Why the Dalai Lama is a Socialist: Buddhism and the Compassionate Society

by Terry Gibbs

Overview

To the surprise of many, the Dalai Lama recently declared that, 'I am a socialist'. While many Buddhists and socialists would be perplexed at the suggestion that their approaches to life share fundamental principles, important figures in the Buddhist tradition are increasingly framing contemporary social and economic problems in distinctly socialist terms.

In this novel and provocative work, Terry Gibbs argues that the shared values expressed in each tradition could provide signposts for creating a truly humane, compassionate and free society. Hopeful about our potential to create the 'good society' through collective effort, Why the Dalai Lama is a Socialist is grounded in the fundamental belief that everyday human activity makes a difference.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783606474
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	03/15/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	450 KB

About the Author

Terry Gibbs started her political life as an activist and popular educator working in solidarity with various social movements in Latin America. She has since lived, worked and conducted research around the world, landing in such places as a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, a Marxist guerrilla camp in Colombia, a biodiversity farm in India and a Buddhist monastery in Thailand. She also enjoys hanging out with her family, gardening and cooking. Terry currently teaches international politics at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia, Canada, and is co-author, with Garry Leech, of The Failure of Global Capitalism: From Cape Breton to Colombia and Beyond (2009).
Terry Gibbs is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Read an Excerpt

Why the Dalai Lama is a Socialist

Buddhism and the Compassionate Society

---

By Terry Gibbs

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2017 Terry Gibbs
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78360-647-4

---

CHAPTER 1

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

A leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars. — Walt Whitman

I first encountered the idea of emptiness as a small child. I was maybe five years old when I looked at my little brother Rick with his mad scientist-looking blond hair going in all directions and wondered, 'Why am I me and you are you?' Which led me to ask, 'How do I know I'm me?' Even at that age, or perhaps, because I was that age, I could sense there wasn't really any tangible or separable 'thing' that was 'me'. Or, if there was, I certainly couldn't find it. A body walked 'me' around, a voice spoke when 'I' wanted to say something, and a tummy grumbled when 'I' was hungry, but where exactly was the 'me'?

Buddhists and other spiritual practitioners have long pondered this question, many meditating for hours, days, even years on it, and seasoned practitioners such as the Dalai Lama keep coming up with nothing, or rather nothing. Absolutely Nothing or, as many Buddhists would say, emptiness. But we are reminded by Buddhists and physicists alike that it is an emptiness that is teeming with all kinds of life, from sub-atomic particles to entire galaxies, so it is not empty in the Western nihilist sense. It is just empty in that it is, to make up a word, unthingifiable. In other words, it is empty of things that exist in isolation from each other. There is only an interconnected whole and there is no-thing, or no-self, that is not an intricate part of that whole.

But, despite this reality, most of us 'grow up' and the Western socialization process we are subjected to assists in the creation and nurturing of a solid 'me' – what Western psychology would call the 'ego' – which we learn to experience as a thing separate from other things in the world. For Buddhists, this 'me', while we might think it necessary in a practical sense to function in the 'real world', is ultimately a delusion. Albert Einstein agreed. In his words, living one's life as though one were separate is, for the individual, 'a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness'.

When we realize that we are not separate (and embody this in the way we live), and we discover that it is in fact impossible for us to be separate, we become enlightened or liberated or free depending on what tradition one is speaking from. Zen Master and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh speaks of the state of 'interbeing', which expresses in his terms what Einstein was trying to say: nothing in the universe has an independent existence. What the Buddhist tradition calls delusion or ignorance is the state of living in contradiction to this basic truth and is ultimately, from the Buddhist standpoint, the source of all our suffering. It is a form of being alienated from our true nature, which is one of interdependence with all things. This alienation is what allows us to hurt ourselves, other humans, non-human animals and nature.

If it is impossible to isolate a thing called the self, and if it is also true that all the parts of who we are (thinking, digesting, bleeding, excreting, etc.) are all interdependent, and if we are unable to actually exist without nature's air, water, food and so on, then everything that exists is ultimately part of US and we are part of IT. So we, and everything else in the universe, are empty in the sense that we do not have a separate 'is-ness'. But why might this be important to us as individuals at the beginning of the twenty-first century? And how can we understand these ideas in relation to what is happening in our current reality?

While few Buddhists specifically use the language of economics to talk about contemporary forms of alienation (British economist E. F. Schumacher was well ahead of his time), we are increasingly seeing socially-engaged Buddhists such as Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche and Sulak Sivaraksa address the alienation inherent in the culture of capitalism. Sivaraksa, for example, notes, 'Capitalism brainwashes us through advertising and the skewing of priorities to think we need to become someone other than ourselves by rejecting who we are. But we can never become more than ourselves by rejecting who we are'. Sakyong Mipham uses the language of worthiness to argue that at some deep level we have lost our sense of being worthy, both at an individual level and as a broader culture. At an individual level we feel we are too poor, too fat, too old, too slow, too brown, too bald, etc. And if we could just obtain enough money wecould fix our problems by purchasing houses, cars, anti-aging make-up, skin and hair dye, diet products, penis lifters, holidays, and so on.

