Facebook is scary

Yesterday I played a facebook game called "D&D: Heroes of Neverwinter". I had never played a facebook game before, but I've played D&D and other role-playing games off and on since I was a lad. The game was disturbing. In order to do well, a player must recruit other people from facebook to play it. Players are also rewarded in the game for spending more time playing it, and for playing on consecutive days. The game is optimally designed to spread through social networks and to take up more and more of a person's life.

 Part of the appeal of games like D&D is that they allow people to create their own stories. Role-playing games offer a DIY alternative to the stories and entertainment created by the commercial media. But "D&D: Heroes of Neverwinter" is a preeminently commercial game. Its sole purpose seems to be to spread through facebook to as many users as possible and to get people to spend as much time on facebook as possible (presumably for the sake of generating ad revenue). In other words, welcome to the machine.

 After thinking about this game and why it bothered me, I started thinking about facebook in general. It's a great tool which has enabled people to connect, to reconnect, and to stay connected with people they care about. But the fact that it is a commercial enterprise should give us pause. The owners of facebook want us to spend more and more of our lives using their product. They want their product to become indispensable to our work, play, and intimate relationships. The life experience and connections between people have become commodities. There is a risk that we will live our lives for the benefit of and at the pleasure of a commercial enterprise.

 I say all this as a fan of the free market who believes that competition is the best way of checking the market power of firms. The point is not that free market capitalism is bad because it has given birth to monsters such as facebook. The point is that we as consumers should be as intelligent and careful as possible about how we consume commercial entertainment and social media. Social media like facebook and Google+ are network goods, which means that the greater the number of people who use them, the more valuable they are. (If only a few people used facebook, it would be harder to find people you know and the product would be less valuable. The more people who use facebook, the easier it is to find people you know and to meet new people.)

This can make it hard for alternative social media to compete. But it is not impossible to unseat an established network good. For example, consider Microsoft's Windows operating system, a network good which now has several viable competitors. It's hard to say how things will play out, but the worst case scenario is that people become extremely dependent on facebook or other commercial social media in order to have satisfying work, play, and relationships. A better alternative would be a crowd-sourced, non-commercial social media platform.

Ruth J. Simmons on Leadership

An interview in The New York Times with Ruth J. Simmons, president of Brown University, is full of insights about leadership and working with others:

I worked for someone who did not support me. And it was a very painful experience, and in many ways a defining experience for me. So having a bad supervisor really probably started me thinking about what I would want to be as a supervisor. That led me to think about the psychology of the people I worked with. And, in some ways, because I had exhibited behavior that was not the most positive in the workplace myself, it gave me a mirror to what I might do that might be similarly undermining of others. So I think at that juncture that’s really when I started being much more successful.

Recommended.

Critique of Thomas Friedman

Belen Fernandez has written a caustic but effective take-down of Thomas Friedman over at Guernica. An excerpt:

Friedman’s writing is characterized by a reduction of complex international phenomena to simplistic rhetoric and theorems that rarely withstand the test of reality. His vacuous but much-publicized “First Law of Petropolitics”—which Friedman devises by plotting a handful of historical incidents on a napkin and which states that the price of oil is inversely related to the pace of freedom—does not even withstand the test of the very Freedom House reports that Friedman invokes as evidence in support of the alleged law. The tendency toward rampant reductionism has become such a Friedman trademark that one finds oneself wondering whether he is not intentionally parodying himself when he introduces “A Theory of Everything” to explain anti-American sentiment in the world and states his hope “that people will write in with comments or catcalls so I can continue to refine [the theory], turn it into a quick book and pay my daughter’s college tuition.”

Fernandez also attacks Friedman's fecund use of puerile, semi-coherent metaphors.

David Graeber on the Anarchist Roots of Occupy Wall Street

The reader in social anthropology at the University of London has much to say in an essay at AlJazeera about the flaws of American democracy, the differences between anarchism and Marxism, and the nature of consensus-based decision making:

I should be clear here what I mean by "anarchist principles". The easiest way to explain anarchism is to say that it is a political movement that aims to bring about a genuinely free society - that is, one where humans only enter those kinds of relations with one another that would not have to be enforced by the constant threat of violence. History has shown that vast inequalities of wealth, institutions like slavery, debt peonage or wage labour, can only exist if backed up by armies, prisons, and police. Anarchists wish to see human relations that would not have to be backed up by armies, prisons and police. Anarchism envisions a society based on equality and solidarity, which could exist solely on the free consent of participants.

I applaud the Occupy Movement's critique of American state capitalism, in particular the protection afforded politically connected business interests at the taxpayers' expense, and I agree with Graeber about the general superiority of consensus to democratic majoritarianism, but I doubt that society could ever produce order without armies, prisons, and police--or, for that matter, without a judicial system and legal code. However, I also think all of these things can exist without states, or at least without states as we know them (which unduly restrict the entry and exit of citizens). I therefore fully agree with Graeber that we don't need states to create social order, and in fact that states are frequently disruptive of such order (such as through foreign wars and the war on drugs).

Online Applications

"Mr. Zero" at The Philosophy Smoker has a post about online job applications. I agree that overall they are superior to paper applications in terms of less cost and less hassle. However, applications which simply ask for an email with .pdf attachments of CV etc. are orders of magnitude easier than those which require applicants to enter data into an online application database. The latter are more time-consuming, typically require data which are less relevant for academic jobs than other jobs at the university, and sometimes have issues relating to uploading documents (such as being unclear about precisely which documents need to be uploaded and which documents should be uploaded where).

Are Most Published Findings False?

The problems are evidently ones of small sample size and publication bias. John Ioannadis has been arguing as much for some time (here is an essay at The Atlantic by David H. Freedman about Ioannidis' work). I am not versed in statistics but the basic arguments are easy to follow. With small sample sizes it's easy to find an effect due to chance which is only overturned after the study is replicated and the results fail to hold. Publication bias refers to the tendency of journals to favor interesting results (a positive result for a new hypothesis--or possibly a null result for a confirmed hypothesis) over non-interesting results for publication. Researchers are also less apt to report uninteresting null results in the first place.

Owen Flanagan, The Bodhisattva's Brain

Over at berfrois, philosopher Owen Flanagan offers a precis of his recent book, The Boddhisattva's Brain, and a defense of naturalistic Buddhism. Here is an excerpt:

My answer for Buddhism is that if one subtracts the beliefs in karma, rebirth and nirvana, what remains is a philosophy that should be attractive to contemporary analytic philosophers. “Buddhism naturalized” contains a powerful and credible metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. The metaphysics is an event or process metaphysics. There are no things, only events that unfold in a great beginning-less unfolding, the Mother of all Unfoldings. The self is one of the impermanent events. The epistemology is empiricist: experience first, then reason and only then do we consult the “scriptures,” which are themselves fallible compilations of wisdom from previous experience. The ethics teaches that goodness comes from compassion and Lovingkindness to oneself and to all other sentient beings.

I believe that “Buddhism naturalized” is a serious contender, along with Confucianism and Aristotelianism, for a great wisdom tradition that offers a viable philosophy for 21st century secularists. It might seem odd to recommend these ancient theories as good for us now, but I do really think all three are worth a second look. The reason is that all three of these philosophies, from over 2 millenia ago, are less theistic, and thus more rational, in their core philosophy that the three Abrahamic traditions.

Flanagan is a balanced and rational commentator on Buddhism and other wisdom traditions, and I agree with him that these have much to offer for modern secularists (and, I would add, adherents of Abrahamic faiths as well). However, I wonder whether subtracting karma, rebirth, and nirvana from Buddhism leaves one with Buddhism at all, or something else entirely. This is not to say that we should retain these outmoded elements of Buddhism, but rather that perhaps we should abandon the label 'Buddhism' altogether. Less radically, adopting a term like 'Neo-Buddhism' (akin to the already current neo-Aristotelianism and neo-Confucianism) might make more sense then referring to naturalistic Buddhism as 'Buddhism' in an unqualified sense.

"Shadow Wolves": A Tale of the Border

A recent article in the Los Angeles Times describes a unit of Indian trackers employed by the government to patrol the border with Mexico, which is currently being used as a highway for smuggling drugs and illegal immigrants, in the vicinity of the Tohono O'odham Nation. From the article:

When the U.S. Border Patrol clamped down on crossings in an area east of the reservation five years ago, smuggling rings moved their routes to the forbidding 60-mile backcountry corridor that crosses Tohono O'odham lands. Two billion dollars worth of marijuana, cocaine and heroin have moved through the reservation since then, according to ICE estimates.

