A Luta Continua

The idea of “struggling” has been a recurrent theme in my writing for some time. In Human, Like You (July 4, 2020), I shared my inclination “…to struggle and battle … while trying to survive this unyielding bind that prevents me from knowing just why we all try to persist.” In Too Heavy for Small Shoulders (August 1, 2022), I discussed how in “…the struggle between potential and actuality is where we find our humanity, our meaning, our purpose to continue.” More recently, I wrote in The Water we’re Drowning in (January 1, 2023):

“We all want to rest on a bed of beauty. We all want to witness the emancipation of Being from the shackles of this struggle; the mortal dread we ignore yet cannot escape; the theatre of oppression and resistance that pits heart against heart, and obstructs the flow of dreams from reaching that endless horizon.” 

Looking back, I think this fixation first emerged in the context of my spiritual crisis. As I discussed in this post, the Baha’i Writings describe how some are meant to toil and struggle more than others along the spiritual path. Employing the rich mystic language of Sufi traditions, Baha’u’llah proclaims that the “wayfarers in the wilderness of search and longing, of attainment and reunion, have numerous degrees and countless stations.” He goes on to describe the stations of three different wayfarers, each seeking reunion with the Beloved. The first, and least privileged, Baha’u’llah describes as follows: 

“Some, after spiritual struggle and physical toil, ascend from the lower reaches of ‘no God is there’ to the lofty bowers of ‘but God’, flee from the shadow of negation to abide in the limitless realm of affirmation, and abandon the privation of a transient existence for the bountiful assemblage of reunion. This is the uttermost limit of the realm of effort and striving.”

Of course, this version of the struggle is couched in the context of religious longing, which may not resonate with all in our modern age of disenchantment (see Max Weber). Yet, the underlying experience of restlessness and yearning remains. Indeed, contemporary audiences think nothing of appropriating the writings of religious poets, philosophers, and mystics such as Rumi, Attar, Hafez, Kierkegaard, and Simone Weil to satiate a modern, though areligious, hunger for meaning. On this topic, I quite enjoyed Rozina Ali’s (January 5, 2017) essay in The New Yorker, titled, “The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi.” She provides the following example:

“‘Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field. / I will meet you there.’ The original version makes no mention of ‘rightdoing’ or ‘wrongdoing.’ The words Rumi wrote were iman (‘religion’) and kufr (‘infidelity’).”

Given my professional work in prison oversight and human rights, I often encounter another variation on our current theme: the struggle for or towards liberation. Specifically, a common rallying cry adopted by unionists, civil activists, abolitionists, and revolutionaries the world over is, A Luta Continua. This Portuguese phrase attributed to the FREMLIMO movement during Mozambique’s war for independence is translated into English as, “the struggle continues.” A longer version, “A luta continua; vitória é certa,” apparently used by students and activists in Nigeria, means, “The struggle continues; victory is certain.”

My experience suggests that victory is never certain, but I digress. 

The struggle is, if nothing else, ubiquitous and in many respects the very experience of being alive. At its most primordial, the struggle is our every-day, life-long battle against earth’s treacherous terrain. At a “higher” level, if you will, the struggle describes a state of effortful endeavor towards grandiose pursuits.

Without context, however, to “struggle” is simply to move with difficulty, but the semantic versatility of this word is so great that it can be easily adapted to fit a range of meanings. According to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, there are more than 150 synonyms for struggle: 22 as in to stumble; 43 as in to strive; 19 as in to fight; 52 as in to clash; and 18 as in to battle. In order to situate the term “struggle” within a broader meaning beyond that of “moving with difficulty,” it seems to me that we need to: 1) identify a motive force, and 2) an objective. For example, if the motive force is hunger and the objective is survival, then the struggle might be understood as competition (assuming the scarcity of readily available calories). If the motive force is lust and the objective is intercourse, then the struggle might be characterized as a pursuit. If you feel oppressed or are constrained and desire freedom, the “struggle” might be conceptualized as resistance. 

Though its meanings and iterations are many, I’m compelled to believe that there is an a priori ontological relationship between an inner state of motivation or want (A), an object that we as subjects orient or direct our “want” towards (C), and how we “make our way” from A to C, i.e., the struggle (B), which is then fraught with relative degrees of difficulty. By means of intuition, this idea seems axiomatic, but to assume that this “A to C through B” relationship is ontologically absolute we must first attempt to explain its existence in reality. 

Disclaimer: I’m in no way trained to do this sort of analysis, but here we are. 

One might be tempted to appeal to Darwinism for an explanation: (A) emerged as a way of compelling organisms into action to find (C) nourishment, safety, and opportunities for procreation. Those that persisted through (B) the struggle survived and had a higher chance of passing their genetic material to progeny. Therefore, the disposition to struggle from desire to fulfillment provided organisms with a reproductive advantage. Nothing more or less. Any abstractions of “A to C through B” are only human attempts at attaching cultural and/or religious beliefs to what is essentially the byproduct of Darwinian evolution.

