By Mitch Van Acker
The fourth chapter of our 5 part series: Zenpolitik, in which Van Acker explores taoist practices and political pandemonium. Regardless of where one sit on the political spectrum, this read aims to push readers off their laurels by taking a grim look at contemporary America.
In his famous book ‘Zen and the Art of Archery,’ Herrigel noted how the master archer he studied under had him practice daily for three years before even putting out a target. This may seem excessive to us, but where we see the immediate goal of the target, the Zen master sees a debilitating distraction to any student of infirm mind, breath, and technique. This is a good example for recalibrating our attention to how we conduct our own government. Our country was designed to issue as much sovereignty to its citizens as possible and while the federal government is slow to our cries for justice, we do ourselves a great disservice by underestimating and ignoring the direct power we have over our local governments. We’ve neglected the step-one basics of our country’s governance. How many characters this year will be spilt in Twitter posts by people complaining about issues astronomically out of their control, who will spend their entire adult lives without ever having known where their local town hall meetings are held? Again, it is a mistake to neglect this very powerful aspect of our government as well as the many small ways in which you can donate or volunteer to local action committees and social programs. Many important issues like women’s health policy and gun regulation are addressed first at the level of local forums. One dedicated NRA member in a town hall meeting is likely equal to one-hundred people marching against gun violence in Washington D.C. in terms of influence. Civil servants don’t know how to integrate wide-scale protests and Twitter mobs, but they do know that fifty NRA members that care enough to go to these meetings are fifty sure votes in midterm elections that many people don’t bother to vote in at all. Being responsive to those NRA people is a far better bet in terms of getting reelected than trying to decipher which slice of the nation-wide protest will constitute a meaningful part of their constituency.
We live in a bureaucratic age and the webs of bureaucracy need to be met with careful and patient acts of unsexy but important reforms. The bureaucratic age has no idea how to assimilate our shouts for justice, especially when they are mediated mostly by the internet. The system doesn’t understand that language. It will be very difficult to make movies about the people whowill do the real grunt-work of political reform in the coming years because it won’t be flashy. It won’t be exciting. But it’s necessary to reclaim our democracy.
We’re not living through A Tale of Two Cities scenario. We’re living in a Kafka novel where hindous brutalities aren’t committed by intrigue or clear-cut Disney-calibur villains, but by the small stupid individual moral failings of many people across a broken system which, taken together, result in a massive wheel of misery that crushes the most vulnerable among us. I suggest that everyone revisit Hannah Arendt’s piece Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, an exposé on the trial and execution of Adolph Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal who was, according to Arendt, more of a lame burecrat than a bloodthirsty madman.
“Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is 'banal' and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.”
—Hannah Arendt
One important aspect of the political challenges we face today center around deprogramming this sort of bureaucratic complacency in our institutions. If we can, as Zen teaches, tune into the commonplace fabric of everyday politics as opposed to being agitated by distant externalities we can build a peaceful revolution from the ground up. Attempting to force or terrorize institutional house cats out of their administrative strong-holds will prompt them to only burrow deeper into the security of the status quo. According to Arendt, even in the face of death Eichmann deferred to the same kind of glib clichés and ministerial niceties that glossed his career of war crimes as he mounted the gallows and refused the black hood the hangman had offered him.
We should seek therefore to narrow our attention faithfully to small but important components of our government just as meditation narrows our attention to deep breathing or the disciplined practice of an art. Once we are able to act in this focused way, when the past and future recede in importance, and our obsession with distant externalities part, we will be able to reclaim the primacy of direct experience in the present moment, something our hurried culture conditions us against and something that will ultimately have a greater direct impact on unwinding the broadly distributed tethers of bureaucracy and corruption. By going down and out, by focusing on the smaller components of government, your perspective broadens as opposed to shrinks—what could be ontologically smaller than a self-curated news media feed? This sort of discipline and the shift in perspective comes with it will, by the example of your participation in smaller aspects of government, liberate you from the temptation to perpetuate the false duality of left and right.