What Is the Point of Philosophy (by Way of the Jewish State)?

Joseph Levine, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has a well-written blog post at the New York Times about whether or not "Israel has a right to exist." Levine's thesis is that no people, including the Jewish people, has a right to a nation-state; nation-states do not exist for the sake of any particular people (in the sense of an ethnic group), but rather exist (or should exist) for the sake of all of the peoples who are their citizens.

This article is a great illustration of what the point of philosophy is. It's true that philosophers have often addressed questions which are of mainly theoretical interest, that they have (especially historically) attempted to answer questions which are best left to the empirical sciences, and that philosophy does not produce empirically verified or mathematically proven theories in the same way that the special sciences or mathematics do. So one may be forgiven for wondering what the purpose of philosophy is or if it even has one.

In a word, the point of philosophy is to think carefully and critically about thorny questions having to do with values or with the first principles of science, mathematics, or other disciplines. The tools of the philosophers in their quest for clarity are not microscopes and chemical assays, but rather logical and conceptual analyses.

A big part of both of these tools is the ability to make crucial distinctions (such as that between the ethnic and the civic sense of the term 'people'), which Levine aptly illustrates in his blog post about the Jews and Israel. Conceptual and logical clarity are not sufficient for resolving difficult questions of value or foundations, but they are necessary, and all too often lacking in debates about morality, politics, the arts, scientific methodology, and the like.

I am not hereby endorsing Levine's thesis or his arguments (though they are worth considering seriously), but as soon as I started reading his blog post, I could tell that he was a philosopher or had philosophical training, because of the obvious care he was taking to get conceptual and logical clarity before reaching his conclusion. Most non-philosophers regrettably do not sufficiently distinguish between related issues or concepts as carefully as Levine has done in this piece. I hope that Levine's work serves as a helpful illustration of the value of philosophy, even for such practical, political, "blood and soil" issues as the relations between Jews and Palestinians in the state of Israel.

Jeffrey Sachs' Great Paul Krugman Smackdown

Self-styled "progressive" economist Jeffrey Sachs delivers an energetic smackdown of economist Paul Krugman's over at the Huffington Post. Among Sachs' main points: the CBO's projections GDP growth in the wake of the stimulus have not been met; it matters quite a bit not just how much money the government spends, but what it spends it on; the interest payments on the debt will become uncomfortably large within ten years. Recommended reading for all citizens, not just policy wonks.

David Lynch

"I used to go to Bob's Big Boy restaurant just about every day from the mid-seventies until the early eighties. I'd have a milk shake and sit and think.

"There's a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner."

(David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish, p. 39.)

I wonder which Bob's he went to.

Dark Illumination

For Masters Kong and Lao

The clever-tongued thief of virtue

Grabs you with his rhinestone coat

A rich beggar snatching coins from passers-by.

His light is outshone by the hidden virtue

Of a hooded lantern, invisible from without

Grown brighter and brighter from within.

America's Biggest Foreign Policy Blunder?

Peter van Buren, a former state department official who worked in Iraq, paints a vivid portrait of the failures of the United States' invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, arguing that it constitutes the nation's worst foreign policy failure ever.

D.I.Y.

Make your own glass cleaner: Mix 1/4 cup white vinegar with 3 cups of water in a spray bottle. Spray and wipe down with newspaper.

Never buy commercially produced glass cleaner again!

China's Generation Gap

Chinese parents who came of age during the Cultural Revolution are separated from their children, the balinghou, by an immense cultural gulf. 

David F***ing Lynch

"Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. No one understands when I say that, but it is.

"Eraserhead was growing in a certain way, and I didn't know what it meant. I was looking for a key to unlock what these sequences were saying. Of course, I understood some of it; but I didn't know the thing that just pulled it all together. And it was a struggle. So I got out my Bible and started reading. And one day, I read a sentence. And I closed the Bible, because that was it; that was it. And then I saw the thing as a whole. And it fulfilled this vision for me, 100 percent.

