There’s a story that is the best metaphor I’ve so far found to describe our human condition. Most have heard the first part. The second is less well known, but I believe most important.
The first part tells of people in a village beside a river. One day a woman walking along the side of the river sees a baby floating downstream. She dives in and rescues the child. The next day a fisherman sees another baby floating down the river. He rescues it. As I said, I assume you know the story. Soon the village is completely consumed with rescuing what appears to be an endless stream of babies floating down.
Now the point of this little story tends to be about how rescuing babies is important, but perhaps it’s even more important to find out what the source of the problem is and to deal with that. In social justice circles it’s the divide between social service and social advocacy. Those who advocate for addressing systemic issues in fact have a tendency to dismiss those who toil in social service as putting band-aids on the problem.
Well, here’s what happens when representatives of the villagers made their way upstream to find the source of the problems. When they returned they told that the river divides into three streams. Up the first stream people were in a constant state of war where everyone was afraid of the other, and babies simply endangered the parents who threw them into the river. Up the second stream they found people were consumed with an endless party, drinking and drugs and sex and television and the latest fashions obsessed the people who had no time for the babies and threw them into the river. Up the third stream people were gathered into little communities that walled themselves off from each other, where people who differed in the slightest degree were driven away or simply killed, and babies were long seen as disrupting the constancy of their communities were thrown into the river.
One of the most important philosophers of my childhood was Walt Kelly’s possum Pogo who sagely observed, “we have met the enemy and he is us.” The source of the hurt of our world comes from our human hearts, from our fear, from our grasping and from the walls of certainty we use to cut ourselves off from each other.
Every action we take, whether it be working in a food pantry or organizing for a union or struggling to end a war, if it isn’t informed by our constant looking into our own hearts as we go along, is ultimately no more than throwing bandages on the wounds. Bandages are important. No doubt. And some of these actions are very important. But in and of themselves, none are actually going to solve the deepest problem, which will simply pop up somewhere else. There will continue to be babies floating down the river.
But that’s half the deal. Here’s the corollary. Without action our shifting perspectives, examining the roots of our personal hatred, of our grasping, of the ways we cut ourselves off from each other, become little more than dreams.
This is my best analysis of our human condition. We must look into our hearts all the way down. And we must reach out to another.
The rest is details.
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