The Problem of Traditions

As someone who has practiced Buddhist meditation off and on for several years, and who has been interested in both Buddhist and Daoist philosophy (as well as the philosophy of other philosophical traditions, such as Neoplatonism), I have done a lot of thinking about whether to self-identify as a Buddhist or Daoist, or as a member of a particular Buddhist or Daoist sect or organization. Two of my friends who practice meditation or other spirital exercises, Phil Dickinson and John Gfoeller, have each identified with a particular tradition (Zen Buddhism, in the case of Phil, who is a regular at the Toledo Zen Center, and Orthodox Christianity, in the case of John), which has given me further cause for reflection.

There are several advantages to identifying with a spiritual tradition (or whatever one wishes to call it; the word "spiritual" is after all pretty vague and confusing). One advantage is access to a literary and intellectual tradition that can serve as a source of insight, inspiration, and guidance. Another set of advantages is access to the social, psychological, and material support that people affiliated with the tradition can provide.

Despite these (quite considerable) advantages, I think that there are three weighty disadvantages to identifying with a spiritual tradition. The first is that one is usually expected to adopt all of the beliefs of the tradition, and, in the case of every tradition I am familiar with, at least some of these beliefs are false. The Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation, for example, is a core doctrine of Buddhism--pace Stephen Batchelor and other Buddhists who claim that one can be agnostic or skeptical about reincarnation and still count as a Buddhist, the Pali Canon is quite adamant in its opposition to schools of philosophy which deny the doctrine of reincarnation (on the grounds that this makes mincemeat of the doctrine of karma and its fruit, and thus removes the justification for ethical conduct--a lousy argument, by the way, but not one that I can deal with here). The problem is that the doctrine of reincarnation is inconsistent with the worldview of scientific naturalism, and is therefore overwhelmingly likely to be false. Even Buddhist psychology, which a lot of scientific naturalists (such as Owen Flanagan) seem pretty comfortable with, contains views which conflict with the contemporary scientific understanding of the human mind, such as (according to Buddhists such as the Dalai Lama) an implicit mind-body dualism, and (in the Theravada Abhidhamma) an analysis of mental states into various combinations of psychological atoms. It seems pretty foolish to identify with a tradition that asserts even one false belief, let alone a whole slew of them.

The second problem with identifying with a spiritual tradition is methodological in character. Even if a spiritual tradition happened to assert only true doctrines, there is still a problem with the methodology that members of traditions are expected to employ in generating and maintaining their beliefs. As fas as I can tell, if one is a Buddhist, and insofar as one is a Buddhist, one is supposed to believe in the doctrines of Buddhism, or ar least the core doctrines of Buddhism, at least in part simply because they are a part of the tradition, and not based solely on the fact that they have been confirmed through subsequent careful and impartial investigation and analysis. Even though Buddhists pay a lot of lip service to the notion that one should test out all Buddhist doctrines for oneself to see if they are true, the expectation is that one will in fact confirm each and every one of those doctrines, and if one does not, then one has simply made some kind of mistake or missed something that one will discover later. A Buddhist who uses his own experience to reject the doctrine of reincarnation, or who is even willing to use his own experience to reject the doctrine of reincarnation, is no longer a Buddhist. Simply put, spiritual traditions do not encourage (and in many cases do not permit) their members to use scientific or other impartial and careful methods to put their traditions' doctrines to the test. Identifying with a tradition seems, at least in the vast majority of cases, to involve adopting an attitude of deference to the doctrines of the tradition, or at least its core doctrines, and to foresaking a commitment to subject the doctrines of the school to a critical and impartial testing and evaluation. And this just smacks of an abandonment of free thought and rational judgment, from my point of view--even if all of the doctrines of the tradition happened to be true.

A third problem with identifying with a spiritual tradition has to do with the nature of identification itself (rather than with the nature of spiritual traditions as such). When one identifies with something, one's ego becomes bound up with it, and it is difficult if not impossible to view the thing objectively. One becomes biased in favor of the spiritual tradition with which one has identified, such that even if one were trying to maintain a critical view towards the doctrines of the tradition (and thus even if one abandoned spiritual traditions' flawed methodology for generating and testing beliefs), in all likelihood one's judgment would still be skewed solely due to the fact that one had identified with the tradition in question, and regarded it as one's own. Just as people are biased towards sports teams and political parties with which they dientify, and just as they are biased towards their friends and family members in disputes with strangers, they are likely to be biased with respect to the doctrines and practices of the spiritual traditions which they call their own.

It is for these three reasons, and perhaps for others that I have overlooked, that I have decided not to identify with Buddhism, Daoism, or any other spiritual tradition. Such an act seems too dangerous from an epistemological point of view.

On the other hand, there are costs to not identifying with a tradition, such as the diminished access to the psychological, social, and material benefits that one could receive from fellow members of the tradition. For example, if one is a member of a church, one might receive psychological support from one's fellow members after the death of a loved one, one probably receives the opportunity to participate in shared projects such as fundraisers and charitable works (which fulfills one's need for social interaction, which is part of a flourishing human life), and one might receive financial assistance from the church in a time of hardship or a job offer from a fellow church member in a time of unemployment. These are considerable benefits, and it's a shame that they are so often bundled with the disadvantages of identification with a spiritual tradition that I described above.

