[MD] understanding pattern

[MarshaV]

Greetings,

I particularly like this sentence from below:  "There is a growing consensus that we may understand ourselves and our world more deeply and fully if we conceive of things in terms of interconnected patterns of relationships rather than as reified entities existing somehow independently of their own developmental history, their internally differentiated processes or their enabling conditions."

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"It is no small task to understand this vast, variegated world we humans have carved out for ourselves on this small planet. How does one know where to begin, what to interrogate, and to what end? Events, however, have a way of imposing themselves. As the Cold War melts down and bitter ethnic and religious conflicts heat up the world overi , as endless images of death and violence flash daily across the globe, the multiple faces of human evil and suffering stare steadfastly into our own, intimating, we fear, an inescapably inhumane reality. Our task then, our moral imperative, is as urgent today as it was when Albert Camus (1971, 11) expressed it nearly fifty years ago, just as many millions of murders ago: “One might think that a period which, within fifty years, uproots, enslaves, or kills seventy million human beings, should only, and forthwith, be condemned. But its guilt must also be understood.” This essay is an attempt to take this challenge seriously, an attempt to understand the awful dynamics of human-inflicted suffering, of “man's inhumanity to man” in traditional parlance, of—in a word—evil. Human beings make war and kill each other in a way that no other species does, that no other species could, that no other species would. Somehow, we must make sense of it all. We must be able to discern some pattern, some common dynamic, behind behaviors that are repeated so terribly often, in so many times, in so many places. As Camus suggests, such an understanding—however repugnant its details, however unpleasant its conclusions—is required to even begin preventing them. 

"Understanding, however, is not only what we require, it is also what we must interrogate. For, we shall see, it is understanding itself, imperfect, wrong-headed understanding of our human condition, that lies deeply and malignantly behind these unholy dynamics of human evil. It is this mistaken understanding of ourselves—as individuals, as members of social groups, and as a contingent, historical species—that we must address. We must understand not only the passions that drive men to evil but the confusion over our condition that makes such evil possible.ii The tenacity and pervasiveness of these tragic strains in the human condition—our “fallen state” as it were—have been recognized and addressed by nearly all religious traditions. In seeking to understand these darker sides of human life, however, we shall draw upon the conceptual resources of only one such tradition, Indian Buddhism,iii in dialogue with comparable areas of inquiry from the biological and social sciences. As with any dialogue, we appeal to no external or superordinate authority; it is the cogency of the arguments that count, their compelling and persuasive power, whatever their provenance.

"This dialogue is only possible because recent developments in Western thought and science have begun to find common ground with traditional Buddhist perspectives on the human condition, including the underlying conditions of human evil. There is a growing consensus that we may understand ourselves and our world more deeply and fully if we conceive of things in terms of interconnected patterns of relationships rather than as reified entities existing somehow independently of their own developmental history, their internally differentiated processes or their enabling conditions. There exists, that is, an increasing recognition that thinking in terms of unchanging essences, entities and identities deeply misconstrues the human condition—a misunderstanding that inadvertently leads to, rather than alleviates, human evil and suffering.

"Although expressed differently in various fields, the relationship between our misunderstanding of the human condition and its causal influences upon evil and suffering have been articulated exceptionally clearly, directly and comprehensively in the principles of classical Buddhist thought, which provide the conceptual framework for this essay: 

     1. that all “conditioned phenomena” (saüskçta-dharma) are radically dependent (pratītya-samutpāda) and hence lack any fixed or unchanging “essence” (svabhāva); 

     2. that what we are, rather, are assemblages of dynamic yet wholly conditioned “constructs” (saüskāra) that have been painstakingly carved out (upādāna) of these contingent dependent relationships; 

     3. that we tend to construe these assembled constructs as substantial “selves” or fixed identities (ātman); 
     
     4. that in our efforts to fashion and secure such an “identity” we actively ignore and attempt to counteract its contingent, constructed nature; and, finally, 

     5. that these efforts effectively channel human activities (karma) into the repetitive behavioral patterns that actually bring about more evil and suffering. 

"These activities, in short, represent misguided and futile efforts to deny our dependence, to counteract our impermanence and to attain lasting security for this putative, substantial “self”—attempts, as the Buddhists would say, to “turn reality on its head.”  While the basic ideas of essencelessness, contingency and construction of identity are straightforward enough, it requires considerable thought—and sufficient specifics—to appreciate the profound implications these have for our understanding of human life. We shall therefore draw upon various Western sciences for many of the details to support and flesh out this perspective, attaining in the process, we hope, a more compelling understanding of the dynamics of human evil than either the Buddhists or the sciences have yet to articulate on their own." 
 
 
     (William S. Waldron,'Common Ground, Common Cause: Buddhism and 
        Science on the Afflictions of Self-Identity')