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.

CHRYSLER & HUMAN RIGHTS? WE'RE KIDDING, SURELY?

 I saw the commercial the other day, but having just returned home from the hospital with a newborn, I was blind with exhaustion, and didn't pay it much mind.  A bunch of big, black Chryslers carrying Nobel Laureates to a recent meeting in Berlin.  And then a white one pulls up, it's empty, and the narrator, with real gravitas, informs us that "this film is dedicated to Aung San Suu Kyi, still prisoner in Burma."  And the parting shot: "Chrysler:  For a World Without Walls."  

Really?  Chrysler?  A world without walls?  Why now this stream of visual rhetoric about human rights coming from a greedily managed American multi-national corporation?

You can, of course, slap the Marxist template on this little film and have a blast.  As long as Chrysler had a solvent, money-making operation that thrived on extracting maximum profit from the buying public while, for years, delivering a product vastly inferior, for example, to its Asian counterparts in the auto industry, then the only "rights" that concerned Chrysler were the ones that the unions forced them to acknowledge.  Human rights, on the other hand, is based on altruism, on the understanding that no one's rights are less important than your own, whether you are defining those rights as individual, communal, or corporate.  

Altruism, then, is the first outward sign of an inward and invisible commitment to human rights.  

And altruism has very little to do with the core principles of capitalism.  So altruism has very little to do with Chrysler.  You can say this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I'm content simply to call it, for now, a thing.  It is what it is.

But let's look at it another way.  While I don't for a minute believe that Chrysler's ad people are driven by a consuming passion for "a world without walls," I do feel that they are trying to save their company by advertising; because a successful ad campaign attempts to uncover a popular cultural practice or a deeply held and not quite articulated opinion and align it with a product, it might be logical to assume that the advertising people at Chrysler recently had one of those light-bulb moments.  

I can hear it now.

"It's come to our attention," one exec begins, "that this human rights thing is hot.  Not only that, but over there in Burma, they've got this woman, like, imprisoned, and she's getting tons of attention in Europe and Asia, and so we can play the HR card and the gender card at the same time.  And don't forget two more things:  we supplied the cars for those Laureates recently in Berlin, and Obama himself, we hope, will soon be stepping out of one of our cars, 'cause he's a Laureate, and you know how big he is in Europe.  So this is a no-brainer.  Let's get on the HR bandwagon and put more people in our cars."

So human rights has shown up on Chrysler's radar.  Let's call this a good thing, not because we suspect that Chrysler is about to become a massive non-profit for human rights, but because human rights workers have infiltrated a way of thinking that, while still fundamentally opposed to the founding principles of altruism, has been forced to acknowledge, in the only way it can, that those who fight for a world without walls are worth paying attention to just now.

That the Chrysler people are endorsing a way of life that, if fully realized, would dismantle their operation either hasn't occurred to them yet or would seem to them to present little threat to their confidence in human greed and materialism.

GENOCIDAL OLYMPICS SEEN AS HUGE SUCCESS

You can read about it if you want to, and you probably should.  There will be summaries of the Olympics, appraisals, assessments.  The Globe and Mail in Canada have already added their own rather sobering contribution, and you can have a look at it here.  For those of us who have devoted a portion of our lives to supporting Tibet and the Tibetans, we will have to take an inventory of our own ideas about the future of Tibet and the path that China has laid out for itself.  China is a powerful country, and one that will have its say and its influence on the world stage.

Oppressive regimes such as China's--and North Korea's and Burma's--rely on a host of strategies to keep their country's population under control.  Central among them is the institution of fear:  fear of reprisal, fear of punishment, fear of deprivation, fear of death.  And the goal of fear, of course, is silence.  There is, just now, a blanket of silence over the global community regarding China, one of the world's consistent medalists when it comes  to human rights violations.  And while the Great Firewall of China has shut down access to iTunes, and while the Chinese have done all in their power to use the latest technology to prohibit the free use of technology among their citizens, their mastery of the televisual culture is being credited for attracting the peak audience of 1.2 billion that tuned in for the spectacle.

