Democracy isn’t about elections

12 Sunday Jan 2025

Posted by in Greek and Roman Tradition, Politics

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Matthew Yglesias has a better understanding of the details of public policy than almost anyone I know. He excels at being a technocrat. But there’s a reason technocrats and populists are at odds: populism, whether of the Bernie Sanders or the Donald Trump variety, comes out of a fundamentally democratic impulse, promoting the rule of the people against a perceived élite (even at the expense of lost expertise). And one post of Yglesias’s shows me that he’s not so good at understanding what the rule of the people actually is.

In the case of the particular topic that Yglesias was writing about, he makes a characteristically important point on the practical implications: community meetings, and other forms of providing popular input into government actions, slow down those actions and often prevent them entirely. There is indeed something wrong with “a world where the New York State Legislature can decide in 2019 that it wants congestion pricing for Manhattan and then spend three years compiling a 4,000+ page NEPA review.” Community input often leads to bad policy outcomes. Where Yglesias is wrong, though, is in saying this interferes with democracy.

Yglesias at least states his incorrect position with characteristic clarity: “is democracy about people expressing views at hearings or is it about entrusting elected leaders with the authority to make decisions on subjects of public concern? I think it’s the latter.” And that is where he’s wrong.

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The significance of feminine beauty

05 Sunday Jan 2025

Posted by in Aesthetics, Food, Self

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The English word aesthetician can describe two kinds of professionals. In the less common sense, it can describe a philosopher who makes a living theorizing about art and beauty. In the more common sense, it can describe someone who makes a living helping women with makeup and hair and nails.

These two senses have something to do with each other. But we don’t usually talk about it.

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Getting psychedelic spirituality right

29 Sunday Dec 2024

Posted by in Health, M.T.S.R., Metaphysics, Politics, Psychology

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American psychedelic advocates received a great disappointment a couple months ago when the Food and Drug Administration refused to approve MDMA (ecstasy) as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. The disappointment was great enough to lead Jules Evans of the Ecstatic Integration Substack to ask: “Is the psychedelic renaissance over?“

It seems silly to me to read too much into this one decision. It is not final; a new application could be made in a few years. More importantly, it is one decision, about one substance, by one agency in one country – for one purpose. (It was also a great disappointment for us in Massachusetts that our state voted down the ballot question to legalize psychedelics, but it too is just one state, where the question was extremely poorly promoted; Oregon and Colorado have proceeded with decriminalizing psilocybin.) If the entire “psychedelic renaissance” hung on the outcome of one agency’s decision or one state referendum, it would have been a shallow “renaissance” indeed. Even within the US there are already many other avenues for improving the legal status of psychedelics.

Public-domain AP photo of Timothy Leary.

That said: Michael Pollan’s book How To Change Your Mind probably did more to kick off the supposed current renaissance than anything else, and one of Pollan’s most important takeaways in the book was, let’s not screw this up. Psychedelics were famously popular in the 1960s, but the messages around them were dominated by overenthusiastic salespeople like Timothy Leary, who had little sense of caution. The resulting backlash was so strong that it created the ignorant world I grew up in, in the 1980s and 1990s, where even video games felt the importance of including a heavy-handed “don’t do drugs” message – extending even to cannabis. What the FDA ruling should remind us of, is the importance of avoiding the mistakes of the ’60s – so that the renaissance can lead to an enlightenment, if you will.

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Sketching an existentialist Buddhism

22 Sunday Dec 2024

Posted by in Foundations of Ethics, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Modernized Buddhism, Physics and Astronomy, Self

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If we take a modern Buddhist approach where the ultimate reality is emptiness, what then does that look like in practice? Especially as we think about the key question:how can you be yourself if there is no self?

In thinking through my Buddhism, I had once turned to a reductionist “Sellarsian solution” because it allows in some sense for selves as conventional (rather than ultimate) truth. I’ve now moved instead to a Buddhist view that is based on emptiness rather than reductionism – and, crucially, the emptiness view allows selves in that conventional sense too. For that reason, I think an emptiness-based approach may still be able to leave room for an expressive individualism, where we seek to be ourselves more fully.

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The physics of emptiness

15 Sunday Dec 2024

Posted by in Consciousness, Early and Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Modernized Buddhism, Physics and Astronomy

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How can we reconcile Buddhism with expressive individualism (“be yourself”) and with natural science? When I had previously turned to Wilfrid Sellars for help on this question, I had compared Sellars’s view to two Buddhist metaphysical positions on ultimate truth, which are quite different from each other. One of these was Buddhaghosa’s view that ultimate truth is reductionist, and I no longer find that comparison helpful. But I also turned to Śāntideva’s view that the ultimate is normatively inert, with no good or bad involved. Śāntideva’s view rejects Buddhaghosa’s in some very important ways – and I think that philosophically his metaphysics is considerably more powerful.

That’s a big deal for me because, having come to my Buddhism in Thailand, I have generally viewed myself as a Theravādin like Buddhaghosa. I’ve been skeptical of the most famous piece of Śāntideva’s metaphysics, his ethical deconstruction of self and other in chapter VIII of the Bodhicaryāvatāra. I’m not convinced by his or any other argument for a universal impartial altruism – a key Mahāyāna doctrine. Yet I do now find myself moving closer to a Mahāyāna or at least Madhyamaka view, because of a different aspect of Śāntideva’s metaphysics: the metaphysics of emptiness in chapter IX, which I think are considerably deeper.

