“In praise of negativity”: Now

22 Sunday Feb 2026

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Flourishing, Gratitude, Happiness, Health, Hope, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism, Pleasure, Politics, Psychology, Work

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I appreciate looking back on my 19-year-old self’s piece in praise of negativity because it highlights most the ways my views have changed since then. It’s not that I assess that specific situation differently: the Vector Marketing (Cutco) approach of getting desperate youth to sell knives to their families is an exploitative business model; working that job was bad and I don’t miss it one bit. But what’s in question is the lessons we draw from that situation.

Yes, we should be clear-eyed enough about the badness of our situations that we have an eye to changing them where possible. But what I didn’t realize then is the lesson of the Serenity Prayer: we also have to accept, and even be positive about, the bad things we cannot change. If we don’t do that – if we decide to see every 50% cup as half-empty – then we are undercutting our own goals.

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In praise of negativity: Then

15 Sunday Feb 2026

Posted by in Economics, External Goods, Happiness, Politics, Work

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This post and the next one will form a “then and now” comparison series. I wrote this present post in the summer of 1995, at age nineteen, in the hope of publishing it on the Facts & Arguments op-ed page of the Globe & Mail. The Globe did not decide to publish the piece, but I remained fond of it for a long time. I still think it is a good piece, but I no longer stand by its claims – and I publish it here now, over thirty years later, for exactly that reason. The question it addresses, of positive and negative attitude, may well be the one on which my views have changed the most in the second half of my life to date – starting when I found Buddhism a few short years after this piece was written. Next time I will publish my current views on the same subject, with what I might hope is the wisdom of the years.

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The paradox of free speech

08 Sunday Feb 2026

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Politics, Truth

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Freedom of speech and expression is essential to a good society, to protect both the search for truth and self-expression. The problem is that protecting freedom of expression is harder than it looks – because some speech interferes with other speech.

John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill get this point clearly enough that they are worth quoting in full:

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Freedom of speech was never just about government

01 Sunday Feb 2026

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Work

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We need free speech both to search for truth, and to express ourselves. When free speech is silenced, it interferes with both of those core human goals.

And it therefore needs to be said loud and clear: silencing speech is a problem no matter who is doing the silencing.

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Why freedom of speech matters

25 Sunday Jan 2026

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Certainty and Doubt, Economics, Flourishing, Humility, Politics, Truth

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Freedom of thought, belief, speech, and expression is a principle long cherished in the West. In recent years it has come under the most sustained attack I have seen in my lifetime, from multiple quarters. I believe it is worth defending, and it’s time to say more about why.

On Liberty, generally attributed to the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, is the most famous and widely cited defence of this principle, and for good reason. I had a low opinion of Mill for a while, as his Utilitarianism did a bad job, overall, of defending the utilitarianism I broke from – and that was one of the key reasons I broke from it. But On Liberty is an entirely different story. It provides a powerful and, I think, largely correct defence of free thought and speech on two grounds – neither of which is particularly utilitarian!

Portrait of Harriet Taylor Mill by unknown artist, in the London National Portrait Gallery.

Perhaps the difference is because it now seems likely the book was co-written with Harriet Taylor Mill, John Stuart’s wife – probably published without the woman’s name on it to make a Victorian audience to take it more seriously. (For that reason I’ll refer to On Liberty as written by “the Mills”.) It might be that Harriet was less of a utilitarian than John. But the point here is the two big grounds that the Mills provide for why freedom of speech is important.

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Legalize Plato

18 Sunday Jan 2026

Posted by in Greek and Roman Tradition, Hermeneutics, Politics, Reading and Recitation, Sex

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The Social Justice movement has been notorious for its intolerance to dissenting opinions, and has often reached high levels in university administrations. And of course such left-wing movements on race and gender have a long history of attacking “dead white males” – in contrast to those contemporary right-wingers who seek to “RETVRN” to a premodern West, stylizing it with a V to indicate their classical sympathies. So when a university orders a professor to remove Plato from his philosophy syllabus, surely that must be a woke thing. Right?

Nope!

Texas A&M University ordered the removal of Plato because he was too woke.

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The world of the women’s room

11 Sunday Jan 2026

Posted by in Epistemology, Food, Place, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Reading and Recitation, Social Science

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When I first attended an academic conference en femme, it turned out to be relevant to the conference’s discussion of gender ethics. It also taught me something else – by accident.

When a break between panels began, a female colleague and I were having an enthusiastic discussion of topics coming out of the previous panel. We both needed to go to the washroom1, so we carried on our discussion on the way to the women’s room. Then we entered neighbouring toilet stalls and sat down to do our business – and continued our Buddhist-ethics conversation across the barrier between the stalls, while sitting down in them.