The Shadow Wolves use GPS locaters, high-powered radios and other modern tools, but it is their tracking skills and their feel for the hidden box canyons, caves and seasonal watering holes that make them formidable counter-narcotics agents.

The article is revealing mainly for what is left in the background--the failure of the government's war on drugs, and the difficulties facing this country's American Indian population, who are now facing some of the fallout from that war.

Department of Unintended Consequences

Democrats' Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act may lead employers to rely more on part-time workers, who are not covered by the act. Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution comments.

G.E. Pays No Tax

Via Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution; Mr. Tabarrok comments: "GE’s tax bill illustrates both why our corporate tax rate is too high and too low. The nominal rate is too high which encourages a real rate which is too low."

The Newt

"In the crowded race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney may be the tortoise, but Newt Gingrich is the newt. And newts are highly adaptive salamanders that regenerate limbs when wounded and emit poison when challenged."

This is a softball piece, with the exception of the vicious and spot-on opener.

Links of Interest

1. Carne Ross on the leaderless revolution.
2. James Ford on liberal religion and ecological consciousness.
3. Jaak Panksepp and Jeff Bergdorf's (both formerly of Bowling Green State University) research on rodent laughter.
4. Shakespeare was a gangster.
5. You can't argue with ratings.

Hamilton Morris, I Walked with a Zombie

At Harper's, an excerpt from a new book by Hamilton Morris on Haitian zombies. Morris plans to pick up where Wade Davis (author of The Serpent and the Rainbow) left off. Here is Morris having a conversation with Alex, a Haitian whom he hired as a guide:

I have hinted but not explained to Alex why I’m in Haiti. I am fully aware that what I’m doing is considered by some to be in poor taste and, perhaps worse, slightly obvious. It is approximately six hours into our meeting that I feel at liberty to broach the subject of zombification. We are eating lunch. Alex is more than happy to offer his opinions: “Many Americans think the zombie is a myth, but in Haiti it is a fact that is not questioned except when the upper class wish to impress an American. The politicians and the rich want to abandon the traditional ways, but zombies are real. They work like a slave or a maid. They work on the computers as well, making accounts.”
“What kind of accounts?” I ask.
“Eh, like spreadsheets, they make Excel.”

Another revelation comes from an interview with Max Beauvoir, the famous Vodou priest:

“Wes Craven [director of the film version of The Serpent and the Rainbow] is a filmmaker who understands the Haitian people.”

Hat tip to thebrowser.com.

Eight Books on the Effectiveness of Higher Education

At the New York Review of Books, Anthony Grafton reviews a raft of books discussing the enormous problems facing higher education today. An example from his discussion of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's Academically Adrift:

Their results are sobering. The Collegiate Learning Assessment reveals that some 45 percent of students in the sample had made effectively no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing in their first two years. And a look at their academic experience helps to explain why. Students reported spending twelve hours a week, on average, studying—down from twenty-five hours per week in 1961 and twenty in 1981. Half the students in the sample had not taken a course that required more than twenty pages of writing in the previous semester, while a third had not even taken a course that required as much as forty pages a week of reading.

Grafton's analysis of the eight books under review is judicious but reaches few conclusions. This is only appropriate given the complex nature of the problems facing higher education, which resist easy analysis (let alone resolution).

Science Is Hard

Why don't more Americans have degrees and jobs in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) fields? According to Christopher Drew of The New York Times, part of the answer, at least, is that science is so darn hard to study.

Hat tip to Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution, who notes in his characteristically wry manner that "Science itself is even harder."

Maple Syrup: A Story of Freedom, Purity, and Authenticity

"So long as the maple forests stand, suffer not your cup to be sweetened by the blood of slaves."

Psychology's Magician

A fascinating (if at times insufficiently critical) profile of Carl Jung at The New Atlantis. I didn't finish reading it (busy preparing for a presentation), but what I did read held my attention (Freud, phallus, faith). Timely considering the new film by David Cronenberg. Also, the author's name is fascinating in its own right.

Is Philosophy the Most Practical Major?

Is Philosophy the Most Practical Major?

No.

An Economist Critiques the Humanities

Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution recently blogged about the increase in the number of students with humanities degrees and the lack of growth in the number of students with STEM (sciences, technology, engineering, and math) degrees. As a lover of the arts and letters, it's hard to fault students for pursuing degrees in the humanities, but it's hard to argue with the evidence that students pay a price for pursuing degrees in these less marketable fields. Tabarrok further argues that the government is wasting its money by subsidizing degrees in disciplines with fewer positive externalities for the economy. Another factor is the increasing costs of higher education, which do not appear to be producing increasing gains (either economic or in terms of personal growth and development).

Links of Interest

1. Profile of David Graeber, anthropologist and theorist behind Occupy Wall Street.

2. Scathing critique of Rick Perry's crony capitalism.

3. What happens at a Zen retreat run by Brad Warner.

4. Julian Baggini reviews Owen Flanagan's The Bodhisattva's Brain and James Austin's Meditating Selflessly.

Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen

Brad Warner is an American-born Soto Zen priest who has authored numerous books explicating his views of Zen Buddhism, including Hardcore Zen, Sit Down and Shut Up, and Sex, Sin, and Zen. Warner combines an intense interest in Zen practice with the sensibility of punk rock and American and Japanese popular culture (in particular, a passion for Japanese monster cinema). He blogs at Hardcore Zen, where recently he wrote a post titled "I Am So Over This Buddhism Shit!". Warner has been increasingly vocal with his criticisms of mainstream Buddhism, that is, of Buddhism as it is commonly understood and practiced in the West, in particular the United States. In this blog post, Warner combines a few criticisms of mainstream Buddhism which a critique of the monastic life:

But human beings like to do things together. We're social creatures. And so a monastic tradition also developed within Buddhism. A lotta folks think that if you're not hip to the monastery thang you ain't no Buddhist. They're wrong. Shakyamuni himself did not come to his understanding as a member of any religious order, and there is a laundry list as long as your arm of other great teachers who either shunned monastic life, or came to monastic life after establishing the Way on their own, or who did a bit of the monastic stuff when it was necessary but largely stayed away from it. The non-monastic tradition in Buddhism is just as vital as the monastic one.

But the pull towards making Buddhism a social thing, and only a social thing, is strong. In America, we seem dead set on turning Buddhism into a string of socially agreed upon cliches and buzzwords.

A couple weeks ago or so I put a post up on my blog in which I moaned about some of the buzzwords and neo-traditions that have become au currant among American Buddhists these days. One was that dependable puppy dog of a word, "mindfulness." Christ I hate that word. The word seems to indicate some vague state of thinking hard about what you're doing. And I know we're all taught that we should think about what we're doing. But that's not the Buddhist approach. Do what you're doing. When thinking becomes a distraction, stop thinking and get back to doing. I'm also sick to death of hearing hipster Buddha dudes use the word "skillful" to describe things they like and "unskillful" to describe things they don't. It's a total misuse of the old Buddhist idea of upaya, or "skillful means," by which ancient Buddhist teachers are said to have taught in unorthodox ways. These days it just means whatever's under discussion didn't rub the guy who called it "skillful" the wrong way. I'm also fed up with the concept of the "dharma talk," which has come to mean something like, "guys in funny robes using buzzwords like 'mindfulness' and 'skillful' to lull people who think of themselves as 'spiritually minded' to sleep." I'm tired of watching entire audiences nod out like opium addicts while smiling knowingly whenever a favorite word or phrase floats through the haze.

Warner is correct that Shakyamuni Buddha did not become enlightened while he was a member of a religious order, and that there are instances of Buddhist teachers who were not monks or who did not practice Buddhism or attain wisdom exclusively during their tenure as monks. But it is disingenuous to try to downplay the importance of monasticism in Buddhism in this way. Shakyamuni founded the order of monks, the Pali Canon makes it clear that only monks are expected to be able to become enlightened, and stories of Buddhist teachers who aren't monks are relatively few and far between, nowhere near as common as stories of ordained teachers or teachers who spend most of their working life ordained.

