Diary of a Daoist Hermit

Environmental Vow 19: Politics 101

2012-01-02T08:59:00.000-06:00

Politics 101

Pithily stated, politics is the process whereby groups of people make collective decisions.

“Politics” permeates human society. People tend to fixate on the more obvious examples: municipal, provincial and federal governments. But every group of people has political elements. When a co-worker “sucks up” to the boss in order to get his own way, that is a political act. In the same way, when a CEO organizes a Christmas party for the staff, he is also performing a political act in that he is trying to score “brownie points” with employees in order to encourage loyalty to the organization. Of course, many of these sorts of things are totally unconscious. The boss might be a nice guy who is continuing a tradition and who genuinely wants to “do the right thing”. In the same way, the staff can just as well do the “extra bit” just because the boss really is a “swell guy”. People can also do very self-conscious things to each other. Bosses sometimes steal the credit that belongs to subordinates and workers will sometimes sabotage the efforts of others in order to keep them from getting a promotion in the hope that they will get it instead. Anyone who has worked in any sort of institution would describe this phenomenon as “office politics”. It happens just as often with people who jockey for a little better position at a “mac job” as it does with executives in the biggest corporation.

This is exactly what politics was like in the time of royal courts. Only instead of fry cooks and account managers trying to climb to the top over their co-workers, it involved courtiers with titles such as “groom of the royal bed chamber” or “Lord Chamberlain”. Each of these officials would have a staff of “hanger’s on” and “lackeys” who would also have their own individual political intrigues with one another to gain favour and influence with their “great man”. If the courtier was important enough, each of his hanger’s on would also have his own men, who would also have intrigues amongst themselves in order to gain favour. In the old monarchies the entire nation was held together by these nested layers of patronage. It was how all positions in the bureaucracy, the courts, the military, etc were filled. It was how the countryside was held together by the landed aristocracy and how cities functioned through their Councils. Smaller people gained help from bigger people by helping them with their big projects, and bigger people gained loyal supporters by helping them secure jobs, contracts, etc.

Political parties still operate in much the same way. There are specific “big men” in parties who have groups of supporters. If a big man gets enough supporters, he can become the head of the party. If the party is big enough and has enough supporters in the general public, then he becomes the head of the government.

Why Politicians are Hypocrites

There are differences, though. Patronage in royal systems is primarily about supporting individual people directly for help in return.# In contrast, modern society is a little more about supporting and promoting a specific “worldview”. This is where the “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” stuff bleeds in. Most politicians are not totally “in the game” for money or power. Instead, they believe that they are promoting a specific way of looking at the world that they believe is “right”, “true” and “just”. They will often find themselves acting in what seem to be very duplicitous manners, but usually they see this in terms of “the ends justify the means”. For example, a conservative politician who personally believes in the right of women to make up their own minds about whether or not to have an abortion will often make noises about---and even vote for----making abortion illegal, but will justify this by thinking that if he doesn’t add the anti-choice vote to his core constituency he will never be able to win the election----which would be a catastrophe for the nation because it would result in “tax and spent liberals” taking over and destroying the economy.

Successful politicians realize that the only way to gain enough power to put through the changes that they would like to see in a political party, city, province, nation, union, NGO, etc, is by building a coalition to support them. But usually this involves supporting positions that the political “great man” may not like, but which he finds he can “live with”. Similarly, his political supporters have to make similar compromises in order to find a great man to work for if they want to have a patron who can help them climb the ladder of power. This is why politicians seem to “waffle” or “flip flop” on issues. The ones that want to win realize that they have to build a coalition of using people who have very strong opinions about conflicting issues. Their job is to seduce enough into supporting them to be able to gain power and hopefully do something.

Power doesn’t only come in the form of personal supporters. In jurisdictions without significant campaign finance laws, it also comes from the money that is needed to fund an election campaign. And again, politicians find that to be successful they need to cater to the ideals of people who have a great deal of disposable income. People often confuse a politician’s desire for money with personal greed because they don’t understand that the “system” usually demands that before a candidate can have any hope of being elected he or she will have to raise huge amounts of money for things like television advertisements. Again, this put enormous pressure on politicians to at the very least pay “lip service” to positions they don’t agree with, and at worst, vote in support of them.

Even in societies with strict campaign finance laws based on regulating funding sources, such as Canada where it is illegal for corporations to make donations and all money must be raised in the form of relatively small donations by individual citizens, the system still exerts enormous pressure on candidates who need money to win elections. When money is raised in small amounts from a large number of donors, whomever has control of the lists and can organize the “boiler rooms” needed to bring the money in will end up having enormous control over the careers of anyone who seeks public office. It might be an improvement to have candidates “beholding” to the party fundraisers than wealthy individuals or corporations, but either way it means that the representatives who are supposed to look after the public welfare will inevitably find themselves forced to service specific interests instead of the public good.

I’m not aware of any society where strict campaign finance laws significantly limit the amount of money that a candidate may spend, but if such a system were in place candidates would then find themselves beholding to whatever institutions or individuals are able to provide enough volunteers to build a viable campaign.#

The result of having to balance all these different and often conflicting points of view in order to build a coalition of supporters while at the same time appeasing large donors is that hypocrisy is pretty much essential to the political enterprise. It might be that if people were sufficiently deferential to their political leadership that they would elect governments imply on an assessment of the politician’s character and let them make all the decisions “as they think best”. But unfortunately, the trend in politics has been for a long time to increasingly expect our politicians to enunciate a specific program and stick to it once in office. Unfortunately, this sort of process would only work if there was a clear and coherent vision of where society should be going amongst the body politic. The fact of the matter, however, is that voters believe a great many things, many of which contradict each other and many are based on total ignorance of the true state of affairs. This situation means that the only politicians who have a hope of being elected to high office are those ones that have developed the ability to become convincing hypocrites who have learned to tell people what they want to hear instead of what they believe to be the truth.

