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.
Early in the first Trump administration, I preached the importance of disengaged Buddhists’ lessons: to refrain from anger, to remind ourselves that some things are more important than politics. I think that that was easier to do the first time round. For in the end, the main thing that distinguished the Trump administration from previous Republican administrations – until the various self-coup attempts at the end of his reign – was its hostile rhetoric. On policy, on running the government, Trump 1.0 was not all that different from a standard garden-variety Republican: the only major controversial piece of legislation he passed was to borrow money and hand it to the rich, just as Reagan and George W. Bush had done before him. Some of the policies that drew the biggest outrage – like putting children in cages – turned out to be the work of previous administrations, including Obama. While Trump’s bark did make the United States a more hostile place for everyone, it nevertheless remained far worse than his bite. That made it a lot easier to preach taking a chill pill.
I don’t think any of that is true this time around. After the election, my hope had been for a second Trump term mostly like the first, probably a little worse. But nothing of the sort has happened. As far as I can tell, Trump has done far more damage in the first month of his second term than he did in three and a half years of his first. The actions of Trump, and his unelected viceroy Elon Musk, have already killed thousands of African recipients denied aid, and wreaked havoc on the world from Ukraine through Canada to here in metropolitan Boston, where nearly everyone I know has had their job redefined – if not lost – as a result of cuts and freezes to science funding.
We can say with confidence that, someday, there will be no more human beings. That means that we are fooling ourselves if, as Simone Weil claims atheists must do, we seek an absolute good in a human future, revolutionary or otherwise. The human species and its creations, ultimately, are just like individual humans: ultimately, this too shall pass.
I don’t want to knock attempts to make progress in the world. My life, and so many others, are immeasurably better than were those hundreds of years ago, in the short time we have on this planet. As Peter Berger rightly noted, “remind yourself that, in any historical painting depicting a scene prior to the mid-19th century, 80 percent of the people in the picture are suffering severe tooth pain.” That progress matters. But we must not lose sight that there is no more ultimacy to that progress than there is to progressive improvement within our own individual lives.
This is what Martin Hägglund’s work misses: the “realm of freedom” he envisions cannot be our telos, our ultimate end. I have found Hägglund’s work very helpful because it envisions a utopia that actually seems relatively utopian to me – and by doing so, shows us the limits of utopia itself. Even if we can envision a material utopia that we take do be as desirable as that one seems, and we think that utopia is possible, we need to recognize that that utopia is not our ultimate end; our ultimate end is a literal end, human extinction. (That’s not even to mention the point that even in a material utopia we will have tons of other problems to deal with.)
NASA image of a dying star from the James Webb Space Telescope. This will be the eventual fate of the sun.
How then should we live our lives, knowing that, individually and collectively, they must end? It seems to me that this realization helps us shift our attention from the future to the present, in a myriad of ways – recognizing the need to be here now, to use a once-popular phrase. Multiple traditions point us to the importance of such a present-orientation. I think it is at the heart of George Grant’s Daoism. William Christian’s introduction to Grant’s Time as History says: “Grant found [Nietzsche’s] doctrine of eternal recurrence of the identical an attractive correction to the view of time as history: ‘It is… a doctrine of the trans-historical whole of nature.'” Most traditional cosmologies do not understand time as a progress of history, but as in some respects cyclical or recurrent, and there is something about such traditional views that helps us attune ourselves to the present rather than focus obsessively on the future.
There will, eventually, be an end to the human race. We don’t think enough about the significance of this fact.
I am not even talking about avoidable apocalypses, as real as the threat of those is. I am assuming for the sake of argument that we will manage to avoid being stupid enough to kill ourselves off in the next few centuries, through global nuclear war or climate change or AI robots or nanotechnology or a newly emerging plague. Many if not all of those are real threats and we should do whatever we can to prevent them from destroying us. But for my purposes here I’m assuming we’re smart enough to fend them off. The point is that humanity will end even so. It may take a very, very long time. But it will happen.
