Letter To An American Friend

Letter To An American Friend

You said that you imagine I am a little in love with what you called, “coffee-shop intellectualism” and I was wrong to blame you. You correctly noted before that you know only what I have told you about myself. I must have given you that impression through my ineptness at communicating the things that are important to me. Allow me to struggle through an attempt to explain my values a little more clearly.

Coffee-shops are places where people congregate to show off their understanding of the Philosophies of men who have concerned themselves with questions of such magnitudes as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, do I or do I not exist, and most dangerously: here is the proof that nothing we do is of any consequence because everything is relative, God is dead, and we will all end up as soot in the universe’s ashtray one day anyhow. These are some of the playpens and Frankensteins of our Great Western Intellectuals. I have a very clear understanding of the fact that Philosophy and the Intellect have long been used to justify nihilism, mass-murder and the right of the stronger and that they have contributed little of integrity or genuine virtue to justify themselves. I am also aware that there has not been a modern philosopher with the virtue or generosity of Christ, or as much courage as any revolutionary, for how many men of the Western Intellectual Tradition have been willing to die for their ideals? How could I put much stock then in these “coffee-shop intellectuals?” On the contrary they strike me to my core with anger and dread, because I have seen, in history and first hand, how their arrogance has “justified,”-isn’t this the intellectuals blessing?- so many bloody gallows and guillotines. Intellectuals try to be guided by their minds alone and the mind has as its first goal, the subjugation of the soul and the heart. This is the object then of the “coffee-shop intellectual” and it is very far from my own object.

You have mentioned several times to me a deep concern for the immortal and perhaps you have read in my reticence to comment on this subject myself, a disrespect for this kind of spirituality. Perhaps this also informed your picture of me as a disciple of the intellect. I am not so much as skeptical of mysticism or spirituality, but rather I distrust my maturity on the subject. The issue I have with the afterlife as it pertains to man is that it allows for a person to be saved, to meet a divine grace and live in eternal satisfaction and peace, while others are left behind to continue their suffering, their hell on earth. It provides I think, for a selfish sense of entitlement. I am of the belief that you earn what you have paid in suffering on this world. It is therefore impossible I think, for myself or anyone else whose comfort and ease of life comes from the suffering of people in the third world, to consider immortality at all without an arrogance that is incomprehensible. All of us, religious or atheists flush our toilets thoughtlessly with water that is cleaner than what two thirds of the world gives their children to drink. Many of the plastic disposable goods we buy from Asia, are made in the factories that pollute the water supplies there. The sneakers we buy our kids so that they can comfortably play basketball, are made by child slaves in a country not that far away. The corn and coffee that we consume is also produced with labor that is essentially slave labor. How can any conscious person with responsibility for this situation contemplate taking God’s hand? How can we, without a foolish and blind self-righteousness, concern ourselves at all with connecting to God, until we have connected first with the suffering that our ignorance has caused. God doesn’t need you; the resources of your mind, the generosity of your heart, or the unity of your soul. The ancient spirit of human consciousness here on Earth needs those things.

The people who have the heart for a task such as this, almost always lack the discipline of the intelligence, which makes for a sadly inept attempt. People who have labored to sharpen their intelligence too often silence their heart and soul in the process and therefore lose the ambition for virtue and integrity that they were born with. And so I say that anyone who thinks that by laboring hard enough on this earth, they can earn a place in heaven beside God is wrong. My bet is on the fact that if your happiness and your joy has come, as it has, from the ever-increasing suffering of the Third World, than you have not done enough. Not for them and not for God. I have said before, what one has deserved is evident in the greatness which one has suffered, at least until such a time as how one suffers is a product of the decisions one has chosen to make, rather than where one is born.
Please don’t misunderstand me. It is not that I don’t believe in an afterlife, it’s just not a place I think I could ever deserve. It is not a seat I am willing to take. I’d rather stand with those left behind. I hope that, your own beliefs aside, you would agree for the present that it is better for a person to consider with their days how to live virtuously and affect in a meaningful way, the profound suffering of our time, than how to contemplate ones chances at an eternal state of grace.

Our lives in the end, turn out to be rather shorter than we expected they would be, and so it is important for us to decide what it is that we want to achieve with them. Some people decide to earn as much money as possible, so that they can enjoy and give their children the freedom to travel, enjoy leisure, and live anyway they can imagine. Some people decide to spend their lives making the world a more fair and equal place. They raise money for the homeless, help lessen cruelty to animals, and lobby for political reforms. Some people decide to serve God in the hopes of finding peace, well-being, virtue and salvation. Many other people spend their lives essentially learning crafts that improve the quality of our leisure time such as Medicine, Law, Psychology, Culinary, Architecture, Organic Farming, Sports and most of the Fine Arts. They set out to learn these crafts, which they sometimes mislabel as arts, to advance them, and teach them to others. As the crafts are improved and advanced it is necessary, it seems, for the craftsmen to specialize, as there is too much information for anyone to learn all of it.