Environmental Vow 18: Radical Politics and Activism

2011-12-26T10:30:00.001-06:00

Radical Politics and Activism

I suggested previously that there was a second motivating factor besides religious faith, namely patriotism. As I pointed out, however, the calamities of the 20th century pretty much debased that coin in the minds of most thoughtful people. It is possible to stretch the definition of “patriotism” to embrace more than just “king and country”, though. What if people build their lives around support for some set of noble ideals, such as “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”?

Over the last three hundred years or so millions have built their lives around this sort of thing. Indeed, there are a great many people today who are involved in this form of politics that is specifically focused on environmental issues, namely small and large “g” greens. Surely something like a form of “eco-patriotism” offers some sort of locus for changing people's behaviour in order to deal with the coming eco-catastrophe. Unfortunately, I would argue that any sort of patriotism, not matter what its foundation, has found its coin just as debased as that of the old “king and country” type. Moreover, any attempt to deal with this legacy have made it particularly vulnerable to the “do your own thing” poison that has damaged so many other elements of our society.

The first issue that people have to wrestle with is the impact that Marxism and Fascism have had on the popular imagination and how they still profoundly affect the thoughts of people who aspire to a radical form of environmental politics. Radical politics was the primary guiding force for a great deal of social transformation during the 20th century. People find it hard to believe right now, but up until the Second World War, there were very active Communist parties throughout the Western world----even in the United States and Canada. There were also various flavours of Nationalist, Fascist, Socialist parties with vast followings that had huge impact on the day-to-day life of many people. Since the demise of the Fascist powers and the collapse of the Soviet Union, all this activity seems to be passe, if not down right incomprehensible.

The problem is that these grand experiments in using politics to reconfigure society all ended very badly. Fascism in Germany, Italy and Japan, and Communism in Russia all culminated in dictatorships that either left their nations as occupied piles of rubble despised by the rest of the world, or couldn't even guarantee that their citizens would be able to find any soap when they went shopping. All of them created police states and committed crimes against humanity. These terrible past examples have created a “brand” so poisoned that anyone involved in any sort of radical or activist politics immediately risks being labeled a “Communist” or “Nazi”.

At first glance, this would strike most greens as being profoundly unfair.# I would suggest, however, that there is a grain of truth to these accusations. The point is that once one steps outside of “social convention” in politics, the unconscious popular sentiment is that we risk opening a Pandora’s box or stepping onto the slippery slope. This is because what holds society together is the fact that the overwhelming majority of citizens hold onto pretty much the same worldview and honour a set of conventions about what issues are and are not “on the table”, and, what does or does not represent a “reasonable” demand for change. Once one leaps over these unspoken boundaries to suggest, for example, things like an end to economic growth, the radical redistribution of wealth, or, mandatory birth control, this fragile consensus risks being shredded.

Policy planks like these three, if they seriously have any hope of being implemented, would radicalize opposition to the point of violence between different factions of society. At this point, political differences cease to be settled through stylized political activity (i.e. voting) and instead get worked out with guns. That is politics the way the Nazis and Bolsheviks did it. So while it is unfair to call the pacifist Green candidate a “Nazi” or “Communist”, the “kook” heckler does actually have something of a legitimate point. If political goals become radical for large numbers of people, the citizenry will become polarized, and if taken far enough, it is inevitable that the means of politics will become violent.

The popular imagination understands this on some sort of inarticulate level, which is why most people have a horror of radical solutions. Instead, most ordinary folks want to see change that comes in incremental or evolutionary steps instead of being through radical or revolutionary programs. This inclination flows from two springs. First, there is the idea that “revolutions devour their own children”. That is to say, that once society gets turned upside down the social forces that sweep away the old order sooner or later get turned on the revolutionaries themselves. The examples of the terror of the French revolution and the purge of the old revolutionaries from the Soviet Union and China come to mind. Secondly, there is a feeling that when the revolutions devour their children, the people who end up on top seem to be the same sorts of people who were in power before. The cliche for this process comes from the 1960’s rock band the Who, who coined the phrase “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”. Absolutist monarchs in France, Russia and China all ended up being replaced by absolutist dictators, namely Napoleon, Stalin and Mao. Ordinary folks might have some sympathy of the ideals espoused by radical activists, but they generally have grave suspicions about what would happen if these particular people ever got any real power.

A lot of people who are attracted to one type of green politics or another will find my position hard to accept. But I think, however, that if they really work at trying to understand what politics really is, they will find the above assertions make a great deal of sense because one situation follows from the other almost like a geometric deduction.

Fear, or, Entitlement?

2011-12-08T14:32:00.001-06:00

I try not to follow politics all that much, but there's been a lot of weird stuff happening in politics land lately, and it can't help but get me thinking. For one thing, there's been a lot of strange stuff coming down the pipeline about gay bullying at schools. There's been a rash of teenage suicides by gay teens at Ontario schools, so a lot of authority figures have been making "It gets better" videos for YouTube. Here's one from the Premier of Ontario.

This is actually more than just a platitude. The Premier is passing new rules that force all Ontario schools to agree to support "gay straight alliance" groups if students want to start them up. This has many religious people up in arms, because they say that it infringes on their rights.

