I would have little problem with this claim if by “come to terms” Wilber meant only that they must acknowledge and react to the existence of post/modernity – as fundamentalism does, by mostly reacting against it. But in his explanations it becomes clear he means significantly more: they must embrace and adopt it. In this claim Wilber echoes the title of one of Spong’s works, a work he names approvingly: Why Christianity Must Change Or Die. The implication of both Wilber and Spong on the topic is that only a post/modernist liberal or postliberal Christianity will be able to survive the coming decades and centuries, as post/modern ideas become more widespread through the world.

But is this claim right? It’s a version of the secularization thesis, a sociological thesis so popular in the 1950s through the 1970s that its truth was almost assumed. People saw societies abandon their “religious” traditions and abandon them faster than a single generation – as Québec did in its startling Quiet Revolution, or Spain after Franco. This, it was assumed, was the fate of all societies as they came to develop economically and technologically: their youth would throw off the shackles of myth and superstition and greet the moderns as liberators.

Anyone who has observed the history of the past few decades, however, will have seen that that’s almost the opposite of what actually happened. From Iran to India to the United States, “religion” made a huge comeback, and it was not the liberal modernizing religion of Spong and Küng, but the supposedly backward, superstitious, conservative traditions of Jerry Falwell and the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Wilber, of course, is one of those who has observed this history. He has been able to watch it for considerably longer than I have; I was blissfully unaware of Zia ul-Haq‘s fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan because I was in diapers. This is the history that Wilber explains as the result of modernity’s discarding of spirituality, the one that can be fixed with a turn to modernizing liberal (“orange and higher”) Christianity or Islam.

Does this explanation hold? Are people turning to fundamentalist Christianity because they haven’t been exposed enough to liberal Christianity? If this explanation was the best, one would expect to see liberal Christianity growing and thriving as an alternative to fundamentalism. But it isn’t.

The Glenmary Research Center’s Religious Congregations and Membership study – comprehensive enough that the US Census directs researchers there for detailed data on “religion” – shows some eye-opening statistics for the period 1990-2010. The large liberal denominations that have embraced a Christianity like Spong’s have shown a drastic drop in the number of adherents (including “all full members, their children, and others who regularly attend services.”) Spong’s Episcopalian church is down 20%; the still more liberal United Church of Christ, 35%. Meanwhile the Southern Baptists, who enshrined fundamentalism, grew 5%; the Catholic Church, 10%; the Mormons, a whopping 74%. And that’s just the United States. Philip Jenkins reads the global demographic data and notes that Christians in the southern hemisphere are rapidly coming to outnumber those in the north, if they do not already – not just because of population growth but because of conversion. And the churches growing so rapidly there are filled with strict sexual taboos, faith healing, exorcism – a Christianity significantly less liberal than American fundamentalism.

Recent history has made a mockery of Spong’s title. For the actual sociological evidence shows the title’s opposite: the Christianity that has changed is the one that has been dying – at least, the Christianity that has changed in the way that Wilber and Spong would have wanted it to. The Christianity that thrives is the conservative one, laden as it is with magic, taboo, “superstition”.

That this is the case should not come as a dramatic surprise. This conservative “amber” or “red” Christianity (using Wilber’s colour codes) offers people in a secular age an alternative that liberal “orange” Christianity does not. For orange Christianity is often quite hard to tell from atheism. Wilber’s descriptions of it are often phrased primarily in the negative: it does not privilege its account of truth over others’, it does not believe literally in myths. But many forms of atheism do not do these things either. What exactly does liberal/orange Christianity have that atheism doesn’t? And why should anybody bother with it at all, when they can simply be atheists?

One answer is the ties of social community that a church provides: a place to meet new people when one moves residence, a place to give one’s children the kind of ethically rich education that is difficult in secular public schools. The most prominent liberal tradition that has indeed been growing is Unitarian Universalism: 11%, better than the Southern Baptists. But Unitarians are often described as “atheists with children”; most Unitarian churches are community centres more than spiritual ones. With the exception of a few more traditionalist churches in New England, a Unitarian church is as modern a place as the biomedical engineering department at Cal Tech; atheism is typically more welcome than prayer. Is this going to be enough to satisfy people’s spiritual longings, to turn back the disaster of modernity? Do people turn to fundamentalism just because they haven’t been exposed to Unitarian community centres?

I don’t expect that Wilber would answer that question yes. As far as I can tell, the spirituality that he preserves has to do primarily with meditative and mystical experiences. But those are a feature which, as the article I’m writing argues, was not central to most premodern traditions – even for their élite practitioners, let alone the majority. The idea that mystical experience is at the core of the traditions is an invention of the 19th century, as many religion scholars like Wayne Proudfoot, Robert Sharf and Wilhelm Halbfass have noted. It seems very unlikely to me that fundamentalism would cease if its practitioners had access to mystical experiences that they could interpret within a liberal framework.

Rather, I think, fundamentalism and other forms of conservative tradition thrive because of a discontent with modernity itself. Modernity is a gain in many ways, but it is also a loss, and a loss that cannot be fixed merely with the mystical experience whose prominence is itself a modern phenomenon. Many of the things that most turn us moderns off about premodern tradition – its rigid restrictions on sexuality, its supernaturalism, its literal readings of sacred texts – are themselves the appeal for conservatives. The promise of an afterlife allows the hope of a transcendent future better than the suffering we experience in this lifetime. Rigid behavioural rules allow a comforting and often necessary structure – certainly to those in trouble whose lives are falling apart, but even to successful intellectuals like Paul Griffiths who celebrate the joy of submitting to a tradition.

I think Christian conservatives or fundamentalists are wrong about most issues. But I also think they’ve got a point, one that cannot be easily argued away. They do not merely represent an earlier stage of human development, but a considered reaction to modernity and the real problems it involves, and one we would do well to take seriously. I intend to take the point up further next week.