This sense of 'lack', the related sense of low self-esteem, and the instant gratification provided by material things all reinforce individualist, consumerist behaviour, which is the fuel that allows the capitalist system to keep running. And for those too poor to engage in the market, the promise that the capitalist consumer dream may one day become a reality for them is continually reinforced by media and education systems and, in the global South (Latin America, Africa and Asia), by the ideology of the Western development model. But while many of us in the global North (North America and Europe) are sufficiently pacified through consumerism to the point that we accept our alienated state as natural, there remains an underlying sense of persistent unease expressed in the rising figures for drug and alcohol abuse, clinical depression and other 'mental' disorders. Luckily for the rich, who benefit economically from this system, we think it's our own fault because, while we run around feeling shitty about ourselves and wondering where we went wrong, we believe that most other people are living normal and happy lives. But, in actuality, many people are experiencing the same alienation as we are – and depression and other 'disorders' are arguably natural responses.

From different angles both Marxists and socially-engaged Buddhists talk about the ways in which 'value' – including how we value ourselves, others and the planet – is determined under capitalism. Marxists argue that under capitalism all value comes from labour and is realized through exchange of the product of that labour in the market. By selling his or her labour power to the capitalist, the worker loses ownership and control over the product of his or her labour and this disconnectedness from that expression of their inner creativity results in a sense of alienation, a lack of completeness. In short, as Karl Marx noted, the worker lives to satisfy the needs of the capitalist:

The demand for men necessarily governs the production of men, as with every other commodity. Should supply greatly exceed demand, a section of the workers sinks into beggary or starvation. The worker's existence is thus brought under the same condition as the existence of every other commodity. The worker has become a commodity, and it is a bit of luck for him if he can find a buyer. And the demand on which the life of the worker depends, depends on the whim of the rich and the capitalists.

Under capitalism everything (humans, non-human animals and nature) must be commodified and brought to market in order to gain value. Consequently, aspects of nature such as a flower or a mother's care for her children in the home are not valued unless they can be bought and sold on the market. Only when you sell a flower does it attain value under capitalism. If it remains where it is in nature, it doesn't have value, unless it is growing in a park that people pay to enter. A river has no value until it can be diverted to a dam. Cows have no value until they become steak. Nature ultimately has no value until her various components can be used as 'resources' for consumption. If someone works for a day-care centre, the attention they give to children gains a value because they are selling their labour power and therefore contributing to Gross Domestic Product (GDP), although sadly such important nurturing work is of small economic value in most capitalist societies. But if a person takes care of their own kids, their work ultimately does not have value – hence the refrain 'I'm just a stay at home mum/dad'.

Also, an idea has no value until it is patented. While the idea of protecting 'intellectual property rights' may not be inherently problematic – we should get acknowledgement for and have some control over what happens to our ideas – patenting in the capitalist framework is often used to protect the rights of large companies to make profits at the expense of indigenous and traditional knowledge systems. This is particularly evident in issues such as seed patenting where a small 'innovation' is made to a traditional seed variety and then, when farmers attempt to use the seeds they have used for generations, they face legal battles.

From a Buddhist perspective, this objectification, or thingification, of people and nature could be seen as the root of the existential dualism that experiences the self as alienated and sees other people and nature as things to be manipulated. We are alienated because we learn to believe that we don't have value in and of ourselves, therefore we must gain that value from outside conditions (i.e. the capitalist market). Paradoxically, we then support the capitalist structures that maintain these conditions even though these structures and the resulting conditions are often the root cause of our alienation. This state of being inevitably affects our behaviour both individually and collectively, impacting how we interact with our neighbours and how states engage geopolitically.

The individualist and consumerist values that are continually reinforced under capitalism prop-up a dichotomy of greed and scarcity which feeds into systems of structural and physical violence that are rooted in fear. The view is that there may not be enough oil, land or water tomorrow, which means that future-minded states engage in economic and military strategies that have one eye in the present and one eye in the future. But there is always an 'other' that is in the way of what we need. Those others must be pacified, bought, controlled or killed in order to protect what we must convince ourselves is rightfully ours. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, we believe we have an inalienable right to 'our resources that happen to be in their countries'. Contemporary political struggles from the Middle East to Sub-Saharan Africa and the violence endemic wherever extractive industries operate are just the most visible examples of this problem.

For Buddhists, this violence is only possible because we have understood ourselves as separate and therefore in competition with others, and we have bought into a societal view that causes both our own suffering and the suffering of others. In many ways, this is also true for Marxists, who use the term 'false consciousness' to refer to the ways in which we buy into the ideology of the ruling capitalist class despite the fact that this ideology masks the real causes of alienation and exploitation suffered by most people under capitalism. In a sense, false consciousness speaks to the way in which the ideas of the ruling class become our own ideas without us realizing.