Liberals have been tap-dancing around this issue, but the overwhelming fact of the matter is that this really does infringe on people's religious rights. If you look at a lot of religious groups, they do teach that we should hate gays and lesbians. Indeed, there are individual quotes in the Bible that suggest we should kill them.

"If a man lies with a male as with a women, both of them shall be put to death for their abominable deed; they have forfeited their lives." (Leviticus 20:13 NAB)

Of course, it also says in the same place that we should kill anyone who hits or curses their father, commits adultery, atheists, people who believe in other religions, etc. But the main thing is that the current, oral tradition of very large religious congregations teaches that we should ostracize, bully and abuse homosexuals and lesbians.

Is it any wonder that naive children act on these teachings of the church?

The question is, therefore, whether or not politicians should be going after church teachings and outlawing the ones that are causing real suffering to children?

This is not a straight forward question. Enlightened politicians, like the Premier, have an obligation to avoid letting the baser elements of society whip the public into a frenzy of hate. It isn't enough to be right, it's important to do the most you can to avoid harm. This means that when a politico is faced by an evil, manipulative scumbag that just might be able to mobilize the public if they throw around enough lies, falsehoods and innuendos,

they should be willing to consider bending a little in order to avoid a greater catastrophe.

The problem is, however, that if we pander too much to the religious bigots in order to deflate their attempts to mobilize the public, we run the risk of letting said bigots win half a loaf through just threatening to go for the whole one. And that in turn, raises the issue of whether the forces of darkness can eventually take over by forcing one compromise after another compromise out of the other side.

There are a lot issues raised by this 'cultural warfare', but two come to my mind which I think are both very important and very rarely raised.

The first one is the way liberals almost invariably let the bigots wrap themselves in the mantle of "morality". I personally don't think that it is moral to preach hatred and intolerance towards people because of their sexual orientation. I don't think hatred of any form is moral. I also think that it is very important to understand people who are different, even if we do not approve. I also believe that if people who are intolerant did try to understand the people that they don't approve of, they might find that their intolerance is totally unjustified. It may not be true that "to know all is to forgive all", but I do believe that "to know all is to forgive a great more than you would have before".

Not only do I think that intolerance is immoral, I also think that will-full ignorance is too. Indeed, I think that there is a great deal of will-full ignorance in our society. People who refuse to really look into important issues---such as global warming---and instead simply believe what is tremendously convenient to their worldview are being will-fully ignorant.

I understand that traditional religion doesn't consider hatred, intolerance or will-full ignorance as being immoral. But I think that if people of good will pushed ordinary folks on the issue, we'd find a great many citizens do think of them that way. The problem is, that most liberals are so committed to the language of moral relativism that they refuse to use this, the strongest weapon in their arsenal.

The second issue that comes to mind in this debate is the way bigoted people seem to be manifesting some sort of outrage against their loss of a certain type of privilege. The problem is that if you were a white, middle-class, heterosexual, Christian, male, you used to be "on top of the heap". This meant that you were the last laid off, the first hired, people laughed at your jokes even if they weren't funny, and you could force other people to adhere to a code of behaviour that you believed in even if it made no sense to them. Now things are a lot more egalitarian. And you know what? A lot of people don't particularly want there to be prayer in school because they are either atheist or non-Christians. People like Perry (or the Republican primary voters he is trying to suck up to in the above advertisement) don't like losing this privilege. Most of them are too insensitive to understand that there are people out their that don't want prayer in schools or discrimination against gays, others just don't care because they are right and those other people are wrong.

I think we need to understand how tremendously awful the world must seem to these people. Younger people often forget this stuff, but at the advanced age of 52, I can remember when blacks were still getting routinely lynched in the American South for being "uppity", the police in Toronto were still arresting gays for being "found ins" at bath houses, my sister was flat out told that she couldn't enroll in a horticultural schools "because they don't allow women to take any of the courses", abortion was illegal, etc. For the older, tea-party types that are so important to the Republican and Conservative parties, it must seem like the world has been taken over by Martians.

Understanding where these people are coming from is not the same thing as accepting their behaviour, though. We simply cannot allow these people to damage our society the way that they have been doing. What needs to be done, therefore, is the creation of a public discussion that changes the "terms of discussion" so they no longer get to wrap themselves in the mantle of "morality". People need to stand up to these folks and use their own language.

The above Youtube parody is a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, it can easily be dismissed as being "sacrilegious" by anyone who refuses to listen to what the actor is really saying. I do think, though, that people like Rick Perry and his supporters need to be "carpet bombed" by people who tell them that they don't think that picking one specific quote from the Old Testament then using it to preach hatred and discrimination really fits in with the over-all message of Christ as expressed in the New Testament.

"War and Peace" and the Dao

2011-11-18T11:50:00.001-06:00

I just got finished reading Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace for something like the tenth time (I've lost track.) As before, I found more to it than I had gained from previous readings. Since I know that for the overwhelming number of people it is considered an impossibly long, abstruse book, I thought that I'd share a little of why I love the book so much, and why I would suggest that the themes that Tolstoy discusses should interest Daoists.

