Fundamental questions

What causes harm?
What is evil?
What is degraded? What is manipulative? What is superficial?
How are we complicit in causing harm?
What has value? What is meaningful?

Beautiful books

‘Banned Books week’ is a national event to celebrate freedom of speech and condemn censorship. Beautiful Books is an event planned to compensate for the deleterious effects of the established event, by promoting the idea that some books are better than others. This could be seen as a radical idea in a world where tolerance and open-mindedness are valued so highly. Beautiful Books will highlight artistic works that are meaningful, elevating, or profound, and it will criticize works that are degrading, perverse, or harmful.

We don't support the censorship of ideas. Government should protect the free expression of ideas. But some forms of expression should be restricted. In this event we are not calling for government action. Our most effective tool is moral confrontation: rebuking or applauding those who stock our libraries and theaters with vile or valuable material.

This event should take place at all of the sites and 'venues' that are being propagandized by Banned Books week.

HERE ARE ENSHRINED THE LONGING OF GREAT HEARTS
AND NOBLE THINGS THAT TOWER ABOVE THE TIDE
THE MAGIC WORD THAT WINGED WONDER STARTS
THE GARNERED WISDOM THAT HAS NEVER DIED
--Brooklyn Public Library

Click here for more on Beautiful Books celebrations. (Link under construction.)

(An event to balance the effects of 'banned book week,' by highlighting artistic works that are meaningful, elevating, or profound, and criticising works that are degrading, perverse, or harmful. There is a difference! We don't support censorship at all: we don't think that government should make moral decisions for its population. We prefer that degraded art and life does not present a viable choice to begin with (for instance, by the choice of librarians who are stocking their shelves or choosing their Internet Service Providers). This event should take place at all of the sites and 'venues' that are being propagandized by banned books week.)

Spiritual direct action

Others protest against economic injustice, political corruption, environmental danger. These are important but external issues that are the consequences of our own character. Is it possible to effectively protest against more subtle forms of injury: moral and spiritual assaults on culture, community, and personality?

These propositions may appear to be quixotic or audacious, but so what? We can create the spaces, forums, events, and actions to reclaim the ‘moral commons.’ The cultural elites cannot fully control our social and interior life. We can uphold our right, our 'human right,' to the freedom for integrity, vitality, and virtue.

Have ideas about other kinds of direct action in the moral commons? Want to explore these issues together? Want to take action together? Contact us.
(More coming soon)

The natural reaction to injustice is to blame the perpetrators. It is more difficult to understand our own role and to take responsibility for it. The goal of Complicity day is to build justice by ending our own participation in harm, and cultivating the ability to live into being the world that is an expression of who we are.

Morality is concern for the effect of actions – not just the outer, but the inner effect. Complicity is responsibility for the effect of one’s own actions. When we discover that we ourselves have been causing harm, the most direct moral imperative arises.

We receive things and privileges from innumerable sources. Global interconnections implicate us in ways that we often do not understand. But just because we don’t know the effects doesn’t mean we are not responsible for them.

We may be complicit in injustice in subtle ways that are hard to comprehend. What is the origin of sex workers, who exist in every city? Why are there children without parents, sick people without medical care; lonely people without emotional support? It is incorrect to assume that we are unassociated with victims. The invisible ties stretch and pull at us, and until we shine light on them the tension only gets worse.

It is possible to cause harm by being a spectator, when this serves to strengthen and reproduce a culture that is inane or destructive.

What is the origin of the possessions which we have accumulated? What is the reason for the existence of so many dispossessed people, and so many people who are abandoned, or victimized, or alone?

We should not claim innocence until and unless we address our complicity and put an end to it. What can we offer, and how could we help? It could mean that we a great deal of what we have, if we sought to redeem the injustice we perpetuate. Maybe we would offer our homes, or our bank accounts, or our life energy.

We have the right to know how we are complicit in hidden relations, and so we could issue a challenge to providers of services that they provide the information we need to make judgments about justice. This might include: labeling or providing information about the ramifications of products and services, such as: the condition of the workers who produced them, the environmental and social conditions of the production, the health effects, and more.

Implicity

We are complicit in problems, but we are implicit in the total range of the ramifications of our existence. Implicity is the actual fabric of relationships that interconnect us.

Implicity involves the entire process in which we interact, including the way what we produce and consume affects our humanity.

Understanding implicity requires that the whole range of the ‘functions’ of a human being – such as imagination, vision, thought and feeling – are addressed. All these influences produce the social, moral and spiritual climate in which we live. This climate is the air we breathe: the subtle but tangible environment that lifts us or flattens us, that stimulates joy or fear, that engages us in active, creative life, or distracts us and satiates us with tepid amusements. It sets limits for the depth, quality, and meaning of our life in society.

There is a sadness that is spreading over us. The hidden influences on everyday life are often pernicious. A multitude of oppressive influences, of degrading or destructive cultural objects, are continually being presented to us.

