Thought for the Day BBC Radio 4 14.07.23
When a storm blows up in the media we get drawn in. Milan Kundera and the Buddha can help us stay alive to humans realities behind the news.
One of the many lessons the Czech novelist Milan Kundera, who died this week, urged on us was to recognise ambiguity. ‘Every human life has many aspects,’ he wrote. His characters are complex and elusive and their motives are never quite what they seem. That opens a space for nuance and irony – for a lightness that contrasts with the heaviness of ideology and the rush to judgment.
Kundera associated such heaviness with his country’s communist regime, but it’s a universal tendency. Buddhism, for ever concerned with the mind, describes how we build interpretations from direct, sensory experience. We have feelings about what we interpret, and construct a view of reality that seems so real we think it’s the truth.
The whole process spirals very fast. Buddhism calls this mental proliferation. Think of a row. Someone you love says something you find unacceptable. You say as much, but they argue back, so now there’s both the original problem and the fact that they’re arguing with you. A row can spiral, like a desert sandstorm, till sand is all you see. Then you notice your emotions or take a breath and, sometimes, the row just dissolves. You can listen and maybe apologise. Lightness returns.
Buddhism mainly focuses on these processes in individual experience, but they also operate collectively. The media storm that has blown up this week was fuelled by asking whodunnit, by the fear that something bad was being concealed. As the questions multiplied we got drawn in, curiosity piqued, wanting answers.
Things changed when doubts emerged about the allegations, when we learned who the individual was and that he’d been admitted to hospital with mental health problems. Attention shifted somewhat from the allegations themselves to the reporting of them, but perhaps we as media consumers should also consider our responses to the story.
Buddhist teaching points to our tendency to misinterpret experience and get sucked into those misinterpretations. To free ourselves from them we need self-awareness. ‘A wise person guards awareness as a fine treasure,’ said the Buddha. Perhaps that awareness is the source of the lightness Kundera describes that contrasts with the heavy rush to judgement and keeps us alive to ambiguous human realities.
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