This leads to the question of whether it is possible, at least in principle, to form groups or organizations that retain the benefits of affiliation with spiritual traditions while avoiding some of the drawbacks. This is a topic for a separate post, but such groups would combine solidarity with the principles of equality and liberty, such that individual members could use their own judgment to form beliefs, based on the best information and chains of reasoning they can find from others or develop themselves, while at the same time contributing to and benefiting from the shared psychological, social, and material resources of the group. Such groups would combine the virtues of intellectual autonomy with those of fellowship and shared commitment.

It is an open question whether it is psychologically possible for people in such an alternative organization to retain the same amount and quality of fellowship and commitment that are found in conventional organizations, while jettisoning the usual uncritical acceptance of core doctrines. And to the extent that committing oneself to a group involves identifying oneself with the group, then it may not be possible to avoid the third problem with identifying with spiritual traditions, even if one is able to avoid the first two problems. But forming alternative spiritually affiliated groups or organizations which do not compromise intellectual autonomy and critical thinking still seems like an attractive proposition.

Singapore, Efficiency, and Monopoly

The economist has a profile of the government of Singapore and why it should be taken as a model for the West. The main point is that Singapore is successful not because of a heavy-handed industrial policy or because of its authoritarian restrictions on civil liberties (which, to be fair, have lessened of late), but rather because it provides quality governance at a low price (the state consumes only 19% of GDP). The efficiency of Singapore's government is what attracts foreign capital and labor. The article ends by recommending that Western nations adopt some of Singapore's methods which don't involve sacrificing liberty, such as firing teachers who don't perform well or paying civil servants more (to attract talent away from the private sector).

I don't know enough about Singapore to comment of the specifics of the article, but the focus on government efficiency got me thinking about the benefits of increasing competition between governments. One of the reasons why government is often inefficient is because it lacks sufficient competitive pressure. What's interesting is that most people have a healthy fear of business monopoly power (indeed, perhaps an excessive fear, given the difficulty of maintaining a monopoly or cartel in even imperfectly free markets), but they lack a corresponding fear of government monopoly power. In part because it is costly for people to move to a different country, most governments don't feel the pressure of competition to retain their base of residents, citizens, and corporate bases of operation. Choosing which government to pay taxes to is not like choosing a cell phone company, it's more like "choosing" a family, in that most cases one is simply born into it. If this were the case with cell phone companies, we wouldn't expect them to provide a very efficient product. Market power, whether in the form of a cartel or a monopoly, tends to increase the price and decrease the quality of a good or service, compared to cases where firms are forced to compete with rivals for market share. Why should the case of government be any different?

We tend to think that democracy works to constrain the inefficiency of governments, because bad governments can be thrown out of power. To a certain extent this is probably true, and it may explain, at least in part, why the government of modern parliamentary democracries is so much better than most governments throughout history (in terms of levels of crime, corruption, infrastructure, and so on). But there are still massive inefficiencies even in "good" governments such as those of Japan, South Korea, Europe, and North America. To begin to understand why, imagine an analgous case of non-government monopoly plus democracy. Let's say that Walmart is granted a monopoly on all retail stores through an act of Congress (historically, most monopolies are only created and maintained through government action, although that's a topic for a different post). We would of course expect Walmart to restrict supply, raise prices, and lower quality, in order to increase their profits. Why does the monopoly give Walmart the power to do this? In the absence of the monopoly, Walmart would lose customers if they increased prices and lowered quality. The only way they can continue to get customer dollars is by providing a product that is about as good and that costs about as much as those of other firms. (In fact, even if there are no other firms in the market, as long as it's possible for another firm to enter the market and seize market share, that still provides an incentive for Walmart to keep their prices relatively low and their quality relatively high, so that they don't risk losing market share to such a firm in the future; this is the disciplining effect of potential competition, as opposed to actual competition with firms currently in a market.)

Now suppose people get fed up with the Walmart molopoly and try to improve matters by replacing its current corporate government with a nationally-elected assembly. Would we expect as much benefit from democratizing a still-monopolistic Walmart as we would from simply exposing Walmart to more competition? Probably not. Sure, politicians would tend not to be re-elected if they passed laws that greatly and obviously hurt the Walmart consumer, but there are all kinds of inefficiencies that would remain. Two important sources of government inefficiency are the lack of voter decisiveness and the externalization of the costs of voting.

When a consumer decides to buy from a different firm, his choice is decisive; once he makes up his mind, he either reaps the reward of higher quality or lower price, or suffers the cost of lower quality or higher price. The case is different with democratic government, becuase a voter only gets the government he votes for if he happens to be in the majority; his vote does not decisively determine the government he receives (and, in fact, the chance that a single vote will sway an election is close to zero). Moreover, the costs of bad government are not internal to those who voted for it, but are externalized to all taxpayers, regardless of who they voted for. As Bryan Caplan has argued in his The Myth of the Rational Voter, these two factors (lack of decisiveness and externalization of costs) makes it cheaper for voters to hold irrational beliefs about the quality and cost of their favored policies or parties. A consumer with an irrational bias about a product at least feels the pinch in his pocketbook, and therefore has a standing reason to revise the irrational bias. A voter with an irrational bias about a party or policy does not receive the same feedback, both because his vote is not decisive, and because the costs of the policy or party he supports are in any case distributed throughout all of society, which makes it much cheaper for him to support a bad policy or party if he gets even a mild feeling of pleasure for doing so (or avoids the pain of having to change his mind and abandon a cherished belief or party affiliation). Irrationality is cheaper for voters than for consumers, and we should therefore expect voters to be more irrational than consumers, and to vote for less efficient policies. This is as true with a democratically run Walmart monopoly as it is true with democratically run governments.

