TIBETSPACE

WHEN CHAOS IS ENOUGH—MORE ON WHY IT'S KICKING OFF EVERYWHERE

Paul Mason's book, Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere, ought to be required reading for anyone interested in the recent social movements that have been agitating for democracy around the globe.  I made this clear in an earlier post. The book has had a generally favorable reception, and unless you're in the middle of one of these movements, I think Mason will give you a lot to think about as we face our rapidly unfolding future, or futures—if you buy the technological multi-faceted horizon that our exploding social media are busily preparing for us.  

The book has been gently chastised, however, for dropping the names of serious people—Jameson, Zizek—whose high purpose doesn't quite make it into Mason's prose.  Maybe.

But I don't really care what Jameson might think about Mohamed Bouazizi, for example, the Tunisian who set himself on fire and ignited the Arab Spring. There are, I realize, explainable economic reasons why Bouazizi was making $140 a month, and why he was trying to support his sister's college career with those minimal wages.  The ideological analysis, however, amounts to an asbestos shield against the man's flaming sacrifice, and while our economic and political theorists will weigh in with their abstractions, these abstractions have none of the power that social media brought to Bouazizi's action.  In fact, it turns out that there are segments of the human psyche on display in Tunisia that theory can't touch, and the attempt to understand it theoretically always arrives too late, often devours the event within its own conceptual apparatus, and most likely disgraces the essential and informing spirit that might otherwise define a compassionate citizenry. Mason has resisted the theorizing that will inevitably arrive later, after things settle down, when theory is once again possible.  He ought to be congratulated for that.

After all, theory can't exist in the moment, particularly the social-media moment, because theory requires stable phenomena that support extended analysis. As Mason points out, many of the occupiers and protesters resist ideology of any sort and move in a kind of serendipitous way from commitment to retreat to apathy to employment to attack, and all of these forms manifest over a matter of weeks.  A moving target.  

Does this signal a lack of commitment?  Naivete? Immaturity? Ignorance?  Who cares? Theoretical analysis is a form of intellectual targeting, and in this case, to get out of the line of fire, the protestors, either driven by the roulette wheel of Tweeted realities or by a loose concern for managing and publicizing social chaos, have withdrawn themselves from the theoretician's view.

Good for them.  Mason's book captures this perspective accurately, and for that alone, ought to be praised.

IT'S KICKING OFF EVERYWHERE: FIVE THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND AS THE REVOLUTION GETS TELEVISED

If you're like me, and you don't work for the BBC or live in Cairo, you might have missed Paul Mason's important blog posting over a year ago, "Twenty Reasons Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere."  The "it" he refers to in the title are the democratic movements that have been sequentially kicking off throughout the Middle East, as well as the "occupy" movements that have popped up around the globe.  Mason has recently published a book on the subject that provides the back-stories for the twenty reasons he cites in his blog.  The book is called Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere:  The New Global Revolutions, and it's a necessary narrative of these movements, the personalities that drive them, and the social media that facilitate them.  Mason's a wonderful writer; he's a field journalist, and his prose bristles with the pressures of living in the field. 

As I was reading the book—which I'd recommend everyone do—I made some notes that ultimately pertain to what's happening in Tibet. Think China, think economic power, think oppression, and how it can be dissipated.

