The death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of US commandos last week brought into sharp focus something I’d been thinking about off and on for a while.
I broadly agree with the people criticial of the way bin Laden was targeted for killing rather than being brought in like other criminals to face a proper system of justice. And the equivocation of the US Government over what went on in the moments before he was killed and the way his body was swiftly disposed at sea adds to the moral shoddiness of the whole operation.
My chief interest, though, is how the affair demonstrates the principle of duality that is a constant in human affairs. It was fascinating how Barack Obama, in his speech after the death of bin Laden, described it as “justice”. America, he said, was the place of “liberty and justice”. Effectively an extrajudicial killing, probably a summary execution, was “justice” meted out by the military of a country that stood for justice and freedom.
In the early ‘90s, about the time of the first Gulf War, I saw a documentary based on a book by the American author Sam Keen called Faces of the Enemy. In it Keen pointed out that an individual or country that has a one-sided picture of itself, as being pure or on some kind of holy mission, creates a psychology of opposites in which there has to be a demonic adversary. Good incarnates evil, and the defenders of liberty and justice will inevitably find terrorists bent on their destruction. As the ancient Greeks said – hubris invites nemesis.
But duality is not simply about absolutes, not simply freedom versus al Qaeda. It exists as an inner fabric of temporal life. Indeed all life can be seen as a relationship of opposites: day-night, black-white, man-woman, mind-body, subject-object, rich-poor, left-right, earth-heaven, positive-negative, life-death, good-evil, being-nothingness, and so on.
In my work for a not-for-profit community organisation in Melbourne, I am aware of one such element of duality – progress. By that I mean how the aims of the organisation, which is to spread the benefits of renewable energy and environmental sustainability, translate into change in the community. At the moment there is a new state government that shows little interest in sustainability and the progressive agenda in mainstream discourse is under fire from conservative critics and seems stalled.
I can only see it as a process of moving forward and back. Inevitably and inexorably as some challenge is met, some synthesis made, some enlightenment gained, there will be a dark and regressive element that will seek to undo that which is achieved. It applies to the psychology of groups and whole cultures as much as to individuals. It’s true the regressive element will tend to thrive in certain conditions – particularly where there is fear, ignorance and uncertainty – but it is a constant companion no matter what circumstance.
It’s also true that dark material will tend to surface just after a point of enlightenment. A beam of light inevitably exposes that which has been festering in the darkness. This can be seen, for instance, in the way countries that embrace democracy and greater openness after long periods of dictatorship find themselves initially torn by divisions and strife. Old conflicts that lay dormant break into the open. Criminal gangs, ethnic violence and economic chaos came in the wake of the demise of communist regimes in Eastern Europe. The current upsurge in violence between Muslims and Christians in Egypt could also be an example of this process.
There is a lot to be learnt in the way that Eastern philosophy tackles the problems of duality. Broadly speaking, it counsels not to identify with any single element of a pair of opposites but to embrace and integrate them as a whole. The West’s tendency has been to split one opposite away from the other. For many centuries Western religions told their followers to identify with goodness, creating a monstrous shadow of evil that ran amok in various ways including wars and genocide.
Duality menaces because of our limited vision and lack of preparedness to bring the opposites together in a meaningful way. There is wholeness beyond the opposites, a point of harmony most of us are aware of at different times, if briefly, in our lives.
In this context the US President might want to consider the following excerpt from the Taoist classic Tao Teh Ching by Lao Tzu:
If one does not know the Constant,
One runs blindly into disasters.
If one knows the Constant,
One can understand and embrace all.
If one understands and embraces all,
One is capable of doing justice.
No comments:
Post a Comment