Book 7 - Ch. 2 (1 of 1) - Seeing Our Broken World
SEEING OUR BROKEN WORLD
Cardinal Joseph Cardign developed a popular approach to social justice described simply as the See-Judge-Act method. Reflective of modern, secular trends that adapted Immanuel Kant’s philosophical “turn to the subject” and the prophetic tradition of the Bible that challenges one to identify and respond to the “signs of the times,” this methodology suggests a person should begin with observable reality. When operating according to this method, a person’s actions are not determined by self-interest; instead, they are a response to what the community needs. The See-Judge-Act method is incompatible with the self-centered ego because it is responsive and search-oriented. When operating as gods people begin and end with their answers, but the See-Judge-Act method requires that people sacrifice the license to do whatever they want in exchange for the freedom to search for and give themselves to the real needs of the world. In this spirit I would like to briefly consider an important sign of our times and a part of the human condition that constantly calls for a response — the prevalence of pain in our world and in ourselves.
We are occupants of a broken world. If people open their eyes, they will witness widespread emotional, physical, spiritual, psychological, and social suffering. The call for kindness in the midst of this suffering is essential because we forget that others are hurting. As a society, do we consider that those we look down on are hurting? Recognizing the pain experienced by those who are marginalized in our society changes our perspective regarding these people and reveals the inadequacy of our judgments. The awareness of hurting invites us to replace a judgmental disposition with a compassionate one.
Some of humanity’s suffering can be attributed to natural causes like earthquakes, floods, mental illnesses, physical illnesses, and old age. While people can find peace in the midst of these challenging realities, natural disasters and illnesses are sources of pain that cannot totally be eliminated. Tragically, our world is also saturated with an avoidable type of suffering that we inflict upon each other. This suffering is often rooted in a failure to truly see the other as a person who is as valuable as we are. The failure to see can cause pain through simple negligence, or it can allow us to intentionally cause harm. It is easy to observe how a deficient lens enables intentional harm in terrorist attacks or school shootings, where the perpetrator’s ability to pull the trigger or otherwise inflict harm suggests a failure to recognize the victim as a fellow human being. It is more difficult to recognize the suffering caused by negligence, where the hurt is the result of our alienation of, carelessness about, or ignorance toward others. This can be seen in a societal failure to adequately address the poverty or mental health issues that contribute to various social problems.
Truly seeing requires a sympathetic lens aimed primarily at enlightenment and understanding. It might be useful to spend a few moments identifying various peoples that we sometimes fail to see or only see inaccurately through the simplistic, distorting lens of judgment.
Often, we don’t see the poor, especially the women and children who are over-represented in poverty. We don’t see those who make our goods. We don’t see those who are suffering and will suffer in future generations from our environmental irresponsibility. We don’t see the innocent victims of our wars. We don’t see those who we call our enemies or those civilians who we associate with our enemies. We don’t see our own soldiers, veterans, and their families. We don’t see those who are persecuted because of their religious or political views, especially when those views are different than our own. We don’t see those who die of hunger or those immigrants who seek refuge from the poverty and violence afflicting their own country. We don’t see our animal cousins that, as a result of human activity, are going extinct at rates rivaling the earth’s five great extinction periods. We don’t see those who will be unable to escape the rising tide or severe droughts that result from climate change. We don’t see those whose life experience, social class, race, gender identity, or sexual orientation is different from our own. We don’t see the person whose mental illness or addiction makes it difficult to hold a job. We don’t see the single mother working a minimum-wage job whose health condition assures her that the best she can hope for is survival and bankruptcy. We don’t see those people whose poverty is deepened as a result of a fraudulent home foreclosure. We don’t see the millions of people who are in prison and may never get an authentic second chance. We don’t see underprivileged youths who don’t trust a system that they feel presumes they are guilty and for whom there is no visible path to a more prosperous future. We don’t see ethical law enforcers who put themselves in harm’s way yet are identified with those whose (often subconscious) prejudices impact their performance. We don’t see the member of a differing political party or religious persuasion. We don’t see our employer, who seemingly doesn’t appreciate the effort we put into our work and the financial struggles and insecurity of working class life, or our employee, who seemingly doesn’t appreciate the pressures of running a small business. We sometimes don’t even see our spouse or child, who is not going along with our plans.
Perhaps de Mello is right: seeing would simply be too painful because it would leave us with the uncomfortable feeling of responsibility. It might ask us to replace the righteous judgment that feeds our sense of superiority with a sympathy that leads us to identify with the one we are judging. Seeing another’s perspective can also be problematic, as someone else’s experience might undermine the narrative in which we place our total faith and trust.
