It’s a great question, and one I’ve asked myself a number of times. Being anti-political is a position I’ve flirted with a lot, especially over the course of writing my dissertation, and my personal views are closely entangled with the ideas I address there. In many respects I see the dissertation’s main contribution to Śāntideva scholarship as pointing out the strongly anti-political nature of Śāntideva’s thought, and the underlying reasons for his anti-politics. Śāntideva is, I think, often thought of as a great friend to the Engaged Buddhist program of Buddhist political activism, since he is probably best known as the favourite thinker of that noted activist Tenzin Gyatso, the present (fourteenth) Dalai Lama; I claimed in the dissertation that such a placing of Śāntideva is mistaken.

The dissertation explains this point in great detail (mostly in its fourth, fifth and seventh chapters), but I haven’t yet said much about it on the blog, and I probably should. Briefly: Śāntideva says very little about political action, but what he does say (in the Śikṣā Samuccaya) indicates that he rejects it. He gives a list of genres of information that are not worth knowing or learning about, and includes law and political science (daṇḍanīti) on this list. When he gives advice to kings, it is that they give their kingdoms away.

Why is this? I argue that it’s because Śāntideva rejects or devalues most of what Martha Nussbaum (following Aristotle) would call “external goods”: things not under our control which we would normally want, including relationships, social status and (above all) material goods. For him these things are neutral at best, and most often actively harmful (as I discussed here.) Śāntideva does say that one should give these things to others – one of the reasons why Engaged Buddhists like Stephen Jenkins see him as arguing for political action on behalf of the poor. But Śāntideva’s reasoning for giving things to others, I argue, is not that they benefit from possessing the gift – indeed, they may be harmed. But such harm is worth it when they receive a gift from a bodhisattva, because it produces esteem (śraddhā) toward the bodhisattva – it makes the recipient more likely to listen to the bodhisattva’s dharma teaching. A crucial feature of this gift encounter, however, is that the gift come directly from a bodhisattva. Donations from a government or NGO will not do the trick. And this, I argue, is why Śāntideva does not care about governments; action to help others in politics has no genuinely beneficial effect.

I came to these ideas slowly. When I first presented on Śāntideva at a graduate student workshop, I was excited to talk about what Śāntideva could teach us in a contemporary context; a respondent claimed that if he urged political quietism, we could not be able to accept such a worldview in the present age. (I mentioned this response in this early post.) I was a little cowed by this response at first, and it took me a while to figure out an appropriate reply: but then I realized that that political quietism was, in many respects, itself one of the most important things that Śāntideva has to teach us. Whether we agree or disagree with it, his anti-politics is a profound and impeccably Buddhist idea, one that challenges us in a way we must think about and respond to.

For me, it was intoxicating to discover such an idea at a time when I needed to get away from politics, when caring about politics brought nothing but pain. I felt validated in my search for a better, happier life outside politics. The seventh chapter of the dissertation juxtaposed Śāntideva’s ideas against Nussbaum’s more politically charged philosophy, effectively defending Śāntideva against Nussbaum’s objections.

What the dissertation did not do was take up my own substantive, constructive position on the question at hand – for such constructive positions are largely frowned upon, if not scowled upon, in academic religious studies. But such a lack of attention to constructive views allowed me to get off the hook too easily, to defend Śāntideva’s anti-politics without thinking too hard about whether I really believed it.

For in the end I don’t reject external goods; on that basic question I do stand closer to Nussbaum than to Śāntideva. Again, if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have got married; the logical practical conclusion from Śāntideva’s thought is the monasticism which he himself practised. Some external goods are genuinely good. They can indeed be negative, as in the case of the hedonic treadmill; and in some cases their absence can strengthen us, as Śāntideva also claims and as I noted in an earlier post. But I do not think that this negativity is the norm – especially at the lower end of the social ladder, where governments are most likely to direct their help. External goods are often genuine goods, especially when they are what we often call “basic needs.”

In short, Śāntideva’s position on external goods – and therefore on political action – cannot be mine. So where do I stand? Well, I haven’t settled that yet. This is part of the reason I’ve lately been trying to explore the concept of altruism: the value of politics depends a lot on who we are ultimately trying to benefit. Should we aim for an enlightened self-interest, for the good of those close to us or whom we identify with, or universally for the good of all? Śāntideva takes the latter, universal position, in no uncertain terms. But I suspect he may be only able to do this because he devalues external goods, because the good of all is identified as their spiritual liberation. To value external goods and still seek the good of all is basically to be a utilitarian, a terribly frustrating and perhaps ultimately counterproductive way of life.

