Category Archives: Politics

The wisdom of serenity

27 Sunday Oct 2019

Posted by in Courage, Daoism, Metaphysics, Politics, Prayer, Protestantism, Serenity

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There are probably few people in the English-speaking world unfamiliar with the Serenity Prayer. In its best-known form this prayer asks: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” The prayer was created by Reinhold Niebuhr, a mid-20th-century American Christian theologian who was possibly the biggest influence on Martin Luther King. It has spread into widespread usage through its adoption by twelve-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous. Because of its ubiquity, I think, it is sometimes regarded as a sort of vacuous and vapid New Age pablum. I do not think that it should be. Continue reading →

Let non-white be non-white

13 Sunday Oct 2019

Posted by in Politics, Social Science

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The term people of colour has been around since at least the 1980s, but in those days it was typically treated as something of a joke, a silly prettified euphemism. In the 2010s, in the US at least, it has now become a widely used term to group together people who are not racially white. This may be in part for the valid reason that the old term “minorities” is no longer appropriate, given that in some places like California and Texas, white people are now themselves a minority. Nevertheless, I do not think that the adoption of “people of colour” is a good thing. Continue reading →

Is mindfulness meditation a problem for Christians?

29 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by in Christianity, Early Factions, Health, Meditation, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Physical Exercise, Politics, Psychology, Self

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As mindfulness meditation practices become ever more popular and widespread, their claim to be a “non-sectarian technique” takes on progressively greater importance, just as it does with yoga. By claiming their practices to be secular techniques, teachers not only can promote the practices to adherents of Abrahamic traditions; they can also aim to avoid the legal restrictions placed on “religion” –though they can then also be taxed, and even treated as a competitive sport.

But that’s not the only problem. Continue reading →

Kant’s quantitative individualism

23 Sunday Jun 2019

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Buddhism, Foundations of Ethics, Free Will, German Tradition, Politics, Self

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In response to my discussion a while ago of the problems between Buddhism and qualitative individualism, Patrick O’Donnell suggested that J. David Velleman’s Self to Self offered a possibility of bridging the gap between the two. My reaction was skeptical, since Velleman explicitly situates himself as a Kantian, and I have taken Kant as exactly the opposite kind of individualist, a quantitative individualist. I said as much in response, claiming that for Kant “ethically most significant about human beings are those characteristics we all share, not our differences – the right way for one person to act in a given context is broadly the right way for any other person to act in the same context.”

Patrick’s response was where the discussion got really interesting. For this is the first time I’ve seen someone question the very distinction between qualitative and quantitative individualism. Continue reading →

Podcast interview on qualitative individualism

06 Monday May 2019

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Economics, Foundations of Ethics, Health, Human Nature, Politics, Psychology, Self, Virtue, Work

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Stefani Ruper interviewed me for her video podcast a while ago, and the interview is now live. It focuses on the topic of qualitative individualism, elaborating on ideas from my earlier series of posts. It gets into some topics that are a bit more intense than I’ve covered on the blog in recent years, but I’m pleased with it. Thanks to Stefani for this opportunity.

I’ve embedded the video above, so you can watch it here, and I also highly recommend you check out Stefani’s excellent philosophy podcast in general:

iTunes: http://stefaniruper.com/listen

Spotify: http://stefaniruper.com/listenspotify

Youtube: http://stefaniruper.com/watch

Stream & other outlets: http://stefaniruper.com/podcast

 

 

The material conditions of qualitative individualism

27 Sunday Jan 2019

Posted by in Economics, Flourishing, Politics, Self, Work

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When I first started reading Charles Taylor on qualitative individualism in my 20s, my Marxist father complained that Taylor paid too little attention to material conditions. I didn’t really get the criticism at the time, but I do now, for reasons that go well beyond reading and writing.

