Category Archives: Politics

Caution towards innovation

21 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by in Aesthetics, French Tradition, German Tradition, Modernized Buddhism, Place, Politics, Psychology

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Sunday’s post, on modernism and the change in values from “old-fashioned” to “old-school,” might help explain a question that I and others have pondered here: why do human beings so often prefer what is old? Stephen Walker noted the point in his comment on Yavanayāna Buddhism: people often seem unwilling to credit themselves with innovations, to accept that their ideas are new. Rather they present themselves as defending old ideas when they come up with new ones. (In his The Sociology of Philosophies, Randall Collins suggests that this is a typical pattern in human thought (especially in Japan, but elsewhere as well): “innovation through conservatism.” A while back I asked a similar question about authenticity: why do we privilege authenticity so much, when its distinguishing feature would seem to be the absence of choice?

Maybe we can start to see an answer now that we’ve had a chance to look back on the alternative. The twentieth century, in many ways, was the century of modernism – the rejection of the past as a guide to living. As I noted last time, modernism brought us Pruitt-Igoe, the grand and innovative housing project that was dynamited as unlivable. But more than that, I think, it brought us Communism, the form of government practised in the Soviet Union, China and their allies in the mid-twentieth century. Continue reading →

“Old-fashioned” and “old-school”

18 Sunday Oct 2009

Posted by in Aesthetics, French Tradition, Islam, Place, Politics, Social Science

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Texaco buildingAmong my peers in their twenties and thirties, the word “old-fashioned” seems, well, old-fashioned (unless, tellingly, it’s referring to the cocktail). I rarely hear it anymore. More commonly, to describe something that seems to belong to an earlier time – a rotary-dial telephone, a tabletop Ms. Pac-Man game, a handlebar moustache – the word of choice is “old-school.” As far as I know, this term has its current provenance from hip-hop music, referring to older works from the 1980s, before the genre became completely mainstream. Urban Dictionary, the anarchic oracle of contemporary slang, identifies “old school” as “Anything that is from an earlier era and looked upon with high regard or respect…. Typically, they are highly regarded and sometimes the very thing that started it all.” Compare a definition of “old-fashioned” from Apple’s dictionary widget: “(of a person or their views) favoring traditional and usually restrictive styles, ideas or customs: she’s stuffy and old-fashioned.”

This change in usage can’t be a coincidence. I think of a twentysomething friend of mine whose father is a modernist architect, a devotee of the International Style. He builds the kind of buildings that only architects can love, eminently functional buildings that appear to most people (including his daughter) as merely ugly: what Jane Jacobs famously called a Great Blight of Dullness. When I visit their house, I see at a picture of him on the wall from the 1970s: a dashing, handsome young man, decked out resplendently in the fashions of the age. Once upon a time, it was the trend to be modern. Continue reading →

The singular achievement of the 20th century

11 Sunday Oct 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Family, Islam, Politics, Roman Catholicism

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Pope John Paul II once declared the 20th century to be the most evil of all centuries, and it’s not hard to come up with evidence for such a claim even if one doesn’t share his presuppositions. The Holocaust, other genocides from Armenia to Rwanda, Stalinism, Pol Pot, the threat of humankind’s voluntary self-extinction by nuclear annihilation and then of involuntary self-extinction by environmental catastrophe – the human beings of the 20th century have a lot to answer for.

I sometimes imagine the centuries lined up on some chronological Judgement Day, and the 20th century being shown its great catalogue of horrors and atrocities. A cosmic judge asks that century “What do you have to say for yourself? How can you possibly justify your existence in the face of this destruction?”

In spite of everything, before this cosmic temporal court, I believe the 20th century could make up for it all with three small words: Continue reading →

Neither supernatural nor political

07 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by in Epicureanism, French Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Supernatural

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I’m sometimes curious about the resolutely political nature of modern secular thought – self-proclaimed humanists tend to see political activism as an intrinsic part of their belief system, along with a refusal to believe in the supernatural. So too, in Yavanayāna Buddhism, a skepticism toward the supernatural tends to go hand in hand with political engagement.

The same is true at most Unitarian Universalist churches. I attended a UU church for two years, but this is among the major reasons I stopped going. The UU church appealed to me because it seemed open to seekers with a wide range of values; nevertheless, there are some values that typical UUs do share, among them a commitment to political activism for social justice as a central part of a good life. That’s something I’m skeptical of, at the least. And so while I found a great community there and made some lasting friendships, I ultimately found myself far out of sync spiritually with the church’s ethos.