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The scientific self is not reductionist

08 Sunday Dec 2024

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Biology, Early and Theravāda, Metaphysics, Modernized Buddhism, Philosophy of Science, Self

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Any serious contemporary Buddhist intellectual needs to think through the connection between Buddhist ideas and the relevant claims of natural science. Many of us, too, are expressive individualists: we believe that there is something valuable in the project of discovering one’s true self. The expressive individualist view of self-discovery and self-expression – put perhaps in most recent terms as “let your freak flag fly” – is that’s an uncomfortable fit with a tradition that has proclaimed for millennia that there is no true self.

There are at least three different metaphysical understandings underlying each of Buddhism, natural science, and expressive individualism, and at least at first glance they all appear to be in conflict. Resolving this conflict is not easy, and recently my views on how to do it best have significantly changed. I often find I get the best sense of what’s important in other people’s philosophies by figuring out what they changed and why, so I thought it would be helpful to show the changes in my own.

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Nondualism without monism

01 Sunday Dec 2024

Posted by in Deity, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Roman Catholicism, Vedānta

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Monism is the idea that everything is, or is ultimately reducible to, one. This is not quite the same as nondualism, a term increasingly common in mystical circles. Nondualism is the idea that everything is not two or more – not more than one. Nondualism and monism are very similar concepts, but they’re not exactly the same.

I’m speaking here of each term’s deepest metaphysical meaning, where it refers to the ultimate nature of the universe (each term can be used in other ways as well). The general core idea of nondualism is quite widespread: that is, that the most ultimate reality should not be identified with the many plural distinct things we typically observe and the distinctions between them. The ultimate is not dual or plural, and especially, at the ultimate level there is no distinction between subject and object. Yet all of that still doesn’t necessarily mean that the ultimate is one.

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“It is God’s will that I should have sinned”

24 Sunday Nov 2024

Posted by in Action, Anger, German Tradition, Morality, Roman Catholicism, Serenity, Shame and Guilt

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It’s not hard to see why the Catholic Church condemned Meister Eckhart for heresy. One of his teachings, in particular, is shocking even today: the good or blessed man, properly “poor in spirit”, is

so much of one will with God that he wills everything that God wills, and in the fashion in which God wills it. And therefore, because in some way or another it is God’s will that I should have sinned, I should not want not to have done so, for in this way God’s will is done “on earth,” that is, in misdeeds, “as it is in heaven,” that is, in good deeds. (Book of Benedictus section 2, pp. 216-17 in Meister Eckhart)

Or, as Eckhart’s accusers put it in the papal bull accusing him of heresy, “A good man ought to so conform his will to the divine will that he should will whatever God wills. Since God in some way wills for me to have sinned, I should not will that I had not committed sins; and this is true penitence.” (p. 77)

That’s a pretty extraordinary thing to be saying: it sounds like Eckhart is saying it’s good to be doing evil. That idea is as alarming to us as it would have been to the medieval Church.

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The Buddhist critique of shame

17 Sunday Nov 2024

Posted by in Disgust, Early and Theravāda, Fear, Humility, Shame and Guilt

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It doesn’t sit very well with many modern readers, including myself, to put a high value on shame. We often find shame to be something that cripples us, makes us burn with embarrassment in a way that inhibits our doing good. Too often I look to some minor misdeed of mine, sometimes even just a joke that failed to land, and instinctively beat myself up for it. Yet detailed introductions to Pali Buddhist texts will often note that these texts prize the mental states of hiri and ottappa, two Pali terms which are both often translated “shame”. It is important to pay attention to the parts of a tradition we disagree with, especially if it’s our own tradition; they can be the ones we learn from the most. So I don’t want to dismiss the texts’ valuation of what looks like shame.

And yet one day while looking through the suttas for something unrelated, I chanced upon something that is much less commonly remarked on: the Pali texts also contain a critique of shame. Or at least of something that could be translated as “shame” just as reasonably as hiri and ottappa can be. That something is kukkucca.

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Happiness from politics, or, mourning in America (again)

10 Sunday Nov 2024

Posted by in Anger, Attachment and Craving, Compassion, Despair, Gratitude, Grief, Happiness, Mahāyāna, Patient Endurance, Politics, Serenity

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This is the first time I’ve ever reposted an old Love of All Wisdom post, because, despite its being nearly twenty years old now, I think it’s timelier than ever.

I first posted the following piece in 2016 when Trump won the first time – but I wrote it in 2005, after George W. Bush won the second time. I had been furious at Bush’s endorsement of torture and devastation of the climate throughout his first term I had been able to comfort myself with the thought that he didn’t really win: after all, even leaving aside all the voting irregularities, his opponent had also got more votes than he did. But in 2004 no such comfort was available to me; that disaster of a president had won a decisive victory including even the popular vote, and I had to find some way of coming to terms with the awful world he was going to keep building. I wrote this piece in my personal journal, for myself, and I have kept its original stream-of-consciousness style, reflecting my raw thought process as I processed.

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