It's very easy to devote oneself to a spiritual path at the exclusion of the world around us. Pretty much every major spiritual tradition actually encourages some level of disengagement with the world. "In the world but not of the world," is repeated in both Eastern and Western traditions. But if we are looking at spirituality as inseparable from the evolutionary process, then it demands that we actively engage in the world in order to fix the problems that have been created in the course of human development. Politics is the poster child for spiritual disengagement; it's about the hardest thing to reconcile to a path of honest spiritual inquiry, and to some degree it has become the postmodern house of religious thought. In order to reconcile these seemingly irreconcilable areas of life, we first have to examine how political thought relates to the development of consciousness.
Take the US occupation of Iraq. You have two radically incompatible schools of politico-religious thought seemingly butting up against each others' interests. I've heard numerous Americans ask how it is that any sane person could possibly blow up a car/airplane/oneself in order to murder people in the name of their god. Which is equivalent to asking how somebody could perceive the world according to a different moral structure than oneself. But let's roll the clock back a thousand years. Were the kingdoms of Europe under the direction of the Roman church doing anything different? At that time, Persia was a sophisticated center of learning and culture, but they did not worship the Christian god so they were labeled infidels by Christian Crusaders.
We are not those Crusaders, but the point is, our Western heritage is no different from the fault we find in other cultures. Tactics may differ, but tactics are determined by needs and resources -- they have nothing to do with the agenda itself. Just look at the guerilla tactics of the American Revolution. You'd be hard pressed to find an American -- including myself -- who doesn't think that was the right thing to do and who wouldn't do the same thing in the right circumstances. And that's precisely the point. What is different is the moral context from which we interpret current events.
Right now we are living in a culture that has been able to develop basically unimpeded by any outside influence for over 500 years. And to be fair to the Catholic Church, it brought a sufficient degree of unity and civilization to Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire to support the development that fostered the Renaissance. But we have to remember that the Middle East has not followed that same developmental path. While Persian culture surpassed many of the achievements of the European Renaissance hundreds of years before, Asian and European conquests interfered with the ongoing development of culture, leading actually to repeated collapse and eventual regression to an ethnocentric, tribal level of cultural development. And that's where they are today. If we look at the historical record, the sort of xenophobia and violence that we are witness to are perfectly normal in a tribal/ethnocentric society. The difference today is the capability to cause destruction and death on such a scale did not exist among the ethnocentric cultures of the past.
In other words, this is not simply a clash of ideas, political or religious. If only it were just that. This is a confrontation of of cultures that do not see eye to eye because they cannot see eye to eye; they simply see the world very differently. But we cannot invalidate the ethnocentric perspective just because it is not our own for the same reason than an adult cannot dismiss the rebelliousness of a teenager. Stages of development cannot be skipped over, and unless healthy growth is fostered, you have to accept the consequences of pathological behavior.
The only way to change the current global political scene is to find a way to allow ethnocentric cultures to develop in their own time and along their own path. Continued interference will only prevent that development from taking place and guarantee continued conflict. The cycle of arrested development must be broken in order to give them a chance to grow out of this. Take a look at other conflicts of a similar nature: Northern Ireland, the Basques -- these conflicts are dying out because new generations are growing up among different ideas and are developing the cultural consciousness beyond the need for such conflict. Just like the teenage rebelliousness, eventually you grow out of it if you're given the chance.
But that realization doesn't solve the problem. When you have people willing to travel and commit atrocities on a large scale, some mitigating strategy is necessary. But the problem we should be focusing on is not how to kill people who are willing to kill us. Rather, we should be investigating how to foster development of the cultural consciousness beyond the need for violence. And that applies to our own culture as well until we evolve the need to meet fear with violence, violence with vengeance. In the meantime, there probably needs to be some sort of containment policy in place. Coalitions of nations need to take responsibility for the growth of less developed cultures, but take a hard stance against unacceptable violence. Just like a parent supports the development of their children but does not tolerate unacceptable behavior. This applies equally to terrorism as to the US occupation of Iraq as to genocide in Darfur as Russian aggression in Chechnya, etc. We need to allow various levels of development to coexist, but enforce certain standards of acceptable behavior.
Einstein said that the solution to a problem never arises at the same level that the problem was caused. This is a perfect example. We must evolve in order to find the right solutions to global problems, and we must take impersonal responsibility. That means, we take the action necessary without serving our own egoic impulses or making ourselves servants to other egos. We need to take responsibility for our world, for our evolution, for our survival as a race. The DNA we have in common is a lot more compelling than the ideas and experiences we don't. But until we begin to look at these problems outside the egoic experience, we will keep making the same mistakes over and over again for as long as we survive them.