In addition, there are other sources of inefficiency in government apart from lack of voter decisiveness and the externalization of the costs of voting, such as the fact that many unelected civil servants lack adeqaute accountability. Therefore, even though it makes sense to doubt that markets are perfectly efficient, there is good reason to believe that governments are even less efficient than markets. Opponents of the efficient markets hypothesis should also oppose the efficient government hypothesis.

So how does Singapore manage to do such a good job? It's probably a matter of the incentives facing the rulers. Singapore is not very democratic (they have a virtual one-party system, and lots of power is concentrated in the office of prime minister, of which Singapore has had only three since 1959). Usually this is a bad thing, but in the case of Singapore the rulers for some reason have felt the need to attract foreign capital and labor, which put a check on the normal tendency for authoritarian governments to simply feather their own nests at public expense. A ruler can make himself wealthy through corrupt governance, but he can't make a nation wealthy through corrupt governance. The centralization of power in Singapore has made it possible for the government to plan for the future and to commit to a consistent policy over the long-run, but centralization of power is not itself enough for government efficiency, in the absence of the incentives to rule well which the government of Singapore seems to have faced. The key thing is that, in the case of Singapore, what saved the day was not democratic competition within a polity, but competition for labor and capital between polities. In order to attract foreign wealth and labor, Singapore had to provide firms and workers reasons to move to and do business in Singapore.

To my mind, this is the only way we will see sustained improvements in the quality of government over time: if governments lose their monopoly character and become increasingly competitive. Libertarian anarchists, such as Murray Rothbard, David Friedman , and Roderick Long, propose a market for services normally provided by the state, with competing firms providing protection and other state services within the same geographic territory, and with no state having monopoly on any good or service provided within that territory. This might work, but I think it is unlikely ever to happen, given that states will probably never give up their monopoly privileges over their territories, at least not willingly. A much more plausible route to competitive governance is for there to be competition between states which retain monopolies over their territories, but which are disciplined by their efforts to attract freely-moving labor and capital from other states. A glimpse of this scenario may be found in the behavior of the government of Singapore; what's needed now is for more states to feel the pressure to attract individuals and firms through providing efficient government. This doesn't seem likely to happen, but on the other hand, if it happened in Singapore, it might happen elsewhere as well.

But what about democracy? What about the power of the people? And what about the authoritarian character of Singapore--should this really be a model for other states? First of all, it is not the authoritarian character of Singapore or the conservatism of its laws which have produced success; it is the fact that the rulers have actually felt a need to provide good government. In fact, insofar as firms and individuals benefit from liberty as much from the services provided by government, there is a reason for Singapore to respect liberty insofar as this attracts firms and individuals--and this may explain why Singapore has become less conservative and authoritarian in recent years.

With regards to democracy, it is over-rated as a political ideal. Empowering people is important, indeed essential, but democracy is a lousy way to give power to the people. It is more important to give people the power to choose between states than it is to give people the power to vote. The former is decisive, and internalizes costs and benefits; the latter is not decisive, and externalizes costs and benefits, and as a power is therefore pretty thin gruel.

Khan Academy

I just found out about the Khan Academy, a website that has free video lectures on math and science and software with practice exercises. Salman Khan recently did a TED talk about how he got into education and how his site works. People are saying "this is the future of education" and for once I am on the bandwagon. Khan emphasizes how his site can complement in-class instruction, but he is really understating the radical implications of his approach. First, it clarifies how poorly the field of education has been performing for some time. Second, adopting khan academy lectures and exercises in the classroom radically redefines the role of the teacher, from someone who focuses on giving static lectures to the entire class to someone who focuses on giving targeted interaction to particular students based on real-time data about their performance. Third, given the availability of free peer tutors via Khan's website, the need for traditional education institutions seems to deline at the margin.

How resistant will primary, secondary, and higher ed institutions be to this new approach to education? Khan seems to be accumulating data that might give objective evidence for the effectiveness of his methods; how much will such evidence (assuming it exists) matter in public debates over education? My prediction: traditional education institutions and their employees, from the public school district to the four year university, will dig in their heels to resist re-hauling the education system on Khanian lines. I hope I am wrong.

Article on Transcendental Meditation in the New York Times

There was an article on transcendental meditation published Friday, March 18th in the New York Times. Evidently, there has been a mini-revival of interest in TM among some celebrities, including David Lynch (who has been practicing TM since the 1970s), Russell Brand, and Moby. The article includes several celebrity testimonials about the value of TM, including this one by Brand:

“Transcendental Meditation has been incredibly valuable to me both in my recovery as a drug addict and in my personal life, my marriage, my professional life,” Mr. Brand said of the technique that prescribes two 15- to 20-minute sessions a day of silently repeating a one-to-three syllable mantra, so that practitioners can access a state of what is known as transcendental consciousness. “I literally had an idea drop into my brain the other day while I was meditating which I think is worth millions of dollars.”

