Category Archives: Social Science

You can’t just wish detransition away

06 Sunday Jul 2025

Posted by in Health, Politics, Psychology, Sex

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Being gender-fluid, in a certain sense I transition and detransition my gender every week (just not medically). It feels only natural to me to think that people who’d undergone full-time or medical transition might come to regret it or decide it wasn’t for them. The core idea underlying the trans movement is expressive individualism: you should be able to express your true self. So surely, if you thought you were one gender and then realized you were another, that’s something the movement should affirm. And yet, sadly, it seems that much of the trans movement not only does not affirm such a position, but views it as a threat.

Kinnon MacKinnon. Image from York University.

This Reuters report notes that online detransitioners often face “members of the transgender community telling them to ‘shut up’ and even sending death threats.” The work of Kinnon MacKinnon, the most prominent academic studying detransition, gets denounced as “transphobic”. True, right-wing groups hold up detransitioners to advance a political agenda against youth medical transition; they’re happy that detransitioners are convenient to that agenda. But when trans activists are denouncing research on detransition as transphobic and sending death threats to detransitioners, it’s simply laughable to claim that they are doing anything different! For both the right-wingers and the trans activists, the agenda comes first and the people second. Detransitioners are forced into taking a position I’ve too often found myself in in a variety of regards: I’m sorry that my existence is inconvenient to your narrative.

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Why philosophy must cross boundaries

22 Sunday Jun 2025

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Karma, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Natural Science, Social Science

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When I described philosophy in my “Why Philosophy?” interview, I hadn’t intended my description to be controversial. Only when Céline Leboeuf gave the interview a title did I realize that it is.

Leboeuf entitled the interview “philosophy crosses boundaries”, which is a phrase that had just felt obvious to me when I wrote the interview answers. But when I saw that that was the title Leboeuf had picked, I suddenly realized that it isn’t. Many philosophers, I recalled, don’t think that way.

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After mystical experiences

08 Sunday Jun 2025

Posted by in Daoism, German Tradition, Metaphysics, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Psychology, Roman Catholicism, Vedānta

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I’m delighted to be giving a talk at Psychedelic Science 2025, the annual conference of the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies. The conference (June 17-20 in Denver) promises to be really fun and stimulating. If you can make it, I’d love to say hi: registration isn’t cheap, but you can use code SPEAKER15 to get 15% off your registration.

I’m especially excited because my talk is really experimental, the kind of broad comparative work that would have got frowned on when I was in grad school. I’m still aiming to exercise scholarly caution to avoid saying anything false, trying to stay reasonably close to what’s in the texts, but I am writing about multiple thinkers whose source languages (classical Chinese and old German) I don’t know well: something which I think one has to do in order to investigate human cultural commonalities, but which would have raised every eyebrow in my PhD program. It’s the kind of project that an aspiring professor only undertakes after getting tenure; in my case, I can do it because I’m no longer trying for a faculty job.

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Where race and gender overrode everything

11 Sunday May 2025

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Work

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A while ago I identified what I considered the Social Justice movement‘s first tenet: that the most urgent issue facing the world in the 21st century is inequalities of race and gender (including sexual orientation and gender identity). I stand by that description. I think that that view is implicit in Ibram X. Kendi’s most widely quoted idea: that neutrality is a mask for racism, that anyone who isn’t actively antiracist is racist. Because that idea directly implies that one must prioritize racism over other issues, that neutrality might be acceptable on other issues but not on this one.

There’s plenty more evidence that a wide swath of influential people treated race and gender as the most urgent issues of all. Let’s turn first to National Public Radio (NPR), the US’s major public audio broadcaster – its audio equivalent to the BBC or CBC. An exposé of NPR delivered by its veteran ex-editor Uri Berliner makes it clear: CEO John Lansing

declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.

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Checks and balances are only as good as their enforcers

13 Sunday Apr 2025

Posted by in Confucianism, Courage, Economics, Leadership, Morality, Politics, Virtue

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When the head of state or government goes rogue, what happens next?

Consider the recent experiences of three countries where the top leader pursued an agenda far more radical than they had campaigned on, in a way that caused widespread panic. In South Korea, Yoon-Suk Yeol attempted to impose martial law, marking an attempted return to something like the country’s past military dictatorship. In the UK, Liz Truss attempted tax cuts so radical that even the business community hated them. In the US, Donald Trump is now attempting something like both: after having been blatantly caught trying to sabotage the election and encouraging a riot that sought to prevent a peaceful transfer of power, now he is not only claiming to be move toward an unconstitutional third term in office, he has also engaged in tariffs so drastic that the market’s reaction to them was even worse than to Truss’s cuts. (Trump is taking as much from the rich as much as Bernie Sanders would – just without giving any of it to the poor.)

But there is an obvious difference between the three cases: Yoon and Truss were removed from power within a few months after their drastic measures, while there is not the slightest sign of any such thing happening to Trump. And that should lead us to ask: why this difference?

