Is This Thing On?

(First published in the Bali Advertiser, May 24, 2006)

“Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it.” – Harry Frankfurt, Princeton University professor emeritus, in his essay ‘On Bullshit’

Every good reporter is supposed to have one – a first-class, grade-A bullshit detector. Mine seems to be broken. The batteries must be dead or the contacts corroded. You’d think a few days at the second Quest for Global Healing Conference in Ubud in May, and it would have registered at least one red-line alarm. Maybe the Bali damp has messed with the calibrations.

It should be as easy as falling off a log to poke fun at this meeting. One workshop promised to get people in touch with their animal spirits. People were asked several times to “sit and be with themselves for a moment” after especially inspiring speakers or performances. Betty Williams, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1976, made a reference the first day to the “ruling military junta in Washington” and was cheered. The audience chuckled at every report of a witty remark by that impish rascal, the Dalai Lama -- whom many people said they had met personally. Speakers talked of letting go and journeying together on voyages of sharing and discovery in transformative processes. And the five days closed with the burning of a Peace Altar to “consecrate the intentions, understandings and commitments birthed at the event.”

Nothing more than a gathering of “loony left” escapees from California is the tempting judgment. Friends usually more open to this sort of thing steered clear for fear of it being too “New Age-y.” A few had the impression that it was just a bunch of rich, ex-hippy Americans with nothing better to do with their organic money than attend a feel-good conference in Bali. But, for some reason, it did not all seem to be hooey. Maybe it was having Desmond Tutu as one of the headline speakers. Maybe it was the focus Day 4 on the practical business side of activism.

And also there’s this: As I sat in the audience for three mornings, listing things wrong and weird about the conference, one question kept coming back at me. What are you personally doing about any of this, chump? Because that’s the question that can always silence anyone sitting in the scorner’s seat. Do you have anything better? Do you have any suggestions? Can you do anything except sit there and snicker at the smirking remarks you’ll make later in the pub?

No matter how high my eyebrows raised at the odd mix of the New Age, “local” and “native” wisdoms, and the just plain made up stuff, there wasn’t any escaping the fact that many of the issues talked about at the conference – poverty, hunger, war, environmental degradation, abuse of the helpless – are among the things that sometime keep me awake at night. But I would never actually try to do anything to end them, you know. Or, if I hold the thought until morning that maybe someday I might get around to helping feed a few of the 40,000 or so kids that die each day from malnutrition, I usually get busy answering e-mails and getting on with my morning schedule. And the environment? I honestly don’t do enough to keep my own family’s ecological footprint from being larger than it should be; and I’m too worried about my personal finances to be anxious for long about half the world’s population living on less than US$2 a day.

Then there’s the factor of just being overwhelmed by the magnitude of things wrong with the world. Even if the folks at the conference can be dismissed as so many bearded prophets foretelling doom if repentant action isn’t taken promptly, it is not a great philosophical or symbolic insight that the world dies and is reborn every second. And in that light, isn’t it better to focus on the rebirthing and renewal rather than on the dying? No matter how one feels about animal spirits, moon burnings, and righteous, wrathful wood nymphs?

Too, the role of religious sentiment, traditional, loony, or otherwise, can’t be completely ignored when trying to inspire people to action. “One’s capacity to move into something bigger than what you might not have been able to do before, does require, I think, at least the recognition of something other than just your own humanity being at play,” said Marcia Jaffe, co-director of Quest for Global Healing in an interview. She’ll begin living in Bali part-time from July to form an institute aimed at getting non-profit organizations, businesses, and world leaders to cooperate together on changing the world. If that sounds grandiose, it can’t be any more damaging to the cosmos than other hobbies people take up after the kids leave home.

If nothing else, it’ll give me plenty of opportunity to test this darned BS meter of mine. Anybody got a Phillips?

(The second Quest for Global Healing conference was held at the ARMA Museum in Ubud May 3-8. Speakers included Nobel Peace Prize recipients Betty Williams and Desmond Tutu, as well as former Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, or Gus Dur. The third QGH conference will be in late 2007 or in 2008.)

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi