Like the rest of New Zealand,we, at Enough! are deeply saddened and shocked by the toxic violence perpetrated in Christchurch. Our heartfelt sympathy and condolences go out to those directly affected by the shootings.
On the morning of 16 March 2019, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern concluded her address to the country with the statement: “While the nation grapples with a form of grief and anger that we have not experienced before, we are seeking answers.”
Indeed, we are.
New Zealanders have been asking questions about how the twenty-eight-year-old Australian-born gunman who carried out the attack in Christchurch, was able to enter the country and undertake this act of terror.
But amongst the abundance of questions that have followed the tragedy, the most prominent is: Why did he carry out this act of terror?
The gunman’s 74-page manifesto, in which he tries to justify his murderous assault on Muslim worshippers during Friday prayers in Christchurch, has since been banned.The ruling to ban the manifesto was part of the prime minister’s wider strategy to undermine the perpetrator’s attempts to gain global notoriety. Jacinda Ardern has pledged never to utter his name publicly, and to press platforms like Facebook to deny access worldwide to the manifesto as well as the seventeen minutes of video that was livestreamed by the gunman during the attacks.
In keeping with this spirit, Enough! editors do not wish to dwell on the “beliefs”which led the gunman to carry out his atrocities. However,we do believe it is in our readers’ best interest to note, like analysts across the globe have done, that the gunman was a victim of a thriving online ideological structure that tries to recruit and radicalise young white men to save “Western civilisation” from an “invasion” by immigrants. This ideology aggressively promotes white supremacy: a vision of the world that proclaims white people to be intrinsically superior to other ethnicities. Political scientist Jean-Yves Camus, for example, has pointed out the gunman was first and foremost a hardcore white supremacist.
In light of this, it is tempting to see the Christchurch attack entirely as a direct consequence of the ideology of white supremacy. But as New York Times columnist David Leonhardt warns:
“Drawing a direct line from the purveyors of hateful rhetoric to any specific hate crime is usually impossible. And it’s usually a mistake to try. The motive for these crimes . . . is typically a stew of mental illness, personal anger and mixed-up ideology.”
Leonhardt is spot on. History shows that humans are adept at (mis)using any ideology to justify expressing hatred toward a particular group of people. That being said, it is also hard to ignore the self-evident reality that ideas motivate, inspire, and energise people. That is, ideas have consequences.
Put more precisely, our conception of ultimate identity matters. Because it is not humanly possible to live in an intellectual vacuum, we all have some conception of who we ultimately are. And because humans are finite, dependent, contingent beings, we inevitably look outside ourselves for our ultimate identity. In doing so, we look to define our identity in relationship to something greater than us.
Our conception of this greater reality that we are part of is our conception of the divine. We define ourselves by our relationship to the divine, however we define divinity. Therefore, we could say that every concept of identity is based on a relationship to some god. For white supremacists that god is the god of the “white race.” But when we conceptualise our identity in relation to a particular race or religion, we inevitably get stuck in an “us and them” mentality, a mentality that sows the seeds of division, disunity, and discord.
If we are serious about countering the “us and them” rhetoric increasingly prevalent in the world, we need to look for ideas advocating unity in diversity. At Enough! we believe that bhakti texts like the Bhagavad Gita and the Shrimad Bhagavatam provide a rich repository of ideas that can foster unity in diversity.
The core idea animating these texts is simple: all living beings are spiritual souls inhabiting different material bodies which are like different dresses. Just as it is deeply irrational to hate persons because they do not wear the same dress as I do, it is also deeply irrational to hate other living beings simply because they have a different material body or dress from mine. The Gita explains:
“As a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, the soul similarly accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones.” (2.22)
The Gita perspective of reality is that our actions in this life create our karmic account. This karmic account determines the type of material body we get in our next life. We may now be in a white,male body, but at the time of death we are transferred to another body, which won’t necessarily be white or male. Moreover, if we have trashed our karmic account by engaging in harmful and malicious activities, we will certainly devolve to subhuman species.
From this perspective, it is sheer ignorance to exalt the identity linked to our current temporary material body. This does not imply that our identity forged from race or ethnicity is irrelevant. It simply means that our racial or ethnic identity may have relative value but it isn’t ultimately important. What is ultimately important is to recognise that in spite of obvious differences in gender and ethnicity, all human beings are spiritually one.
The bhakti texts therefore urge us to seek our ultimate transcendent identity, an identity that goes beyond gender, race, ethnicity, and even religious affiliation. In speaking of this ultimate transcendent identity, bhakti texts promote their second core idea: there is one ultimate personal source of all that exists.
Bhakti texts say our ultimate transcendent identity is in relationship to this supreme person. All of bhakti practice—bhakti-yoga—is geared toward reviving our ultimate transcendent identity.When we experience that eternal spiritual identity, then we are no longer shackled by the ignorance that forces us to identify with this temporary mortal frame. Once we attain this state of pure consciousness, we are freed from the cycle of repeated birth and death—samsara.
Indeed, bhakti wisdom affirms that in pure consciousness, we see all living beings as members of a single divine family originating from the Supreme Person, in such pure consciousness we spontaneously show compassion toward all living beings. Now, more than ever, we need to strive to develop authentic spiritual consciousness and practice universal compassion.