"I don't think I'll ever say what that sentence was."

(David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish, p. 33.)

Daniel K. Gardner (translator), The Four Books, and Edward Slingerland (translator), The Analects

Daniel K. Gardner's The Four Books is a translation of selected portions of the four great Confucian classics: Great Learning (Daxue), Analects (Lunyu), Mencius (Mengzi), and Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong; translated by Gardner as "Maintaining Perfect Balance"). These four books became the basis of the Chinese imperial examination system during the Song Dynasty, due to the influence of the "Neo-Confucian" (Daoxue) scholar Zhu Xi (1130-1200); previously, the Five Classics (Wujing) had been the basis for the imperial exams, but Zhu Xi argued that the Four Books served as a better introduction to the study of Confucian thought.

Gardner's aim in this slender volume is to introduce the student of philosophy not only to the Four Books themselves, but also to Zhu Xi's influential Neo-Confucian commentaries, through which Chinese students have traditionally approached and interpreted these classic texts. While Gardner does not translate Zhu Xi's commentary directly, his own commentary is peppered with quotations from Zhu Xi, and Gardner explicitly adopts a Neo-Confucian stance when explaining how the passages from the Four Books have traditionally been read. This choice does provide an effective introduction to the Neo-Confucian commentarial tradition, and to Neo-Confucianism generally, but at the expense of occasionally obscuring the original meaning of the texts.

By contrast, Edward Slingerland, in his translation of Confucius' Analects, makes use of a range of traditional commentaries, together with modern textual scholarship, in his own attempt to make sense of the Analects (in terms of their likely original meaning, to the extent to which this can be reconstructed). There are certainly advantages and disadvantages to both of these interpretive strategies, and there is likely room for both in preparing contemporary translations and editions of classic Chinese texts.

While Gardner's The Four Books largely accomplishes what it sets out to do, I would have preferred an edition which contains the complete versions of Great Learning, Analects, Mencius, and Doctrine of the Mean, even if this meant expanding the work to multiple volumes. Also, since Gardner in many cases merely paraphrases Zhu Xi's commentary, it would have been preferable to simply include a translation of Zhu Xi's commentary alongside the original text, supplemented where needed by Gardner's own notes or additions (perhaps noting those cases in which other commentators have disagreed greatly with Zhu Xi). Nevertheless, Gardner has produced an excellent introduction both to the Four Books themselves, and to the Neo-Confucian commentary tradition of Zhu Xi, which colored the reception of these texts in China for hundreds of years (and which still does). 

Confucius

"The Master said, 'A clever tongue and fine appearance are rarely signs of Goodness [ren].'" (Confucius, Analects 1.3. Translated by Edward Slingerland.)

Links

Hat tips to TheBrowser and Marginal Revolution.

1. The London Underground as a state of mind.
2. Are we living in the early 19th century? Income inequality and standard of living.
3. The current state of Africa. (The headline could be: The Economist calls for a Pan-African Union. Read to the end.)

Donald Ritchie, A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics

Donald Ritchie's A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics is a learned introduction to traditional Japanese aesthetic concepts, such as wabi, sabi, and mono no aware. Ritchie lived in Tokyo and wrote about Japanese culture for decades. In his Tractate, Ritchie deftly handles traditional Japanese sources, telling famous tales such as tea master Sen no Rikyu's development of the refined yet rough and simple aesthetic later associated with the tea ceremony; he also appropriately clarifies and juxtaposes Japanese aesthetic concepts using Western aesthetic thinkers and artists such as Hume, Kant, and Oscar Wilde. The "tractate" form averred to in the title is that of an extended essay, which aptly serves Ritchie's goal of creating an introduction to his topic suitable for the literate novice. Recommended. I will be using portions of this tractate as a required reading for my aesthetics class this semester.