What is most striking in the change from Wilber-4 to Wilber-5 is its post/modernism. Wilber has moved much closer to a postmodern view in which there are only perspectives, which bring worlds into existence rather than discovering them; he has also become more modernist, giving much more prominence to an idea of cultural evolution where the modern age supersedes those that came before. But as David Harvey has noted, the continuities between modernism and postmodernism can be more significant than their self-proclaimed differences. (In this discussion I will repeatedly use the term “post/modern”, to emphasize the important respects in which the two are the same.) In this case, premodern traditions play an ever smaller role. Wilber’s earlier thought, in looking at the traditions of the premodern world, had tended to incorporate only mystical experience, but mystical experience still got the trump card – it was able to tell us what ultimate reality is. In Wilber-5, mystical experience needs to be kept in its place, without any sovereignty over other kinds of knowledge. Where Wilber’s earlier thought was all about the relationship between Ascent and Descent, Ascent now takes a smaller role as only one or two perspectives out of many, the rest being Descending and post/modern.

Since so much of my philosophical project has to do with recovering premodern wisdom, I was at first quite negatively disposed toward Wilber-5: it seemed like a decline rather than an improvement. But after mulling over the impressive methodological comments of one of my anonymous peer reviewers, I’ve revised that view. I’ve come to think that the change to Wilber-5 happened for some very good reasons.

One of the most prominent concerns of Wilber-5 is method, and this is as it should be. If we’re going to try to figure out how all the different worldviews out there relate to each other, how are we going to do it? How is it possible to do that responsibly?

And what drives Wilber’s post/modern turn, I think, is a recognition that the methods available to us for such a project are post/modern ones. For Anselm or Śāntideva, one could assume the truth of one’s own tradition fairly easily, and have an unproblematic project of “faith seeking understanding”. Competing traditions were available, but they were typically not live options – to accept one would mean a drastic change in one’s life and social position. Now conversion, including a conversion to or from atheism, is an ever-present possibility. This is the great change that Charles Taylor calls a secular age.

So too, the vast array of empirical evidence marshalled by natural science, overthrowing so many traditional cosmologies, was not available before the past few centuries. But it has been so persuasive now that even those opposed to science’s accepted conclusions still frame their views in scientific terms, as in the intelligent design movement.

What all of this means is that we simply cannot inhabit premodern tradition in the ways the premoderns did themselves. We need to think with the moderns. That is important and true; it’s a point I think I’ve sometimes neglected in my enthusiasm for premodern thought. And so I’m grateful for Wilber’s post/modern turn, for its reminding me of this point.

Now with all of this in mind, there remains plenty that I disagree with in Wilber-5, and I’ll be exploring that disagreement here over the next couple of weeks. The key problem I see is that for Wilber, the transition to post/modernity is part of a story of almost unambiguous progress. “Almost” unambiguous, because Wilber does acknowledge the claims of the Romantics, those who see post/modernity as a decline. There is, for him, a “disaster of modernity”. But in his eyes, this disaster comes essentially because we have not progressed enough. Humans have multiple lines of development, one of which is the spiritual; and “orange” modernity – Wilber-5 colour-codes his proposed levels of human individual and social development – halted its progress at the collective level by denying the spiritual line entirely. For him that’s what gives rise to fundamentalism and other conservative “religious” movements: those are the only options people see that don’t discard spirituality wholesale. All we need to do now is recover that spiritual dimension, and we’ll set the march of progress going forward again as it should be. Spirituality needs to recover itself at an “orange” and higher level; and then the energies that go into fundamentalism can be directed there.

I have at least two problems with this approach: one empirical and sociological, one deeper and more philosophical. I will explore both in the weeks to come.

This is the point where programming becomes philosophically interesting. It’s not a new rhetorical move to take something usually considered a vice and call it a virtue, of course. Ayn Rand – a philosophical hero to many programmers, I might note – entitled one of her essays (and essay collections) The Virtue of Selfishness. On the topic at hand, Bertrand Russell spoke many decades before In Praise of Idleness. But while the move is not original, it is nevertheless effective. It almost forces us to start doing philosophically, to start thinking about big questions and ultimate ends, because we can no longer assume what we took for granted – that selfishness or laziness is a vice. Even if we reaffirm our original view, it is not quite the same now that we have allowed it to be called into question.

I especially like the move of giving an ostensible vice the name of virtue because it helps highlight what I find one of the most crucial ethical themes of all: the Aristotelian mean, the idea that virtue is a matter of occupying the right middle ground between two vicious extremes. We’re directed toward the vices because they each have some good in them; the badness of one vice lies in the fact that we ignore the good in its opposite. I find justice as good an example as any: we need to take the interests of others into account, but also need to stand up for ourselves. Hugo Grotius had criticized the idea of justice as a mean because he thought there was nothing wrong with asking for too little. But I think part of Rand’s widespread appeal is that she recognizes there is something wrong with excessive self-sacrifice, with meekness and submissiveness – though I would argue she then finds herself stuck at the opposite extreme.

Now to the topic at hand: laziness. It is a commonplace to view hard work or industriousness as a virtue. And there’s a truth to that view, in that hard work is associated with the genuine virtue of self-discipline or temperance, of being able to put aside the desires of the moment and think toward the longer term. But hard work is not an end in itself, especially not work for pay, alienated work. An old quip says “Nobody ever died wishing they’d spent more time at the office.” Yet too often we treat paid work as if it is its own end, and as a result we work too hard. This is especially the case in the United States, where it is common even for highly skilled workers, workers in high demand, to be allowed only two weeks of vacation a year – and sometimes, shockingly to me, they don’t even use those two weeks. The US is also the land of convenience, of 24-hour stores and frozen pizza, which allow one to save a great deal of time; the problem is that that very saved time tends to get funneled back into more paid work.

I’ve discussed this much before; it is the key reason I am not a right-winger. And again, Russell overall said it better than I have. I mention it to show one way in which laziness, or at least something often called laziness, can be a virtue: the proper recognition that we have worked enough, that it is time to play.

