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.Continue reading →
Writing advice often rightly asks authors: “When was the last time you wished a book was longer?” Well, now I can say: it was when I recently read Lawrence Harvey’s Offbeat Philosophers: Thinkers Who Played A Different Tune (whose publishers offered me a review copy). This book clocks in at a mere 73 pages, plus bibliography. Fortunately it’s priced accordingly ($10 for the paperback, $8 for the e-book), but Harvey doesn’t leave himself a lot of room to do the job. The book catalogues ten “offbeat” philosophers; it could have used more of them, but more than that, it could have given them each more space. They get about six pages each (including a list of questions-for-further-reflection), which leaves little room to explore the depth that makes a philosopher’s thought exciting.
Harvey doesn’t say a lot about what makes a philosopher “offbeat”, or his criteria for inclusion. He develops the musical metaphor: as in musical syncopation, where “the regular rhythmic flow is disrupted with accents and stresses occurring out of step with the expected norms”, so “the philosophers in this short anthology all play to what might be termed a different tune – one that serves to disrupt and unsettle the fixity of rhythmic thought.” (1) That’s a very imprecise way of putting things, the sort of imprecision that might drive an analytic philosopher crazy, but perhaps that’s just the point: in a philosophical world still ruled by the analytic tradition, to be “offbeat” may well mean to avoid putting precision first.
Younger readers may not remember just what an aura of inevitability surrounded the idea of globalizing capitalism in the late 20th century. Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, in a 2002 award acceptance speech, proclaimed: “It has been said that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the law of gravity.” And he did not dispute this thing that “has been said”. Margaret Thatcher’s frequent slogan was “there is no alternative“. Tony Blair went so far as to say “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”
When Donald Trump first rose to rapid popularity in American politics, many people were shocked and had no explanation. I was not among those people, for a couple of reasons. Among them: one way to make a new phenomenon comprehensible is analogy. And having watched Indian politics for a couple decades, I found it easy to say: Trump is a BJP-wala.
Matthew Yglesias has a better understanding of the details of public policy than almost anyone I know. He excels at being a technocrat. But there’s a reason technocrats and populists are at odds: populism, whether of the Bernie Sanders or the Donald Trump variety, comes out of a fundamentally democratic impulse, promoting the rule of the people against a perceived élite (even at the expense of lost expertise). And one post of Yglesias’s shows me that he’s not so good at understanding what the rule of the people actually is.
In the case of the particular topic that Yglesias was writing about, he makes a characteristically important point on the practical implications: community meetings, and other forms of providing popular input into government actions, slow down those actions and often prevent them entirely. There is indeed something wrong with “a world where the New York State Legislature can decide in 2019 that it wants congestion pricing for Manhattan and then spend three years compiling a 4,000+ page NEPA review.” Community input often leads to bad policy outcomes. Where Yglesias is wrong, though, is in saying this interferes with democracy.
Yglesias at least states his incorrect position with characteristic clarity: “is democracy about people expressing views at hearings or is it about entrusting elected leaders with the authority to make decisions on subjects of public concern? I think it’s the latter.” And that is where he’s wrong.
The English word aesthetician can describe two kinds of professionals. In the less common sense, it can describe a philosopher who makes a living theorizing about art and beauty. In the more common sense, it can describe someone who makes a living helping women with makeup and hair and nails.
These two senses have something to do with each other. But we don’t usually talk about it.
American psychedelic advocates received a great disappointment a couple months ago when the Food and Drug Administration refused to approve MDMA (ecstasy) as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. The disappointment was great enough to lead Jules Evans of the Ecstatic Integration Substack to ask: “Is the psychedelic renaissance over?“
It seems silly to me to read too much into this one decision. It is not final; a new application could be made in a few years. More importantly, it is one decision, about one substance, by one agency in one country – for one purpose. (It was also a great disappointment for us in Massachusetts that our state voted down the ballot question to legalize psychedelics, but it too is just one state, where the question was extremely poorly promoted; Oregon and Colorado have proceeded with decriminalizing psilocybin.) If the entire “psychedelic renaissance” hung on the outcome of one agency’s decision or one state referendum, it would have been a shallow “renaissance” indeed. Even within the US there are already many other avenues for improving the legal status of psychedelics.
Public-domain AP photo of Timothy Leary.
That said: Michael Pollan’s book How To Change Your Mind probably did more to kick off the supposed current renaissance than anything else, and one of Pollan’s most important takeaways in the book was, let’s not screw this up. Psychedelics were famously popular in the 1960s, but the messages around them were dominated by overenthusiastic salespeople like Timothy Leary, who had little sense of caution. The resulting backlash was so strong that it created the ignorant world I grew up in, in the 1980s and 1990s, where even video games felt the importance of including a heavy-handed “don’t do drugs” message – extending even to cannabis. What the FDA ruling should remind us of, is the importance of avoiding the mistakes of the ’60s – so that the renaissance can lead to an enlightenment, if you will.
In thinking through my Buddhism, I had once turned to a reductionist “Sellarsian solution” because it allows in some sense for selves as conventional (rather than ultimate) truth. I’ve now moved instead to a Buddhist view that is based on emptiness rather than reductionism – and, crucially, the emptiness view allows selves in that conventional sense too. For that reason, I think an emptiness-based approach may still be able to leave room for an expressive individualism, where we seek to be ourselves more fully.
How can we reconcile Buddhism with expressive individualism (“be yourself”) and with natural science? When I had previously turned to Wilfrid Sellars for help on this question, I had compared Sellars’s view to two Buddhist metaphysical positions on ultimate truth, which are quite different from each other. One of these was Buddhaghosa’s view that ultimate truth is reductionist, and I no longer find that comparison helpful. But I also turned to Śāntideva’s view that the ultimate is normatively inert, with no good or bad involved. Śāntideva’s view rejects Buddhaghosa’s in some very important ways – and I think that philosophically his metaphysics is considerably more powerful.
That’s a big deal for me because, having come to my Buddhism in Thailand, I have generally viewed myself as a Theravādin like Buddhaghosa. I’ve been skeptical of the most famous piece of Śāntideva’s metaphysics, his ethical deconstruction of self and other in chapter VIII of the Bodhicaryāvatāra. I’m not convinced by his or any other argument for a universal impartial altruism – a key Mahāyāna doctrine. Yet I do now find myself moving closer to a Mahāyāna or at least Madhyamaka view, because of a different aspect of Śāntideva’s metaphysics: the metaphysics of emptiness in chapter IX, which I think are considerably deeper.
Any serious contemporary Buddhist intellectual needs to think through the connection between Buddhist ideas and the relevant claims of natural science. Many of us, too, are expressive individualists: we believe that there is something valuable in the project of discovering one’s true self. The expressive individualist view of self-discovery and self-expression – put perhaps in most recent terms as “let your freak flag fly” – is that’s an uncomfortable fit with a tradition that has proclaimed for millennia that there is no true self.
There are at least three different metaphysical understandings underlying each of Buddhism, natural science, and expressive individualism, and at least at first glance they all appear to be in conflict. Resolving this conflict is not easy, and recently my views on how to do it best have significantly changed. I often find I get the best sense of what’s important in other people’s philosophies by figuring out what they changed and why, so I thought it would be helpful to show the changes in my own.
