I had a great time at Chattacon this weekend, which included a fun panel on Dune and Philosophy!
Today is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day here in the US. I was looking forward to following up my Chattacon experience with my local MLK Day march and parade, but today we're having some winter weather. The local MLK Day festivities have been postponed.
So, I'm home thinking about some of the many great ideas and turns of phrase in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s writings, especially his "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" (which you can read here and includes a lot of great material on the philosophy of nonviolence).
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" is a great line and people are right to quote it frequently, but lately I've been thinking a lot about the idea of an "inescapable network of mutuality."
In one sense, this is obviously true. Unless you live alone in a cabin in the mountains or somewhere totally disconnected from all other human beings, we are all, as some Buddhists would say, interdependent. For most of us, most of the food we eat, clothes we wear, art we experience, and so on come to us through the work of other people. We all get by with a little help from our friends, not to mention many strangers we may never meet personally. And this is even before considering the entire nonhuman universe that makes our lives possible.
To push it a bit deeper, the languages we speak, the cultures and histories that shape us, the ideas that drive us, much of our basic conceptions of life, the universe, and everything are heavily influenced by other people as well. Your basic sense of who you are and how you fit into the larger scheme of things--your "philosophy" in the colloquial sense--owes quite a bit to other people going back generations, even thousands of years.
Sure, it's ultimately up to you what you accept into your "fortress of solitude," but it's what you're exposed to (the people around you, the things you learn, etc.) that gives you the options in the first place. This is, in fact, a big part of why I love teaching philosophy, both inside and outside the classroom: I get to introduce people to new ideas they may not have otherwise been exposed to, even if whether they ultimately accept any of it is totally up to them (in fact, I think you've got to leave things open to some extent for any real philosophical learning or development to take place).
The pandemic and other things in recent years have encouraged me to think more deeply about Buddhist notions of nondualism, or roughly the idea that there is no strict separation between self and other, between you and the rest of the universe. As many Buddhist philosophers have been thinking about for centuries, the "inescapable network of mutuality" goes much, much deeper than you might think--into the very roots of your being.
Whether one has to go that far to understand what King was talking about, I'm not sure. As such abstruse nondual experiences are relatively uncommon, perhaps I should hope we don't all need to have the experiences that even Buddhist philosophers like Vasubandhu admit only fully enlightened Buddhas really have.
Still, I'm wondering if even considering the kinds of ideas that Buddhists have been talking about for thousands of years could be a kind of inspiration or impetus toward the deeper rethinking I think we all need if humanity is to survive the various crises of the 21st century, like climate change, pandemics, inequality, injustice, poverty, violence, war, fascism, bigotry, and so on.
I wonder if there's some benefit to anything we can do to make the conceptual walls between ourselves and others a little less opaque, a little more permeable. Especially in my native United States, the deeper root of a lot of our problems is a type of zero-sum thinking: me versus you, people like me versus other groups, and so on (for a great social science based critique of this zero-sum thinking in a US context, see Heather McGhee's The Sum of Us).
I realize the kind of abstract Buddhist philosophy that I work on as an academic is not going to solve the world's problems all by itself. It's not easy to read, and even more difficult to think! But a big inspiration for both a current academic project of my own and a class I'm teaching this semester ("Buddhist Nondualism: Identity, Climate, and Beyond") is that I wonder if considering nondualism could supply some small part of recognizing our "inescapable network of mutuality," which in turn forms a key part of the larger revolution of values that King fought and died for. Perhaps it gives us conceptual resources for thinking of how we might recognize our network of mutuality while acknowledging our differences (nondualism does not, it seems to me, imply that we're all the same, just that we're all connected).
I'm not sure where this will lead. Indeed, the Beloved Community that King spoke of is almost as difficult to imagine from the confines of our unenlightened world as the fully nondualistic experience of the Buddhas is to imagine from within our dualistic context. Yet I think hoping for a better world--especially one we can't fully imagine today--is precisely what the King holiday here in the US is all about.
Happy MLK Day 2024!
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