Category Archives: Politics

Marx and Mill: similar makers of the modern left

16 Sunday Aug 2026

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Economics, Flourishing, German Tradition, Place, Politics

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill have both done a great deal to shape modern political philosophy. Their differences stand out fairly easily: Mill the analytical English-language utilitarian enthusiast of capitalist progress, Marx the “continental” dialectical advocate of communist revolution. Yet what stands out to me is what they have in common.

Maybe their commonalities stand out to me because they’re the first two philosophers I ever seriously engaged with myself, back in high school. As I sought a deeper justification for my own activist political views, Mill’s Utilitarianism was the first primary philosophical text I ever read. And my father’s Marxism spurred me to do a paper on Marxism in a high-school economics class, for a teacher who was somewhat bewildered by it. Possibly as a result, both thinkers have shaped my own political philosophy considerably – though I have my disagreements with both. But in both my agreements and disagreements, I find their similarities more important than their differences.

Continue reading →

The Radical Buddhism Project

06 Thursday Aug 2026

Posted by in Modernized Buddhism, Politics

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, ,

My friend and colleague James Shields has just started a new site called the Radical Buddhism Project, “an independent digital humanities archive and research portal dedicated to recovering, preserving, and contextualizing the historical intersections of Buddhist doctrine with radical left-wing socio-political thought.” It collects information on Buddhist radicals in countries across Asia.

I’ve often been at pains to point out that classical Buddhism often opposed political engagement. (Others like Brian Victoria and Michael Jerryson have called attention to something that should have been obvious, that Buddhism has frequently been deployed in a right-wing direction as well.) That said, traditions flourish by being reinvented and extended in new ways, from Chinese Tiantai to medical mindfulness. I think the radical Buddhists on the site are creating an interesting form of modernized Buddhism that’s worth knowing about, and I’m excited that James has put the site together.

The gap is not glorious

26 Sunday Jul 2026

Posted by in Daoism, Death, Deity, Early and Theravāda, Economics, Flourishing, Metaphysics, Mindfulness, Politics

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

The Buddha’s encounter with unwelcome facts of life. Picture from Wat Preah Prom Rath, Siem Reap, Cambodia: Adobe Stock image copyright by Godong Photo.

The great Buddhist poet Aśvaghoṣa famously tells the story of the Buddha’s father, the king, who tried to keep his son as an heir rather than a monk by isolating him from all the bad things in the world. Of course the king’s plan doesn’t work: the Buddha-to-be sneaks out and sees an old man, a sick man and a dead man, reminding him that these fates will come to a king as surely as anyone else, and so he renounces the world and becomes a monk. The story shows us that there always remains a gap between what is and what should be: we will always face sad facts like illness and death. That gap is bad, it is always with us, and that is unfortunate; it is just the way things are, whether we like it or not. It provides a need and an impetus for us to improve our minds, to escape the suffering that comes from craving in the face of those sad facts.

A very different take on that gap comes from Jacobin senior editor Alex Caring-Lobel in the Springer Handbook of Mindfulness, which collects over thirty essays objecting to the modern mindfulness movemennt. These essays take particular objection to David Gelles’s claim that “stress emanates from a mismatch between our expectation of how things should be and the way things are”. (p85) Caring-Lobel, in particular, objects to Gelles’s view because it

dismisses that glorious gap between “how things should be and the way there [sic] are” as a kind of impediment to flourishing. This is, after all, the space of the social imagination. It is also the space in which democracy operates. (Caring-Lobel p209)

Continue reading →

On being from Canada (and not India)

12 Sunday Jul 2026

Posted by in Indigenous American Thought, Modern Hinduism, Place, Politics

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Stan Rogers. Picture taken originally from Toronto.com, used under fair use.

The great Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers – taken from us far too soon at a mere 33 – has inspired me in many ways. I first encountered him through his modern (and very Canadian) sea chantey “Barrett’s Privateers“, a staple of folk singers at pub nights for drunken Canadian undergraduates like myself (and which has more American admirers than you’d think). The joy of singing along to that song was part of what led me to join McGill’s Folk Music Society club, and eventually become its president for a year. It wasn’t long after that that I had my life-changing Buddhist epiphany in Thailand – yet even there, Rogers’s “Mary Ellen Carter” played a major role. His “The Idiot” was a great comfort at the times I expected a tenure-track job would leave me in a long-distance relationship from the woman I loved on the East Coast. When I married her, “Forty-Five Years” was the last dance at our wedding.

Lately, though, there’s a much lesser known song of his that has been going through my mind repeatedly. It is the closing song of From Fresh Water, his posthumous 1984 album about Ontario – where, despite his well known ties to the Maritime provinces, Rogers (like me) was born and raised. This song is called “The House of Orange”.

Continue reading →

Against nostalgic ecology

28 Sunday Jun 2026

Posted by in Biology, Politics, Serenity

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

When we think about the natural environment and how to treat it, we often assume by default that what we’re trying to do is return the nonhuman world to where it was before we started seriously messing with it. That impulse is very understandable. The world’s ecosystems functioned better, in the way that they had evolved to do and a way that was helpful to us, before we started clear-cut logging and making vast pits full of plastic waste and so on. It would be great if we could get the natural world back to where it was in 1800.

