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Thursday, January 27, 2005Peace is the WayDeepak Chopra Self-help guru Deepak Chopra has taken on a new and bigger challenge: Healing the whole planet. So, has he finally gone round the bend? To the contrary, he seems as sane as ever. His discussions are not rooted in pie-eyed fantasies about “what if they gave a war and nobody came?” but in a serious attempt to figure out how to bring out the best in human nature and help people overcome their worst impulses, especially those rooted in irrational fear. If enough people do this, he believes, the momentum will be with people supporting peace. The first thing to note about Chopra’s project is that he distinguishes between being pro-peace and anti-war. Too often, he says, activists get caught up in the anti- side of their causes, which does not solve the problem, only demonizes those who disagree about its nature or solution. Though I haven’t seen it directly cited, Chopra answers the old rhyme about “War, war, what is it good for?” quite nicely: too much. The source of war is not evil men in dark lairs plotting to ruin the planet’s day. It is a combination of social and economic factors that have given us the tools for war and an emotional context in which we’re suddenly glad to have them. The solution to war, in Deepak’s world, is not pat slogans and disdain for those who disagree with us. It is an understanding of where war comes from and a concerted effort to address its causes before it comes to that. The number one cause is fear, people defending themselves by attacking, hurting others to avoid being hurt. What is needed for this is not to look down upon those favoring war but to seek more constructive ways of living, first as individuals, then as societies. And it has to be understood that this takes time. You can’t march on Washington, declare you’ve done your part and go home. Peace isn’t promoted by celebrating peace, but by living it, respecting those you meet, helping people not just materially but with smiles and kindness, with attention to others when you’d rather focus on yourself. Notes Chopra, it’s easy for the average American to go days, weeks, months without killing a single human being. It’s not so easy for the society to do so. Making the move from an agglomeration of peaceful people to a peaceful society, though, will take a leap of imagination in which we start thinking about how to do collectively what we do individually. Chopra believes that human progress doesn’t always have to be a slow, uphill climb. Rather, new ideas fire the collective imagination and in a matter of months or years, the whole landscape changes. Though I’m only 32, I’ve seen this several times in my lifetime. I’ve watched us go from typewriters to word processors to computers. From the US Mail to FedEx to the fax to the Internet. From a world where people read from the selections at their public library to a world where if you click the book cover at the top of this article and give ‘em your credit card number, they’ll drop Deepak’s book on your doorstep in three or four days. All of these things involve the expansion of consciousness, enabling to say more, learn more and share more than we ever could before. Which means that if someone has a good idea, a lot of people can learn about it fast. Deepak hopes he has one of these ideas. He admits he isn’t sure. But he hopes that maybe he’s figured out a little bit of what’s gone wrong. And unlike Douglas Adams’ Fenchurch, he’s gotten his chance to tell us. It’s worth a hearing. It is striking to read this book the week after Bush’s inauguration. There are all sorts of little things that pop out because they sound exactly like the more idealistic notions Bush espouses. Deepak notes, in fact, the oddity of this wartime presidency. Glory, power, prosperity – the President disdains all the classic motives for war and instead announces that with no hope of profit or power we’re going to risk American lives and treasure so that other people who may or may not be grateful can live in freedom. Even if you don’t trust the President’s motives, his words tell us that we’re in a different world. I think Chopra may not be as far off as he fears. In World War II, we had the firestorm of Dresden – bombing so fierce that the very air caught fire – followed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And then we got sort of freaked out. Every war since then has been fought with careful attention to making sure that another atom bomb didn’t get used. MAD and SDI, whether you think them cunning or misguided, were the epitomes of this thinking, whole doctrines and programs built on the notion that we would make sure we wouldn’t use the weapons we had. And now? Now the symbol of military might is the ability to control without killing. Minimizing innocent casualties used to mean you only bombed factories making war materiel. Now it means you try to separate the conscripts who really don’t want to be there but will shoot if they have to from those who are actually dedicated to defeating your army. In the Carter era, we talked about neutron bombs vaporizing people without hurting the infrastructure. In the telecom era, we’re going to make electronic bombs that stop tanks’ engines without hurting the soldiers inside (we’ve already done a little in this direction). What happens when the most prosperous and militarily capable nation in the world starts losing its stomach for war? It depends. In an earlier era, it was bad news, making the world a playground for tyrants, murderers and thugs. But that’s because before you get rid of war, you have to come up with something better in its place. Some new way of addressing the needs and fears and wants of the world so that instead of lashing out at each other we can reach out to each other. Deepak’s version of this is conscious evolution, a deliberate decision to try to be better people individually so that when the time comes to choose between love and violence, we’ll make the right decision. It would be easy, of course, for the supposedly realistic to laugh at the idealism of it all. But then, why did President George W. Bush pop up at a mosque a few days after 9/11? We’ve got a ways to go before humanity works this war thing out of its system. Maybe it never will. But, from Bush’s call for universal freedom to Chopra’s call for universal love, there are signs that, maybe, just maybe, the world is shifting. Signs that if war is not to end, it is at least to become a much smaller part of human existence than it has been. Chopra notes an interesting statistic: Though we’ve passed a thousand American deaths in Iraq, the world has just experienced the 12-month period with the fewest war deaths since 1945. Forget the hippies chanting, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” The real question is: What if peace came and no one was ready? Chopra offers a way to get ready and to maybe help make it happen. It’s worth a look. 
posted by gbarto at 8:20 PM |
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