Chapter 6: The Picture I Hold
This chapter: about 2,855 words, roughly 10 pages at 280 words a page. Updated whenever the site is regenerated.
Up to here, almost everything came with a check you could run. There’s one more, at the start of this chapter. What follows it doesn’t have one. It’s the picture I hold when I step back from one mind to all of them.
Bring back the stranger’s face from Chapter 2. 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.
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, before you work out who has been deprived of anything. The tree has no conscience; the arch has no inside. Yet for me, the violation reaches the same place. Something was there in its own right, and someone delighted in treating it as nothing. If it doesn’t reach that place in you, take what follows as my report.
I can’t capture that by saying I’m concerned for wellbeing. An arch has no wellbeing. Nor do I mean that everything must be left untouched: a lion eats a zebra. But the care doesn’t stop where the category “living thing” stops. The world doesn’t become disposable there.
Yet a forest can come down to meet a quarterly number, and the rest of us buy what it becomes without a second thought. What happened to the feeling at the tree?
The Deepest Form
Contempt’s deepest form is one we hardly notice: the world held as dead matter, there to be used for our benefit. That’s contempt for the world itself, the contempt the others grow out of, and it’s so common it passes for realism.
Peoples have subjugated one another for as long as there have been peoples. That isn’t new. What the modern world added was a program. In early modern Europe, Francis Bacon wrote of “enlarging the bounds of Human Empire” over nature, and Descartes hoped science would make us its “masters and possessors.”1
Power over nature isn’t what troubles me. We need food and shelter, and there’s no shame in a bridge. What troubles me is the way of seeing that grew up around that power. Nature became something we stand outside of, measure, and put to use. In time, what I can measure quietly became what exists. The part of me that recognized something sacred in a forest was told it was having a feeling. A feeling can be respected, but it gets no say over what is built.
That’s the turning away from Chapter 1, at the scale of a civilization. My enemy knew what I was doing and couldn’t prove it. Here everyone knows, and the knowing doesn’t count. A culture can keep its churches, its prayers, even its sincere believers, and still run its institutions as though nothing were sacred.
This is the pattern I meant when I said the one that gave rise to colonization still exists. A people held as a resource and a forest held as lumber are the same seeing, aimed at different things. It went furthest in Europe, which exported it by force. It runs everywhere now, India included. It runs in me.
What I say next I can’t give you a check for. In the fullest seeing I’ve known, the line between living and not-living didn’t hold. A stone was there in its own right as much as the tree beside it. As far as I can tell, mystics in nearly every tradition report the same. The sacred they find isn’t a feeling laid over the world. It’s what the world was all along, before we learned to see it as stuff.
So that’s the pattern we’re still living inside: more power to change the world than any people has ever had, and the knowing that could guide it treated as optional.
The Part That Proves
How does a whole civilization learn to treat what it knows as optional?
Contempt teaches this lesson to everyone it touches. The person on the receiving end knows exactly what happened and can’t prove any of it. So what they learn is that the part of them that knew, and couldn’t prove it, isn’t worth listening to.
I teach it to myself, too. Recall in Chapter 1 how my justifications felt more righteous than my conscience. Now picture the same thing gaining in every mind at once. What culture would it build?
One that raises the part that argues and proves as high as it can go, and quietly demotes the part that knows: across all of us, what the locker room built across ten men. That is what I see in the culture most of us were schooled in. The part that proves is honored from the first day of school, and it has earned the honor. Our faith in metrics lives here: what can be counted is what counts.
Charles Eisenstein tells the story of the Tehri Dam on India’s Bhagirathi River. It was completed in 2006 and credited with cutting carbon. It met its measured goal. What the climate credit didn’t weigh: a hundred thousand villagers displaced from ancestral land, along with their traditions, their ties and their places; the submerged ecosystems; methane from the reservoir; sediment withheld from the river downstream. Counting those, the dam may have harmed the climate it was credited with helping, as well as the people.2
It is astonishingly easy to prove that an agenda, philosophy, or ideology is good: to marshal all the evidence, convince brilliant minds, and then watch it wreak havoc. When the damage is done, often after we’ve profited, we look back and say, How were we supposed to know? But we could have known, if only we’d looked at what we were hiding from ourselves instead of trusting our calculations alone.