The article also says the following about David Lynch's experiences with TM:

I was not into meditation one bit,” Mr. Lynch said, in his laconic Missoula, Mont., drawl that years of living in Los Angeles has failed to dilute. “I thought it was a fad. I thought you had to eat nuts and raisins, and I didn’t want any part of it.”

Mr. Lynch was persuaded by his sister, Martha, when he began having marital difficulties with the first of his four wives, Peggy, in the early ’70s. “I had a whole bunch of personal anger that I would take out on her,” he said. “I think I was a weak person. I wasn’t self-assured. I was not a happy camper inside. Two weeks after I started, my wife comes to me and says, ‘This anger, where did it go?’ I felt a freedom and happiness growing inside. It was like — poooft! — I felt a kind of smile from Mother Nature. The world looked better and better. It’s an ocean of unbounded love within us, so it’s real hard to get a conflict going.” (Still, a year later, the couple divorced.)

I'm a fan of meditation, but such anecdotes don't really tell us much about what, if anything, meditation is good for. We don't know, for example, whether Brand's meditation was the cause of his recovery from drug addiction, or whether Moby's meditation was what enabled him to give up drinking (as he is quoted as claiming in the article), because it's possible for people to lie or to simply be mistaken about such things.

But that's not my main concern with this article. It's more troubling that the author focuses on the benefits of TM, without going into its darker side. TM was founded as a business venture by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi; in order to practice TM, you have to pay for special training sessions, in which a teacher gives you a secret mantra that you have to recite when you are meditating, and which you aren't supposed to share with anyone else. The abbreviation TM suits the business well, since they have vigorously asserted ownership over their intellectual property, for example having trademarked the term "Transcendental Meditation" itself. The TM movement has also authored studies which purport to offer scientific evidence for the health and other benefits of TM. What's disturbing to me about TM is that they seem to be ripping people off, by charging for what anyone can practice for free (mantra meditation), and by claiming, whether implicity or explicitly, that TM has some kind of special benefits not attainable through any of the various "freeware" meditation practices that are also available.

The very occasion of the New York Times article is a recent fundraiser organized by David Lynch, for the purpose of providing scholarships to pay for TM lessons for those who can't afford it. This all sounds very noble, until you realize that the only reason such a fundraiser is necessary in the first place is because of the greed and puffed-up claims of the TM movement itself. Now, I am a great admirer of Lynch's work, and am fascinated by the apparent relationship between Lynch's meditation practice and his creative output, but I believe he is doing people a great disservice by leading people to TM, when so many other, equally effective meditation practices (such as zazen or Vipassana) are available for free. On the other hand, I did learn from the article that George Lucas's Yoda character may have been based on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, which fact alone probably made the article worth reading.

There's probably a lot of dirt on the dear old Maharishi, but my favorite is the story that he made sexual advances towards Mia Farrow and other women who traveled with the Beatles to his ashram in 1968. Sexual impropriety seems unfortunately common among people with spiritual authority (there are numerous cases from the world of Zen, for example), and to me this is another reason for being weary of gurus, especially those who charge unreasonable sums for magical mantras. If only the Maharishi could live up to the noble Yoda, who was created in his image! Now there's a guru I can't imagine charging money in exchange for teaching Jedi mind tricks, nor making a pass at Leia when Luke wasn't looking.

Government Contracts vs. Free Market Competition

Alex Taborrok had a recent blog post over at Marginal Revolution where he criticizes an argument for public trash collection made by Arnold Kling. Here is Kling's argument:

Surely, if we all lived in small mountain communities we would need less government. But imagine purely private trash collection in an urban area. If you pay for somebody to collect the trash in front of your house, then instead of paying for my trash to be removed, my strategy is to put my trash in front of your house and free ride on your trash collection.

Taborrok's reply, in brief, is that there are cases of successful private trash collection, including in his own Fairfax, Virginia:

I know because my neighborhood has two private, competing garbage collectors and the service is better than I have ever experienced in any other neighborhood. I get two trash collections a week (three counting yard matter such as leaves and cuttings), they take everything including recycling, the price is low and they work on government holidays. Most of Fairfax County has private trash collection. In fact, around the United States and the world private trash collection is quite common and there are typically substantial cost savings, on the order of 20-30%.

I agree with Tabarrok, in that private trash collection, at least in some contexts, does not constitute a public good problem. (Even if it did, the state is not necessarily the best solution; we must always compare imperfect free market and other imperfect consensual solutions to the imperfect state-based solutions of offer.) I am more interested, though, in the point Tabarrok makes in his following paragraph:

It is important to note that cost savings come from creating competition rather than from privatization per se–substituting a private monopoly for a public one is not very helpful but creating and maintaining a competitive environment can work wonders.

A common mistake is made by both pro-business and anti-free market factions (the latter is actually a species of the former, though most people don't realize this): a "privatization" scheme in which the government pays a private contractor to perform a service will not, in general, lead to much or any improvements in the price or quality of the service. But this is not because of a failure of the free market.