Teaching the Bible in Texas Public Schools

I think the Bible should be taught in public schools, since its influence on world civilization (history, politics, religion, art, literature) has been profound. However, according to a recent article in the New York Times, the teaching of the Bible in Texas public schools involves possible violations of the principle of the separation of church and state. For example, some religion classes are taught by evangelical pastors, whose teaching is colored by their particular theology, and some public school students take their religion classes (which are part of the public school curriculum) in nearby churches.

The Year Thus Far in Links

1. What's wrong with ebooks.
2. Buddhist hell-realms depicted at Thailand's Wat Phong Rai Wua.
3. Christmas book flood in Iceland.
4. An environmentalist's reasons for supporting GMO and factory farming.
5. The wisdom of psychopaths? 
6. "The Deep End." Hand-drawn animation, white-out, and coffee. By Jake Fried.
7. China's new 'it girl' is a grandfather.
8. Music tastes and delinquency.
9. Prehistoric oral bacteria.
10. Head trauma sometimes unlocks creative talents.
11. The decline of Jewish delis.
12. "World's worst tattoo" inked in Bowling Green, Ohio.
13. The science of WEIRD people. 
14. Addictive junk food?
15. Out of control health care costs.
16. Five psychiatric disorders share genetic risk factors related to neural calcium channels.

Confucius

"The Master said, 'One who is Good sees as his first priority the hardship of self-cultivation, and only after thinks about results or rewards.'"

(Confucius, Analects 6.22. Translated by Edward Slingerland.)

D.I.Y.

Toothpaste: mix one part sea salt to one part baking soda. Make a 50/50 mix of water and hydrogen peroxide, and then add enough of this to the salt and baking soda to form a paste like consistency. Add a few drops of pure peppermint oil.

Stop buying mass-produced toothpaste! The homemade stuff is cheaper and (in my experience) works better.

Jerry's Map

World building as open-ended semi-random fine art project. Jerry Gretzinger also has a blog about his project.

Update (2014.10.26): Wired now has a piece about Jerry's map with extensive pictures.

Links

1. A plan to build a real-life Starship Enterprise.

2. Neuroscience and stage magic. (Hat tip to the Browser.)

3. A flowchart for changing habits.

The Future of TV = Broadcast + Broadband?

According to Tech Crunch, "Cord cutters"--households without cable TV--represent only 5% of TV households, but their number has grown over 22.8% the past year. I am a cord cutter myself; a big part of the reason is that cable companies do not allow consumers to purchase individual shows, but instead require that they purchase a large bundle of channels, even if consumers aren't interested in most of the programs that are in the bundle. At the Atlantic, UCLA sociologist Gabriel Rossman explains the economics behind cable companies' resistance to a la carte programming. He also links to an amusing cartoon from the Oatmeal which portrays internet piracy of cable TV shows as a response to cable companies' lack of flexibility in delivering content.

Robot Wars

Who would win: a 5-axis milling robot or a 3D printer that works in metal? According to this article, the future lies with 3D printers, but for the time being the safe money is on the milling robot.

The Nine Hells

1. Slavery in Mauritania.

2. Born and raised in a North Korean prison camp.

3. With U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

4. The madness of Philip K. Dick.

5. Mississippi hate crime.

6. Staff Sergeant Robert Bales.

7. Inside America's Ivy League fraternities.

8. The harassment of women in modern India.

9. Seeking justice for Haiti's rape victims.

Links

1. New York Times review of "Marley", the new Bob Marley bio-pic.
2. Wired profile of Joss Whedon.
3. Jennifer Tilly, poker player.
4. Chairs are dangerous.

The Quants Rule, OK

Atlanta, Montreal, Oslo, Paris. What do these cities have in common?

Recent social network research reveals the answer: Montreal leads North Americans' raido listening habits when it comes to indie music, while Atlanta leads for North American hip-hop. In Europe, Oslo is the leader for general music listening habits, and Paris leads for indie music. This means that what people are listening to on the radio now in Montreal (for example) will soon be what people are listening to across North America.

