Inclusion, Exclusion, and Community Theme Analysis

In addition to searching for truths about the universe through meditation, Ray Smith and his friends also dream of changing the world. They believe that their values could form the basis of a religious community, and Japhy Ryder even talks about starting a countercultural “rucksack revolution” to transform society as a whole. Nevertheless, when they talk about this free and inclusive society, Ray, Japhy, and their friends ironically imagine that everyone in it is a white man, just like them. So, while Kerouac suggests that happiness is best found in an open community of likeminded people, he also shows how people with privilege—like the white men at the center of his book—can mistakenly think their communities are open and free when they’re really deeply exclusionary. This suggests that, while homogeneous communities can be comfortable and freeing for those who build them, they are just as often dangerous, oppressive, or exclusionary to those who don’t.

Japhy views Buddhism as a collective project and thinks it’s his calling to transform the world through by building Buddhist communities. He dreams of getting “millions of guys all over the world” to join his revolution and start “bringing the word down to everybody.” He thinks that they will build a new kind of society, in which everyone lives like he does: they will reject consumerism, wander the mountains, drink tea, and read poetry. And, not surprisingly, Japhy thinks that his likeminded Buddhist friends are the chosen people who must start building this new society on a small scale. As a result, he views his friend group’s homogeneity as an advantage: they all love Buddhism and poetry, and they have a great time partying together. By extension, Ray and Japhy think that if everyone in the world followed their value system, everyone would be better off. As they bring others into their friend group and share their thoughts and writings, they believe that they are starting to build the inclusive, utopian Buddhist community that they’ve dreamt about.

Ray and Japhy intend to save the world from its own folly, but Kerouac shows that their vision of spiritual community is limiting because it relies on homogeneity. Namely, they want everyone to believe the same things and live the same lifestyle, and they imagine a society built for middle-class white American men. Their privilege leads them to falsely assume that their individual experiences are universal, which then blinds them to others’ needs, experiences, and humanity. Accordingly, even though they theoretically want to include everyone in their friend group and future religious utopia, they actually end up excluding most people from it.

First, Ray and Japhy view white men like themselves as the ultimate authority on Buddhism, while ignoring the actual Asian Buddhists who surround them. When they pass a Buddhist temple in San Francisco, for instance, Japhy refuses to visit because he considers his own version of Zen Buddhism purer than Chinese immigrants’ traditional Buddhism. Similarly, he reveres many Buddhist monks and poets from China and Japan, but they’re are dead or mythical—he doesn’t know any living Buddhist leaders. Thus, when Japhy actually goes to Japan to study Buddhism, he imagines that he’ll bring its secrets back to the U.S.—even though many Japanese Buddhists are already living and teaching in the U.S. Rather than joining the existing Buddhist community, Japhy insists on forming a new community by and for white men. In his utopia, these white men get to learn from Asian cultures and religions, but actual Asian people are never involved in this process. In this way, the like-mindedness in Ray and Japhy’s community is actually based on racial exclusivity.

Similarly, even as Ray and Japhy preach openness and inclusivity, they also refuse to see women as their equals. Japhy’s girlfriends Princess, Polly, and Psyche all take an interest in Buddhism, but Ray and Japhy treat them more like sex objects than intellectual equals. For instance, Ray comments that Princess “wanted to be a big Buddhist like Japhy” but that she can’t, because she’s a woman—the most she can do is have sex with “big Buddhist” men and become a “holy concubine.” When Princess calls herself a bodhisattva, the men start laughing, yet when Japhy calls Ray a bodhisattva, he takes this as a serious compliment. This shows the men’s double standard: even though Princess’s beliefs about Buddhism are just as sophisticated as Ray and Japhy’s, the men don’t view her as an equal. This isn’t accidental: it’s built into Japhy’s vision of a spiritual community. He imagines a network of white Buddhist men living in shacks and meditating across North America—or even colonizing the rest of the world. But he promises that the “pure holy men” won’t have to be alone: they’ll “have women, too, wives, small huts with religious families.” Not only does Japhy talk about women and children as men’s property, then, but he thinks that women should be forced to live isolated lives in the woods, take care of their absent husbands’ houses, and raise their children so that their husbands can freely wander around the world, party, and pray. In other words, the community of Buddhist men he wants to create relies on those men being able to control women and treat them as property, rather than admitting them to the community as equals.

Despite their well-intentioned desire to build a free, inclusive community, the Dharma Bums end up creating a community that’s neither free nor inclusive for people who don’t happen to be white men. Perhaps they’re blinded by their privilege and imagine the lives they want to live and the world they want to live in, rather than the lives and worlds that would be best for everyone. Regardless, by ignoring diversity and imagining that it’s possible for large communities to be totally homogeneous, they undermine their own plans. While homogeneity can help build communities, Kerouac’s novel shows, it can also be dangerous and exclusionary.