It is even more misleading for Warner to imply that the emphasis on monasticism is somehow uniquely American. The opposite is closer to the truth. It is only in the West that we have seen such a proliferation of non-ordained Buddhist teachers, and teachers of mindfulness and other Buddhist meditation techniques. This represents a massive transformation of the understanding of Buddhism and of the social role of Buddhist teachers, in comparison with all of the lands in which Buddhism was traditionally practiced. Warner's opposition to the monastic life (and in particular his musing while on retreat that "But god-dammit I’d rather be at Amoeba Records right now"!) marks him as distinctively American in his approach to Buddhism, and--dare I say it--much closer to "mainstream Buddhism" than he would care to admit.

Warner has always been a contrarian, and that's both part of his charm and part of his usefulness to the broader Buddhist community. He is assuredly not afraid of rocking the boat or of ruffling feathers (or, heck, plucking them off one by one!). The story is that, back in his punk days, he used to dress like a hippie (bell bottoms and long hair) when he went to shows--just to razz the other punks, or to teach them the deeper lesson that no rules means no rules? One gets the sense that Warner relishes his role as a thorn in the side of mainstream Buddhism, so perhaps it is not surprising that he should attack mainstream Buddhism even when he most seems to embody it.

Warner is also harshly critical of the mindfulness movement in mainstream Buddhism (as represented by Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Sharon Salzberg, the three founders of the Insight Meditation Society). Once again, I think he overstates his case. In fact, I think he is being downright uncharitable in his interpretation of mindfulness, and in effect attacking a straw man: "The word seems to indicate some vague state of thinking hard about what you're doing." This is not at all how Goldstein, Kornfield, and Salzberg use the term "mindfulness," as Warner would surely know if he had read any of their books--or indeed, any of the many popular treatments of mindfulness which have come out in recent years. The traditional understanding of mindfulness as a state of nondiscursive, nondual awareness, in which the subject attends directly to the objects of his experience, without the meditation of the conceptual categories of discursive thought, must be well-known to Warner. I can only interpret his assault on mindfulness as part of an attempt to brand himself as outside of and therefore superior to the many teachers and practitioners of mainstream Buddhism. The recent popularity of mindfulness must be driving much of Warner's opposition to it. But I think Soto Zen's emphasis on bringing the awareness of meditation into daily life actually has much in common with both the traditional Buddhist understanding of mindfulness and the contemporary mindfulness movement. In fact, this very similarity may be partially fueling Warner's need to distance himself from mindfulness, in order to retain a distinctive brand for his version of Buddhism.

On the other hand, Warner is right about the over-use of buzzwords in Buddhism, including "mindfulness" and "skillful". The terms "skillful" and "unskillful" typically do not add much more than "good" and "bad", or "useful" and "not useful". But the over-use of buzzwords is a human phenomenon, it is not unique to mainstream Buddhism, and it doesn't seem to be as damaging as, say, a Buddhist priest mis-appropriating funds or having sex with his or her students. Warner is also correct about the lazy, hazy attitude that can take over among Buddhists. Once again, I think this is a general human problem, though it may be especially problematic in mainstream Buddhism, perhaps because mainstream Buddhists (to the extent that this term meaningfully refers to anyone, which could be problematic) do seem to conceive of their religion or their practice as a "feel-good" type of thing, as opposed to a serious and challenging practice with respect to which they should always be on guard and always on their feet.

I've been speculating about Warner's reasons for attacking mainstream Buddhism, and these speculations could well be way off the mark. But it does seem clear that he's being uncharitable and inaccurate in some of his attacks against mainstream Buddhism. It also seems clear that Warner is much more of a mainstream or American Buddhist than he would care to admit. The contrariness, the punk and pop culture sensibilities, and his avowedly secular lifestyle (despite being ordained as a Buddhist monk) mark him as distinctively Western and American, and as being very much against the grain of the entire tradition of Buddhism, going back to Shakyamuni himself. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. But Warner--unlike, say, Stephen Batchelor, one of the initiators of the movement known as secular Buddhism--seems unwilling to acknowledge just how radical his interpretation of Buddhism actually is.

Secular Buddhism

In a comment on a previous post on this blog, Hadgu suggested I check out a couple of blogs by secular Buddhists. In a nutshell, secular Buddhism is a new movement which seeks to make Buddhism compatible with the worldview of scientific naturalism. Among other things, this entails stripping Buddhism of supernatural doctrines, as well as any doctrines which conflict with the discoveries of the empirical sciences; it also entails abandoning rituals or other practices which are predicated upon such doctrines. So, reincarnation is out, as well as propitiation of gods and spirits. Secular Buddhists also seek to reconcile Buddhism with contemporary ethics and politics.

Hadgu mentioned three blogs for me to check out: David Chapman's wordpress blog; The Secular Buddhist blog; and Zen Naturalism. All of these blogs are worth looking into if you are interested at all in learning more about secular Buddhism. In this post, I will spend a little time discussing David Chapman's blog.

I'm not sure whether David Chapman identifies himself as a secular Buddhist, but he's definitely someone interested in making Buddhism consistent with the discoveries of contemporary science. For example, he has a series of posts which effectively debunk the theory that contemporary Buddhist meditation practices are descended from the methods practiced by monks in the time of the Buddha. Chapman's central claim is that Buddhist mindfulness meditation (and even Buddhism itself) as we now know it was effectively a creation of the 19th century, by reformers in Theravada countries such as Burma, Sri Lanka, and Thailand influenced in at least some cases by ideas from the West. Chapman's claim is based in part on research by contemporary historians of Buddhism, but also on his own reading of the records of the founders of the modern meditation practices in Burma and Thailand. As pointed out in some of the comments on his blog, Chapman probably overstates the extent to which Buddhist meditation was invented in the 19th century; the term 'revived' is probably more apt, based on what is now known (and there is much about the 19th century revival of meditation that is still unknown). Nevertheless, Chapman is correct that contemporary Buddhists, especially traditional Buddhists, routinely obscure and rewrite their own history, and that they are irrationally hostile towards the work of modern researchers which challenges the stories they tell about themselves.

Chapman is also interested in challenging what he refers to as "consensus Buddhism", which is the family of views about Buddhism which predominates among Western Buddhists, particularly (or so it would seem) in the United States. I'm not sure the extent to which the concept of consensus Buddhism captures the complex and diverse reality of Western Buddhism as it actually exists, but many of Chapman's observations are to the point, such as his discussion of the way in which many Western Buddhists have down-played or ignored the traditional role of disgust, horror, and contempt in Buddhism (such as in the traditional meditation practice of the funerary contemplations). He has many interesting posts which summarize some of the current research on the history of modern Buddhism, which was transformed in the 19th and 20th centuries, both in Asia and as it was carried to the West (for example, see here, here, here, here. and here).

Chapman seems to be quite sincere in his practice of Buddhism (he is a dedicated practitioner of a lineage of Vajrayana Buddhism), and he is an effective expositor of issues relevant to secular Buddhism, traditional Buddhism, and contemporary Western Buddhism. Having said that, I wonder whether he is misguided to spend so much energy in what seems like attacks on fellow Buddhists. One thing that can be noticed on many of the excellent Buddhist blogs and websites out there (and I hope to discuss more in future blog posts) is the amount of time and energy dedicated to arguments with other Buddhists and with people from other belief systems. I resonate pretty deeply with the aims and methods of people like David Chapman, and with the secular Buddhists and Buddhist naturalists out there, but I'm not sure that the best way to spend the fleeting moments of your life is in bitter contention, or trying to relentlessly prove that your own way of looking at things is the best. Even if your way of looking at things is the best, there's something you miss if you lose sight of your actual everyday experience. (And this everyday experience is not really ordinary, but pretty surprising and extraordinary if you look at it closely enough.) I guess my worry is that too many of us interested in discovering and exploring the sacred (whatever that may turn out to mean) fritter away too much of our lives in sterile debate, and miss out on quite a lot of lived experience. That's something I'm trying to avoid on this blog--although frankly it's been something of a struggle, since my whole conditioning pushes me towards contention and condescension whenever I say anything at all. But I think those of us interested in naturalistic approaches to the sacred would probably do better to focus on providing a positive vision of what we're about, than to try to tear down the views of others. Here's hoping we succeed at that task.

Some English Translations of the Daodejing

The Daodejing may be the single most-translated Chinese text. Nevertheless, finding an English edition of the Daodejing which is suitable for use in the classroom or individual study is something of a challenge. When I first started teaching the Daodejing, I used the Penguin Classics edition with D. C. Lau's translation. This translation dates from 1963, but is still very useful. The translation is clear, with few idiosyncratic choices. Lau's only bias is that he reads the work more as a political treatise than a mystical work (whereas in fact it may be both). The Penguin Classics edition provides an extensive introduction, glossary, and chronological table, and supplementary essays on "The Problem of Authorship" and "The Nature of the Work."