Most of my readers probably don't know much about Leo Tolstoy, but he was an absolutely amazing person. He was born into one of the richest and most powerful aristocratic families in Russia. As a young man, he gambled and whored away most of his family fortune. Bored with this life, he decided to join the army and ended up fighting in Chechnya. Returning from the war, he took up writing and was recognized as an "up and coming" writer at the age of 24. He produced an astounding amount of work: 24 novels and novellas, many short stories, 6 plays and 9 non-fiction books. As if this wasn't enough, he did this while being a very successful farm manager and while working at various projects to improve the life of his peasants and humanity in general. (The Doukhobors who live in the West of Canada had half of their passage fare from Russia paid by Tolstoy.)

Tolstoy also emerged as a major thinker in how to change society through peaceful means. His writings so impressed Mohandas Gandhi that he wrote directly to Tolstoy to ask if he could reprint A Letter to a Hindu that he had written to another member of the independence movement. His ideas on Christian anarchism have influenced people up to this day, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. (Mandela's autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, he mentions that he had a copy when he was in prison at Robben Island, which he read many times.)

The book itself deals both with the private lives of various people, primarily Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Count Pierre Bezukov, and, Napoleon's wars with Russia. Tolstoy attempts with his novel to create a grand theory of history and explain how people's private lives fit into it. One theme that he illustrates over and over again is how even though people naively believe that specific decisions are made by "great" individuals, what really happens is that web all get swept along by circumstances.

One early simple example comes from a battle. A group of soldiers is attacked by some French cavalry. A sergeant yells out to the men to run into some trees or else the horsemen will slaughter them. Later on, a colonel gets a medal for ordering his men to go into the woods, thereby saving them. The officer is loath to turn down a medal, so he lets everyone believe that he is a hero.

Tolstoy believed that not only does fate (or, as I would say, the Dao) control history, what little control we have over our lives diminishes as we become more and more important in the grand scheme of things. A sergeant may be able to yell out to his men to run into the trees, but a leader like Napoleon is hemmed-in by the forces beyond his control.

Tolstoy illustrates this point by pointing out that Napoleon seemed incapable of controlling his men once then entered Moscow. He couldn't stop the looting that destroyed all the supplies that the army needed to survive the winter. When the retreat started, he couldn't stop the army from bunching up from fear of Russian partisans, which destroyed its ability to forage for supplies. He couldn't stop the army from trying to carry back all the loot it had gotten from Moscow, which encumbered its supply train and killed all its horses. And he couldn't slow the column down. (Tolstoy writes that most of the soldiers were so terrified of the Russians that they marched at the astounding pace of 25 miles per day all the way from Moscow to the border. He maintains that this pace is what killed most of the Grand Army of Europe and many of the Russian troops who chased them attempting to do battle.)

In contrast, Pierre, who was travelling as a prisoner in the Napoleon's column for part of the trip found himself "free" for the first time in his life. He was barefoot and living on horse meat, at the beck and call of is guards, but he found for the first time in his life that he was master of his own thoughts. He got up when the guards told him to, slept as soon as he laid himself down, and, when something unpleasant came to his mind, learned he could just divert his attention and be free as a bird. A man who has control over his mind is free, whereas a man who is "in charge" is imprisoned by the illusion of his own importance. Pierre's experience is that of a Daoist who frees himself from the "land of dust".

While Pierre is a captive of the French he becomes friends with private who the French pulled from an army hospital (he was sick with a fever): Platon Krataev. Krataev is a representative of the "good peasant" that Tolstoy held so dear. Krataev is filled with pithy sayings that Pierre finds apropos to the issues he faces as a captive. He is also fatalistic and humble. He "takes life as it comes" and adapts to the circumstances without complaint. Eventually Krataev is too sick to keep up with the column, so the French murder him. But Pierre is so impressed by his example that long after the war is over, and Pierre is a happily married wealthy aristocrat, his wife can draw him short on a scheme of his by simply asking him "What would Platon Krataev think of this idea?" I believe that Platon Krataev is a pretty good example of what Daoists would call an "uncarved block".

In contrast to Napoleon's false "heroic" style of leadership, Tolstoy's real hero is Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov . Whereas Napoleon is shown as an arrogant, pompous fool in love with grand gestures and who makes big plans about battles. Kutuzov is shown as an old man who does as little as he possibly can to "get in the way" of his soldiers. His genius consists in what he doesn't do, not in what he does do. He understands that once the French invade Russia, his job is to control the enthusiasm of his men, who want nothing more than to tear the Grande Armee to pieces. Battle between the French and Russians finally came about at Borodino, where even though the Russians left the field Kutuzov considered his men to have won a huge victory.

This is an important point for Tolstoy. Kutuzov saw it as a victory because even though the troops were not deployed ideally, they refused to break and run like all the other armies of Europe had done in the face of Napoleon. Instead, they simply fought off the French and if driven from a part of the field regrouped and retook it. Eventually, simply because of lack of supplies the Russians had to leave. But they didn't run away in a route, they simply retreated back down the road towards Moscow. The Russians not only proved that they were as good or better than the French, the French knew it too. That was why they retreated so quickly and in a disorganized mass instead of an organized army.

The secret as Tolstoy writes is that Kutuzov understood that he was fighting a "people's war" where every single member of Russian society was totally mobilized to resist the French. The aristocrats refused to stay behind in occupied territory and "make nice" with the French. The storekeepers handed out all their goods to Russian soldiers for free and burnt what was left, rather than sell to the French. The peasants left their land and refused to sell food. The Tsar himself in one passage says that he will retreat to Siberia and grow his own potatoes before he will sign a peace treaty with Napoleon.