We might well allow all of this to divert us from our task.  Eddie Vedder, the lead singer for Pearl Jam, mentioned in an interview last year that the contemporary atmosphere was so filled with static and meaningless noise and chatter that it was sometimes hard to file it all down into a focused, coherent song.  That it was sometimes hard to find the space to connect with the authenticity of the human experience.  The mainstream media is partly to blame for this--great globs of oppressive eye-candy, television shows devoted to the celebration of radically insignificant human behavior, cable news shows pressing an ideology while disavowing a bias, telegenic news casters whose private lives ultimately become the subject of the news coverage . . . the celebration of the self, the rabid quest for celebrity status, the acquisition of power in that quest, those famous for being famous . . . all of this signals a drift away from the core of introspective knowledge that gave rise to the people and books and music that I have loved for decades and that changed the way I thought about my relationship to the world at large. 

It is difficult in the current environment to look within ourselves, and the television spectacle that was the Beijing Olympics took full advantage of this.  As 1.2 billion stared at the television, Tibetans were killed, imprisoned, and interrogated.  His Holiness was denied an audience with President Sarkozy of France because the Chinese forbid him from meeting with him.  Six more Tibetan hunger-strikers were taken off their cots and into the hospital, against their will.  Two Chinese women in their seventies in Beijing were sentenced to a year of "re-education through labor" for legally requesting the right to protest.  A documentary film made by two brave Tibetans, Leaving Fear Behind, was smuggled out of China, shown in Dharamsala, and the two filmmakers were arrested and haven't been heard from since.  (BTW--the distributors have sent me a copy of the film, and we will be doing a benefit showing here in Northwest Arkansas soon.)

What then are we to do? Living in America, we are insulated from the kind of human suffering that finds 40,000 children starving to death each day in developing nations.  We don't have starving families living under our porches, a common scene in Indian cities; we have fresh water; we have electricity; our political system is participatory and stable.

We often think of change in political terms:  send food and water, build hydro-electric plants, install democracies.  But while that kind of change is necessary and vital, that kind of change is effected by a precious few:  engineers, social leaders, humanitarian workers.  Most of us are taking out the garbage, raising children, paying bills. 

What can we do?  More than might be immediately apparent.  We hear the phrase "raising awareness" continually, and we tend to think, "O, I see; I know about the human rights abuses in China and Tibet, so my awareness is thereby raised."  That's a start, but it's not enough.  Ken Jones, in The New Social Face of Buddhism tells an important story:

Self-awareness of emotional states is critical in every aspect of social engagement.  How this awareness can help others as well as oneself is illustrated in the Samyutta Nikaya by a story about two traveling acrobats who perform hazardous feats on the end of a long bamboo pole.  One said that their act would be accomplished safely if each watched and attended to the other.  But the other and wiser one maintained that if each concentrated on doing his own part of the act safely and well he would thereby protect his friend as well as himself (105).

So we look to our own part of the act first . . . we examine our motivations for action, which we can only do in self-imposed solitude; we analyze our real place in our real community of friends and co-workers, which we can only do in self-imposed solitude; and we realize that the front-lines of non-violence and compassion are wherever we happen to be standing, which we realize in solitude and enact in the family and the community.  Sulak Sivaraksa has written extensively about the mechanics of effecting these kinds of changes, and I'd recommend starting with his extraordinary little book, Seeds of Peace.  In his essay, "Religion and Social Change" he writes:

We have more than enough programs, organizations, parties, and strategies in the world for the alleviation of suffering and injustice.  In fact, we place too much faith in the power of action, especially political action.  Social activism tends to preoccupy itself with the external . . . Activists tend to see all malevolence as being caused by 'them'--the 'system'--without understanding how these negative factors also operate within ourselves . . . The opposite view--that radical transformation of society requires personal and spiritual change first or at least simultaneously--has been accepted by Buddhists and many other religious adherents for 2500 years.  Those who want to change society must understand the inner dimensions of change (61).

The inner dimensions of change . . . most of us don't want to see monks tortured and murdered; most don't want to see seventy-year old Chinese women sentenced to a year of forced labor, to see 40,000 children starve each day . . . and no one, it appears, can stop it. 

But everyone can turn toward that "inner dimension" to cultivate and grow those changes that would stop starvation, murder, torture, and unlawful imprisonment, if they were widely adopted.  It isn't easy; in fact, it's easier to undertake social action because you're spared the realization that the violence you're confronting outside yourself is simply the fruit of the violence that you carry around within you.  That's a difficult realization, but it's the one that leads to social change.  And this is the project for a lifetime. 

The fact is that meaningful, long-lasting social change cannot be divorced from this renovation of the inner dimension.  And this renovation--unlike working for an NGO in in Africa or Tibet--is our common occupation, our common inheritance. 

