The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [117]
But speaking of these revolutions also reminds us of the horrors of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and others—revolutions that devolved into reigns of terror. Revolution, we have learned, does not necessarily imply mercy.
The Greek experiment with democracy failed for the same reasons that our modern experiment with democracy is in danger of failing. It is the reason I mentioned earlier: unless social reconstruction is accompanied by personal transformation, democracy merely liberates the ego-self. If I am still motivated by greed, ill will, and delusion, my freedom will be dangerous, to myself as well as to others. As long as the illusion of an individual self separate from others remains strong, democracy—despite the countless attempts that have been made to create systematic safeguards—can’t help but provide opportunities for some individuals to take advantage of others.
Athenians became aware of this problem quite early. According to the sociologist Orlando Patterson, Greek individualism “was rooted in the Homeric tradition of personal fame and glory and was nourished by habitual competition, as much in art and athletics as in business, but everywhere off the battlefield with little team play.” This individualism “was tempered by little sense of strictly moral responsibility, or in particular of altruism.” It soon became obvious that “private appetites” were motivating people to corrupt the democratic process. Demosthenes lamented that politics had become the path to riches, for individuals no longer placed the state before themselves but viewed it as another way to promote their own personal advantage. Plato’s distaste for democracy is explicit in The Republic, which argues that too much liberty encourages a lack of self-restraint that tends to yield to the strongest pressures of the moment—a recipe for social as well as psychological strife.
This sounds strikingly familiar, although today it’s not so much private appetite as institutionalized greed that subverts the political process. We still distinguish between the economy and the government, but at top levels people easily move from corporate CEO to Cabinet position and back again, because they share the same self-serving vision: continuous economic growth is the most important thing of all, overshadowing all other social and ecological concerns. As Dan Hamburg concluded from his years in the U.S. Congress: “The real government of our country is economic, dominated by large corporations that charter the state to do their bidding. Fostering a secure environment in which corporations and their investors can flourish is the paramount objective of both [political] parties.”
From a Buddhist perspective, it would be naive to expect social transformation to work without personal transformation. But the history of Buddhism shows us that the opposite is also true: although buddhadharma may focus on promoting individual awakening, it cannot avoid being affected by the social forces that work to keep us asleep and submissive. It is the mercy of the West that those social forces need no longer be mystified as natural and inevitable.
For modern Buddhists, the world shows us daily that our own awareness cannot thrive indifferent to what is happening to the awareness of others. As the old sociological paradox puts it, people create society, but society also creates people. Our economic and political systems are not spiritually neutral; they inculcate certain values and discourage others. As our awareness becomes more liberated, we become more aware of the suffering of others, and of the social forces that aggravate or decrease suffering. The bodhisattva path is not a personal sacrifice but a further stage of practice: if I am not separate from others, how can I be fully awakened unless they are too? Today our world calls