The North Coast times-eagle., January 01, 2003, Page 11, Image 11

PAGE 11
NORTH COAST TIMES E A G L E, JAN/FEBRUARY 2003
a laboratory — a golden opportunity to advance and experiment
with their own grandiose ideas of the way things ought to be
Almost immediately they perpetrated separation from their
environment just as their cultural antecedents had done begin­
ning with the tribes of Abraham. They built walls and fortified
them, treating with the natives only when it was to their
materialistic advantage In a sense that could be interpreted
as a declaration of war.
As a proud descendant of English and Scottish immi­
grants endowed with the traditions and education of a neoclas­
sical heritage, I can attest to personal difficulties in avoiding the
secure (though uptight) walls of analysis and classification which
tends to give me the illusion that I, as an individual, necessarily
stand alone as a separate entity against the tides of existence,
against the sea of humanity and that, by God, I had better
overwhelm mine enemies before they overwhelm me. Without
apologizing for being proud of my personal skills and strengths,
I have long erroneously assumed that strife means war when
actually it only means struggle or turmoil. I have long associated
the natural instinct for personal survival with a lust for power and
the inevitability of war
The transformation I mentioned near the beginning of
this article has enabled me to start scrutinizing my cultural walls
of what I call separatism: separatism of race, of nationality, of
religion, of gender; separatism which emphasizes differences
in existence and minimizes the common link of all phenomena.
I am starting to understand anew and with more clarity (in the
vein of those profound words of Theodore Roethke, "In a dark
time, the eye begins to see" — words long printed in the mast­
head of the North Coast Times Eagle) that my proud bid for
individualism and rationalism has separated me and still
separates me from my instinctual awareness that unity and
acceptance of my relationship to nature is more important
(as a first step) to the cause of global peace than is my blind
activism.
I have long understood the major difference between
war and peace is that war is temporary, whereas peace (by
virtual definition) is intrinsically eternal, or in colloquial earthly
imagery, forever; if it's not forever, it's not peace, not truly. As a
self-proclaimed atheist, I have made the mistake of disavowing
the notion that anything lasts forever. That is one area in which
Judeo/Christian religionists possess a greater understanding
than I do.
I believe in evolution, and since I also believe that
human evolution is strongly influenced by past, present and
future cultural and social behavior and beliefs, I must also
believe in my personal ability to make a quantum leap in order
to break the impasse which previously prevented my total belief
in the possibility and inevitability of global peace, for we shall
achieve it, either through complete and personal worldwide
understanding or through global obliteration.
Firm in the belief that planetary obliteration is neither
necessary or acceptable, I am in the process of exploring and
developing an unorthodox (though far from original) theory, o<
series of theories or foundations on which to construct avenues
toward world peace. Since peace is a new field of endeavor for
me and will therefore require a considerable amount of groping
on my part, much of what I write here will also be new to me
and even more organic than usual in the sense that many of
the ideas expressed here will be formulated as I key them to my
computer screen. In the hopes these thoughts will be worthy of
considering, they should also be taken with a grain of salt for I
am no Dag Hammarskjöld; in the land of orthodox negotiation
and international diplomacy my ideas are not germane.
I suppose the key to understanding what I am thinking
about peace is to be aware that I strongly believe war and other
forms of mass murder are not part of the biological makeup of
humanity And further, even if science should determine a DNA
linkage to mass violence it is still possible to bring such behavior
to a cessation — if not through science then through evolution
via exercise of restraint which would eventuate lack of need
for that function and render it biologically obsolete. But without
belaboring the question of whether or not war is inherent in
human nature, I assert that it is not.
I sincerely believe the key to world peace lies in the
love of life (existence) and being in constant awe of all its
‘Although I do not doubt the man called Jesus also
possessed a thorough understanding of the nature of love, I
am not speaking of the love to which devout Christians faithfully
adhere, for as an atheist I don’t believe in transcendent anything
(except, perhaps, hot air) and I am automatically disqualified and
rightfully so. Rather, I am attempting to refer to an acceptance of
everything in existence as being of equal importance or conse­
quence in the overall scheme of things; as a concept which I am
just beginning to grasp, it is a monumentally iconoclastic blow to
my cultural ego. If this line of blather smacks of 1960s drug
induced dogma, it gets worse. My heretica. ;ew line of thinking
leads me to conclude that I am molecularly related to everything
and everybody else in the entire cosmos, even to George Bush,
a notion that would no doubt horrify him more than it displeases
and offends the culturally developed civilized egocentric sensibili­
ties of the very me who writes these words and thinks these
thoughts
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ramifications. The more I think about it, the more convinced
I become that the lack of reverence for all existence is the root
cause for human violence. This irreverence often causes deep
resentment, ridicule and sometimes violent behavior toward
those few who profess love as a way of life or a path to peace.
If I think about it in concrete representative terms, the two
individuals who leap to the forefront of my mind are Mahatma
Gandhi and Albert Schweitzer *
I have long been in awe of the magnitude of existence
with its infinite levels and/or dimensions which stagger any
attempt to understand or explain no matter what brand of icon
is used to pinpoint them. Even so, I am beginning to believe the
very vastness and elusiveness of the phenomenon of existence
is not only (in itself) the ubiquitous and eternally sought for
“secret of the universe,” but it is also one of the primary
characteristics which give my perspective evidence there is,
indeed, a common thread which links each particle with every
other particle and the whole of existence — the key contributing
factor to my new found belief that peace on earth is possible,
hopeful and perhaps (if we envision it) inevitable.
