ISO open-eyed hope
I’m still trying to make sense of what happened a few weeks ago when I got word of the second death threat to an AJS worker. Something broke inside of me. It still feels a little bit broken. Every so often this happens, and to this day I’m not clear how the thing gets fixed again. Or whether it ever does. Maybe it’s always broken, and one-two punches of very dark things are just enough to remind me of it. To make its feelings grow conscious.
Its feelings are a lot like those I’ve had around sports competitions, where both sides really, really want to win. The inevitability of one side losing takes the fun out of playing or watching for me–at least a lot of the time–because I hate it that everyone can’t win. What’s the fun of winning if you know there will be people devastated by it?
Hope feels this way to me sometimes, too. Like dancing on the sidelines of a funeral procession. There are people living horrors every day. And I don’t mean only minimal horrors, either. I mean the kind that make your bones turn cold. The kind you don’t ever want to talk about, let alone see.
The reality of this is what knocks me flat on my back sometimes. Is what makes my happiness and hope feel like masks I wear, or any of us wear, to cover over what’s true. I know darkness is only half the story, give or take, but sometimes it feels like a hell of a lot more give.
So. Here’s a shot at a paradigm shift that seems like it holds promise–of helping hope seem totally called for, every single day:
What if instead of expecting that humans should be nice, should know how to share, should not throw sand in one another’s eyes, or bullets at one another’s chests, we expect that humans are just another part of the animal kingdom. They’re a part with far more destructive weaponry than any teeth or tusks could bare, but still: they’re animals. They operate by instinct. They rise and fall as top dogs and peeons. They spawn offspring and run around trying to get theirs without thought of offspringing consequences. They kill when they think it’ll benefit them. They don’t when that seems better. They do whatever it is their instincts push them toward.
The beauty of this view is that it makes me far less scandalized by the reality of our world. We’re animals, for crying out loud! Who holds animals to standards of morality? It’s the absense of morality, isn’t it?, in places where we expect it should be, that causes all our scandal.
The greater beauty of it, though, I think, is that humans don’t actually always act like animals. There are spots of un-instinct-like behavior everywhere. People loving each other deeply, past thought of reproduction or the status it might bring. People forgiving. People caring more for the common good than themselves or their tribes alone. People thinking about long-term consequences. People writing and painting and composing and organizing things that inspire us to live more equitably, more beautifully. More fully at peace and at rest.
Rather than some expected norm, these spots of behavior become sources of gladness and wonder. Reasons to think “Wow! What a world!” with a smile, rather than despair.
Maybe, in a world such as ours, we need to push the dehumanization that’s destroying us far further than it’s ever been pushed, so far that it inspires the kind of wonder and joining-a-renegade-mission mentality that I think it’ll take to save us from ourselves.
January 3rd, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Dear Kristin,
This is a different spin on a view I have held for a long time - a hopeful spin. It takes the ‘original sin’ paradigm and turns it on its head (at least this is how it looks from my Christian upbringing perspective). Instead of originally (or fundamentally) sinful/bad or good, we don’t even include the black and white starkness but see it as animal or instictual vs humane (which may not be such a helpful term because then we see the human as fundamentally humane, rather than somehow holy or divine) or godly/holy/lovely. This paradigm is indeed full of hope, if for no other reason (in my mind) because it frees us somewhat of hard and fast categories into a freedom of being in the many ways we are created and able to be. thanks for continuing the conversation on this.
julianne
January 3rd, 2007 at 8:07 pm
Julianne, yes! That’s exactly it! I find it tremendously refreshing to not be scandalized by our world, but instead go around being delighted that anything other than “animal” behavior exists at all. I’m uncomfortable demeaning animals by this label, as though they’re coming even remotely close to destroying one another or our planet like humans are, but I think that’s beside the point I’m wanting to make, which is that they and we are the same sort of beings maybe, acting according to instinct. To blame any of us for being what we are seems strange, in this light. To celebrate the ways any of us steps out of ourselves, out of a kind of rote existence, is what seems most called for.