It took me a while to figure out the reason for this, but I came to see it quite clearly: for most left-wingers, the good is fundamentally political. The place to focus our efforts, in changing the way that things and people are, is on the inequalities, oppressions and pollutions of the state and the corporations and wealth it regulates. Conservatives, at least social conservatives, often do not think this way. Our big problems are with ourselves. It matters that people become better, more virtuous; even when they do obsess about politics, it is as an attempt to make people better in some sense. An interesting example is Rod Dreher, one of the conservative bloggers I linked to in the earlier post: while his blog was originally called “Crunchy Con” (as in “conservative”), it later just took on his name, and now is called Macroculture – the emphasis has been steadily less on politics and more on culture, and the blog has gotten steadily more interesting (though less popular) as it went. This is an attitude I tend to be largely in agreement with. My deepest debt to Buddhism is that it saved me from politics, made me focus on problems with myself and not with the world.

The question I’ve then come to ask myself is: why haven’t I become conservative myself? I don’t mean a movement Republican, for that question is easily answered: George W. Bush, and his ideological successor Sarah Palin, represent an abhorrent combination of procedural, symbolic and substantive wrongs, many of which would count as wrong from any ideological standpoint. ̇When his writings were primarily political, Dreher was a fierce critic of Bush on conservative grounds – the enormous expansion of government and the deficit, the wars of choice, the incompetence in the face of Hurricane Katrina.

But why not become a more skeptical right-winger like Dreher? This is where the question gets more philosophically interesting. I’ve sometimes found it perplexing that in the contemporary right wing, social and cultural conservatism is often joined with economic libertarianism, extreme liberalism in the classical sense (and the inverse is true on the left). The justification for this connection is often articulated by right-wing bloggers like Dreher and William Vallicella: government social intervention on behalf of the disadvantaged, the centrepiece of a left-wing political problem, makes people worse. It discourages people from working hard and being thrifty, makes them lazy, less virtuous. Under a left-wing social-democratic government, the good people who work hard and save to get rich are punished, while the lazy are rewarded. Right-wingers typically maintain some modified version of the Protestant ethic chronicled by Max Weber, according to which wealth is, if not a sign of God’s favour, at least a deserved reward for a virtuous life spent working hard and saving.

And where I depart most from such a viewpoint is not in the idea that the government should avoid the promotion of virtue, nor in the belief that social programs may discourage work or thrift. Rather, it is in the idea that hard work and thrift are themselves virtues. It is this conceit – typically American but hardly unique to the US – that I disdain.

Hard work and thrift are often associated with real virtues, such as temperance and patient endurance. To put in long hours earning money, one must have the ability to put aside the desires of the moment and endure present hardship for future benefit; this ability is an excellent character trait. But it is not a virtue in itself; indeed, especially in the US, it often becomes a characteristic vice. As I argued last week, this is the real problem with “convenience”: spending money to save time is a futile and unworthy pursuit if all we do with that time is make more money.

Marx was wise to emphasize alienation – our work lives are lives lived for someone else, they take us away from the things that are most important, in the name of money. Most of us need to work, but if that becomes our priority in life, we have bad priorities. The iconic Silicon Valley entrepreneur who works 90-hour weeks in order to make millions – this seems like a right-winger’s model of a good human being. In my view, however, such a person is seriously deficient. I’m hardly the first to make this point – Bertrand Russell put it far more eloquently – but it is all too absent from contemporary political conversation, especially those of self-professed conservatives. The thrift and saving that makes many millionaires, too, can easily degenerate into miserliness, and a capitalist economy often rewards the latter even more than the former. The self-made rich, even if they have come by their money entirely honestly, are not necessarily any better than the rest of us, and may well be worse.

Beyond all this, of course, there is the basic point that hard work and thrift are often not related to economic success; one can easily compare Paris Hilton to Mexican immigrant families who struggle tirelessly and still can’t make ends meet, or any number of similar examples. This is of course an important point in deciding where on the political spectrum one will fall; but it interests me less here than the wider point about virtue. Even if wealth were awarded entirely in accordance with effort and labour, it seems to me that it would still be worth offering some government support to the needy, and doing so would not necessarily affect the people’s character for the worse.

the most precious element any human has, the very measure of his individuality — time…. Everything we value, from love to lucre, takes time. Time is the measure of the conflicting demands put upon us, and as such is the measure of our very selves. It is the one commodity that turns out, for each individual, irrevocably, to be finite. (111, emphasis in original)

Seen from this perspective, there is nothing frivolous or optional whatsoever about “convenience.” This is true whether we live a worldly life seeking worldly ends or a monastic one seeking liberation. Without a belief in rebirth, we do not have anything like the infinite eons Śāntideva envisioned in which one could progress slowly on the bodhisattva path. He thought it was urgent for us to become monks and dedicate ourselves to liberation in this lifetime, because if we didn’t, we wouldn’t get another chance for billions of years. Yet just as importantly, eventually, after some unimaginable amount of time, we would get that chance, in a way that now seems unlikely at best. Without rebirth, death places an absolute limit on our time. Saving time is in a sense saving a life – for when we speak of “saving” a life, all we can ever mean is prolonging that life, which is in turn to say giving that life more time.

