At this moment it seems to me I would be hard pressed to trust anyone I cannot visualize taking up a blade and taking blood to defend something, or more importantly someone, they loved. I cannot see myself trusting anyone who is unwilling to defend causes that matter to them. I cannot allow into my tribe anyone who rejects tribes.
Now, we see constantly that tribalism is the source of all violence, where violence is assumed to be the principle evil in the world. This idea is bullshit.
First, the essence of Liberalism is recourse both to universal ideals, and specific, contextual tolerance as expressed in a political system which permits wide arrays of behavior and law. Within a truly Liberal context, differences are not suppressed or ignored, but actively explored by the parties concerned in mutually beneficial and instructive ways. Both grow as a result of exposure to difference.
But we do not live in a Liberal society, by and large. We live in a society in which the dominant culture is suppressed by the dominant culture, and difference not explored, but lionized, making one party feel superior with no justification, and the other inferior, also without justification.
There have been no civil wars in any other nations over the issue of slavery, which continues unabated to this day in many Islamic nations, since they see nothing wrong with it. It continues unabated in Cuba, and North Korea, and to a great extent China (even though they claimed within the past few days to have closed their slave camps).
Secondly, violence as an evil is vastly inferior to moral vacuity, meaninglessness, an addiction to the sopophorics mouthed by those who truly believe nothing. We all die, but is it not worse to die having done nothing meaningful after a long life, than to live a short, but connected life? That is my view. Better a day as a lion than a thousand as a sheep.
I am doing some emotional house-cleaning–as well as some very literal, very physical house-cleaning–and I want to say something many won’t like: I don’t trust the Dalai Lama. I have sensed in my meditations that he has more or less directly cut a deal with the Chinese not to make trouble for them.
We watch him smile compassionately. His embrace of ahimsa seems genuine. He has told the Tibetan people that their sufferings will be rewarded with greater virtue.
But I call bullshit. There are campaigns that could be waged against property. There are sit-down strikes that they could do. They could sit on train tracks. There are many things the Tibetans could do to make things so hard for the Chinese that they would cease their de facto war against the culture of the Tibetan people. He could have called for guerilla war long ago. The Tibetans are tough, and their terrain would likely make it hard to resist a long insurgency. Certainly, it would slow the pace at which the Chinese are moving in, and forcing Tibetans out of their own cultural centers.
I may not know what I am talking about. I don’t know the details of the mass rebellions that happened several years ago and which were brutally suppressed. All I know is that Tibet is disappearing: what once was will be no more; and as the only leader they have (few know that the Panchen Lama was identified as a child decades ago, and promptly disappeared into Chinese custody, never to be heard from again), more is possible.
Again, specifically, it irks me to see compassion lauded without placing equal emphasis on wisdom. Compassion is an easy virtue. It can and often is the virtue of cowards, who believe nothing. All of the emotions we were born equipped to feel have uses. Hate has a place and a time, even for the wise, in my view. You cannot permanently suppress any emotion in this world and not lose some part of your efficacy, your utility, your full humanity.
Rumi once said, roughly, that there was no place in his hall for those with no evil in them, and this is what he meant, in my view. He sought men, not machines.