Ships Passing in the Night

Issue #2.10 ~ July 18th, 2023

Heat, Guns, and Denialism

Two of the major domestic news stories so far this month involve the splurge of mass shootings over the July 4th holiday, and the spread of record-breaking high temperatures throughout much of the southwest.

Neither of these phenomena comes as a surprise to anyone who has been following the social science underlying increased gun violence and the meteorological science behind accelerating climate change. The mounting evidence that we are poisoning the streets with too-easily-available guns and poisoning the atmosphere with too high levels of carbon emissions is, for many, compelling and incontrovertible.

But for an alarmingly large portion of the population, each new mass shooting and each new extreme weather event elicits not informed thoughtful responses, but instead illogical emotional reactions. “Guns aren’t the problem!” “It’s just weather!” “What about our constitutional second amendment rights?” “Global warming is a hoax!”

One common thread running through all these ludicrous claims is denialism. Here’s a helpful definition of denialism that I found on Wikipedia …

In the psychology of human behavior, denialism is a person's choice to deny reality as a way to avoid a psychologically uncomfortable truth. Denialism is an essentially irrational action that withholds the validation of a historical experience or event when a person refuses to accept an empirically verifiable reality.

In the sciences, denialism is the rejection of basic facts and concepts that are undisputed, well-supported parts of the scientific consensus on a subject, in favor of ideas that are radical, controversial, or fabricated.

The motivations and causes of denialism include religion, self-interest (economic, political, or financial), and defense mechanisms meant to protect the psyche of the denialist against mentally disturbing facts and ideas.

It’s all but inconceivable to me how one can have a fact-based conversation with someone who denies facts. This seems to be the conundrum we face in our current polarized political environment: scientific evidence-based solutions versus conspiracy theory-laced denials. Two sides talking right past each other, like the proverbial two ships passing in the night.

What, if anything, we can do to remedy this total absence of meaningful communication remains an unresolved concern that we will continue to explore in future TLBR issues.

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Moving from Regret to Remorse

For the most part, my daily meditation practice and my engagement with the teachings of Buddhism over the past fifteen years have been of so much value to me that I can hardly imagine what my life would be like without them. However, there was a brief span of time, some six or seven years ago, when the opposite seemed to be true, when it felt as if meditation and Buddhism were actually making my life more difficult.

In order to explain this, I’ll need to plunge into a bit of autobiography, and describe the outsized role that regret had played in my pre-Buddhist life.

Put quite simply, regret was the predominant mood of my entire early adulthood, from the start of my 20s until well into my mid-40s. These years were marked by an unbroken string of transient friendships, unsatisfying relationships, and assorted dead-end jobs. In the Buddhist vernacular that I was not yet familiar with, my day-to-day existence back then was filled with “dukkha”.

Deficient in both emotional and mental maturity at the time, I attributed these long dreary decades of dissatisfaction to the undue influence of the Catholic Church, under whose sway I had spent my high school and college years as a seminarian aspiring to the priesthood. Upon leaving the seminary in 1970 (and, not long after, setting aside both Catholicism and its beliefs), I entered adulthood totally bereft of my childhood friends and classmates (all of whom I had foolishly left behind upon entering the seminary eight years before), completely inexperienced in matters of dating and intimacy, and utterly without a clue as to what I should do with the rest of my life.

One of the more unskillful coping mechanisms I adopted in those years was to indulge in a continual stream of “if only” fantasies: How wonderful my life would have been … if only I hadn’t been in the seminary all those years … if only I had attended a co-ed high school where I might have enjoyed normal teen-age dating and party-going … if only I had gained entrance to a respected university where I might have gone on to earn an advanced degree and become a tenured professor … if only, if only.

So much self-justification, so much self-pitying. Once again, using the Buddhist vernacular I still had yet to encounter … so much “self”.

By the time I finally did discover Buddhism, sometime around 2008, my life circumstances had changed significantly for the better. I had been happily married for nearly twenty years, our then-14-year-old twins (a son and a daughter) had just begun high school, and I was enjoying a fledgling dual career as a personal coach and a mindfulness blogger.

Yet, despite all the gratification my actual present circumstances were bringing me, those pernicious “if only” fantasies about my imagined past continued to manifest on a very regular basis. I felt hopelessly perplexed by these strange bedfellows in my psyche - deep contentment with a present I hoped would never change, and festering resentments about a past I would have done anything to change.

The beginnings of a breakthrough came one Sunday morning as I attended the weekly session of my meditation group on Manhattan’s upper west side. During his dharma talk, our guiding teacher Allan Lokos, whose chosen topic that week was forgiveness, offered this thought to his listeners … “Forgiveness begins with accepting that you can never have a better past.”

Allan’s linking of forgiveness to this recognition that one can never have a better past landed deeply for me, and it pointed me toward a resolution of the battle being waged by my competing mental bedfellows. As I internalized the truth that of course no one can ever have a better past, those “if only” fantasies began to make less frequent appearances, and when they did show up, they no longer cast their familiar alluring spell over me.