Saving time, then, can be among the noblest of human goals. The reason “convenience” looks so suspect, however, is that very often it doesn’t really save us time, doesn’t actually add anything to our lives. The biggest trap is the pattern all too familiar in the US: one spends one’s money on conveniences (convenience foods, labour-saving devices, and so on), in order to save time – and then spends the newly available time making more money, much of which itself is spent on conveniences. Little if anything is gained here. One might well argue that little time is genuinely saved. For too often we are trapped in the belief that our paid work should be our life’s fulfillment when, as Marx long ago noted, it is by definition alienated: to the extent that we work for pay, we work for others and not for ourselves. We might be lucky enough to find work we enjoy most of the time, but there is no reason to expect that paid work should be any more fulfilling than cooking or washing the dishes. Perhaps we are still a little too wedded to what Max Weber called the Protestant ethic, which rejected the use of money for pleasure and enjoyment (vacations, eating out, beauty products) but endorsed spending it on “comfort,” an idea not too far removed from “convenience.” The idea of making money to save time to make more money may have made sense within the dour world of Calvinist theology, but it’s a little bizarre that the rest of us would continue to follow it.

Still, these points all raise a related question: what, exactly, should our time be used for? Suppose that, as Marx imagined, we really could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner” – should we do all of these? Thanks to the heroic work of the early twentieth-century labour movement, most of us have two days a week on which we can do exactly what Marx says – at least if we do not raise children in addition. But how then should we make decisions about how to use this precious “spare” time? Should we indeed spend the day in pastoral and agrarian pursuits followed by dinner, and then write critical philosophy in the evening – or should we spend the whole day doing one or the other if that’s what we love? Or should we play games and sports with friends and loved ones? Or should we raise children and spend the time doing that? Once we realize how finite our time on earth is, the way we spend it comes to take on great importance.

What then should we do about our impending death? The most common answers typically involve the supernatural, with belief in an afterlife. Christians will speak of an afterlife in heaven, Buddhists of rebirth. So all we have to do is be good in this lifetime (or ask forgiveness for our sins), and we’ll be able to continue “living” well after death. Such a view is comforting. Unfortunately, I don’t have any reason to believe it true. I’ve heard it argued that we really don’t know enough about consciousness to say that it ends with death. That may well be so. But we also don’t know enough to say that anything else happens to it, either – certainly nothing like the graphic hells that, according to Śāntideva, await those with sufficiently bad karma. In terms of any sort of survival of the self after death, it seems to me, the very best we can do is agnosticism, and perhaps not even that.

But if death really is – or might be – the end of each individual, then what? Well: I posted a little while ago about three basic ways of life, three orientations to theoretical as well as practical philosophy: the asceticism of most Buddhists, Jains, Advaitins and early Christians; the traditionalism of most Jews, Confucians and dharmaśāstra; and the libertinism of Marx, Nietzsche, Rawls, Ayn Rand and the utilitarians. Asceticism and libertinism can each take on more egoistic or more altruistic forms. Stephen Walker challenged the formulation somewhat, noting that Mozi doesn’t comfortably fit it; but a typology like this must necessarily consist of ideal types in Max Weber’s sense, giving us extremes within which real examples take a middle ground, and Mozi seems like an altruist who takes on some elements of all three basic ways of life.

My point here, however, was to be that these three ways of life each seems to have a corresponding way of death – an attitude toward death that does not depend on the supernatural. This is true whether they take an egoistic or altruistic form, for others must die as surely as oneself. The traditionalist would take the path most people likely take, seeking immortality through her children. This is the path the Hebrew Bible offers – progeny represent immortality. (Thus the now-shocking happy ending to the book of Job: he loses all his children, but it’s all okay in the end because he gets more!) By contrast the libertine, it seems to me, must follow Lucretius’s advice: do not fear death; nothing bad can happen to you. True, you won’t have any of the things you loved during life, but that won’t matter, because you’ll be dead. You won’t notice any of it.

And the ascetic? Most ascetic traditions do rely in some sense on the supernatural, but I’m not sure that they have to. I’m particularly intrigued by the approach to death in Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta philosophy. Our selves are illusion in the first place; the true nature of the world is a simple oneness identical with all our selves, if we could perceive it. Indian gurus will sometimes leave the words for their disciples: “I was not born, I did not die.” This sounds somewhat supernatural, but I don’t think that it must be – at least not if we take “supernatural” in the standard sense of “ideas incompatible with the evidence of natural science.” The Advaita view is not falsifiable by empirical evidence, and is not supposed to be; arguments for it take place at the pre-sensory level of a priori foundations, of what makes empirical knowledge possible.

Now the idea of immortality through one’s children requires a bit more fleshing out, to the point that Job’s version no longer satisfies. The simple fact of having children does nothing to defeat death, for one’s children are not oneself. Children can only offer a sort of immortality because they promise what Freud (or his translator) called cathexis (German Besetzung): the breaking down of self boundaries, so that we come to identify ourselves with our children, and really come to see ourselves as existing partially in those children. It seems unlikely that this happened in Job’s case; if new children were as good as the old ones, he can’t have been that closely cathected with the old ones to begin with. On the other hand, cathexis alone isn’t enough; we surely cathect with our spouses or other romantic lovers, but they will only survive a few decades beyond us at most, and usually not that. Children, on the other hand, can pass on their own cathexis, a new identification with our grandchildren and their descendants.

