us. It is an important exercise to write down on what basis we judge something or someone to be good, helpful, moral or its opposite, and how it is that we sense these qualities to be present or not. The age we live in and the recent election give us ample opportunity to practice such awareness.
Recently I went to a documentary film about James Baldwin, the black writer and activist, called I Am Not Your Negro. It is a searing look at the civil rights era and the struggle for justice by Black Americans from the time of slavery to the present. While I was watching it and the scenes of white prejudice and violence I thought that many Americans would find this intolerable to watch and would seek to deny our terrible history toward the “other”, toward indigenous peoples, African Americans, Asians, Latinos, refugees and immigrants. And perhaps I could only watch it, but with dismay, because I have been blessed with mixed race grandchildren or remember being a young immigrant of seven and being told to go back home by a group of playground bullies.
Before I provide a brief list of my own criteria and ask you to create your own I want to express my deep conviction that we are each capable of the greatest crimes and the most sublime love and kindness. Under certain conditions I can imagine myself as a thief, a murderer, a tyrant and a criminal. I can find many instances in my life of behavior I regret and find its sources in fear and egotism. I also have no trouble in locating the Trump in me, from vanity about my hair, to lying in order to get my way to deeply resenting criticism from others even when I know it is well deserved.
The distinctions I make between good and evil are based on asking what is life enhancing, joy creating, community building, love engendering, diversity strengthening, nature honoring and gratitude based and what is not. Egotism, selfishness, race baiting, misogyny, profiteering, not honoring the truth or other agreements, fostering violence and greed, denying the human spirit and the possibility of love and kindness are to my mind regressive, patriarchal, unbalanced and evil. I think that many of our institutions in Western Society which foster blind consumption, ecological recklessness, human exploitation, and selfish greed are manifestations of structural evil, as Cynthia Moe-Lobeda calls it, that is they are based on assumptions and produce outcomes which are not life enhancing.18)
The reality and truth of structural evil in our society is concisely described by Mahatma Ghandi in his summary of Seven Deadly Social Sins :
· Wealth without Work : ( The rent seeking culture of our investment and business world described by Robert Stiglitz in The Price of Inequality).
· Pleasure without Conscience
· Knowledge without Character : ( Knowledge that is manipulative and control oriented, without morality.)
· Commerce without Morality
· Science without Humanity
· Religion without Sacrifice
· Politics without Principle
Gandhi first published this description in 1926 and then handed it, written on a scrap of paper, to his grandson the day before he was assassinated.19) It is still an apt description of much of what ails us as a society and it contains explicit moral judgments which we are not comfortable making in a predominately secular and materialistic society. Yet I believe modern life and the many crises we face will force us to come to grips with questions of good and evil to an ever greater extent as we will not be able to discern the false prophets of our time without such a matrix of judgement.
Crucial in making such moral judgments is distinguishing the policy, statement or position from the individual espousing it. We can say that a blanket policy of deporting immigrants has evil consequences or that the indiscriminate use of fossil fuel extraction is evil given what we know about climate change but we should not demonize the individuals who hold such views. The truth of this was brought home to me recently in talking to a family member who is a Trump supporter but who as a person goes out of his way to help people in trouble, even financially. He has a generosity of heart that often humbles me and for which I have great respect, eventhough I struggle greatly to understand his political and social beliefs.
Subtle Activism: Connecting the Inner and Outer World
There are two powerful but incorrect messages which the modern world intones, the first is that you as an individual have no influence and no power unless you are wealthy, control an organization, have a TV show or are part of a larger mass movement. The second is based on the Cartesian separation of mind and matter: what is significant is what is observable in the physical world, behavior matters but not your thoughts and feelings.
Both are manifestly incorrect. It is only individuals, who together with others bring about change in the world. It is individual women and men who heard about the ban on immigrants and rushed to the airports to offer their legal or translation services. It is individuals who protest war, corruption, and racial violence and who conceive of and create alternative technologies and social innovations.
Modern scientific research “ is increasingly coming to embrace the notion that consciousness and world , or mind and matter are complexly interrelated. “20) We know that meditation and prayer can help friends to heal or recover from illness, that observer and observed are linked in intangible ways and that plants will react to aggressive or peaceful thoughts. And we know that the social world- the world of families, towns, schools, roads, violence, friendships and conversations -is supported and made possible by a rich web of understandings, concepts, and feelings. So we can say that we live in one world, in which outer and inner are deeply interconnected.
An old friend of mind, Lex Bos, had this understanding many years ago and wrote a small book with the title Nothing to Do with Me, suggesting that all social issues have an inner side which when we identify them allows us to work for healing and transformation in both an inner and an outer way. He cites the case of political torture and suggests that it is based on not seeing the humanity of the other and then wonders what we are doing to the store clerk or the toll collector when we do not acknowledge or look at him or her. 21) What would happen to the psychological and spiritual balance of forces in the world if ever more people made a practice of looking into the eyes of the other, acknowledging their humanity, and inwardly or outwardly thanking them for their help.
If we are upset by how immigrants are treated, also an instance of objectifying, or othering them, what happens when we make it a practice to speak to people in our lives who are foreign and offering them friendship and human support in times of need. If we are bothered by the crony capitalism of the Trump administration or the constant lying, how do we deal with truth and lying in ourselves and how is it that we make financial agreements with others who work for us. Are we fair in what we pay and what we expect and do we have transparent conversations about such matters? There are a host of such practices we can begin which, I believe, affect the balance of good and evil in the world and which counter the egotism, conceit, corruption and manipulation of the Trump administration. Practicing just a few will serve to make us feel less helpless and will serve the good.
