Author Archives: Amod Lele

Technological wisdom of the elders

31 Sunday Jan 2010

Posted by in Gratitude, Happiness, Work

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This semester, in addition to my teaching, I’m helping out at Stonehill with instructional technology, helping other profs learn the new learning management system (the software that runs things like gradebooks and online discussion forums, similar to Blackboard). It’s great work, helping people out with something they really appreciate.

In the process I’ve noticed something. It’s a cliché that people my age and younger – Gen Y and late Gen X – are more comfortable with computer technology than people of older generations, the boomers and early Xers, since we grew up with it and they didn’t. That’s been my experience on the job so far; I’ve been effective at this work because I pick up tech skills more quickly than the other professors, most of whom are older than me.

But I also notice they have something I don’t. When I show them the system’s capabilities, they’re impressed and delighted. They really appreciate how this software can make their teaching careers easier. But me, when I first started learning the software, I first noticed its gaps, the things it can’t do but should. (“You’re kidding! This piece of crap doesn’t have any way to separate out two sections of the same course?”) I’m finding myself a little envious of their gratitude, their ability to appreciate technology. I worry that I’m on a technological hedonic treadmill: I’m surrounded by so much technology that my expectations are higher, and it doesn’t make me any happier to have it.

Ah, the jaded cynicism of youth, and the wide-eyed wonder of the years. David Wedaman, an instructional technology specialist at Brandeis, said a little while ago on Twitter: “Augmented reality is about as amazing as anything I can think of. I think I’m getting old.” If he is, I think he’s lucky.

Why worry about contradictions?

27 Wednesday Jan 2010

Posted by in Buddhism, Christianity, Epistemology, Greek and Roman Tradition, Honesty, Logic, Metaphilosophy, Monasticism, Philosophy of Science, Social Science, South Asia

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Stanley Fish, self-proclaimed “contemporary sophist,” recently weighed in on the “religion and science” question in the New York Times. For him, the chief problem we have in this area is that we’re too bothered by contradictions: “The potential for logical conflict, however, exists only under the assumption that all our beliefs should hang together, an assumption forced upon us not by the world, but by the polemical context of the culture wars.”

As a historical claim, the latter part of the sentence is laughable and merits no consideration: it takes very little research indeed to find that the drive for logical consistency far predates any modern culture wars. It can be found not only in Plato, its most famous advocate, but also in Augustine, in Aquinas, in Śaṅkara and Kumārila. One might be tempted to find an exception in Nāgārjuna and his Madhyamaka school, which try to avoid having any position whatsoever; but even Nāgārjuna relies in his arguments on the assumption that our positions should not contradict each other – should make logical sense. Fish is smart enough to know this point; the claim that the drive for consistency is a product of the contemporary culture wars can only be understood as a deliberate falsehood, a lie.

More interesting is the normative claim, the view that we shouldn’t be bothered by contradictions. After all, if that’s true, Fish may be entirely justified in lying. Continue reading →

“On the grounds of religion or belief”

20 Wednesday Jan 2010

Posted by in Morality, Politics

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Found an interesting news article from last fall in the Manchester Guardian: British employers, a judge has ruled, are forbidden from discriminating against employees because of their environmental convictions. The case in brief: employers at London’s Grainger real-estate company mocked one employee’s devotion to remedying climate change, even taking steps to provoke him – in one case ordering him to fly to Ireland just to deliver a BlackBerry his boss had left behind. Eventually, he was fired – and a judge says he has a case. The relevant 2003 British labour law, indeed, is worded to prohibit discrimination and harassment on the grounds of “religion or belief.”

Generally, such a law strikes me as overdue. I’ve long been uncomfortable with the idea of giving legal protection only to “religious” convictions, for the idea of “religion” so often tends to obscure more than it clarifies. Aside from the obvious difficulties in classification (does the term “religion” apply to yoga exercises? To meditation? To brushing our teeth?), the term leads us to ask the less important questions, about differences between traditions rather than within them. For these intellectual reasons I suspect it’s a category we’d be better off without, if we could be.

But here the problems with “religion” are more than intellectual. On what reasonable grounds can we proclaim that this man’s refusal to fly on frivolous grounds is less serious, less important, less well considered than, say, a Jew’s refusal to eat pork? I disagree with politically activist views that see commitment to environmental or social causes as our fundamental moral duty; but then I disagree with much of the Qur’an’s moral teaching as well. Anti-discrimination laws are specifically designed to protect those with whom we disagree. Either the law should protect all deeply and sincerely held beliefs, irrespective of their “religious” status, or it should protect no such beliefs at all.

(No post this Sunday, as I’ll be out of town, as well as starting a new semester.)

