Hobbes and Rousseau

After months of living with my thoughts with fewer than usual interruptions, where I have lingered in a depressive position of more or less accepting this and that with a minimum of judgement, as we lurch forward into an increasingly uncertain future, one that is not so easily predicted from the past, I am recognising a new sense that there really is a struggle going on between our capacity to draw on our strengths for compassion and cooperation, for kindness to strangers, and our undoubted ability to turn our rejecting violent and murderous thoughts against what we may think of at any particular time as the other. We may put the argument to two referees, Hobbes and Rousseau, as Rutger Bregman has done in his book, Humankind. There is the old self-interest of neoliberalism, the corruption that comes as part of the package with power, the capacity for gratuitous cruelty that defies theological explanations –and evil has often been cloaked in religious fervour. But it feels like we continue to battle with ourselves. (Excuse me, if you have worked this or knew this all along. But I come from a different place, still lost in enquiry.) So I indulge some magical thinking about the virus – that it is teaching us a lesson, offering us an opportunity, a 21st century equivalent of Noah’s Flood. We abuse nature, we know that but we still do it. Nature fights back. We - those of us who live comfortably – know that our way of life is unsustainable. The political process makes our doubts irrelevant – who votes for the Greens, even now? In our politics we still vote for self interest, not our actual literal economic self interest, as the neoliberal ethic dictates, but something more dangerous, the confirmation of our unconscious prejudices. It is said that political rainmakers, those who seed the clouds of discontent to support their way of life, propping up politicians to do their will, do not trust the people. And that this is the threat that may lead to the fatal weakening of democratic processes. Well, we cannot altogether blame them for their mistrust, when they have discovered how easy it is to manipulate the so-called will of the people. There are movements that make a difference. I think that #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have shifted the balance of public opinion and put chauvinist and racist prejudices on the defensive. But I am not yet convinced that Occupy, while it was a defiant celebration of anti-capitalist sentiment, has changed anything. Nor – as yet – has Extinction Rebellion. Leftish commentators talk about a low level swell of resistance against the complicit exploitation of resources. I don’t know as yet if they are right. The attempt to mobilise some of that questioning resistance in the recruitment to Labour Party membership has not worked out well. I saw uplifted faces on a protest march, as if they were going to the Sermon on the Mount, but the political leadership failed in its first duty to be an effective opposition to the Government in power, and allowed its own prejudices to contaminate the movement. I am sitting by a reflective pool in my garden. In a pandemic we are aware of our interdependence with all humankind – or we bunker down in survival mode. Which way do we jump? So asks the frog as the pond gets hotter. On that question depends our future.

Time to Think

Covid19, with its reminders of mortality, and the opportunities created to get to know ourselves better during lockdown, has given us TIME TO THINK – even if only in FRAGMENTS. For example: I am more deliberately taking up a life of being an elder, where it is possible to practice wise reflection and face the challenge of our mortality, our impermanence in this world. There is a letting go of personal ambition. Of economic striving. Of sexual competition and possession. There is a forgiving acceptance of declining capacities, of physical and mental frailty and vulnerability. There is an encouragement of the virtues of the young. We are at the mercy of the mob, which can never be safe. We have to be stoical in the face of the possibility of violent rage. Attempts by the elderly to hold onto power, as heads of state or corporate magnates are inevitably doomed to failure, and are obstacles to our capacity to adapt to the changing priorities the human project. A wrinkly and emotionally incontinent oligarchy does not prove the leadership that we need in this world. Our role is to be advisers and supporters of an emerging leadership. The Queen and the Dalai Lama are example of wise elders, privileged but not exercising power. The executive power of their historical roles has been stripped away. A gerontology of political leaders, which we have seen in African states, and in the superpowers of the USA and China, does not bode well. Everywhere I look, stress is very high. Different circumstances for each person, and different reactions. Misunderstanding and furious argument. I have had discussions online break up in out of control ways – people who are usually wise and helpful. We get nervous of conversations of any kind. I am struggling with the increasing realisation of the mess we are in and wanting to make a useful response. In no way privileging my position – only the urgency of my enquiry. So I appreciate the different discourses I find I am in, which are increasingly irritable and adversarial, as we have difficulty in finding any dry land of certainty and flounder about instead. My current preoccupation has been with the way that those I work with, those I talk with, and myself – when I talk to myself – seem to be able to hold two incompatible positions at the same time – so that we complain bitterly about the lack of direction from government, from advisers, from senior management in our organisations – those who ‘should know’ – and at the same time complain about such direction that we are given and lay claim instead to personal authority, believing whatever we choose to believe. Sometimes I can hear both in the same sentence. I hear it in my consultations with front line teams in the NHS. I want to keep thinking – being curious while recognising the tendency to rant. I am interested in the Buddhist teaching on wise speech, which are strikingly austere – only speak, if it is true, useful, unlikely to cause harm. The alternative of noble silence can seem the easier option. How to understand silence? Bion felt justified in interpreting the words of one or two members what the group thinks – if these words have not been challenged by other. In a zoom meeting there is an increasingly likelihood that objections remain silent and are not seen. I am influenced by what David Bohm had to say on dialogue. ‘In a dialogue, nobody is trying to win. Everybody wins if anyone wins. … There is no attempt to gain points, or to make your particular view prevail. Rather, when a mistake is discovered on the part of anybody, everybody gains. It’s a situation called win-win, in which we are not playing a game against each other but with each other. In a dialogue, everybody wins.’ Imaginative empathy is important for our capacity for dialogue. We have to listen to the other to imagine how reality looks to the other, different from the reality we are familiar with. The alternative is that we outshout each other from defended positions of certainty. We live in gated communities of the mind. There are processes of voluntary segregation. It is dangerous to wander from post code to post code in exploration of a diverse landscape. ‘The Earth just sent us to our rooms to think about what we’ve done.’ (Who said that?)