A related story: a school for quants doing research in network science at University College London. These are the job skills of the future. Adapt now, or forever hold your peace. Amen.

Links

1. Modern slave owner in Mauritania becomes an abolitionist.

2. China's 30 million cave dwellers.

3. E-books may make it harder to remember what you read. (Hat-tip to Marginal Revolution.)

Links

1. Ten lessons to learn from Jeremy Lin.

2. Tiny lizards in Madagascar.

3. Spartan vs. Athenian models of education. (Hat tip to The Browser.)

'Undue Weight' on Wikipedia

Timothy Messer-Kruse is a professor in the department of ethnic studies at Bowling Green State University. The Chronicle Review recently published a piece of his, in which he recounts his many failed attempts to edit the Wikipedia page related to his area of expertise, the Haymarket Riot of 1886. The main problem: while Messer-Kruse's claims are backed up testimony from the trial available from the Library of Congress and by his own peer-reviewed articles, they conflict with the account given by the majority of published sources, which, according to Messer-Kruse, have been simply repeating the same errors for decades. The problem stems from Wikipedia's 'undue weight' policy, which requires that the content of Wikipedia articles reflect the majority of published works on a given subject (even if the majority happen to be in error):

[A] Wiki-cop scolded me, "I hope you will familiarize yourself with some of Wikipedia's policies, such as verifiability and undue weight. If all historians save one say that the sky was green in 1888, our policies require that we write 'Most historians write that the sky was green, but one says the sky was blue.' ... As individual editors, we're not in the business of weighing claims, just reporting what reliable sources write."

Given Messer-Kruse's experience, it would seem difficult or impossible for a new discovery by a researcher to make its way quickly into Wikipedia; as he puts it:

I guess this gives me a glimmer of hope that someday, perhaps before another century goes by, enough of my fellow scholars will adopt my views that I can change that Wikipedia entry. Until then I will have to continue to shout that the sky was blue.

Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life

I have recently been reading Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, a set of techniques for resolving disputes in a way that is nonviolent (as the name implies) but does that meets everyone's needs without compromise. NVC was developed by a clinical psychologist named Marshall Rosenberg; Rosenberg, a student of Carl Rogers, first used NVC to mediate disputes in schools that were desegregating in the 1960s, and more recently he has traveled to hot spots such as Bosnia, Rwanda, Israel-Palestine, and northern Nigeria to try to mediate disputes between people who have literally been killing each other. More prosaically, Rosenberg also leads workshops on NVC in the U.S. and other countries.

The core of NVC involves four main steps: (1) observing actions, (2) identifying and stating feelings, (3) identifying and stating the needs which cause these feelings (when they are either met or not met), and (4) clearly articulating requests for actions. These four steps can be performed both on oneself and the person one is communicating with. Though easy to understand, it's actually quite hard to put these techniques into practice, due to the power of our habitual ways of interacting with people. My attempts to use NVC in the classroom and in my personal life have been difficult, but still effective--even if the only effect is to get greater awareness of what I am feeling and needing when someone does something (which makes it less likely that I will react with anger, resentment, or a passive-aggressive behavior).

One of Rosenberg's claims is that while people's preferred strategies for meeting their needs often conflict, the needs themselves could all be fulfilled if only they were willing to use different strategies to meet those needs. Now, like much of the theory behind NVC, I don't believe this 100%; there are surely some cases in which genuine needs conflict, such as lifeboat scenarios where there is only enough food or water for one person to survive. But like the other defects in the theory of NVC, this point does little to undermine the effectiveness of the techniques of NVC, which are quite practical. In the vast majority of human conflicts, even those involving physical violence, everyone's needs could be met without violence (even if not everyone's preferred strategies could be met without violence--such as if one side seeks to satisfy its need for security by killing off every member of the opposing side).