Lau's translation holds up exceptionally well, and is still referenced by other scholars. A lot has changed in the field of scholarship on the Daodejing since 1963, however. Lau's translation predates the discovery of the Mawangdui and Guodian texts of the Daodejing, for example. The Mawangdui texts were found in 1973 in a tomb dating from 168 BC. Two copies of the Daodejing were found at Mawangdui--the "A" and "B" texts, both written on silk. The A and B texts are mostly complete, though they contain differences both from each other and from the received (Wang Bi) edition of the Daodejing. For example, the order of the Dao and De books of the Daodejing is reversed in the Mawangdui texts, with the De book coming first. The Mawangdui texts also lack the chapter divisions of the received edition, and contain many (mostly minor) textual variations.

The Guodian text, written on bamboo, was discovered in 1993 in a tomb dated from before 300 BC. The Guodian text is the oldest copy of the Daodejing to be discovered, but is incomplete, though it contains 14 bamboo strips with material not included in the received edition of the Daodejing.

Some recent translations of the Daodejing have been based on the Mawangdui or the Guodian texts instead of that of the received edition. Robert Henricks, for example, has put out both a translation based on the Mawangdui texts and a translation based on the Guodian text. I have only read the former, which is published under the name Te-Tao Ching (Ballantine Books, 1989)--to reflect the reversed order of the Dao and De books in the Mawangdui texts. Henricks' translation of the Mawangdui texts is clear and a delight to read:

When the highest type of men hear the Way, with diligence they're able to practice it; When average men hear the Way, some things they retain and others they lose; When the lowest type of men hear of the Way, they laugh out loud at it. If they didn't laugh at it, it couldn't be regarded as the Way (ch. 41).

The Hackett edition of Henrick's translation contains a very helpful philosophical introduction, and some useful textual notes throughout. I used Henricks' translation when I taught an undergraduate seminar on Indian and Chinese philosophy in the spring of 2010. The translation and ancillary materials worked well, but I decided it is better to use the received, Wang Bi edition of the Daodejing when students are reading the text for the first time. This is largely because the Wang Bi edition is the one referenced by all of the classical commentaries and by most contemporary scholarship. It was also a distraction to have to explain to my students the various ways in which the edition we were studying differed from the received edition, and how this might affect their subsequent reading about the Daodejing.

The last time I taught the Daodejing, in the spring of this year, I used the translation by Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo (Hackett Publishing, 1993). This translation contains a brief (but nonetheless helpful) introduction by Burton Watson, a glossary of Chinese words, and, most surprisingly, works of original calligraphy by translator Stephen Addiss. This translation of the Daodejing is currently my favorite, because it is the clearest and most literal that I have yet to find. The Daodejing is a very terse text, even by the standards of classical Chinese, and partially on account of this it gives rise to many difficulties in interpretation. Most translations of the Daodejing contain as many interpretations as straight translations, but Addiss and Lombardo endeavor to adhere as closely as possible to the original text of the received edition, even where this makes for hard going in English. For example, here are the first two lines of the first chapter of the Daodejing, as translated by Addiss and Lombardo: "Tao called Tao is not Tao. / Names can name no lasting name." Addiss and Lombardo capture the concision of the original text, and this makes it all the more useful for teaching purposes, because it lets students grapple themselves with the issues of interpretation. It is not for nothing that the esteemed scholar of Daoism, Livia Kohn, has said of Addiss's and Lombardo's work that "This is by far the best translation on the market today, and I have been praising it to whoever would listen." (Incidentally, Addiss's calligraphy is also of high quality, and contains both traditional and contemporary pieces, which seem to resonate with the spirit of the Daodejing.)

Despite all these strengths, I will not be using the Addiss and Lombardo translation the next time I teach the Daodejing. The translation is excellent, but the Hackett edition is lacking in terms of a sufficiently robust historical and philosophical introduction, and in terms of providing sufficient interpretive notes and commentary to help students who may be struggling with the text. The glossary of terms also suffers greatly from the fact that it seems to only make reference to those Chinese characters which happen to appear in the one line of Chinese text which has been printed alongside each of the chapters of the English translation. Given the brevity of the text, it would have made much more sense to provide a complete facing-page copy of the Chinese characters, instead of choosing somewhat arbitrarily to restrict the Chinese to one line per chapter.

Hackett has another good translation of the Daodejing in print, this one by noted sinologist Philip J. Ivanhoe (first published in 2002, and reprinted in 2003). Ivanhoe's translation is clear, adheres closely to the text of the received edition, and contains few idiosyncratic readings: "A Way that can be followed is not a constant Way. / A name that can be named is not a constant name." The Hackett edition contains a brief but helpful introduction, fairly extensive textual notes, and an appendix which discusses the language of the Daodejing. I would have liked to have seen a more extensive introduction, and more extensive notes discussing the interpretation of both individual lines and whole chapters of the text. Nevertheless, I am currently planning on using Ivanhoe's translation the next time I teach the Daodejing.

Two other recent translations are worthy of note. The first is Roger T. Ames' and David L. Hall's Daodejing: "Making This Life Significant": A Philosophical Translation (Ballantine, 2003). This edition contains the original Chinese text from the Wang Bi edition and a medium-length commentary by the translators alongside each translated chapter. This seems like a promising format for an edition of the Daodejing intended for use by students and scholars. This edition contains both a historical introduction and a separate (and lengthy) philosophical introduction, a glossary of key terms, a thematic index, and an appendix with a translation of a text called The Great One Gives Birth to the Waters (which comprises the 14 bamboo strips found in the Guodian text of the Daodejing that have no parallel in either the Mawangdui texts or the Wang Bi edition).

While I like the format of Ames' and Hall's translation, and I like their stated goal of creating an edition of the Daodejing with specialized commentary by and for philosophers (not just sinologists), in practice I find fault with several characteristics of this edition. For one thing, I would have liked to see more traditional commentaries and contemporary scholarship cited in their chapter by chapter commentaries. More importantly, I found the style of their translation wanting, in part because it seems (for lack of a better expression) "too clever by half": "Way-making (dao that can be put into words is not really way-making; / And naming (ming) that can assign fixed reference to things is not really name-making." Their translation contains too much interpretive interpolation for my taste, and does not convey the graceful (albeit frequently ambiguous) simplicity of the original. Ames' and Hall's interpretive commentaries and introductions also seem biased and idiosyncratic, containing their own philosophical musings when it would be more helpful to provide a context for interpretation grounded in the traditional commentaries on the one hand and recent work by scholars on the other. Indeed, this tendency toward the idiosyncratic is seen in the tile of their work itself: the phrase "Making This Life Significant" is inserted after Dao De Jing, and this choice reflects the heavy-handed approach Ames and Hall fall into in attempting to reveal the work's philosophical significance.

The last translation I will mention is by Edmund Ryden, and published by Oxford World's Classics (2008). The translation is based on the received edition of the text, but Ryden occasionally also makes use of the Mawangdui and Guodian texts for some of his readings and interpretations. Each chapter of the translation is cross-referenced with the corresponding section of the Mawangdui texts (and the Guodian text, where appropriate). This edition has a very informative introduction by Benjamin Penny, a very brief commentary on each chapter prior to the translation, textual notes, and an index of key terms and images which appear in the text. This apparatus is useful, though I would have liked to see more extensive introductory comments on each chapter with at least a few references to classical commentaries and contemporary scholarship. The main problem with this edition, at least for me, lies in the idiosyncracies in Ryden's translation. For example, Ryden translates de as "life force," and he uses feminine pronouns whenever referring to the Dao: "Look at her and you do not see her: name her invisible; / Listen to her and you do not hear her, name her inaudible" (ch. 14). Neither of these choices is woefully misleading or inaccurate, and both are thought-provoking, but I find these and other unusual choices in Ryden's translation to be quite distracting, especially when taken as a whole.

Wang Bi on Progress and Goals

"Being good at making progress lies in not hurrying, and being good at reaching goals lies in not forcing one's way." -- Wang Bi (226-249), Outline Introduction to the Laozi.

Were the Inca literate?

