28 Sunday Feb 2021
Posted in Asian Thought, Economics, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Politics, Western Thought
Tags
Andy Wang, Bryan Van Norden, Cambodia, Christmas, Japan, Jay Garfield, Jaya Sundaresh, Kassy Cho, race, Susan Scafidi
Jay Garfield, Bryan Van Norden, and most of my colleagues on the Indian Philosophy Blog are shamelessly committing massive acts of cultural appropriation. Perhaps I am too. And that’s a wonderful thing.
Continue reading10 Sunday May 2020
Posted in Happiness, Leadership, Metaphilosophy, Politics, Work
Back in 2013, the Canadian journalist Chrystia Freeland decided to make a major career move: she left journalism to become an elected politician. (She now serves as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, in the Liberal cabinet under Justin Trudeau.) The move horrified a number of people close to her: according to a New York editor she admired, “if I entered politics I would never again be able to tell the truth—and that even if I tried, people wouldn’t listen to me, on the grounds that I was a politician, and therefore a liar.”
Soon after she was elected, Freeland wrote about her career transition in an excellent piece considering the larger implications of the move and the suspicion it evoked. Freeland frames the issue at hand in terms of a distinction between snark and smarm. She doesn’t specifically define either term, but evokes a common cluster of meanings of them: the fight between snark and smarm is a “fight between the cynics and the true believers, the pessimists and the optimists, the naysayers and the cheerleaders.” Politicians present themselves as smarmy true believers, optimists, cheerleaders; journalists present themselves as snarky cynics, pessimists, naysayers.
Continue reading13 Sunday Oct 2019
Posted in Politics, Social Science
The term people of colour has been around since at least the 1980s, but in those days it was typically treated as something of a joke, a silly prettified euphemism. In the 2010s, in the US at least, it has now become a widely used term to group together people who are not racially white. This may be in part for the valid reason that the old term “minorities” is no longer appropriate, given that in some places like California and Texas, white people are now themselves a minority. Nevertheless, I do not think that the adoption of “people of colour” is a good thing. Continue reading
06 Monday May 2019
Posted in Early and Theravāda, Economics, Foundations of Ethics, Health, Human Nature, Politics, Psychology, Self, Virtue, Work
≈ Comments Off on Podcast interview on qualitative individualism
Tags
20th century, academia, Catharine MacKinnon, Friedrich Nietzsche, gender, generations, Georg Simmel, Hans-Georg Gadamer, identity, Immanuel Kant, interview, John Locke, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Monty Python, music, qualitative individualism, race, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Romanticism, Stefani Ruper, United States, virtue ethics
Stefani Ruper interviewed me for her video podcast a while ago, and the interview is now live. It focuses on the topic of qualitative individualism, elaborating on ideas from my earlier series of posts. It gets into some topics that are a bit more intense than I’ve covered on the blog in recent years, but I’m pleased with it. Thanks to Stefani for this opportunity.
I’ve embedded the video above, so you can watch it here, and I also highly recommend you check out Stefani’s excellent philosophy podcast in general:
iTunes: http://stefaniruper.com/listen
Spotify: http://stefaniruper.com/
Youtube: http://stefaniruper.com/watch
Stream & other outlets: http://stefaniruper.com/
14 Sunday Oct 2018
Tags
Charles Taylor, Gretchen Rubin, identity, law, music, Prince Ea, qualitative individualism, race, Supreme Court of India
When we study non-Western cultures it is difficult to separate out the study of “philosophy” from the study of “religion”. Those of us who study the brilliant arguments of élite men are often told we should pay more attention to the lived culture, to what people there actually say and do. There are advantages and disadvantages to studying other cultures this way. But one of the things we often don’t do is turn that same gaze on our own.