1. Free-market capitalism has gone South, and whenever it decides to return, it will do so badly damaged.  Few people trust it to solve our problems, even those who have profited most by its excesses.  The moment capitalism proves itself an unreliable system for acquiring more profit, the profit-makers will leave it behind.
2. The alliance between the emerging social technologies and the push for self-determination is not exaggerated.  The alliance is real, it's working, and it's undisciplined, so it has problems of implementation that lead to surprising, or unplanned, results.  This is why it seems, at times, chaotic.  But for those who are in the midst of the movement, the so-called chaos has a revisionary energy to it.  Regimes topple because the created chaos makes for a moving target of revolutionary bodies.  Regimes appear orderly in this model, and oppressive.  And they lose.
3. While self-determination and freedom, at least since Thom Paine's Rights of Man (1791), are regarded as natural human rights, the new social technology extends the dream of freedom and self-determination to populations that might previously have found that dream unattainable, unthinkable, or inconceivable.  The technology, in a very real sense, has become for political activists the Liberty-Making Dream Machine.  
4. Old folks, like me, think it's all about "the internet" because we've never gotten over the fact that we can read Tolstoy online, and because our eyes still sparkle when we think about the days before email. To the young people who are currently challenging these oppressive regimes, the internet is nothing more than a cup of coffee: always useful, almost always around, but always unreliable, because it doesn't do what a macchiato will do—focus, drive, and sustain at a very high bit rate.  For political change nowadays, you avoid the firewall by jumping over the firewall with texts, street art, graffiti, memes, music-sharing, and constant movement across the spectrum of expression available to the newly operative, political agents of change. A t-shirt with the right graphic, camera-phoned and messaged across north Africa, does more to promote social change and political reform than any sponsored bill in any deliberative house of duly elected officials.  "Due process" is now a mystifying phrase that in the current milieu has been relegated to a big, dusty dictionary that no one reads.
5. Knowledge is no longer a vertical proposition (except in universities) where you begin on the ground floor and work your way gradually upward through increasing complexities and an expanding network of relevance.  So authority no longer resides at the top, where in the penthouse are gathered those who have survived the trials and tribulations of traditional learning. Authority belongs now to those who most effectively use this text, or that song, or this picture, or that graphic to effect this change.  Period.  The knowledge base now has been levelled—it's a horizontal affair, and its relevance is judged by the changes it effects. If you decide to make the world a better place, most of what you want to read, hear, or see to bring about that betterment is readily available to you without being examined, tested, or credentialed.  Here's the kicker:  to a certain degree, this has always been the case (I'm thinking now about how many writers I love that avoided the American educational gauntlet . . . like, all of them?), but social media encourages visionary renovators to bypass the indoctrination of a standardized American university-think education.  This is a good thing.  And we have the new media to thank for it. So the old road is rapidly aging.  And if you're old like me you know the rest of the lyric. 
6. IMO.

JAMPHEL YESHI, 27, DIES AS PRESIDENT HU ARRIVES IN DELHI: THREE REACTIONS

With the recent self-immolation and death in Delhi of Jamphel Yeshi, and with the incarceration of Tenzin Tsundue yesterday, and with the arrival of Chinese President Hu in Delhi, Tibetan affairs have become tense.  And that's an understatement.  Human rights, independence, autonomy, Obama, China, Tibet . . . all of these issues are cresting at high tide just now.  Those of us who support the Tibetans have had varying reactions to these events, and I thought I'd offer three observations, three notes-to-self that I recall on a daily basis.

1. Be quiet. Listen. Watch. I don't think I have any business debating the effectiveness, purpose, or intentions of the self-immolations.  It's a difficult business, setting yourself on fire, and to install myself as judge of that difficult business lacks humility, at least.  The Tibetans are struggling mightily to determine their own futures, and they are talking to each other, a task that is made more difficult by the fact that most of them live in occupied Tibet, while those who are directing the international public relations campaign live in India and elsewhere.  And as they are talking to each other, they are conceptualizing that future.  They are perfectly capable of setting their own goals, and pursuing them however they wish.  
2. Stop intellectualizing. I am not going to spend another second wondering whether self-immolation is something a Buddhist ought to do.  (I never have, in fact, approached the problem from that perspective.) China has brutalized the Tibetan people for sixty years; they show no signs of negotiating with them, and have recently, in fact, compared the Dalai Lama's policies to Nazi policies.  And the Tibetans have largely responded to this brutalization with nonviolence.  Hand-wringing about whether there is Buddhist precedent for these actions is academic, beside-the-point, sheltered, and only meaningful to people like me who live in a neurotically developed country with time to wring their hands and fret about religious consistency.  Tibetans are lighting themselves on fire, and their reason and their logic and their love of their country have led them to do it.  That's all I need to know. 
3. Generate love wherever you are.  As I have watched the news roll in from Tibet and India over the past several months, and seen the bodies staggering in flames, I have tried to recycle the powerful energy rising within me.  Anger, hatred, frustration, helplessness—all of these I have felt, and all of these I have tried to understand as manifestations of ignorance.  Such understanding, if it comes at all, however, lasts briefly.  And then it's gone. But kindness toward those I work with every day and patience with my two-year-old daughter who is valiantly trying to understand the difficulties of the potty, well, these are two actions that seem to help.  Perhaps they involve me in a campaign whose central energies are aligned against those energies that fuel human cruelty wherever human cruelty exists.  And perhaps the inter-connections among us are indeed that subtle.  Still, I don't know why this works, and what is more, I don't care why this works (see point 2:  stop intellectualizing).  I only know that it does work.

