Chapter 2: Common Ground

This chapter: about 1,870 words, roughly 7 pages at 280 words a page. Updated whenever the site is regenerated.

Imagine looking into a stranger’s face until it stops being something you’re looking at and becomes a place somebody is looking out of. Don’t try to add anything on. Just stay with the face, and see what comes.

If I stay there long enough, here’s what comes first for me—not a conclusion, but a recognition:

There’s someone there. This is real from the inside, the way I am.

Now notice what happens to their wellbeing while that stays in view. For me, it starts to register. Not necessarily as affection, but as something I can’t treat as nothing. Using them for my own ends feels wrong, in a way I didn’t have to be taught.

Call this being turned toward them. Notice whether it requires any stories to maintain, or if there’s something natural about it.

From this place, try to wish them harm. For me it can’t be done. Something has to go out of view first, or be covered over: I must turn away from that perception—usually by adding a story about them and what they are, even if I’m still looking them in the eye. Accounts of atrocity return again and again to the same preparation: the hood, the number instead of the name, the word for vermin.

Not everyone you pass is in view in this sense, but that doesn’t make it contempt. The hundred people around you in an airport are in the background; if one of them dropped a bag and started crying, they’d come into view, and you’d feel the pull. Turning away is keeping someone out of view when they’d come forward, because their reality would otherwise place a claim on you.

Out of view doesn’t mean out of sight. A torturer has his victim in plain sight, and the cruelest watch the face closely. What they’ve turned from isn’t the person’s presence. It’s his claim: that the one looking out of that face counts the way they do. That’s the only sense of “in view” I’ll use, and it’s the sense contempt was using all along, when it spoke to the one who’s in there to tell him nobody is. That makes part of this a definition, and I’ll own it. What isn’t a definition is what you checked: that your wrong needed a story, and your decency didn’t. The torturer’s turn is the one I make, smaller, to feel okay cheating on a test.

Now put your enemy’s face there instead (if it’s someone who abused you, pick another), and try for the same recognition of sameness. If it won’t come, notice what arrives in its place, and how fast. For me the story is there before the face is. That’s the turning away, live.

If awareness were neutral between care and harm, why would harming someone require turning away from it? Why couldn’t cruelty proceed in full, undivided awareness? My own direct experience is that care belongs to awareness itself, and that’s also the simplest explanation I can find. That care is what I’ll call the light: what I turn from to cause harm, and what anyone is turned toward when they aren’t turned away, in themselves and in everyone else. It’s all the word will mean.

Turning away takes upkeep, at least until it’s practiced enough to run by itself. A grudge has to be fed: the reasons rehearsed, the case kept open, their face kept out of view. Being turned toward someone takes nothing like that. And when a grudge finally drops, it doesn’t feel like starting a new effort. It feels like setting something down. If turning away were the mind at rest, I’d expect it the other way around. So darkness is not an equal and opposite force. As I read it, it’s what’s there when awareness turns away from its own nature.

Now widen it. Put the face of someone you love there. Then the stranger again. Then an animal you know, and then one you don’t. Notice whether the recognition has an edge, a place where it stops and what’s in front of you turns into stuff. For me it doesn’t stop at people. It only gets fainter.

Here’s a check that needs no metaphysics. Somebody cuts down a tree that has stood for a thousand years, for fun. Somebody takes a hammer to a stone arch that took ten thousand years to form, for the pleasure of watching it fall. Notice what you feel, and whether it arrives before any story about who was deprived. The tree has no conscience and the arch has no inside. Whatever you’re registering, see whether it lands in the place where the violation of a person lands. If it doesn’t, take what follows as my report.

When I look most deeply into what I am, I find life. Not a thing I have; what’s doing the looking. Whatever is looking out of your eyes right now is alive, and it’s the same kind of thing that looked out of the stranger’s. That is what I mean by seeing myself in others, and I mean it literally. Not that he is like me. Look for what would tell the two apart: not the faces, the histories, the stories, but what’s doing the looking. I can’t find anything.