The point that Kutuzov and Tolstoy understand is that people can only be oppressed if they agree to participate in their own oppression. Men who will not make any accommodation to the people who occupy their nation will not be occupied long. (This is exactly the point that Gandhi understood about the British occupation of India.) Kutuzov's behaviour as described in War and Peace is a perfect example of Wu Wei.

Pierre is oppressed from having married an terrible woman, Helene, early after he inherited his title and enormous wealth. She is very beautiful and uses sex to create a fashionable "salon" in St. Petersburg society. She is portayed as vain, ambitious, takes lovers, and very clearly only marries the naive Pierre for his money and title. Eventually she dies from what is implied to be a botched abortion. Yet before he finds out that she has died, which sets him free to marry a woman he clearly loves, Pierre gains the realization that he loves Helene as he loves everyone. He says "why should I blame her for wanting to live the life that she wants?"

This insight comes from a dream that Pierre experiences while in French captivity. He finds himself in a study with his Swiss tutor from his student days. He is looking at a globe. It appears to be somewhat "fuzzy" in that it's edges seems to be moving. On closer inspection, he realizes that the globe is composed of billions of living things----the people, plants and animals that inhabit the earth. He hear's his tutors voice in his ears "God doesn't live up the sky. God is Everything." Pierre realizes that God loves everything and he should love everything else, because we are all God. The realization about his wife is just putting this grand vision into practical effect.

It is easy for modern people who are badly poisoned by the modern versions of religion that we have had inflicted upon us to grind our teeth and shudder at any mention of the word "God". Which might turn a lot of people off of Tolstoy. But he is meaning the term in a very specific way, one that is a lot more like the "DAO" than Jimmy Swaggard or Pat Roberston. Indeed, Tolstoy was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox church. (I don't really think I like the DAO type of Daoism, myself. I'm more likely to see the Dao is "that's just the way it is" rather than build some sort of giant theology around the concept, but I still really like Tolstoy and think that this is more of a quibble than anything else.)

I could go on and on about this book. But I've already had my software erase this blog once and have to rebuild it. I do hope that I will encourage some people to make the effort to read War and Peace . I think someone interested in learning about Daoism would be better off doing this than trying to find some hidden gems of wisdom in their one hundred reading of the Dao De Jing.

Environmental Vow 17: Liberal Christianity

2011-11-02T20:37:00.001-06:00

Liberal Christianity

Many people who have problems with the “Olde Tyme Religion” of fundamentalism yet still see value in the life of faith have attempted to create liberal forms of religion. Indeed, it could be argued that these formulations are the latest manifestation of gradual reform that has taken place within religious denominations since the reformation. As I see it, however, there is an inescapable dilemma that faces liberal religion, namely, “How does one deal with the ancient formulations of the faith?” That is, how do you reconcile the modern worldview with the scriptures and traditions that predate the enlightenment? How does Christianity, Judaism and Islam “work” in a world where no sensible person, for example, can believe in the literal existence of the old sky-God of the Torah?

The Liberal Christian answer has been to create something which, for lack of a better term, could be called a “humanist” Christianity. In general terms, this is an attempt to take away the problematic elements of the Christian tradition (e.g. God, miracles, parts of the scripture that support genocide, etc) and replace them with terms and beliefs more acceptable to modern sensibilities. Theologians such as Paul Tillich have replaced the “old man in the clouds” with the “God of the philosophers”. That is, he gives up on any idea of God as being a human-like entity that has volition, makes choices, gets angry with sinners, etc, and replaces him with vague, philosophical formulations such as God is “the ground of all being”. In the same way, Biblical scholars such as Rudolf Bultmann used the methods of literary analysis to point out that our “holy” scriptures are mythological documents, not historical records. The “God” of liberal Christians is a short-hand for for a complex, philosophical understanding of human existence and the stories about Moses and Jesus exist alongside those of Heracles and Hiawatha as culture-building myths instead of historically accurate records.

I would argue that aside from the relative intrinsic merits of this sort of religious formulation, there are tremendous practical problems that result from this sort of theology. First of all, this sort of faith requires an enormous amount of effort to sustain. Secondly, because it cannot engage the entire congregation of believers, it inevitably becomes “hidden” behind the traditional signs and symbols of the past. This allows a sort of “ur-conservatism”# to take hold of the religious membership, which eventually holds the priesthood hostage. Finally, because the “god of the philosophers” doesn't have the same sort of hold over people's consciousness as the “old man in the clouds” does, even if the liberal church avoids being held hostage by internal fundamentalists, it will inevitably find itself drawn towards a sort of extreme humanism that results in a theology of “being nice”. This effectively neuters the institution and its leadership by removing any ability to develop “prophetic” moral reactions to the great problems of the day, such as the death of Nature.

Perhaps the biggest problem with liberal Christian exegesis is that it is so intellectually difficult. If people really do want to understand the “god of the philosophers” and “Bible as myth”, they will need to undertake a daunting ordeal that involves reading very large books composed of academic prose. Oddly enough, however, there exists a very large segment of the religious population who eagerly devour this sort of thing. # But the plain and simple fact of the matter is that this sort of theological orientation simply cannot ever be anything other than elitist. Ordinary parishioners, most of who have neither the education, nor the leisure, let alone inclination, will never put in the hours necessary to understand all of this stuff.