This idea is poignantly illustrated in the 'lucky bastard' scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian film where one prisoner of the Roman Empire who is hung up by his arms on the cell wall explains to the 'lucky' newly-arrived prisoner that he may 'get off with crucifixion' for a first offence. To the surprise of the new prisoner, he goes on to explain, 'If we didn't have crucifixion this country would be in a right bloody mess. Nail 'em up I say! Nail some bloody sense into 'em'!'The prisoner's views highlight the degree to which he has accepted as legitimate the beliefs of the very people (i.e. the Romans) who are oppressing him. Marxists highlight the degree to which false consciousness allows the labourer to imagine a better self and a better world, as promised by capitalist elites through advertising and on TV, despite the reality of his or her alienated condition and the entrenched inequalities in society along class, race and gender lines. Therefore, the sense of the 'self' as alienated is a key part of both Buddhist and Marxist frameworks.

Many theorists have linked the breakdown and dislocation of social interactions with the rise of consumer capitalist society. Drawing on academic studies in the mid-1990s, Robert Lane tells us that since the 1960s every generation in so-called advanced and rapidly-advancing capitalist societies has seen a rise in clinical depression with people born after 1945 ten times more likely to suffer from it than those born before that year. We are also, apparently, suffering this ailment at younger and younger ages. Lane points out that this is not the case in so-called less developed countries, suggesting that there's a link between modernity (or the Western development model) and depression that is 'undermining the doctrine that market economies increase well-being'.

It is now well understood that consumerism beyond a certain level no longer fulfils us. Recent studies show that income doesn't correlate with happiness once earnings surpass the amount required to subsist. According to Richard Layard, director of the Well-Being Programme at the London School of Economics, 'Over the last 50 years, living standards in the West have improved enormously but we have become no happier. This shows we should not sacrifice human relationships, which are the main source of happiness, for the sake of economic growth.' So why do we keep chasing after the materialistic dream if it doesn't make us happy? Lane suggests it could be related to our hardwired sense of scarcity, which is reinforced by our corporate media and by our fear-mongering political leaders. It is also connected to the immediate gratification, or ego soothing, that shopping, like all other addictions, provides us in our desperate attempts to escape our alienated state, hence the phrase 'shopping therapy'. Many of the 'habitual patterns' (as Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön would call them), that are pervasive in our Western societies such as constant busyness, over emphasis on achievement over fulfilment, desire to be constantly entertained and so forth could be seen as reflections of a deeply alienated culture. Buddhist leader Sakyong Mipham goes as far as to suggest that our busyness is often indicative of a form of laziness, an unwillingness to be truly present with ourselves and with others. This alienation is expressed in a general malaise which, as some scholars suggest, is exacerbated rather than solved by our new social media addictions.

Ultimately, how we see ourselves affects every choice we make in our lives, including how we treat others. It is linked to the choices we make in terms of how we live and labour. But where labour is alienated, the 'harm' done is not always directly visible and the worker may exist in conditions where there is no choice but to labour in activities that harm other humans, non-human animals or nature. Indeed, those with power and privilege often depend upon the working-class and the poor to do their 'dirty work' for them. Slaughterhouse workers, pesticide sprayers, mine security personnel, and women who literally carry other peoples' shit on their heads are just a few forms of employment that come to mind. When we look structurally we can see many 'harms', such as the human rights violations in sweatshop factories and the violence and pollution inherent in the large-scale agriculture that feeds Western diet and consumer patterns.

Now while many of us in the global North and some elite sectors in the global South enjoy disproportionate privileges of choice about who we sell our labour power to, what we buy and where we live, this is not true for most of the world's population. An increasing number of the world's workers have no one to sell their labour power to because the global economy does not need them. The United Nations estimates that the percentage of the economically active population in the global South engaged in the informal sector has almost doubled in recent decades from 21 per cent in 1970 to nearly 40 per cent. And Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek, in speaking of what economists call the '80-20 rule', points out that due to high-tech advances in production we are moving towards a global reality in which only 20 per cent of the world's labour force will be required to do the necessary work in our economy with the remaining 80 per cent becoming 'irrelevant'. As Zizek points out, 'is not a system which renders 80 per cent of the people irrelevant and useless itself irrelevant and of no use?'

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Why the Dalai Lama is a Socialist by Terry Gibbs. Copyright © 2017 Terry Gibbs. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Much Ado About No-Thing
2. Compassion is a Verb
3. Living in an Alienated World
4. Consumer Citizens in a Globalized Society
5. Bodies in the Basement
6. Capitalism and the Democratic Deficit
7. In Search of the Global Citizen
Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

The Dalai Lama has long voiced a need for Buddhists to be involved in societal and political change as well as inner transformation, in line with Gibbs's hypothesis linking Buddha Dhamma and Socialism. Gibbs's work advocates moving towards a more compassionate world, and starts to explore a vision for a future without suffering.” —Sulak Sivaraksa, founder of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists

“This book could not have been published at a more appropriate time. Immersed as we are in an economy of greed, it offers a vital message of hope and compassionate action for justice and equality.” —Vandana Shiva, activist and author of Earth Democracy

From the Publisher