What are we living through and why is it so painful?
This question is present in every moment of self-consciousness throughout history. In agonizing times, we ask it directly: we ask ourselves, our authorities, our gods, our families and friends as well as books and other records of the past. When we’re hurting deeply, the question loses its sense of possibility—its being answerable in different ways at different times—and becomes a statement of rejection, incomprehension, and loss.
The question is with us now as it has always been.
There are dangers—not only intellectual but physical, moral dangers—that follow the attitude which dismisses this question as solved. People with this attitude think asking this question is like finding the solution to a mathematical problem published and justified long ago by somebody else: a waste of time and resources. This dismissive and dangerous attitude is of course indistinguishable from a confidence in technology and technical—not personal, artistic, or spiritual—processes. Why is this technical attitude, which believes the problem of understanding and pain to be solved, dangerous? Because it dismisses, then gradually works to eliminate, anyone who can be identified as bearing the question. The technical attitude must sort and classify not to better and more precisely rid the Earth of the conditions for confusion and pain, but to separate the believers from the idolaters. The technical attitude hides in its announced quest for material betterment a relentless drive to exterminate.
Since the bureaucrats, engineers, marketers, lawyers, and gamblers (investors, bankers, and traders) who determine the bounds of acceptable behavior share this attitude, this question—our question—is today a kind of contraband. Like contraband, sharing this question with others is dangerous; this act of asking proves that one has no loyalty to the technical organization whom we call “the powerful.” And without this loyalty to the powerful, one must admit that not all problems can be solved with tools; one must admit that at least some problems have a solution that is not only material. To be blunt: our problems are moral. Every problem is moral, because every problem is felt and spoken by people.
We are in agonizing times.
A new illness—a coronavirus named COVID-19—has in three months (less than a season) spread across the world, infecting over a million people. This illness kills thousands of human beings every day. In other words, this illness is destroying with each sunrise and sunset thousands of unique and irreplaceable events: thousands of people whose histories, memories, habits, jokes, prayers, and loves are now lost to all around them. We cannot get these people back, despite our beliefs; we cannot bring their light back into history.
The illness is not moral; it does not judge. But our response to this illness—our morality—is what is now and every day clearly in front of us. And for the first time in history, we as a species see and feel the same problem regardless of our loyalties or locations.
What are we living through and why is it so painful? Let us ask the question; let us carry this contraband.
We in the United States are living in an economic and political system which presents this choice to millions of people: endanger yourself and others or starve. More simply, this choice is to work or to die. Laws that tell bureaucrats to give money to people who don’t work set up complicated and humiliating hurdles over which one must jump, then wait, and then jump again. As long as we have “public assistance programs” and have not structured ourselves so that public assistance is constant and universal—a given, not an exception—we have not done away with the choice to work or die; we’ve only softened its terms. American politicians have decided to give most Americans $1200 while over 40% of us have less than $400 in the bank. $1200 is a pittance. Bigger unemployment checks are a pittance. The fundamental conditions of this pain remain: the economic system called capitalism admits no value for those who don’t do what its markets deem “work;” our political system, profanely called “democracy,” is an opaque and interlocking set of corporate feudalisms whose shifting cast of managers treat the will of the people as a fickle force to be ignored, manipulated, or mocked; our cultural system celebrates the rich and healthy, or occasionally those whose poverty and illness do not stifle what we laud as their “ambition.” Again I will be blunt: daily American life is striving for distracting comforts while our neighbors are burned.
Yet we are in agonizing times, so the contraband spreads.
Today is so painful because we see so constantly and plainly—so obviously—that we as living beings have before us two paths: life or death. The path of death is what we are forced by our corporations, governments, and laws to march upon: it is a path prioritizing the health of the dollar over the wellness of the Earth. In fact, by equating these two priorities—by saying that one can be measured by another—this path is cut, paved, and maintained by the technical attitude. Walking on this path is a death march. Choosing to not provide people what they need is so obviously murderous, and so arbitrary. And it is painful to watch this killing.
But a question means a possibility. We can walk on the path of life, though we ourselves must make that path.
The path of life reorganizes our society, doing away with our organized lovelessness. In this society we will recognize our problems as what they are: challenges for the heart. And we will meet those challenges with all our capacities: with our tools, yes, but also with our close and agenda-less listening; with alms and prayers; with our willing sacrificial care; with our imaginative and intuitive expression; with a steady refusal of the caricature, the scapegoat, the slogan; and with our intolerance for the evils of the past and our trust in the development of our selves and our communities (for we are new creatures and there is much to discover). We will recognize and respect—and even be gracious for—our physical limits, and live where we are. We will face our neighbors and make our lives with them. We will believe in that intractable goodness that is every living thing, we will be alive to our pains, we will reject narcotization. Seeking understanding is humbling work, so we will keep asking the question: both to seek humility and to seek the heart of the real. We will ask the question and keep the trail by which we follow it.
We know that we should. We know the ground will give.