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Why I’m staying in the USA

06 Sunday Apr 2025

Posted by in Family, Flourishing, Friends, Place, Politics, Social Science

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Canadians have always had a love-hate relationship with the USA; for obvious reasons, the hate side is stronger right at the moment. The US government is doing everything it can to make the country hateable – and harder to live in. When lawful permanent residents are detained without trial for exercising their free speech, this becomes a scary place indeed. So it’s quite understandable that many of those who can leave the US for Canada are planning on doing so – like the philosopher Jason Stanley making a high-profile announcement that he’s leaving Yale for Toronto.

It’s tempting to try to do something similar myself. But I’m not going to. And I want to talk about why.

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The MAGA case against Trump

23 Sunday Mar 2025

Posted by in Economics, Politics

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As awful as the second Trump administration is, very little is accomplished by criticizing it from the perspective of a leftist like me. The administration wants to appall us, even take revenge on us. That’s the point. I’ve seen multiple bumper stickers and T-shirts proclaiming “Trump: Make liberals cry again.” As far as I can tell, last time, Trump drew strength from every apopleptic tweet our team raged out about how horrible it all is. We can and should take concrete steps to fight it all – the only obvious one being to contribute to legal funds challenging his actions in the courts, of which Democracy Forward seems to be the most prominent – but we do little by publicly expressing our outrage. Our hatred of any Trump administration is a feature, not a bug.

Old-fashioned Reaganite conservatives who stay true to their principles are going to be pretty horrified, too. When an unrepentant admirer of the old Soviet Union conquers back USSR territory (at great human cost on both sides), it’s got to be crushing to see the leader of “the free world” walk away from the conflict on terms favourable to the conqueror. But it’s been startling to see how few even care about those Reaganite principles anymore. Some of the ones who do, like Dick Cheney, often already campaigned for the other side – in a way that may have served only to illustrate that side’s complete ideological incoherence. (If you advertise that you’ve got endorsements ranging from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney, does that really look like you’re the common-sense consensus candidate, or does it look like you stand for nothing at all?)

All of which makes far too much criticism of the administration effectively irrelevant. If you’re a true-blue Reaganite, let alone a leftist, it means none of the people who put this administration in power actually care what you think. And that’s a big problem, because what the administration is doing is really, really bad – even from the perspective of its sympathizers.

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The secret of mindfulness meditation

09 Sunday Mar 2025

Posted by in Emotion, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Psychology

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One of the things that really surprises me about contemporary mindfulness meditation is how rarely – especially at the beginning – they highlight what, as far as I can tell, is the most beneficial aspect of the practice. It’s not a “secret” in the sense of being concealed away somewhere, just that beginners are rarely told how important it is; I more or less had to figure it out for myself. This holds true for the practices I’m most familiar with – Headspace, Robert Sokolove’s medical mindfulness recording, Goenka vipassanā – but also seems to hold for other forms of modern mindfulness that I’ve listened to recordings of. Because of this, I think it’s easy for a beginner to misinterpret what mindfulness meditation is about.

Headspace’s meditation instructions usually involve focusing your attention on your breath – its inward and outward movement, the way your chest and stomach rise and fall with the breath. (Sokolove’s likewise.) Goenka vipassanā puts more emphasis on repeatedly scanning your attention up and down through your body. But it’s become clear to me that that focus, on the breath or the bodily sensations, is not the point of any of these exercises.

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We need to see emotions as bodily

16 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by in Anger, Compassion, Emotion, External Goods, Fear, Health, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Practice, Psychology, Stoicism, Unconscious Mind

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The most important lesson I ever learned was back in Thailand in 1997: that the biggest contributor to my unhappiness wasn’t external problems like being single or unemployed, but my own mental states like craving. Fixing those mental states was a surer path to happiness and reducing suffering.

But the question that has played an ever-increasing role in the three ensuing decades has been: okay, but how? It is one thing to recognize that your craving and anger – or fear or self-pity or shame or other negative emotions – are the main thing keeping you down. It is quite another to do something about them. Our animal natures make those states quite recalcitrant.

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The philosopher takes the same psych meds as his dog

09 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by in Action, Biology, Emotion, Health, Human Nature, Psychology, Unconscious Mind

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Over the years I’ve managed to treat my insomnia in various ways, to the point that nowadays I can get a reasonably good sleep most nights. Mindfulness meditation – prescribed to me medically before I called myself a Buddhist – has been one big help with that. But just as big has been a medication called trazodone: primarily used as an antidepressant, trazodone in smaller doses helps one stay asleep and avoid the typical insomniac anxiety spiral where you wake up and worry that you can’t get to sleep and find that the worry makes it harder to get to sleep so you worry more. It does a great deal to take the edge off.

Meanwhile my dog, Christmas Belle (so named because we got her in a snowstorm on December 22), faced various anxiety issues that made her resistant and fearful to getting in the car and going to the vet. To help her cope with those situations the vet recommended… trazodone.

Christmas Belle Feeley-Lele, when not feeling anxiety. Photo by author.
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