I suppose a similar kind of cathexis might happen in the attempt to achieve immortality through one’s work: artistic, scientific, philosophical, sociopolitical. If the creation one brings into the world is closely identified with oneself, and if it is everlasting, then it can similarly keep one around. But both kinds of cathexis face a similar problem: one cannot know at death whether the object of cathexis will survive. Will one’s descendants keep oneself alive, or will their bloodlines die out, as seems to be happening frequently in my generation where so few have children? Will one’s social accomplishments be toppled, will one’s artistic work fade into such obscurity that it is forever lost? (Woody Allen: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.”) Lucretius’s comfort with nonexistence, and Śaṅkara’s identification with a unified cosmic Self, seem to promise a surer way.

But I think the conflict may be very difficult to resolve, for reasons that are philosophically interesting – they get to the heart of important questions in political theory. What follows are my layman’s reflections on the issue, not the views of an expert on Thai politics, and I may have some details wrong; but the issues seem big enough to merit posting on here regardless.

What is fundamentally at stake in Thailand, it seems to me, is the question of populism vs. technocracy – a debate that animates almost every modern democratic system in some respect, though it’s often unacknowledged as such, lost between the more common oppositions of “left” and “right” (or even “libertarian” and “communitarian”).

The Red Shirts, whose protests were the occasion for the most recent round of protest, are fundamentally populist. To them what matters is that the people be represented, that their choices be respected, that the system be genuinely democratic. (No doubt some of them are just in it for the money – Thaksin is using his riches to fund much of the support for him – but it seems highly implausible to me The Yellow Shirts, who set off the previous round, are technocrats – their concern is that government govern well. The two sides have come to an impasse over one man: Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister elected in a landslide and then ousted in a military coup.

As I understand it, it’s hard to dispute that Thaksin’s government was corrupt to the core, enriching Thaksin’s own pockets at the country’s expense, in a way that could have brought the country to ruin. Reaction of the Bangkok businesspeople went beyond anger to panic: if Thaksin kept up, would Thailand start looking like Laos, as impoverished as it was 50 years ago? And yet Thaksin was elected, never lost an election, and would very likely win another one if it was actually held. Nobody, as far as I know, suspects that Thaksin’s corruption went as far as systematic vote-rigging. He is the people’s choice. Why? He put in many reforms that benefitted the poor north and northeast of the country; those might not have been economically sustainable in the long term (as the yellow shirts fear), but in the short term they worked wonders, and the Thais love him for them.

The Yellow Shirt movement against Thaksin seems to me, at its heart, utilitarian: the idea is to bring about the best overall consequences for the greatest number in the long run. If to accomplish this you need a military coup to topple a democratically elected leader, more power to you. (There is a very strong historical connection between philosophical utilitarianism and economics, the technocratic discipline par excellence.) The Red Shirts, on the other hand, are fighting for popular sovereignty: for the right of the people to collectively decide their own fate, even if it turns out it’s a bad one.

The Yellow Shirts embody the ideal of technocracy, the Red Shirts of populism. And this is a battle that plays out elsewhere as well, cutting across left-right lines. Hugo Chávez and Pat Buchanan are both populists, Manmohan Singh and Angela Merkel both technocrats. Technocrats set what appears to be the “centre,” and yet the populists on either “fringe” can sometimes find more to agree on with each other than with those centrists.

In the United States, Sarah Palin and Ralph Nader share the same populist appeal as the Red Shirts: the idea of speaking up for a silenced people. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, was a consummate technocrat, leaving no grand plans or inspiring visions, staking his legitimacy only on the great prosperity for which his later years are remembered. George W. Bush succeeded because he talked like a populist and acted like a technocrat. The grassroots Christian conservative populist movement, without whom Bush could never have been elected, got very little of what it wanted from him; but the big businesses who depended on him for their profitable functioning got everything.

In Canada the Bloc Québécois embodies a populist spirit, speaking out for French Québécois who feel alienated from the larger system, against the consummately technocratic Liberals. The old Reform Party tried to be populist, but as it moved toward power it got absorbed into the much more technocratic Conservatives.