All of these options of how to spend our short lives seem reasonable or at least understandable to me; and so I ask, what of them is truly the most essential? Which of them am I willing to dedicate my own life to? After much consideration, it seems to me that the only thing which is of truly essential importance is decreasing human suffering on Earth. What did you contribute to ending human suffering? I believe that every person can and must be judged with this as the sole criteria.
I have struggled for sometime with how to apply this criteria to my own life. If you focus on ending starvation by giving people food, but fail to change the system which has forced them into poverty in the first place, then it seems like your efforts have been futile in any lasting or meaningful sense. I have broken the problem down into two parts:

1.) Physical Suffering
Physical suffering is described as war, torture, bondage, starvation, disease and murder. There has never been a time in human history when it would be as easy to solve these problems, to end them if they were an international priority, as it is today. Because of the ease, it must be done, even though this is really only patching the problem rather than solving the bigger problem which is causing the physical suffering in the first place. The best way for an individual to contribute to solving this simple problem is to send large sums of money, at least 5% of your earnings, to one of the few organizations that can efficiently move food, medicine, and liberators to these people. (Two such organizations are OXFAM and Doctors Without Borders.) This sum of money may seem like an impossible burden to the lower middle-class, but if we take the money out monthly from our budgets as though it were a mortgage or a credit debt, and we forgo expenses that we really don’t need, I think we will find that there is enough fat even in the lower middle-class for such a self-imposed tax.

2.) Non- Physical Suffering
Secondly there is Non-Physical Suffering where falls spiritual, emotional, and intellectual suffering. People do not die from Non-Physical Suffering, they kill instead. This is the First-World disease, whereas physical suffering is, with noteworthy exceptions, a Third World Disease. We, as Americans lag behind every other First World Nation in the Charitable Contributions we make and yet we consume more resources and spend more money on consumer goods. We are therefore the Great Oppressors of the world and it is our ignorance, apathy dishonesty and greed that fertilizes and nourishes all forms of physical suffering. Even if we as individuals are opposed to the suffering our nation causes, we reap the benefits and advantages of that suffering in almost every aspect of our comfortable daily lives. But how fortunate we are to be in precisely the right place and at the right time, to change all of this.

What must we do? First, we must, as I mentioned previously, send large sums of money, but this is the easy first step. The second step is much more difficult: we must earn Integrity. We must be honest and look at the crimes and excesses we commit ourselves, before we blame the problems of the world on the opposing political party. This honesty must be able to admit how little we have done up to this point and how little our failures have bothered us. It is a much simpler thing to reform yourself than to try to change others and if you are honest you will see that the actions that separate you from the people that you judge are immeasurably small in any meaningful, concrete way. In addition to honest, we must also be wise. I believe that it is unwise for instance to dedicate money and effort to the issue of abortion-rights. Whether you are pro-choice or pro-life, a wise person would realize that deciding this issue is a luxury that we as a society can afford only after the hundreds of thousands of children that painfully die of starvation in the world, have enough to eat. It would also be wise to lay aside other political issues which are essentially local and which do not effect the profound physical suffering we have mentioned. For instance we should lay aside the issue of equal-employment, marriage, and anti-discrimination laws for homosexuals until we make it illegal for them to be imprisoned, tortured and murdered in other parts of the world. We should demand that our government grant asylum rights to people in danger, before we worry about their insurance benefits. Wisdom, at least in part, is the ability to make very difficult decisions about what should have priority over something else. I believe that murder, torture, war, bondage, starvation and disease should have priority above everything else.

In addition to honesty and wisdom, we must also seek to acquire for ourselves a sense of justice, generosity, and intelligence. Justice will help us to see what we posses in our lives which we have no right to, it will help us to let go of our excesses and give the materials of them to people more deserving. It will help us to weigh what we take from the world against what we have given. If we acquire generosity, it will bring us joy to give away the things in our lives which we cherish, to people for whom it may make a difference between survival and a painful death. Intelligence we must acquire so that we will not be fooled by a false victory or sense of accomplishment. Intelligence helps us to know what must be done and how it must be done; it provides our heart with the fire and justification to push forward.

Finally we must find physical strength and courage, not so that we may be soldiers and fight a righteous war, but so that we can be heros and defend those who are too weak and oppressed to stand or survive without our defense. It is wrong for people to condemn all war, especially for people such as ourselves who have never had to hide our children in attics, or watch our neighbors kidnaped by vicious soldiers in the night. It is wrong to condemn defending innocent people when they are begging for help, just as it is wrong not to defend a child from an abuser.
It is in this way that I believe we must act, if we are ever to change anything meaningful, if we are ever to effect the horrible condition of suffering in the world. People often talk about pursuing a oneness with God, or with the earth, or sometimes with The Collective Unconscious of the Universe. I do not yet see the fault of abandoning these abstractions which cannot be simply explained and strive for the course of oneness with a divinely human integrity made from the best fibers contributed from our hearts our minds and our souls, which for themselves whisper this demand silently every day of our lives.

-S.A.B