The computer programmer’s virtuous laziness is related, but slightly different. What has struck me about computer science in my limited studies to date is how deeply devoted it is to efficiency. The study of data structures and algorithms – the theoretical underpinnings that make computer science different from mere programming – is all about making a computer accomplish tasks using as few of its resources as possible. But good programmers take this a step further. Good programmers are lazy because they try to make a computer accomplish tasks using as few of their own resources as possible. Rather than writing code multiple times to accomplish different but similar tasks, they create a data structure and algorithm that allows them to turn it all into one task, written once, that performs the task in different ways. The same or more results with less time and effort put in: that’s the programmer’s goal. “Work smarter, not harder.”

Or so one might hope. The software industry can be notorious for its long hours, especially in the game industry where many work 70-hour weeks or more. Here the programmer’s so-called laziness really is anything but. She has the exact opposite of Russell’s virtue of idleness; the irony is that she trains herself so that she could have that virtue. The programmer’s laziness turns out to be simply a variant on the basic problem of convenience. A good programmer doesn’t want to do repetitive tasks, so she programs in a way that saves time. That’s lazy, and it’s good. But what is that time then used for? A properly lazy programmer would be able to say: “I have accomplished a task that a less skilled programmer would have taken more than a 40-hour week to do, and I have done it in 20 hours. Now that I have done more than everything my employer expected for the week, I will go home and enjoy the fruits of my labours.” But the culture of the software industry rarely allows for this. Instead, the effect of the good programmer winds up being like that of the washing machine: work saved is merely an occasion for more work. Marx would not be surprised.

Many students of other cultures soon come to see individualism as a Western conceit – a bizarre peculiarity of an eccentric society that went wrong with Descartes. If indeed the modern West is a complete solitary exception to the rule, then there would seem to be something to this view.

I wrestled with it for a while myself. I used to believe Dumont’s classification of India was correct. It certainly resonated with my personal experiences, seeing how much more my Indian family cared about family and community ties. But those experiences, combined with the communitarian stereotype of India found in the likes of Dumont and Max Weber, blinded me to things I read every day in graduate school for years without actually noticing.

For classical Indian thought – Buddhist, Jain and brahmanical – is a very different beast from everyday Indian society, ancient or modern. I’ve addressed this topic a number of times before, but I can’t stress it enough because the point is so often ignored: classical Indian thought, by and large, places its highest value on the autonomous individual. The classical Indian individual is not the same as the modern Western individual, for the classical Indian individual achieves his freedom (and it usually is a he) by transcending the world rather than within it; it is an individualism of ascent rather than descent. But individualism it nevertheless is. In the Yoga Sūtras and Jain texts like the Tattvārtha Sūtra, the ideal is to break free of all dependence and achieve kaivalya, literally aloneness. Some variant on this ideal is found in nearly all classical Indian thought – even the other-oriented Mahāyāna Buddhism, where one encourages others to depend on oneself but aims to avoid all dependence on them.

The social expression of Indian independence is the renouncer, or monk (bhikkhu, sannyāsin), who cuts all ties to family and the wider world and lives a life single-mindedly devoted to the pursuit of liberation. The figure of the monk is what is missed in many accounts that exaggerate the difference between modern individualism and premodern communitarianism. We often assume that it is the capitalist money economy that allows people to consider themselves autonomous individuals, free of the ties of family and community. But monks were freeing themselves in the same way a long time ago. All this is why I continue to find Thomas Kasulis’s intimacy-integrity distinction a far more powerful classification of philosophies than most: it allows us to grasp the way in which modern individualism has historical precedent outside the modern West.

Now studies of monasticism will often claim that Indian monks were not nearly as independent as they proclaimed themselves to be. For after all, they lived on food provided by the community outside the monastery. An old article by Stanley Tambiah compared Indian monks negatively to the Benedictine Christian monks who (like East Asian Ch’an monks) did agricultural work and made their communities self-sufficient. Whereas for Indian Buddhist monks,

work as such was not valued, and its negation meant the monks’ complete material dependence on the laity for the provision of food, clothing, and shelter. Thus the Buddhist renouncer’s material dependence on the laity, specified from the beginning, cuts into his existence as ‘individual-outside-society’ in important ways.

But this understanding – monk as dependent on the lay community – is not how the Indian renouncer traditions understood themselves. Of course the monks received the food they ate from the community and would have died if they did not. That sure sounds like dependence. But is it? Or at least, is that how they understood it?

The pioneering work of Maria Heim (née Hibbets) on gifts in India is important in this regard. Heim points out that classical and medieval Indian texts, whether Buddhist, Jain or “Hindu”, drew a sharp distinction between compassionate gifts to the needy, on one hand, and “upward” gifts of esteem (śraddhā) on the other. The latter kind of gifts – of which the paradigm is the food given to monks – are not supposed to be given for the sake of benefitting the recipient, but the giver; indeed, there are stories (whether true or not) told of kings fighting over the right to give such gifts. Why? It’s both assumed and stated that these upward gifts will produce large amounts of good karma; but as I noted recently, even in the old texts good karma is not merely about producing a better rebirth in the next life, but about good effects in this one. And the texts regularly sing the praises of esteem – of having the attitude of reverence toward monks that leads one to admire them and listen closely to their teachings, an attitude expressed in giving them gifts.

All this is to say that according to the kind of understanding expressed in Indian texts, monks’ “alms rounds” are not begging and should not be understood as such; they are not understood as opportunities for monks to get the food they need, but for laypeople to develop the esteem they need. We saw last week that despite their obtaining food from laypeople, the point remains for monks to be autonomous and independent; a monk who feels dependent on the laypeople is a bad monk.

