The MAGA case against Trump

23 Sunday Mar 2025

Posted by in Economics, Politics

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As awful as the second Trump administration is, very little is accomplished by criticizing it from the perspective of a leftist like me. The administration wants to appall us, even take revenge on us. That’s the point. I’ve seen multiple bumper stickers and T-shirts proclaiming “Trump: Make liberals cry again.” As far as I can tell, last time, Trump drew strength from every apopleptic tweet our team raged out about how horrible it all is. We can and should take concrete steps to fight it all – the only obvious one being to contribute to legal funds challenging his actions in the courts, of which Democracy Forward seems to be the most prominent – but we do little by publicly expressing our outrage. Our hatred of any Trump administration is a feature, not a bug.

Old-fashioned Reaganite conservatives who stay true to their principles are going to be pretty horrified, too. When an unrepentant admirer of the old Soviet Union conquers back USSR territory (at great human cost on both sides), it’s got to be crushing to see the leader of “the free world” walk away from the conflict on terms favourable to the conqueror. But it’s been startling to see how few even care about those Reaganite principles anymore. Some of the ones who do, like Dick Cheney, often already campaigned for the other side – in a way that may have served only to illustrate that side’s complete ideological incoherence. (If you advertise that you’ve got endorsements ranging from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney, does that really look like you’re the common-sense consensus candidate, or does it look like you stand for nothing at all?)

All of which makes far too much criticism of the administration effectively irrelevant. If you’re a true-blue Reaganite, let alone a leftist, it means none of the people who put this administration in power actually care what you think. And that’s a big problem, because what the administration is doing is really, really bad – even from the perspective of its sympathizers.

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Disengaged Buddhism in the second era of Trump

16 Sunday Mar 2025

Posted by in Despair, Early and Theravāda, Hope, Politics, Serenity

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Early in the first Trump administration, I preached the importance of disengaged Buddhists’ lessons: to refrain from anger, to remind ourselves that some things are more important than politics. I think that that was easier to do the first time round. For in the end, the main thing that distinguished the Trump administration from previous Republican administrations – until the various self-coup attempts at the end of his reign – was its hostile rhetoric. On policy, on running the government, Trump 1.0 was not all that different from a standard garden-variety Republican: the only major controversial piece of legislation he passed was to borrow money and hand it to the rich, just as Reagan and George W. Bush had done before him. Some of the policies that drew the biggest outrage – like putting children in cages – turned out to be the work of previous administrations, including Obama. While Trump’s bark did make the United States a more hostile place for everyone, it nevertheless remained far worse than his bite. That made it a lot easier to preach taking a chill pill.

I don’t think any of that is true this time around. After the election, my hope had been for a second Trump term mostly like the first, probably a little worse. But nothing of the sort has happened. As far as I can tell, Trump has done far more damage in the first month of his second term than he did in three and a half years of his first. The actions of Trump, and his unelected viceroy Elon Musk, have already killed thousands of African recipients denied aid, and wreaked havoc on the world from Ukraine through Canada to here in metropolitan Boston, where nearly everyone I know has had their job redefined – if not lost – as a result of cuts and freezes to science funding.

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The secret of mindfulness meditation

09 Sunday Mar 2025

Posted by in Emotion, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Psychology

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One of the things that really surprises me about contemporary mindfulness meditation is how rarely – especially at the beginning – they highlight what, as far as I can tell, is the most beneficial aspect of the practice. It’s not a “secret” in the sense of being concealed away somewhere, just that beginners are rarely told how important it is; I more or less had to figure it out for myself. This holds true for the practices I’m most familiar with – Headspace, Robert Sokolove’s medical mindfulness recording, Goenka vipassanā – but also seems to hold for other forms of modern mindfulness that I’ve listened to recordings of. Because of this, I think it’s easy for a beginner to misinterpret what mindfulness meditation is about.

Headspace’s meditation instructions usually involve focusing your attention on your breath – its inward and outward movement, the way your chest and stomach rise and fall with the breath. (Sokolove’s likewise.) Goenka vipassanā puts more emphasis on repeatedly scanning your attention up and down through your body. But it’s become clear to me that that focus, on the breath or the bodily sensations, is not the point of any of these exercises.

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We need a history of modern yoga but not A History of Modern Yoga

02 Sunday Mar 2025

Posted by in M.T.S.R., Meditation, Modern Hinduism, Physical Exercise, Sāṃkhya-Yoga

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Even more ubiquitous in the West than mindfulness meditation, and for a longer period of time, is yoga: specifically meaning the practice of postural stretching exercises, with names like “sun salutation” and “downward dog”. They can be supplemented by breathing exercises and perhaps occasionally meditation, and there is often some element of Sanskrit or philosophy involved, but to a normal English-speaking layperson, the core of what yoga means is the postures. This is the sort of yoga that is sometimes even a competitive sport. Its health benefits are rarely contested; as my own aging body gets less naturally flexible, it’s probably only a matter of time before I sign up with a local yoga studio myself.

Yoga as we know it today. Image copyright Somkiat, Adobe Stock.

