[Buddha-l] Silence ?

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Wed, 2005-04-06 at 08:35 -0400, Stanley J. Ziobro II wrote:

> I would agree that the terms "liberal" and "conservative" are not simple
> referents, but it is overstating the case by claiming that they've lost
> "all meaning" in contemporary society.

They still have value as words used to bludgeon and belittle one's
enemies. Aside from that, however, they are almost perfectly useless.

> As for the Pope's anti-Communist views, these are the results of his
> very rich and nuanced personalist philosophy whereby any proper
> response to the person can only be that of love, i.e., seeking the
> well-being of the Other.

That's also what Marxism is all about, Stan. So you'd think a good
Catholic would almost automatically be an ardent Marxist.

> His contention with liberation theology was not that there was no
> validity, but that Marxist ideological concerns were substituting for
> the theological virtues and the fuller demands of justice.

What he failed to see, however, is that for the liberation theologians
there is no real conflict between Marxist and Catholic ideologies. Yes,
there have been flaws and miscarriages of justice in the implementation
of both ideologies, but as ideologies they are quite compatible.

> I won't quibble over contrastive terms to "rigid", but I do wonder what
> you mean by claiming that John Paul was tragically rigid and shortsighted
> in his dealing with issues of injustice in Central America.

Which word did you not understand?

> Have you read his speeches and sermons given in the countries he
> visited where the "resistance" was operative, for instance, in El
> Salvador? 

Read? Read? this is the age of television, man. I saw his speeches and
sermons on television.

> Ideology is trumping reality in your claims here, Ricardo.

As I have made abundantly clear in other contexts, I don't give a damn
about reality. Any ideology that is too feeble to trump reality is not
worth proclaiming. The whole purpose of any ideology is to change
reality. 

As I have said about the Pope, he used his ideological influence to
change many realities. He apologized for the Crusades and the
Inquisition and for Catholic silence during the holocaust, for example.
He was the first pope to visit a synagogue and the first to visit a
mosque. He donated generously to help rebuild the Buddhist sangha in
Cambodia. He criticized the United States for its unwarranted and
illegal detention of suspected terrorists without trial and without
being charged with specific crimes. And he proclaimed, and consistently
held to, the policy of "a culture of life." His advocacy of the culture
of life led him to criticize the United States for failing to abolish
the death penalty, and for not dismantling its nuclear arms network and
for the totally unnecessary and unprovoked invasions of Afghanistan and
Iraq, as well as for its sluggishness in enforcing important
environmental regulations. (It's a crime that some Americans have
hijacked the name "culture of life" but abandoned the full ideology that
the name stands for. Thus we have the spectacle of an American president
who speaks of the "culture of life" while advocating the death penalty
and starting a war that has led to the deaths of more than 100,000
mostly innocent people.) 

In all these ideological proclamations that totally ignored operative
realities, I can only applaud the late Pontiff, for in all of these ways
his Catholic ideology was completely in accord with my own Buddhist
ideology. In Central America, however, he fumbled the ball, showing
that, like all of us, he was capable of being rigid and short-sighted.
In most of us, short-sighted rigidity is merely part of the standard
equipment of being human, all too human. In an otherwise great man, this
flaw is tragic, in the Greek sense of the term.

Speaking of spectacles, one of the most embarrassing moments for us
Americans during the vigil leading up to the Pope's death was hearing a
rerun of Nancy Reagan's appearance on the Larry King show in which she
enumerated all the ways in which Pope John Paul II resembled Saint
Ronnie the Communicator. (They were both victims of assassination
attempts in 1981, and they both brought down the iron curtain, and they
were both actors, and they both loved the outdoors, and they both loved
to hug children, and...and...and....)

It's all past now. As the Buddhist meditation on death reminds its
practitioners, all men and women die, whether they lived as sages or as
fools, whether they were virtuous or vicious, whether they were known to
everyone alive or known only to the lice who lived in their hair. The
death of a celebrity such the pope serves to remind us all of our own
inevitable deaths, a reality that no ideology can trump.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico