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 Where I think she goes too far with that evidence is in the title of her unpublished paper on the topic, which is “Against naturalizing Buddhism”.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.
You probably know the story: Once upon a time, human beings evolved in Africa, looking much like the black people we know today, and then gradually spread out into the rest of the world over a few million years, evolving to look different in each place. This geographical spread created the different groupings we now know as races, each a branch off the human evolutionary tree: white people in Europe, people with similar facial features but brown skin in South Asia, people with narrower eyes in East Asia, and so on. Once each kind of people evolved in each place, they mostly stuck around there, mixing mainly with their own kind, over the millions of years – until the ages of sail and of transport innovations allowed them to move around the world, creating an era where the formerly separate races newly began to mix.
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?
Standpoint theory begins from a genuinely important insight: people’s knowledge comes above all from their life experience, and so different people will have different insights and recognize different things. Our life experience does shape what we see and don’t see, and can blind us to things that others see in their position. This difference can in turn become a problem in the context of power relations, when only the experience of the powerful is represented, and other perspectives are ignored and therefore become missing. Standpoint theory’s best moment was probably Patricia Hill Collins’s 1986 sociology article “Learning from the outsider within“, which pointed out that sociological generalizations at that time were generally made by white men, and thus missed things that were clearer to black women:
Jürgen Habermas during a discussion in the Munich School of Philosophy. Photo by Wolfram Huke, CC-BY-SA 3.0 licence.
It’s not often that a philosopher makes the top entry of Wikipedia’s “In the news” page – I don’t recall that ever happening before – but that happened last week with the death of Jürgen Habermas. I think that status is well earned. Habermas was one of the few philosophers to earn respect from both the analytic and “continental” sides of the philosophical tradition, engaging in reciprocated debate with both John Rawls and Jacques Derrida. We might even say that his death marks the end of the great era of German philosophy, an era that begins with Immanuel Kant – for while through his early life there were other major German figures leaving an impact on philosophy, he was really the last remaining German philosopher to have made such a significant mark. I think the only later philosopher of arguably comparable stature who is carrying on the German philosophical tradition is Slavoj Žižek – who is not himself German but Slovenian.
There are plentyofobituaries appropriately reviewing Habermas’s overall contributions. But for me personally, Habermas’s death brings me back to an earlier time of my life, and makes me think of roads not taken.
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.
We need free speech both to search for truth, and to express ourselves. When free speech is silenced, it interferes with both of those core human goals.
And it therefore needs to be said loud and clear: silencing speech is a problem no matter who is doing the silencing.
Freedom of thought, belief, speech, and expression is a principle long cherished in the West. In recent years it has come under the most sustained attack I have seen in my lifetime, from multiple quarters. I believe it is worth defending, and it’s time to say more about why.
On Liberty, generally attributed to the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, is the most famous and widely cited defence of this principle, and for good reason. I had a low opinion of Mill for a while, as his Utilitarianism did a bad job, overall, of defending the utilitarianism I broke from – and that was one of the key reasons I broke from it. But On Liberty is an entirely different story. It provides a powerful and, I think, largely correct defence of free thought and speech on two grounds – neither of which is particularly utilitarian!
Portrait of Harriet Taylor Mill by unknown artist, in the London National Portrait Gallery.
Perhaps the difference is because it now seems likely the book was co-written with Harriet Taylor Mill, John Stuart’s wife – probably published without the woman’s name on it to make a Victorian audience to take it more seriously. (For that reason I’ll refer to On Liberty as written by “the Mills”.) It might be that Harriet was less of a utilitarian than John. But the point here is the two big grounds that the Mills provide for why freedom of speech is important.