But aren’t monks still placed in a condition of dependence regardless of their beliefs? Well, not necessarily. Their dependence on the laypeople is a conditional: if you don’t get food, you will die. But the trump card of the ideal monk is that even this outcome doesn’t matter to him much. The goal is to transcend all attachment, up to and including the attachment to life itself. One may note here the Jain ideal of sallekhanā – a voluntary fast unto death – or the Buddha’s repeated sacrifice of his life in the Jātaka stories of his previous lives. Take such an attitude of indifference (or even welcoming) to death, and one is no longer dependent even on those who keep one alive.

Ideally, then, Indian renouncers are not dependent on the community. Contrast this to the Western ideal of being independently self-supporting. Every “self-made” Westerner achieves a presumed autonomy only because others buy his products or services; and he must spend a great deal of time selling to them, because he needs their business so badly. And once he has made it he is dependent on others’ acceptance of his money and a government’s maintenance of the property system. By contrast the proper monk faces death with equanimity, and in that respect his independence is fuller and purer than that of any modern Westerner.

Heim sees Buddhist and Jain ideals of gift-giving as being quite different from brahmanical (“Hindu”) ideas in at least one important respect. But I’ll argue here that the three are actually much closer to each other.

Anthropologists of modern India have often said brahmins believe in a “poison in the gift” – a bad and potentially deadly consequence of receiving gifts. (The words used in India do not literally mean “poison”, though they are somewhat close; I suspect the “poison” terminology may be a pun on the fact that Gift means poison in German.) For example, studying brahmins in northern India, Jonathan Parry and Gloria Raheja found they believed that, by accepting ritual gifts, they believed they not only threatened their own ascetic integrity but themselves took on the bad karma of the giver. This bad karma, they thought, would inevitably cause them to sicken and die, and it caused others to regard them as inauspicious (bad luck); but they had no choice, because taking it was the only way to feed themselves and their families.

Heim considers these cases of the “gift as poison,” but sets up Jain and Buddhist tradition in sharp distinction to them:

The case of Jain and Buddhist mendicants differs considerably. There is no inkling of the poison in the gift, however conceived, in either contemporary anthropological or premodern textual accounts of Jain and Buddhist practices of gift giving…. The logic of the ideal recipient being the one most disinclined to accept gifts is present in the Buddhist and Jain sources, but it follows from the religious values of renunciation as opposed to ideas about the transfer of inauspiciousness or moral evil. Since renouncers are aloof (ideally) from the normal patterns of exchange, Jain and Buddhist monastics are unambiguously free from the cycles of worldly exchange and no ambivalence is encountered in their status as receivers. Their removal from economic intercourse, with its patterns of give-and-take, generates the purity that allows them to receive gifts.

Heim is right to a certain extent. While Śāntideva clearly believes that good karma can be transferred from person to person, he never suggests any such transfer of bad karma. For him, monks receiving gifts are never despised in the way that Parry’s brahmins can be. On his account, to the extent that the gift is dangerous, it is dangerous because it interferes with renunciation, not because the gift carries bad karma with it. I wrote on this point a while ago: wealth, for Śāntideva, is suspect because it can produce mental attachment.

And I think Heim misses a significant consequence of this danger. Her parenthetical “ideally” is crucial here. For Śāntideva, one who has an adequate degree of mental renunciation will indeed remain “aloof from normal patterns of exchange,” and it is therefore safe for him to receive an upward gift. But not every monk does. Some may be apātribhūta – in an unsuitable state to receive gifts. Monks’ “removal from economic intercourse” is not sufficient to purify them and the gifts they receive. I noted in the dissertation (pp. 136-9) that a bodhisattva who receives gifts must specifically take steps to ensure he has the appropriate attitude of non-possession; only then is the gift appropriately pure. If he does not, then there is a poison of sorts in the gift, though it comes from the danger of attachment rather than transfer of bad karma.

In the diss I argued further (p. 94) that in Śāntideva’s work gifts, qua property, are dangerous for householders just as they are for monks, because they interfere with the state of nonattachment. It is that mental renunciation (tyāgacitta), rather than the literal renunciation of a monastic livelihood, which is crucial to purifying gifts. Renunciation is not an ideal for monks that stands separate from the ideal for householders; there are not two ideals but one. Mental renunciation is an ideal for everybody; monks are just better at it.

And so, for a renouncer who has not yet achieved the great nonattachment of a buddha or advanced bodhisattva, the status of his gift receiving can be ambiguous and ambivalent indeed. In Śāntideva’s Buddhist “premodern textual account,” the gift can be poison — but there is an easily available antidote.

Wright’s basic approach is to read karma as meaning something like an Aristotelian virtue ethic: good actions are rewarded with a good, flourishing life, in this life irrespective of future ones (and bad ones correspondingly punished). This much is not a Yavanayāna innovation; plenty of Buddhist texts make it clear that good action is rewarded in this life as well as in future ones.

Śāntideva, for example, tells us that anger interferes with our peace of mind, happiness and even sleep, and loses friends as well, so that one who fights off anger is happy “here and elsewhere” (iha paratra ca, Bodhicaryāvatāra VI.3-6). He expands on this phrasing later, saying that wordly pleasures (kāmas) “are generators of bad consequences here in the world (iha loke) and elsewhere — here because of imprisonment, beatings and dismemberment, and elsewhere in hell and so on.” (Bodhicaryāvatāra VIII.40. Translations are mine.)

Śāntideva doesn’t specify what causes the “imprisonment, beatings and dismemberment” – my guess is he’s thinking of legal punishments administered to those who pursue sex and money so avidly they step outside the law – but it doesn’t matter too much in the present context. The point, as with anger, is that he believes that bad actions have bad consequences (and good actions good ones) here and now, in this life and this world, not merely in places like the hells which one will only get to in a future life. Wright’s constructive innovation is to treat karma only in terms of these worldly consequences and not in terms of supernatural ones in another birth.

The most obvious objection to such a naturalized theory of karma is that life doesn’t work that way; good actions aren’t really rewarded in life. This complaint is recognized as early as the Book of Ecclesiastes: far too often the wicked prosper as the just suffer. Christians rightly spend volumes of work agonizing over this problem. What reason could we have to think that being good is rewarded in this cruel world? Surely to speak of such worldly reward is mere wishful thinking, at least as much as to speak of reward in an afterlife.

