A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack

Four. The Lack of Modernity

87 Four The Lack of Modernity When religion ceased to be a political force, politics became a substitute religion. —Lewis Mumford According to Buddhism the three roots of evil are lobha greed, dosa ill will, and moha delusion. Traditionally these are personal problems, but today they must also be understood more structurally, as institutionalized. Our economic system promotes and requires greed in at least two ways: desire for profit is necessary to fuel the engine of economic growth, and consumers must be insatiable in order to maintain markets for what can be produced. Although justified as raising standards of living worldwide, economic globalization seems rather to be increasing inequality, unemployment, and environmental degradation.The United Nations Development Report for 1997 pointed out that 1.3 billion people now live on less than one dollar a day, and estimated that there are ninety-three countries having a per capita income below what they had a few decades ago. Long after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. federal government continues to devote the largest percentage of its resources to maintaining an enormously expensive war machine. Most other countries continue to spend more on arms than social services.There is no sign that the military-industrial complex, or the lucrative international market in 88 A Buddhist History of the West arms sales, will be diverted into plowshares anytime in the forseeable future. The media that might inform us about these problems distract us with “infotainment” and sports spectacles in order to promote their real function, advertising. One would expect universities to be encouraging and developing the critical thinking necessary to reflect on these developments , but in the midst of the greatest economic expansion in history we are told that budget cutbacks are necessary because there is less money available for education. Increasingly, the need to become more market oriented is diverting academia into corporate research and advanced job training for those eager to join and benefit from a morally questionable world order. In short, our global economy institutionalizes greed; the militaryindustrial complex at the heart of most developed nation-states institutionalizes aggression; our media and even our universities institutionalize ignorance of what is actually happening. Unlike the original Buddhist roots of evil, these institutional roots of evil are rationalized as operating according to a logic (e.g., “laws of the market”) that is inevitable because it is “natural.” From my lack perspective, however, they are better understood as the results of particular historical forces that can and should be challenged.This chapter attempts to understand how those forces encouraged the development of such problematical institutions, which today control the earth and all its “resources” (including us). Nation-states have divided up the earth’s surface and waters and airspace as well as its peoples; transnational corporations exploit the resources of these areas for their own purposes; these claims are policed by war machines that have the power to unleash irresistible violence against those who challenge this world order; and these three are serviced by scientific and technological establishments that exist primarily to meet their insatiable pursuit of ever greater power and wealth. . . . How did all this come to be? This chapter argues that our collective sense of lack has been an important factor in developing these institutions. It offers another episode in the social history of lack, supplementing the previous chapter’s account of our individualistic idolatries with a lack history of our institutional idolatries. “Men are literally hypnotized by life and by those who represent life to them,” Ernest Becker has argued; replace “life” with “being” and we begin to realize how our sense of lack is also a source of social domination. All power is sacred power, Becker adds, “because it begins in the hunger for immortality, and it ends in the absolute subjection to people and things that represent immortality The Lack of Modernity 89 power” (1975, 49).Again, substituting “being” for “immortality” hints at the spiritual roots of our modern world. In particular, the supposed secularity of the nation-state,corporate capitalism, and mechanistic science may be problematized by summarizing what is known about their origins.We will see that there was something compulsive and delusive about their development because it was motivated by a profound social anxiety—a collective sense of lack—which became “liberated” in the sixteenth century and then channeled into these directions. THE ORGANIC PARADIGM ‘Tis all in peeces, all...