Being Good People

What are the ethical implications of taking a $2,000 cruise across the Atlantic? How do you square this kind of luxury with the kind of grinding poverty that’s the norm in so many of the places I’ve traveled through over the past 8 months?

I actually got on this boat — Holland America’s Koningsdam cruise ship, sailing from Rome to Ft Lauderdale — because it was, remarkably, cheaper than taking another cargo ship, like I did to cross the Pacific. Unlike said cargo ship though, the past two weeks have been a sort of surreal foray into the heart of upper-middle-class American excess.

Don’t get me wrong: the past couple weeks have also been undeniably pleasant. Being on a cruise — or, well, being on *this* cruise, since it is emphatically my first (and probably my last) — is a bit like living in a super luxe hotel that’s a bit short on windows but also happens to contain an excellent, varied, 24 hr all-you-can-eat buffet.

Meals are a big part of my day. In addition to this surprisingly good pizza “restaurant” I’m currently sitting in — overlooking the expansive pool deck, which also serves as an exceedingly comfy movie theater in the evenings, and comes equipped with a great glass roof that peels open to the sky on nice days — there’s a formal dining room, a constantly rotating 12-station cafeteria style restaurant, a burger joint, four or five fine dining restaurants where you have to pay extra, 24 hr room service, and no less than eight bars. Except for the booze and fancy extras, it’s all included.

Every day, there’s a positively packed program of performances, seminars, and blowout sales in the high end shops that fill the lower decks. Virtually none of it sounds remotely interesting to me; a sampling from today’s program: a talk on WWII, a discussion (read: sales pitch) on the unique properties of “chocolate” diamonds, and a workshop called “Express Yourself with Windows Ink” (part of a full programming track sponsored by Microsoft, which evidently is really doubling down on its existing target audience). Thankfully the ship also has an excellent gym, where I’ve been spending most of my non-eating time.

Aside from the temptation to eat ice cream multiple times per day, my biggest material “trial” on this boat has been getting people *not* to do things for me — like the daily bed turndown service (I can fold back my own covers, thank you!), the constant towel washing (I don’t need a new towel after literally every use, thank you!), and the unnervingly impeccable service (I can refill my own teacup, the machine is right there, thank you!). Well, I guess that and finding a quiet spot to meditate.

Company-wise, this journey is markedly different from my last ocean crossing: In place of a couple dozen Filipino sailors, there are 800 Filipino & Indonesian hospitality workers… aaaand about 2,000 American senior citizen “guests.” With a small handful of noticeable exceptions — a spattering of Western Europeans, a couple small groups of Chinese folks, a single African American couple, one pair of thirty-ish honeymooners — my fellow cruisers skew dramatically toward the older, whiter, and richer end of the spectrum. (In contrast to my months of backpacking through Asia in the company of twenty-somethings, I’m feeling decidedly youthful, relatively speaking!)

This is, shall we say, a somewhat challenging demographic for me. Especially in the first week of November, in this year of our lord 2018. Given my sample size here, I think it’s safe to say that some established trends amongst the older, whiter, and richer segment of the American population hold pretty true with regards to horrible, reactionary politics.

“Not all old, rich, white people!” you might say. Sure, yes, of course. I’ve had some perfectly pleasant conversations with my neighbors at dinner. I overheard one nice middle aged lady talking about how she went to great lengths to vote absentee for Beto while in Rome, and I chatted with one sweet pair of Canadians who wept actual tears there in the cafeteria while describing the Oprah speech they watched about voter suppression in Georgia. But I’ve also seen a couple of Trump t-shirts, and there’s a whole lot of Fox News watching going on on the treadmill screens in the gym.

I haven’t gone out of my way to argue with folks about politics though, even in the midst of midterm craziness back home. Instead, I’ve been working on practicing “metta” meditation. (Sorry-not-sorry to those of you *not* following along for long digressions about my meditation practice!)

“Metta” is commonly translated as “loving-kindness” or, more simply, “goodwill.” The practice consists of basically beaming good wishes at people, from individuals you love to groups you dislike, and everyone in between. In the classic form, you progress from the beloved to the, um, less-loved, with the mantra “May you be safe. May you be strong. May you be happy. May you be at ease.” Or some variation on that. It sounds a bit cheesy and superficial in the telling, but in practice it can feel quite profound. Profound, and fucking *hard*.

