Notes on Ethics for the New Millennium, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, 1999, Riverhead Books, NY.
Chapter 14, “Peace and Disarmament”
starts by quoting a guy: “Chairman Mao once said that political power comes from the barrel of a gun.” (p. 217) This is a very male idea. The chapter is rife with masculine urges—fully appropriate, written, as it is, by a man. Yet I think my feminine response and reflections on the topic here are important.
“A spirituality which forgets God as all-powerful and Creator is not acceptable. That is how we end up worshiping earthly powers, or ourselves usurping the place of God, even to the point of claiming an unlimited right to trample his creation underfoot.” (Paragraph 75) Pope Francis’s words express caring for our common home—profoundly, you see when you read Laudato Si.’ He quotes a writing of St. Francis of Assisi in the first paragraph of this encyclical letter, On Care for Our Common Home: Laudato Si’, 2015: Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. St. Francis said that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life: “Praise be to you, my Lord,” says the Pope, quoting Francis, “through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with colored flowers and herbs.” (Paragraph 1) Thinking of our planetary home like a sister retains the feminine aspect but leaves behind our strong resentments, if any, towards our feminine parent.
Later, however, Pope Francis asserts that “The best way to restore men and women to their rightful place, putting an end to their claim to absolute dominion over the earth, is to speak once more of the figure of a Father who creates and who alone owns the world.” (Paragraph 75) I disagree with the Pope. It is time for a Mother/Sister who shares the world! This daddy thing doesn’t work because it is part of mens’ chemical structure to find pleasure in the suffering of others—the experiments of Dr. Tania Singer, neuroscientist, on the Charter for Compassion website in a landmark paper in Science in 2004, are described by Dale Debakcsy in “Dr. Tania Singer and the Neuroscience of Empathy:” Singer reports on research she did regarding gender differences in empathy-related brain responses, finding that females were more empathic– when an unfair reward distributor felt pain –than males were. “Male participants, on the other hand, glowed with empathy whenever the Fair actor was [electrically, painfully] shocked, but registered no response at all when the Unfair actor was and, in fact, showed marked activation in their pleasure-associated [brain] reward centers when they knew that the guy behaving unfairly was getting a nasty jolt. It was a fascinating result that has since spawned a flood of interesting questions about when our Empathy Engines are engaged, and when they are left dormant, and evolutionary questions about why the difference between men and women in this and subsequent experiments is so substantial.” If it is true that women might make better decision-makers in tense situations than men, and might not act with revenge-motivation—why not hire us as world leaders, as some nations have done? Really, why not? Really?
Females are psychologically different because our sexuality isn’t hanging in front of us 24 hours a day. We can be just without proving anything!
To return to the Dalai Lama’s chapter, he states that “The potential is there,” to create a “more compassionate world,” (p. 217). This is good news, but I would write, “The potential is here!” As the man asserts, people like peace, there is plenty of evidence for that (pp. 202, 208, 215); but people are enthralled by fancy weapons and military bands, too (p. 204). He suggests we “disarm ourselves internally” (p. 206): developing internal peace, we can create external peace (p. 206); and we must conceive of genuine, lasting world peace, a condition not just of cessation of fighting war (pp. 203, 206).
However, since people are not today capable of avoiding conflict—“there will have to be ways of dealing with miscreants” (p. 207)—the larger picture will include United Nations troops (p. 212) and, also, voluntary disarmament efforts, which the Dalai Lama suggests will be “gradual” (pp. 207, 212).
I have problems with this. If we learn to deal with conflict effectively, we will not resort to violence to resolve it, according to the work of Doug Noll. He has entered prisons and taught inmates to treat conflict with “emotional competency” and says that when given the choice—when educated—they choose his nonviolent techniques for conflictual situations (see yogabody.com, EP#488, “How to De-Escalate Conflicts with Doug Noll on the Lucas Rockwood Show”). The Dalai Lama fantasizes about a “‘smart’ gun with bullets that could custom-assassinate a particular person” (p. 205), this as “more fair;” but it seems to me that changing the substrate here is what is needed—so violence of ANY kind is not relied on. We cannot imagine a totally peaceful world, with residents who do not hurt others, but that does not mean that there could not be one! I am a fan of touching arts that do not hurt people much, such as sex, capoeira and judo, and involve interaction and sorting things out.