On March 8, 2022 I posted my essay About the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, which I continue to update, and below is the first paragraph.
Day after day I have a line from a 1980s rock song on a loop in my head: It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine). Actually, I am feeling better than fine but not to the same degree as during My Enhanced Well-being in 2020. I feel energized and excited by this very important moment in history.
Within a day or two, my mood shifted and I became weepy. I am following the siege of Mariupol where over 400,000 Ukrainians are fighting to survive. To date, only about 20,000 have escaped and perhaps 20,000 are already dead. We know what the Russians are capable of as geopolitical analysts point to what happened in Grozny. Will Mariupol become another Grozny?
I have been processing my initial emotional reaction. Today I got a lot of help from Robert Wright when his Nonzero Newsletter arrived in my inbox. It is behind a paywall and therefore I will quote extensively from it.
The other day someone on Twitter said this about me: “I feel shocked by Robert's dissociated quality of thought lately. It's almost like he's autistic.”
I asked for elaboration and got this in reply: “*Dissociated* meaning disconnected from emotion. From your work on meditation and empathy, I'd have expected a much more visceral sense from you of how Ukrainians feel right now.”
I don’t object to the indictment itself. It’s true that, in writing about the Russia-Ukraine war, I haven’t dwelt on the suffering of Ukrainians. It’s also true, more broadly, that I haven’t adopted the wartime tone that prevails on social media and in mainstream media. Though I’ve condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a clear violation of international law, and noted with obvious disapproval the increasing brutality of the attack, I haven’t done much emoting about these things.
I have been a follower of Robert Wright since 2017 when he started his Mindful Resistance newsletter. He has helped me make sense of the world and of my own life. Today he is one of the very few who I pay in order to receive their content and he is worth every penny.
I’m going to argue not only that a dispassionate state of mind in wartime has its virtues, but that it has more virtues than the prevailing state of mind.
…let’s approach the meaning of mindfulness indirectly, by talking about an interesting irony of mindfulness meditation: It can get you both closer to your feelings and further away from them.
Like Wright, I am a very imperfect practitioner of mindfulness. It is at the core of my spiritual practice. Everyday I try to be mindful of this present moment, mindful of my breath, mindful of the gratitude I feel for personally being safe at this time, mindful of and grateful for the good life I have, and mindful of and grateful for my wife who I can share this experience with.
The feelings themselves—such as outrage at Russia’s brazen invasion of Ukraine—may be morally valid. But that doesn’t mean they’re good moral guides right now. I wish advocates of a no-fly zone were closer to being “disconnected from emotion,” as my Twitter critic put it, than they are. Because then they might be better at coolly calculating the consequences of a no-fly zone.
Yes, emotionally I too want that no-fly zone. But that would probably trigger a nuclear WWIII, or at least greatly increase the risk. Sadly, preventing such escalation is more important than helping Ukraine, more important than helping the people of Mariupol. And as I write this I feel weepy. I can feel my heart beating loudly in my chest.
There are two kinds of empathy:
1) “Emotional empathy” is empathy in the common sense of the term—“feeling their pain” or in other ways identifying with people’s emotions.
2) “Cognitive empathy” is empathy in the sense of “perspective taking”—just understanding how people view the world. Cognitive empathy can (and should) involve understanding what feelings people are having, but it doesn’t involve identifying with their feelings.
From Buddhism I learned that emotions are just emotions, that emotions can be detached from thoughts. In recent years I have tried to make a practice of this. So I make no apology for my emotional state during the first two weeks of the war.
Mindfulness affords a more expansive, more global awareness than ordinary consciousness. That’s kind of ironic, since a mindful state also allows you to become deeply absorbed in highly local things—a taste, a sound, the texture of a brick in a wall. But there’s a fluidity of awareness that makes it easy to then zoom out from trees to forest.
This fluid, expansive awareness, I think, helps cultivate compassion—helps you have a concern for one person’s wellbeing that doesn’t come at the expense of your concern for another person’s wellbeing.
In case that sounds incomprehensibly fuzzy, here’s a Ukraine War thought experiment that may crystallize the point:
Presumably you, like me, feel something on the spectrum from compassion to emotional empathy when you see video of Ukrainians suffering under Russian aggression. Now: How do you feel when you see video of a Russian tank getting blown up?
I am also aware of, and pleased by, the current impressive worldwide wave of empathy for the Ukrainains. And I am aware that there is nothing comparable for the Syrians long suffering in their civil war. And I am not sitting in judgment of others. I too feel far more empathy for the Ukrainians than I feel for the Syrians. And this too I am trying to process.
One way I process emotions is by writing. That led me to write About Becoming Radical, posted March 5, 2022. I am trying to focus on radical honesty and radical acceptance. And I am grateful that I have found the others who share my deep longing for a radical new imaginary, a new radical paradigm and radical personal and global transformation. I will end this essay with wise words from Jamie Wheal.
As we become increasingly aware of the meta-crisis we're in, there's simply no way to maintain Hope for ourselves… But there is another option––a way for us to go from personal hope to a radical hope that is more robust and a little less fragile.
Radical hope gives us perspective beyond the false certainties and certain vulnerabilities of our own lifetimes. We may not get to the Promised Land ourselves, but we keep on walking in the conviction that our children, or their children, might.