There is a fascinating article on Slate about the quest to decode Incan khipus, knotted cords which were used to record numbers, and which may have also been used to record written information as well. According to the article, the financial record-keepers of the Inca seemed to out-perform Spanish accountants when their figures were compared in 16th-century lawsuits. Apparently, the Spanish eventually put the kibosh on the use of khipus, in characteristic fashion:

The Spaniards' institutional response to this singular accounting system, originally benign, shifted in 1583, when Peru's nascent Roman Catholic church decreed that khipus were the devil's work and ordered the destruction of every khipu in the former Inca empire. (This was the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition, and the church was making a major push to convert natives from their pantheistic state religion.)

What can one say? The brutal destruction of cultures is as depressing as it is common in history. One only hopes that the surviving khipus will one day be decoded.

Links

1. The absence of top predators unravels ecosystems.

2. NASA's next space telescope may be scrapped.

3. $625 cookbook.

Links of Interest

1. Carl Bernstein on Murdoch's Watergate.

2. What's it like to work at a call center in India?

3. "Harnessing the power of feedback loops."

4. Meditation is roughly as effective as morphine at reducing pain.

Links

1. The recession hits Irish gangs.

2. Google to re-brand Blogger and Picasa.

3. Interview with Gary Klein on the role of intuition in expert decision-making.

David Brooks on House Republicans

Conservative columnist David Brooks wrote a piece yesterday criticizing House Republicans for failing to make a budget deal with House Democrats. I do not stay very informed about contemporary politics, but based on what I have been reading in the news, Brooks' column rings true:

But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.

The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it.

The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation’s honor.

Brooks' words are a damning indictment of the anti-tax ideology of the contemporary Republican party. I agree with Republicans that tax rates are too high, but as Brooks points out, there are a lot of other issues on the table, and the tax issue should not be viewed as a trump card or sine qua non of politics. It is unfortunate that the Republicans, who portray themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility, are not proving more effective stewards of the government's finances. I would consider voting for Republicans if they focused on effectively promoting personal freedom and sound economic policies, but they seem excessively focused on promoting militarism, moralizing crusades, and an extreme and economically unsound anti-tax ideology.

John R. McRae, Seeing through Zen

I recently read a book about the early history of Zen Buddhism called Seeing through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Geneaology in Chinese Chan Buddhism, by John R. McRae, a professor of East Asian Buddhism at Indiana University.

McRae's book presents a summary of the early history of Chan, from its origins in China during the Tang Dynasty, through its mature development during the Song. McRae criticizes a lot of the previous histories of Chan, for naively treating legendary stories as factual, and for adopting both an overly-romanticized view of Chan during the Tang Dynasty on the one hand, and an overly-cynical view of Chan during the Song Dynasty on the other. There has been a tendency to regard Tang-Dynasty Chan as uniquely authentic and rigorous, and to regard Song-Dynasty Chan as having degenerated from its original state of rigor and sincerity. Interestingly, this conceit seems to have originated in part as a literary device among Chan texts from the Song Dynasty itself.

McRae's book is formed from a collection of essays which were edited together to form a single continuous narrative. While his history of early Chan is not comprehensive, the resulting text does not feel too broken-up, and it works well as a general introduction to recent work on the history of early Chan.

I will probably have more to say about Seeing through Zen in a later blog post, as it is a text rich with implications both for historians and practitioners of Zen, and at some point I would also like to write about another book by McRae, The Northern School and the Formation of Early Ch'an Buddhism. Until then, I would just like to highly recommend both of these works to anyone interested in the history of Zen.

The Illusions of Psychiatry?

Marcia Angell recently wrote a two-part article in the New York Review of Books containing numerous criticisms of the field of psychiatry. Angell's article contains a review of three books: The Emperor's New Drugs by Irving Kirsch; Robert Whitaker's Anatamoy of an Epidemic; and Daniel Carlat's Unhinged. I am interested primarily in discussing Irving Kirsch's claim that psychiatric drugs are no more effective than placebos, and Robert Whitaker's criticisms of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR).

Irving Kirsch gives two main arguments in defense of his claim that psychiatric drugs are no more effective than placebos. The first is that, when one takes into account all of the clinical trials conducted by pharmaceutical companies--not just those successful trials which are more likely to get published in medical journals--placebos are 82% as effective as the six psychiatric drugs approved by the FDA between 1987 and 1999 (Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Serzone, and Effexor). This result shows that the drugs are at best not much more effective than placebos.

Kirsch's second main argument is that the apparent extra degree of effectiveness of psychiatric drugs over placebos is actually due to an enhanced placebo effect. Kirsch notes that the psychiatric drugs believed to be effective all have noticeable side effects. The problem is that the presence of noticeable side effects undermines the double-blind control put on the trials. Because the actual drug causes noticeable side effects, and because a placebo does not cause side effects, it is possible for a patient to figure out if he has been given the actual drug and not a placebo. The fact that the medications appear to work better in treating severe cases of mental illness may simply be due to the fact that higher doses tend to be given in severe cases, and the side effects are therefore more noticeable. When side effects are noticeable, it becomes more likely that the patient believes he is receiving the actual drug, and thus more likely that the placebo effect occurs. Thus, psychiatric drugs may out-perform placebos (by a small margin) just because they are better at producing a placebo effect.

Crucial to Kirsch's analysis is data from unpublished studies conducted by drug companies on the effectiveness of the psychiatric drugs in question. Kirsch had to use the Freedom of Information Act to get the FDA to release the data. The FDA requires drug companies to give them data on all of the trials conducted by drug companies--not just selected trials or trials which have been published in medical journals. However, the FDA only requires that two of the trials show clinical effectiveness before giving a drug approval. This is problematic, because drug companies can conduct any number of trials in an attempt to show effectiveness, and even if two of the trials do show effectiveness, these two trials do not necessarily reflect the overall data set. The FDA basically allows the drug companies to cherry-pick trials in determining the effectiveness of a drug.

The second part of Angell's article contains a discussion of Robert Whitaker's criticisms of the DSM-IV-TR and its predecessors. Angell portrays the DSM as largely the creation of one man, Robert Spitzer, a former professors of psychiatry at Columbia University. Angell portrays Spitzer as not giving sufficient weight to views other than his own in producing the DSM; Spitzer both hand-picked the 15-member task force who developed the DSM, and said in an interview in 1989 that "I could just get my way by sweet-talking and whatnot," for example. Angell claims that Spitzer's work on the DSM was biased by his goal of producing a diagnostic manual that would facilitate the use of psychiatric drugs to treat mental disorders. Finally, Angell notes that the DSM is free of citations to back up its decisions regarding the classification of and diagnostic criteria for mental disorders, which undermines its claims to represent an informed scientific consensus.

I would add that the DSM is inherently problematic in that its definitions of mental disorders and diagnostic criteria are generally symptom-based. My understanding is that it is preferable, perhaps essential, for a disease to be identified and diagnosed not on the basis of symptoms alone (especially behavioral symptoms, which are often hard to reliably assess), but rather on the basis of measurable physical indicators--such as the presence of antibodies in the blood in the case of a viral infection. The criteria proposed by the DSM seem to at best identify syndromes which consist of characteristic clusters of abnormal behaviors, and not true diseases with specific etiologies and biological markers.

I don't know enough about psychiatry to say whether Angell's article gives an accurate picture of the state of psychiatry as a whole, or whether she is exaggerating the problems the discipline faces. Nevertheless, I think she presents enough information to give reason for concern. I do think that psychiatry's medial model has great potential to help people with mental disorders, but it may be that this potential has been realized even less than we think.

How Not to Write a Novel

Via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, here is a list of practical advice on how to write a book from 23 successful authors. The list was compiled by Steven Silberman, author of the famous article "The Geek Syndrome," who is currently working on a book on autism and neurodiversity.

In terms of works of fiction, the best how-to book I have read is How Not to Write a Novel, by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman. This book was recommended to me by my friend Teresa Milbrodt, a creative writing professor (and excellent writer) who blogs at The Continuing Adventures of Walks-Far Woman. My own native genius was the source of another way not to write a novel, which was to simply desist from trying. (For some reason, Mittelmark and Newman neglected to include that bezel of wisdom in their otherwise admirable text.)

To Lecture or Not to Lecture?

My boss Fred Miller recently directed my attention to an article in the journal Science (from 13 May 2011) about the relative effectiveness of two teaching methods. The study pitted senior physics instructors who had received high marks as lecturers against less-experienced post-docs using a method known as "deliberate practice." Deliberate practice involves giving students pretests to assess prior student knowledge, making them work on challenging questions during class meetings, and giving them frequent feedback on the questions they have been working on. In the study, the senior instructors were rated highly in terms of the quality of their lectures, but more learning happened in the classes using deliberate practice.

