Love of All Wisdom

To describe something as “authentic” today is usually thought to give it high praise. But I sometimes question how much of a good authenticity really is.

What makes a thing authentic? Central to authenticity, it seems to me, is the absence of choice. To decide to be authentic is a contradiction.

If people built a house out of stone in 1850 because it was the only material available, we call it an authentic stone house; we do not say this when, of the many materials available to build your house out of today, you choose stone. A Jamaican raised in a Kingston shanty, exposed to reggae all his life, makes authentic reggae himself – in a way that someone who comes in from outside to make reggae music does not. If I were to open an Indian restaurant, people might consider it authentic since I am ethnically part Indian, something I didn’t choose; whereas if I were to open a Thai restaurant, nobody would consider it authentic, even though I can cook much better Thai food than I can Indian.

So why is this something we value? Why do we praise the thing people didn’t choose over the thing they chose? I think it has to do with the inescapable presence of modernity and capitalism, living in the age Marx described so well in the Communist Manifesto, where the “bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.” What is chosen can be bought and sold easily. One can certainly buy and sell authenticity; but one cannot create authenticity. In the prosperous modern world, the unchosen is scarce, and that makes it valuable.

If you’ve been following this blog so far this week, you can tell I’m fairly clearly on the left side of the political spectrum – especially by American standards. Nevertheless, the blogs I personally read most often and find most interesting right now are avowedly conservative (and American): Front Porch Republic, and Crunchy Con by its contributor Rod Dreher.

Why are these the most interesting? First, it’s always good and mind-opening to know how the other half thinks, and these sites have very intelligent and well written conservative commentary. But there’s considerably more than that. They’re not typical right-wingers by any means. They’re generally strongly environmentalist and deeply disillusioned with George W. Bush, while at the same time hostile to abortion and gay marriage. In a sense these sites are all about being genuinely conservative: wanting to preserve the traditions and ways of life accumulated through generations, against the capitalist market – and the government that supports it, and the libertine pop culture that it creates. The philosopher they take as a founder is Wendell Berry, a public intellectual who defends (and lives) the life of the simple self-sufficient farmer.

What you’ll find there is, in short, a consistent public philosophy, probably more consistent than either the left or the right usually is. Moreover, it’s a philosophy concerned with making us better people, which is something I believe to be absolutely essential – compared to libertarians and liberals, for whom the greatest concern is often just making sure people can have and do more of what they want.

I have many criticisms of this philosophy – the “crunchy” views as well as the right-wing views. But I nevertheless find it tremendously stimulating, one of the most thought-provoking sets of ideas around today. It’s something I have learned a good deal from already, and expect to learn a good deal more.

Cross-cultural philosophers often wish to treat Jesus of Nazareth as a great philosopher, whose life and thought we can learn from – but one who is fully human, no more divine than the rest of us.

C.S. Lewis hated this move, thought it was intellectually sloppy. (continue reading…)

When I first read Śāntideva, his practice of redirecting good karma (pariṇāmanā, often translated “merit transfer”) struck me as somewhat curious. As I tend to a naturalistic view of karma, I wasn’t sure how habits could realistically move from one person to another. Dale Wright’s article on naturalized karma speaks of redirection mainly to criticize it.

I gained a newfound respect for the practice, though, when I attended a vipassanā meditation retreat in S.N. Goenka’s tradition, in 2005. Many people I know swear by Goenka’s overall technique; it frankly didn’t do a lot for me. What made a huge difference, though, was at the very end of the retreat, when Goenka urged us to a practice very much like traditional pariṇāmanā. Wish everyone well, he said on his videotape. Think of people you know and wish them the best.

Fine, that’s the easy part. But then he said: wish your enemies well. Think of your enemies, and devote wishes to their being happy. So I thought: who is my greatest enemy? As a lifelong leftie, in 2005, it didn’t take me long to identify George W. Bush. And so, as part of the practice, I tried sincerely to wish that man well.

The experience was more than unsettling. I cried in the process. But it helped me grow a lot. I had spent a long time feeling such poisonous hatred for that man, which did terrible things to me and my own well-being – in a way that Śāntideva warns us about. It’s a terribly unnerving, but highly rewarding, thing to wish your enemies well. Since your enemies are only human it makes philosophical sense to do so, really, if your main aim is consequentialist – that is, to produce the best results for yourself or for humanity. The trick is that it requires you to give up retribution as a goal, and even for a consequentialist, that’s not easy.

(continue reading…)

Catholic conservatives frequently say they defend a “culture of life” against a “culture of death” soaked in abortion and euthanasia. (It’s not only Catholics who use these terms, but they’re most popular in Catholic circles, not surprisingly since they originate with former Pope John Paul II.)

The intended rhetorical significance of this phrasing is pretty clear: life good, death bad. But I find myself taking it somewhat differently. The problem with contemporary worldviews, in my books, isn’t that we have a culture of death. The problem is that we don’t have a culture of death, and we should.

All life ends in death. This isn’t news. How, then, could we imagine a culture of life that isn’t a culture of death? We need a culture that enables us to face the inevitable reality of our own deaths and the deaths of our loved ones, and that’s exactly what we don’t have. In our everyday lives we allow ourselves to think that death won’t really happen to us. I think of the generally forgettable movie Practical Magic, which rests on the premise that its leading women suffer from a curse: a man who falls in love with them “will die.” Not die young, not die prematurely; just “he will die,” and this is seen as something horrible. But we all suffer from this curse. We just don’t want to admit it – because we don’t have a culture of death.

Plato said the love of wisdom – philosophy – is the practice of death. We should listen.

