Twenty minutes pass (or has it been two hours?). I remember the compromise I learned during 12-hour nights of tech support. The 20-20-20 rule: Every 20 minutes, take twenty seconds and look at something twenty feet away. If only Cerner had a chime, and a wellness consultant to ring it thrice an hour, to pull me from my glazed grogg. But the story ends well — I got out of that job, and am free!! . . . to stare at a computer 12 hours a day on my own accord.
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Is Noam Chomsky a Bodhisattva?
A Bodhisattva (bow-dee-saht-vuh), in Mahāyāna Buddhism, is an individual who is capable of reaching nirvana but who instead chooses, out of great compassion, to stick around to alleviate the suffering of countless beings for however long it takes. Which may be billions of eons.
The two major Buddhist schools, Mahāyāna and Theravāda, differ in their emphasis of the bodhisattva path. Theravāda (meaning “small vehicle”), while having the option for aspirants to take the bodhisattva path, emphasizes the paths of discipleship (becoming a śrāvaka) and individual liberation (becoming an arhat). But in the Mahāyāna (meaning “large vehicle”) tradition, becoming a bodhisattva is the ideal path for all. The large Mahāyāna vehicle is a megabus to enlightenment, and the bodhisattvas don’t pull into The Heavenly Station until everybody’s on board.
Solomon Burke sings “one of us are chained, none of us are free.”
The Jewish poet and activist Emma Lazarus wrote in 1883 “until we are all free, we are none of us free.”
And Martin Luther King Jr. echoes the same words in the wake of the civil rights struggle 80 years later, “no one is free until we are all free.”
At the heart of King’s struggle for civil rights and economic justice for all was interconnectedness. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” This is the mind of the bodhisattva, seeing one’s own emancipation from suffering intrinsically tied to the emancipation of all sentient beings.
This brings me to Noam, and the two existential threats that the human race is barreling towards: Tik Tok launching their own streaming service and a Jeff Bezos presidency in 2024. Just kidding! Nuclear war and environmental catastrophe.
For the last 25 years, Chomsky has said that he much prefers his other interests to being the workhorse of the left, giving answers like these when asked how he carries on in activism: “to tell you the truth, if the world would go away, I could think of a lot of things I'd much rather do than be involved in political activism. I don't particularly enjoy it. I don’t like talking to big groups, I certainly don’t like to go to jail, I hate being maced, demonstrations I can’t stand, and so on.”
But the state of the world is too horrific to ignore, so the 92-year old goes on giving interviews and lectures for hours every day. And the lecture has become much the same in recent months, varying only slightly as headlines roll in. Nukes and environmental catastrophe are grave concerns. There are straight-forward, simple solutions, some with near universal international agreement (such as establishing a Nuclear-Free Zone in the Middle East, which the US unilaterally opposes). Yet we are running in the opposite direction.
Needless to say, now is a great time to find your inner bodhisattva and get involved! Massive and sustained popular movements affect meaningful change, forcing conversations like systematic racism and police funding into the mainstream. Our president is now held accountable to challenge climate change as a major threat thanks to the long-standing dedication of writers and investigative journalists, naturalists and botanists, GreenPeace ships and scientists. Biden is obliged to address systematic racism and can be held accountable to turn words into meaningful change, thanks to the massive popular movement of BLM and all the lifelong activists, musicians, teachers, and so many others.
What I believe makes Chomsky eligible to apply for bodhisattva-hood is his willingness to put aside his own bliss and work towards mitigating the possible doom of future generations. Still, bodhisattvas develop the six perfections of generosity, morality, patience, diligence, concentration, and wisdom, so the bodhisattva path can look many ways, both within as well as outside of politics. Developing these qualities would lead to as many various expressions of compassion as there are individuals; I just picked one individual who has my heart *cue that disco classic, I’ve Got a Crush on a Bodhisattva*.
So can a bodhisattva be a Republican? Can a bodhisattva be a Democrat? Or a libertarian (don’t get me started)? How do we know our efforts are of the proper disposition to relieve suffering? Chomsky names nuclear weapons and climate change as the threats of our time, but even if we launch every nuke to Pluto and chill out the earth, we would have new (and age-old) issues to work on. Billions of eons.
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I want to give the majority of this month’s bandwidth to a condensed version of what Chomsky considers a very important analysis for the survival of humanity — the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ annual Doomsday Clock. I know you’re probably feeling pretty worried right about now, but don’t fret; dosha talk will resume next month.
