Karma
Hope my disrespect for the concept of karma doesn't earn me bad karma.
Weekly Three
HEAR: This week's topic-inspired jam is "Karma Police" by Radiohead from their magnum opus OK Computer. You simply can't go wrong with Radiohead on a Friday afternoon.
READ: "I Write About the Law. But Could I Really Help Free a Prisoner?" by Emily Bazelon is a moving piece about a journalist who helped exonerate a man sentenced to 60 years in prison without parole. Karma? Luck, rather.
VIEW: I thoroughly enjoyed The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf, a new animated film on Netflix. If you like it as much as I did, check out the "Castlevania" series also on Netflix. A Witcher never hesitates.
No. 40: Karma
That one good deed ensures another at my benefit and one bad deed foreshadows another at my expense is too squeaky clean a way to explain both human behavior and metaphysics. Karma, it’s often called, but the name suggests an oversimplified understanding of morality mapped to cause and effect. Can it be so simple? Not in this newsletter.
Still I believe some version of traditional karma to be true. If we are in a position to do something good — hold open a door, give a beggar some food, support an artist, lift-up someone in need — by doing so we put good into the world. Each act of good tips the scale ever so slightly in the right direction. That tip of the scale gives hope. That hope inspires goodness.
Bad, on the other hand, is vacuous. It gives nothing to anyone, stemming from selfishness, greed, lust, and ignorance. Bad can be infectious, but for the most part the non-murderous bad actor seals only their own ugly fate.
But good and bad, what are they? In this newsletter, good = acts performed out of love, and bad = acts performed out of evil or against those who act out of love. Anything more than these self-made definitions I’ll leave to the philosopher.
Some bad was done to me this week.
My car was the target of a break-in. I was walking down the sidewalk on a blue-sky day, the first after countless overcasted by wildfire smoke, carrying a folding chair and backpack of books, ready for the beach, when I found my car window smashed in. Fine. Nothing was taken because there was nothing to take — or so I thought. I brushed away the turquoise shards of glass and got in the driver’s seat. The car wouldn’t start. Fine again. I called my friend Alex to give me a jump, but when I opened the engine compartment I discovered my battery was gone. Not fine.
Then yesterday — another blue-sky day — after a serene yoga session at the end of which my instructor wished that “the benefits of our practice might extend into [my] day,” I pedaled my bike with limber legs toward the corner store for a whiteboard to hang above my desk. I locked my bike to the rack, and when I returned my bike pouch was gone. Fine. Then I realized my house and car keys were in it. Not fine.
What gives? Crime, old as time. I’ve committed crimes, I admit, but only against transnational corporations. Man-to-man crime is somewhat new to me — my skateboard was stolen from my van in college, and my brother’s silver bike was stolen from the community pool when we were kids. The consecutive attacks of the past week set my mind spinning like a top kept upright by its own momentum.
Being the victim of theft gives rise to a range of emotions, namely, and in this order . . .
Disbelief, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Resignation, “Welp, it’s done, goddammit, and there’s nothing I can do.”
Anger, when the fabricated image of the unseen criminal comes to mind mid-crime.
Paranoia, will the criminal strike again? Where? When? How?
Acceptance, “I’m alive, it’s a beautiful day, it could have been worse.”
And finally, Bravery, “They may have got me this time, but never again,” when measures are taken to prevent a future attack.
The seasoned human might have dealt with these inconvenient ordeals with a leveler head. My raw self had to attempt to understand these senseless — if minor — acts against me with empathy.
To resort to crime the struggles of the criminal must be incredibly difficult. What the criminal doesn’t care to acknowledge, though, is that crime is a short-term game and will never raise them from their uncomfortable circumstance. Instead it plunges them further downward even as materially they rise. The do-badder can expect nothing more from life than what they put in, and when they only take, they should expect life to take from them — in the least, they shouldn’t be surprised when it invariably does.
I don’t wish harm or hardship on my exploiter, but these will come for the criminal as they come for all of us, and when they do, did the criminal expect some better fate? When, after stealing someone’s car, the thief is shot through the chest by the car’s enraged owner, can he express honest shock? By stealing, the criminal condemns goodness. In that black mental space, anything goes. Why shouldn’t the perpetrated, like the perpetrator, condemn their better nature as they pull the trigger to fire a deadly shot? When it’s too much to say the criminal has deserved whatever misfortune comes their way, it’s enough to say they’ve earned it.