Meanwhile, in the classical Sanskrit from which the term is derived, yoga refers to a variety of spiritual practices in which postures play a minor role, if any. Śāntideva uses the term “yogin” to describe people with a greater understanding of reality, with postures never being mentioned in the text. The most famous and influential yoga text, the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, says that posture (āsana) is one – just one – of the eight limbs of yoga, and the only thing it specifies about posture is that posture should be “firm and pleasant” (sthirasukham) (YS II.46). There’s no stretching involved here; indeed the text suggests the opposite, that one should be comfortable, likely for meditation. The Yoga Bhāṣya commentary – traditionally included with the original – names several kinds of posture without explaining them; when Vācaspati Miśra’s subcommentary does come to explain them, it shows that they are postures for meditation, ways of placing your feet while you sit. Meditation, in general, plays the largest role in this classical yoga; stretching plays none.

So it’s natural to ask: how exactly did we get from one to the other, from a meditative classical yoga in which stretching plays no role, to a modern yoga in which it plays the primary role? I’ve seen this question asked in surprisingly few places. I wanted to get a deeper understanding of that question, so I thought it would be worth reading Elizabeth De Michelis’s 2005 work with the very promising title A History of Modern Yoga.

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Empiricism of the subtle body

23 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by in Biology, Emotion, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Philosophy of Science, Supernatural

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A public-domain illustration by Alex-engraver of the chakras and channels, taken from Wikipedia.

Traditional Indian and Tibetan tantric anatomy tells us that in the middle of the human torso there are three channels (nādis or “streams”), one each on the left, middle, and right, and that these proceed vertically upward through a number of circular centres (cakras in standard Sanskrit transliteration, chakras in modern English spelling). This account of the “subtle body” (sūkṣma śarīra) has become popular in modern yoga and other forms of alternative medicine or spirituality.

I don’t believe this account of the subtle body – but not primarily for the obvious reason.

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We need to see emotions as bodily

16 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by in Anger, Compassion, Emotion, External Goods, Fear, Health, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Practice, Psychology, Stoicism, Unconscious Mind

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The most important lesson I ever learned was back in Thailand in 1997: that the biggest contributor to my unhappiness wasn’t external problems like being single or unemployed, but my own mental states like craving. Fixing those mental states was a surer path to happiness and reducing suffering.

But the question that has played an ever-increasing role in the three ensuing decades has been: okay, but how? It is one thing to recognize that your craving and anger – or fear or self-pity or shame or other negative emotions – are the main thing keeping you down. It is quite another to do something about them. Our animal natures make those states quite recalcitrant.

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The philosopher takes the same psych meds as his dog

09 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by in Action, Biology, Emotion, Health, Human Nature, Psychology, Unconscious Mind

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Over the years I’ve managed to treat my insomnia in various ways, to the point that nowadays I can get a reasonably good sleep most nights. Mindfulness meditation – prescribed to me medically before I called myself a Buddhist – has been one big help with that. But just as big has been a medication called trazodone: primarily used as an antidepressant, trazodone in smaller doses helps one stay asleep and avoid the typical insomniac anxiety spiral where you wake up and worry that you can’t get to sleep and find that the worry makes it harder to get to sleep so you worry more. It does a great deal to take the edge off.

Meanwhile my dog, Christmas Belle (so named because we got her in a snowstorm on December 22), faced various anxiety issues that made her resistant and fearful to getting in the car and going to the vet. To help her cope with those situations the vet recommended… trazodone.

Christmas Belle Feeley-Lele, when not feeling anxiety. Photo by author.
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Of offbeat philosophers

02 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by in Aesthetics, Analytic Tradition, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy

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Writing advice often rightly asks authors: “When was the last time you wished a book was longer?” Well, now I can say: it was when I recently read Lawrence Harvey’s Offbeat Philosophers: Thinkers Who Played A Different Tune (whose publishers offered me a review copy). This book clocks in at a mere 73 pages, plus bibliography. Fortunately it’s priced accordingly ($10 for the paperback, $8 for the e-book), but Harvey doesn’t leave himself a lot of room to do the job. The book catalogues ten “offbeat” philosophers; it could have used more of them, but more than that, it could have given them each more space. They get about six pages each (including a list of questions-for-further-reflection), which leaves little room to explore the depth that makes a philosopher’s thought exciting.

Harvey doesn’t say a lot about what makes a philosopher “offbeat”, or his criteria for inclusion. He develops the musical metaphor: as in musical syncopation, where “the regular rhythmic flow is disrupted with accents and stresses occurring out of step with the expected norms”, so “the philosophers in this short anthology all play to what might be termed a different tune – one that serves to disrupt and unsettle the fixity of rhythmic thought.” (1) That’s a very imprecise way of putting things, the sort of imprecision that might drive an analytic philosopher crazy, but perhaps that’s just the point: in a philosophical world still ruled by the analytic tradition, to be “offbeat” may well mean to avoid putting precision first.

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Globalization was never inevitable

26 Sunday Jan 2025

Posted by in Economics, Politics

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Younger readers may not remember just what an aura of inevitability surrounded the idea of globalizing capitalism in the late 20th century. Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, in a 2002 award acceptance speech, proclaimed: “It has been said that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the law of gravity.” And he did not dispute this thing that “has been said”. Margaret Thatcher’s frequent slogan was “there is no alternative“. Tony Blair went so far as to say “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”

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Trump is a BJP-wala

19 Sunday Jan 2025

Posted by in Islam, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Protestantism, South Asia

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When Donald Trump first rose to rapid popularity in American politics, many people were shocked and had no explanation. I was not among those people, for a couple of reasons. Among them: one way to make a new phenomenon comprehensible is analogy. And having watched Indian politics for a couple decades, I found it easy to say: Trump is a BJP-wala.

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