gapwblog

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. Carl Jung

One need not be a chamber to be haunted.  Emily Dickinson

I wonder if that’s how darkness wins, by convincing us to trap it inside ourselves, instead of emptying it out.  Jasmine Warga

Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light. John Milton

They gave it up before they ever really even got started. J.D. Salinger

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me; all day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.  Sylvia Plath

I need more of the night before I open eyes and heart to illumination. Denise Levertov

I’m writing this morning on the darkest day of the year in the northern hemisphere and from a city currently with the highest number of COVID infections in a state with the highest number of COVID infections in a country with the highest number of COVID infections.  Chants in the US of “we’re number 1” have never seemed as shallow to me as they do at this particular moment, a time which continues to put extraordinary strains on those few for whom caregiving is a vocation not circumscribed by what seem to be the ever-shrinking circles of concern of so many of the rest of us.

The media is chock-full of disturbing health-related and political messaging of late, pitched alongside the hope that the miraculously rapid development of COVID vaccines will stem the current tide of death and misery early in the New Year.  Will we in the north survive this infection-saturated winter? If so, will we be able to recover our human touch or will we remain secluded our smallish worlds, defined more and more by computer screens and video distractions? Moreover, will we make good on pledges for equitable access to vaccines for the entire global community?  It would seem to be almost a miracle of another sort if we could collectively walk back the fear and self-preoccupations which have defined us through much of 2020 and affirm – through policy and practice – this global responsibility (thankfully reinforced in large measure by UN agencies) to ensure global access to vaccines which offer hope, in the short-term at least, that we can dodge full-scale damage from this plague and, once again, manage to save ourselves from ourselves.

However, many social and media commentators now recognize publicly what many of us have feared privately – that the dysfunctional personal and political traits which have accelerated in this plague year – not birthed this year – will be hard for us to shake.  We have had another long year to justify turning our backs on each other, creating enemies from conspiracies, transforming climate denialism into an art form, holding fast to beliefs about the “myth” of COVID in some instances to our last dying breaths.  The vaccines will, if all goes well, keep the pandemic in check, but they will have no direct impact on the creeping “malignity” of our spirits, darkness which we have chosen to bury inside of ourselves and which is unlikely to be dispelled either by medical breakthroughs or by the sunlight now poised to oh-so-slowly return to our northern skies.

And, sad to say, we are getting scant assistance in confessing and overcoming our darkness from our institutions of governance, which often seem trapped in their own bubbles of self-importance and self-interest.  The US is only one of what seem to be a growing number of states seduced by authoritarians and their sycophants who seem to believe that holding power is about taking advantage of opportunity rather than serving the public interest.  And in so doing, such “leaders” are reinforcing for their publics values based on a nefarious “creed” described recently by Anne Applebaum: “Everyone is corrupt, everyone is on the take.” We’re living in a world without morals or principles and “all that matters is whether or not you win.”  Such a cynical, transactional view of the world has certainly taken root in the US, and those roots are now deeper and broader than some of us are willing to admit.

Thankfully, we know that corrupt practices and winning at all costs does not define us entirely, even in this plague year. Our own social media is inundated each week with incredible acts of courage and kindness that offer hope to our present and help ensure a post-pandemic quality of life for future generations.  From tree planting in the Sahel to emptying prisons of the politically incarcerated and tortured, initiatives are underway in so many global settings to stem the current tide of normative decay and blatant cruelty. In this the UN is doing its part beyond rigorously promoting the “global public good” of vaccines.  This week alone we witnessed some good movement towards a global moratorium on the use of the death penalty, some enthusiastic support for political and peace progress in countries such as Afghanistan and Sudan, and a couple of compelling events focused on the need for human rights-based approaches to counter-terror operations and more robust institutions of accountability for those who commit mass atrocity crimes.

But like the many countries at present whose social fabrics are fraying at the edges, the UN has also been subject to increasingly stubborn postures and nasty exchanges that seem a bit startling in an institution that generally reinforces diplomatic politeness (with occasional touches of passive-aggression.)  In the Economic and Social Council, diplomats hurled vague accusations, including at ECOSOC’s current president (Pakistan), over the fate of a still-unendorsed Political Declaration that is badly needed to help galvanize state support for the UN’s Decade of Acton on sustainable development. And in the Security Council, its often-ugly and rarely-impactful discussions on Syria’s long decade of violent abuses flared up even further this week, punctuated by China’s assertion that Germany’s soon-to-be-concluded humanitarian leadership on Syria and its overall Council tenure have been a “failure.”  

We don’t share China’s judgment in this, but we are mindful of what these exchanges represent – signs of further fraying of our standards of propriety and mutual responsibility.  States are now dabbling in what too many of us in our personal realms are doing as well – shutting the metaphorical doors and windows to divergent viewpoints and basking instead in the echo chambers of our self-selected, self-interested versions of “reality.” Whether in Washington, Brasilia, Moscow, Damascus or any number of other capital settings, our leadership is increasingly acting out a cynical script, less about inspiring people to be their better selves and more about keeping our darkness locked within where it can best “haunt” personal and collective potential.

Given this pervasive dearth of inspiration by much of our political leadership, the way out of our darkness, out of the hell that we have relentlessly manufactured for ourselves, will likely be long and hard.  And the near-miraculous vaccines now becoming available to those most vulnerable to infection will not by themselves bring the illumination that we so long for in this season.  But they might eventually help give our species one more chance – a chance to end corrupt practices in governance, increase responsiveness by our international institutions, guarantee better health and educational access, and make our political systems of checks and balances more reliable, our judicial systems better able to ensure accountability for the worst of human crimes, and our economics more equitable and eco-responsive.

Given where we now find ourselves and despite a bevy of pandemic-related disruptions and uncertainties, if winning is indeed, “everything” then surely this is the “winning” to which we should aspire. This is the “illumination” which we should now be preparing to welcome, illumination which can effectively dispel darkness to which we have become both conscious and committed to push out from our most remote inner spaces.  Indeed, if we are to reset our pandemic-infected, darkness-infused present, it will take more than governments, more than global institutions, certainly more than vaccines.  It will, as Jung noted, take more of us with the courage to “face our own souls,” to confess our dark spaces and then persevere to the brink of our capacities in illuminating and incarnating opportunities to make our world greener and less violent, opportunities that might just represent our last, best chance for life.

This evening in the northern sky, a rare convergence of planets will lead to the sighting of the “star of Bethlehem,” a “star” that was believed to settle over the manger where the baby Jesus lay many centuries ago, a mysterious star illuminating a sacred promise. This year’s version of manger season offers its own inspiration and guidance on how the promises that define our own time might best be implemented and sustained, how our current darkness might have its power over our values, priorities and actions finally and fully dispelled.  We would do well to urgently discern its message.

Tags: authoritarianim, Darkness, pandemic, United Nations