In a sense, liberal Christianity is a bit like what Indians would call Jnana Yoga. That is, the path to salvation that comes from certain sort of intellectual knowledge about the universe. This form of Yoga is not conceived as something that can be followed by anything more than an intellectual elite and as such is usually discouraged for most people. The problem with liberal Christianity is that it doesn't exist within a structure that offers other clearly-defined options, such as Bhakti Yoga (the path of “love”) or Karma Yoga (the path of “works”.) Nor does he inhabit a rigidly hierarchical society where people simply accept that there are mysteries that only the educated Brahmins can be expected to understand. Instead, the Christian in a liberal congregation who cannot figure out what is going on will often try to find some other sort of way to accommodate him or herself to the congregation.

One of the things about religious symbols and rituals is that they allow people to function together on a shallow level while holding very different worldviews. This is practically feasible because symbols and rituals function on a symbolic rather than explicit level. This allows people to share an experience without realizing how radically different their understanding can be.

Take, for example, the symbol of the cross. Some people see it specifically through the frame of “suffering”. That is, they believe that it shows that in some sense suffering makes a person a better human being. This view supports the sort of people who flagellate themselves (either literally or figuratively.) Others see it as a symbol of Jesus as the scape-goat for the sins of humanity. The cross reminds them that ultimately the only thing that really matters is whether or not one is “born again”. Others see it as an execution device that was used to kill someone who rebelled against unjust authority.

If you see the cross in terms of suggesting that suffering is “noble”, then it will support a position that suggests that the best response to social ills such as poverty is to learn to endure them with grace and serenity. The more we suffer on earth, the more we are rewarded after death. In contrast, if you see the cross in terms of Christ as the scape-goat for humanity's sins, you will tend to believe that the core of “salvation” comes from accepting that scape-goat story. Trying to be a good person or developing some sort of serenity, according to this worldview, is at best irrelevant and at worst the sin of pride.# Finally, if you see the cross as an execution device for rebels, then Christ's message becomes one of the necessity of being fearless in one's opposition to injustice and support for the oppressed. Seeking serenity and belief in a scape-goat, in this view, would be mere self-indulgence that hinders the creation of the God's imperial domain.

As long as the cross exists just as a symbol without any attempt to explain it's meaning in any detail, it can unify a congregation. The various people sitting in a pew can all have different views on its significance yet be unified by their veneration for it as a symbol. But once anyone attempts to “unpack” the symbol's meaning, then it becomes obvious to one and all that the “unity” of the congregation isn't quite as deep as once thought. I once read, for example, of an attempt by an artist to create a new crucifix for a congregation that involved a sculpture of Christ as an obvious black man sitting on an electric chair.# His reasoning was that modern American Christians fail to understand that in the context of Roman Palestine, Christ was a member of an oppressed minority (a poor Jew in the Pagan Roman Empire) who had been executed by the state in a specifically humiliating manner for breaking the law against rebellion. The statue was absolutely vilified by some members of the congregation that had commissioned his work. As memory serves me, it was never used. The reason why is because his attempt to unpack one particular set of meaning made it cease to be an agent of unity for the congregation and instead become one of division.

The stories of the New Testament operate in a similar fashion. Take, for example, the story of the trial of Christ. The anti-Semite can read the account of the trial before the Sanhedrin as an example of the evil in the Jewish soul. In contrast, the radical can read this group as not a Jewish group, but as instead an Ecclesiastic Hierarchy. In this case, then the story becomes one of how the religious institution subverts and perverts the values it purports to support. It all depends on whether the readers chooses to see in the Sanhedrin the Jewish pawnbroker down the street, or, the Papal court in Rome. As long as the congregation just refers to the story in the Good Friday service there is no source of dissension. But once one tries to unpack the meaning and explain what the story “is all about”, then all Hell risks breaking out.

When a congregation or denomination does try to explain what these symbols mean, the results can be dire. For example, when the United and Anglican Churches of Canada decided to not only officiate at same-sex weddings but to also allow accept homosexual clergy many members of the church decided that this was a “deal breaker” and left. Sometimes this even happened en-mass with the congregations either becoming independent or joining some other denomination. For the liberals, the question about homosexuals was one of discrimination and revolved around Matthew 25:40's “Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me”. For conservatives, the issue was that of following the divinely revealed morality of God and focused on Leviticus 18:22's "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination".#

The liberals in these congregations understand from their study of modern scholarship that the Bible is a human creation which needs to be reinterpreted by each generation as its collective knowledge increases. But for those who have not gone through the laborious effort of studying the ponderous, academic texts on the subject this willingness to jettison old moral “verities” is scandalous. In many congregations those clergy who have developed a liberal interpretation feel themselves to be prisoners of their more conservative members of the congregation who watch them with an “eagle eye” for evidence of dangerous “back sliding”. # Many clergy realize find that if they say what they really think on a wide variety of issues they risk being removed from their position. Even non-clergy liberals routinely “bite their tongue” because they do not want to risk ostracism from the congregation and the fellowship they seek.

To give conservatives their due, I think that they do have something of a point.

The problem with formulations of Christianity that give a primacy to philosophical concepts (i.e. God as “the ground of all being”) and which see the scripture as a human creation, is that it takes the “old man in the clouds” out of the religion. That really is the point of liberal religion. As I've pointed out previously, the old formulations not only no longer seem viable to modern ears, they have positively driven the best and brightest people out of the church. But the “old man in the clouds” is a real, palpable sort of vision that engages people and motivates them in a way that vague, philosophical musings never seem to be able. The Benedictine Abbeys were not built by people trying to serve “the ground of all being” or who were inspired by a man-made record of ancient myths. They believed literally in God, the afterlife and that the Bible was absolutely true.