Genuine populists, then, rarely get very close to power; as they do, they become more technocratic. To the populist, that transition is a matter of selling out; the populists in power get bought off by big business, big government and big labour, they need to strike too many deals on the way up. To the technocrat, on the other hand, it’s a matter of seeing the reasons why the world is as it is: radical at 20, pragmatic at 40. I used to have very strong populist sensibilities. These took a hit after I moved to the US where direct democracy and referenda – key tools in ensuring the people’s wishes are followed – are politically prominent. Since I moved to Massachusetts ten years ago, the state has seen ballot measures both to establish universal health care and to repeal the income tax. It would have been easy for voters to establish both – but that would have required draconian sales taxes, drastic cuts to everything but health care (education, transportation, law enforcement) and probably a giant deficit to boot, none of which voters would have voted for. Policy is much more effective when it’s made as a package; but ordinary voters think piecemeal about particular initiatives, not about the package. That’s a basic argument for technocracy. And yet, when that argument is followed, government is genuinely taken out of the hands of the people; it becomes significantly less democratic. I have seen no way to resolve the problem yet. So I suspect that the conflict between Red Shirts and Yellow Shirts will persist – and not only in Thailand.

It would be nice to think that the academy was some sort of exception to this rule; but it’s anything but. People go into academic work because they love to think and read and write and teach. But in a research-oriented job where one is paid to think and read and write, one must do it according to established disciplinary boundaries that do not necessarily make sense for one’s work: in my field one writes either for “philosophers” who value only precision and logical rigour, and care little or not at all for the great ideas of the past; or for “religionists” who care only about an accurate representation of the past and not about what that past has to teach us. If one tries to cross the boundaries, one is hurt far more than helped. And even if one is comfortable with those boundaries, one cannot simply take the time to learn, understand, absorb; one must write and be published, even if one would rather take the time to read and learn more before doing so. As for that vaunted “academic freedom”: for the majority of people employed in academic positions, there is no such thing. I started this blog only once it seemed likely I would not have an academic career in the long term; for I try here to speak my mind openly, explore my passions and intellectual curiosity, in a way that all the world can see. As long as I sought an academic career, I was deathly afraid that search committee members would discover that my views were not what they wanted to hear, and promptly exercise their wide-ranging arbitrary powers to deny me a livelihood.

And then there’s teaching: often in subjects that have little to do with one’s own passion, and equally often to students who do not care. That’s not even to mention the oft-required bureaucratic committee work, work that most academics relish far less than either research or teaching. Between these three alienated commitments, an aspiring philosophy or religion professor often has less time to think about philosophy than one who is outside the academy. And to do all this, in the vast majority of cases, one must effectively abandon friends and family, move to a place to which one has no ties and may well despise – and all of this is what one does if one is lucky, if one does not join the majority of PhD graduates who teach courses for less than a living wage.

To enter the academy, to try and write or play music for a living, to sell homemade crafts – these are often failed and futile attempt to avoid alienation, one which only leads one deeper into oppression and false consciousness. As an adjunct professor, one is exploited far more ruthlessly than any unionized factory worker – and the work that one does is scarcely any more one’s own than is the product of a modern factory. Marx would not be surprised to see that colleges and universities – even now that they’re run by the Sixties generation of former radicals – are alienated capitalist shop floors like any other. We want to think that the university is a place for the free exchange of ideas, outside of alienated market labour; it is anything but. It is one more site of capitalist exploitation.

The more I experience the capitalist workplace, the more I see that Marx’s diagnosis was right. Where Marx was wrong was in his prognosis of a better system. Bart Ehrman portrays Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet – one who thought that the Day of Judgement was coming in his own lifetime. Marx thought the same: the last would be first and the first would be last, a new order would come in where justice would prevail and humans’ true ends would be fulfilled.

Jesus and Marx were wrong. There was no new order. Once they were gone, their hopes were dashed. In the 150 years since Marx wrote they have not been fulfilled; nor have they been fulfilled in the 2000 years since Jesus’s lifetime. It’s been long enough in both cases to think that if the prophecies have not yet been fulfilled, they may well never be. And to me, this is where Buddhism comes in, another reason why I find the Buddha’s thought profounder than Marx’s. What Christianity and Marxism share above all is a sense of hope – a hope that history has so far falsified. Buddhism, on the other hand, offers us a critique of hope. The world is never going to get better. What we can do is work on our own suffering, and that of those around us, in the midst of our alienation and oppression. As the bumper sticker used to say, I feel so much better ever since I’ve given up hope.

Or, if you can’t handle that kind of pessimism, at least consider this. Marx was always cagey about his vision of a future society, what a non-alienated world would look like – it was supposed to arise out of the reflection of alienated or exploited groups. And yet he did offer glimpses, especially in the early work that focuses most on alienation. In the German Ideology, Marx speaks of a better world where one could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind,” as opposed to the specialized, mechanized world of alienated capitalist labour. My father, explaining this passage, once mentioned a time he had been flying first class and discussed Marx with a wealthy heiress sitting beside him on a plane. He had mentioned this passage to her, and she replied: “I can do that right now!” The difference was just that Marx hoped to see everyone, not just the aristocracy, have such an opportunity for self-definition.