I'm not really sure how these three points will show up in your own lives, if in fact they do at all, but it's the best I've got now in the wake of today's news, and I thought I'd share it with you.

IT'S A NO-BRAINER FOR WESTERNERS: SUPPORT TIBETAN SELF-DETERMINATION, BUT KNOW HOW TO DO IT

A recent article in Tibettruth argues that many Western Tibetan Buddhists have ceded to the Dalai Lama an infallibility that approaches the same sort of infallibility that has historically been given to the Pope.  This is a problem, the article points out, because these same Westerners not only take spiritual advice from the Dalai Lama, but they also accept his views on the future of Tibet.  They take his political advice as well.  As a result, they support autonomy, as opposed to independence, for the Tibetans who are currently living in Tibet.  Appropriating a phrase from the Mahayana tradition of Buddhism, supporters of autonomy have branded this position as the "Middle Way."

Side-note:  I don't know how anyone could ascribe to a radical thinker like the Buddha anything approaching a compromise with oppression, violence, lying, rape, mutilation, starvation, torture, and cultural genocide, but I will leave that discussion to the Buddhist scholars.  To call political  autonomy the "Middle Way" is, at least, a stroke of branding genius that ad agencies around the world ought to examine.

But to return to my main point:  I agree with this article in Tibettruth because I used to be one of those Westerners.  Many of us have at times gotten so involved with Tibetan spirituality that we have allowed its most able spokesman, the Dalai Lama, to influence our opinions about the political future of the Tibetan people.  And in that discussion, His Holiness represents one voice.

The moral of the story? Tibetans get to decide for themselves how they want their own futures to unfold.  

When I realized that I was an American who had grown up with the notion of self-determination as a national and founding principle, I also realized that if I were going to have an opinion about Tibet's future, I would have to understand first how Tibetans envisioned their own future.  And I would have to extend to them the same priviliges I would want extended to me—I would have to honor the notion of self-determination.

Many Tibetans have now determined that they want to be free and independent, and they have made that position clear.  Even if only one Tibetan, however, had articulated this position, I don't see how an American, or any Westerner, could do anything but honor and support that position. 

And we mustn't confuse discussions concerning the goal of freedom with those that address the possibility of achieving it.  Those are two different conversations.  The complexity involved with determining whether or not independence is a realistic goal does not compromise the determination that independence is still the desired goal.

The struggle for independence and freedom, wherever it occurs, deserves the unqualified support of all Westerners.  This is no less true of Tibet now than it was of the American colonies in the eighteenth century.  As Americans, we honor our past by recognizing that Tibet would envision its own future in a similar fashion.

VIDEO: THE LATEST SELF-IMMOLATION FROM TIBET

A new video from Tibet shows the reactions of monks and lay-people alike to the most recent self-immolation in Rebkong, Amdo.  Have a look at it.  And buckle your seat-belts.

Two things stand out to me when I watch this video.  First, the Tibetan people have suffered and are still suffering the consequences of China's brutal opposition, which has been continual since 1949.  Second, the Tibetans have used every means at their disposal to respond to this suffering in a constructive, nonviolent way.  China, by all odds, should have long ago silenced the Tibetan people, but they have failed to do so and seem, on a daily basis now, increasingly unable to do so. Whatever it is that I see in this brief film, however I want to describe this Tibetan spirit, I feel clearly that the Tibetans have revealed here a profound and unshakeable commitment to achieving a free state.  

They seem during this brief video a more stable, more commited, more powerful citizenry than anything China has so far mustered.

