(This is Part 20 of a series. Go back to Part 19.)
Is war moral?
One of the most interesting features of life on this planet —or we could say, of reality itself—is that it's poised on a perfect knife edge between what seems to us humans as "darkness" and "light."
It happens to be a great blessing that this is so, because, as the Buddha pointed out long ago, it is by far the most conducive to the evolution of consciousness.
If earth were some sort of heavenly realm where all was sweetness and light, we would be so absorbed in riding that wave that we would never dig deep, we would never look profoundly inside ourselves to find the core of our consciousness. We would have no motivation to do so.
On the other hand, if earth were an exclusively hellish realm our attention would be so fixated on suffering that we wouldn't be able to discover the intrinsic beneficence of existence.
It's because we are poised on this knife edge, susceptible to both pain and pleasure, perceiving both darkness and light, that the potential exists to surrender far enough to become aware that there is a light that goes beyond all conceptions of darkness and light—and includes both.
It is precisely on this knife edge that the divine love that Jesus talked about—where all things are included, with nothing left out—appears. Then we bless the sunshine
and the rain, and welcome the perfection of a reality that includes both.
Where we fall into error, in my opinion, is when we succumb to black-and-white thinking, where we imagine that we—meaning our nation, our tribe, our group, our ideology—is the embodiment of truth, justice and light, and the "other"—certain other nations, tribes, groups, ideologies—embody the forces of darkness and evil.
It is when we humans are caught in black-and-white thinking that most if not all of our mischief against each other occurs.
Because it is only a step from believing that "we" embody truth, justice and light to believing that any means is then justified in our righteous battle to overcome the "other." That is when the "other" becomes an object, and can be killed or mistreated.
War and the lead-up to war in the media—when the drums of righteousness are pounding the loudest and when any dissent is considered treasonous—is particularly adept at tempting us into black-and-white thinking.
And this is the very moment when we become, at least temporarily, the evil against which we are supposedly fighting. For we then adopt the same rigid and narrow mindset that we condemn in the other and that leads directly to mischief.
Yet this doesn't mean that all war is immoral. That in itself would be a form of black-and-white thinking. There is a place for everything in this existence, and there are times—though perhaps relatively rare—when the waging of war, though still tragic, becomes perhaps necessary.
An example of that might be World War II. Let's say you were Churchill in 1940, as Hitler was overrunning Europe with his black-and-white ideology of racial purity and any-means-is-justified.
If you were Churchill at that moment, would you have counseled pacifism or surrender? I don't think I would. If I were in Churchill's shoes I believe I would have tried to do more or less what he did.
Yet the vast majority of wars cannot be justified. Mostly, they are based on ego, ambition and the self-righteousness that comes from black-and-white thinking.
Perhaps the greatest respect is due to those souls who find a way to overcome oppression through non-violence.
Gandhi, to take one example, could have led a movement of violent resistance against the British. That is what most mediocre leaders would have done. Gandhi's genius was to find a way to liberate India without adding to the tragic violence of the world. Quelle homme!—what a man.
Or Martin Luther King. How easy it would have been to fall into the temptation of leading a violent resistance movement. King did something much greater and much more difficult—he found a way to thread that impossible needle, he found a way to liberate his people through raising consciousness.
These are examples of the larger principle of turning on a light instead of fighting the darkness.
(This is the end of Part 20. Go to Part 21.)
—jim sloman, 9.29.03 for 11.16.04
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