The part that proves can be pointed anywhere. Even when it’s pointed away from goodness, cut loose from the part that knows, it can prove that it isn’t. And the brighter the mind, the better the trap it can build: something the whole world admires, its builder included.
The industries that pollute rivers, cut down forests and strip-mine mountains benefit from the view that the world is lifeless stuff. Is that because their CEOs got together and published a memo? Or is it enforced, through social norms, far beyond their boundaries? Nobody designed it. Everyone gets something from it, and that’s enough.
What do I get from it? As long as the part that knows is only a feeling, I never have to hear what it knows about me: what my money is doing, what I buy, where my work goes once it leaves my desk. So we have relegated it to the spiritual, where it can be safely locked away. Part of us knows that if we opened that box, we would be forced to confront our own part in what’s wrong with the world. Religion is no shelter: a creed can stand in for the part that knows as easily as a theory can.
A culture that trusts only what can be proven also leaves the field to the harm designed to leave no record. Contempt is that harm. Most of what we now recognize as evil was once respectable. Plenty of it still gets a pass: greed gets praised as ambition. But contempt is the one we still praise as goodness itself, as what a good person is supposed to feel toward bad people. And that’s why the others are so hard to stamp out: we fight every one of them with it.
The Living World
How can almost none of us be monsters, and the world still be tearing itself apart and eating the biosphere it stands on? It doesn’t take monsters. It takes the background hum: the quiet contempt that can happen a thousand times a day without my noticing, carried by all of us at once.
That’s how I believe my contempt for a neighbor makes an atrocity on another continent a little more likely: passed from room to room and feed to feed. I can’t trace that line. I can trace the short ones, from me to the next room, and I have no reason to believe it stops there.
The same turn, added up, is what I think is behind our ecological crisis. Its physical causes are many, but the movement beneath them is the same: countless choices, across billions of people, to turn away. Some are as direct as the oil executive’s in Chapter 2. Others are further upstream: my willingness to defend him because his business benefits me, or to stop asking questions about something I buy because I like the price. Our power and responsibility vary enormously. But wherever I keep some part of life out of view because letting it count would cost me, the move is the same.
I don’t have to want a forest destroyed, a species gone, or a river poisoned. I only have to find the reasons that let me keep taking my particular benefit without facing my share in the cost. Across enough people and enough decisions, those refusals accumulate into a world none of us would have chosen to face all at once. Each of us has an explanation for our part, while the living world carries the sum.
Here I go past anything I can trace. I believe the devastation we see in the world is a mirror image of the sickness within: the collapse of the biosphere is our self-deception, made external. That’s a claim about what all of us are doing, not about anyone the damage lands on. The villagers moved off the Bhagirathi didn’t build the dam.
If that’s right, it also says why exploiting the world can’t finally work, however cleverly it’s done. We could never pull a fast one on the world, because we are the world. The only way to exploit anything or anyone is to hide what we know from ourselves, and the hiding is itself what darkens our reality.
One Darkness
Looked at all together, the harm doesn’t scatter the way accidents would. It leans one way, as if something wanted it.
Something does benefit. Every parasite does better in a darker world, where it has more cover. And there’s nothing else to tell one darkness from another. A turning away has no qualities of its own. Two rooms differ in everything the light shows; the dark in one is the same as the dark in the other.
That’s why looking into the eyes of two “evil” people can give the uncanny sense of looking at the same thing. It’s also why more than one tradition that looked hard ended up naming an adversary: Mara, who tempted the Buddha; the Devil. I’ll borrow that name when it helps, since it’s the one everybody knows. They were seeing something real. It isn’t a creature, and it has no plan. If I give it a goal at all, it has one: to make us forget there was ever a light to steer by.
