Pro-Siblinghood: An Argument for a Mature Middle Way in the Middle East
As I’ve been reading and listening to reports of arrests and protests at my alma mater (MA Sociology 2000) — and my longest employer (full time 1998–2019) — The University of Texas at Austin, I’ve wondered if I should make a sign and go join the protests. I’ve wondered if the characterization of those protests as “Pro-Palestinian” is really accurate? I’ve wondered if the apparently rampant confusion between “Anti-Genocide” and “Anti-Semitic” has a cure? I’ve wondered if, like here in the United States, being critical of Israel's foreign and domestic policies is often confused with being unpatriotic, with being insufficiently ‘on the team’… When a policy disagreement, or a moral or ethical one — for that matter, is quickly and fervently responded to with an ad hominem attack on that person’s loyalty, one must begin to wonder whether the arguments presumably on the side of patriotism and loyalty hold any water at all. Especially when they all start to sound like vain attempts at articulating and expanding the doctrine of just war… which is just a small part of what I think we NEED to talk about. Let’s begin here:
“Experience (is teaching us), not that life is cruel or random, arbitrary or unjust. Experience (is teaching us) that life is, unlikely, everything considered. Waking up each day and having your children do so is not written in the stars, it’s not an entitlement, it’s far from inevitable, it’s not even the fair-trade, meritocratic consequence of being careful and living right, for all that, waking up each day is a gift. It’s a gift that is not reward for playing by the rules, it is a gift (of grace), giving each living person the capacity, not just to go on, but to go on as if he or she had been gifted, to go on in gratitude and wonder that all the things of the world that keep them alive have continued while they slept. (In) Wonder, awe, and a feeling of being on the receiving end for now of something mysteriously good.”
— Stephen Jenkinson, from Die Wise, (alterations mine)
The journey of midlife toward wise-elderhood broke free from the cultural-inertia of being stuck in adolescence for me the first time I read this quote, and I’ve come back to it over and over again in the intervening years. Now, Stephen has his way of being provocative and this is a taste of it, and I have my own way — it goes something like this:
If the current leaders of our world were the wise elders that we both need and deserve, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. We wouldn’t be arguing about whether the current atrocities in Gaza are genocide or aren’t genocide, because there wouldn’t be atrocities in Gaza. We wouldn’t be arguing about whether and how much military aid the United States should send to Ukraine, because there wouldn’t be any reason, justifiable or not, for those folks to be killing each other. Let’s be clear, this isn’t an American failure, or a Russian failure, or a Ukrainian or Palestinian or Israeli failure, this isn’t a Christian failure or an Islamic one or a Jewish one… this isn’t any of those things, this is a HUMAN failure, it is shared that broadly, and YOU and I are IMPLICATED. And YOU and I have to begin reckoning a way out of this mess. If we do not find a way to cultivate a new generation of wise elders and to promote those wise elders into the leadership positions in our geopolitical and economic institutions, no one will.
Alright, that’s the foundation — so let’s talk about the structure of the thing. First, we need to understand what it means for our current leaders to be stuck in adolescence, for them to have failed matriculation into the ranks of wise elders. Also, please be clear WITH me, this indictment — and it IS and INDICTMENT — is not individual, it is collective and cultural and universal. I am not saying “There are no wise elders.”, there are a few. I am saying that we have failed, collectively, at two things: 1. Cultivating a critical mass of wise elders and 2. Systematically promoting those wise elders we produce into the positions of power in our leadership structures. What we do instead, is promote something we have a lot of — power-obsessed and competence-addicted adults who are spiritually stuck at an adolescent level of development. Here’s the difference:
The adolescent’s view conflates proximity and actionability, two aspects of locality, with importance:
- Actionability — Here are the things that are near to me, I can effect these things.
- Proximity — Here are the things that are dear to me, the things I know directly.
- Those things that are near and dear to ME are the MOST IMPORTANT.
The wise elder’s view discerns between importance, proximity, and actionability:
- We must act locally and think (& love) globally.
- Actionability — Although the ripples of my actions extend, intertwined, throughout the fabric of the entire universe, I am here and I am now, and this is where I choose and act, this is where I AM.
- Proximity — Although I have the most intimacy with those closest to me, although I have the most in common with those with whom I share space and language and culture and systems of governance, although all this is true… none of it is any more true for me or less true for others, not for any of my siblings, living or dead, who have ever existed or will ever exist.
- Importance — The largest and most important miracle is that we exist, the second that we are alive, the third that we are gifted with the awareness and faculties to apprehend and appreciate the first two, that we are blessed to be human. The happenstantial vicissitudes of geopolitics, economics, etc. pale in comparison to the miracle of this life we’ve been gifted, to this existence we’ve been gifted, to this reality — which is fundamentally a shared reality — that we are blessed to inhabit, and to be.