This study received coverage in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which ends with the following words of caution:

Mr. Deslauriers [one of the authors of the study--JSM] cautioned that instructors who wanted to change methods to improve learning in their classrooms would have to spend a fair amount of studying the practices for them to be effectively executed.

This quotation bears keeping in mind. Deliberate practice sounds like a great method, and I plan to use more of it in my teaching next year, but I do thing it will require a fair amount of effort to actually implement effectively. I wonder if there are any books or articles on education methods that provide useful advice on its implementation. Based on my previous dipping into the education literature, practical advice on implementation is much harder to find than the reams of verbiage on abstract theories of learning and teaching.

"The Garden of Flowing Fragrance"

That's the name of the traditional Chinese formal garden at the Huntington in San Marino, California. For those of you who don't know, the Huntington is a former private estate converted into a series of gardens, art galleries, and collections of prints and manuscripts open to the public. I've been going to the Huntington since I was a child, when I remember being particularly fascinated by their collection of illuminated manuscripts (including a copy of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales), early printed works (the most famous being a copy of the Gutenburg Bible). and maps and globes from the age of exploration. This time, what stood out most was a new (to me) exhibit on the history of science --which included such gems as Isaac Newton's own copy of the Principia and Edwin Hubble's copy of Copernicus--and the aforementioned Chinese gardens. I had never before seen a traditional Chinese formal garden, and would have liked to have learned more about the nature of its design, construction, and maintenance, but I was able to take a few pictures of its plants and pavilions while I was there (one of which is shown above).

Emotional Vampires, and How to Deal with Emotionally Explosive People

Last week I read two popular psychology books by Albert J. Bernstein: Emotional Vampires and How to Deal with Emotionally Explosive People. These books both have very cheesy titles, and one of them (Emotional Vampires) relies on a corny metaphor for personality disorders throughout. Moreover, as you will discover if you click on the preceding links, Bernstein's website needs a major makeover! I cannot believe that this is the best picture he has of himself, for example. For someone who is such a clear writer, and who has had so much success as a consultant in the business world, I am surprised that he doesn't have more savvy at promoting himself on his website, which (like the art from his books) has a whole "It came from the 90's" vibe, in the worst possible sense.

However, despite these defects, Bernstein's books are chock full of insight into mood and personality disorders, contain informative summaries of relevant research, and give plenty of practical, hands-on-advice for dealing with emotionally difficult people (or for dealing with yourself, if you should have a personality or mood disorder!). For example, if someone is explosively angry, Bernstein recommends a variety of disarming and defusing interventions, such as calmly introducing yourself and asking to shake their hand, saying that you need a minute to think about what they are saying, or politely asking them to speak more slowly so that you can hear and understand what they are saying.

We tend to think of anger as the "explosive" emotion, but Bernstein also discusses depression and anxiety disorders in his book How to Deal with Emotionally Explosive People. Interestingly, the emotions of sadness and fear have their own corresponding categories of mood disorders (depression and anxiety disorders, respectively), but anger does not; Bernstein associates anger issues with a variety of personality disorders, which are also the main subject of his book Emotional Vampires. Remarkable for a popular work, Bernstein even makes some interesting methodological criticisms of the field of psychology in his book on explosive emotions, and critically discusses the issue of whether people with mood disorders are morally responsible for their behavior. These theoretical discussions are at a pretty rudimentary level, but Bernstein is an insightful and balanced commentator, so they still enhance his books. Bernstein has had a lot of experience working as a consultant in the business world, and his familiarity with dysfunctional behavior in the workplace really comes through. In Emotional Vampires, he even offers insight into why management gurus are so successful, and provides a balanced look at the benefits and drawbacks to their advice. Both of these books are recommended! (By the way, the new edition of Emotional Vampires which is on sale an Amazon.com lacks the cheesy vampiric cover art of the original edition, which in my view is a great improvement.)

Sophora for Health

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been sick with chronic fatigue syndrome since 2006. I wasn't diagnosed correctly until last year, and there aren't a lot of options for treatment. In my previous post on CFS, I mentioned some of the research I had found, including John Chia's theory that multiple pathogens, including viruses, bacteria, and molds, are behind CFS cases. Chia treats CFS cases according to which pathogen he finds in the patient (using blood tests or, for some of his enterovirus cases, biopsies of stomach tissue, since the infection can be hard to spot in the blood). The preferred treatments are antibiotics and antiviral drugs, but in the case of enteroviruses, there aren't yet any effective antiviral drugs which can be prescribed. Chia first tried using interferon to treat his enterovirus cases, with some success, but the costs and side effects of the drug proved prohibitive. Ideally, antiviral drugs effective against enteroviruses will soon be developed (in a phone consultation, Chia told me that a drug currently being developed to treat polio may also be effective against the kinds of enteroviruses he has found in some of his CFS patients). Until then, Chia has been prescribing an over-the-counter herbal supplement called sophora to his patients with enteroviral infections. Sophora is used in China to treat cancer and hepatitis. The root of the sophora plant contains oxymatrine, which appears to modulate the activity of Th1 and Th2 cells (which are important components of the immune system). Chia claims that 52% of his patients treated with sophora have seen an improvement in symptoms. In some cases, this has included a complete remission of symptoms, while in other cases, the imrprovements have been more modest.

I have been taking the Equilibrant brand of sophora since September of last year. (Equilibrant is a product developed by Chia in order to create a pharmaceutical-grade version of sophora, since, as with many herbal supplements, the actual dosage of oxymatrine in other sophora supplements can vary from tablet to tablet.) I decided to blog about this in case any of you have chronic fatigue syndrome, or know someone with chronic fatigue syndrome, since it can be very difficult to obtain effective treatment. In my case, I am still suffering from severe fatigue, but after taking Equilibrant for the last 8 months, several of my other symtpoms have improved dramatically: the myalgia in my muscles has decreased a lot, the digestive problems are much less severe, the circulation problems are much improved, and I get much less frequent flus and colds (previously, I would get sick with opportunistic infections literally every week or so). It seems to take a long time for the sophora to do its work, probably because it doesn't attack the virus directly, but instead merely improves the activity of the immune system; given a large enough viral load, it can take months to notice substantial improvements in symtpoms. Chia told me as much in a phone consultation, but I would have expected either that my CFS symptoms would have stopped improving by now, or that the sophora would have not had any positive effect. Instead, my symptoms still seem to be gradually improving, and this 8 months after the start of treatment.

I didn't want to blog about sophora until I knew for sure whether it was working. Even though I'm not fully recovered, the improvement has been remarkable, and I would recommend the use of sophora to others suffering from CFS, provided that they have reason to believe they are infected with an enterovirus or other pathogen that can't yet be treated through conventional means.

Amis on Hitchens

Martin Amis has written a simultaneously urbane and touching tribute to his friend Christopher Hitchens' rhetorical skills over at the Guardian. Amis praises Hitchens for his ability to create witty retorts and one-liners, but adds that Hitchens' rhetorical flourishes are coupled with a depth of insight usually lacking in those gifted with a quick tongue and a sharp wit:

"A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends."

"It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment."

"This has always been the central absurdity of 'moral', as opposed to 'political' censorship: If the stuff does indeed have a tendency to deprave and corrupt, why then the most depraved and corrupt person must be the censor who keeps a vigilant eye on it."

While Amis is generous in his praise for his friend, he also doesn't shy away from a few criticisms that seem to hit the mark. Remarkably for a writer with Amis' reputation, he (justly) accuses Hitchens of violations of literary decorum in the latter's insertion of low-brow (if punchy) verbal attacks against his opponents:

Here are some indecorous quotes from the The Quotable Hitchens. "Ronald Reagan is doing to the country what he can no longer do to his wife." On the Chaucerian summoner-pardoner Jerry Falwell: "If you gave Falwell an enema, he'd be buried in a matchbox." On the political entrepreneur George Galloway: "Unkind nature, which could have made a perfectly good butt out of his face, has spoiled the whole effect by taking an asshole and studding it with ill-brushed fangs." The critic DW Harding wrote a famous essay called "Regulated Hatred". It was a study of Jane Austen. We grant that hatred is a stimulant; but it should not become an intoxicant.