A moment's contemplation should make this clear: when the government uses tax money to pay a private company for a service, this is not a free market transaction. Free markets only exist when buyers are not coerced into paying for products (which does not fit the case of taxpayers), and when sellers are free to enter the market at any time and seize market share from rival firms (which does not fit most or any government contracting schemes). That is, a free market involves competition, and that's the only reason why free markets often contribute to the common good. Take away competition, and you have the same kinds of high prices and low quality that often characterize services provided by the most obvious monopoly of all, which is government.

The fact that "pro-business" factions often push for privatization schemes of this nature should not cloud our judgment. Government contracting is not a substitute for genuine free markets, because the same kinds of incentives are not in place. Most pro-business groups are perforce anti-free-market, since the free market is never in the interest of a particular firm. The best outcome for a firm is if it receives subsidies and protections from the government, not if it has to cover all its own expenses and compete on an even footing with rival firms. It's true that people in general are benefitted by free markets, but from the perspective of a particular firm, competition is not the best situation to be in, but rather protection, subsidy, and, if possible, sweet, sweet monopoly. Support for genuine free markets is therefore a radically "anti-business" position, but this does not seem to be widely understood. (Reading Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations may help, since the godfather of the free market is excoriating in his attacks on the business interests of his day, who had paid off people in the government to restrict competition.)

Unfortunately, this is often obscured in debates over privatization. The failures of government contracting are then often blamed on the free market. What is interesting about most debates over privatization is that genuinely free market positions are never even considered: the choice is often between government provision of a good or service and provision of a good or service by a private firm on a government contract. Neither of these supports the common good.

Liberal Libertarians

There's a growing trend among libertarians to self-identify as liberals and to distance themselves from political conservatism. This trend has precedents; the economist Friedrich Hayek wrote an essay in 1960 entitled "Why I Am Not a Conservative," for example. As a previous blog post of mine might indicate, although I consider myself a libertarian, there are several things about libertarianism, at least as it is commonly understood, which I find problematic. Specifically, many libertarians are committed at the level of ethical theory to an axiomatic principle of liberty or to a theory of natural rights; this puts them in opposition to consequentialist ethical analysis, which I regard as important, particularly with respect to questions of social justice--a concept which many libertarians, including even good old Hayek, regard with suspicion or skepticism. Openness to taking social justice seriously is part of what makes for a genuinely liberal strain of libertarian; other parts include cosmopolitanism, a secular worldview (or at least a secular approach to politics), opposition to war and militarism, opposition to the war on drugs, and support for the rights of gays and other people regarded as deviant or inferior by most conservatives.

Will Wilkinson, who has been an outspoken liberal libertarian for some time now, recently blogged about Bleeding Heart Libertarians, itself a new group blog by libertarian philosophers with an interest in neoclassical liberalism, combining libertarianism with contemporary liberalism, and libertarian social justice. Special mention should go to one of the blog's contibutors, Roderick T. Long, who has been an energetic advocate of "left libertarianism" for some time now.

On a related note, Peter Jaworski, a faculty member in the philosophy department at Bowling Green State University (where I currently teach part-time), recently blogged about the liberal libertarian phenomenon, including a discussion of the ethical issues underlying questions of social justice, and why an ethical principle of social justice does not by itself provide the justification for a welfare state.

Personally, my libertarian political beliefs have been a constant source of frustration and embarassment. Culturally, I am much more liberal than conservative, so most of my friends have been liberal, and as a consequence they have been either intolerant of or at least uncomfortable with my libertarianism, should I ever bring it up. Libertarianism is simply not acceptable among liberal social circles. As is often the case when it comes to political beliefs, a libertarian is usually regarded by liberals as being, not just ignorant or mistaken in his political beliefs, but downright morally defective on account of them. It's very difficult to have a rational conversation with anyone about politics (or religion, for that matter), even with someone who is very intelligent and relatively broad-minded. This probably has something to do with the way the human mind works--specifically, the psychology of group-based identity, or in-group / out-group thinking (about which there has been a lot of fascinating psychological research in the last ten years). A person with divergent political beliefs is regarded not just as wrong, but as a threat to the faction with which we identify, and by extention a threat to ourselves and those we care about. You can imagine the political disagreements among our hunter-gatherer ancestors as often being a matter of life and death, and it still feels that way today, even when our life is not in fact at stake.

In any event, I'm glad that there are other libertarians out there of a decidedly liberal bent--in terms of their cultural proclivites, political views, and even aspects of their ethical theory (insofar as most conservative libertarians seem to be defend theories of natural rights). I regard libertarianism as a progressive political philosophy, and I hope that more people in the general public will start to view it that way as well, even if they continue to disagree with it.

Conspiracy Theories

The Wall Street Journal had a recent article about the clash between patients and scientists over the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome. Evidently, some patients with CFS accuse the CDC of deliberately obstructing or delaying the publication of data showing a link between CFS and viruses such as XMRV. I personally doubt the CDC or anyone else has deliberately suppressed any information. If anything, it is the CFS patients who seem one-sided in their advocacy of a link between XMRV and CFS, given that some studies have failed to show a connection. As I indicated in a previous post, there is some evidence of a connection between CFS and chronic infections of several kinds, but the data is still spotty and I don't think anyone knows for sure what is causing cases of CFS. In addition, focusing too much on particular viruses like XMRV may direct attention away from the possible role played by other viruses, such as EBV, CMV, HHV-6, and enteroviruses, much less other pathogens such as bacteria and parasites.

