Love of All Wisdom

By far the most famous portions of Śāntideva’s work are his meditations on the equalization and exchange of self and other, found in chapter VIII of the Bodhicary?vat?ra. They appear in Western introductory readers on ethics, and are considered the foundation for an entire genre of Tibetan literature, blo sbyong or “mental purification.” Personally, these are not generally my favourite parts of Śāntideva’s work; his arguments against the existence of the self do not convince me, and the meditative exercises strike me as potentially damaging. That said, they do contain one line that sticks with me, that strikes me as extremely profound and valuable: All those in the world who are suffering are so because of a desire for their own happiness. All those in the world who are happy are so because of a desire for the happiness of others. (BCA VIII.129, my translation)

I discussed this claim once before but want to return to it. The claim is, I think, overstated for rhetorical effect. Even in Śāntideva’s eyes, merely desiring others’ happiness will not make you happy – especially if you are misguided about the causes of their happiness, so that you try only to provide them with external goods rather than addressing the inner mental causes of their suffering. And yet from my experience, I would still say the claim is more true than not. There’s something self-defeating about searching after one’s own happiness itself. If one keeps one’s eye on this goal above all, one becomes too acutely aware of failures at it, too focused on one’s lack of happiness – “I’m trying so hard to be happy and yet I’m not; something must be wrong with me” – and the goal is inhibited. (In his book Power Sleep, psychologist James Maas noted a similar problem with respect to sleep: subjects offered $20 if they fell asleep quickly would take longer to fall asleep than subjects who were not offered the money.) (continue reading…)

I’ve been noticing a topic I’ve dealt with repeatedly in other contexts but would like to address head on: the possibility of deliberately lying to oneself, of intentionally believing things that aren’t true. I spoke before of “noble lies” to others, but not to oneself.

The point seems to come up again and again, for there are many reasons why trying to believe false things might prove valuable. In cases where one’s children make one less happy, one is still a better parent if one falsely believes that children make one happy. Some psychologists suggest the possibility of depressive realism: the idea that depressed people actually view the world more accurately than others. In a comment I noted the happiness often radiated by evangelical Christians: should one perhaps try to become such a person even if their God doesn’t exist? Last time the point came up in speaking of prayer: there seem to be real benefits from prayer, but it might require belief in an entity that isn’t real.

Now in every one of these cases, the good thing about lying to oneself has something in common: it is a good result. (continue reading…)

This weekend I went to New York City with friends so they could attend a bridal shower. I love New York – but I’m also wary of it. Happiness researcher Christopher Peterson ran an online happiness questionnaire and analyzed the results by zip code – and found that the most miserable zip codes of all were found in midtown Manhattan. Peterson himself cautions that this is not a controlled or rigorous experiment, and even if it were, it would still be measuring happiness by the questionable measure of self-report.

Still, in many respects these results are exactly what I would expect. I found this happiness data from Penelope Trunk, who nails the problem with living in New York exactly. If you are (like me) the kind of person who loves city life, then in New York you really do have the best of everything, at least on this continent and in some cases anywhere: the best food, the best entertainment, the best shopping for almost any goods you could want, the best access to transportation, the best art. But that’s exactly the problem. On one hand, you’re competing with everyone else to have access to the best of everything, so everything is very expensive, so you have to work much harder to make more money. (A little like Dr. Seuss’s Solla Sollew, where they have no troubles except for the fact that you can’t actually live there.) On the other hand, and more insidiously, if you live in New York, it’s probably because you are the kind of person who tries to have access to the best of everything.
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In examining my previous question on internalism and externalism I’ve been trying to explore a powerful but complex and difficult answer: that this question is expressed in the very history of Western philosophy.

Lately I’ve slowly been making my way through Philosophy and Freedom, a collection of essays by and about the neglected Canadian Hegelian philosopher James Doull (rhymes with towel). Doull, like Socrates or George Herbert Mead, never published a book during his lifetime; his reputation derives almost entirely from being spread by his students and their students, mostly through the classics department at Dalhousie University and the great-books program at its affiliated University of King’s College. (I myself know Doull’s work only because a lifelong friend of mine is one of Doull’s “grand-pupils,” a devoted student of Doull’s students at Dalhousie and King’s.)

Doull’s work is difficult, both in the density of its prose and in the wide range of the texts it expects familiarity with – the chapter on ancient Greece covers not only philosophy but the full range of history, tragedy and comedy, viewing their scope all together through a Hegelian philosophical lens. Moreover, because Doull’s concerns are so wide-ranging, a study of his work does not immediately repay the reader with direct application to particular philosophical questions and problems. If ever there was a big-picture thinker it is this man, at least when it comes to Western philosophical traditions.

And yet studying Doull closely has ultimately paid off for me in thinking about the big question I’ve addressed above. I realize that this question of ethical motivation has, in its way, been central to Western philosophical tradition, not merely in the works of individual thinkers but through its history. (continue reading…)

This semester, in addition to my teaching, I’m helping out at Stonehill with instructional technology, helping other profs learn the new learning management system (the software that runs things like gradebooks and online discussion forums, similar to Blackboard). It’s great work, helping people out with something they really appreciate.

In the process I’ve noticed something. It’s a cliché that people my age and younger – Gen Y and late Gen X – are more comfortable with computer technology than people of older generations, the boomers and early Xers, since we grew up with it and they didn’t. That’s been my experience on the job so far; I’ve been effective at this work because I pick up tech skills more quickly than the other professors, most of whom are older than me.