In the past, I’ve struggled with this kind of meditation. The universe is a screaming cacophony of suffering and death at least as much as it is anything else, and to a large extent that’s just *how it goes*. Animals experience pain and die, even human animals. No one can be, ultimately, “safe.” So how, in fact, do you wish for something that you know to be simply impossible? And how do you wish for the happiness of people who are made happy by hurting others? What does it mean to wish “strength” for an egomaniacal fascist?

Although I’ve never been much for taking things on faith, I’ve recently found that the wishing-for-the-impossible part feels a bit like what I imagine religious faith feels like, and I’m pretty OK with that these days. As for the rest of the contradictions I’ve struggled with in metta practice, I’ve recently been working my way through them like this: I’m not actually beaming people love and acceptance *just the way they are*, Mr-Rogers-fashion. I’m actually wishing for them to *change*.

I don’t think the Trump t-shirt wearers and Fox News watchers are irredeemable humans or bad people on the deepest and most fundamental level. But neither are they doing the “people” part well enough. In fact, they’re doing it really badly right now, and we need them to do better: to be less dominated by machismo and threat response, to have more empathy, to be stronger in the resisting-groupthink-and-fearmongering sense. To find more joy and ease.

That last one, ease, is always the easiest for me to visualize in metta practice, and — unlike safety, strength, and happiness — always somehow feels the same for everyone. After so many days of wandering this ship whispering mantras to myself, I’ve also started to add semi-conscious hand gestures (just, ya know, to maximize my crazy-lady vibe). My natural hand gesture for ease is a motion of drawing out: the drawing out of some poisonous, universal tension we all carry in our core.

This weird gestural meditation practice reminds me of something my dharma teacher back in the Bay Area often says about Buddhist mantras and rituals: They’re spells, really. Ancient incantations, time-worn and hallowed with use. And like all spells, they work most potently on the caster. However much it consists of fervently wishing for people to change for the better, you don’t do metta meditation to actually keep people safe or make them happy — you do it for you, to be a better person yourself. To keep yourself from boiling in anger when one of your co-cruisers says something straight-up rude to the waitstaff, or talks smugly about conspicuous consumption, or pulls out some light reading about how Hillary Clinton engineered the Russia investigation.

Anyway, I’m working on it. This is one of the ways. Lord knows, beaming loving kindness at a cruise ship full of older white folks is not for everyone though. (In particular, I don’t think anyone has the right to expect or demand love-for-the-oppressor from people who are actively being oppressed, just saying.

Working out where I stand on this question of luxury also feels important right now, especially given a) the way I’ve been trying my best to travel in a relatively low-impact fashion for the past 8 months, and b) that as I get closer to home I need to start figuring out what the rest of my life is going to look like. What constitutes a luxury, beyond the basics of dignified survival, and at what point does it cease to be morally tenable?

Certainly the sheer amount of consumption happening on this cruise seems like too much to me — somewhere between the lobster dinners and the full body spa treatments and the diamonds. Some people spend months and months on these floating luxury hotels. Some people spend $20,000 on a cruise, and then squabble with each other over the chance to buy 20 discounted t-shirts at the weekly deck sale. I dunno. It all seems willfully oblivious to the state of the world and its many cascading, interlocking crises, all of which are related to consumption and inequality on some level. It all seems a bit Nero-with-his-fiddle, a bit Marie Antoinette-with-her-cake.

On the other hand, I very much believe in the rule of thumb that we should judge systems harshly but regard people with empathy. No doubt there’s a decent minority of my fellow cruisers for whom this is a rare, long-saved-for vacation. And absolutely everyone on this ship is making choices within an unfathomably complex web of circumstances.

And then there’s me. I’d originally meant to make this blog post about privilege. Specifically my privilege. Among the ways that I experience privilege — which is to say, among the fair number of ways that I am *not* subject to hardship and struggle — is the financial wherewithal to make this whole long trip happen. I quit my job and have spent the better part of a year traveling, for chrissake. That’s no small thing, and not something the vast majority of people can access. At the very least, I have a responsibility to make that as explicit as possible.

But another way of putting the luxury question is this: Is *wealth* morally tenable? I’m very much in the “billionaires shouldn’t exist” camp, but that seems like an easy call in comparison. What about wealth on the comparatively modest scale that my partner and I have it?

I don’t think I’m a bad person for having access to that wealth, of course. But I also suspect we need to do better.