The Doomsday Clock was started in the wake of the United States dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Every year, their team of nuclear technology experts and climate scientists (including 13 Nobel Laureates) adjusts the Doomsday Clock to reflect how close we are to destroying civilization and rendering earth uninhabitable.
The clock was set at seven minutes to midnight at its inception in 1947. When the Cold War ended and the US and the USSR signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty to weaken each country’s nuclear arms arsenals, the clock was at its furthest, 17 minutes to midnight.
Last year, the team abandoned minutes and moved to seconds — 100 seconds to midnight. This year, the clock remains at 100 seconds to midnight.
I’ve reduced the report to about a fourth of its original length. If you’d like to read the full report instead of my abridged version, your wish is my command.
And if you just want the whole thing in one big sentence, well fine: The widespread dysfunctioning of today’s information ecosystem is a threat multiplier that vastly complicates society’s ability to address the threats of nuclear weapons, which many countries continue developing, and climate change, which we saw many horrible signs of in 2020, not to mention that world leaders need to cooperate because COVID showed how inadequate leadership is at cooperating, communicating, taking responsibility, or protecting its citizens when a known threat is on the horizon.
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 2021 Doomsday clock
This is your COVID wake-up call: It is 100 seconds to midnight
“Humanity continues to suffer as the COVID-19 pandemic spreads around the world. In 2020 alone, this novel disease killed 1.7 million people and sickened at least 70 million more. The pandemic revealed just how unprepared and unwilling countries and the international system are to handle global emergencies properly. In this time of genuine crisis, governments too often abdicated responsibility, ignored scientific advice, did not cooperate or communicate effectively, and consequently failed to protect the health and welfare of their citizens.
As a result, many hundreds of thousands of human beings died needlessly.
Though lethal on a massive scale, this particular pandemic is not an existential threat... Still, the pandemic serves as a historic wake-up call, a vivid illustration that national governments and international organizations are unprepared to manage nuclear weapons and climate change, which currently pose existential threats to humanity, or the other dangers—including more virulent pandemics and next-generation warfare—that could threaten civilization in the near future.”
On misinformation (the ‘threat multiplier’): “[T]he existential threats of nuclear weapons and climate change have intensified in recent years because of a threat multiplier: the continuing corruption of the information ecosphere on which democracy and public decision-making depend. Here, again, the COVID-19 pandemic is a wake-up call. False and misleading information disseminated over the internet—misrepresentation of COVID-19’s seriousness, promotion of false cures, politicization of low-cost protective measures such as face masks—created social chaos in many countries and led to unnecessary death. This wanton disregard for science and the large-scale embrace of conspiratorial nonsense—often driven by political figures and partisan media—undermined the ability of responsible national and global leaders to protect the security of their citizens. False conspiracy theories about a “stolen” presidential election led to rioting that resulted in the death of five people and the first hostile occupation of the US Capitol since 1814.”
“The widespread dysfunction in today’s information ecosystem is a threat multiplier that vastly complicates society’s ability to address major challenges,” shown by pandemic. “The need for deep thinking and careful, effective action to counter the effects of internet-enabled disinformation has never been clearer.”
On the nuclear threat: “In the past year, countries with nuclear weapons continued to spend vast sums on nuclear modernization programs, even as they allowed proven risk-reduction achievements in arms control and diplomacy to wither or die. Nuclear weapons and weapons-delivery platforms capable of carrying either nuclear or conventional warheads continued to proliferate, while destabilizing “advances” in the space and cyber realms, in hypersonic missiles, and in missile defenses continued. Governments in the United States, Russia, and other countries appear to consider nuclear weapons more-and-more usable, increasing the risks of their actual use. There continues to be an extraordinary disregard for the potential of an accidental nuclear war, even as well-documented examples of frighteningly close calls have emerged.”
On signs of climate change in 2020 (aside from it being tied with 2016 for the warmest year on record): “In 2020, the impacts of continuing climate change were underscored in extreme and damaging ways. Portions of North America and Australia suffered massive wildfires, and a clear signal of human-caused climate change was evident in the frequency of powerful tropical cyclones and the heavier rainfall they produced. Meanwhile, evidence mounted that sea level rise is accelerating, and the effects of the oceans growing warmer and more acidic because of carbon dioxide absorption were clear in many marine ecosystems, as was most dramatically illustrated by the ongoing destruction of coral reefs.”