Perhaps. I admit that locating the genesis of the struggle within a Darwinian framework would negate my thesis that “A to C through B” has a fundamental (i.e., metaphysical) existence that precedes human evolution. I also admit that I’m not remotely smart enough to do much more than speculate on this topic, but that’s what this blog is for – my intellectual meandering. 

Even if we were to accept the evolutionary explanation, it could only be a partial acceptance. At most, we can assert that Darwinian evolution gave expression to a pre-existent “A to C through B” relationship. Our question might be formulated in this way: “why do entities seek to resolve the qualia of want by persevering through a struggle towards a fixed objective?” Sure, a complex consciousness navigating technologically and socially advanced ecologies will manifest the “A to C through B” relationship in the form of doom-scrolling Instagram stories to see the latest iteration of the Miley Cyrus’ vocal fry video. For real, it’s the same thing. However, one could argue that the first organism to seek nourishment and that struggled to reproduce did not spur to action after reflecting on its desires and goals. Along the way, some organisms were born with a random mutation to do “something like” yearn after an object, and this would increase their reproductive advantage.

Another way to frame this is to apply the anthropic principle. That is, the “A to C through B” relationship is intelligible to us because, in this universe, only living beings capable of observing and reflecting on such things have survived (a logical extension of Darwin’s theory of evolution). As a consequence, we can make sense of anything backwards because the universe we’re living in selects for beings with the capability to do so. 

A more far-fetched idea is that any directionality in our universe follows the trajectory of entropy. (Make sure you’re sitting down for this one). The struggle is nothing more than a distant echo of the second law of thermodynamics, i.e., disorder increases with time. Where (A) is equal to improbable states of order and (C) is equal to more probable states of disorder. 

“Our subjective sense of the direction of time, the psychological arrow of time, is therefore determined within our brain by the thermodynamic arrow of time. Just like a computer, we must remember things in the order in which entropy increases.”

Prof. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (1996 ed.)

Why then do we yearn for ordered states whilst the universe expands obstinately towards greater disorder. Is it because entropy signals the approach of our annihilation? Has the universe selected living beings that struggle to hold out against the inevitability of death? Or is this merely one worldview among others that are better aligned with our observations of existence? 

“After scaling the high summits of wonderment, the wayfarer cometh to the Valley of True Poverty and Absolute Nothingness. This station is that of dying to the self and living in God, of being poor in self and rich in the Desired One. Poverty, as here referred to, signifieth being poor in that which pertaineth to the world of creation and rich in what belongeth to the realms of God. For when the true lover and devoted friend reacheth the presence of the Beloved, the radiant beauty of the Loved One and the fire of the lover’s heart will kindle a blaze and burn away all veils and wrappings. Yea, all that he hath, from marrow to skin, will be set aflame, so that nothing will remain save the Friend.”

Baha’u’llah, The Seven Valleys (circa 1857)

Maybe it is philosophical folly when we force a wedge between intangible ideas and related events or things in order to satisfy some preconceived ontological hierarchy of being (e.g., “higher” and “lower” or “primary” and “secondary” ranks of existence), but our current theme doesn’t exclusively fall into the domain of philosophy. The matter of yearning towards an objective through a struggle – “A to C, through B” – is actually present and prevalent in the paradigms of our age with respect to mental health, humanistic psychology, and theories of human nature. We’ve just recast the language to appear less esoteric and more “rational” or “scientific” (in the sense that science works exclusively on the assumptions of positivism, physicalism, and empiricism): Yearnings and desires (A) became motivations and drives; goals and objectives (C) replace the Beloved or our object of yearning; and the struggle (B) becomes the work we do to achieve “well-being.” This mechanistic reformulation lends itself to operationalization while still retaining the essential elements, which are as inseparable from human experience as breathing. 

Even the hierarchical structure of needs and objects traditionally attributed to revelation – in the sense that inferior needs and objects are more corporeal or secondary and less “spiritual” or primary – can be found in Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs from his 1943 paper, “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Hunger is inferior to safety. Safety is inferior to friendship. Friendship is inferior to Transcendence. However, from the perspective of revelation (and as the quotes from Baha’u’llah included in this post clearly state), “the uttermost limit of the realm of effort and striving” is the soul’s search after God. In effect, all lesser forms of “A to C through B” find their fullest expression in spiritual longing and search. All lesser forms of yearning and struggle are resolved through the recognition of the Supreme Godhead or Manifestation.

Regardless of whether you’re oriented to this religious yearning or spurred into action by some other motive force, the narrative of “A to C through B” animates every aspect of our lives. The yearning is intrinsic, the objective can vary, but A Luta Continua. Perhaps most importantly, it is in our common struggle that we find an empathy that transcends our ephemeral differences. An empathy that reminds us not to judge too severely because, afterall, what do any of us really know about anything?