And yet here’s the thing. Thanks primarily to the work of twentieth-century labour unions – often allied with Marxists, especially in places where their gains were strongest, outside the United States – many of us now have some of our lives to ourselves, where we can define ourselves in this way, independent of our alienated careers. If we can manage to find the 40-hour work week that our grandparents fought so hard for, we can certainly hunt in the morning, fish in the evening, and be a critical critic in the evening – on the weekend. Even the rest of the week, we might have several nights on which we can do at least one of these things. Alas, these days the work week seems to be getting longer; any fights in this regard are to maintain the status quo, not to make things better or bring them any closer to a non-alienated utopia.

Still, the benefits are there if we accept them – and, I suppose, if we don’t have children. Marx didn’t seem to think much about that part: even if we all had the resources to hunt in the morning and criticize in the evening, who would raise the kids? Friedrich Engels took up that question some, but Marx himself didn’t. Still, to have children is a choice which many people undertake, and undertake for their own reasons, not as part of a bargain with an employer; whether or not children actually make them happy, people have them because they believe they do. If we don’t take that choice, and we fight to keep the rights our grandparents fought for (as so many people today do not), then we may well be able to do the things we love in life without getting paid for them, do work that is a genuine labour of love. The work I did in academia was not my own. It was alienated labour. But this blog, I am happy to say, is not. I am lucky to have the chance to do some work that is all mine.

Within a century or two, however, along comes the great N?g?rjuna and his Madhyamaka philosophy. Madhyamaka thinkers take the no-?tman doctrine much further. Now the ?tman isn’t just the thinking subjective self; it’s the self-ness in everything. Objects, including the atomized particles and events so dear to the Abhidhamma, are just as unreal as the subject. The deconstruction of the subject leads historically to the deconstruction of the object.

I thought about the point a couple months ago when reading Nick Smyth’s excellent post on existentialism. Existentialism is not an area of much expertise for me, and I appreciate the way Smyth helped make sense of it. The way he portrays it, existentialism is about deconstructing objects and the way we make the world, including people, into objects (with the avowed “objectivity” of scientists and especially social scientists). We objectify people by putting them into categories, making them into the sum of their parts. But people are more than these categories, they are free individuals, choosing subjects, selves. (Existentialism as thus described seems rather the polar opposite of the Speculative Realist movement and its “object-oriented ontology.”)

Intellectual fashion has not been kind to these existentialist views of late. While existentialism dominated much of the mid-twentieth-century intellectual scene, the followers of French philosophy often ignore it now. What’s replaced it has been the postmodernism of Foucault and Derrida. And while postmodernists accept the existentialist critique of objectifying categories, they refuse to accept the choosing subject. Where Jean-Paul Sartre had proclaimed “existentialism is a humanism” because of his intense focus on the agency and choice of human beings, Foucault and Derrida instead turn to an anti-humanist structuralism which largely reduces human agency to the social structures that shape it. Here the deconstruction of the object is followed by the deconstruction of the subject.

I’ve been thinking about this point in reading James Doull’s chapter on Augustine. Doull, discussing Augustine’s Confessions, notes how intellectually Augustine, before his turn to Christianity, made the move from Manicheanism to classical skepticism. The Manicheans, Doull says, deconstructed the subject in their own way: there was no unified self, the self was merely a battleground for the cosmic forces of good and evil. And once Augustine accepted that there was no subject, it was an easy slide for him into a skepticism that believed there was no object either.

I put all of these transitions – the Buddhist, the Augustinian, the 20th-century – together because I think there’s a Doullian connection to be made here. For Doull, as for Hegel and Ken Wilber, intellectual movements in society mirror movements made in an individual’s development, as the movements at both levels involve a rational necessity. I think Doull would argue that these transitions from either no-subject or no-object to neither-subject-nor-object are no coincidence at all: this is something that has to happen once we think it through, whether “we” are individuals (like Augustine) or a whole society (like Buddhist India). It doesn’t logically work to elevate objects without subjects, or vice versa; once you stop having both, it’s inevitable that you’ll end up with neither. I suspect Doull would come to a critique of Speculative Realism on these grounds as well: object-oriented philosophy, with the subject objectified in the way Smyth’s existentialists object to, will just lead people to a philosophy that has neither object nor subject.

Would Doull be right about this? I can’t say. To say more would require venturing much more deeply into details of which I have only the vaguest outline so far. I can’t help but think that Doull is on to something here, but I can’t yet back that up in a way that allows me to say so with any confidence.

Why did he do this? I suppose it could have been merely a cynical move to gain followers, but Marcionism had an appeal that lasted long after Marcion’s death; I don’t see much reason to believe that Marcion didn’t believe what he was writing. But this is still puzzling. To our eyes it seems like an awful sort of arrogance to edit historical writings according to one’s own theology. One might ask: how could he have believed any of this?