My hope is that China is beginning to register the same perception at some level, however secretly, however bureaucratically. 

THUPTEN JINPA, HHDL'S TRANSLATOR, SPEAKS OUT ON THE CURRENT SITUATION IN TIBET

On February 5th, 2012, Thupten Jinpa, the principal translator of the Dalai Lama, tweeted:  "Three more Tibetans have sacrificed their precious lives.  With these self-immolations, our struggle has probably crossed a threshold."  When I read this, I wondered specifically about the the word, "threshold."

What did he mean?

On March 8, he answered my question.  Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Jinpala said that "there is a growing recognition among Tibetans that Beijing lacks the political imagination and will to resolve the question of Tibet."  Jinpala also indicated that the Chinese leadership had only a narrow window of opportunity now to settle the Tibetan question, and if it missed this opportunity, then it would lose Tibet altogether.  Tibetans in Tibet, he reasoned, were crossing the threshold.

Many believe this has already happened.

Jinpala's statement is important not only for what it says, but perhaps most importantly, for the simple fact that he is the Dalai Lama's translator, and in many ways, is as close to His Holiness as anyone.  He has been a monk, and he understands the monastic perspective.  

And he is now sounding the warning signals about the serious nature of Tibetan unrest, and by implication, about the very real struggle in Tibet for nothing less than independence.

That is a statement of significance.  Or so it seems to me.

HUMAN RIGHTS, KONY 2012, AND VIRAL MARKETING—WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE

KONY 2012, the viral video that has been making the rounds on YouTube and college campuses, has come under fire recently. (Read the account on The Daily What and the WSJ).  The group behind it, Invisible Children, was recently on our campus, and I wrote at the time that the organization had one of the slickest internet presences I'd seen in a long time.  And it's galvanized attention among college students around the world.  If my sophomore literature students didn't know a thing about Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army last year, they do now.  And the only reason they do is because of KONY 2012; or rather, because of the social media support KONY 2012 has engineered.

The problem is that Invisible Children has a bad credit rating in the non-profit world, giving only 31% of their funding to the cause of stopping Kony.  I won't rehash these two articles.  You can read them whenever you're ready to read them.

My point is that we need to exercise some caution as we correct these abuses. Of course, part of my reaction is cynical.  As social media campaigns can now be designed and produced with a relatively small staff, a relatively small staff with the wrong intentions can have a pervasive and international influence, while maintaining their deep and well-stocked pockets.  That's the bad news.

The good news is that a few well-intentioned reformers can just as easily construct social media campaigns that trade in pure compassion and awareness.  There are fewer checks and balances on social media because anyone can use it.  But intentions, whether good or bad, are exposed quickly and efficiently in social media.  And that's a good thing.

Social media, in fact, highlights one of the most important dimensions of any sort of social action devoted to helping others.  From a neighborhood renovation to an international intervention, our approach to human rights ought to begin with an examination of our personal motivation—without such an examination, the philosophers of intention tell us, the results of our action might be compromised or weakened.

Publicity—it's not just for ad agencies and glossies anymore.  Intention?  That's where we ought to focus a good portion of our energy.

SO YOU'RE AN AMERICAN & YOU SUPPORT TIBET: HERE'S MORE STUFF YOU NEED TO KNOW

Let's assume, for a moment, that you're an American.  And let's assume, furthermore, that you're interested in the future of Tibet, Tibetans, and Tibetan culture.  If you practice a form of Tibetan Buddhism, let's forget about that for now because religion tends to confuse things if we're not careful.

As Americans, we've got a substantial list of things that we can do on a daily basis that Tibetans cannot do in Tibet.  Things like worship freely, speak freely, work freely (or look for a job freely), or complain loudly because we cannot find a job or we don't make enough money or we don't like our government or we don't like our future.  

America has made enormous sacrifices to preserve these freedoms.  We know the cost of freedom.

Many Tibetans are now asking to be given the same freedoms that we exercise every day.  

So:  when an oppressed people wish to exercise the very rights that define us as Americans, we must respond in kind:  we must recognize the human profundity of that wish by assenting to that wish.