As deft verbal attacks, Hitchens' barbs are effective, but they violate Amis' formulation of literary decorum, which demands (inter alia) that a writer match his content with his style. Amis seems correct that, when having a serious argument on topics such as politics or religion, the potty-mouth language and low-brow humour is best left behind (though perhaps to be used later in a different context. . .).

I enjoyed reading Amis' essay, both for the wit and wisdom of Hitchens himself, and for the just criticisms that Amis makes of his friend's literary conduct and character. I was also intrigued by Amis' brief discussion of literary decorum, which brought to mind Cicero's classic discussions of eloquence, and the recurring interest in Cicero as a model for rhetoric and prose by later generations of scholars and thinkers in the West--from the Renaissance at least down to the period of the Enlightenment (when writers such as David Hume were directly inspired by Cicero's Latin prose in crafting their own literary creations using early modern vernaculars). I will close with Amis' statement of the principle of literary decorum, which is far too sloppy to satisfy an analytic philosopher, but succeeds in providing a useful starting point for anyone who cares to think seriously about this matter:

In literature, decorum means the concurrence of style and content – together with a third element, which I can only vaguely express as earning the right weight. It doesn't matter what the style is, and it doesn't matter what the content is; but the two must concur. If the essay is something of a literary art, which it clearly is, then the same law obtains.

Well said!

Sugar: The Bitter Truth

Last night, a few friends and I did one of our semi-regular "Movie Nights." We started with Transcendent Man, a documentary about inventor and tech prognosticator Ray Kurzweil. This was interesting, but I would have liked to see more in depth arguments both for and against Kurzweil's singularity thesis, instead of relatively insubstantial sound bites from Kurzweil and his detractors. For example, the documentary could have shown some of the mathematical models Kurzweil uses to make his predictions, and the objections of the critics could have been explained in terms of the particular models he is using.

After the Kurzweil doc, we then watched "Sugar: The Bitter Truth," a youtube video of a presentation given by Robert Lustig about the harmful effects of eating sucrose and fructose. I first learned about this video after reading an article by Gary Taubes in the April 13th issue of the New York Times Magazine. According to Lustig, a professor of clinical pediatrics at University of California San Fransicso, consumption of sucrose and fructose (but not glucose) is behind a lot of the health problems of modern societies, including the increased rates of obesity, type II diabetes, and heart disease. Lustig claims that the harmful effects of sucrose and fructose are due to the way that these molecules are metabolized by the liver, and in his presentation he goes into considerable detail about the biochemistry of sucrose and fructose metabolism. He also presents a lot of compelling evidence linking sugar consumption to chronic ailments such as type II diabetes and heart disease. This aroused considerable interest in my friend Scott Hevner, who teaches biology, and Hadgu Hadgu, who is planning on pursuing a career in public health. I think we were all a bit surprised by how compelling Lustig's presentation was, given the controversial nature of his claims. I for one will be looking for more information about the health effects of sugar, and I have already decided to consume less fructose and sucrose as a preventive measure: even though the jury is still out among experts about the health effects of sugar, there seems to be enough evidence about its ill effects to be cautious.

The Theory and Practice of Religion

In his post from April 7th, John Gfoeller said:

Intellection can only take a person so far. Then one must make a choice: to choose a religion –which is a package deal– or not; and then to put that decision into practice. If religion is like a vehicle, then only so much can be learned from studying it. After a certain point, a person should pick a vehicle and make the journey.

John made a similar point in his post from April 12th:

Religion isn’t a set of points of points of propositional logic. Religion is a way of life, a set of beliefs and tools for addressing the ultimate issues of our shared experience of life.

And the issue came up again in his post from April 14th:

Religion is a way of life. It is a set of beliefs, practices, community, and spirituality that expresses and reinforces a shared encounter of life and life’s ultimate issues. It is not mostly about data and thinking. It is about how to live.

It seems that you are analyzing religion solely or mostly in terms of philosophy. I think that approach can only yield partial results because philosophy is only part of religion.

Yet, religion is its own thing. It is not a branch of philslophy (although sometimes it can be philosophy in action or as applied to life). Religion — like art, sport, love, etc. — is its own sui generis phenomenon with its own purpose and process. Philosophy can be part of religion, but that is not necessary for religion to function. Hence, analyzing religion in terms of philosophy alone is like trying analyze art or sport or love in terms of philosophy alone. The result will only be partially accurate.

Consider, for example, that most members of religion (now and in the past) have not known much (or any) of the philosophical side of their religions. Yet, they practiced those religions.

I agree that religion is a way of life and not just a belief system. Since in my previous posts I was focusing on the doctrinal side of Buddhism, it probably seemed that I was reducing the religion to its set of beliefs. But I did not intend to be suggesting that.

While I agree that a religion is more than just a set of beliefs, I do think that beliefs are an essential part of a religion. For example, Christians are supposed to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, and I don't think this is an optional or insignificant part of being a Christian, even though it is not the whole shebang. Similarly, Buddhism is in part a set of beliefs about karma, rebirth, and the end of suffering, even though it is also a code of conduct and a way of life.

Because beliefs are part of the essence of religion, it seems irresponsible to adopt a religion if one doesn't share its beliefs, or at least its core beliefs. How one defines the core is a tricky question, but not an impossible one to anwser; a Christian who denied that the genealogies of Jesus given in the Gospels are historically accurate probably still counts as a Christian, but one who denies that Jesus is the Messiah almost certainly does not, for example. Similarly, a person who denies that the Buddha could fly through the air or walk on water (as described in the sutras of the Pali Canon) may still count as a Buddhist, but if he denies that the Buddha was enlightened, then he almost certainly does not.

Having said that, John is right to focus on the practical side of religion, for if doctrines are the bones and sinews of a religion, then practice is its flesh--that from which a person derives spiritual sustenance, if you will. Yet for all that, the flesh and the bones are something of a package deal. And if you can't stomach the bones, then you should stay away from the religion.

Groups and Independence of Judgment

I am separating my responses to a previous post by John Gfoeller, in order to keep the length of the posts manageable. (My previous responses to his first post are here and here; I have also responded once to his second post, here; my original post which started the dialogue is here.)

In his post, John makes a third point in response to my earlier post on spiritual traditions:

You are concerned about preserving your objectivity and your autonomy as an individual within a community.

My friend, mankind is a social species. We live our lives in terms of each other, and we are defined in large part by our relationships. Objectivity (like personal autonomy) is largely an illusion.

Again I speak as an outsider; I am not a Buddhist. But, I imagine that if you join the Buddhist religion, it will in fact shape your views. And that is not bad; that is a product of your choice to practice a religion; indeed, that is the purpose of adopting a religion. You will still be highly intelligent; you will still be a thinker and a philosopher and a scholar and a PhD., and an instructor at a university. You would lose your perspective as a secular outsider looking at religion from afar. Instead, you would be religious. Hence, what you would lose from one perspective, you would gain in experience from the other perspective.
You will not become a robot or an automaton, but you will be what you choose to affiliate yourself with and practice.

It's true that mankind is a social species, and that it is pretty difficult, if not impossible, for a person to flourish in isolation from other people. It does not follow, though, that a person should join a spiritual tradition, if this requires sacrificing independence of judgment.

It should be noted that not all groups require members to sacrifice their independence of judgment, even if the group must make collective decisions which conflict with the judgments of some of its members (as long as the individual is permitted to remain with the group with his dissenting opinion). The benefits of interaction with others, and with membership in groups to which one is committed (and, perhaps, for which one is willing to sacrifice one's own individual well-being), are indeed important, but this does not entail that one should join groups which require one to sacrifice one's freedom of thought or independence of judgment. Note that it may well be in the interest of the group for its members to retain independence of judgment, and also note that it may be unpleasant, indeed a major burden, for an individual to accept independence of judgment, for this requires great responsibility on his part.

The issue of objectivity is separate from the issue of group membership. I don't think that objectivity is an illusion, at least not in an unqualified way. Indeed, if there is no such thing as objectivity in any sense, then it is difficult to have meaningful discussions with others. Rational discourse seems to presuppose an objective basis for resolving disagreements and harmonizing judgments.

Note that independence of judgment does not imply that a person is not shaped by the views of others. Far from it. Independence of judgment simply implies that a person believes in accordance with the best evidence and arguments available to him (and this can include deferring to expert opinion when the person has good reason to believe that someone else is a qualified expert in a particular field). Much of the information an individual uses to form his judgment will indeed come from other people. And the principle of independence of judgment does not presuppose that individuals are better at forming beliefs than groups. Not at all. The principle merely presupposes that groups of people whose members work together to form beliefs but who retain independence of judgment will generate more reliable beliefs on average than groups of people whose members work together to form beliefs without independence of judgment. Groups whose members retain independence of judgment benefit from the multiple sources of information and analysis, and in fact are able to make use of more information than groups with more rigid belief-formation structures.