Regarding the bacterial and parasitic infections, it is even possible that some CFS cases are due to infections caused by tick bites. Another recent article on msnbc's website discusses the increase in hard-to-diagnose (and often hard-to-treat) tick-born infections, and some of these have symptoms similar to CFS (including severe fatigue and "brain fog"). Since CFS is a syndrome, and not a disease with a specific etiology, it's not yet possible to say how many different types of infections or other conditions are behind CFS cases. When patients cling to one theory of CFS and attack scientists researching the syndrome, one fears that this will only hinder the pace of research. On the other hand, I haven't seen many scientists discuss the possibility of multiple infectious agents behind CFS cases, and this may represent a bias on their part which is also holding back the research. Too many people, patients and scientists included, seem to be looking for a single cause of the syndrome. I wish more studies were structured to test CFS patients for multiple pathogens using the best assays currently available.

Death to PEMDAS and There Is No Indigo

I have been a fan of role-playing games (rpg's) off and on since I was about 11 years old. Recenty I got into gaming again, after a hiatus of many years; I am currently playing an old-school Dungeons & Dragons campaign with my girlfriend Brenda and her sons. This blog post is not about gaming, though, except incidentally. As a result of returning to gaming, I have found a couple of really great old-school gaming blogs, one of which is Delta's D&D Hotspot. "Delta" is a mathematics professor (and rock musician) who lives in New York City; his blog posts often involve statistical analyses of game rules, or erudite discussions of concepts related to gaming (such as, most recently, the tactics of cavalry, pikemen, and archers).

Delta recently posted a surprising fact about the visible color spectrum:

Did you know that most color scientists no longer recognize "indigo" as a distinct color in the spectrum (as opposed to Newton's original 7-color scheme)?

I also enjoyed his screed against the ever-popular PEMDAS acronym:

Wednesday night, I walk into a lecture room for my first-evening algebra class of the spring. And what do I see on the chalkboard? Some motherfucker has oh-so-carefully written out the PEMDAS acronym, with each associated word in a column sequence. . . . among its flaws are (1) leaving out radicals as the inverse of exponents, (2)overlooking that multiplication & division are tied, and (3) overlooking that addition & subtraction are tied.

I ask you, if we can't rely on PEMDAS, what can we rely on? It makes one wonder how much of the information taught in schools and widely believed is (1) a gross over-simplification or (2) pure bunk. (In my own teaching, I've encountered a surprising number of incorrect beliefs relating to history and philosophy, many of which were picked up in schools.)

Stephen Bachelor's Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist

Classes are canceled this week for spring break, and I was planning on getting a bunch of work done on my research and other writing projects. Unfortunately, I have been sick the past two days with a cold, and while I have gotten some work done, the pace is a lot slower than I had planned. On the other hand, I have been able to do some "light reading," namely Stephen Batchelor's latest, Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist. Batchelor is widely known in Buddhist circles; I was first introduced to him by my former dissertation advisor (and meditation teacher) Marvin Belzer, who directed me to Batchelor's Buddhism without Beliefs.

Batchelor interweaves three strands of narrative in his latest work: (1) the story of his own disovery of and ever-changing relationship with traditional Buddhism, from his ordination as a Tibetan monk in northern India in the late 1960s, to his intensive study of Zen meditation at a monastery in Korea, to his exit from ordained life and marriage to a former Buddhist nun (whom he had met at the very same monastery in Korea); (2) the story of the life of the Buddha, as revealed through scattered passages from throughout the Pali Canon and traditional commentaries, with a particular focus on the Buddha's often tumultuous relations with secular rulers and members of his family; (3) the story of Bachelor's continuing attempt to develop a secular form of Buddhism, which forges a "middle way" between a rigid and excessively subjective orthodoxy on the one hand and sterile academic objectivity on the other. Batchelor's re-telling of the Buddha's life is fresh and reveals new insights into the political, social, and economic milieu in which the Buddha operated. Batchelor ties his re-telling of the life of the Buddha into a tale of his own journey along the Buddhist pilgrim route in north India, where he hits the most important places in the life and career of the Buddha, and makes by turns droll and tender observations about the colorful people he inevitably meets along the way.

I have yet to finish reading Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, but so far my impression is quite favorable, with one important caveat. Batchelor, it seems to me, is trying to do too much in one book. I would have preferred to have read his reconstructed life of the Buddha, together with the relevant (and genuinely thought-provoking) philosophical commentary he provides, as a separate, self-contained work; as it is, his narrative is constantly interrupted by tales from his earlier life as a Buddhist monk, and by the story of his more recent photo-essay-inspired pilgrimage through north India. So too, the autobiorgraphical material, and the material related to his re-thinking of the core principles of Buddhism in order to combine a genuinely spiritual practice with a secular worldview, are well worth reading, but would have been more compelling and easier to absorb had they been presented separately. Nevertheless, I can recommend this book without hesitation to anyone interested in Buddhism, meditation, atheism, and the relationship between secularism and spirituality.