The most important point about such an objection is that has in many respects been made against Aristotle’s ethics itself. Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia – human flourishing – includes within it to some extent both internal and external goods: both states of mind that we control, and at least some material or political goods that are out of our hands. And for the Stoics and Epicureans who followed Aristotle, this wasn’t enough. External goods are largely out of our control; we may be virtuous and still not have them, be righteous and still suffer. Yet an adequate concept of human flourishing, for them, needs to mean both virtue and happiness; and it cannot do this if external goods are also included as a constitutive part of flourishing. The Stoics reduced flourishing to virtue: the virtuous man flourishes by definition. The Epicureans reduced it to happiness, but to a happiness defined entirely through internal states of mind – which, they said, could be obtained without external goods.

It is to Wright’s credit that he takes this objection into consideration. The move from supernatural to naturalized karma involves in some respect a move from external to internal goods. He quotes the Dalai Lama saying “As a result of stealing, one will lack material wealth.” Wright’s reply is worth quoting at length:

Because we all know that successful thieves and corporate criminals may or may not live their lives lacking in material wealth, we can only agree with this claim insofar as we assume that the author is here referring to an afterlife, some life beyond the end of this one. That is to say that only the metaphysics of rebirth can make this statement plausible. Otherwise, the doctrine of karma cannot truthfully guarantee such an outcome of external rewards.

Had he been focused on internal goods, he might have said that, as a result of stealing, one will have deeply troubled relations to other people, as well as a distorted relation to material goods. As a result of stealing one will find compassion and intimacy more difficult, be further estranged from the society in which one lives, and feel isolated and unable to trust others. As a result of stealing, one will become even more likely to commit other unhealthy acts, and may ultimately find oneself in an unfulfilled and dimin- ished existence. These results of the act of stealing have a direct relation to the act; every act pushes one further in some direction of character forma- tion or another, and further instantiates us in some particular relationship to the world. External goods, while certainly important, cannot be so easily guaranteed, except insofar as one offers that guarantee metaphysically by referring to lives beyond the current one.

Although, promises of personal rebirth aside, there would appear to be no necessary connection between moral achievement and external rewards, there is a sense in which moral achievement does often make external re- wards more likely, even if this is never a relation of necessity. This is true because the more human beings enter the equation, the more likely it is that a human sense of justice will intervene, drawing some connection be- tween virtue and reward, or sin and suffering. People who characteristically treat others with kindness and just consideration are often treated kindly themselves, although not always. Those who are frequently mean spirited and selfish are often treated with distain. Honesty in business often pays off in the form of trusting, faithful customers, while the habit of cheating customers will often come back to haunt the merchant. These dimensions of karma and of ethical relations are clear to us, and we are thankful that they exist. But it would seem that their existence is human and social, rather than structured into the cosmos.

Therefore, all we can say is that things often work this way, not that they always do, or that they must. Sometimes unscrupulous businessmen thrive; on occasion, kindness and honesty go completely unrewarded. These occurrences make it impossible for us to claim a necessary relation between moral merit and external forms of reward. (pp. 84-5)

In short, insofar as there is a necessary relation between virtue and well-being, that well-being must be regarded entirely in terms of internal goods; the relation between virtue and external goods is a highly contingent one. I would go beyond Wright in noting that the latter relation doesn’t merely depend on other people, because virtue isn’t merely a matter of other-regarding morality; courage, self-discipline, mindfulness are virtues that would likely create external benefits even on a desert island. Wright’s basic point stands, though.

But this very tension between external goods and virtue is found in classical Buddhist accounts of karma, just as it is in classical Greek accounts of eudaimonia. We saw above how the Stoics and Epicureans disputed the role of external goods in flourishing with each other and with Aristotle. And similarly, Barbra Clayton’s in-depth study of Śāntideva notes that he uses the term puṇya (good karma) interchangeably both with śīla (good conduct) and śubha (well-being). He does not specify the relationship between śīla and śubha as clearly as either Wright or the Greeks do. But his usage shows that when we speak of flourishing in a Greek-derived way, referring to a good life that involves some combination of virtue and well-being with a debatable amount of external goods, then we can be quite justified in calling it good karma – even if we believe rebirth is hogwash.

The use of “merit” to translate puṇya derives from the Catholic theological term, to which it bears some resemblance. But Peter Harvey and Barbra Clayton‘s books have both pointed out a key problem with the English word “merit” as a translation of puṇya: it implies has strong connotations of desert or entitlement. These connotations are not necessarily there in the Catholic term, but few English-speakers anymore – even Catholics – are likely to first think of Catholic theology when they hear the term “merit”. A far more common use is the likes of “This merits a reevaluation” – “merit” meaning “deserve”. But “deserving” has nothing to do with puṇya. It refers to the impersonal, causal, possibly cosmic power of action to produce happy or fortunate results, without any actor (such as a deity or an institution) rewarding the deserving.

The problems loom similarly large with “sin” is a translation of pāpa. For puṇya and pāpa are clearly opposites and juxtaposed as such. But even in Catholicism, “merit” and “sin” are not opposites. Indeed, “sin” really has no opposite. It’s not merely that it has no semantic opposite in English – as would be the case for a word like “well-being”, where it’s easy enough to invent an awkward opposite term like “ill-being” and have one’s readers know what it means. Rather, the very concept of sin does not lend itself to an opposite: it has to do with a basic, intrinsically bad, state and nature of human action and character. If pāpa were sin, its corresponding concept puṇya would need to be something with a similar scope and gravity that was also based in human action. But the theology of sin holds no such concept. To the extent that Christian theology allows for an opposite of sin, it would likely be “grace”: a concept which does not correspond with the agent’s actions and their results, and therefore has little to do with puṇya. For these reasons, sometimes “demerit” is chosen instead for pāpa. But not only is “demerit” awkward, as far as I know it does not occur in the Catholic theology that was the reason for choosing “merit” in the first place; and it falls into the same problems of desert that afflict “merit” as a translation in the first place.