At the same time as the fantasies were loosening their grip on me, I started delving deeper into Buddhism’s teachings about the interconnectedness of all beings and the complex array of causes and conditions in which we all exist and interact with each other. And before I knew it, I had begun to develop a radically different perspective on my past.

At first, this new perspective was painful, because it was forcing me to recognize that, where I had long taken comfortable refuge in my perception that I had been victimized by the extreme limitations of my adolescent experience in the seminary, I now had to own up to the role I had actively played in choosing that experience, and to see unsparingly my self-absorption and lack of concern for others through all the years I was attempting to recover from that experience.

This new self-awareness was not at all easy to accept. But it was undeniably true.

And so, at one point, during a weekly class that Allan conducted for a small group of interested students from our larger meditation group, I mentioned - only half-jokingly - that meditation and Buddhism were actually making my life more difficult! It hurt to view my past experiences through the lens of Buddhist ethics.

With encouragement from Allan, I continued to struggle with this new awareness, and as I did so, I felt all the more distaste for my past regrets. They now registered as the conveniently selfish deceptions that they in fact were. My “if only” fantasies - always all about me, me, me - which had once offered solace, now brought shame.

As I released more and more of these old regrets about my past, I began to experience a newfound sense of remorse for it. Whereas regret had felt like a blindfold wrapped tightly over my eyes, restricting my vision to myself and my resentments, remorse was like gazing through some kind of magical magnifying lens, opening up to an infinitely expanding field of vision - one that included just about everyone I could remember from my past, and allowed me to see each of them in my mind as I might have truly seen them in actuality, had I not been so utterly self-absorbed at the time.

And with this new expansive take on my past, with the replacement of regret with remorse, meditation and Buddhism stopped making my life difficult, and once again they helped to make it more easeful and more meaningful.

To be sure, there is indeed some similarity between regret and remorse, in that remorse can also carry a tinge of “if only” sadness that things were the way they were, and not otherwise. But the significant difference between the two, as I’ve experienced them both, is that the sadness of regret has a secret agenda of wanting the past to have been different for one’s own selfish sake; the sadness of remorse has no such agenda, but simply acknowledges how the past as it actually unfolded included a certain amount of unavoidable sorrow and disappointment - and not just to oneself, but to many others as well.

In the Buddhist vernacular with which I am at last becoming somewhat conversant, remorse elicits a response of compassion and caring, as opposed to regret’s call for anger and resentment. Remorse releases us from the grip of self, while regret locks us in. Both bring us face-to-face with our past sorrows and suffering, but only remorse invites us to step through our own dukkha and settle into a space of equanimity and caring.

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“Tread the Path with Care” - revised and expanded

In the May 30th issue of TLBR, I offered a short personal reflection on the Buddha’s purported last words to his followers, “Things fall apart. Tread the path with care.” A slightly revised and expanded version of that essay was recently posted on the Secular Buddhist Network website. You can read it here, and you can learn more about secular Buddhism by visiting the SBN home page here.

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Interesting reading from the past few weeks:

In this thought-provoking and well-titled piece, “5 Deaths at Sea Gripped the World. Hundreds of Others Got a Shrug.”, New York Times reporter Richard Perez-Pena contrasted the intensive media coverage and rescue efforts undertaken for the five affluent victims of the Titan submersible implosion with the negligible amount of attention and assistance extended to the seven hundred refugee victims of an overcrowded ship that sank in the Mediterranean Sea that same week … “After contact was lost with the five inside a submersible descending to the Titanic, multiple countries and private entities sent ships, planes and underwater drones to pursue a faint hope of rescue. That was far more effort than was made on behalf of the hundreds aboard a dangerously overcrowded, disabled fishing trawler off the Greek coast while there were still ample chances for rescue. And it was the lost submersible, the Titan, that drew enormous attention from news organizations worldwide and their audiences, far more than the boat that sank in the Mediterranean and the Greek Coast Guard’s failure to help before it capsized. The submersible accident, at the site of a shipwreck that has fascinated the public for more than a century, would have captivated people no matter what. But it occurred right after the tragedy in the Mediterranean, and the contrast between the two disasters, and how they were handled, has fueled a discussion around the world in which some see harsh realities about class and ethnicity. Aboard the Titan were three wealthy businessmen — a white American, a white Briton and a Pakistani-British magnate — along with the billionaire’s 19-year-old son and a white French deep-sea explorer. Those on the fishing boat — as many as 750, officials have estimated, with barely 100 survivors — were migrants primarily from South Asia and the Middle East, trying to reach Europe.‘We saw how some lives are valued and some are not’, Judith Sunderland, acting deputy director for Europe at the group Human Rights Watch, said in an interview.”

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Thanks for reading this issue of TLBR. We continue to be on our summer schedule of extended intervals between issues, so please look for the next one in four weeks, posting on Thursday, August 17th.

{Please note that, starting next issue, TLBR’s publication day will be on Thursdays instead of Tuesdays.}