continuing from...

Hey, I’m back. So two historical changes I mentioned in my previous post —are the popularization of Buddhism (in ads, and, also in lay practice), and, historical changes in capitalism/society. Each change conditions the other.

A third shift in the last 40+ years, is that younger generations are working consuming, meaning making in ways that are very different than the OGs of the 1970s. More of our understanding of society comes not from news, for example, but from other sources.. ..snippets of the NYT and Post, not lengthy essays. Time and our attention demand shorter intervals. Writ large… not in every instance, not for everyone. For example, identities have changed even as the very notion/categories of identity are legally and political scrutinized and criticized. Boomer adaptation to meaning making can, sometimes, be a little arcane. Nonetheless meaning making appears in popular culture—we cathect to identities, politics, possibilities through social media.

If the context and milieu in which we make meaning has/is changing, then so what?

The long duree...

The pendulums of change, time, history are always in flux…. Sometimes when one can distill the essence from the background noise, broader trends appear. That’s the job of visionaries and social scientists of all kinds. I digress but a visionary by definition, imo, needs to be a good historian. To see the world as it is, over time. The signal versus the noise is what social scientist call this. Sorry Nate Silver, its your book title, but it comes from econometrics. See the forest not the moss on the tree in front of you. Where are we headed?

Here are three important changes I see:

First, the historical context for meditation and Buddhist practice has changed dramatically in the last 40 years. How so? First, what was at one time a beatnik counter culture practice is now mainstreamed into apps, meditation centers, dharma lectures on line. Sure the HHDL is part of this, as are venerable teachers, like Thick Nhat Hahn. Their teaching coincide with movements for peace, ecological awareness, climate change, and technology and social media that makes monk practice visible to those of us who have never been to Tibet, Nepal, Japan, India.

courtesy youtube

The above 2012 IBM commercial is a good example of how the world became smaller, and how monk-dom became part of the iconography of technology reaching across oceans. Right, not Foxcomm and apple products, but monks. Who wants to see slave labor to build iphones (and yes, I have an iphone) when one can see a monk? Who doesn’t love a monk? Orientalist fetish, idealizing a tradition lost in time (but recovered through IBM)… all in service of evoking happiness, imagination, creativity, and capitalism. Its the juxtaposition of this stuff that sneaks affect into our understanding of buddhism. One cannot but distill our rising awareness of the East in the West apart from capitalist investment.

The expansion of Buddhism, meditation, monks is coincident with, also in the last 40+ years, a reckoning in our collective consciousness—about the intractibility of inequality, of suffering. As the U.S. for example, became more minority populated (just a term), the stark realities of flat wages since the 1970s, the decline in public/state funding of infrastructure, education, and health…. result in dysfunction in the public sphere. Pain—suffering, physical, mental, and otherwise spill into downtowns, rural areas, small towns and big cities. In the social scienes, we talked for decades+ about the squeeze on the middle class. Some called it the disappearing middle class, or, the collapse of the middle class. Not sure if those terms are exactly right, certainly, there has been a major realignment of class structure. These are macro changes that shape our hearts and minds.

If one set of changes has been of context, macro changes, economic squeeze, tehcnological promise, then a second grand shift has been a dramatic contraction in the legal, political terrain on which we think, talk, act on inequality, esp. racial politics. Racial politics are always and already class and gender and sexuality politics, so my use of racial is meant to signal a multi- axial webbed inequality. If narrative and discursive understanding of inequality used to be anchored by terms like representation (like under represented) discrimination, alliances, bias, things are now changed. When did it change… circa 1990…. I dunno that is another essay/meditation. Hey you can’t read Toni Morrison or Maya Angelou or Alice Walker in some schools, you can’t ask about race in admissions, you can’t say x, you can’t say Y.

Politics is more AFFECT than fact. And affect does not depend on rational thought. It might include rational thought for some, but for many, it does not. Take for example the term “bias”…. which has become a floating signifier devoid of its historical origins… Bummer. History matters.

Anger has been a huge mover of AFFECT. The contraction in wages from 1970-2010 seeded a rage of working and middle income families wanting to become… their plans to work, raise families, buy property, send their kids of college… was made difficult by rising investment in the global economy for a few of us, and, flat income for most. Anti black, anti affirmative action, anti state, anti Jewish, anti women, anti gay, all of the foregoing rides waves of resentment about “special treatment” that is reserved for some. No amount of altruistic pleading for compassion generosity or understanding can salve that your kid didn’t get into Berkeley or Yale or …. get the job at IBM, etc. While anger and rage might have been popularized as white versus non white, the truth about narrative discursive practices…. is that once laid, we all partake. Yeah we partake in different ways, sometimes whispered under our breath, sometimes in an outburst of profanity. But its all profane… and mundane. Unexceptional. Asians are angry at other Asians. blacks are angry at other blacks, divisions within the LatinX population rise up. The very cohesiveness and solidity of categories like white, black, etc, give way to a chaotic blend of frustration and anger.

Yeah, you can muck around in the chaotic anger and frustrations—and seek rational understanding, but honestly, that does not change the fundamental fact: Politcs is affective, history is five years old (not centuries or decades), and we go through a ritualized exchange of information to pretend to have rational exchange about disagreements. Cynical right. True.

to be continued..