"Whenever I'm about to do something, I think, 'Would an idiot do that?', and if they would, I do not do that thing."
This is the opening statement in the above-embedded excerpt from a Northwestern commencement address by Illinois governor JB Pritzer. It caught my ear because it reminded me of my own rule of thumb: Nothing stupid is Buddhist. Listening further, I found similar agreement with several more of the governor's insights. Take this one:
"The best way to spot an idiot: look for the person who is cruel."
Been relying on this one since childhood. Beware: it's not just for those you dislike. For example, though I long binned ideology as the only thing dumber than dogma, I live mostly on the left. And these days, I'm surrounded by fellow travellers who believe focussed cruelty is an effective retort to racism, classism, homophobia, sexism, religious bigotry, sexual predation, a catch-all crime called "insensitivity", and literally any other arrogance conceivable by monkeys. And so they ramp about, rightwinging anybody they can spin into a target.
Which is why I'm uneasy in their company. Because without you're an idiot, you know that sooner or later, by that standard, we all hang.
The governor does have a somewhat outdated view of our evolution, however. As I recently explained, far from securing our survival, we had to skim our ancestors' reptilian instincts off the gene pool to avoid them scrubbing us. But Pritzer is exact when he points out that empathy and compassion are evolved states. They are in fact seminal to our extraordinary run on this planet.
So the cruelty so fashionable to this era can't be forgiven as innate. The vicious make a conscious human choice.
No natural selection there. Just a mountain of karma.
Anyhow, I won't spoil the rest of the video for you. It's an excellent – one might say, prophetic – 3 minutes, that quite stands on its own.
Be sure to note Governor Pritzer's closing declaration. That we've so long allowed cultural authorities to teach us and our children the opposite reflects poorly on our own selective fitness.
I respectfully propose that reversing this trend is the essence of engaged Zen.
(This passage, drawn from my manuscript Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands, refers to the Sinlahekin Valley, a region of northeastern Washington that's one of my favourite places on Earth.)
The ghosts of the Sinlahekin don't live in town. Wade into a blue-skied draw, far from roads and barbed wire, where wormwood and dry grass ripple in the mind, and there, in the earth's own cleavage, wait. They will come.
By the late 1800s, every indigenous civilisation in the Oregon Country was lost or losing. The Haida were decimated, the Modoc deported, the Palouse ground to dust between soldier and Shoshoni. Smohalla died of grief; his dream, of Homily and Moses. Leschi, great statesman of the Nisqually, the settlers studiously strangled, following due process of law.
In this time Sarsarpkin withdrew his tiny Sinkaietsk band to the upper Sinlahekin. Congress had once reserved the entire American Okanogan to the First Nations, but the whites had never respected this. When gold was discovered, even the pretence of treaty was dropped. In the idiom of the day, the reserve was "opened to the public", leaving Sarsarpkin with an ultimatum: abandon his home and join the nations already herded onto the Colville reserve, or accept what we, in our own idiom, call "privatisation". Sinkaietsk land would be "allotted" – parcelled out – to individuals, who would be empowered to sell it to strangers if they wished. This, the old man knew, would only defer his people's dispossession of, and expulsion from, the Sinlahekin.
Sarsarpkin had fought the occupiers in the canyons, and he had fought them in Congress. He had never won. And so he lived the remainder of his days on a Sinlahekin allotment, still the moral, if not political, leader of his people. He attended Mass, maintained relations with Colville and Canadian nations, and by all accounts practiced neighbourly acceptance of the usurpers. None of which convictions suffered from his equally well-documented addiction to alcohol.
Neither could they overcome it. In November 1887, Sarsarpkin's older son Peter, also drunk, pushed his father over a cliff and killed him. The following spring, younger son Jack bashed in Peter's skull in like circumstances. The other Sinkaietsk families fell to similar pressures, kicking their allotments one by one into foreign hands. The scant survivors straggled into Nespelem, their very name shattered like busted sod.
Sarsarpkin was buried, along with his widow and his children, on a low rise outside Loomis. Years later the town erected a high marble cross on the site, but even that eventually disappeared. This day, a wire enclosure and two headstones were the only clue that a nation slept there beneath the scrub and jumping cactus.
But Sarsarpkin's heart still spoke, in words those who stood beside his grave could hear. In the end, he'd had a single choice: die somewhere else, or die here.
The fundamental tenet of Darwinian theory is not that the strongest survive.
That's been arrogant-prick propaganda from day one.
Rather, the fundamental tenet of Darwin's hypothesis is that the fittest survive.
Among humans, fitness boils down to one thing: living in a group that prioritises coöperation. Members of that group not possessing this instinct weaken the unit's ability to meet survival challenges; something our species only does collectively.
If obsolete members gain too much influence, whether through numbers or other means, and so draw below parity the group's ability to overcome environmental obstacles, your band collapses, leaving you to fend for yourself. In our species, that usually means dying without (further) offspring.
If, on the other hand, you're lucky and/or sufficiently evolved, you might earn membership in a new group. Thus the trend among human cultures has been to privilege coöperating individuals over those who compete. (In-house, at any rate.)
Spooling forward, we find humanity overall becoming less churlish by comparison with ancestor species; more drawn to novel others whose very difference suggests obtainable value, and less given to reflexive fear and attack.
(Note that these generalisations, like all evolutionary principles, apply only to the species as a whole. They don't apply to individuals – or, in the case of humans, individual cultures – and take no account of the infinite temporary tidal patterns within the gene pool.)
When the bulk of our community becomes unable to apply the essential human survival tool of sociability in amounts sufficient to clear the next hurdle, our species will lie down with the trilobite and never been seen again.
In view of this scientific fact, I propose a question:
In what ways must our Zen practice – each one – change to meet this existential imperative?
(Photo courtesy of the Houston Museum of Natural Science, Wikimedia Commons, and a generous photographer.)