January 8th, 2007 at 9:35 pm
If only humans behaved like animals. Animals kill only what they need to eat to survive. There is no hate. There is no waste. They do not make death threats as a means of forcing their world view or politics on anyone else. They do not kill for fun, for vengeance, for spite. Their instincts are calibrated for a balanced pariticpation within the limits of the natural world.
This post made me think of the first gust of shock I felt when I read that Pema Chodron put a note on her refrigerator that read: “Abandon all hope.” I think this challenged something at my core: my sense of responsibility (and therefore investment in things turning out a certain way) for pretty much everything around me. I wanted everyone to be happy and safe and free, and I couldn’t fix any of the mess anywhere. And it was just terrible.
Well, I still want everyone to be happy and safe and free. But I return again and again to that phrase “abandon all hope.” It is like a deep breath that settles me in my helplessness. In a way, I think the “standard” that breaks our hearts is hope, rather than morality. We want to see the world a certain way, and we want to see humans do what we think is right in that world. And this is where we get tangled in knots: in the dissonance between what is and how we believe things should be.
The older I get, the more suspicious I am about what I think I know. And the more I respect my own suffering. Which makes it a little easier to respect the suffering of others. And I wonder what the world would be like if we humans sniffed each other’s butts, declared “friend” or “enemy” right off the bat, and then honored those instincts without the complications of how and who we’re taught to be in this complex culture of humanity.
January 8th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
Sage, well put. Maybe we’re more like viruses than animals. Makes me remember that scene from the Matrix where Agent Smith is talking with Morpheus about why he hates people so much.
All of this has me very curious, though…are we and animals as different as you describe? Could the death threats we use be compared with a leader of a pack of animals baring its teeth and rearing up to say, “my way or a fight to the death”? Could my childhood cat who killed and played with mice, or N’s childhood dog who killed cats, a goat, and rabbits–not to eat, apparently–be compared with any of the ways we take advantage of the vulnerable around us, even sometimes for pleasure? I really take your point about how our behavior seems so much more calculated and complicated and sinister than any of the other animals I’ve learned about, but I wonder whether we and they are as extremely different as we sometimes think. What do you think?
“Abandon all hope” does resonate with a kind of wisdom, a kind of release that can open one up to gladness when things go well, rather than surprise and scandal when things go poorly. I have to think more on this one, though, because when I try to imagine actually abandoning hope, I feel filled with despair and lethargy, rather than peace or true rest. Maybe what feels better to me is to abandon unrealistic hope, and rather nurture a hope that’s a lot more gritty somehow. One that recognizes how helpless we actually are, and how impossible it is to fix even a handful of the struggles in or around us. I explored this a little bit more here, I think.
But maybe I’m not understanding the angle you’re getting at with it. With hope abandoned, as you or Chodron thinks of it, what would life look like? Would there be joy? Would there be motivation to pursue healing or wholeness?…to love? I’d really love to understand this more.
January 17th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
Hi Kristin,
Forgive my delay! I got lost in my own writing journey for a few weeks there. I also often contemplate the cruelties of my cats and dogs — these deaths that seem to be primarily about entertainment. As I see it today, they suffer a kindred kind of domestication poisoning that we do. They have instincts that have been confused by another way of living that has been imposed on them by humans. I think these particular animals are quite similar to us in their lack of synchronicity with the natural world. Wild animals have historically been much more in balance with the natural world. However, as we destroy every inch of their natural world, we are completely disrupting that balance, as well. And we have bears and coyotes doing all kinds of craziness because we’ve taken their land and their food supply. Whew. I will stop there.
I’ll get back to you on the “abandon all hope” concept. I feel I need to revisit the Pema Chodron book, and I have evidently loaned it to someone!
Hope the writing is just ecstatic over there! xo, Sage