I’ve seen it in my own eyes, the last time I held my enemy in contempt: only for a second, at its smallest, and the same thing all the way up.
It can’t win a head-on fight with the Light. With someone fully in view, I couldn’t even wish them harm. So it wins slowly, by taking the Light’s place, until our own thoughts come to feel like the ones that decide what’s good. You can only choose the counterfeit once you’ve forgotten what the real one feels like, the way people choose junk food over real food when they’ve never been offered real food.
I think that’s why our culture puts rationality and intellect above everything else. They can’t detect the spreading infection until after it has physically shown up, by which point it is too late. So we trust our thinking minds to tell us when they’re lying to us, and then use more thoughts to prove that thinking is all we have. I can still hear the argument in my own head: if there really were an inner light, someone would have proved it by now, so there’s no point in looking for it.
Follow the counterfeit far enough and the real thing starts to look naive. Someone acts with plain integrity, and I don’t quite believe it: there must be an angle. At that point the darkness doesn’t have to hide each wrong on its own: the one orientation every one of us steers by has become the one thing none of us believes is there.
Why is it common knowledge that humans are fundamentally greedy and selfish? Does that knowledge make people kinder, or more likely to act selfishly themselves? If the parasite draws power from one person teaching another that the world is dark, how much would it draw from all of humanity believing it together: not just vaguely, but as received wisdom, impolite to question?
And the oldest stories of the Devil come with an observation about how it gets in: never as the bad kind of darkness, always as the good kind.
And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness. —2 Corinthians 11:14–15 (NIV)
It doesn’t care who you hate, as long as you hate. It can lose a leader, an institution, an entire regime, and remain in the eyes of the people celebrating its defeat. King’s line, that darkness cannot drive out darkness, has a reason behind it: it was never trying to.
In this picture, every act of contempt, for anyone, feeds it. The line between those who deserve our compassion and those who deserve our contempt exists only for the Devil to keep its foot in the door.
Reason in Service
So what gets a civilization back, if hatred only feeds the thing, and the calculations were how we forgot?
Not calculation alone, I think, though I’d never argue for less of it. Weigh what the villagers lost next time, and the methane and the silt, and maybe the dam never gets built. But somebody decides where the count stops. Tehri’s climate credit stopped at the coal it replaced. Nothing in the arithmetic put the line there. Someone did, and it felt like rigor.
Our better nature doesn’t know in detail what is good. That’s what it needs the reasoning part for. The trouble starts when reason is asked to decide what’s good.
A civilization can make that mistake as easily as one mind can, and I think ours has. The way back isn’t to demote reason. It’s to put it back where it belongs: reason in service to Love. Someone could have counted what the villagers lost. First, someone had to want it counted, and that wanting never came out of a count.
Nor can I get to that wanting by thinking harder. At most, thinking can convince me that I should be oriented this way, and then I’m holding an idea again. The orienting itself happens deeper than the intellect. Ask most of us whether we’re trying to serve life, and we’ll say, Well, of course.
This is close to where this book began for me. When we go to work, we’re usually lying to ourselves about what it will do to the world. Either it’s really there to enrich us, or we’re caught in the materialism trap, etc. So the most important thing we can bring to our work is our connection to the Light. And not only to our work: to all of life. If we’re trying to follow our thoughts to tell us what our behavior will do, we’re probably lost.
I don’t have a plan for getting a civilization back, and I’d only trust one that came second: not necessarily later in time, but after, the way a servant comes after the one it serves. What I have is smaller. It’s what my teacher had when he caught me stealing, and what you may have had the time you stopped someone without sending the extra. The recognition came first. The reasoning served it.
When you’re actually fighting the darkness, it doesn’t feel like fighting. It feels like love, like pulling someone out of a darkness they didn’t know they were carrying, even if some part of them did.
I didn’t reason my way to this picture. I saw it first, and spent years afterward finding the reasons.