Evil Is Never Radical - Wisdom from Hannah Arendt

"The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them."

"evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.” Hannah Arendt - The Banality of Evil

Beloved Community

On first hearing these two words together, I thought ‘beloved’ seemed too intimate for my ‘community’.  Later I realized the power of these words even as the word ‘community’  implies something too complex to be ‘loved’.

What is love anyway? Eros, the romantic exclusive love is what we are most familiar with, but there are other expressions of love.  ‘Philia’, the love of family and friends, and ‘agape’ the inclusive love for humanity. Beloved refers to that which is greatly loved.

The phrase “Beloved Community” was popularized by Dr. Martin Luther King who envisioned a society based on justice, equal opportunity, and love of one's fellow human beings. (Ritterman, The Huffington Post. January 19, 2014). I heard it from a UU minister.

While capitalism exploits love for the sale of diamonds, chocolates and roses, and politics corrupts tribal love for war, King managed to address what he hoped might bring us back to a reverence for life itself. 

Different reasons have brought people to the BC island of Gabriola. Some have come to get away from the city for a peaceful, quiet retirement, some seek a deeper community than the consumer based suburb surrounding a shopping mall.  If there is any value we share, my guess would be the wish to preserve beauty and the peace to enjoy it.  

“Beloved community” is not an optimistic sentiment or a new religion. It is the planning, planting, building, investment of time and energy into something we value.  The question is how do we achieve this with a constituency of diverse interests? How do we communicate to people with different capacities? The mind of a lawyer is trained differently from the mind of a nurse. The knowledge and discipline of an economist is entirely different from a high school teacher. Yet we share the same planet.

As a species we have evolved with such highly distinct vocabularies we have created the impossibility of a shared solution. I suspect we know this, collectively, on a deep inarticulate level, and the brutality exhibited by those who seek to force their “Solution” is the result of madness: the mind falling into pieces before the heart can rescue it. 

On this island we have many gifts, assets and services we couldn’t live without. Some are paid, but most of this wealth is sustained through millions of volunteer hours never counted on the stock market.  

This is what beloved community looks like to me. It’s noisy, exhausting and sometimes irritating. It asks more from those who give and nothing from those who don’t. It’s emergent in design. It requires more learning than we would like – mostly about the human capacity to care. What propels people to give so much to community? Where do they find their rewards? Sharing in the joy of others?

Thich Nhat Hanh writes “A lot of suffering is born from the discrimination between self and others and our notion of a separate self.” The Buddhist teaching of “nonself” far from being a nihilistic escape, is an insight into how we are all connected whether we want to be or not. The threat of an oil spill is a great example of this.

How much more “news” do we need to understand that our future is fragile, because decisions made in offshore board rooms where we have no voice, could lead to our own demise.

The narrative of global politics focuses on conflict between separate identities: nation against nation, faith against faith, left against right, but ignores the work of villagers who know that clean water, air and food, must be sustained through community dialogue and engagement. This is why the arts are essential.

Beloved community is a radical departure from top-down authority in what Hannah Arendt saw as a world of lonely consumption, where people have forgotten how to work together in trust. (Duncan Cameron, rabble.ca). It is a determination to not turn away when the structures that govern politics and business are no longer working, an integrity that enters the unknown refusing to despair.

It’s not love that we should fear, it’s the gap between what is and what we have to lose that shakes us out of complacency. 

(First published in The Flying Shingle  July 7, 2014, and first posted on this blog in 2014)

The Sacred Feminine

The emphasis on the feminine as I experienced it growing up, was in appearance.  Looking gentle not hard. Being dressed well. Ornamenting my appearance with make-up and jewellery. Being soft and yielding.  I internalized these values, admired the beauty of women and strove to be that myself.

My sense of the sacred feminine was uncomfortable with this self-absorption and vanity. My obsession with appearance meant I was creating tension for my growing children. 

Because of the sacrifices my mother and father made,  I grew up believing I had a responsibility to be successful, whatever that meant.

I looked for examples of women who I thought were successful, and questioned what made them successes? Were they honest about their own feelings? Did they listen to others?  Did they emphasize the  value of the group above their own ego?

How is the sacred feminine different from the sacred masculine?  Women and men have different expectations imposed on them, and therefore different challenges. But every individual needs to examine their innate nature too. What do they value? How will we move to the next decade in beauty and strength? How can we support the development of a nurturing community and protect nature from our baser instincts?