The paper goes on, reporting that demand for fossil-based power has declined while demand for renewable power has risen. The question is whether the rate we are changing is quick enough to prevent environmental collapse, and the answer is no. Fossil fuel emissions are projected to grow two percent per year over this critical decade, where we know they must decrease to meet temperature commitments of the Paris Agreement.
And “to what extent will economic stimulus spending aimed at ending the coronavirus economic slowdown be directed toward efficient green infrastructure and low-carbon industries?” So far we’ve seen among 20 developed nations a spending ratio of 3/2 favoring fossil-fuels.
COVID as a wake-up call: “The pandemic is not a unique departure from a secure reality. It is a harbinger, an unmistakable signal that much worse will come if leaders and institutions do not enact wide-ranging reforms to forestall and minimize future pandemics, to restore the primacy of science-based policies, and to reduce the possibility of nuclear war and the impacts of climate change.”
What to do?
World leaders “must do a far better job countering disinformation, heeding science, and cooperating to diminish global risks.”
Biden “can show leadership by reducing US reliance on nuclear weapons via limits on their roles, missions, and platforms, and by decreasing budgets accordingly. The United States should declare its commitment to no-first-use of nuclear weapons and persuade allies and rivals to agree that no-first-use is a step toward security and stability. President Biden should banish the fear that a single person would have the power to end civilization by eliminating his own and future US presidents’ sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. He should work to persuade other countries with nuclear weapons to put in place similar barriers.”
Leaders in governments and the private sector “can emphasize COVID-recovery investments that strongly favor climate mitigation and adaptation objectives across all economic sectors and address the full range of potential greenhouse gas emission reductions. This includes capital investments in urban development, agriculture, transport, heavy industry, buildings and appliances, and electric power.” Also, cooperate to find ethical ways to combat internet misinformation, provide aid for developing nations for cleaner energy (part of the Paris Agreement), and allow science-based US officials to engage with and educate the public
Citizens worldwide “can and should organize and demand—through public protests, at ballot boxes, and in other creative ways—that their governments reorder their priorities and cooperate domestically and internationally to reduce the risk of nuclear war, climate change, and other global disasters, including pandemic disease.”
What I’m Consuming
Things watched
Documentaries by Australian journalist and documentarian John Pilger. The Coming War on China looks at US hostility toward China, and America’s dark past of testing nuclear weapons and nuclear radiation effects on the native islander population of the Marshall Islands from 1946-1958. The War You Don’t See looks at how American and British media amplified false claims from WMDs to anthrax, and how media provided propaganda to justify our unjustifiable invasion of Iraq in 2003.
My editor says if I’m listing everything, I ought to include Kung Fu Panda 1 and 2. KFP 1 gets a 7/10, while the sequel gets 5/10. Tune in next month for my review of Kung Fu Panda 3!
Things read
Reading Chomsky’s “For Reasons of State,” his analysis of the Pentagon Papers. Long story short, the US wanted to expand their economy and install leaders in Vietnam that would be sympathetic to US business interests, and America was willing to commit decades of war crimes and drop millions of tons of bombs that targeted farms, dams, and other infrastructure and left up to three million Vietnamese dead. Much was done in secret from both the American public and the US Congress (including further wars into Laos and Cambodia), because the government realized people knowing about atrocities would lead to massive unrest and opposition. Daniel Ellsberg leaking the internal government documents helped an informed public oppose an unjust war, which helped bring it to an end.
I loved this Cicely Tyson interview, three weeks before her death, on dating Miles Davis, getting married in Bill Cosby’s house, and her advice for a full life.
From Time Magazine, “Could Amsterdam’s New Economic Theory Replace Capitalism?” The piece proposes that cities need to move toward a model that provides basic standards of living for all (housing, healthcare, etc) while staying within environmentally acceptable means. Called the “Doughnut model.” Perhaps reframing issues will help us aim to solve them? We’ll see how cities taking it on, from Amsterdam and Brussels to Portland and Austin, fare.
Forbes makes space accessible: On what we know about spacerock ‘Oumuamua and why it probably wasn’t an alien spacecraft.
Things heard
“Trouble” by banjo-pickin’ Virgil Anderson, “Cool Blue Reason” by Cake, and System of a Down’s whole Toxicity album. So so good.
Thanks for reading, with love,
Luke