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Do you need anger for respect and accountability?

04 Sunday Jan 2026

Posted by in Action, Analytic Tradition, Anger, Free Will, Mahāyāna, Morality, Psychology

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I am delighted to announce the publication of my first book, this coming fall, with Shambhala Publications. It is a book project I have been working on for many years, and the topic has veered considerably from the version I discussed five years ago, becoming much more specific than the ambitious project I had imagined then. The title will be After Anger: What Buddhism Can Teach Us about Our Culture of Rage. As the title suggests, it will constructively address the Buddhist critique of anger – and then, afterwards, will turn to the deeper mental roots of our anger in craving and resistance. I’ll be saying more about the book in this space as we get closer to publication time.

In the meantime, I have a number of thoughts that had to be left out of the final version of the book, but that I think are nevertheless worthy of publication on this blog. As you can imagine, anger has many defenders, who have a variety of different reasons. I tried to deal with most of those sorts of reasons in the book, but there are a couple that didn’t quite make it in.

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In praise of alcohol

28 Sunday Dec 2025

Posted by in Aesthetics, Early and Theravāda, Food, Friends, Health, Judaism, Place, Pleasure, Rites, Zest

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Alcohol is further out of fashion these days than at any time in living memory. Even American Prohibition just made people try harder to get alcohol. Today, though, alcohol drinking in the US has fallen to record lows, with only 54% of Gallup survey respondents saying they consume it. Nearly every cocktail-serving restaurant or even bar I visit these days has non-alcoholic mocktail options, often with sophisticated bartending flair – something barely imaginable twenty years ago.

The reasons for this are not too hard to imagine. On the one hand, the medical studies about alcohol’s harms keep piling up, often indicating that even moderate drinking – the kind touted as beneficial to health a couple decades ago – may now have many negative health consequences. On the other, alternative mind-altering substances are now easily available – most obviously cannabis, legal in many American jurisdictions and across Canada, which is a clearly healthier alternative. All in all, all things considered, the downward trend in drinking is probably not a bad thing. And there’s plenty of traditional precedent for being suspicious of alcohol: the fifth of the Five Precepts, guiding lay people, enjoins refraining from alcohol on the grounds that it causes heedlessness.

That said, there are reasons why alcohol has remained so enduringly popular in human history. And we do ourselves a disservice by disregarding them. Alcohol is not for everybody – many people find it takes control of their lives in a harmful way. But even for those people, there’s usually a reason it got so powerfully appealing in the first place. In many human lives, ones where one can control its consumption well, alcohol plays a very positive and valuable role. And as we approach the one festival in the North American ritual calendar where the drinking of alcohol typically plays the largest role, it’s worth thinking a bit about alcohol’s positives.

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Who were the Magi?

21 Sunday Dec 2025

Posted by in Christianity, Greek and Roman Tradition, Judaism, Place, Supernatural

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Depiction of Jesus with his visitors, from St. Michael’s Cathedral in Toronto. Wikimedia Commons photo by Wojciech Dittwald, CC-BY-SA licence.

One of the most familiar and celebrated parts of the traditional Christmas story is the tale of the visitors who brought gifts to the baby Jesus at his birth. If you were raised anywhere in North America or Europe you surely at least know of this tale, even if you have no Christian background. More than any other part of the Christmas story, this tale may have served to create Christmas as we know it today – since few things are more central to modern Christmas than the giving of gifts, and that giving is usually held to commemorate the story of these visitors. The famous Christmas carol “We Three Kings” is entirely about them, and several other beloved carols refer to their story (“The First Noël”, “What Child Is This?”)

Yet there is something enigmatic about these visitors. Biblical scholar Eric Vanden Eykel wrote an interesting book on them (which also serves as an engaging introduction to the methods of biblical scholarship). Vanden Eykel doesn’t even try to ask the question of whether they historically existed, because we have so little evidence on which to base an answer. Within the Bible, they are not mentioned outside of one short passage in chapter 2 of the Gospel of Matthew, and there are no other texts from a similar time period that mention them either. There are apocryphal Christian texts – texts outside the Bible – that mention them, and I was hoping these might tell an alternate story, but Vanden Eykel points out that that these are significantly later and draw on the Matthew story themselves; they are not independent witnesses. That means that if they ever existed historically – Vanden Eykel never asks that question, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was because he believes they didn’t – Matthew is by far the closest thing to a witness that we have.

So let’s take a look at what Matthew says about Jesus’s visitors. I’m taking this translation from the New Revised Standard Version, which I understand to be the most historically accurate – though leaving a couple words in the original Greek because we’ll talk about them later. I’m leaving out the part in the middle about their encounter with King Herod for space, but providing everything it says about them and their encounter with Jesus:

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