It does not mean that we understand politically how this wish will be granted. It does not mean that we will lead the Tibetan people to freedom.  It means simply that as Americans we have no choice but to honor the wish, to honor the human will to be free.  

And to do what we can to move this dream a little closer toward reality.  More on that later.

A BIG-THOUGHT INFO-VIDEO THAT MAKES YOU THINK BIG THOUGHTS

Have a look at the video below when you get eleven minutes to yourself.  You're going to like it.  It's one of those speeded-up, hand-sketched, animated graphics that's capable of presenting, like, the entire history of the world in several easily digestible moments.  And the narrator, Matthew Taylor, has a British accent to boot, so Americans are persuaded he's smart from the get-go because we figure if you're articulate, you're also intelligent.

Here's ten things he says that you'll agree with:

1. We're going to have to live differently in the 21st century.
2. Most of our insights into human nature are going to be counter-intuitive. The true stuff about ourselves won't, on the face of it, make much sense.  Like, I'll be very happy if I spend my time making others happy.  Sounds good, admire the ideal, but really?  Come on.
3. If you want to be a happier person, don't read a self-help book, just have happier friends. He means by that, just connect!
4. What we want now is a more self-aware, socially embedded model of autonomy.
5. Let's start thinking about the hubris of individualism, and all the problems its caused us.
6. Can we develop a relationship to our reactions rather than be captive to them?
7. Things are getting better regarding person-to-person violence; realtime social media brings social problems into our living rooms.  We have data now.
8. Inter-personal, communal, global—three adjectives you're going to see hooking up everywhere.
9. Stop thinking about big plans and start figuring out the nature of empathy within each of us.
10. You knew there was going to be a big phrase that solves our problem.  Here it is:  empathic capacity.

There's a lot to digest in this little video, and it's a helpful video. But like all films of this genre, it's an inspirational video, which means it's short on solutions because, well, because the point of the video is that each of us has to come up with our own solutions and make our own contributions, and the film wants inspire us to do that.  Good.  But you knew that, right?

So where do we go from here?  The film kinda sorta hints at a solution in the Copernicus passage that claims it doesn't seem like the we go around the sun, but in fact we do.  

Here's our homework assignment:  realize that the structure of our individual personality is set up to process incoming data in fraudulent, self-serving, and ultimately destructive ways, and also remember that the consumerist culture that nurtures that personality has silently agreed to take advantage of our personality's tendency to misrepresent things, and the two forces—misrepresentation and consumerism—have quietly signed a pact that gets us to buy stuff—literally and figuratively—that we don't need.

Our task? Dissolve that pact. And let me know how you're doing with that.

NONVIOLENCE IS A WAY OF LIVING: IT'S NOT A WAY OF LIFE

Nonviolence is a way of living. It is nothing more than that, nor is it anything less. Because our ways of living create for us the culture that we deserve, nonviolence stipulates specific ways of doing things that have been designed by specific groups of people who have imagined for themselves a specific future.  A nonviolent future.

It is very easy to understand violence as a biologically determined default setting that we cannot reset. Turn on the television, for example, and  watch one of those nature shows where a lion—always in slow motion with an orchestral soundtrack—runs down a gazelle, and we say, "Look!  Even the noble lion kills the beautiful gazelle. Violence is part of our nature!"

It never occurs to us at these moments that lions don't have Wal-Marts and that they can't plant soybeans.  

They can't make the decision to be nonviolent.  We can.

Nonviolence is way of living.  It is not a way of life.  It is a way of living because nonviolence involves making decisions every second of our lives that will create the causes and conditions that give rise to the causes and conditions that we want, the ones that will nourish the conditions for peace within ourselves, within our families, within our communities.  

So nonviolence is not a life; it is not a seamless coat that we put on, a one-time decision we make, and become nonviolent.  It is a process of living, of negotiating, of trying one thing and watching closely the results that arise as a result of having tried that one thing, and then deciding whether or not that one thing increased the peace dividend within ourselves, our families, our communities. 

We make choices every second either to indulge the thoughts and emotions that give rise to nonviolence or to linger on those that cultivate violence.

Nonviolence is a choice, and it is made very second of the day.

And what is violence?  More on that later.