Esteemed Reader: November 2010

by Jason Stern, October 26, 2010

Our guest columnist is John Godolphin Bennett, from a talk he gave in 1972.

There is a crisis, and it is a crisis of people. We seem not to be able to live in such a way that we can avoid the troubles that threaten us, though we must, or face terrible outcomes. Therefore, if we’re going to think and talk about the future, we must first think and talk about people. What kind of people are we? Am I the kind of person who is responsible for there being wars on the earth, for there being injustice?

I may think I am not that kind of person. I am not a belligerent person. I don’t even wish to have anything to do with war. I have not the wish to impose myself on other people. But if I look at my behavior and I see that I take more than my share of what there is in the world—that I am able to eat not only all that I need, but even all that I want of food; that I am able to provide myself with comforts that couldn’t possibly be available on the same scale to everyone else in the world—then I am contributing to the whole injustice of the world, and the degradation of the planet.

All of us are in this position of making our contribution to the intolerance, injustice, and imbalance of the world and essentially there is no difference between us. We may see exaggerated manifestations and we may condemn those in whom these manifestations are so violent that we see the consequences of them. We say this group of people is responsible for the killing, that group of people is responsible for intolerance, another for taking undue advantage of material power, but essentially we are not different. Not in so far as we also take advantage of our strengths to the extent that we are able to.

The belief that what we can do we have the right to do is so deeply ingrained in us that it would require a long process to change, perhaps just as long as the process by which the respect for the individual was slowly engendered in the human race two to five thousand years ago. It may take a very long time to come to an understanding that we human beings cannot live by the principle that might is right and that what I can do I am entitled to do. But if we’re to arrive at this, or perhaps prepare for a future in which there will be an acceptance of obligations rather than assertion of right, what are we to do about ourselves?

We can’t make a new start unless we are prepared to see ourselves and recognize that every one of us—the most just, the most tolerant, the most pacific—is making his or her contribution to the total injustice and intolerance of the world. Unless we see this, then we haven’t really a starting point. Because if we think that we can solve the world’s problems in terms of other people being different while we remain the same, then we shall certainly get nowhere.