My oldest friendship is with Nicholas Thorne, whom I met in the 1970s. That’s not a typo, even though he and I are in our mid-40s; the friendship began, so our parents say, when he crawled up to my house’s doorstep, before we were old enough to walk. He is probably the one who most sparked my interest in philosophy, when he studied in James Doull’s Hegelian department at Dalhousie University and was delighted by what he found. It was through him that I found my lifelong interest in Hegel. Eventually, both of us got our PhDs in philosophical fields but, as is so typical for our generation and those after, neither of us found long-term full-time faculty work.
Nevertheless, we both kept up our passion for philosophy and kept writing. I’m delighted that Thorne has now published a book, Liberation and Authority, and I’m pleased to review it here.
Tomorrow is the winter solstice: the shortest, darkest day of the year. After that, everything will slowly start getting lighter and brighter. And never in my lifetime has that felt like more of a perfect metaphor.
Christmas is perhaps the festival that most obviously commemorates the light in the darkness at this time of year, but it is not the only festival to acknowledge the darkest days and prepare for the light. Hanukkah is a smaller part of the Jewish ritual year than North Americans typically make it out to be – it is not nearly as important as Passover – but it is a real Jewish festival of light at the darkest time of the year. So too, Westerners mark a new year beginning just as the old year is at its darkest.
All these events happen every year. But this is a year like no other.
Donald Trump has not received enough votes to remain President of the United States. Joseph R. Biden Jr. received enough votes, in the states that matter, to be insulated from recounts and legal challenges. Blessedly, very few major right-wing figures are urging Trump to challenge the result, and at this point it is not clear how he could; thus, despite Trump’s refusal to admit the legitimacy of the election, it appears there will indeed be a peaceful transfer of power. So, on Wednesday, 20 January 2021, Donald Trump will no longer be president; Joe Biden will. And I expect most people reading this, inside and outside the United States, will breathe a sigh of relief.
The 2020 election campaign was a referendum on Trump, with his opponent something of an afterthought. According to polls, about 67% of Biden supporters considered their vote primarily against Trump rather than for Biden; about 71% of Trump supporters considered their vote primarily for Trump rather than against Biden. As for Biden, he had trailed in the Democratic primary field for a long time, behind the more exciting candidacies of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, after he turned in lacklustre debate performances that left no one enthusiastic about him. He trailed, that is, until two moderate candidates suddenly dropped out and endorsed him, because they prioritized beating Trump and thought a moderate like Biden was better equipped to do it than their other rivals were. Then, campaigning against Trump during the COVID pandemic, Biden kept a light schedule and campaigned from home. The election was never about him – and that worked well for him.
I am not entirely sure that I agree with the argument I am about to make. However, I do find it at least plausible and I have not seen it made before. I think this argument is worth somebody making, and I think it is worth doing here.
That is: I would like to make a Buddhist argument against rebirth. An argument against rebirth on Buddhist grounds.Continue reading →
Leonard Cohen at the Arena in Geneva, 27 October 2008
2016 has taken many great musicians from us. Early in the year we lost Prince and David Bowie. Gord Downie of the Tragically Hip is still with us for now, but the band played its last concert. And then there was Leonard Cohen.
Cohen began his career as one of the long parade of 1960s singer-songwriters who temporarily changed the phrase “folk music” so that it now referred to the music of educated urban élites. He earned a place alongside Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan – many of whom he played with. In that context he developed his talent for enigmatic, evocative lyrics. But as far as I’m concerned, none of his real greatness comes from that period. If he had died as young as Janis Joplin (or Amy Winehouse), I wouldn’t be writing this tribute, and a few decades from now I’m not sure that he would be remembered.
Cohen’s real brilliance came out in the 1980s and early 1990s, when decades of whisky and cigarettes had lowered his sensitive folkie voice into a gravelly growl, and his music took a darker turn to match. Continue reading →
Last week I discussed the first reason you can read my dissertation on this site, and said that this week I would talk about the second reason. But I’m going to put that off until next week, to speak this week of a current event.
I refer, of course, to the election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis. The selection of a pope is a philosophically significant event, for a pope is in some respects among the modern age’s closest equivalents to a philosopher-king: a man trusted by millions or even billions of people to decide the truth about ultimate reality and what is good. And the selection of this pope in particular seems to me an excellent one, a man much better suited for this role than I expected him to be. Continue reading →