Now, in the context of nineteenth-century English usage, “merit” and “demerit” might perhaps have been the closest English concepts available to render puṇya and pāpa, despite the aforementioned flaws. But that isn’t so anymore. The twentieth century has seen the Sanskrit word karma, especially in the phrases “good karma” and “bad karma,” enter the English language in widespread popular usage, first in works explaining South Asian traditions and then more widely in a New Age context. The popular English usage of “good and bad karma” refers to the good and bad fruits of one’s actions, which come back to affect one positively or negatively in the future. One can observe plenty of random examples of this usage. I was once discussing this usage in the Harvard graduate student café (which has no significant Buddhist theme). A colleague of mine – inclined to Christian theology – who didn’t think the usage was that common. I pointed him to the tip jar in that very café, which bore the large prominent label “Tipping brings good karma.”

This modern usage corresponds exactly to the meaning of the Buddhist terms puṇya and pāpa, even though those terms do not themselves involve the Sanskrit word karma (which simply means “action”). There is, at any rate, no disputing the close connection between Sanskrit karma, on the one hand, and puṇya and pāpa on the other; the latter are typically referred to in Sanskrit as karmaphala, the fruits of action. Therefore I think it is best to translate puṇya and pāpa as “good karma” and “bad karma” respectively; as adjectives, one can turn to the slightly more awkward “karmically good” and “karmically bad”.

Why does all this matter? It’s not just a translation issue, not just that I find the use of “merit”, “demerit”, “sin” to be annoying. It also has to do with some of the hidden methodological debates in Buddhist studies. Jonathan Z. Smith famously argued in Drudgery Divine that much of what passed as the neutral historical study of Christian origins was in fact animated primarily by Protestant-Catholic apologetics and polemic. One might perhaps expect such a result in a field so deeply important for Christian belief. What’s more surprising is that similar Christian debates have reproduced themselves in Buddhist studies. The debates chronicled by Smith may have helped make “Protestant” a dirty word in religious studies more generally – including Buddhist studies, where Gregory Schopen seeks to dismiss the textual study of Buddhism by referring to its “Protestant presuppositions”, and Yavanayāna Buddhism is often referred to with the epithet “Protestant Buddhism” (and the implicit claim that it is therefore not really Buddhism but Protestantism).

It seems to me that the negative use of “Protestant” in religious studies is often motivated by exactly the kind of apologetic agenda that Smith attacked: an assumption that “real religion” is somehow more Catholic. The translations of puṇya and pāpa show us a case where, by contrast, Catholicizing leads us astray. Henry Steel Olcott, often pointed to as a key figure in the foundation of “Protestant” Buddhism, was not a Protestant but a Theosophist – part of a movement that inspired the modern “New Age” movement, where the use of “good karma” and “bad karma” is now widespread. In the case of translating puṇya and pāpa, to put it bluntly, the Catholics got it wrong and the hippies got it right.

(This discussion expands on a passage in my dissertation.)

People who say “I will try” have given themselves permission to fail. No matter what happens, they can always claim that they “tried.”

People who hear “I will try” and don’t realize what it really means are fooling themselves, by thinking there’s a chance that the speaker will actually succeed.

People who really and truly achieve goals never say “I will try.”

Instead, they always say “I will do” something–or, better yet, “I must do” whatever the task is.

As a wise (though fictional) guru once said: “Do, or do not. There is no ‘try.’”

The “guru” quoted at the end, of course, is Yoda. And the wisdom of this advice is also fictional, for the advice relies on believing a falsehood. The advice is nevertheless all too pervasive – I recall some New Age-inclined family members of mine in the ’80s trying (and usually failing) to purge the word “try” from their vocabulary, even snapping their wrists with an elastic band as a mild punishment when they said it.

What I’ve always found a far more helpful and important piece of business advice is “Underpromise and overdeliver”. To say “I will try” is to underpromise; and to underpromise makes it possible to overdeliver. By contrast, what happens when you refuse to say “I will try” and instead say “I will do”? Well: Human beings are not perfect. Every human being fails at stated tasks, and fails frequently. I guarantee you that that is true of Geoffrey James as well. If Geoffrey James follows his own advice, there will be many times when he says “I will do” something and does not do it. That means one of two things. One, he is delusional, even megalomaniacal: he sincerely believes in his own capacities so much that he genuinely does not recognize the possibility of failure. It does not take much practical wisdom to know that it is bad business advice to believe oneself a deity. Two, and more likely, he is dishonest: he says “I will do” when he knows that he might not succeed at doing it. In other words, he has told a deliberate lie.

Now Geoffrey James’s bio tells us that he works in sales, and writes about sales. This is no surprise either – for all too typically, sales is a profession built on deception. The figure of the slimy salesman who tells all manner of evasions, half-truths and bald-faced lies to sell a product is a cliché, and is one for a reason – such people often succeed at sales, at least in the short term. Honest selling is a real possibility, and a good and noble thing, but its success comes in the long term, making it much more difficult to measure. When one’s job description is selling, it is all too easy to focus on the short term. Former Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith recently made waves with his resignation letter published in the New York Times. He bemoans a corporate culture where the question most frequently asked is “How much money did we make off the client?”, and the employees most promoted are those who persuade their clients to invest in “the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit” – the ones that they do not themselves believe in.

They are, in short, relying on deception to sell. And when one deceives others regularly, it becomes very easy not only to deceive oneself regularly, but to pass off this self-deception as good advice – which is exactly what Geoffrey James does here. But the problem with self-deception is the biggest problem with all deception: those you deceive learn not to trust you. And it is a terrible fate to be unable to trust oneself.

