Brightly Colored and Very Loud

I'm not saying that Bill Hicks was a Buddha, I'm just saying this bit of his was pretty damned enlightened.

Yesterday, I implied that conservativism, like its brothers intolerance and xenophobia, resembles a genetic disorder, one which occurs when the cultural DNA doesn't get enough new information due to an insular and isolated suburban lifestyle.  I didn't mean that viewpoints that are different than mine are necessarily inferior, genetically or otherwise.  I'm just saying that everything is caused by conditions, and a Mendelian model describes the origins of intolerance, xenophobia, and conservativism as well as any.  It also explains why some of the staunchest Republican districts are often out in the suburbs. Even left-leaning cities like Boston and Portland have right-wing strongholds in their suburbs.  

The Buddha had a word for the kind of intolerance, xenophobia, and conservativism that I'm talking about here, one we still use every day: ignorance.  In his discourse on the Twelve-Fold Chain of Dependent Origination, he explained how the human condition, including our suffering, sickness, old age, and death, arises from causes, the traced the causes all the way back to their origin - ignorance.  But he never explained the conditions from which ignorance arises.  Some have taken this to imply that the twelve-fold chain is like a circle, and that the ignorance at the beginning of the chain arises from the human suffering at the end of the chain.

It would be easy, but going too far, to say that they are wrong, that ignorance arises from Marietta, Georgia, from Orange County, California, from Morristown, New Jersey, and from the vast suburban tracts of other American cities.  No, looking deeper, ignorance arises from emptiness, and there's a whole lot of emptiness out there in the urban sprawl.