Where Politics and Buddhism Intersect

[flashl]

For most of my childhood my father's Buddhist faith was little more than silence -- early morning meditations that I never even witnessed. But when I hit my mid-20s, it became real. I was looking for some kind of psychic comfort, some kind of larger explanation for all the suffering I saw in the world, so I started reading his old, dog-eared books -- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Beginner's Mind, The Power of Now. I gained insight into my own anxiety but still felt desperate for a faith that also offered a political analysis, a set of ethics, a worldview.

It turns out that one of my own peers -- 29-year-old Ethan Nichtern -- has provided just that in the form of his new book, One City. He writes passionately and innovatively about our interdependence and its implications for our lives and our world. Nichtern's toolbox is deep and original -- surprising metaphors, hip-hop lyrics, personal stories, plenty of traditional Buddhist training -- and his voice is resonant and refreshing. In a time when most Buddhist leaders seem up in the clouds and most political leaders seem lacking in moral imagination, Nichtern represents the wisdom of the in between.

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Describe one of the defining moments that led to your commitment to author One City.

Being in a bookstore and seeing that the books with Buddhist topics were either in the self-help section or the Eastern Religion section, and wondering why there wasn't any books that contained Buddhist ideas near An Inconvenient Truth or books by Naomi Klein, or the guys who wrote Cradle to Cradle. I've always viewed my study of Buddhism as more cultural and political than anything self-helpy. And there's definitely nothing about Buddhism to me that is either a) Eastern or b) religious. So I wanted to write a Buddhist book that might make it into a different section of the store.

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You make a fascinating point about mindfulness as a method for preventing dogma, and taken to the logical conclusion, war. How do you see the current situation in Iraq fitting into this framework?

It's been commonly agreed that the administration was trying to get into Iraq in the first meeting on September 12, 2001. Even before that. Mindfulness is the curiosity to bring our mind into the present moment as if we don't already have the stock answer to a problem. Mindfulness inherently means you don't know what comes next, because you are placing your attention in the present moment, which is always undiscovered territory. You don't just rehash an old script. You bring your mind into now and assess. If you don't do this, the present moment will only play out the brittle assumptions of the past, and that's how we get into vicious cycles like the military-industrial complex. And then, as the quagmire deepens, you just keep responding the same way, and the cycle deepens and deepens.

So obviously there were a lot of unexamined assumptions that went into U.S. decisions post 9-11. The deepest assumption that almost no one in mainstream media tried to practice mindfulness of was: "Violence is the necessary response to terrorism." Really? Pay attention and see if that makes sense beyond our habitual assumptions from the past.

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I like this thought:

As you admit, acknowledging interdependence, especially on a global scale, can be exhausting and overwhelming. How do you recommend that we prevent feeling powerless in the face of it all?

Until we recognize that feeling powerless is the greatest of all propaganda models, we're going to be paralyzed by guilt again and again.