The problem is we can’t do that. Extinction is forever, as they say – with a very significant exception that I’ll get to. The garbage dumps are there; we have no way of turning all the plastic in them into something not-plastic. As Alan Weisman vividly reminds us in The World Without Us, if humans were to disappear entirely from the planet tomorrow, our products – from ceramics to radioactive waste – would remain for millions of years. We can certainly take steps to diminish the impact of our future actions, but the effects of our past actions are going to remain with us. The natural world, now and in the future, is the natural world impacted by our actions.

Continue reading →

The Gnostic aesthetics of leg waxing

31 Sunday May 2026

Posted by in Aesthetics, Biology, Daoism, Deity, Human Nature, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Politics

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,

A couple weeks ago I had my annual leg wax. I only get my legs waxed once a year – in the spring, when baring one’s legs becomes newly possible – because the process is expensive and painful. After that I just shave them, which doesn’t leave them as smooth for as long. (I’m bemused by the association of women with weakness when beauty treatments are so metal: you rip out your hair with hot wax, or even literally get shot with lasers.)

I’ve noted before how feminine beauty is deserving of attention in philosophical aesthetics. So we might well pause on how remarkable it is that so many of us do pay money to have our leg hairs ripped out with hot wax.

Continue reading →

Being marginalized doesn’t make you smarter

26 Sunday Apr 2026

Posted by in Dialectic, Economics, Epistemology, German Tradition, Politics, Social Science

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Standpoint theory begins from a genuinely important insight: people’s knowledge comes above all from their life experience, and so different people will have different insights and recognize different things. Our life experience does shape what we see and don’t see, and can blind us to things that others see in their position. This difference can in turn become a problem in the context of power relations, when only the experience of the powerful is represented, and other perspectives are ignored and therefore become missing. Standpoint theory’s best moment was probably Patricia Hill Collins’s 1986 sociology article “Learning from the outsider within“, which pointed out that sociological generalizations at that time were generally made by white men, and thus missed things that were clearer to black women:

Continue reading →

“The future will belong to the mestiza”

19 Sunday Apr 2026

Posted by in Politics

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

Gloria Anzaldúa. Photo by K. Kendall, CC-BY 2.0.

Unlike “progressive” Americans who embrace race, the caste reformer B.R. Ambedkar envisioned a world where race/caste distinctions were annihilated – and specifically by mixing, by intermarriage. The view of racial purity shared by the mainstream American left and right – where Barack Obama’s white ancestry counts for nothing – makes that annihilation more difficult. But not everyone in the Americas – or even in the United States – shares that view.

Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is an eccentric book now often considered a classic of Chicana (Mexican-American) literature. It mixes essays and poetry, English and Spanish – perhaps appropriate for someone whose ethnic identity is itself mixed, the mestiza of the subtitle, as indeed are most Mexicans. In striking contrast to the life story Ibram X. Kendi tells, which struck me as generally comfortable and middle-class, Anzaldúa lived in a more clearly oppressed world, of the migrant workers of South Texas; the poetry paints a poverty-stricken picture of rapes, of lice, of cleaning shit from toilets, in the face of a racist Border Patrol. So she does often speak of her people in contrast to “the whites”, falling sometimes into the oppressed/oppressor binaries of standpoint theory on which she was an influence. Yet she also acknowledges and praises mixing in a serious way that moves beyond the binaries.

Continue reading →

Hiding your ideas in plain sight

12 Sunday Apr 2026

Posted by in East Asia, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Hermeneutics, Honesty, Metaphilosophy, Politics

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

I recently read Shadi Bartsch‘s Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism. The book’s topic is fascinating to me: the ways that modern Chinese intellectuals have taken up classical Greek philosophy. In some ways it made me feel oddly hopeful – that even under the totalitarian régime that has run China since 1989, it turns out that classical learning, even foreign classical learning, gets more respect than it does in the anti-intellectual United States. Unfortunately the book itself takes a highly unhelpful method of dealing with the topic: Bartsch spends a great deal of time telling you what’s wrong with the views of Chinese pro-government intellectuals. A Western audience really doesn’t need that: we’re already predisposed to be suspicious of that way of thinking. I wanted to learn about how the Chinese intellectuals themselves think – something I can’t get for myself, since my Chinese isn’t nearly good enough – and the book gives them very little time to speak in their own worlds.

But there was one thing the book sparked in me, which I don’t think was the author’s intent: an appreciation for the work of Leo Strauss.

Continue reading →

Don’t be an Ugly Canadian

05 Sunday Apr 2026

Posted by in Anger, Place, Politics

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

The No Kings protest on Boston Common on March 28 was the first time in a long time that I’ve been to a protest march. I was moved by the joyful spirit of defiance there, and I thought especially of the Canadian anti-American anger that I wrote about a couple weeks before. I was moved to make a short video – amateurish by TikToker standards, no doubt, but sincere – aimed at Canadians, reminding them that we left-leaning Americans are as alarmed by Trump as they are. I shared it on Substack Notes as well as on Instagram, which posted it to Facebook in a way open to the public. The video went modestly viral (as in 600+ views on Facebook)… and of course, it drew many comments.

Meme created by author on imgflip, recreating an older meme I couldn’t find.

I am aware of the perils of open social-media comments sections, and as I read I was reminded of the attached meme. There were several heartwarming messages of support from both sides of the border, and at least as many juvenile trollish comments from Trump supporters – including many Canadian Trump supporters (a point that will be quite relevant to what follows). But I knew the Trump supporters were out there. The commenters who saddened me this time were other Canadians.

Continue reading →