Listen to me read this post:
Well, with this post I seem to have spontaneously started a mini-series of posts on the enlightening lyrics of rock musicans, Canadian if possible! I’m on a roll, so I’m going to do one more.
One interesting aspect of Stoicism is their embrace of what they called cosmopolitanism, or the idea that human beings are kosmopolitēs: citizens of the world. Stoics taught— at a time when this was far from a popular or common doctrine— that our primary community as human beings was all other human beings, and that other identities- male, female, Roman, barbarian, Jew, pagan—were secondary (thought not unimportant). This was an idea that apparently originated with the more radical Diogenes the Cynic, who provocatively abandoned all limited identities and customary social obligations.
Two thousand years later, this view—which I share— is under attack in ways both blatant and subtle. One attitude which I think undermines cosmopolitanism is “us and them-ism”, an endemic human cognitive bias which insists on the moral and intellectual superiority of one’s own tribe.
As a child of Holocaust survivors, these issues have been live for me since I was small. My grandparents, uncle, and father survived being killed by a group of genocidaires who were basically Neo-Pagans with an interest in the Occult (sounds like the good guys in some people’s stories) by fleeing to a country where a group of Atheist Socialists (the good guys in some other people’s stories) then tried to kill them.
I have been among Theists who believed that Atheists were less moral than them. I have also been among Atheists who believed that Theists were stupid (no, they’re not) or, again, less moral than them. I have been among Buddhists who thought they were superior to Christians and Jews who thought they were superior, again, to Christians, and I have been among Nondualists who thought they were superior to everybody.
I am not opposed at all to the idea that one set of beliefs, or one scientific paradigm, or one philosophical conclusion— is better than another one because it is more evidently true or has a better effect on those who hold it than other views. Far from it. I am, though, against every form of assertion which, when you come down to it, basically says that the other guys are the sinners, and we are the good guys. This belief, as well as generally being false, relies on selective perception and confirmation bias— two bad cognitive habits I am, of course, guilty of, but try to avoid.
Enter Bruce Cockburn, Canadian songwriter and brilliant lyricist, with a song that I love, and which I think serves as a good reminder to us all. I posted the lyrics below, and here is a recording:
What's been done in the name of Jesus?
What's been done in the name of Buddha?
What's been done in the name of Islam?
What's been done in the name of “man”?
What's been done in the name of liberation?
And in the name of civilization?
And in the name of race?
And in the name of peace?
Everybody
Loves to see
Justice done….
On somebody else
Can you tell me how much bleeding
It takes to fill a word with meaning?
And how much, how much death
It takes to give a slogan breath?
And how much, how much, how much flame
Gives light to a name
For the hollow darkness
In which nations dress?
Everybody
Loves to see
Justice done….
On somebody else
Everybody's seen the things they've seen
We all have to live with what we've been
When they say charity begins at home
They're not just talking about a toilet and a telephone
Got to search the silence of the soul's wild places
For a voice that can cross the spaces
These definitions that we love create --
These names for heaven, hero, tribe and state….
Everybody
Loves to see
Justice done
On somebody else