As with most questions of philosophy or practical wisdom, there is a flip side to the issue. There is a truth in what James says. Especially: when one believes that one can and will succeed at a goal, that very belief typically makes one more likely to succeed. A false belief in one’s inevitable success does not make the success inevitable, but it may well make the success more likely. In that sense, James may turn out to be right: the people who acknowledge the truth of the situation – which is to say, the possibility of failure – are the ones most likely to fail.

Then, I think, we are dealing with another case of a problem I discussed before: where lying to oneself produces good consequences. I’ve often spoken of such a problem in the case of childrearing – even if having children makes one less happy, it would seem that a good parent should not believe that.

And I have waffled a little bit on the question of what one should do in such circumstances. I proclaimed that one should never lie to oneself, but then retracted the claim a few weeks later. I have regularly noted that truth has an intrinsic value independent of its consequences, and would continue to claim this; the question is what that value implies.

I suspect that the answer to this question is not something that can be resolved in the general case. Like so many cases of right action, it is a matter for discernment, for practical wisdom – for judgement based on a deep familiarity with the particulars of the current case. With respect to children, it does seem that most often the effects of one’s belief may well be more important than its truth. Whether one’s children actually make one happier or not, as a parent one should strive to believe that they do.

But is the same true for achieving goals? I don’t think so. Children’s effect on happiness is general. When your children make you unhappy, you can still think of those times when they did make you happy, and keep up the belief that in general they do make you happy. But each given goal is specific, particular. When you tell yourself “I will do it” and you fail to do it – and this is a matter of when, not if – there is no resolving it into the more general issue. The evidence is too obvious. You told yourself you would do this, and you didn’t. You lied to yourself, and if you think about your actions at all, you know you lied to yourself. It’s even worse if you told someone else “I will do it”, as James recommends. You lied to them; you let them down. Even if you do succeed at your goals more often, that success is purchased at the cost of dependability and reliability, to the point where your words cannot be trusted. As far as I can see, that is too high a price to pay.

I characterized Wittgenstein there as having “an indifference to ethics and concerns about the good life…” Given the concerns that occupy the bulk of his writing, it’s very easy to get that impression; compared to his voluminous prose about epistemology and philosophy of language, the amount of published or unpublished writing that he devotes to ethics and the good life is almost negligible.

But as several respondents to the post pointed out – both in the comments and in private emails – it’s really not fair to characterize that lack of ink as indifference. (And though I am by no means well versed in Wittgenstein’s thought, I did know enough about him that I should have remembered that.) The things Wittgenstein said about ethics were certainly limited; but they did exist. And those relatively few remarks tell us in his own words why he said so little.

Thill quotes an important letter that Wittgenstein wrote to Norman Malcolm:

You see, I know that it’s difficult to think well about ‘certainty’, ‘probability’, ‘perception’, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other peoples lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it’s nasty then it’s most important.-Let me stop preaching. (quoted from p.35 of Malcolm’s memoir)

This is hardly an expression of indifference. But it does raise the question: if it’s so important, why did Wittgenstein say so little about it? He points out that it’s very difficult, but he didn’t let that stop him on other matters. The key here, I suspect, is in the “if possible” – it seems likely to me that Wittgenstein thought it wasn’t really possible to think about the good life, at least in our usual discursive, linguistic sense of thinking.

Wittgenstein famously ends the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus – at 75 pages the longest work published in his lifetime – with the German phrase Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen. The book is divided into seven sections, and the last one consists solely of this phrase, which is also repeated near the preface to the book with one change (the word sprechen is replaced with reden, which both mean “speak” though the connotations may be different). The Sanskritic grammar of this phrase requires that any accurate English rendering will be at least somewhat awkward, but the meaning comes across: “What one cannot speak about, one must remain silent about.” As far as I can tell – and do correct me if I’m wrong again – in Wittgenstein’s view, ethics and the good life fall almost entirely under this category of wovon man nicht sprechen kann, and that is why Wittgenstein remained mostly silent about them.

If this is the case, some further implications follow. For my own part, if such an interpretation is correct I would become still less sympathetically predisposed to Wittgenstein. (I really am hoping one of these days to hear something from Wittgenstein that I actually find valuable or profound. I do think it’s there, but I haven’t found it yet.) If one claims, as Wittgenstein seems to, that ethics is ineffable, the inevitable conclusion seems to me a drastic conservatism. And by this I do not mean the political literal conservatism I have previously praised, which rests largely on pragmatic grounds about the observed harmful effects of revolution. Rather, the ineffability of ethics leads us to a deeper and more harmful conservatism, one that preserves everything intact in both individual lives and the larger social order.

For without language, there can be very little reasoning – only the rudimentary kind of reasoning engaged in by dogs who figure out how to climb up onto the kitchen counter, which some might argue isn’t reason at all. And without reasoning, there can be no criticism. Individual desires and passions are left just the way they are, as they are with dogs; you can use stimulus, reward and punishment to change a dog’s behaviour, but you can’t convince it that it should stop engaging in self-destructive acts. Without reasoning there is no room for the kind of searching reflection that changed my life in Thailand.

A Wittgensteinian might, I suppose, argue that such changes in belief are only apparent; that the changes don’t really occur at the level of reason and language. In his comment, Ethan Mills mentions Wittgensteinians of his acquaintance who, speaking of Ethan’s turn to atheism, “told me that if I had REALLY believed, this wouldn’t have happened. What happened to me is that I simply REALIZED that I never really believed in the first place. Upon reflection, this seems closer to my experience.” But at least two replies to this are in order. First, that’s not at all what happened to me; I passionately believed in a utilitarian political life for a long time, and did not abandon that view until serious reflection happened otherwise. The idea that “you wouldn’t have changed your beliefs if you really believed” does, of course, raise the idea of tautology. And I suspect that may not be a very Wittgensteinian reply in the first place; on my understanding, Wittgenstein sharply criticized the idea of implicit beliefs (“I don’t have a belief that the world will not end five minutes from now.”)