Another defect in the theory behind NVC is Rosenberg's claim that humans are not inherently violent; violence, he maintains, is something against human nature which we learn through our culture or society. To the contrary, since violence has been a part of every human culture, and since rates of death by violence were higher in stone age hunter-gatherer societies than they are in today's society, it is arguable that human nature includes the propensity for physical violence, and that if anything culture is gradually shifting our behaviors to less physically violent forms. But this theoretical quibble seems to have no bearing on the effectiveness of the techniques of NVC. These are grounded in careful observation of people's behaviors, coupled with acts of interpretation which seek to clarify feelings and needs, and finally with the formulation of clear action requests that can move dialogue forward more effectively than vague or judgmental criticism and demands.

My friend Lynn Ackerson first told me about NVC several years ago, but it took me a while before I actually looked into it further. I was turned off in part by the corny terms and techniques used by Rosenberg to communicate his ideas. As shown in the picture above, Rosenberg frequently uses tattered hand puppets to convey his points about NVC. This technique would be utterly laughable except that Rosenberg does seem to be in on the joke. It's a way of getting attention and of clearly summarizing points; when the "jackal" puppet says something, we know he is giving an example of violent communication, even when it doesn't sound like it--such as when someone snivels and says "I'm sad because you hurt me". Rosenberg also occasionally sings God-awful songs on his guitar (many of which he wrote himself!).

All of this, together with the problematic theory behind NVC, should be overlooked when one is considering the effectiveness of the techniques themselves. They are the real deal, and have been field-tested by Rosenberg in the worst conditions imaginable--when talking to groups of Christians and Muslims in northern Nigeria, some of who had killed relatives of those on the other side; when talking to convicted murderers and rapists in prison; when dealing with one's own road rage while driving behind the slowest car in the world! Likewise, Rosenberg's original inspiration for NVC was his own brutal experience as a child in Detroit in the 1940s, where he witnessed terrible race riots immediately upon moving to the city (in which many people were killed right in his own neighborhood), to being repeatedly beaten at his school starting on the first day because of the fact that he was Jewish. Rosenberg may occasionally indulge in cheesy or hokey antics, and his theoretical speculation seems off the mark, but NVC itself is no joke and should be practiced by more people.

Jonah Lehrer on the Incredible Shrinking Effect Size

Jonah Lehrer recently wrote an article in The New Yorker (and another in Wired) about decreasing effect sizes in the sciences. An excerpt from the former:

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.

Possible explanations for the problem include publication bias (journals like to publish interesting results), selective reporting of data by scientists, and data mining (scouring already collected data for interesting results, as opposed to collecting data to test an already determined hypothesis). One of the scientists interviewed by Lehrer proposes as a solution an open-source database, in which researchers are required to outline their plans for research and to document all of their results. Lehrer's Wired article is titled "Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us," but science rather seems to be revealing the problem with some of its own methods; the problem is real but potentially self-correcting. Lehrer also makes a philosophical mis-step when he invokes David Hume's skepticism about causation:

Hume realized that, although people talk about causes as if they are real facts—tangible things that can be discovered—they’re actually not at all factual. Instead, Hume said, every cause is just a slippery story, a catchy conjecture, a “lively conception produced by habit.” When an apple falls from a tree, the cause is obvious: gravity. Hume’s skeptical insight was that we don’t see gravity—we see only an object tugged toward the earth. We look at X and then at Y, and invent a story about what happened in between. We can measure facts, but a cause is not a fact—it’s a fiction that helps us make sense of facts.

Hume was skeptical about the view that a cause is a necessary connection between cause and effect, not about whether a cause is a fact. Hume's point is that causal reasoning can be overturned by subsequent experience, unlike reasoning about relations of ideas (such as logical or mathematical truths), which is immune to empirical rebuff. Philosophical quibbles aside, Lehrer's articles are a useful layperson's introduction to this important issue.

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.