To me, perhaps the most curious example of the close connection between politics and non-supernaturalism is Robert Hanrott‘s now-defunct Epicurus Blog. Hanrott claimed to devote the blog to the Epicurean philosophy of “moderation, enjoyment of life, tranquillity, friendship, lack of fear,” along with Epicurus’s rejection of gods and other supernatural forms of causation. Hanrott explicitly acknowledged that “those who try to follow Epicurus and his teachings are not supposed to involve themselves in politics.” And yet the majority of the posts on his Epicurus Blog wound up being about… politics. Continue reading →

Medicine as ethics

01 Tuesday Sep 2009

Posted by in Biology, Early and Theravāda, Flourishing, Food, German Tradition, Happiness, Health, Judaism, Politics, Psychology, Roman Catholicism, South Asia

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In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre once said that “it is the lawyers, not the philosophers, who are the clergy of liberalism.” That is, in modern societies – liberal in the broad sense – it is lawyers who do the work, and have the status, once given to the medieval European Christian priesthood.

On this point I think MacIntyre is half right – or perhaps three-quarters right. He is quite right to note the low status that the modern West accords philosophers; but he overemphasizes the role of lawyers, because his concept of the good is (to my mind) overly political. Lawyers do play the role of medieval clergy as the rulers’ intellectual assistants in determining what a good state will be in practice. When it comes to the good life itself, however, the intellectual heavy lifting is done by a very different group: namely doctors, and medical researchers. It is medicine, not law (and certainly not philosophy), that plays the greatest role in telling moderns how they should live.
Continue reading →

How not to defend Hinduism in academia

09 Sunday Aug 2009

Posted by in Christianity, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism, Politics, Sex, South Asia

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Over the past decade, the academic study of Indian traditions has become heavily politicized. For those who haven’t been following the issue: basically, some people of Indian origin (usually Hindu), in India and elsewhere, have started finding out what North American religionists are saying about the traditions they recognize as their own; and it outrages them. Their most visible leader is Rajiv Malhotra, a New Jersey-based businessman with pockets deep enough to get his views a hearing. Most of the time the flashpoints for the critics are around sex: they are outraged at frankly sexual depictions of the tradition they follow and the gods and leaders they revere. The outrage is not so much about the obviously sexual parts of the tradition – the Khajuraho temples or the K?ma Sūtra – so much as it is about Freudian psychoanalytic depictions of beloved figures in the tradition, such as the elephant god Ga?e?a (Ganesh), the military hero Shivaji or the nineteenth-century mystic Ramakrishna. There have been calls to ban or even the offending books (respectively by Paul Courtright, James Laine and my friend Jeff Kripal). Sometimes these calls have effectively succeeded, with Courtright’s Indian publisher removing his book from circulation in India. As a result of these controversies, a group of activists from the right-wing Hindu Shiv Sena party broke into the offices of Shrikant Bahulkar – one of the kindest, gentlest and most generous men I have ever had the fortune of working with – and blackened his face, as well as destroying priceless manuscripts at the institution where he works, solely because James Laine had thanked Bahulkar in the acknowledgements of his book. Continue reading →

My story: a break with utilitarianism

21 Tuesday Jul 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Foundations of Ethics, Happiness, Politics, Social Science, Work

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I’ve noticed that the “About me” page on this blog has so far got more views than any other. So I hope it won’t be overly narcissistic of me to wax autobiographical for a moment, and expand (in this post and the next) on the story that I tell there, of how I came to the kind of philosophy I have now.

Philosophy intrigued me a lot in high school. My first real exposure to it was in grade 9, in 1990, in a mini-course at Queen’s University offered to precocious high-school students in my home town; I came to really enjoy it in a philosophy course that my high school offered in grade 12. What appealed to me most at the time was ethics, in a conventional sense (as opposed to the expanded sense that matters to me now): explanations of why we should do what we should do. But what those courses taught me above all was that I was a committed utilitarian; everything came down to acting for the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Mill’s Utilitarianism was the first philosophical book I ever read in the original. It’s no coincidence that I was also a dedicated political activist at the time, participating in every left-wing cause I could get my hands on.

I started having philosophical qualms about utilitarianism soon afterwards, as I began my undergrad years studying sociology and urban geography at McGill; I couldn’t find a satisfying philosophical justification for it. I hadn’t read John Rawls at the time, but if I had, I probably would have become a worshipful devotee of his. (As I noted last time, while Rawls isn’t a utilitarian as such, and devotes much of his energy to attacking utilitarianism, the resulting worldview looks very much like utilitarianism’s: a life spent in political action to uplift the most deprived people.)