In the Buddhist tradition there is an inner technique called Tonglen which touches on the essential aspect of what I have been describing and which I have been working with sporadically in a rather unschooled way. It involves taking into our soul the suffering, struggles and evils of the world in image form, breathing it in and then when that image is clear and alive in our soul, breathing out a transformed picture, full of love and compassion.22) An image I have worked with on occasion is a group of refugees in central Europe, in snowy weather, standing next to a barbed wire fence not knowing what to do, with the women and children huddled in the center. I then envelop them with a feeling of love and compassion. Having done this for a period of time, a second image came to me of people arriving with shouts and greetings, bringing coats and food and starting a warming fire after they had cut holes in the fence. I have also worked with images of starvation and even of young ISIL fighters in Mosul awaiting encirclement and death. It is a practice that can enlarge our hearts, I too am that suffering, struggling person. In the end our journey as human beings is to learn to love our neighbor, to overcome our egotism and to let the other in. Hard work.
Creating a New Society Now
As we work on ourselves and seek to care about the other we are also practicing the principles of a more wholesome society. When listening deeply to an adolescent child in trouble or paying careful attention to a colleague with whom we disagree, we are acting as a guardian of the other’s freedom. When we let this listening deepen, we come to an experience of the other’s essential humanity and will want to safeguard their rights, their equality, rather than marginalize them. Seeing and understanding the other in conversation, in a family or in groups and institutions, awakens a deeper desire to help, to serve the other in word and deed. Through this process of dialogue with the other we can continuously experience the principles of freedom, equality, and sisterhood and brotherhood, of a new and more generous community and society.
As we bring consciousness to the meeting with the other we come into touch with three deep longings which live within every soul, the longing for inner and outer freedom, the longing for a mutual recognition of the equality of all human beings, and the longing to be in a mutually beneficial cooperative relationship with our brothers and sisters on the road of life. These yearnings slumber within every human soul but are concealed from us by our egotism, our fear and our prejudice. A willingness to reflect, to work on ourselves, will uncover them as a force for joy and a deep foundation for social reform. The election of Donald Trump and the manifest suffering in the world can serve as a call for us to do this work, and to practice creating more loving communities.
Notes:
1) Wendell Berry, Standing by Words: Essays, p 65, North Pont Press, San Francisco, CA,1983.
2) L.A. Times, Vol. 16, Issue 791
3) Lawrence Douglas,” Why Trump wants to disempower institutions that protect the truth”, The Guardian, Feb.7th, 2017
4) See Henry Giroux, “Normalizing Trump’s Authoritarianism is Not an Option,” Tikun, Jan. 19,2017
5) Julian Berger, “Flynn’s Resignation Likely Not the Beginning of Trump’s Russia Woes-Not the End”, Feb. 14th, The Guardian
6) Rolling Stone, Greg Palast, “The GOP’s Stealth War Against Voters”, August 24th, 2016
7) RSN, Tom Engelhard, “Was 11/8 a New 9/11”, Dec. 2/2016
8) Cited in Douglas Kellner, Television and the Crisis of Democracy p.65, Westview Press, CA. 1990
9) Jean Baudrillard, in his book on Simulacra and Simulation, (English translation 1994), makes the argument that post-modern society is shaped and to some degree determined by television and the electronic media.
10) Michael Moore, “Do these Ten Things and Trump Will Be Toast”, RSNews, Feb 22.2017
11) Sarah van Gelder, The Revolution Where You Live, Berrett-Koehler, 2017. Also see her edited book, Sustainable Happiness: Live Simply, Live Well, Make a Difference, Berrett-Koehler, 2014
12) See Tom Atlee, Random Communications From an Evolutionary Edge, Essay: “ Our Responses to Evolutionary Threats”.
13) Thich Nhat Hanh, Your True Home, #3, Shambala Publications, Boulder Co. 2011
14) Rudolf Steiner, The Work of the Angels in Man’s Astral Body, p.37, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1972
15) Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark : Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, p.24, Haymarket Books, Chicago,2016
16) Rudolf Steiner, Staying Connected, p.38, Steiner Books, Great Barrington, Mass.,2009.
17) Poem contained in the play, A Sleep of Prisoners by Christopher Frye, Oxford University Press, London, 1951.
18) Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda, Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation. pp.1-23, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, MN. 2013
19) M.Gandhi, The Seven Deadly Social Sins, See original plus commentary at http://www.gandhi institute.org/
20) David Nicol, Subtle Activism: The Inner Dimension of Social and Planetary Transformation, pp 1-16, State University of New York Press, Albany, N.Y. 2012.
21) Alexander Bos, Nothing to Do with Me, Floris Books, available from Stichting Dialoog, Holland.
22) I am indebted to my good friend Joseph Rubano for many wonderful conversations about questions of inner development and to my limited understanding of Tonglen.
Christopher Schaefer Ph.D. is a co-director of the Center for Social Research at the Hawthorn Valley Association and is an author, adult educator, and a retired organization development consultant. He was for many years a faculty member and program director at Sunbridge College, a part of the Threefold Community in Chestnut Ridge, N.Y. If you are interested in an earlier companion essay “The Dance of Shadows in America: Reflections on the Presidential Election of 2016 “ please contact him at [email protected].