What if, as philosophers in the West, we paid more attention to the ideas that actually underlie our everyday lives and cultures and arguments rather than to prestigious theories? As “religious studies” scholars do, in ways that do not and should not depend on the concept of “religion”? I think that if we approached contemporary Western philosophical culture in this way, we would discover how much of our ethical life is animated by an important ethical ideal that has not had a defender as philosophically rigorous and articulate as a Kant or a Rawls. Continue reading
22 Sunday Jul 2018
Posted in Early and Theravāda, M.T.S.R., Modernized Buddhism, Politics
Tags
Aśvaghoṣa, Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Burma/Myanmar, Disengaged Buddhism, Engaged Buddhism, George Bond, Joseph Cheah, Judith Simmer-Brown, race, Thomas Tweed, United States
My upcoming paper on disengaged Buddhism focuses on classical Indian texts that engaged Buddhist scholarship has generally silenced. As I read more, though, I come to see that contemporary Asian and Asian-American Buddhists also have politically disengaged tendencies, which modern politically active scholarship – not only Buddhist – also tends to silence.
I first noted this tendency of silencing in Judith Simmer-Brown’s introduction to the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, the leading engaged Buddhist organization she helped found. The group, she says, “was concerned that Buddhist practice centers and groups had become entirely removed from the social and political issues of the day: some teachers and organizations were even actively discouraging political involvement.” (69) And that’s it for those “teachers and organizations”. Why were they discouraging political involvement? What did they say? What were their names? No answers are forthcoming; they receive no voice. What we hear instead is the story of how Simmer-Brown and her American fellows put together a politically engaged group in defiance of their teachers.
The tendency plays out in a different way in Joseph Cheah‘s Race and Religion in American Buddhism. Continue reading
21 Friday Jul 2017
Posted in Politics
Tags
academia, Barry Daniel, conservatism, Edmund Burke, interview, Joseph de Maistre, Martin Luther King Jr., race, Sarah Silverman, technology, United States
Barry Daniel of the Middle Way Society recently held a podcast interview with me, asking about my ideas on literal conservatism. It’s about half an hour; have a listen if you’re interested.
16 Sunday Apr 2017
Posted in Anger, Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Psychology, Serenity
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autobiography, conferences, Disengaged Buddhism, Donald Trump, Engaged Buddhism, Four Noble Truths, George W. Bush, IABS, Pali suttas, race, S.N. Goenka, Śāntideva, United States
Cross-posted at the Indian Philosophy Blog.
Śāntideva’s anti-political views are very commonly missed by Buddhist scholars today, especially constructive or theological ones, who are excited by the Engaged Buddhist embrace of political action. He is hardly alone among classical Indian Buddhists in expressing them. So last September I proposed a presentation to the International Association of Buddhist Studies (IABS), which I intended to turn into a paper, explaining the importance of these anti-political views and entitled “Disengaged Buddhism”.
I was expecting Hillary Clinton to win the American election. Continue reading
22 Sunday Jan 2017
Posted in Humility, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism, Politics
Tags
Anagarika Dharmapala, authenticity, B.R. Ambedkar, David McMahan, Engaged Buddhism, identity, Jim Wilton, modernism, modernity, race, Richard K. Payne, Sulak Sivaraksa, Tibet
Late last year I was delighted to see a post from Richard Payne retracting his earlier post on “White Buddhism”, motivated at least in part by my critique. It is all too rare to see a human being change his or her mind, especially on politically charged issues where passions run high and it is all too easy to develop attachment to views. I commend and thank Payne for his thoughtful retraction. On my end, he has provoked me to make a retraction of my own. Continue reading
08 Sunday May 2016
Posted in M.T.S.R., Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Patient Endurance, Politics
Mindfulness meditation has become so mainstream that it’s not just doctors who prescribe it. A couple weeks ago, Boston University had a workshop on mindfulness for its information-technology staff. Google made a splash for having an in-house mindfulness coach, Chade-Meng Tan, who was recently interviewed in Religion Dispatches.
Tan makes some startling claims in the interview – most notably that American Buddhism is “purer Buddhism” because mindfulness is its “source teaching”, which temples in Asian countries have supposedly moved away from. I have spent plenty of time debunking such an approach in Ken Wilber and others, and there’s no need to say more here. What does need a response is a recent discussion of Tan by Richard K. Payne. Continue reading