But while I saw problems with a utilitarian worldview, there wasn’t much to replace it, and during those years I remained more or less a utilitarian by default. Things really changed after graduation, when I went to work for the United Nations in Bangkok, trying to edit works that would help coordinate efforts for people with disabilities in Asia and the Pacific: a supremely utilitarian or Rawlsian job, aiming to help out millions of people in the direst of physical conditions.

And I found there was that I was terribly unhappy. Small things, like paper jams on printers, drove me to desperation. I wasn’t all that much more unhappy than I’d been in the previous years, but I was noticing it more. My unhappiness posed a significant problem for a utilitarian worldview, a problem that standard critiques of utilitarianism usually don’t get at. Namely: in the name of the greatest happiness, I was trying to help ensure that all these poor and deprived people could have the kinds of opportunities I’d had in my own privileged upbringing. But what good is it do to that, if someone with all these opportunities and privilege can still end up miserable?

Rawls the utilitarian

19 Sunday Jul 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Economics, Happiness, Morality, Politics

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John Rawls is widely recognized as one of the most important critics of utilitarianism. In some respects he is; utilitarianism per se became much less popular in analytic philosophical circles after the publication of Rawls’s work. Yet in another respect, Rawls’s work is fundamentally a continuation of the utilitarian project – softening John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism in something very much like the way that Mill had softened Bentham’s. Continue reading →

In defence of hypocrisy

28 Sunday Jun 2009

Posted by in Morality, Politics, Virtue

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Recent news of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford’s affair provides an appropriate occasion to discuss a topic that’s been on my mind lately: hypocrisy. When social conservatives like Sanford or Bill Bennett get caught in vice, the charge immediately hurled at them is hypocrisy; this is said to make their crimes far worse than those of, say, Eliot Spitzer, who wasn’t that kind of moralizer in the first place. But I want to make the case here that hypocrisy is really not so bad.

A defence of hypocrisy is not original to me. There are plenty of right-wingers who’ve defended hypocrisy in these sorts of situations: William Vallicella blogged about it a while ago, Jeremy Lott wrote a whole book about it, and most recently James Matthew Wilson‘s defence of hypocrisy at Front Porch Republic was where I heard about Sanford’s adultery in the first place. But these men do not share the ideals of those who usually attack hypocrisy, and I think the point might be more persuasive coming from a left-leaner like me. I oppose Sanford’s and Bennett’s sexual politics, and I think their behaviours were unjustifiable; but I want to claim that these two criticisms are and should be mostly separate.

Put it this way. Suppose a man preaches anti-racism, tells all his friends they must avoid racism, donates to anti-racist causes; but himself refuses to hire black people or associate with them professionally. Now imagine a man who acted the same way toward black people but advocated doing so — a man who said that black people are unreliable and should not be hired or associated with. The first man is a hypocrite, the second man is absolutely not; the second man is sincere, and true to himself. But is the second man then better than the first? I don’t think so. In both cases the serious wrongdoing is the racism, not the hypocrisy. I might say, actually, that the hypocrite who preaches anti-racism is at least a bit better than the consistent man who doesn’t; the first is doing some good. Moreover, one can point out the inconsistency between his behaviour and his ideals, in a way that helps his behaviour change for the better. It’s much harder to change the man whose bad ideals match his bad behaviour.

Interesting blogs on the right

11 Thursday Jun 2009

Posted by in Politics

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If you’ve been following this blog so far this week, you can tell I’m fairly clearly on the left side of the political spectrum – especially by American standards. Nevertheless, the blogs I personally read most often and find most interesting right now are avowedly conservative (and American): Front Porch Republic, and Crunchy Con by its contributor Rod Dreher.

Why are these the most interesting? First, it’s always good and mind-opening to know how the other half thinks, and these sites have very intelligent and well written conservative commentary. But there’s considerably more than that. They’re not typical right-wingers by any means. They’re generally strongly environmentalist and deeply disillusioned with George W. Bush, while at the same time hostile to abortion and gay marriage. In a sense these sites are all about being genuinely conservative: wanting to preserve the traditions and ways of life accumulated through generations, against the capitalist market – and the government that supports it, and the libertine pop culture that it creates. The philosopher they take as a founder is Wendell Berry, a public intellectual who defends (and lives) the life of the simple self-sufficient farmer.

What you’ll find there is, in short, a consistent public philosophy, probably more consistent than either the left or the right usually is. Moreover, it’s a philosophy concerned with making us better people, which is something I believe to be absolutely essential – compared to libertarians and liberals, for whom the greatest concern is often just making sure people can have and do more of what they want.

I have many criticisms of this philosophy – the “crunchy” views as well as the right-wing views. But I nevertheless find it tremendously stimulating, one of the most thought-provoking sets of ideas around today. It’s something I have learned a good deal from already, and expect to learn a good deal more.