Buddhism and society

I've just finished reading The Heart of Buddha's Teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh. I think this book may have changed my life (in the short term at least), but I'll need to learn some more about Buddhism before I can say. In the meantime, I thought I would share a passage from the end of the book:

There is so much violence in our schools. Parents, teachers and students need to work together to transform the violence. Schools are not just places for transmitting technical know-how. They must also be places where children can learn to be happy, loving, and understanding, where teachers nourish their students with their won insights and happiness. We also need places in hospitals where family members, health are workers, patients, and others can sit, breathe and calm themselves. We need City Halls where responsible people can look deeply into local problems. We need Congress to be a place where our real problems are truly addressed. If you are an educator, a parent, a teacher, an architect, a health care worker, a politician, or a writer, please help us create the kind of institutions we need for our collective awakening.

Our legislators need to know how to calm themselves and communicate well. They need to know how to listen and look deeply and to use loving speech. If we elect unhappy people who don't have the capacity to make their own families happy, how can we expect them to make our city or our nation happy? Don't vote for someone just because he or she is handsome or has a lovely voice. We are entrusting the fate of our city, our nation, and our lives to such people. We have to act responsibly. We need to create communities of deep looking, deep sharing, and real harmony. We need to be able to make the best kinds of decisions together. We need peace, within and without.

 The book has given me some very tentative thoughts about the role of spiritual awakening in bringing about social change. Basically, what I'm getting from this book is a set of concrete values that I strongly agree with, and a series of practices that can be used very effectively to bring about change in your lifestyle and behavior very quickly. Me being me, the political implications of that (some of which Hanh gets into in those passages) get me pretty excited.

My thoughts are initial and rambling. For that reason, they're behind the cut.



So I have three putative thoughts, really. The first is related to one of Rosa Luxemburg's critiques about Leninism, which is that the notion of a revolutionary vanguard party just doesn't cut it. She says you need a long-term commitment on the part of the proletariat - in effect, the workers cannot be led to the revolution, they must bring themselves there. How this is to be achieved becomes the big question. It strikes me that the kind of spiritual awakening that Thich Nhat Hanh proposes could be a key factor in any such awakening, by fundamentally changing the ways in which people interact and taking exploitation out of the equation.

My second putative thought, expanding on that last sentence, is that spiritual awakening is a means of reforming society without having to get involved in the messy process of actually changing laws when the system is stacked against you. Not only can spiritual awakening be a tool for promoting solidarity, it can effect actual concrete changes in society whether the government likes it or not.

Finally my third putative thought is about Slavoj Žižek's favorite metaphor - Wile E. Coyote running off the edge of a cliff and then not falling until he notices that there is no ground beneath him. Žižek maintains that this is basically how the revolution will happen - the ruling class will wake up one day to discover that they have no real power anymore, and the whole edifice will come crashing down. It strikes me that a large-scale spiritual awakening could bring precisely this about. Through changing people's interactions with one another you effect change in society, bypassing government, and eventually those changes could be such that you really do achieve the withering away of the state - and you could do it without violence, too.

In this sense you end up looking at an oddly very short term and very long term timescale: on the one hand Buddhism is very clear that large changes in behavior can be brought about almost immediately. But if you're talking a national (let alone global) spiritual awakening, you're obviously talking longer term. But Buddhism seems good for making one comfortable about thinking in those terms.