On Body Ritual among the Nacirema

17 Sunday Jan 2010

Posted by in Health, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Rites, Social Science

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[UPDATE: This has become my most frequently read blog post of all. I’m guessing that’s because a large number of undergraduate students come here wondering what Body Ritual among the Nacirema means. If that’s you, welcome! I would just ask two things of you: first, please do read Body Ritual and try to figure it out for yourself first before reading this post, and second, once you have read the post below, don’t spoil it for everyone else.]

One of the most important anthropological studies to be conducted in the past century is Horace Miner’s (very short) 1956 classic Body Ritual among the Nacirema. If you haven’t read it, you owe it to yourself to follow the link now and examine Miner’s penetrating insights into one of the most unusual cultural groups yet to be studied by ethnographers. Please do read the essay before you read the rest of this blog post, as the post won’t be very helpful without it. Continue reading →

Cross-cultural anorexia

13 Wednesday Jan 2010

Posted by in African Thought, French Tradition, Health, Patient Endurance, Psychology, Rites, Social Science, Therapy

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Great article by Ethan Watters in the New York Times last Friday, called The Americanization of Mental Illness, which deals with questions at the heart of cross-cultural philosophy. (Watters also has a book on the subject coming out, and a blog.) The article notes how “mental illness” remains a category far more culture-bound than psychological studies are typically willing to admit. The DSM, American psychologists’ scripture, has a seven-page appendix (pp. 897-903 in the DSM-IV-TR edition) for “culture-bound disorders,” such as amok (a condition in Malaysia where men get violently aggressive and then have amnesia) or pibloktoq (an Inuit condition involving a short burst of extreme excitement followed by seizures and coma). It’s telling that few of the disorders in this section are culture-bound to the United States; and those which are, are quite telling: “ghost sickness” is “frequently observed among members of many American Indian tribes”; locura, nervios and susto are found among Latinos; sangue dormido is found among Cape Verde Islanders and their immigrants to the US; “rootwork” and “spell” are “seen among African Americans and European Americans from the southern United States.” That is, the only “culture-bound disorders” to be found among white Americans are found among those weird Southern hillbillies who live beside black people. Normal white Americans, the kind who live in Cambridge, MA or in Manhattan, don’t get “culture-bound disorders.” Their disorders are just part of the universal human condition.
Continue reading →

Without rebirth, suicide?

10 Sunday Jan 2010

Posted by in Buddhism, Death, Flourishing, Greek and Roman Tradition, Hope, Karma, Serenity, South Asia, Supernatural

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I’ve often heard it said, rightly I think, that Buddhism cannot do without a concept of karma; it is too central to Buddhist thought. I don’t see this as a big problem in itself, even for those (like myself) who would wish to do without the supernatural elements in Buddhism. For karma, as Dale Wright has proposed, can be naturalized on Aristotelian grounds: virtue makes our lives better, because it makes us happier on the inside. In that sense, our good and bad actions come back to us as good and bad results, without any supernatural causation being involved. Buddhism may require karma, but we can have karma without rebirth.

The question troubling me now is: can we have Buddhism without rebirth? There’s a basic problem posed here by the First Noble Truth, the classic Buddhist idea that all is dukkha: all is suffering, painful, unsatisfactory, sorrowful, bad. If this is so, why not commit suicide? For a classical Buddhist, rebirth is the answer to this question, and the obvious answer. Suicide makes your dukkha even worse; as a bad, un-dharmic activity, it will trap you in a far worse rebirth, leave you far more sorrowful and suffering than you are.

But if there is no rebirth? Then death starts to look disturbingly like nirvana. Continue reading →

Brit Hume on Buddhism

06 Wednesday Jan 2010

Posted by in Anger, Buddhism, Christianity, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Patient Endurance

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Brit Hume of Fox News has been lighting up the Buddhist blogosphere lately, with this criticism of adulterous golfer Tiger Woods:

“The extent to which he can recover, seems to me, depends on his faith. He’s said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So, my message to Tiger would be, ‘Tiger, turn your faith, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.”

Shortly afterwards, in an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor, Hume attempted to defend his comments with the claim that his point was about Christianity rather than about Buddhism: Continue reading →

Freud the chastened intellectualist

03 Sunday Jan 2010

Posted by in Christianity, Confucianism, Flourishing, German Tradition, Human Nature, Psychology, Therapy, Unconscious Mind

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A little while ago I blogged about Aaron Stalnaker’s concept of chastened intellectualism. Chastened intellectualism, for Stalnaker, is a central feature of the thought of Augustine and Xunzi, across their very different cultural contexts. Their ideas are “intellectual” in that one needs to learn (directly or indirectly) from texts and reflect intellectually on them in order to live a good human life; but “chastened” in that our own reflection is insufficient to allow us to reach this good life. We unconsciously sabotage our efforts to reach the good; we need help from others to get there, likely involving some sort of practice that will transform us.

