The Mad House
Life Wants to Live
What we are seeing in current events is, in part, the culmination of a strange antipathy for the distinctive ways humans live and thrive. What are the names of this assault? The reduction of meaning to profit, of beings to resources, the religion of extraction and consumption, colonialism – and their children – racism, xenophobia, classism, patriarchy, and the rest. I am not sure if there is an overarching name for this impulse but in its various forms it is distinguished by a passion to extinguish the life force in all beings – including themselves, emptied of everything but a desire to amass beyond all excess and destroy the rest. Whatever good and bad was in the past, the steady displacement of life by this spirit of accumulation places pressures on the human spirit it bears.
This spirit of anti-life cannot be understood if it is thought of simply as a pitiless set of economic policies. In this translation of all of reality into objects, the human spirit is a fundamental obstacle and so its destruction is of paramount importance. One can think of any number of examples: the criminalization of native languages, the demonization of religions and cultures, the appropriation of Christianity as its willing instrument, moral codes at odds with the goodness of the human body and its desires. The destruction of the human spirit begins at school. “Leaving no child behind” – an encouraging-sounding motto - simply means that education will be stripped of resources and recalibrated so that children’s bodies, artistic impulses, cooperative learning, imaginations, and emotions are repressed and punished. Children are retrained to resemble as closely as possible the computers that assess their reading and math so that in their deadened state, they will be more pliant objects of manipulation.
The genius of anti-life lies in its skillfulness at the great lie. It is astonishing how long Europe was able to conceal the savagery of colonialism under patriotic sounding noble causes. America’s beautiful dream of life, liberty, and happiness disguises the utterly ruthless extraction of wealth through the expediencies of genocide, slavery, and a permanently impoverished underclass. We are led to believe that number two pencils really do assure that our children are being well and fairly educated. We are carefully led away from the feeling that the destruction of ecosystems and species is grievable. All of these things are presented to us as normal, necessary, and rational rather than insane and cruel attacks on the human spirit.
The signs that the human spirit cannot bear this system of anti-life are everywhere: addiction, alienation, inability to find stable work, illness, preoccupation with entertainment and gaming, social media as ersatz human connection, broken or abusive families, the largest prison population in the world, depression, anxiety, suicide, confused political allegiances. But these are all interpreted as individual faults, evoking contempt and condemnation. The rage and ennui that fuel our political system are not simply people making unwise or selfish choices, but a reflection of a society that has gone mad. Humanity cannot thrive when every aspect of its existence has been denuded of meaning.
It is befuddling to live in a mad house and have to pretend everyone is sane. But recognizing one is in a mad house can be a relief. It opens other possibilities.
John Lewis says: “One primary purpose of our lives is to cast off all illusions and awaken to the eternal knowledge of what is truly real” (Across That Bridge). In one sense, this awakening is our vocation as human beings. This is the message of the Buddha. It is the first thing Jesus says to us in the Gospel of Mark - wake up! (Metanoia!) Becoming more skillful in recognizing the many specific illusions we endure is itself a kind of liberation. When we realize how deeply we have been mired in an anti-world, built around anti-life, and promulgating anti-truths we can feel like an athlete stripped for contest. We are ready for this. We have been training a long time. Bodhisattvas, Buddhas, the Torah, the gospel remind us that the spiritual energy to live in the midst of anti-life and yet refuse to partake is not alien to us. They joyfully call us to become more awake, less seduced by illusion, more alive to beauty, and more generous in love.
Everything anti-life steals from us we can take back. We will each do it differently – that is the nature of life – we are all unique, marvelously particular, unrepeatable. We can remember what it is to live – to embrace it full throttle: the ordinariness of pleasure, the crippling power of grief for losses too huge to comprehend, the exhilaration of challenge, the sweetness of rest, the cathedral of the natural world, the tenderness of mutual care, the exhilaration of adventure and challenge, the soul’s joy in creativity without having to be an “artist” or “good at it,” the insistent calling of the stars to be admired and moon to be worshipped.
I say these things because I feel the ferocity of anti-life licking at my heels, blowing its reeking breath on me. “It is over. Everything belongs to me. Your little refusals are less than the trash I blow down beaches.” But I know it can only tell lies. I do a warrior asana and feed the birds. That there is so much suffering and destruction is something we will never understand. It seems very dim in the world right now. But we are still alive. And what a wonderful adventure we are on and what good company we are in.
P.S. I encountered the term “anti-life” in Michael Yandell’s work, now published as War and Negative Revelation: A Theoethical Reflection on Moral Injury.