I’m taking a break for the weekend (as I will probably do most weekends). There will be much more next week, so if you’ve enjoyed this blog so far, please come and visit again then! (In a few weeks I’ll establish a more regular, if perhaps slightly less frequent, schedule; I’ll make a public note when I do.)

Aristotle is well known for saying that virtue is a mean between two bad extremes: learning to live well is like learning to hit a target with an arrow, neither too high nor too low. Such an account seems sensible, even obvious, when it comes to virtues like courage. Too little courage makes one a coward; too much makes one foolhardy, taking unnecessary risks. Virtue here seems clearly in the middle.

But what about justice? Aristotle thought that this too was a mean. If we demand more than we deserve, we are greedy; fair enough. But what if we demand less than we deserve? Aristotle thought that this too was a vice. But isn’t it a good thing to be nice and generous in this way? The Dutch legal philosopher Hugo Grotius certainly thought so, and therefore disagreed with Aristotle. The essence of justice, said Grotius, “lies in abstaining from that which belongs to another.” Grotius’s claim moved society away from an understanding of justice based on virtue, and toward one based on law.

I think, however, that Aristotle is smarter than Grotius gives him credit for, in a way that has significant implications. If one asks for too much, Aristotle tells us, one commits injustice; but if one asks for too little, one suffers injustice, and both, in their way, are serious wrongs. It is unjust to refuse to stand up for yourself, to allow others to walk all over you.

The point is particularly important in an age where women are struggling for equality. The vice of submissiveness or meekness, of not asking for enough, is probably more prevalent in women than men. Sociological works like Women Don’t Ask note that gender wage gaps often arise because women don’t feel entitled to their fair share. Aristotle’s view is empowering.

You can’t study Buddhism for very long without bumping into the concept of karma – or more specifically, good karma (pu?ya) and bad karma (p?pa). Karma poses a significant problem for those trying to learn from Buddhism in a contemporary context informed by natural science. In a great many Buddhist texts, the central thesis of karma – that good actions result in good fortune for the agent, and vice versa for bad actions – is simply assumed. Śāntideva, for example, spends a long time warning you about the time you’ll spend in the hells as a result of being bad, but doesn’t give you any reason to believe this is true beyond his own say-so and that of the s?tra scriptures.

But does this mean we should simply throw out the idea of karma? I don’t think so. The most helpful way I’ve seen to think about karma is in Dale S. Wright’s valuable article Critical Questions Towards a Naturalized Concept of Karma in Buddhism. Wright proposes an approach to karma based on an Aristotelian approach to virtue: roughly, good actions develop good habits in us – which is to say virtues, such as courage, generosity or patient endurance – and those good habits in turn tend to make our lives better. The key point is that it depends on a distinction between internal and external goods: virtue makes us better and happier on the inside, and makes our lives better in that respect. It doesn’t necessarily make better events happen to us.

There are some problems with Wright’s thesis that I expect to take up here later. But its central insight seems to me worth adopting for a very simple reason: that it is both Buddhist and true.

There is much that I admire in the works of Ken Wilber, and I think it is essential reading for anyone who wants to think philosophically in the 21st century. That’s not to say that Wilber is right about most things; in many respects I think he isn’t, and I will critique his work in future posts. But before I get to critiquing Wilber’s work, I want to discuss why I admire it so.

Wilber sometimes seems to claim that his work is widely studied in academia. It isn’t, but that’s not a criticism. Wilber’s writing is exactly the kind of work that really needs to be done, but is rarely done within the confines of academic writing. Why? Because Wilber’s work looks at big questions: questions of truth wherever it can be found, the nature of the universe and our place in it, the good life. The traditional questions of philosophy, in other words. Academics generally refuse to investigate these questions, whichever of the three main academic approaches they take. Philologists often believe we have no right to discuss the questions in a text unless we’ve studied it in its own language for decades; analytic philosophers carve up questions into smaller and smaller pieces, leaving the bigger questions unanswered; postmodernists question any questions we might ask, so that the meta-questions are all that are left. (Why these approaches dominate is a question I’ll leave for another time.) Each of these approaches has its value; but each is missing something big.

Wilber’s work finds that “something big.” He takes what he calls an integral approach, meaning an attempt to integrate the valuable insights and truths from every possible source, Asian, Western or otherwise. This basic methodological idea is what makes Wilber’s work a valuable starting point for any cross-cultural philosophical inquiry.

One of the recurring, and more controversial, themes in my dissertation was Śāntideva’s strong suspicion toward political involvement, as when he proclaims that texts on law and politics (da??an?ti) are fruitless and lead to delusion. When I first presented a chapter of the dissertation at a workshop, a colleague was critical of my attempt to use Śāntideva as a resource for contemporary ethical reflection. I don’t remember his exact words, but they ran along the lines of: “We cannot today accept an ethical system that does not involve working for political change.” For him, Buddhism could only now be acceptable if it was Engaged Buddhism. You can find similar points made in many other places; my friend and occasional mentor Jeff Kripal frequently insists (in the joint article Quietism and Karma, for example) that “quietistic” ascetic traditions cannot be “an adequate resource for contemporary ethics.”

But why should this be? The most typical argument has to do with a variety of “after”s: rhetorically, it is assumed that “after colonialism, after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, after Gandhi’s satyagraha…” political inaction is morally suspect or even unethical. (The quote is from Jeff’s book Crossing Boundaries, pp. 56-7.) I’m skeptical of such claims. History is full of genocides, massacres and struggles, dating back as far as it is recorded. What, if anything, makes our age different? Political quietism has been defended as perfectly ethical, for about as long as it has existed. Why shouldn’t it be similarly defended now?