This is more complex than laying out rules of right and wrong. Feminine and masculine natures are evolving. Social responsibility for a woman and for a man is built on our individual conscience arising out of our social conscience and our relationship to nature.

The sacred feminine appears in the work and character of women who contributed to our world, such as those listed below:

 Julian of Norwich (14th century) a Christian mystic, and theologian. Her Revelations of Divine Love was the first book in the English language known to have been written by a woman.

Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) was a German-born Jewish American political theorist whose phrase 'the banality of evil' has influenced our thinking on power and its abuses. 

Naomi Klein  an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and author of the New York Times and #1 international bestseller, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism has inspired movements of resistance against neoliberal capitalism. 

Shelagh Rogers, OC, is the host, and a producer, of CBC Radio One's The Next Chapter and Chancellor of the University of Victoria. Her dedication to Canadian literature has given our country insight into our often overlooked culture, including our First Nations.

Leah Hokanson is a pianist, choir director and teacher emphasizing the spiritual container for creative expression and health. She has developed choirs, accepting singers of all capabilities, and encouraged us to get in touch with the music within us for the sake of our own peace and happiness.

These women are warriors that enable rather than conquer and they embody what the sacred feminine means to our culture and the worth of women and men everywhere.

If I Can't Rule the World I Shall Destroy It

This is the cry of the authoritarian narcissist, and those who support him or her. It's a cry of despair from the minds of those who believed that reason and justice ruled the world and now realizing it's the opposite, feel betrayed but cannot see their part in it. In denial and without humility they sink into the dark hole of revenge. 

The trouble is we confuse ideology or the power of ideology with right and wrong. "Ideologies may be viewed as societally defined ideational structures that exist in order to permit latent dimensions of the psyche to become manifest in the external world." says, Richard Koenigsberg in his essay "Why do Ideologies exist".

When someone says "the real world" what they mean is the "ideational structures" that we have taken for granted as "truth". What we often call human nature is the "psychic functions" that permit certain desires and fantasies to be projected onto "reality".

The ideational structure I am most affected by is the notion of control. Raised in a nation who preached progress and who embarked on racist, colonial brutality, we argued about how to rule the world but not how to care for it. 

The male head of the household made decisions for members of his family whom he viewed as weak and childlike, who needed his strength and protection.  When things didn't go as planned the ones who failed were those who could not live "up to" the patriarch's laws.  

In authoritarian cultures, the sons learned to shut down their emotions and daughters learned how to keep silent.  Love became duty. Empathy and compassion died. 

We are born into a set of beliefs that our parents and teachers assume are right, and since we need approval from our society to survive, we learn how to adjust ourselves to an external view. It works to oppress and make obedient the people who live under its power.

I grew up believing I was good and those who behaved and thought like me were also good, and if we all thought the same there would be peace. Prejudiced and privileged, I must now swallow how wrong I was. Thanks to the Republican party in the US, I see how corrupted the white colonialist is capable of becoming. I see the harm I have caused by believing I must be in control, by holding on to control and blinding myself to the effect it has on those who have less.

The more I age, the more I lack confidence in talking about big issues. How to create or be part of an inclusive and just society is beyond my control. Things are changing. There is so much I cannot know - even on my own street. I am a stakeholder in this thing called humanity but not its ruler.

When despotic opportunists threaten what little bit of civil society remains, I feel absolutely lost. Outraged that we vote for hate rather than deal with our own discomfort because we are not in control.  You and I can't rule the world. Yet we commit endless acts of violence to support the delusion that we can. Nations are not great. And we are destroying the world because we can't rule it.

Fascist and communist movements in Europe in the 1930's, according to Hannah Arendt, recruited support from the masses dismissed as being too stupid for the other parties.

Chris Hedges, in his article The Revenge of the Lower Classes and the Rise of American Fascism. writes there is only "one way left to blunt the yearning for fascism coalescing around (Donald) Trump. It is to build, as fast as possible, movements or parties that declare war on corporate power, engage in sustained acts of civil disobedience and seek to reintegrate the disenfranchised—the “losers”—back into the economy and political life of the country." 

In short,  we must declare war on our addiction to power-over and use our power to care for and heal our world in any way we can.