And, as far as I can tell, life naturally wants to serve life. That’s what you felt when the stranger’s wellbeing started to register without your deciding it should. Nothing was added to make that happen. It’s what’s there when nothing is in the way, and with nothing in the way at all, what’s there is a fierce care for everything, even beyond the things I’d normally call “alive.” Each thing has its place. A sidewalk is for walking on, and a lion eats the zebra. But there’s a way of holding the world in which it’s all just stuff, who cares, none of it matters, and this is the opposite of that. I’d call it sacred, except the word turns it into an idea, and we saw how that goes off the rails. What I mean is a perception: the one that arrived at the tree before any story did.

Nobody gets to that perception by merely thinking harder. Thinking can at most convince me that I should be oriented this way, and then I’m holding an idea again; ask almost anyone whether they’re trying to serve life and they’ll say of course. The orienting itself happens deeper than the intellect, and staying oriented takes a patience and honesty that no book can hand you.

It also explains how the knowledge in Chapter 1’s trap could be common—not merely shared, but something each of us can count on the other already knowing. If what’s looking out of us has nothing to differ by, then to know this in yourself is already to know it in them, and to know that they know it in you, and so on. If that’s right, the knowledge is exactly common; if not, it’s close enough for the trap to work. Either way the trap needs it. Otherwise, there would be no violation to recognize, no hypocrisy to expose, no taunt to make land. Darkness can communicate only by borrowing the light as common ground.

To wield contempt, we have to already know that it’s evil, and that its target is redeemable: the verdict was aimed at pushing them further from the light, and nobody can be pushed from a place they aren’t in. And for the message to sting, they had to read it as evil, not as harshness. So it wasn’t the good kind of darkness I told myself it was in Chapter 1. Harshness alone would have landed like the second stranger’s correction, and left my enemy a way back. Mine told him the door was closed.

Contempt is evil. That’s not a value judgment.

There is one kind of evil, and it’s the turn. By evil I don’t mean damage. Damage can be an accident. I mean the not-seeing that licenses it, and every harm done while the people it touches are held out of view has it in it. Check it against the cases you’d already use the word for; I haven’t found a second kind. It was never a thing some people have. It’s the turn itself.

It needn’t be big. Watch what cutting in line does to you. The cost is thirty seconds. The heat is out of all proportion to thirty seconds, because what you’re reacting to isn’t the cost. It’s the exception: somebody put you out of view to get ahead, and let you see it. The smallest evil carries a whiff of the whole, because there’s nothing in it but the turn, and the turn is the same turn at any size. And it isn’t the damage. The friend who forgot your birthday did more damage by most accountings than the friend who made one small cutting remark, and the remark is the one you’re still thinking about a week later. Ask a soldier whether it’s wrong to desecrate an enemy’s corpse, with nobody watching. I expect a yes at once, and no answer to who’s hurt. The dead man is past damage. What the yes is tracking is the turn.

And contempt is the turn made into a message. It’s evil’s way of spreading in secret, through people who sincerely believe they’re fighting it.

Goodness is one thing too. Being turned toward, seeing yourself in others, love, goodness: all one. And since what you turn toward in yourself is what looks out of everyone, turning toward yourself and turning toward everyone are the same act. It’s only the whole thing when it includes everyone. Not because partial love is fake; it’s the seed. But love for one person at the expense of another, love that needs someone else to be worthless, isn’t love.

This is why awakening another person doesn’t mean teaching them something new. It means helping them stop turning away from what they were already using—even in their darkness—to understand you. Words can point, but the deepest reminder travels the way the contempt did: you stay turned toward them, and show openly what both of you already know. That’s the look you started with, held when it’s hardest to hold.

The question is whether we can oppose the darkness, fiercely when it takes that, without identifying the person with it—because that identification is how the darkness passes between us. And the only way to do that is by remaining unflinchingly turned toward them.

No amount of turning away ever produces a turning back. That’s the other big lie: that enough contempt, aimed well enough, will make the world better. It can frighten someone into stopping, and now and then into thinking again. But when they do turn back, it’s through the very awareness the contempt was attacking, not through the contempt. King said it: darkness cannot drive out darkness. It’s not just a slogan. The most reliable thing I know of that turns anyone back is someone who stayed turned toward them while refusing what they did. That is kindness, and it can be the harshest thing in the room.