Zen Sourcebook

Yesterday I received an examination copy of Hackett Publishing's Zen Sourcebook, which is an anthology of scriptures and other Zen texts from China, Japan, and Korea. I have yet to read it, but judging by the table of contents alone, it looks to be an excellent anthology. It's always been somewhat difficult to track down the various texts which are essential to the Zen tradition. The Zen Sourcebook collects Hui-Neng's autobiography (from the Platform Sutra), excerpts from Huang-Po's Transmission of Mind, the Lin-chi Record, K'uo-an's Ox-Herding Poems, excerpts from the Blue Cliff Record, selections from Dogen, Bankei, and Hakuin, and much, much more, all in one convenient and low-priced package ($13.95 retail). To be honest, when I requested the exam copy, I figured there was only about a 10% chance I would actually make the book a required text for my Indian and Chinese Philosophy class next year, but I have already decided to do just that. At the risk of sounding like a corporate shill, Hackett has done a really great job making critical editions of Western and now Eastern philosophy available for a reasonable price.

Update: At today's daily meditation group at The Common Good, Phil Dickinson gave me the syllabus for the class on Zen Buddhism he is teaching next year at Bowling Green State University (the class is titled Zen Buddhism, The Arts, and Everyday Life). Phil is using an anthology by Nelson Foster and Jack Shoemaker entitled The Roaring Stream: A New Zen Reader which he claims also does a great job of collecting a bunch of Zen texts in one place. This anthology was published in 1996, so I was wrong about Hackett being the first to step up to the plate in this area. On the other hand, Hackett still has the edge in terms of list price (which is $18.00 for The Roaring Stream). Three cheers for competition!

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

I have been very ill with chronic fatigue syndrome since 2006. This is a very difficult and elusive illness, which is still not really understood by modern medicine. In my case, the fatigue and other symptoms characteristic of the disorder started several months after a severe viral illness in late 2005. But it took five years to get a correct diagnosis; at first, I was told that I had a virus that would go away on its own; then, I was told I was depressed; then, I was diagnosed with a type of inflammatory arthritis (partially on the basis of a blood test which revealed elevated autoimmune antibodies). It was only in 2010 that I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and dysautonomia related to chronic fatigue syndrome.

As is probably obvious, this illness has made all areas of my life much more difficult. I won't bore you with the details here; the purpose of this post is not to gripe about my own difficulties with the syndrome, but rather to share with you what little useful information I have been able to find (some of which is still not widely known).

To my understanding, the most promising theory of chronic fatigue syndrome is that it is caused by chronic, unresolved infections of one sort or another. Now, there have been several studies widely reported in the media claiming a connection between various viruses and CFS. The findings of these studies have not been confirmed by subsequent research. So why believe that viruses may cause CFS? One possibility that has not been much discussed in the media is that there is not one virus, or even a single class of viruses, but rather a wide variety of viruses of different classes that are behind cases of CFS.

The view that multiple viruses may be at work seems to have received some confirmation from the research of Martin Lerner, MD, Jose Montoya, MD (of Stanford University), and John Chia, MD. Examples of viruses that these physicians and reseachers have claimed to find in CFS patients, and treatment of which they claim reduces CFS symptoms (thus indicating that the virus could be causing the CFS), include human herpes virus 6 (HHV-6), ebstein barr virus (EBV), cytomegalovirus (CMV), and enteroviruses. In addition to a variety of viruses, John Chia has found chronic bacterial infections, including chlamydia pneumoniae, and mold infections in some of his CFS patients (some of Chia's research can be found on the Research page of the EV Med website; the rest can be found by searching PubMed or Google Scholar).

If there are several types of pathogens in play in CFS, then this could explain, at least in part, why the syndrome has confounded researchers. It's impossible to replicate findings which show a link between CFS and any particular pathogen if every sample of CFS patients have arrays of different pathogens causing their symtpoms. In addition, Chia, Montoya, and Lerner claim that the particular viruses behind some CFS cases are hard to detect through conventional blood tests, because the viruses in question, such as enteroviruses, spread from cell to cell, and do not kill the cells that they invade, and thus not many copies of the virus get swept up into the bloodstream, at least in the advanced stages of infection. Chia has developed more sensitive blood tests to detect the presence of entervirus in his CFS patients, but he has also had to use endoscopies to get tissue samples from the stomach, and then stain the samples for viruses in order to detect their presence in some of his patients. (This and other some details of Chia's research are discussed in an interview he did for the website Phoenix Rising.)

Approximately 50% of Chia's CFS patients show evidence of chronic enteroviral infection. To my knowledge, the media has not reported (at least not widely) on a possible connection between enterovirus infection and CFS. Chia has found evidence for 11 different kinds of infection in his CFS patients, including viral, bacterial, and mold infections. In addition, approximately 25% of Chia's CFS patients are infected with no known pathogen, so it is at least possible that there other pathogens out there behind CFS (perhaps including parasites, for example).

Chia has had some success treating his CFS patients with antibiotics and antiviral drugs. Unfortunately, there are currently no effective antiviral drugs for use against chronic enteroviral infection, which makes up his largest class of CFS patients. Chia first tried using interferon-gamma and interferon-delta to treat the chronic enteroviral infections, which was effective, but very costly and had many side effects. He currently uses an herbal supplement called sophora to treat patients with enteroviral infection, which seems to improve symptoms in about 50% of his patients (some of his patients recover completely; others see reduction of symptoms; other see no benefit; more men than women see benefit). Sophora boosts the activity of T1 cells of the immune system, and is used in China to treat hepatitis and cancer. Chia is currently looking for other more effective treatments for chronic enteroviral infection (in a phone consultaion, he mentioned that some of the antiviral drugs currently being developed to treat polio, which is a type of enterovirus, could also be effective in treating the enteroviruses he sees in his CFS patients).