Such practice seems at first to involve the kind of thing we might normally count as “religion”: meditation, prayer, ritual. But it seems to me that there’s another thinker, not religious except in the broadest stretching of the word, whose worldview also counts as chastened intellectualism: namely, Sigmund Freud. Freud’s message, it seems to me, is very similar to Augustine’s and Xunzi’s: the ego is not the master of its own house. To be saved from oneself, one needs some understanding of the textual learning that Freud saw himself as beginning; but simply reading Freud isn’t going to be enough to understand yourself. Our repression, our defences, are too strong. You need to engage in the practice of therapy (or analysis) at someone else’s guidance.

I tend to suspect that a chastened intellectualist view of humans is correct. I rather wish it weren’t, because its conclusions never seem pleasant. Augustine slams the very idea of human flourishing – because we are weak we cannot live a good life in this world, only in the next. Freud says a very similar thing – but denies that there is a better world to come. All we can do is be slightly less neurotic. Of the three, it’s Xunzi who seems to allow that a life in this world could be good – but only if restrained by the kind of hierarchies that would now seem tyrannical to us.

Living through the ’00s

30 Wednesday Dec 2009

Posted by in Anger, Buddhism, External Goods, Gratitude, Happiness, Hope, Karmic Redirection, Meditation, Patient Endurance, Politics, Serenity

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My philosophical awakening occurred in Thailand in 1997; but it has been over the past decade, “the ohs,” that I’ve really had the chance to develop my thoughts. As that decade closes, I would like to note how my thoughts were shaped by their time.

I spent almost the entire decade living in the United States, except for two three-month stints in Toronto in 2001 and India in 2005. It was not the ideal decade in which to do this, for the US of this decade was the US of George W. Bush: a man who opposed almost everything I had ever stood for, whether substantively (torture, wars of choice, gutting environmental regulations), procedurally (incompetent patronage appointments for natural disasters, governing unilaterally without respect for other branches of government) or symbolically (insisting on suits and ties in the White House). I had grown up despising Ronald Reagan, but Reagan now looked like a saint compared to W – Reagan at least was competent. And in the face of all this, Americans returned him to office in 2004.

For my many American friends – the vast majority of them left-wingers like me – this decade was a time of powerlessness and rage. But they at least could vote, could contribute to political campaigns, could do something about it. Continue reading →

Could we please stop talking about the “problem of evil”?

27 Sunday Dec 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Christianity, Deity, Free Will

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When you teach at a small Catholic school, theodicy is a question it’s relatively easy to get students excited about: how can God permit the world to be so full of suffering? The problem is finding a good reading to engage students’ interest, one that isn’t full of formal logic’s technical jargon. (We’re talking first-year non-majors taking a required class.) So far, alas, when I’ve found such jargon-free readings, they tend to be exclusively about the “problem of evil.” Which makes them useless.

Evil, per se, is something of a red herring when it comes to theodicy. Evil is what we think of first, after the human-inflicted horrors of the twentieth century. And yet evil is the easy part. Why is there evil? Because human beings have free will, of course, and it’s good for them to have free will. Now, there are some problems with the free-will defence, questions that Augustine grapples with in On Free Choice of the Will – why is it good for humans to have free will, if it leads to all these evil acts? But the answers to those problems are pretty well thought out – determinate good is just not as good as freely chosen good.

The tougher part of the problem is those sufferings for which free will is no defence. I think people understood this part better before the twentieth century, when human-caused suffering was lesser than the suffering of natural disasters – when, as Susan Neiman notes, the one-word reply to claims of God’s goodness was not Auschwitz but Lisbon. Young children, too young to have committed any serious wrong, die in earthquakes, in hurricanes and tsunamis, from tuberculosis. Old people get afflicted by ALS, a cruel degenerative disease that makes people prisoners in their own bodies. This is “evil” only in the old sense, where “evil” just meant “bad” – this isn’t something that we did, a bad action, it’s just a bad thing that happens. Some theologians have tried to come up with justifications for this as well; but it’s much harder to justify these natural sufferings. Can we really say that the torturous drowning of innocent children is justified as part of a larger plan?

People smarter than I am have answered yes. Maybe we can still legitimately believe in God in the face of natural suffering. But let’s not distract ourselves from the real issue by calling it the “problem of evil,” and allowing believers to get out of it with the far-too-easy answer of free will. Call it the problem of pain, as C.S. Lewis did; or call it the problem of suffering, a more common answer. But don’t weasel out of the problem by claiming it’s all about evil. There’s no point in explaining how God could permit Auschwitz if you can’t also explain how he could permit – or cause – Lisbon.