Unposted #28: Grievances

24 May 2023

Please be advised that this text contains provocative statements that may give offense if the shoe fits. It is an expression of opinion under the free-speech principle that may under no circumstances may be taken to imply any consent on the author’s part to having his moral character impugned, his person assaulted, or his livelihood threatened even in cases where the law may be persuaded to turn a blind eye in this glorious year of our Lord 2023.

We are what we think.

With our thoughts we make the world.

“Look how he abused me and beat me,

How he threw me down and robbed me.”

Think such thoughts and you live in hate.

Abandon such thoughts, and you live in love.

In this world hate never yet dispelled hate

Only love dispels hate.

This is the law,

Ancient and inexhaustible.

—Dhammapada 1.1–5 (translated by Thomas Byrom)

     In one of his most astonishing images, the Buddha exhorted his students with the example of a saintly traveler who had fallen into the hands of robbers and who, even as he was getting sawed in two by them, wavered not for a moment in his thoughts of loving kindness towards his killers (Majjhima Nikaya 21:20). Jesus, as he was dying on the cross, prayed not for himself but that his torturers might be forgiven (Luke 23:34), and Socrates, even while insisting on his complete innocence of the charges brought against him, would not consider invitations to escape from his confinement while awaiting execution for supposedly subverting the religion of the Athenians and corrupting the young (Plato’s Crito).

     Socrates’ countrymen would have been relieved, presumably, to see him go into exile for a while and thereby allow them to save face, with no great harm done to anyone; but he stayed where he had been put by his accusers and drank the hemlock, calmly and without hesitation, betraying not a trace of ill-will to anyone, no matter how grave the injustice done to him. We are dealing with the champion’s league of saintly behavior here, granted, but the common element is worth noticing even if one cannot hope to rise to such levels of perfection: hatred and rancor are misplaced in dealing even with one’s tormentors, for they know not what they do, and any ill-will towards them would only fall back upon us one way or another. Nobody says that this is easy for ordinary worldlings to take seriously, let alone to live by; but it is a matter of record.

     Meanwhile the millennial mind seems to have taken a decided turn away from this ideal vision, and instead makes it a matter of pride and honor to hunt out as many occasions for feeling aggrieved as possible, going after big game if one can find it, but bringing out the magnifying glass if necessary, or even a microscope, in a relentless chase after ills to denounce and prosecute, and be they ever so paltry. The human types to whom this most appeals, let it be said openly for a change, are not likely to endear themselves much to their contemporaries at any time or place. For all the lip-service paid in public to the supposed justice and virtue of an overbearing regime and its thought-police, there can be no doubt that behind closed doors and in whispers, mankind has always hated the type in proportion to its fears: for they break the universal glue that holds all societies together, namely trust and truthfulness, a certain underlying amity and mutual forbearance that everyone recognizes without quite being able to put a finger on it. Meanwhile the calm-minded and magnanimous are everywhere loved and admired, sometimes even by their enemies.

     Jesus’s call to turn the other cheek has ever been suspected of fostering an ethic of indignity and giving encouragement to aggression. Yet he was surely acting on a profound principle, namely that as soon as you put your fists up for defense (as most of us are quick to do), you are consenting to the fight, and you invite the next punch, if it comes to that. If you escalate by striking right back, and harder, you may win the fight, of course, but you perpetuate and aggravate with further seeds the harvest of hate that you are already reaping. You may be able to protect yourself from the fires, perhaps, but they can never be put out that way—marking the central point where the Buddha’s Dhammapada and the Christian Gospels meet with many other of the noblest human spiritual teachings. It is true that such sublime principles must be seasoned with practical wisdom and common sense in the world, or what starts as inspiration really may end up encouraging wrongdoing; but at their heart there remains a core of insight that worldlier counsels cannot match, though perhaps they must supplement it in practice.