It is difficult to objectively quantify the level of a person's commitment to a religious vision, but one plausible way of doing so is to track the amount of money individuals with a specific type of religious orientation give to their religious establishment of choice. The clear tendency seems to be that the more liberal a person is, the less they give to charity. One study, for example, showed that when people were separated into different categories of “conservative”, “moderate” and “liberal”, they each donated, on average, $3255, $2,926 and $1,879 respectively to secular charities. In addition, they also donated, on average, $1,841, $1,115 and $499 to their place of worship.#

There are a great many possible explanations for this difference in financial support. I am not a statistician and this is not a book about that sort of analysis. But it certainly seems obvious that if someone literally believes that there is a sky-god looking down on her from “on high” who can and will punish her directly for her behaviour, then she will modify her behaviour accordingly. In contrast, someone who instead believes in some sort of vague philosophical principle will not feel a similar sort of need to act.

This is not to say, however, that conservatives are better people than liberals. Human behaviour is extremely complex. Our behaviour is driven by compulsions and drives that have very little to do with what we consciously believe about the universe. The conservative who feels that the eye of God is always on him may still end up getting drunk on Saturday night and beat up his wife. Similarly, the Liberal who doesn't believe in God or an afterlife can still live a life of calm sobriety. The Gospel of Matthew expresses this point well: “the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”# But having said that, the fact of the matter is that our behaviour is driven not by calm reason, but rather by emotions. And “the old man in the clouds” is a much more powerful emotional driver than “the ground of all being”. Moreover, it is a lot easier to get emotionally engaged in the stories of the Bible when we see them as being directly handed to us by God instead of as a collection of myths written by ancient people living in a long-dead world.

If the liberal no longer believes in the old man sky god, then what, ultimately, is the basis of her faith? If we talk about God as “the ground of all being” we are really talking about “how the human mind works”. And if we see the Bible as a collection of ancient myths written by fallible human beings, then we are really talking about “how the human mind has seen things in the past”. Ultimately, liberal religion is a form of humanism.

And with humanism, we come back to the same problems I identified with Abraham Maslow's ethic of self-actualization. The problem with this type of religion is that it no longer has any room for what Christians call the “prophetic spirit”. That is, if one's religion does include some element of the “old man in the clouds”, then it is possible to believe that one is following his commandments and that you have the authority to demand a great deal from people. You can say that they should turn from their sinful ways and that God wants them to build an abbey in what is now not much more than a swamp. In contrast, if God is “the ground of all being” and an idea that was inherited from our ignorant ancestors, it is going to be a lot harder to generate the necessary enthusiasm to get much of anything off the ground.

And once you remove any sort of appeal to divine authority, you get left with Protagoras' saying that “Man is the measure of all things”. At that point, it's pretty hard to push Christianity much farther than Douglas Adams'# characterization of Jesus' message: “Why can't we all be nice to one another?” Prophets are not “nice” people. They offend when they point out where people fail to live up to some sort of ethical ideal. And they also sometimes suggest that there are social goals that are more important than the comfort of the population. Old Testament prophets could argue that God wants people to eat locally-grown, organic food and take the train instead of flying. Humanists are left with “wouldn't it be nice if people thought about the consequences of their actions?” Neither appeal is going to change the behaviour of the majority, but I would argue that a larger minority of Conservatives is going to effect a greater change than that of Humanists, simply because their appeal is based on more basic, emotional drivers.

Democracy

2011-10-16T16:05:00.003-06:00

One of the things I've been seeing in quotes from and about the "occupy Wall Street" protesters is that they are creating a form of "true democracy". As someone who has spent decades actively engaged in trying to understand and manifest in some sort of concrete fashion what "true democracy" could be, I thought I'd write a post about it. Oddly enough, in thinking about the subject I've found my path leads back to the Dao, even though I originally saw it as just a side line.

I was involved in building Canada's fourth major party, the Greens. My finger prints were at one time all over both the constitution of the Green Party of Canada and Ontario. I've also been told that decision-making structures that I designed have also been adopted by other groups. So this is one of those tiny little niches where I actually am a bit of a "world-class expert". This knowledge has not been acquired easily, however, as each and every lesson learned involved agonizing work with some of the most mulish, idiotic people I have had the bad luck to meet.

One of the first things I learned was that "democracy" means a wide variety of different things to different people. Unfortunately, for a surprising number of people it simply means that they always get their own way. Luckily, I've found that the majority of people believe instead, that "democracy" means letting people have their say and then going along with what the majority believe.

This held true for the Green Party membership as well, but unfortunately, there was a subtle subtext to the self-selected group of people who had a Green membership. That is, the overwhelming majority of them would not take action to "shut up" or "marginalize" people who disagreed with the majority. This is probably one of the core Green beliefs and something that separates them from the vast majority of people.

This ideal makes sense if you consider that these members usually represent an extremely marginalized minority within their own home community. For example, Greens believed in an end to economic growth long, long, long before you could even write about the subject on an Op Ed page in a newspaper. The only suggestion by "mainstream" voices was the old Club of Rome report Limits to Growth that came out in 1972. And when it came out, it initiated such a firestorm of opposition that whole industries of bullshit were designed in order to lessen it's impact on the imagination. Most notably, this included the concept "sustainable development" and the "Brundtland Commission".

(Primarily, this was a remarkably successful campaign by a coalition of business and politicians of all stripes to create "plastic words" that would suck out all of the clear and startling meaning from "Limits to Growth" and replace it with a phrase that seems to mean the same thing, but in actual fact means whatever you want it to. "Sustainable Development" purports to be about economic activity that will allow for the sustaining of the environment, but most people really use it to mean a system of environmental regulation that will allow economic growth to continue just as it always has.)

