One of the stories on the TV news magazine “60 minutes” was about the CNN anchor Lou Dobbs. When Lesley Stahl said to him that he had been called a racist he said that it was not true because he did not believe that one race was better than another, but yet other things that he said and believed had the same “tone” or attitude as a racist. As I thought about this it came to me that maybe the reason that people were using the term racist to describe Mr. Dobbs belief system, was not because they though he believed in racial inequity, but because of the attitude he projected. So maybe what is going on is that the term racist has expanded to describe an attitude, one which makes judgments about one belief being better than another, which is not racisms original meaning. It was the attitude that people were calling racist.

The attitude that people refer to as racist, but is more than the old term, appears to be a new and growing understanding that any judgment that says that something is innately better than some other thing makes no sense in the broader scheme of things or nature. Where this idea is not new to philosophers it is new in the sense that more and more people are embracing it and have an understanding of it. It is in fact one of the signs of the new paradigm. Things like nationalism are breaking down. The U.S. is not the best country; there is no best country, only countries that people like better than another. Most Americans like America best, but the ones that have the new understanding, understand that the Japanese like Japan the best, and from natures perspective one nation is not any better or worse than any other nation.

Pomegranates are not a popular fruit in the U.S., and some think of it as a messy and therefore bad fruit, but from natures perspective it is not better or worse than any other fruit. There are no bad or evil people from nature’s perspective, only people that do bad things. By the same token there are no good people only people who try to do the right thing by other people.

Mr. Dobbs told a story of having one of his professors in college put him down in front of the class for being from Idaho, which the professor called the “cultural wasteland of America.” The professor was projecting the attitude I am referring to here. He believed that because the eastern U.S. had a big city culture it was somehow better than the farm culture in Idaho. Growing up, the professor must not have heard the story of the country mouse and the city mouse. If he did he didn’t get the message. Then Mr. Dobbs said, “He was right, but he didn’t have to say it in front of the class.” This showed that Mr. Dobbs had the same judgmental attitude as the professor, a judgment that nature would not make.

Jesus of Nazareth is quoted as saying that unless we become like little children we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. Jesus was clearly trying to teach this new paradigm. What he meant was that little children don’t engage in Mr. Dobb’s or his professor’s judgments. The children’s world just is, then we adults teach them judgment, and the us against them attitude. Since Jesus believed that the kingdom of heaven was within us, he was saying we couldn’t have true inner peace until we look at the world from nature’s perspective.

Two thousands years before Jesus the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said it this way:

“As soon as the world regards something as beautiful,
ugliness simultaneously becomes apparent. As soon as the world regards something as good, evil simultaneously becomes apparent.”

Lao Tzu then went on to say that the more we get away from making judgments the more like nature we become, and the more inner peace we have. So maybe a broader definition of racism is progress.

O Frank Turner
Author and Speaker
The Science of Spirit: Beyond The Bleep www.ofrank.com