A Crisis of the Spirit

The slums of Jakarta. Image by Jonathan McIntosh, used under Creative Commons Attribution License

This is a repost from my other blog, makotokan.org. I'm in the process of transferring my writing from there to here. If you haven't read it before, enjoy!

The world is in the midst of an unprecedented crisis.

I believe this current crisis is a spiritual crisis.

I don't mean this in a religious sense. I am not a religious person.

Rather, this crisis is tied into our very humanity. It is a crisis of our essential nature.


The slums of Jakarta. Image by Jonathan McIntosh, used under Creative Commons Attribution License

We are animals - but we are different from animals. Animals live in what Dave Pollard calls "now time". Humans exist on different levels of abstraction. We have language. We can think about the future, and the past.

In Zen Training Katsuki Sekida describes the self in terms of nen, or "thought impulse" (108). A) Nen or "thought impulse" is inseparable from action, and B) at the level of initial or first nen, there is no separation between mind and matter, self and world. There are degrees of reflection involved in this thought impulse or nen. In the "first nen," one simply manifests the nen, "It is sunny outside today." In the second nen, one thinks, "I wonder if it was sunny yesterday," or "I was not so aware of the weather yesterday." One might have yet another level of reflection, a third nen, "Why have I been thinking about the weather so much recently?"

According to Sekida, we can become lost in second and third nen and so have difficulty returning to the ever-present first nen, which he also calls "pure existence" (119).

In addition to the danger of getting lost in abstractions, we have other evolutionary holdovers that affect our lives - tools that were/are necessary to our survival, but are not always appropriate to our 21st century lives.

These include

• The emotions - unconscious, and mostly out of our control. They are important to our survival, a gift of our evolutionary heritage. Fear keeps us from harm. Happiness bonds us to beneficial things.


• Drives are also evolutionary gifts, related to our physical needs: the need to eat, or the need to reproduce. These manifest themselves in many indirect, subtle and not so subtle ways. Our desire for status is related to our drive to reproduce, to attract the best mate. The drives are also tied in with our emotions in complicated ways.


• Rational thinking - a valuable skill, but one that can separate us from our reality, causing us to get lost in abstraction.


• Pattern seeking - another valuable survival skill that allows us to learn - but can easily lead to superstition and irrational beliefs. This trait leads us to create stories about reality, about ourselves, and others.


• Cultural conditioning - This includes much of our morality, although much recent scientific work seems to show that a great deal of morality is an evolutionary trait as well. Our cultural conditioning also affects what we value and how we live our lives.


• Emotional conditioning - the events of our lives shape our behavior.

We humans are a mish mosh of all of these things - unconscious drives, nonrational emotions, cultural conditioning... Our morality and our character are partially inborn in us, and partially taught.

David Brooks, in a recent column in the New York Times, says this: "It is as if we all contain a multitude of characters and patterns of behavior, and these characters and patterns are bidden by cues we don't even hear. They take center stage in consciousness and decision-making in ways we can't even fathom."

He's referring to the Grant Study, a longitudinal study of 268 Harvard Students that began in the 1930s and continues today. The study is also examined by Joshua Shenk in an essay in The Atlantic Magazine,"What Makes Us Happy?"

How does this relate to the current crisis?

I see two ways: marketing and consumption and integration.



Percentage of Urban Population Living in Slums. Legend here. Image by Jonathan McIntosh, used under Creative Commons Attribution License

Consumption

Americans are the richest people on the planet. We make up five percent of the world's population, and we consume 25% of the world's resources. Meanwhile, something like three billion people live on less than two dollars per day.

This way of life is simply unsustainable. To bring the rest of the world up to our standard of living, we would need five Earths. Indeed, bringing the rest of the world up will actually destroy our way of life, since
our wealth depends on extracting resources from the rest of the world.

This consumption is driven largely by a long term project of consumer engineering. In the early 20th century, corporations began studying how science and psychology could be harnessed to increase profits - to get people to buy more things that they would "use up", and fewer things that they would "use".

Americans view the world through corporate sponsored glasses. Our natural drives and emotions have been harnessed, even enslaved, in the name of ever increasing quarterly profits.

I'll talk about integration in a later post.