Taylor’s discussion of qualitative individualism (or “expressivism” or the “ethics of authenticity”) takes place largely in the realm of ideas, as mine also has so far. I have tried to trace the history of the ideas of qualitative individualism. But such a history is incomplete. Continue reading →

The case for individual teleology

23 Sunday Dec 2018

Posted by in Biology, Flourishing, Metaphysics, Politics, Self, Sex, South Asia

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The big problem with the relative lack of philosophical attention given to qualitative individualism is that the ideal has had few relatively powerful defences. Its most explicit defenders have been existentialists like Sartre, but Sartre’s best-known defence, at least, seems to fall flat. Charles Taylor has done the most to articulate the idea and how and it makes internal sense, but for the most part he is very cautious about ever actually endorsing it. Sometimes his defence of it seems to be simply on historicist grounds, as I quoted him in my first post on the subject. That is: qualitative individualism happens to be what we believe in the educated 21st-century West, and it is just for that reason important to us. Western governments therefore need to respect it just as the governments of Turkey or Indonesia need to respect Islam. Beyond politics, it is among our assumed starting points for inquiry, such that philosophically it is important to think with it (even if in the end we come to find it untenable). This point does matter.

But the point also doesn’t go far enough. Continue reading →

The birth of qualitative individualism

11 Sunday Nov 2018

Posted by in Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Metaphysics, Politics, Self

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What is remarkable about the ideal of qualitative individualism is that it is so pervasive yet so rarely thought about in depth. To get a bit more of that depth, I would like to examine next the question of where it comes from.

The idea is modern, I think, though like so many modern ideas it has premodern antecedents. A while ago I breezed a little too easily over the differences between qualitative individualism and Aristotle. I said:

Aristotle – not exactly a great friend of modern liberal freedom – thinks of the best politics in terms of allowing each person to fulfill a highest end or telos, all being the best they can be. Some thinkers would consider this teleology a higher and truer kind of freedom than choice alone. But it seems to me that the freedom of choice is a vital part of the freedom to be what you are. Who would know what you’re meant to be better than you yourself?

I missed something there. If it’s so clear that you’re the person who knows best what you’re meant to be, then why would Aristotle have been “not exactly a great friend” of the political freedom of choice lionized by qualitative individualists today? Continue reading →

An invisible ideal that we cherish

14 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by in Foundations of Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Politics, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Self, Sex, South Asia, Western Thought

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When we study non-Western cultures it is difficult to separate out the study of “philosophy” from the study of “religion”. Those of us who study the brilliant arguments of élite men are often told we should pay more attention to the lived culture, to what people there actually say and do. There are advantages and disadvantages to studying other cultures this way. But one of the things we often don’t do is turn that same gaze on our own.

What if, as philosophers in the West, we paid more attention to the ideas that actually underlie our everyday lives and cultures and arguments rather than to prestigious theories? As “religious studies” scholars do, in ways that do not and should not depend on the concept of “religion”? I think that if we approached contemporary Western philosophical culture in this way, we would discover how much of our ethical life is animated by an important ethical ideal that has not had a defender as philosophically rigorous and articulate as a Kant or a Rawls. Continue reading →

The psychological case for disengaged Buddhism

05 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by in Anger, Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Fear, Happiness, Health, Mahāyāna, Politics, Psychology

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My project on disengaged Buddhism has now been submitted to a journal. It’s undergone several revisions by this point. One of the most important such revisions was suggested unanimously by BU’s magnificent CURA seminar. In an earlier draft I had attempted to emphasize the contemporary constructive significance of disengaged Buddhism by noting how its ideas were corroborated by some contemporary psychological research. The seminar participants thought that discussion of psychology did not strengthen the paper because I didn’t have the space to defend them fully; the paper would stand best discussing disengaged Buddhists’ claims in their historical context and letting those claims stand on their own.

I think they were right, and I removed the psychology discussion from the paper – a little sadly, as I thought the psychological case for disengaged Buddhism was worth making. Fortunately, I have another place to make it: here. Continue reading →