Tag Archives: United States

The material conditions of qualitative individualism

27 Sunday Jan 2019

Posted by in Economics, Flourishing, Politics, Self, Work

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When I first started reading Charles Taylor on qualitative individualism in my 20s, my Marxist father complained that Taylor paid too little attention to material conditions. I didn’t really get the criticism at the time, but I do now, for reasons that go well beyond reading and writing.

Taylor’s discussion of qualitative individualism (or “expressivism” or the “ethics of authenticity”) takes place largely in the realm of ideas, as mine also has so far. I have tried to trace the history of the ideas of qualitative individualism. But such a history is incomplete. Continue reading →

Listening to contemporary disengaged voices

22 Sunday Jul 2018

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, M.T.S.R., Modernized Buddhism, Politics

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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 →

The philosophy of The Good Place

01 Sunday Apr 2018

Posted by in African Thought, Analytic Tradition, Christianity, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Practice, Virtue

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the good placeThe Good Place, an American comedy-fantasy series created by Michael Schur and airing on NBC, is perhaps the most explicitly philosophical American television show in recent memory. I think it aims to do for moral philosophy what Breaking Bad did for chemistry. (This post speaks of the second season, but does not have spoilers – at least in the sense that it does not reveal any of the show’s twists.) Continue reading →

What’s eating Michael Pollan?

06 Sunday Aug 2017

Posted by in Aesthetics, Biology, Food, Pleasure, Politics

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One of my greatest passions in life is food, trying out new cuisines and spices in unusual restaurants. In a certain way, a love of food was central to my philosophical development; part of the reason I went to work in Bangkok, where I discovered Buddhism, was my love of Thai food.

So I’m interested in philosophical treatments of food. Recent treatises on the subject, though, have proved disappointing. One of the worst is Leon Kass’s The Hungry Soul, a work that tries to think through just about every aspect of eating except for the pleasures of taste. He mentions them very briefly on pp. 90-91, where he dismisses them as ephemeral, disappearing once enjoyed, and therefore “closed to the permanent or the eternal” – just like music or drama, though this parallel goes curiously unmentioned. Kass admits that he “cooks little” and “has unsophisticated tastes” – basically, it would seem, he doesn’t enjoy food very much. Which makes The Hungry Soul comparable to a treatise on music written by the tone-deaf.

But Kass may be a bit too easy a target. He has already been the target of much ridicule on the Internet for his pompous pronouncements on food etiquette, most notoriously his condemnation of the act of licking an ice cream cone, as “a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive.” I know few who take him seriously.

Far more of a hearing is given to Michael Pollan, whose recent work seems to echo Kass’s puritanism in language more acceptable to educated left-wingers. Especially, his work In Defense of Food seems rather to be an attack on it. Continue reading →

Disengaged Buddhism in the era of Trump

16 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by in Anger, Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Psychology, Tranquility

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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 →

Happiness from politics, or, mourning in America

18 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by in Anger, Compassion, Despair, Gratitude, Grief, Happiness, Mahāyāna, Patient Endurance, Politics, Practice, Tranquility

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I will be taking a break from blogging as I travel in the next couple weeks. In the meantime I would like to leave you with this.

The results of the 2016 American election came as a surprise, and for many of us it was a horrifying shock. (One survey indicates “shocked” was the most common word Democratic supporters used to describe their reaction.) For me, though, this was not an unfamiliar shock. For the 2004 election had shocked me in a very similar way. In 2000 I had comforted myself with the idea that Bush didn’t legitimately win, and I was confident the people of the United States would reject him after horrors like Abu Ghraib. I was wrong. They did not. He even won the popular vote. Those results shook me to the core, filling my every moment with rage and frustration.

I had to learn ways of dealing with a world that so plainly rejected my values. A year or so after the fact, Goenka’s karmic redirection helped me a lot. But in the immediate aftermath of 2004, what helped was writing in my personal journals, thinking through ways to come to terms with the terrible situation. Just as reading can be a spiritual practice, so can writing.

What follows is the journal entry that, I think, helped me most to deal with the situation at the time. Continue reading →

The trouble with democracy

31 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by in Metaphilosophy, Politics

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The present American election is worth significant attention from a philosophy blog because it is a philosophically interesting one. (This is very much the sense in which “May you live in interesting times” is a curse – though not actually a Chinese one). Philosophy has already played a significant role in the election. At first philosophy’s role was mere whipping boy. In one single debate in November, three different Republican candidates attacked philosophy: Marco Rubio said “We need more welders and less philosophers”, Ted Cruz disparaged the Federal Reserve by calling them “philosopher-kings”, and John Kasich insisted “philosophy doesn’t work when you run something”.