Maybe we are trained not to see the other and instead to focus on ourselves. We learn that we must constantly prove ourselves, leaving many of us frightened and insecure. The result of this insecurity is that we exist in a mode which doesn’t afford us the luxury of looking beyond ourselves except to gain the affirmation that temporarily relieves our low self-esteem. Father Henri Nouwen admitted feelings that I can identify with, observing:
"A little criticism makes me angry, and a little rejection makes me depressed. A little praise raises my spirits, and a little success excites me. It takes very little to raise me up or thrust me down. Often, I am like a small boat on the ocean completely at the mercy of its waves. All the time and energy I spend in keeping some kind of balance and preventing myself from being tipped over and drowning shows that my life is mostly a struggle for survival: not a holy struggle, but an anxious struggle resulting from the mistaken idea that it is the world that defines me."
The lie of self-centeredness is that, while it promises to provide for our well-being, it ultimately creates personal suffering. Society (“the world”) wants us to be needy. It wants us to have a low self-esteem and focus only on our own pain because when we are stuck on ourselves, we are easier to manipulate. If we don’t value ourselves, we must seek the approval of others to give us a sense of value. Our fear, anger, resentment, insecurity, embarrassment, and low self-esteem can be used by others to influence our thoughts and actions. As we saw Einstein recognized that self-centeredness “imprisons us.” This prison leaves us feeling isolated, alone, and vulnerable. When we are focused on self, when our small boat is being battered by the waves, and when we are fighting for our own survival, it is nearly impossible to see other people who are hurting or to think about a bigger picture.
Don Miguel Ruiz, a Mexican author, developed four agreements based on ancient Toltec wisdom to serve as guidelines for living well. For Ruiz a commitment to these agreements would help us overcome our personal hurting. The second of Ruiz’s agreements challenges us not to take everything so personally. Our tendency to take things personally causes us to suffer unnecessarily. Perhaps we become angry when our children are not listening to us or are acting disrespectfully. We might find ourselves thinking, “After all that I sacrifice for them, how dare they misbehave? How dare they not take my feelings into account?” Like gods we fall into the trap of believing everything is about us, which doesn’t liberate us but leaves us insecure, defensive, judgmental, sad, bitter, and angry. As Ruiz observes, it leaves us in hell. If we can escape this downward spiral of taking things personally, we might ask, “Why aren’t my children listening as well as I would like?” Rather than anger, this simple shift leads to empathy. We might find that they are tired, hungry, struggling at school, or simply in need of our attention. We might find that they are acting out their own suffering or that they are struggling with an attention disorder. We might even discover that we need to find a more effective way of communicating our expectations to them. Unfortunately, when we are unconscious of our own woundedness, it’s difficult to look outward and respond sympathetically to the hurting around us.
Our internal struggles are not the only phenomena that keep us from encountering the hurting of those with whom we share the world. Competition can prevent us individually and communally from seeing our rival. The competition and tension between countries, sometimes in the form of wars, economic policies, and opposing interests, keep societies from seeing the hurting other. Wars necessarily involve propaganda that dehumanizes the enemy.
I like to ask my students whether conventional action movies would be ruined if the enemy was humanized. I paint a picture for them of our hero “blowing away” hundreds of bad guys (who don’t look like us) as they come over the crest of the hill. I ask, “Why not pause when one of them gets shot, zoom in on the character, then begin a flashback?” In the flashback we see our dying, non-descript bad guy looking a little more clean cut as he carries his duffle bag out the front door. Just then, his four year old girl comes running out, crying, “Daddy don’t go” (we have to read the subtitles, because she doesn’t speak our language; she, apparently, is not like us). He pats her head, gives her a hug, and tells her, with a look of regret, “Daddy has to go, but I promise I’ll come back for my special girl.” Returning to the action, we watch a tear fall down our “villain’s” cheek as he realizes he won’t be able to keep his promise to his little girl. Then, he closes his eyes for the last time. Finally, we return to our hero who is gloriously slaughtering more “bad guys.”
Truly seeing the reality of the bad guy would ruin the joy and excitement of this sequence. Seeing changes everything; it leads us to identify with the other. Sadly, it’s not just extras in the movies that we fail to see. Real people’s experiences and lives are thoughtlessly ignored or dismissed.
While we are often broken individuals in a wounded world, the notion of brokenness implies the possibility of wholeness, healing, and reconciliation (reconnecting). There is much confusion about how we can foster such healing. A first step to bringing wholeness to this broken world is learning to love ourselves so that we can have the trust to open our eyes and look outward. Loving and valuing ourselves also gives us the courage to acknowledge and work on our own self-centeredness.
Many people put their faith into varying systems and beliefs to fix a broken world. Certainly, a consideration of systems and beliefs is useful and can offer some solutions to our problems; however, in the long run no system provides the final answer to the world’s problems. As long as people are self-centered, they will corrupt their system to insure that their own interests are promoted, even when their interests lead to suffering for others. Ultimately, nothing will change until our species undergoes a widespread conversion from self-centeredness and ego to a perspective that truly allows us to see the other. Maybe ego is the original sin, observed by ancient story-tellers, theologians, and philosophers, that has prevented us from experiencing harmony and general well-being. Ego and self-centeredness lead to division and brokenness, while love and sight restore understanding and allow harmony to exist.