In trying to understand Marcion I can only think of the popular view expressed in the Mah?y?na Adhy??ayasa?codana S?tra, that “whatever is well spoken is the word of the Buddha.” This was a justification used for the newly emerging Mah?y?na s?tras. It’s pretty clear from any historical standpoint that no such texts existed during the Buddha’s lifetime; the Mah?y?na was a new phenomenon, and many of its creators seemed to know it. They justified the composition of new s?tras by arguing: the Buddha knows everything, so anything that is correct is therefore effectively spoken by the Buddha. Surely this is what Marcion was up to: because Jesus was God, he could only have spoken the truth. So since the content of the revised Marcionite Gospels were true, as we could presumably ascertain on scripture-independent grounds, it must therefore have been what Jesus really said.

Which brings us back to the previous post’s discussion of authenticity. It’s strange to me that today we put such a high value on things being what they have always been, unchosen by contemporary people. But the premodern view of authenticity is curious in its own way. If you are already so convinced that your new scripture is true, why do you need to attribute it to the Buddha or to Jesus? Why not just admit that you found the truth yourself?

I guess I can start to see an answer when I look at what people do try to come up with from scratch, without connection to the past. Modernist attempts to rebuild society from the ground up didn’t work very well. And individually, when we avoid submitting to the guidance of a tradition, we run the risk of merely believing what we want to believe, being guided by our persistent and troublesome unconscious desires rather than by the truth. That’s why I have myself argued that in some cases it is important to argue that some people and practices are not really Buddhist. The example that comes to my mind here is Gary Snyder’s horrifying Smokey the Bear Sutra: a “Buddhist” text advocating ecologically motivated violence and wrath. I try to avoid feelings of offence, but that text felt like a slap in the face toward Buddhist critiques of anger.

Here there seems to be a justified continuity between premodern and modern authenticity: our individual choice leads us too easily to the wrong places. This idea is at the heart of a chastened intellectualist view of human nature, a view shared by thinkers as diverse as Augustine, Xunzi and Freud. If we just do what we choose and believe what we discover for ourselves, we will be led astray: to sin (Augustine), to chaos and disharmony (Xunzi), to repression, neurosis and pathology (Freud). Rather, we need to be humble, to submit ourselves to others with greater vision than ours. I wonder if the contemporary search for authenticity is an aestheticization of this view: there’s something objectively better that happens when a North American discovers the pleasures of Chinese food developed over generations in China, as opposed to the Chinese food designed to conform to his North American sweet tooth at the Panda Hut around the corner. Rather than having one’s existing tastes pandered to, one educates one’s palate, becomes a connoisseur.

Then again, I’m not sure this answers the question of why people write or edit new scriptures and claim their authenticity. One might rightly want to aim at humility, seeking to prevent the arrogance of believing oneself in charge of the whole truth. But isn’t it just as arrogant to believe that one’s own discovery is not only the truth, but the word of the Buddha or Jesus himself?

I said this because the trendy scholars in religious studies (especially performance theory) tended to view “nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism” as the root of all evils in the field. Religious studies, I heard over and over, had been too dominated by the study of texts and scriptures and ideas, all the pernicious influence of nineteenth-century liberal Protestants like Friedrich Schleiermacher. We needed to be exploring “lived” religion (with the implication, it was admitted in more candid moments, that the study of texts amounted to “dead” religion). For most people in history, they said, religion is not about texts but about ritual, performance, history, society, supernatural beings. Colleagues cited Vasudha Narayanan’s JAAR article entitled “Liberation and lentils,” in which she recounted how Indian traditions like her family’s, involving rituals like picking the most auspicious lentils to eat at particular holidays, had been marginalized in favour of philosophical claims about liberation, or the myths in the Vedas. Religious studies, it was said, needed to focus more on lentils and less on liberation, more on ritual and less on philosophy.

I didn’t and don’t buy a word of this argument. To begin with, it relies almost entirely on the obscuring and pernicious concept of “religion,” a highly unfortunate term that leads us to emphasize the wrong differences, to give some beliefs a legal privilege they don’t deserve, to underplay similarities between “religious” and “secular” phenomena. The assumption is that what we had in common in religious studies was that we intended to study “religion.” Which, in my case, was completely false. I had no interest in “religion”; I was there to study Asian philosophy, which is marginalized if present at all in the vast majority of philosophy departments. But because the departments where one could study Asian thought were called “religious studies,” we were told that the concept of “religion” should have a normative value in deciding what we consider worthy of study.

Beyond the word, there’s an unspoken populist criterion of value underlying the anti-textual argument: the fact that more people do ritual than texts is taken as implying that ritual is therefore more worthy of study than texts. Such a view, I think, is one of the factors behind the current tendency to study other people’s ethics and act as if one is doing ethics oneself. But why, again, should this be so? More Americans, at least, believe in creationism than in evolution. By the populist criterion, it would seem that the sociology of creationism is more worthy of study than is evolutionary biology.

The most widely read response to Harris (and the one that Harris himself responded to at length) is one by Sean Carroll. I find the Harris-Carroll debate instructive because both seem to miss the most important point; and that, in turn, would seem to be because both fall prey to an unfortunate empiricism.