     The grievance model, by contrast, working as it does on the basis of fear and intimidation, or a top-down re-education of the benighted, cannot even achieve what it ostensibly sets out to do: it will not often win over the recalcitrant to a new and more righteous way of living because we all get our backs up as soon as we are approached (and reproached) in this manner. The usual outward concessions of hypocrisy may be won this way, but not real agreement, approbation, or respect. (Apparently it needs repeating: no one ever respects another while a gun is pointed at his chest.) And perhaps winning others over is not even the point of the exercise, if one looks closely: for it defines the putative elect that they must be and ever remain a chosen few among a host of reprobates. To allow too many through the hallowed gates (even if the decision is not really for us to make but reserved for higher powers) would only cheapen the membership in such an exclusive and uniquely favored club of self-appointed superiors.

     So why would anyone want to be an informant or, what comes to much the same thing in our age, a walking grievance detector? There is a darkly honest answer remarkable for its self-awareness, but not likely to be heard very often: because if offers a rare chance to feel important and powerful, and this not least on account of the fears it inspires in others. What one will hear more usually is an answer understandable to all, but acceptable to none who have outgrown their teenage mindsets: because I am right and you are not! (Or rather, to hide the smallness of self a little more decently behind the loincloth of a bigger cause, because my politics or my religion, my country or my tribe, is the superior one...)

     Yet is not the progression from adolescence to adulthood, among those who are capable of it, marked precisely by this: that one begins to realize how little one really knows, how fallible one’s own judgments are, and how precarious a basis for anything is the feeling that one is right and others are not? Being right, sighed Alfred Adler, is often the worst thing in the world. It alienates others and leads to the kind of intransigence that makes you insist blindly on your right of way and die in the resulting crash, perhaps taking a few others with you for good measure.

     If wisdom has a beginning, it is in self-doubt, not puerile self-assurance. But wait, there is another angle: for behind the show of outward confidence someone may well be digging in his heels behind a particular set of intransigent truths precisely as an antidote to the myriad confusions and uncertainties that beckon when one lets go of the reassuring shibboleths. As for the glorious ends that are invariably invoked where supposed certainties reign supreme, they involve a misunderstanding of what is really at issue. For the ends are no more than a compass; it is the concrete steps one is willing to take in the intended direction that count. The most reliable and practicable test of any set of ends has ever been what means are required for their realization, if the goal is ever more than a phantasm in the first place. The point is not how beautifully an earthly paradise one can paint in one’s imagination; the point is that we don’t live in the Garden Eden, but East of it irrecoverably. Children may still believe in living happily ever after under the unchallengeable powers of benign paternal forces; but to be adult is to put away childish things and face the world in its maddening complexity. In other words: yatha-bhuta, yet again.

     So the grievance model subverts human relationships and betokens all manner of psychological turns better not taken—but is it at least beneficial for the grievance hunters themselves, in the end? Not even that, I don’t think. For as Epictetus pointed out in his Handbook (section 6), and the Buddha stressed as the very pivot of his teaching, we make the world with our thoughts and judgments; as we think, so we are, and as we judge things to be, so they become for us. Meaning that if you build yourself a mental world in which every trace of sin (in any form that an age chooses to be preoccupied with) must be put under the magnifying glass with a giant can of Raid in your other hand, then you will have to live surrounded by dirt and nastiness every moment of your life, with nary a moment of respite when you may pat yourself on the back for being different—and even then there will be, inevitably, spells of silent but harrowing self-doubt even alongside the most over-zealous self-assurance.

What you end up with is a hell of your own making, and the only excuse is that we know not what we do. Since the whole construction is premised on an unwillingness to overlook or forgive anything, however, we can hardly expect to be forgiven ourselves as we keep adding bricks to the walls that enclose us, still blaming others for our lack of joy and freedom. I have faith enough in our human capacities to hope that we will come to our collective senses again eventually. If we could only start by recognizing just how confused we really are, perhaps we might actually take some steps towards that better world which the more grandiose social architects can only dangle before us in blueprints that do little more than stain our fingers if we get too enamored of them.