DALAI LAMA CAUTIOUSLY OPTIMISTIC OVER TALKS WITH CHINA

Speaking in Dharamsala today, the Dalai Lama expressed a note of cautious optimism over the recently promised talks with China concerning the situation in Tibet.  Many commentators--myself included--have expressed a degree of skepticism over this offer, believing that it arises largely from the desire to stem the tide of international criticism that has engulfed the Beijing Olympics. 

The Dalai Lama, a veteran of Chinese stall tactics and frustrated negotiations, expressed similar concerns. A meeting just to appease international concern would be "meaningless," the 72-year-old spiritual leader said.  Others have argued that "China's offer is unlikely to bring a breakthrough on Tibet and that it is a PR exercise ahead of the Beijing Olympics."

So we will wait . . .    And see if the Chinese are ready to negotiate in good faith.  And count the days until the Olympics begin. 103 to go.

TIBET: THE VIEW FROM AMERICA, PT. 2

Over the past few days, we have witnessed from all quarters of the globe a groundswell of support for the Tibetan situation.  The media, of course, has been partly responsible for this.  But so too has the technology that powers the media.  Give a video-phone to a Tibetan protestor in Amdo, and you've got a major story on your hands.  When the spirit of nationalism joins forces with a cell phone, the world is watching a new partnership in freedom.  For that we're thankful.

As I mentioned yesterday, Prime Minister Brown's decision to meet with the Dalai Lama in May is of major significance, particularly since that meeting is being couched within Premier Wen's announcement to Brown that talks with His Holiness were now possible.  I also expressed my reservations about China's offer.  China has worked long and hard for decades to secure Tibet, and I don't see them making real concessions at this point.

As Americans who are interested in the problems that Tibetans everywhere are currently facing, we need to have a clear idea about how we might help them solve those problems.  In one sense, there is very little that we can do.  Political action lite--signing petitions, writing our Congressmen, attending meetings, organizing vigils--is often the most that we can do.  So we sign up, show up, and give up our prayers whenever it's asked of us.  Nothing wrong with that as long as we don't begin to pride ourselves on the level of our concern . . . we need always to remember that there are others who are working harder under life-threatening conditions, and as we learned yesterday, there are many who have given up their lives in this struggle for their ideas and beliefs.

So how are Americans, in fact, to respond to this conflict?  Each of us might well have different responses after we've agreed, as many of us do, on the horrific nature of China's oppression and the rights of the Tibetan people to their own form of self-government. The first thing that we can do, and the most important thing that we can do, is listen to what the Tibetan people are telling us.  Tibetans are like all of us, however; they don't agree on the course their people should take.  As Americans, we are often at a disadvantage here.  We don't have the necessary information to provide the kind of help that we might otherwise provide.

But we do know certain things.  I mentioned yesterday that I had the opportunity last  summer to speak with Keltsang Phuntsok, the President, at that time, of The Tibetan Youth Congress.  I was aware that many Tibetans had begun to express their reservations about the policies articulated by His Holiness regarding non-violence and the middle way when dealing with China.  Jamyang Norbu, for example, orginally a freedom fighter in Tibet and now one of Tibet's leading writers and intellectuals, calls the middle way simply another form of appeasement.  I wanted a reaction from Phuntsok to the fact that many Tibetans were now appearing to part company with His Holiness.  I got my reaction.  "What the Dalai Lama thinks about this situation," Phuntsok snapped, "doesn't matter. What matters is what the Tibetan people think about this situation."  As I said, I got my reaction.

The fact that so many Americans identify His Holiness's opinions with those of the Tibetan people is natural.  Because of his extraordinary achievements, he has become a focal point of the international media, and both his intelligence and his charisma have made his smiling image one of the most recognized faces in the world.  But ask yourself:  How many Tibetans do you know?  And how many of those have shared with you their opinions about what is happening in Tibet?  And if we add another control to our experiment--How many Tibetans who are neither monks nor nuns do you know?--then the originally small number most likely dwindles to an even smaller number.  And since there are most likely between 6 and 7 million Tibetans currently living in the world, and since the vast majority of them are neither monks nor nuns, we can conclude that they are entertaining ideas about their plight that many Americans are unaware of.

We can also conclude, I believe, that the sacred wing of Tibetan culture--its monks and nuns--has exerted an inordinate influence on what most Americans know about Tibet and Tibetans.

That is the unassailable fact that we need to investigate, and we'll have a look at that in my next posting.