It is also easy to see how the idea of ineffable ethics could lead to the intellectual bullying that J.M. Keynes witnessed in Wittgenstein’s colleague G.E. Moore. Without reason, social hierarchies are maintained based on raw power and force, not justice; it is the world Plato rightly warns us against in the first book of the Republic, which makes no room for the criticisms of a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King. A world in which we cannot speak about the good is a bleak world indeed, one which might well not be worth living in.

An additional implication of such an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s views: the symbiosis with early Chinese thought that I discussed at the end of the earlier post becomes less plausible. True, Confucians at least similarly tend to be conservative and preserve existing views about ethics; but that is something they make an explicit case for, in the way that Wittgenstein says we cannot do. I think the earlier post hinted at the possibility of a division of labour, in which Confucians could supply the reflection on ethics that Wittgenstein neglected but that was compatible with him. But on this interpretation, Wittgenstein would have actively ruled such reflection out – even in the aphoristic mode of Confucius, let alone the more detailed arguments of Mencius and Xunzi — or Mozi or Zhuangzi. (Heidegger might be a different story. Maybe.)

I got Wittgenstein wrong before, so I’m not going to put much stock on this interpretation of him. If he did not believe ethics was ineffable, I’d be happy to know that. If so, I’d still be happy to have said many of the things above, as a response to other people who do make that claim.

I’ll be on vacation for the next two weeks. I expect new posts will begin again on 18 March.

What does that mean? As part of the class, students are required to live for various periods of time according to various restrictions, each one followed by an actual monastic order of some tradition or other. No technology beyond electric lights; no reading news from the outside world; no eating after dark; no caffeine or alcohol; no vegetables that grow underground (a nod to Jainism). Breaking the rules requires confession.

Terry Mattingly, editor of religion-journalism blog Get Religion, found the AP article very strange. It “has a gigantic hole: It contains no information whatsoever about the prayer and worship life of these monks.” Mattingly’s claim of a hole, of course, is based on the assumption that monks qua monks must have a “prayer and worship life”. For he claims: “Monks, you see, have to have tradition. Tradition is the frame that surrounds the life of a monk. The goal is to live a tradition and to be transformed by it.” To which the easy reply is: says who?

Mattingly asks, “What is the point of monasticism, if not transcendence, submission and union with Another?” Here he’s already betraying his Christian parochialism; Theravāda Buddhist monasticism has nothing whatsoever to do with “union with Another”, and I doubt that Mattingly would be willing to go so far as to claim that Buddhist bhikkhus are not really monks. (Similar point about his emphasis on “prayer and worship life”: Theravāda monks do have that, but it’s hardly the point; lay Buddhists pray too. Monasticism is about trying to work off bad karma and reach liberation – or more cynically, about following cultural norms so that one can become more marriageable.) But more importantly, the reporter answers Mattingly’s question in the context of the course: “‘It’s not about individual restrictions,’ said McDaniel. ‘It’s about building hyperawareness of yourself and others.’” To which Mattingly replies:

I do not doubt that the story is accurate in conveying that this is the professor’s answer to these crucial questions. However, I find it hard to accept his answer without some kind of information about the spiritual tradition — wither ancient or postmodern — used in this academic exercise. Is there, in fact, a monastic tradition in which increasing one’s knowledge of self and becoming more aware of others are not initial steps to a higher ultimate goal? It would be good to hear the Catholic/Buddhist professor discuss that issue.

Here Mattingly’s question is interesting. For what McDaniel is saying here – and what really makes his class different from Catholic or Buddhist monasticism – is that in his class monasticism is treated as a technique. The reporter mentions that point but doesn’t dwell on it, and the lack of attention to it seems to freak Mattingly out a bit: “This may be one of the strangest religion ghosts I have ever seen in a news story. Ever.” My reaction is rather different: it’s about time!

Few would raise an eyebrow anymore at the now-common practice of having students meditate in a class on meditation traditions – without involving a “prayer and worship life” with those traditions. Meditation, like yoga, is now widely treated as a technique. If one can treat meditation as a technique, then why not monastic asceticism?

A very large number of the Westerners drawn to Buddhism these days are drawn to it because of meditation. S.N. Goenka specifically describes his form of meditation as a technique. But in my own experience with a Goenka meditation retreat, the meditation technique made far less of a difference than the monasticism – the ascetic practices of a sort very similar to those described by McDaniel.

Goenka’s introductory ten-day vipassanā meditation courses, inspired by the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, do not merely require students to sit and meditate. They require a strict, gender-segregated monastic regimen. One does not merely refrain from meat, drugs and sexual intercourse; one is not allowed to read or write, nor to speak except to ask specific questions of practice, and one is expected to wake at 4 am – which, for a graduate student, required more jet lag than a trip across the Atlantic. For me, the meditation was the easy part, and one from which I took relatively little – except for one specific practice at the end of the course, which was not the course’s emphasis. The harder part, which made a much stronger impression, was maintaining the monastic discipline. When I couldn’t get my thoughts out of my head into paper or voice, I thought I’d go crazy – the same thoughts would just circle over and over. It was that monastic discipline, far more than the meditation, that made me acutely aware of my own thoughts and habits.

Much has been made of the MRI studies of the brain of Tibetan Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, showing him to have far more of the brain activity associated with happiness than anyone else in the study, including other meditators. It’s been typically assumed in such discussions that what makes Ricard so happy was his long experience with meditation. But I’ve wondered from the start: couldn’t it be the monasticism? That always seemed to me the more likely candidate: changing your entire lifestyle in a carefully controlled way that turns you away from worldly desires, and thereby getting you away from the suffering caused by craving.

I suspect McDaniel is ahead of the curve in teaching this class. I wouldn’t be surprised if ascetic and monastic disciplines, like meditation and yoga, start being taken up as secular techniques. As far as I can see, just like meditation and yoga, they have real and important practical benefits. That’s very clear to the students lining up to take McDaniel’s course. And contra Mattingly, it’s very hard for me to see anything weird about that.