At the heart of the debate is the supposed dichotomy between “facts” and “values,” or “is” and “ought.” (I would rather say “should” than “ought,” because “ought” sounds increasingly rare and archaic in contemporary North American English, but that’s a quibble.) Harris insists that values are a kind of fact, even objective fact, so that “should” or “ought” statements have a meaning grounded in reality, not entirely relative to or dependent upon the subjects making the claim. “Should” statements, on this view, are a kind of “is” statement. In this, I think, Harris is entirely right.

Where Harris slips up is in missing the elision of “fact” with “empirical fact.” It’s this point that lends plausibility to Carroll’s criticism: Carroll is right to reply that we get “off on the wrong foot by insisting that values are simply a particular version of empirical facts.” Harris’s reply, however, misses this elision, not challenging it, and that’s why he’s vulnerable to Carroll’s counter-claim: “there exist real moral questions that no amount of empirical research alone will help us solve.” (his emphasis)

On Harris’s example of corporal punishment, for example, let us assume that Harris is right that corporal punishment negatively affects the well-being of children and of society in general. Does that give us sufficient reason to say that corporal punishment is wrong? Not if we buy Kant’s theory of punishment, according to which punishment is an obligation owed to those punished, irrespective of its consequences. For Kant, as is well known, does not take the well-being of conscious creatures as the primary measure of goodness or rightness. Is Kant wrong? I think he is; but I also think there’s something wrong with a viewpoint that takes happiness, or even more broadly defined consequences like “well-being”, as the sole standard for ethics. I think Harris is right to say well-being should be a standard by which we judge actions, but as far as I can tell he’s got no ground whatever to say it should be the standard.

But to get back to Carroll, the next question to ask here is: just what kind of question am I arguing with Harris about here? Harris, I think, is right to say that they are questions of fact. And to some extent even of objective fact: claims about good and bad do not depend entirely or even primarily on the subject making those claims. Even Kant would agree: lying is wrong whether or not you think it’s wrong, whether or not you want it to be. It’s just that, contra Harris, it’s not an empirical fact; establishing it relies on procedures of dialectical and demonstrative argument that can, but do not necessarily, involve reference to empirical states.

For Kant, knowledge of moral principles is surer than knowledge of the empirical world, because empirical facts change, but moral principles – like mathematical principles – are derived from a priori principles which are true no matter what happens to the physical world. We can imagine ourselves waking up in The Matrix and finding that the laws of physics in this new reality are completely different from what we thought they were. We cannot really imagine 2+2 being 5, even in the Matrix. That’s why Plato looked to mathematics, not empirical science, as a source of certainty; Kant saw moral truths as being like mathematical truths.

Now is Kant right about that? Not wholly. He is right to move the question beyond the realm of the entirely empirical; some ethical claims, especially those at the foundations, must involve the a priori. In his counterargument, Carroll starts to show that he gets this point: “The crucial point is that the difference between sets of incompatible moral assumptions is not analogous to the difference between believing in the Big Bang vs. believing in the Steady State model; but it is analogous to believing in science vs. being a radical epistemological skeptic who claims not to trust their sense data.” Indeed. What Carroll doesn’t get here, though, is that the disagreement between the scientist and the skeptic is itself a disagreement about facts, about the way that the universe is. It can in principle be resolved through argument, just as Carroll tries to resolve his own debate with Harris through argument, while still acknowledging that the debate does not rest on empirical evidence.

And so, while the analogy stands up very well, what doesn’t stand up is the way Carroll resolves the analogy: “In the cosmological-models case, we trust that we agree on the underlying norms of science and together we form a functioning community; in the epistemological case, we don’t agree on the underlying assumptions, and we have to hope to agree to disagree and work out social structures that let us live together in peace.” The assumption here seems to be that scientists can reach agreement because they share underlying assumptions, but that no agreement can be reached with those who don’t share those underlying assumptions. But if that’s so, science is wrong – or at least it’s no more right than Christianity, the Taliban, or any other belief system that Carroll might otherwise wish to condemn. Because of course the Taliban agree on underlying norms and form a functioning community – much more so, I dare say, than scientists do. The hard part, and the place where the norms of ethics are to be established, is arguing across the boundaries of those communities, finding truth between people whose assumptions are radically different. This is exactly what advocates of science like Carroll need to do, not just on questions of ethics, but on the value of science itself. For Carroll – unlike Harris – is saying here that science, like ethics, is itself true only relative to the assumptions of the scientific community. But the whole point of science is to do better than that – to say something about how the physical universe actually works, not just about how we think it works. (In other posts Carroll speaks of wanting to “convert” Catholics to atheism or naturalism or skepticism, which suggests that he does indeed think science’s views are not just different but better; for him to really claim that his views were simply equivalent to Christianity would, I think, be disingenuous.) Ethics is much the same here. Science and ethics both try to establish matters of fact; both rest on assumptions that are always disputed. But we do ourselves no favours in either arena by throwing up our hands and saying there is no truth that crosses communities.