All three candidates lost, of course, and lost to a man far less philosophical than any of them. But that man’s ascendance has led to significantly more explicit attention to philosophy than is common in ruthlessly pragmatic Anglophone North America. Continue reading →

The will of the people and the intellect of the people

17 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by in Foundations of Ethics, God, Politics

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Last time I discussed how the medieval debate between intellectualism and voluntarism remains around today in the distinction between natural and positive law. But there’s another way it remains around, which I think is more fundamental.

The key question between intellectualism and voluntarism is: what is more fundamental to ethics and politics, the intellect or the will? In the Middle Ages, of course, the intellect and will in question were God’s. Between natural law and positive law, the intellect and will are those of the lawmaker: is law whatever the lawmaker wills it to be, or is there a true law that the lawmaker should be able to discern intellectually from reality and base her decisions on?

Few would want to vest authority in just any lawmaker. In modern politics, especially but not only in the West, we typically place a very high value on the idea of democracy, rule by the people. If we are not sympathetic to the slogan vox populi, vox dei – the voice of the people is the voice of God – it is often because we do not believe in God, and see the voice of the people as higher than God’s.

But if the people should rule, what aspect of the people should rule? Their intellect, or their will? Continue reading →

Populism vs. technocracy in the United States

24 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by in Economics, Politics

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You might remember the political crisis in Thailand that made headlines six years ago as protesters clashed in the streets. At the heart of the crisis was Thaksin Shinawatra, the corrupt and authoritarian but very popular prime minister. His supporters bore the unfortunate name of Red Shirts; his opponents, Yellow Shirts.

I had identified the crisis as one of populism against technocracy: the Red Shirts fighting for the sovereignty of the democratically elected people’s choice who put wealth in the hands of the poor, the Yellow Shirts for effective, transparent government and the rule of law. The Yellow Shirts’ supporters had already dethroned Thaksin in a 2006 military coup; the protests were the Red Shirts demanding the return of democracy. They got it: there was another election in 2010. Thaksin could no longer run because he had now been convicted of many crimes – but his younger sister Yingluck Shinawatra did, and won spectacularly. Yingluck was the prime minister until 2014 – when she was turfed by another military coup. The military remains in power in Thailand now. That option remains available to technocratic élites who can’t stand how dumb the masses are: end democracy so that you can ignore their votes.

Back then in 2010 I had already noted how the conflict between populism and technocracy was not limited to Thailand. I had pointed to examples of it in the United States. But my examples then – Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader, even Sarah Palin – were comparatively marginal figures.

They are not anymore. Continue reading →

On making America great again

10 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Work

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In the early 1960s, my father finished his PhD in political science from Cornell. Under the restrictive and racialized American immigration rules of the day, he needed to work in a neighbouring country for two years before he could come to the US. So he applied for six tenure-track faculty jobs in Canada. He was offered five of them. The sixth, at the relatively low-prestige Memorial University of Newfoundland, turned him down with a curt letter that said “In our competition, you failed to qualify.” He found it amusing that such a lower-tier school would say such a dismissive thing when he had offers from so many places higher in the hierarchy.

This story ceased to amuse me when I received my PhD from Harvard in the late 2000s and began applying for faculty teaching jobs myself. I sent out nearly two hundred job applications, most of them for tenure-track jobs, across Canada and the United States, and a few off the continent. I received not one tenure-track offer anywhere. If Memorial University of Newfoundland had offered me a position, I would have taken it without hesitation and been grateful to have the opportunity. The same applies to most of my generation in academia. To those coming of age in the 21st-century university, my father’s story sounds as implausible as if he had wandered into the White House, said “I’d like a job as President of the United States”, and been offered it on the spot. But it was and is true. His experience was in Canada, but as far as I know, those faculty of his generation with a similarly prestigious degree who could apply for jobs in the United States had a comparably wide range of opportunities.

This intergenerational experience should highlight how the story in the academic humanities and social sciences from the 1960s to the 2010s has been above all a story of decline. Many North American leftists look at the real accomplishments made in areas of race, gender and sexuality and see this period as a time of unalloyed progress. I cannot. Continue reading →

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