THIS IS NOT JUST
I am convinced if we are to get on the right side of
the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical
revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a
thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When
machines and computers, profit motives and property rights
are considered more important than people, the giant triplets
of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being
conquered. ..
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on
the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous
indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual
capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia,
Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with
no concern for the local betterment of the countries, and say:
This is not just. It will look at our alliances with the landed
gentry of Latin America and say: This is not just.The Western
arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others
and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution
of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war:
This way of settling differences is not just.
These are revolutionary times All over the globe men
and women are revolting against old systems of exploitation
and oppression, and out of the wombs of a frail world new
systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless
and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before
"The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light" We
in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that,
because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism
and our proneness to adjust in injustice, the Western nations
that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern
world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries.
Now let us begin Now let us rededicate ourselves to
the long and bitter — but beautiful — struggle for a new world
This is the calling of the children of God, and our brothers and
sisters wait eagerly for our response Shall we say the odds are
too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our
message be that the forces of American life militate against
their arrival as full men and women, and we send our regrets?
Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solid­
arity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, what­
ever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer
it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human
history
-MARTIN LUTHER KING. JR
The following was excerpted from the final portion of a
speech Dr King gave at Riverside Church in New York City.
Beyond Vietnam', on April 4. 1967, one year to the day before
his assassination
As I have intimated, I presently believe that civilized
humanity’s quest for concrete immediate answers and solutions
has overcome many problems, but the resulting successes have
also divorced the human species from its instinctive awareness
of its origin as well as its relationship with the rest of nature.This
hypothesis applies to me and shows I must strive to alter my line
of thinking if I expect to work for global peace in an effective
way. I must tear down my long established walls of prejudiced
analytical reasoning which supplant understanding with a
labyrinth of entanglement reduced to cut and dry options no
matter how ruthless they are I must learn to experience and feel
more than I deduce.
Having begun to cast off many of the walls of my culture
I must stop seeking absolutes. I must now start assuming And
this is the crux of what I am driving at. After years of unscholarly
and perhaps haphazard research and rumination concerning the
central nature of existence, I have concluded (despite the rather
contradictory and unorthodox observations and subsequent
deductions of David Hume and other eminent philosophers far
more erudite than I am) that existence is, and I am not capable
of deducing anything, only of assuming virtually everything.
Maybe I am an evolutionary throwback whose mind has
not yet grasped the civilized notion that conditions are not the
way they seem, that I am no less important to existence than
everyone or everything else And if that is so (my primitive out­
look tells me), I must assume all existence and every part of it is
no less important to the scheme of things than I am. As a mere
primitive I am not only unable to grasp Hume’s theory that
nothing exists — my sense and instincts tell me otherwise —
I am also unable to discern that as a human being I am more
important than my cousin the rock that has helped me with life
sustaining food from my cousin the deer and has saved my life
in combat by being hurled at my cousin the mighty lion.
Perhaps it is my primitiveness that prevents me from
comprehending that the species to which I categorically belong,
the civilization of which I am a part, and the nation of which I am
a citizen are any more divine than anything else in existence. I
fail to understand why my powers of reasoning make me in any
way superior (a highly questionable linguistic value conceived
only by humanity and proportionate to the sophistication or
complexity of a civilization or culture) to anything else or why I
should construct, in the name of a nebulous transcendence of an
evanescent ideal or illusory spirit, divisive walls to separate me
from an organic relationship with my environment, a separation
which ultimately transforms my view of nature from the condition
of passivity to that of hostility. Whereas primitive humanity was
an integral part of the landscape and accepted nature on its own
terms, civilized humanity increasingly pushes the environment
into the background and seems to regard its creator, the eternal
plasma of existence (hence the age-old symbol of life springing
from clay) as something to conquer and exploit, declaring war
on everything in the way, including itself.
I am not ashamed to be human, neither am I a doom-
sayer filled with despair at an imagined human annihilation. I
feel we as a species can and will somehow and at some time
arrive at an understanding that we must merge our powers of
deductive reasoning with our long neglected instinctive aware­
ness of the supreme value and inevitability of an intrinsically
equitable and organic relationship with the rest of existence
Ironically, my hope for such a merger lies in my profound
admiration of the very same human spirit I have just criticized
as being the causal force behind the deterioration of our original
instinctive awareness. The powers of reasoning (deductive and
inductive alike) that have utilized their creative and constructive
capacities to lead us to the brink of planetary disaster — if not
absolute annihilation — can and will, I believe, achieve the
merging of cultural creativity with instinctive understanding
regarding intrinsic equitability of all existence, the factor which
will snatch peace from the oft-ridiculed realm of sublime fantasy
into the world of reality.
Although there is absolutely no reason to suppose that
humanity will suddenly become altruistic in an inherently indiffer­
ent cosmos where existence itself is the common thread which
links everything to everything else, I believe the same charac­
teristic that led the human species to try to dominate nature will
necessarily lead it back to harmony within the dynamics of ebb
and flow and the other organically natural processes, which will
be a major contributing factor to the ultimate cessation of the
cancer of human warfare. The creative element in humankind
will enable it to tear down the walls of imagined superiority in
order to reestablish the umbilical connection with our origin.
Perhaps I am naive, but (despite my deep love and
respect for history as well as the very reasonable view that in
order for peace to work it must first have historical precedent)
I believe the road to global peace lies in the assumption of
its inevitability From my perspective, military preparation
physically and psychologically not only causes war by inuring
people around the globe to the possibilities of war but also
virtually destroys hopes for a peaceful solution Yet, if we
convince ourselves that war is inevitable we as a result hasten
to ensure its occurrence War brings me to my knees in despair,
but it also reinforces my strong belief in the powers of will and
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