But I also notice they have something I don’t. When I show them the system’s capabilities, they’re impressed and delighted. They really appreciate how this software can make their teaching careers easier. But me, when I first started learning the software, I first noticed its gaps, the things it can’t do but should. (“You’re kidding! This piece of crap doesn’t have any way to separate out two sections of the same course?”) I’m finding myself a little envious of their gratitude, their ability to appreciate technology. I worry that I’m on a technological hedonic treadmill: I’m surrounded by so much technology that my expectations are higher, and it doesn’t make me any happier to have it.

Ah, the jaded cynicism of youth, and the wide-eyed wonder of the years. David Wedaman, an instructional technology specialist at Brandeis, said a little while ago on Twitter: “Augmented reality is about as amazing as anything I can think of. I think I’m getting old.” If he is, I think he’s lucky.

My philosophical awakening occurred in Thailand in 1997; but it has been over the past decade, “the ohs,” that I’ve really had the chance to develop my thoughts. As that decade closes, I would like to note how my thoughts were shaped by their time.

I spent almost the entire decade living in the United States, except for two three-month stints in Toronto in 2001 and India in 2005. It was not the ideal decade in which to do this, for the US of this decade was the US of George W. Bush: a man who opposed almost everything I had ever stood for, whether substantively (torture, wars of choice, gutting environmental regulations), procedurally (incompetent patronage appointments for natural disasters, governing unilaterally without respect for other branches of government) or symbolically (insisting on suits and ties in the White House). I had grown up despising Ronald Reagan, but Reagan now looked like a saint compared to W – Reagan at least was competent. And in the face of all this, Americans returned him to office in 2004.

For my many American friends – the vast majority of them left-wingers like me – this decade was a time of powerlessness and rage. But they at least could vote, could contribute to political campaigns, could do something about it. (continue reading…)

Heath White of PEA Soup has an interesting new post up called The Ethics of Santa. White argues that parents and educators should not teach their children the myth of Santa Claus, for three major reasons:

1. It involves a lot of lying and deception practiced on credulous people.
2. It tends to foster greed in children and contributes to their false impression that one’s happiness is determined by one’s material possessions.
3. In telling children that the quantity and quality of one’s gifts are a function of one’s behavior, when actually they are a function of one’s socio-economic standing and parental temperament, it induces moral complacency in well-off children and false feelings of moral inferiority in less well-off children.

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I’ve recently been sympathetic to two different positions which seem to stand in some tension with one another. I’ve blogged about them both here, but on separate occasions. On one hand, to some degree happiness seems to require justice: to live happily with others, we need a sense of obligation and legitimate expectation, in terms of something like an Aristotelian mean. On the other, the assignment of blame and moral responsibility – what we might even associate with morality itself, if we distinguish it from ethics – leads to anger and a drive to punishment. Śāntideva even opposes the idea of free will for this reason, because it’s what allows us blame and moral responsibility. It’s so hard for Śāntideva to take this position against blame – he strives for a monastic life that doesn’t depend on other people, so he doesn’t need justice to be happy. But that’s an option I’ve rejected, and I imagine most of my readers have too.

If one is to live in society, dependent on others, one is likely to require justice. That’s what I learned dealing with my loud neighbours in Texas: without a conception of justice, you cannot have a clear conscience; you cannot arbitrate between the competing demands that others make on you. The rub is that justice seems to require blame and moral responsibility (and therefore some kind or degree of free will). Aristotle says that justice consists of giving people what they deserve; doesn’t that very idea of desert or merit imply moral responsibility?

I don’t know Aristotle well enough to know his answer to that question. But Aristotle or not, I suspect it’s possible to have a conception of justice that doesn’t require moral responsibility. The virtue of justice is a mean, in that just behaviour lies somewhere in between taking too much and giving too little (greed, miserliness) and giving too much and taking too little (submissiveness, servility). How do you decide what’s too little or too much? It depends on the particulars of the situation, but it would surely involve some combination of prevailing social norms and mores (what Hegel would call Sittlichkeit) and something like the Golden Rule, treating others as you would wish to be treated (or in some cases as they would wish to be treated, if their desires are not inordinate). Does that require assigning moral responsibility and blame? Not as far as I can tell.

It’s common for those new to Buddhism to ask: “Do Buddhists think wealth and making money are bad?” It’s equally common to answer: “no, wealth itself isn’t bad, it’s just what you do with it.” The Thai scholar-monk Prayudh Payutto (also known as Phra Rajavaramuni and several other names, but this one is the easiest to track him down by) is probably the best-known exponent of this view: in his Buddhist Economics he says “it is not wealth as such that is praised or blamed but the way it is acquired and used.” (61) Others writing on the topic, such as Peter Harvey and Donald Swearer, have said similar things; the topic’s on my mind right now because Justin Whitaker said the same thing in a recent comment here.

There are a number of passages in the suttas that support this interpretation, on which wealth itself is neutral to our well-being (although I suspect that these passages are not always being read in their proper context). But it’s worth pointing out that there’s another view in South Asian Buddhism that takes a significantly more negative view of wealth and its accumulation, one that appears strongly in Śāntideva. (continue reading…)

I’ve recently been enjoying Joss Whedon‘s underrated science-fiction TV series Dollhouse. Whedon’s ingenious plot twists and a strong supporting cast have made the show highly enjoyable, at least since the middle of the first season; beyond that, the show’s premise is bait for philosophers, especially those who focus on the ethics of technology or enjoy “thought experiments.” It’s about a secret operation that erases people’s memories and personalities and “imprints” them with completely new ones. Given the rapid pace of advances in contemporary neuroscience, it is not entirely far-fetched to say that such a process could become feasible within my lifetime; and it raises a great deal of questions, familiar to Buddhists, about the nature of personal identity.

Last Friday’s episode, Belonging, implicitly makes a further point about the good life. (Spoiler warning, if you haven’t seen this episode.) (continue reading…)