Why is this so difficult?
Detail of the Ghost Nets garden 6-18-23
"Hundreds of years ago, pity and piety were synonymous
and conflated with obedience."
Consider these three words: pity, compassion, and empathy. Pity has its roots in a religious experience of withness as a communion with divine mercy. Hundreds of years ago, pity and piety were synonymous and conflated with obedience. It is provocative to consider that obedience to the sacred coexisted so intimately with great class disparities, aggressive colonization, and subjugation of the nonwhite world. We think of pity as a close cousin of compassion, the capacity to completely feel another’s suffering, perhaps because in our souls we recognize the sacred potential of bestowing mercy on another. Yet people often resent feeling pitied. The implication is that pity is not the same as truly feeling the suffering of another. Compassion might be more enlightened than pity. It implies the drive to do something about the source of suffering. Etymologically, the word might be broken down into compassion, “with passion.” Empathy, however, goes one step further, understanding the other’s experience on the other’s terms. That requires us to relinquish the security and control of our own frame of reference or confirmation bias, the assumption that we know what we know, and do the work of living in the edges between ourselves and the other. Empathy has attracted endless research and millennia of philosophical and creative attention. Quite a number of recent writings have singled out failures of empathy throughout public systems, particularly in the United States." p. 22-23 Divining Chaos
When I wrote this, what struck me most from my research was the idea that at one point, the culture accepted the idea that mercy was reserved for those in power, and pity was synonymous with obedience to power, specifically to a church. What strikes me today is how clear the path from medieval obedience is to present-day fascism.
We have come a long way from medieval times but the current international struggle between authoritarian regimes and evolving notions of democracy seems to reflect how attractive fascism is to many people. Fascism is the opposite of empathy. Moving away from empathy for the Other to totalitarian, fascist and authoritarian regimes seems to reflect how intransigent the resistance seems to be to change and generosity. It is also a measure of how hard it is to move from simple to complex systems. democracy, Empathy for the Other requires integrating what lies beyond simple relationships. Obedience is an extremely simple way to organize society. Religion is one of the greatest organizing tools conceivable for small groups to maintain power with simplicity. It is also the fast path to hell for anyone without power. In our present world, power is being concentrated at ever more stupendous scales by ever fewer people. This is a powder keg the world is sitting upon. Much of that powder keg contains religious ideas. The simplest religious system is obedience.
In the rest of the non-human world, power is a matter of symbiosis to maintain a stable system. Wolves eat deer. Deer eat tree saplings. If wolves eat deer, meadows will flourish along with significant biodiversity. Humans routinely hunt wolves to the brink of extinction. Hunters fear the deer will eat flocks but flocks are a small price to pay for systemic equilibrium in the greater world, and a cheap way to guarantee good forage for flocks. Complexity might be the price for sustainable stabilty.
Why is this so difficult to understand?
The Ukrainian Environmental Humanities group are dealing with unprecedented soil contamination because of Putin's war. Like American hunters gunning down wolves, Putin only sees a small part of the puzzle of how systems support life. This is a link to speakers from a recent event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ukrenvhum-food-and-agriculture-tickets-650747632687?aff=oddtdtcreator.
One of those recent speakers were members of the Cooking Section group, who are making connections between food, soil and other international issues. They have included some of my work in theirs. This article references their work: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/cooking-sections#:~:text=Cooking%20Sections%20are%20Daniel%20Fern%C3%A1ndez%20Pascual%20and%20Alon%20Schwabe%3A%20a,organise%20the%20world%20through%20food.
The war in Ukraine is about resisting irrational authoritarianism, governance devoid of pity, compassion, empathy or systemic consequences, but simple. Arguably there are many global examples of pressure to obediently conform to unjust but simple systems, such as the American war on womens rights to autonomy over our own bodies in the United States.
My garden is a study in adaptation to sustainable systems. My design for the garden judiciously combines a few exotics while supporting native habitat. I struggle to control invasive pasture grasses and maintain a clear path through the burgeoning configurations of my original design. If I triumph, I can access the pasture grass to thin them out and avoid ticks and brown tail moths. Do pasture grasses or brown tail moths feel either pity or obedience as they colonize and simplify systems? Does Putin think more deeply about the consequences of obedience than a brown tail moth? I would argue that amongst humans and all the non-human inhabitants of this Earth, obedience, absent compassion for the other and awareness of whole systems functionality, is the most dangerous request in the world.
In medieval Europe, obedience to authority meant subservience to the church and royal prerogatives. That was the world that brought us witch burnings to control obstreperous women, colonialism and slavery. The consequences of obedience to injustice survives and flourishes as ecocide. It is the same world the current American Republican party so fervently wants us to return to. Perhaps it isn't so difficult to understand after all. Power can be very pleasant for those in power. Separating church from state, as occurred in the Age of Enlightenment might be the ultimate foundation of democracy. That foundation is being steadily eroded from the inside out.
" ... understanding the other’s experience on the other’s terms..." That understanding is an act of will, willingness to be generous to the Other, something I believe emerges from an understanding of how systems function so all might flourish. Will we have the will to save each other so we might save ourselves? Clearly, not all have either the understanding nor the willingness to guarantee that outcome.