I apologize for the long blog post (there is more I could share, including .pdfs of studies; perhaps in a later post), but this information is worth sharing if you know of anyone with either chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia (which is a related syndrome). There is a lot of misinformation out there, especially on popular and alternative health websites, and it took me a while to track down any information which genuinely seemed to shed light on the disorder. I hope it proves helpful to someone.

Not as Old as You Think

A recent article in Open the Magazine, entitled "Not as Old as You Think," purports to give the lie to the notion that yoga is part of an ancient Indian tradition. The article's author, Meera Nanda, is a professor of history at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research. Nanda argues that yoga as it is practiced today is largely the creation of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and was influenced by Theosophists and by the aerobics and gymnastics of Sweden and other western countries:

The reality is that postural yoga, as we know it in the 21st century, is neither eternal nor synonymous with the Vedas or Yoga Sutras. On the contrary, modern yoga was born in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. It is a child of the Hindu Renaissance and Indian nationalism, in which Western ideas about science, evolution, eugenics, health and physical fitness played as crucial a role as the ‘mother tradition’. In the massive, multi-level hybridisation that took place during this period, the spiritual aspects of yoga and tantra were rationalised, largely along the theosophical ideas of ‘spiritual science,’ introduced to India by the US-origin, India-based Theosophical Society, and internalised by Swami Vivekananda, who led the yoga renaissance.

In turn, the physical aspects of yoga were hybridised with drills, gymnastics and body-building techniques borrowed from Sweden, Denmark, England, the United States and other Western countries. These innovations were creatively grafted on the Yoga Sutras—which has been correctly described by Agehananda Bharati, the Austria-born Hindu monk-mystic, as ‘the yoga canon for people who have accepted Brahmin theology’—to create an impression of 5,000 years worth of continuity where none really exists. The HAF’s current insistence is thus part of a false advertising
campaign about yoga’s ancient Brahminical lineage.

Nanda is surely correct that yoga as it is currently practiced owes much to innovations in the later 19th and early 20th centuries, including influences from the West. But the article's framing seems a little misleading. The reality is, despite the modern innovations, there is continuity in the yoga tradition, as Nanda herself demonstrates in discussing the history of the yoga asanas or postures:

The four Vedas have no mention of yoga. The Upanishads and The Bhagvad Gita do, but primarily as a spiritual technique to purify the atman. The Bible of yoga, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, devotes barely three short sutras (out of 195) to physical postures, and that too only to suggest comfortable ways of sitting still for prolonged meditation. Asanas were only the means to the real goal—to still the mind to achieve the state of pure consciousness—in Patanjali’s yoga.

So, yogas is mentioned in the Upanaishads, the oldest of which were probably written in the 6th century BC, and some of the asanas were practiced at least as far back as Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, which depending upon who you ask date back to somewhere between 100 BC and 500 AD. That's at least 1,500 years of history to the asanas before the Theosophists and the Swedish gymnasts got their grubby paws onto hatha yoga. It's no doubt true that yoga as it's practiced today differs a lot from yoga as it was practiced in Patanjali's time, but that's not a very damning or suprising claim. Again, the problematic aspects of Nanda's piece stem mainly from the one-sided character of its framing or tone. One could, for example, imagine a person who completely accepts Nanda's factual account of the history of yoga writing an article with the breathless headline, "Roots of Yoga Extend Back 2,000 Years!"

Nanda herself admits that there are historical roots to modern yoga in India, but she claims that the people practicing yoga were little more than drug-addled misfits and magicians:

There are, of course, asana-centred hatha yoga texts in the Indic tradition. But they definitely do not date back 5,000 years: none of them makes an appearance till the 10th to 12th centuries. Hatha yoga was a creation of the kanphata (split-eared) Nath Siddha, who were no Sanskrit-speaking sages meditating in the Himalayas. They were (and still are) precisely those matted-hair, ash-smeared sadhus that the HAF wants to banish from the Western imagination. Indeed, if any Hindu tradition can at all claim a patent on postural yoga, it is these caste-defying, ganja-smoking, sexually permissive, Shiva- and Shakti-worshipping sorcerers, alchemists and tantriks, who were cowherds, potters and suchlike. They undertook great physical austerities not because they sought to achieve pure consciousness, unencumbered by the body and other gross matter, but because they wanted magical powers (siddhis) to become immortal and to control the rest of the natural world.

There's probably something to this characterization of the history of yoga in India, but Nanda postulates a pretty heavy dichotomy between the "ganja-smoking" yogis on the one hand and the "Sanskrit-speaking sages meditating in the Himalayas" on the other. Sorcery overlaps traditional Indian religion just as it did ancient Greek or Roman religion, or just as Voodoo in Haiti overlapped with Catholic Christianity. On the other hand, Nanda's piece does serve as a useful corrective to the many historical errors asserted by practitioners of yoga, such as the evidently common claim that yoga is discussed in the Vedas or that yoga has a 5,000 year history (among many others). Her point of view is worth taking seriously, even if the framing is misleading.