The jumble of transforming the ranking on the left, the adolescent one, into the ranking on the right, the elder one, is the melee that is mid-life, and it is a rough journey — and it is not surprising that without social and cultural structures to support it and mandate it and normalize it, so many have opted out.
“Okay, okay!” you say. “Let’s just say I accept this whole argument, what the hell does that have to do with Gaza and protesters and genocide and war and all of that?”
Well, that’s a fine question. What I want you to focus in on is this: When you reorder the importance order of the locality matrix, you squeeze out all of the space where dehumanization likes to reside. The entire edifice of just war theory resides in the space where you get to claim that your self, your family, your community, your city, your state, your nation are more important than life. This juvenile inversion of the natural order of things creates the space where you can justify violence against your very siblings — because you are more important than them. This natural order is an order that is apprehended by wise elders, it is an order that every religion and wisdom tradition has struggled with — and which each has tried (more or less successfully) to convey (although more so in their esoteric than exoteric variants).
Honest science and honest religion converge at this: We are all siblings.
Science’s discovery and evaluation of DNA is unambiguous on this point. Human genetic variation is about 0.1%. Of all the genes in your body about 999 of every 1,000 are set to the exact same setting as your birth-sibling, your parent, your neighbor… your enemy. Our differences are staggeringly small when viewed in context, yet we choose — when we are stuck in adolescence — to focus on those differences. In anthropological terms, adolescents are addicted to Schismogenesis. To the intentional and cultural formation of differentiation — of creating an us and a them, of propagating what is commonly referred to these days as tribalism. For wise elders, these differences are a source of variation and beauty, they just fail to evoke the sense of separateness that dehumanization requires.
We are all God’s children. When we are stuck in our adolescent schismogenic mode, we worry a lot about making sure that we differentiate our ‘true’ God from anyone else’s necessarily ‘false’ one… or that we differentiate our atheism or agnosticism from anyone else’s belief. I don’t care where you are in your struggle with the word God or the concept of God or your (or anyone else’s) literalisms. What I want you to see, even if just for this one instant, is that the prophets from every religion have been trying to tell us the same thing we’ve just discovered through science: We are all God’s children. If you can’t stop looking at the word God in that sentence — you’re focused on the wrong thing. This sentence isn’t about our relationship to God, it is about our relationship to each other. We are siblings.
Cain and Abel are at it again in Gaza and in Ukraine, and apparently on the West Mall at The University of Texas at Austin right outside of the School of Architecture where I worked for sixteen years… right there in that picture (above). This isn’t a story of one set of people who are entitled to a specific plot of land over and against the claims of another set of people. This is two siblings squabbling over their inheritance, it is just that banal, and just that juvenile, and just that unworthy of respect or attention. “But when GOD said XXX, that meant YYY!!!” “NO!! GOD didn’t say that to me, they said ZZZ!!!” Well, now GOD is out of the picture… not because they’re dead, but because you’ve forgotten how to listen for their voice. Their voice is speaking to you through the electron microscopes of the scientists… and you’re still not listening. Their voice is speaking to you from the deepest liturgical troves of your own religion, or your own humanist philosophy… and you’re still not listening. This isn’t on GOD, this is on YOU. God’s voice — the universe’s voice — the still small voice that resides within each of us, atheist or not, agnostic or not, religious or not, spiritual or not… it is trying to tell you, will you listen?
One state, two state, red state, blue state… not even Dr. Suess could write something sillier. We broke up into teams to play tag, then we forgot to come back together for the picnic afterwards. We got so obsessed with whether our team was winning, we forgot what sporting was even supposed to be about.
Look, this beautiful gift of a world… this beautiful gift of a life, it is hard enough without us working at making it harder. Ecology is a hard enough task master without us needing to invent more complicated and convoluted travails like politics and economy — which have become their own games, instead of being tools that we use to play the big game, the real game, in front of us. Let’s think back to the Jenkinson quote we began with — “Waking up each day and having your children do so is not written in the stars, it’s not an entitlement, it’s far from inevitable… waking up each day is a gift”
It’s not an entitlement — not to your life, to your breath, to your children, to your land. Not to your autonomy or capacity or community or health… But this juvenile sense of entitlement might be the main thing, the core thing, that we have to let go of if we want to grow into wise elders. And losing their collective senses of entitlement is certainly where those living in the Middle East must begin if they are to be reconciled with their siblings... to become neighbors, again… to become family, again… to again BE SIBLINGS.
