While the cover of Seth Zuihō Segall’s The House We Live In claims the book draws its account primarily from Aristotle, the Buddha and Confucius, the deeper, animating influence turns out to be pragmatism. There’s no problem with taking inspiration from pragmatism as such; the problem is that Seth’s pragmatism is so relentless and extreme that it rules out of court all opinions that differ from it – including, it turns out, those of Aristotle, the Buddha and Confucius.
The excessive pragmatism in question is expressed above all in this sentence: “whenever we ask ‘what’s the meaning of “X?”‘, we are really asking, ‘what is the significance of “X” for maintaining and enhancing our lives.'” (107) This pragmatic claim is simply not true. Some of us are really asking the latter question when we ask the former. Seth would like it to be the case that all of us are asking the latter question. But it’s not.
It has taken me longer than expected to get to reviewing Seth Zuihō Segall’s thoughtful and engaging The House We Live In: Virtue, Wisdom and Pluralism. Most of the reasons for that are personal, but some have to do with the book itself: the book is short (less than 200 pages) and in admirably simple prose, but I spent a long time reading it because of the number of times it made me stop and provoked my thinking. It’s provoked me enough that my review and response to it will stretch over four different posts; the other thing that took a long time was organizing all the many things I had to say about the book. (I had even more to say than those four posts, but decided to restrain myself to the most important.)
The book is an ambitious attempt to set out Seth’s own constructive philosophy. (I went back and forth on first vs. last name – although when reviewing a book it’s conventional to use a last name, since Segall is an active contributor to Love of All Wisdom’s comments on a first-name basis, I prefer that friendlier usage.) I’m broadly sympathetic with this attempt, since like my own philosophy it is broadly eudaimonistic (and naturalistic). We agree on an ethical account that focuses on human virtue and flourishing.
Specifically, the book is Seth’s philosophical account of two things: the good modern human life, in an ethical and psychological sense, and a political direction for modern societies, especially the USA. (It does not attempt to probe other philosophical areas, such as metaphysics – possibly to its detriment, as we’ll see later.) The ethical account of the good life is relatively strong; the political account, somewhat less so. At its best it provides an admirable political vision to aspire to. The biggest problem with the book is its papering over of the major differences among traditions. I am going to spend more time on the criticism of that latter point than the praise of the former, just because I think there’s typically more to be learned in disagreement than in agreement. (And indeed, the importance of difference and disagreement will be at the heart of my critique.) I want to be clear that I think the book is well worth the read, at least its middle ethical chapters, and that’s a big reason I am engaging with it at length. For a long time, virtue ethics of any kind was so underrepresented in philosophy that we virtue ethicists all had to stick together against our Kantian and utilitarian foes. I think it’s a sign of major progress that books like Seth’s are now out there – in a way that allows us to turn our attention to our differences.
In everyday communities and institutions – families, universities, businesses, clubs – we cannot help but engage in politics, in the sense of influencing or making collective decisions. I think political philosophy does better when it turns its attention to those communities and institutions smaller than the state, where most of our political actions take place: political philosophy should be a philosophy not just of the state but of office politics, of academic politics.
In that regard, I’ve noticed an interesting commonality between two works whose authors likely wouldn’t see themselves as having anything in common: Graeber and Wengrow’s anarchist anthropology The Dawn of Everything, and the standards set out by the Project Management Institute. Graeber and Wengrow look at a wide range of anthropological and archaeological sources on how humans organize their societies; the Project Management Institute examines how an individual (a project manager) can get a group of people to succeed at a collective institutional goal.
To the former (one of whom is the author of Bullshit Jobs), the latter probably looks like a deadening or sinister tool of The Man. To the latter, the former likely looks like a juvenile whining that refuses to sully its hands with getting anything done. Yet both concern themselves with the questions of how non-state institutions can be run: the latter in the day-to-day practice of making those institutions’ projects succeed, the former in imagining the functioning of a world without a state. And so both wind up exploring one core and inescapable concept: power.
The past few years have taught me the wisdom in Daoist-influenced traditions of sudden liberation: in a certain way we can improve ourselves by not improving ourselves, through an acceptance of everything, including ourselves, in the present moment. Yet I had had good reason to be frustrated earlier with such traditions – for their rhetoric sometimes implies that that present-moment acceptance is easy, which it is not. It was a long and painful lesson for me learning how hard it is to be good. That made me a longtime advocate of what East Asian Buddhists would call the gradual path, but I increasingly also see the wisdom in its converse, the sudden. Can the two be reconciled?
One of the things that helped me realize the need for self-improvement by not-self-improvement was regular practice with the excellent Headspace meditation app, created by a former Tibetan monk named Andy Puddicombe. Headspace is at the epicenter of “McMindfulness”: the app normally charges for access but I get it for free as a work wellness benefit, and this arrangement has made Puddicombe millions of dollars. In turn, the app is a big reason I defend McMindfulness – especially through John Dunne’s hugely helpful distinction between “classical” and “nondual” mindfulness.