An individual forms the most accurate beliefs not by not being influenced by others, but by being influenced by others through the mediation of his own critical judgment. Of course, individuals using their own judgment will make mistakes all the time, but the polycentric approach to belief formation is still better than the imposition of beliefs in a top-down manner by appeals to tradition, authority, or solidarity.

It's easy for us to get hung up on dichotomies like individual vs. group or autonomy vs. solidarity, when a more nuanced analysis often reveals that these pairs are not true contradictories. I think that the intellectual autonomy of an individual is compatible with many forms of solidarity, for example, and that solidarity actually works best in the contect of intellectual autonomy. Similarly, I think that individuals flourish when they are part of flourishing groups, and that groups flourish when they give sufficient liberty to their individual members. John is right to attack the view that individuals need to steer clear of groups of any kind, but that's not the view that I am defending. Individuals need groups as sources of information and to challege and expand their thinking, but groups need to give their members sufficient indepencence of judgment for individuals to benefit maximally from membership in the group, and for the group as such to benefit maximally from its members.

Buddhist Inquiry

In a post on his blog, my friend John gave a response to my blog post on spiritual traditions. John has made a total of three replies to my series of posts on his blog; here, I am responding to another he point he made in his first post (as you can see, I am pretty far behind).

In the post on spiritual traditions, I criticized the methodology used by Buddhists (and others) for generating and testing beliefs. John's response is that the Buddhist method is actually the same (or nearly the same) as that of natural science, namely rational inquiry and controlled experimentation:

Buddhism is primarily a mystical religion with a strong intellectual support. Prince Siddhartha Gautama reported to have achieved an ineffable state of consciousness that we term “enlightenment.” He further reported that this state of consciousness eliminates suffering and produces a host of other benefits. And, he taught a set of beliefs and practices (the Dharma) whereby others can achieve this same state of consciousness also. Hence, there is in Buddhism an emphasis on monasticism as the most complete means for achieving this state of consciousness. Hence too, there is an emphasis on independent inquiry to prove or disprove those statements. In that regard, Buddhism can be regarded as a 2,500 year long investigation –by many people from different times, places and cultures — to prove or disprove Siddharth Gautama’s claims and methodology. The results have been quite a lot of adaptation for local conditions and for different personality traits, but a consistency nevertheless: his claims and his methodology work for those who choose to employ them.

So, on the one hand, Buddhism certainly has its own methodology. On the other hand, that methodology is rational inquiry and controlled experimentation to prove or disprove Siddhartha Gautoma’s claims.

And, there is no obligation to make this inquiry into the Buddha’s claims — especially if one does not find those claims to be particularly credible. For example, I remember reading one such account. The Buddha had just become enlightened, and he was on his was to the city of Benares to tell his friends of this when he came upon a forest monk. They said hello to each other, and then (as was the custom among monks) the forest monk made a polite inquiry into which school of thought the Buddha practiced. The Buddha replied with enthusiasm (perhaps too much enthusiasm?), “I’ve just become enlightened !” The forest monk replied, “Hmm. Maybe.” And then he left. :-) .

I object strongly to the claim that the method used by Buddhists to generate and test beliefs is rational inquiry and controlled experimentation. This claim is often made by those who attempt to portray Buddhism as a rational religion or as otherwise compatible with the worldview of scientific naturalism. In part, these rationalist defenses of Buddhism have their origin in Sri Lankan Buddhist apologetics from the late 19th century, when Sri Lankans were attempting to counter assertions by Christian missionaries that Buddhism, unlike Christianity, was incompatible with modern science (an odd argument for the missionaries to be making, to be sure). (David McMahan's The Making of Buddhist Modernism is an excellent history of this trend within Buddhist thought and apologetics.)

Now, it's true that, from the Buddhist point of view, knowledge is only salvific if one sees the truth of it oneself. It's not enough to simply know the four noble truths as abstract propositions, for example; one is supposed to be able to see these truths directly, by gaining penetrating insight into the nature of samsara and nirvana. This is at least part of the reason why Buddhists often talk about the importance of seeing the truth of things for oneself. It's also true that the Buddha was surprisingly tolerant of questioning or dissent among his followers, at least in comparison to some other religious figures. While, on the one hand, he explicitly condemns (with little argument, and much name-calling) the so-called 62 wrong views, on the other hand, he was open-hearted enough to ask on his deathbed if any of his followers had any doubts (DN 16), or wished to ask any questions relating to the dharma he had taught.

But neither of these facts implies that Buddhism employs a methodology based on reason and controlled experimentation. One is only supposed to put the four noble truths and other parts of the dharma to the test in that one is supposed to see the truth of them in one's own experience. A Buddhist cannot reject any part of the dharma (or at least, the core of the dharma, such as the four noble truths, karma, rebirth, no-self, and so on) and remain a Buddhist. That is why the Buddha spent so much of his time disputing with brahmins and others who disagreed with his views, such as in his dialogue with Khemaka, who denied the doctrine of no-self. Like members of other religions, Buddhists seem to presume that the Buddha is infallible, at least with respect to beliefs and assertions relevant to the religion itself. Buddhists will thus, in practice, and despite their protestations to the contrary, only use reason and experience to try to justify what the Buddha taught, and to explain away apparent objections or inconsistencies. There is no internal mechanism within Buddhism for carefully testing and revising theories based on new evidence or new analyses of old evidence, unlike in the empirical sciences. If one uses reason or experience to reject a doctrine taught by the Buddha, then one is no longer a Buddhist. Of course, individual Buddhists have the power to question the beliefs of their religion, just like memebrs of any other religion, and the culture of Buddhism may be somewhat more tolerant of this than the culture of other religions (though I dispute that this is the case in most, perhaps all, traditional Buddhist sects), but, at the end of the day, one's beliefs have to remain consistent with those of the Buddha if one wishes to remain a Buddhist. This is in contrast with the empirical sciences, in which one can question the beliefs of other scientists, even and especially the founders of one's discipline, and still count as a scientist. I therefore conclude that they have different methodologies for testing beliefs.

Not only are the core beliefs of Buddhism not revisable (from the Buddhist point of view), it seems inaccurate to describe Buddhists as using a method of "controlled experimentation". John may be thinking here of the self-discovery and inquiry that occurs during and as a result of Buddhist meditation practice. I would disagree that this counts as controlled experimentation, however. Whatever one learns as a result of meditation, it's really no better than anecdotal evidence, unless one is scientifically studying meditators. Now, anecdotal evidence can be very useful--after all, we use it every day, and in fact life would probably be impossible without it. But controlled experimentation, at least as it is understood by empirical scientists, is a far cry from any of the "experiments" conducted by Buddhists during meditation or dialogue. Scientific experiments are quantified, and controls are in place so that only one variable is manipulated at a time. This is the reverse of the case with the information one learns from meditation. Now, this is not to knock meditation--I think it is potentially very beneficial, but a method of controlled experimentation it is not, nor even of rational inquiry.

So far I have focused on how Buddhists don't do a good job subjecting their views to impartial testing procedures. Buddhists also do not adopt a rational means of generating the core beliefs of their tradition. Like other religions, the core beliefs of Buddhism are generated based on the fact that they're stated in the scriptures by the founder or his immediate disciplies, and are therefore regarded as true (and non-provisionally true at that). Now, Buddhists may offer further evidence and search for arguments in support of these beliefs after the fact, in order to reduce the doubts of the faithful or to convince unbelievers of the error of their ways, but this is not the same as generating beliefs through sustained, impartial empirical inquiry, nor subjecting theories generated in this way to further tests using truly controlled experiments. It's something of an insult to scientists to suggest that they are using the same method used by Buddhists who are engaged in apologetics or even Buddhists who are earnestly attempting to discover and experiences the (presumed) truths of their religion for themselves.

I could go on, and indeed I may in a later post, but for now I would simply like to recommend Donald Lopez's book on a related topic, entitled Buddhism and Science. I have only started to read the book, but Lopez provides a compelling account about the perceived relationship between Buddhism and modern science, which gives insight into the reason why many westerners and Asian Buddhists have sought to portray Buddhism as compatible with science, when in many ways it is not.