Karin Meyers’s work on the “damned topics” of Buddhist philosophy is most powerful on the topic of rebirth. Because that’s the place where there’s actually some reasonably powerful evidence for the “damned topic”. Where I think she goes too far with that evidence is in the title of her unpublished paper on the topic, which is “Against naturalizing Buddhism”. I think we need to naturalize – that is, to put in non-supernatural terms – one of Buddhism’s most important ideas, namely karma. And I think we need to do that even if the evidence convinces us that rebirth is real.
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.
My father’smemorial service was last weekend. The event was wonderful, bringing together friends and family I hadn’t seen in decades. It was heartwarming to see colleagues, neighbours, Canadian family, Indian family, American family share their fond recollections of him. That evening, colleagues, my uncle, my childhood best friend and I got into a discussion of Greek antiquity so spirited that it felt like my father Jayant was still in the room.
Jayant’s ashes mixed with rose petals, scattered over Milk Lake. (Photo by author.)
I was asked to deliver readings for the event. I was happy to do it; the challenge was finding something right for him, in his spirit. We scattered his ashes over Milk Lake, the small lake he loved where we had a cottage and I spent many weekends of my childhood. There, I chose a reading from Dnyaneshwar: a medieval poet-saint from Jayant’s home state of Maharashtra, whose devotional (bhakti) poetry was foundational for Jayant’s native Marathi language in the way that Dante was for Italian or Shakespeare for English. (“Dnyaneshwar” is the phonetic spelling of his name in modern Marathi; it means “lord of knowledge” and in Sanskrit would be transliterated “Jñāneśvara”. For English-speakers it can roughly be pronounced “nyah-NAY-shwar”.) Jayant grew up with Dnyaneshwar and came to write about him more as an adult. I found a beautiful passage from Dnyaneshwar’s main work, a commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā, which felt like it had the right feeling for scattering ashes on the water:
I’ve been using Anthropic’s Claude.ai in a work context relatively often lately – to produce graphic illustrations, write summaries and so on. (I’m not crazy about referring to it as just “Claude”. That’s my grandfather.) One thing has struck me in those interactions: I’ve found myself saying “please” in the requests I make to it.
I suppose you could say that’s just me being Canadian – for decades the not-entirely-fictional joke has been that Canadians are so polite they say “thank you” to bank machines. But Canadian or not, I think the point raises an interesting question: should we humans act politely toward large language models (LLMs) like Claude.ai and ChatGPT?
A few years ago I argued that utilitarian and Kantian ethics, with the trolley problem as their framing question, were suited for programming robots but not for human beings. It turns out I was wrong — not about the human beings, but about the robots.
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.
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.
Last time I was in Canada, I went into a café and saw an item on the menu I’d never seen before: a “Canadiano”. The barista helpfully explained that this was just an Americano. But it was striking to me that Canadians had just come up with their own version of freedom fries – and specifically out of anti-Americanism.
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.
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.