That is to say: the core practice in Headspace is noticing your emotions, positive and negative, as they arise, and reacting to them with nonjudgemental acceptance. And you do so, yes, in the present moment. Critics like Ron Purser correctly note that that present-moment focus is not found in classical Indian texts like the Pali suttas or Śāntideva – but Dunne notes that it is found in other premodern Buddhist traditions, like the Tibetan writings of Wangchuk Dorje. And I dare say that that present-moment technique is an improvement: one that does a better job than the classical tradition’s techniques at their shared goal of reducing our suffering.
Years ago, in a difficult period of my life, I had looked for philosophical help and explicitly found it in Buddhism and not Daoism, rejecting Daoism and its sudden-liberation views in about the strongest possible terms. But that wasn’t the whole story.
I had already been trying to apply the four-stage model of skill development, taught to me by Nancy Houfek, in which one progresses from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence to unconscious competence. Trying to find a peaceful mind in those difficult days, I was all too conscious of my own incompetence, and Daoism provided no guidance that I could discern on how one could make the all-important step to conscious competence. But it is eight years later now, eight years I have spent working on my mindfulness through a nightly prayer ritual and, increasingly, meditation. I’ve gotten better at stopping my harmful thoughts when I put my mind to it; I think I’ve acquired a certain degree of conscious competence. The next step seems to be making it a habit, making it unconscious competence. And when it comes to that, the Daoists might have a point.
In previous years I have aimed to provide what are now known as content warnings when my posts contained swear or curse words. But just in the years since LoAW began, English swear words have undergone a striking shift; the formerly shocking F-word has become relatively unremarkable, while a six-letter derogatory term for black people is now regarded with horror. In keeping with the likely shift in audience expectations, in future posts I will be warning only about the new crop of swear words rather than the old. I use this post as an occasion to make this transition because the F-word appears in it quite frequently, as the title indicates. That title is probably the last time I will mark that word with asterisks; the word is uncensored in the text.
My wife’s previous round of cancer treatment, in 2015, was one of the most difficult periods in my life. Near the beginning of it I started describing myself as a Buddhist, based on a mere passing question in her hospital survey. But by the end I had become a practising Buddhist, having derived a great deal of support and comfort from Buddhism and its practices.
In the middle, though, I was still experimenting with a variety of ideas and practices from different traditions. The Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi reminded me of the spiritual benefit of practising scriptural reading, and I turned to multiple traditions for help in that regard. Buddhism proved the most valuable by the end, after a long period of learning from other traditions. Among these, I had a particularly powerful reaction to Daoism – perhaps I should say, against Daoism.
The closest thing to a definition of stewardship in the Standard is:
Stewardship has slightly different meanings and applications in different contexts. One aspect of stewardship involves being entrusted with the care of something. Another aspect focuses on the responsible planning, use, and management of resources. Yet another aspect means upholding values and ethics. (25)
That definition covers a lot of ground, but the part that struck me in particular was being entrusted with the care of something. That idea resonated with an ethical principle that I’ve found important as a manager – one which I have drawn above all from Confucianism.
In a recent piece in the Atlantic, the Bates College professor Tyler Austin Harper records an exchange both ordinary and extraordinary, between himself and a white woman he met waiting to register at an academic conference:
At some point, we began talking about our jobs. She told me that—like so many academics—she was juggling a temporary teaching gig while also looking for a tenure-track position.
“It’s hard,” she said, “too many classes, too many students, too many papers to grade. No time for your own work. Barely any time to apply to real jobs.”
When I nodded sympathetically, she asked about my job and whether it was tenure-track. I admitted, a little sheepishly, that it was.
“I’d love to teach at a small college like that,” she said. “I feel like none of my students wants to learn. It’s exhausting.”
Then, out of nowhere, she said something that caught me completely off guard: “But I shouldn’t be complaining to you about this. I know how hard BIPOC faculty have it. You’re the last person I should be whining to.”
It is the idea expressed in the temporary academic’s latter remark that is both ordinary and extraordinary. Ordinary in that the idea is quite frequently and commonly expressed in academic and other educated American circles. Extraordinary in that it is completely cuckoo bananas.
Until recently, my approach to the very new technology of large language models or LLMs – the AI tools of which ChatGPT is the most famous – had been heavily shaped by my experience of feeding it an essay assignment like my classes’ and thinking the result merited a B or B-. On the disturbing side, that meant that ChatGPT could easily generate a passable paper; on the reassuring side, it meant that it could not easily generate a good paper. The latter still required the human touch.