Either the criminal commits their crime assuming their victim is good and will not retaliate, or they assume their victim is likewise bad or will become bad in their rage. In the first case, love and goodness is intentionally exploited. In the second, exploitation again, only that same love and goodness then mutates into something wicked, kicking off a vicious cycle fueled by rage and revenge. Because I don’t believe anyone is born with the desire give the middle finger to love and goodness, both suggest the bad guy has reached a state of hopelessness.
I went to get a new battery for my car. After telling the employee at the auto parts store what happened, he said, “They do bad and expect good to come.” It’s plain to see that logic is bogus, but it’s not because of karma. Hitler could not redeem himself by ordering six million flowers for the graves of those he killed. Likewise, for all her goodness Saint Teresa of Ávila wouldn’t be exempted from the possibility of being killed by a pre-remorseful Hitler. Still, it seems to me that everything that has ever happened in the history of the universe points to this karma-free fact: the bad guy always loses. His loss is not always commensurate to the bad he’s done. And sometimes, on the surface, it seems he hasn’t lost. But he has. He always will. Not because of karma, but because, in his hopelessness, he puts himself in a losing situation, one where all trust for his fellows has been replaced with mistrust, fear, and disdain.
The inevitable loss of the bad guy can come in many forms — thrown in jail, fall from power, harm to the body or the bodies of loved ones, etc. — but without fail the evil doer suffers the loss, or at least corruption beyond repair, of the soul. Unable to maintain the illusion forever, he knows that his deeds are not good, and yet he performs them over and over. What happiness can there be when your livelihood is making others unhappy? What beauty can there be when people like you exist? Hopelessness again and again and again.
While you can’t expect good to come by being good, I think it will. I think it always does. And even if it doesn’t, the knowledge that you’ve done good is good enough. But even this misses the point.
We should do good not for ourselves but for others, for the hopeless criminals, in order to give them hope. Otherwise, we are no better, for a sure sign of lost hope is giving up on good because no good has come from your efforts. That’s not bad, it’s just sad.
The problem with karma is that it’s a transactional and self-serving concept, one that accounts nothing for happiness or sadness, hope or hopelessness, or the complexity of people. Unlike anything in human nature, karma is conditional.
The criminal who took my stuff may one day meet some bad end, but it won’t be because of what they have done. It will be, rather, because of their loss of hope, which allows bad fortune to follow them like a shadow for as long as they remain hopeless; thus it will also be because of the the inaction of good people who neglected to show love and forgiveness that they might restore hope to the hopeless.
This is not a tit-for-tat world. You can give, or you can take.
Pick one. ♦
Mailbox
Your recent newsletter, Action, was another good subject for contemplation, and one that I have equally pondered and grappled with.
When I was younger and had lofty visions of writing a great novel, I felt more guilt about not writing in a disciplined way. I’ve made peace with that ambition.
When I left home at age 18 to join the US Air Force, my mom gave me a journal to fill with my thoughts, observations and dreams. It’s a funny thing to look back on 50 years later. The content is nothing special. Sure, it’s fun to see what and how I thought way back when, but now I see things through the eyes of accumulated self knowledge (wisdom? One can only hope).
I also see that I started out writing microscopically small. As Christopher got into the middle elementary grades, I saw a nearly identical obsession in his projects: absurdly small, neat little letters and words. Genetics, a funny thing. As far as I know, he never saw my written examples.
What strikes me more looking back at those early journals is the absence of discipline and focus. The first few entries are written in this tiny, tiny text filling every page, but before long the entries get more sporadic and sloppy. But they do continue. There have been periods since then when I didn’t write, but I never stopped completely and, at times, writing has been a lifeline.
I have a memory of writing in my journal on a two-month surfing and backpacking vagabond around the island of Kauai. I remember with great clarity one particular day I was feeling down. I was sitting in some coffee shop writing my thoughts down, and that writing felt like a lifeline, a lighthouse when I had no idea where land might be.
Does all my writing amount to anything? The jury is still out but I will — one day, when I have a vast stretch of time before me — begin a process that will result in an answer, one way or the other.
– Fred
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