Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen: Imus and Responsibility

Before I begin I want to do a brief eulogy for Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I was gonna do a long one, but there have been too many already. So I’ll just say that his book Cat’s Cradle was one of my own stepping-stones towards Buddhism. Those of you who’ve read it — and if you haven’t, you should — will recall the fictional religion of Bokononism that appears in the novel. Bokononism starts off from the promise Bokonon makes to his followers that, “All the true things I’m about to tell you are out and out lies.”

Unlike other religious leaders, Vonnegut’s character Bokonon didn’t expect his followers to have faith that the impossible things written in his book actually did happen or that he had any kind of special knowledge they did not possess. This is very much like the Buddhist attitude. It does not attach any importance to believing in the literal truth of its scriptures nor are its teachers held up as examples of divinely inspired beings. I first encountered the idea that something could be true without being literally factual in Vonnegut’s books. When I found that Buddhism had the same attitude I was pretty much sold.

ANYWAY, today I wanted to write about another topic that’s been written about way too much lately — Don Imus’ comments about the Rutger’s women’s basketball team. Actually I couldn’t give two shits about Imus and his comments. I haven’t listened to him since Seventh grade. But what’s happening to him is a little like what’s been happening to me. Although I’m not calling anyone a nappy headed ho. I lived in Africa at just the time my…. um… manhood was beginning to awaken, so the fine women on that team are my idea of smokin’ hot. Nor am I getting suspended or anything for the stuff I say. But, a bit like Imus, I am encountering the idea that, as a public figure (who me?) my audience — at least some of them anyway — get hoppin’ mad when I say stuff they don’t approve of.

Mostly this comes from disgruntled wanna-be Buddhists who think I should write more like their idea of what Buddhist teachers are supposed to write like. I usually just tell people like that to quit reading me and go read stuff by guys who write the way they think Buddhist teachers ought to. There’s plenty of namby-pamby crap out there. But after the Imus thing happened I started thinking about why it is that we demand that writers and public figures should write and speak in certain approved ways.

When you really look into it writing is a fairly new thing. Yeah, it’s been around for something like five or six thousand years. But human beings have been around for something like 130,000 years. That means that for about 125,000 of those years nobody anywhere ever wrote anything down. Just because we only know 5000 years of our collective history doesn’t mean we’re not carrying the other 125,000 years — and perhaps far, far more — with us, mostly buried in the deep recesses of our brains where conscious thought never dares venture.

When writing first emerged only very, very important things were committed to paper and stone. Tellingly, the very earliest forms of writing were receipts. But after that people started wanting to write down the very most important philosophical and scientific stuff they thought of. Sometimes they pretended that stuff was told to them by God. Maybe they really believed it was. They were cavemen after all.

When you think about it, writing must have seemed like a really mind blowing thing when it first got started. Just by making abstract marks on a rock or a leaf or whatever, two or more people who understood the system could read each other’s minds. The fact that not many people could do this made the ones who could seem almost divine. Literature of any kind must have seemed sacred. Some of us still revere those oldest books as something magical.

But the magic of those ancient books really wasn’t anything supernatural. It was due to the fact that the written word was so incredibly precious that the folks who wrote stuff did so very, very carefully. They were, in a sense, practicing a very extreme form of what we now call journalistic responsibility. Writers weren’t just expressing themselves. They were expressing the core ideas of their communities. As literacy increased and more books were produced by more people the air of sacredness accorded literature as a whole and the necessity of community restraints upon it gradually wore off. Though even now there are places where you can still get killed for writing something your community objects to. When film, TV and radio appeared there again was a sense that these forms of communication were too powerful to be left unsupervised by the community at large. So we had the Hays Commission censors, the FCC, the MPAA and all the rest. The airwaves are still considered to be public spaces. And so when Don Imus or whoever says something people don’t like on what they consider “their” airwaves, the shit hits the fan.

But as we all know, the whole idea of any sort of community restraints on what people say has gone right out the window in the age of the Internet. Nothing is sacred here at all. But this doesn’t mean we don’t still hold illusions that it ought to be. 125,000 years of thinking in a particular way about things doesn’t just vanish in a decade or so.

The thing about people telling Imus that he shouldn’t say “nappy headed” or telling me I oughtn’t to say certain things in the context of a piece of Buddhist writing seems to turn on the idea that public figures have a duty to be responsible about what they say lest they influence others. There seems to be some kind of vague fear that if Imus says “nappy headed hos” or I say something somebody out there regards as improper, then somebody out there may think racism or whatever is OK, and that person will get his buddies together and lynch someone. Or something like that. It’s hard to say exactly what the fear is.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from writing and speaking it’s that there is not a single thing you can say that cannot be misinterpreted. Charles Manson thought the message of the Beatles’ White Album was to start a race war. Should the Beatles have refrained from recording Obla-di Obla-da just because some nutcase might take it the wrong way? Furthermore, there are always people out there who want to argue or criticize or complain about what you say no matter what it is. All you can do as a writer or speaker or artist is to avoid deliberately attempting to fan people’s anger and hatred and avoid deliberately trying to incite violence.

In some sense, though, I can understand why people make these demands on public figures. I agree that public figures have a special obligation to be responsible. But here’s the thing. We live in a time when anyone can say anything they please and potentially reach a massive audience. Anyone can be a public figure. Everyone with an Internet connection is potentially a celebrity. As a species, human beings can no longer afford to allow the defense that because an influential person says it’s OK, then we can do whatever he says — or whatever we think he said — without being in any way responsible for that action. We have to stop accepting that lame-ass excuse from anyone anywhere under any circumstances — even from ourselves. We should have been convinced of that after World War II, but not enough of us have learned the lesson yet.

The single most vital thing that needs to happen to insure our survival as a species is for each of us to learn to take responsibility for ourselves. Yet the ability to be responsible is still seriously lacking. Can you believe there are people out there in Internetland who even want me to take responsibility for them?

I won’t. I couldn’t even if I wanted to. No matter what Imus says or what I say, you alone are responsible for how you react to it. And as the collective noise of humanity grows louder by the minute there’s gonna be plenty more to react to in the future. If we cannot learn to accept responsibility for what we do no matter what we hear from the media we’re in a whole big mess of trouble.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and the forthcoming Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

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