(1) To Tell the Truth
The historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gotama, purportedly once told his son Rahula that truthfulness was the single most important virtue a person could cultivate, and furthermore, that without truthfulness, it would be impossible to live a virtuous life.
I wonder what the Buddha would say of New York States’s newest, and already notorious, member of Congress, George Santos. If truthfulness is indeed a prerequisite for the flourishing of virtue, then I suspect that even the Buddha, renowned as he was for his compassion toward evildoers, would pronounce harsh judgment on our fledging representative as a hopelessly irredeemable individual.
In the absence of the Buddha, unfortunately, we are left to rely on Kevin McCarthy and the Republican leadership in the House to pronounce the appropriate judgment on the novice Representative Santos. Not surprisingly, no such judgment appears to be forthcoming.
So while we await the 2024 elections with the hope that voters in his district will supply the needed corrective by removing Mr. Santos from office, let’s consider the larger significance of his ill-gotten political success.
One way to interpret his electoral victory is to see it as the logical outcome of the slow, steady intrusion of falsehood into our public discourse. This phenomenon - nurtured for many years in the assorted hothouses of talk radio, cable television news, and social media - blossomed into its full maturity in the madhouse of the Trump presidency, with the reality-TV master issuing one fabricated statement after another, in such rapid-fire frequency that even the most alert citizen could not possibly keep up.
Even with Mr. Trump out of office, we continue as a society to find ourselves awash in a sea of misinformation, struggling to stay afloat and avoid drowning. As a candidate, Mr. Santos merely caught a wave in these waters, and rode the tide downstream to his dishonorable victory.
It’s been reported that some of his Republican colleagues are aghast at his presence in their chamber, concerned that they will not be able to trust his word on anything. “Trust” is the key word here. Trust is an asset impossible to purchase at any price, yet easily earned simply by being a person known for telling the truth.
Trust is what Mr. Santos has forfeited by the resume of lies he ran on. And trust is what is being eroded by the proliferation of falsehoods infecting our public discourse.
Returning to the opening theme of this essay, let me now suggest that, actually, we don’t have to wonder what the Buddha would say about all of this. He would almost certainly say something as simple as “Tell the truth, always.”
I can think of few four-word maxims that provide better guidance for being both a more virtuous private person and a more trustworthy public servant.
(2) Mortality
In the previous issue, I wrote about my 104-year-old friend Naomi, who had died only a few days before. In the two weeks since, a pair of iconic rock musicians from the 1960s - Jeff Beck and David Crosby, both of whose many albums I listened to repeatedly in my teens and twenties - have each passed away. And then, yesterday morning, I learned from a good friend that he has spent the past month mourning the unexpected death of a close relative who suffered a virulent recurrence of a long-dormant cancer.
And so, I enter this new year, in its infancy a mere 25 days old, keenly and somewhat uncomfortably aware of the mortal nature of our human existence.
Buddhism is rightly renowned, and occasionally gently ridiculed, for its seemingly endless supply of lists. For example, there are the three “marks of existence”, the four “noble truths”, the four “foundations of mindfulness”, the five “hindrances”, the five “precepts”, the five “aggregates”, the eightfold “noble path”, and the ten “paramitas” (often translated as “perfections”). Whew!
My favorite list, without a doubt, is this one, known as “the five remembrances”:
1. I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old. 2. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health. 3. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death. 4. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them. 5. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.
Of particular interest to me at the moment, as I take in so many reports of death in such a short span of weeks, are the first three of these remembrances. There is no way to escape growing old, having ill health, and dying.
Remembering these three, I find, keeps me aware of my own flawed and fragile existence, my own mortality. And that awareness helps me to appreciate all the more intensely the utter contingency of everything (myself included) as I go about my various endeavors and encounters in the daily fleeting whirl of time, and to realize how easily my imperfect perceptions can be tricked into the deluded belief that the present moment is fixed and unchanging.
An ancient monk was once challenged to describe Buddhism in two words, and his response is said to have been, “Everything changes.”
(3) Postscript
Interesting reading from the past few weeks:
Derek Thompson, a staff writer at The Atlantic, wrote this essay on the crucial distinction between invention and implementation, and on how America might be failing in the all-important task of successfully implementing its abundance of scientific breakthroughs … “For many, progress is essentially a timeline of the breakthroughs made by extraordinary individuals. Our mythology of science and technology treats the moment of discovery or invention as a sacred scene. In school, students memorize the dates of major inventions, along with the names of the people who made them—Edison, light bulb, 1879; Wright brothers, airplane, 1903. The great discoverers—Franklin, Bell, Curie, Tesla—get best-selling biographies, and millions of people know their names. This is the eureka theory of history. And for years, it is the story I’ve read and told. But in the past few years, I’ve come to think that this approach to history is wrong. Inventions do matter greatly to progress, of course. But too often, when we isolate these famous eureka moments, we leave out the most important chapters of the story—the ones that follow the initial lightning bolt of discovery.”
Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer at The New York Times, wrote this thoughtful essay calling on selfie-takers to turn their cameras outward. Her pithy title says it all - You’re Pointing Your Camera the Wrong Way … “In the context of the number of selfies taken every year — billions, according to Google — it’s worth considering what that impulse says about our culture and wondering what opportunities we are losing as a result. The greatest danger in flipping the camera toward ourselves isn’t miscalculated risk or the loss of self-esteem. The greatest danger is what happens when we make ourselves the center of the photograph, the center of the world itself. There is no simple way to banish the ennui of our age, but maybe it would help if we stopped looking at our own faces and turned instead to documenting the vanishing natural world in all its manifestations. Perhaps that change would change us in more essential ways, too.”
Tom Nichols wrote this commentary about the war in Ukraine, entitled “No Other Choice”, in a recent issue of The Atlantic Daily newsletter … “Putin has made clear that he will soak the ground of East-Central Europe with blood—both of Ukrainians and of his own hapless ‘mobiks’, the recently mobilized draftees he’s sending into the military meat grinder—if that’s what it takes to subjugate Kyiv and end the Kremlin’s unexpected and ongoing humiliation. At this point, the fight in Ukraine is not about borders or flags but about what kind of world we’ve built over the past century, and whether that world can sustain itself in the face of limitless brutality. If Russia finally captures Ukraine by mass murder, torture, and nuclear threats, then everything the world has gained since the defeat of the Axis in 1945 and the end of the Cold War in 1991 will be in mortal peril. Putin will prove to himself and to every dictator on the planet that nothing has changed since Hitler, that lawless nations can achieve their aims by using force at will, by killing and raping innocent people and then literally grinding their ashes into the dirt.”
John Cassidy wrote this commentary about the recent mass shootings in California and Iowa, calling gun violence “America’s Never-Ending Plague”, in a recent issue of The New Yorker Daily newsletter … “There is one thing that ties many of the most deadly mass shootings together: the ready availability of highly deadly weapons, such as the semi-automatic pistol that police say was used in the massacre in Monterey Park. It is this commonality that distinguishes the United States from most other advanced countries, where mass shootings are rare. We must never lose sight of the fact that all these tragedies take place in a culture that has facilitated the sale for profit of deadly weapons, making it relatively easy for people with deadly intentions to acquire one. Unless and until this environment changes, the carnage will continue.”
Thanks for reading this issue of TLBR. Look for the next issue in three weeks, posting on Wednesday, February 15th.