It is as if we were gasping for oxygen. Without sufficient richness in the concealed yet crucial origins of our life we begin to suffocate.

A stitch is broken, a sleeve is torn. A thread is hanging loose. We must mend our complicity and sew our implicity. The purpose should not be only to remove what is injurious, but to weave a world in which every part is made with care: where no one prospers by making another suffer, where the small and hidden origins of everything that impacts us – though the cause is far away and unknowable – is beneficial.

This great interaction of events, of one caring, insightful creation on top of another, could produce beauty that is unimaginable to us now. Implicity is complicity in the good. It heals fractured relationships, and produces spiritual joy.

Implicity is also an alternative to political action: instead of turning to structures, we assume the full scope of action we actually have that 'lives into being' the world we envision. It is the means and method of bringing the spiritual reality we comprehend into life in society.

A new right

A fundamental human right is seldom recognized, and never included in human rights declarations, but it is just as important as free speech, freedom of religion, or due process under the law: the right to whatever is essential for self-knowledge and spiritual vitality. Whatever shatters the spirit is a crime against human beings every bit as damaging as physical injury.

We can protect ourselves from the assault of culture, which produces physical, psychic, moral, and spiritual numbness. We need not tolerate this assault on what is most important. We can protect the public sphere from the aggressive domination of cultural space which makes depth impossible. We have a right to reclaim the full scope of action in all our daily interactions.

freedom of aggression

The First Amendment guarantees freedom of expression, but it is only the external forms of freedom which are actually protected: political, economic, and artistic. The quantity but not the quality of expression is measured. The price we pay is inner: external freedom is enhanced, but the richness and depth of actual life is curtailed.

Where freedom of expression is protected at the expense of freedom of privacy, the regime of the crude comes into existence. The dross rises to the top. Vulgarity and materialism rule; innocence and sanctity submit. In order to counteract the ascendancy of brutality, we must defend the climate in which gentler personalities can thrive.

the origin of hard-heartedness

What is the culture of aggression? And what are the minimum requirements for a culture of understanding, a culture of the sacred, a culture of care?

There are a thousand forms of heart-heartedness. Beauty exists in human nature, but so does indifference, manipulation, and the willingness to use brute force. Our natural vitality easily falters. Unless they are protected and cultivated, the best and subtlest human capacities are degenerate.

Hard-heartedness exists equally on the global and the personal scale. It’s the nature of most political organizations and institutional religion, and any and every organization which preys on and feeds self-aggrandizement. Cultural elites are working to debase and trivialize life. It’s easy to bemoan the present, and to imagine a more felicitous past. But it’s hard to imagine a society more focused than ours on the external. Our culture is materialistic, egotistical, hedonistic, sexualized, and profoundly superficial. We have a single-minded and vehement pursuit of money, pleasure, and power.

the moral commons

We are not just our well-fed bodies: the greater part of our life is suffering from undernourishment. We are half-starved and crazed for sustenance. The commons has been degraded and sapped of life.

If the commons could hold opposite moral qualities equally there would be no need for action. But brutality is not compatible with gentleness. Vulgarity is not compatible with purity. Harm is not merely physical: anything that destroys our capacity to perceive beauty and truth is just as damaging. External harm is punished by law. Internal harm should be prevented, too – not by law, but by those who stand up for the moral commons.

We have no desire to prevent others from indulging their interests. Let the profane and the vile do what they wish, as long as they do not assault innocent bystanders. This means that their expression must be made in private, not in the public realm, unless prior consent is received from every person who is affected.

Human nature will always assert itself, and aggression is inevitable. A functioning culture of care would respond spontaneously. In our case, where artificial support is given to the use of force, additional inputs are necessary. Just as local economies and cultures need to be protected from the domination of global powers, the moral climate has to be protected from cultural aggression and cold-hearted behavior, which suppresses the expression of those who are less brutal. We want to fence off the moral commons.

There are minimal behavioral and institutional conditions necessary for the development of the full range of human faculties, including humility, integrity, depth, love, and the capacity to perceive beauty and the sacred. The whole person must be recognized and cultivated. We can reclaim the public spaces where this beautiful potential can come into existence.

our scope of action

Our goal is to understand the implications of our choices, to see our complicity, and to resurrect the moral moment. To reclaim our freedom we must focus our attention not on distant and intractable problems, but at the place where we actually have full control. At that nexus there is no intrinsic limit to our freedom.

Opportunities for moral and spiritual action seem to be rare. But no situation is without choice. Political and cultural elites are engaged in the formulation our culture: distant corporate officers, government decision-makers, popular artists and their promoters, all play a role. But everyday we create and re-create the world we live in through direct action, by the fact of what we actually do. We are always in the position of giving or withholding our full consent, and we need only stand up for what we already know and contain. As consumers, spectators, citizens, participants – as human beings – however unwilling we may claim to be or feel we are, we are responsible, capable, and free.