If someone comes from a community where they are used to being totally marginalized as the local "eco-freak" or "tree-hugger", they usually have an extreme sensitivity towards ostracizing someone else for having an unpopular belief. As a result, Greens not only had enormous tolerance towards other people, they were willing to follow a form of decision-making that they called "Formal Consensus" in order to accommodate all points of view.

There are a great many different ways in which formal consensus can be done, but the system that Greens rather unconsciously stumbled into using is what is usually called the "Polish Parliament" system. In effect, the Green Party in Canada for many years believed that the only way it could make decisions was if not one single person objected to a specific proposal, or, every single person present at any meeting had an absolute veto.

This would be bad enough, but in addition, the Green Parties of Canada did not have any sort of delegate system. This meant that all anyone had to do to participate in any meeting (and wield a veto) was to show up. And I mean anyone, because there was never any attempt to even force people to prove that they had a membership or were not cards-carrying members of some other political party. Indeed, there were people who showed up for years and created all sorts of chaos who steadfastly refused to buy a membership because they didn't believe in the value of political parties, per ce. (When I asked one of these guys why he continued to show up, he said "I just wanted to share my experience and wisdom with the Greens.")

As you might imagine, this system pretty much destroyed any chance that the Greens would ever be able to accomplish much of anything. Not only did it hamstring the party, it ensured that it was almost impossible to build the membership. I was very successful in building up the membership in my home riding, for example, but every time I brought people to a convention they would be so appalled by the chaos that they their interest in the group would drop off to nothing immediately afterwards. As a result, I stopped encouraging new members to get involved outside of the riding.

Eventually, after ten years the Green Parties' membership had dwindled to the point where even the most obstinately "nice" members believed that there was no way that we could continue this way. What happened was I able to convince the party in a plenary session to suspend the Polish Parliament system and have a simple majority vote on changing to a new system. While my proposed alternative allowed a small number of individuals to delay passage of a resolution until their concerns had had ample time to be listened to and maybe accommodated, it did not give either an individual or very small minority the right to thwart the majority. This passed by an overwhelming margin and we had a new system. (This was my invention, but it has been called the "Bonser Method" because a fellow named Greg Bonser was the moderator---and a piss poor one too---at the GPO convention where I managed to get it passed. As Ronald Reagan once famously said "You can accomplish much if you don't care who gets the credit.")

You would think that once we had something like a functional system for collective decision-making in the Green Party things would improve. Well, they did but structural dysfunction ultimately proved to be like the Hydra that Heracles was forced to battle. Every time people were able to solve one problem, it seemed like two more would spring up to take their place. For example, the membership wrote a constitution where elected individuals were supposed to be personally responsible for doing specific jobs. What this meant was that the Board that governed the party found itself unwilling/incapable of setting priorities or creating long-term plans because each individual member of the board felt that they had their own personal mandate to do their specific "task" as they saw fit.

In one example, the person who was elected as the Board Secretary decided that the only sort of minutes that he would submit to the party were actual, complete transcripts of the meeting that he had done himself. And since he was a very poor typist, it would take months for those transcripts to come out and reading them was a very tedious job. Yet when I got a volunteer to write up a set of "unofficial minutes" and had them out to the membership the day after the meeting, I ended up being censured by the Chairman for overstepping my authority. As you could see, keeping the elected secretary happy was more important to the Chair (and the other Board members) than actually letting the membership know what was going on.

The fundamental problem that I had run up against was that there really is no such thing as a system of governance or decision-making that can force people to be fair and open about things if the average official doesn't really want to be fair and open, or, can't understand the problem. Similarly, if the odd official really does want to "do the right thing", there is no way that they can prosper in the system and do good unless a lot of the rank-and-file members are willing to support her. If most people are too busy or indifferent to get involved, or even pay attention, then various players for a variety of reasons will figure out ways to either consciously or unconsciously "fiddle" the system.

The overwhelming majority of Green Party members not only didn't know anything about the internal politics of the party, they had absolutely zero interest in learning anything about it. I thought long and hard about this and came to the conclusion that while the majority of people in all parties know little about how their party actually works, the Greens know even less simply because people who join the Greens tend overwhelmingly not to be "people people", but are instead "ideas people". That is, Greens are up in arms about the environment simply because they have spent a lot of time reading books about climate science and such. In the same way that most mainstream politicians know absolutely nothing about science and ecology, most people who are either small "g" and large "G" greens know absolutely nothing about human society and how large institutions work.

And I'm not saying that the people who fought long and hard against coming up with anything like a functional Green Party were evil Machiavellis out to create an empire. Instead, they were like children blundering around in the control room of a space ship and totally unaware of the enormous damage they were doing by playing with the switches.

I might also add that I too was one of those children. I am someone who has spent most of his working life by myself (riding in a tractor seat, swinging a mop, walking a beat, etc) and as a result, know precious little about what makes other people "tick". In addition, my PTSD has resulted in a volcanic temper based with the underlying assumption that when someone is mulish or obtuse that they really do know what they are doing and that they are trying to "fuck things up" on purpose. Someone with greater insight into human nature either would have been a lot more diplomatic and as such accomplished more, or, (more likely) have understood the odds against me and never bothered trying in the first place.

Towards the end of my tenure in the Green Party I spent most of my time telling people that they had better "smarten up" and come up with something like a functional system or else someone from outside would come in and take over the party. This, indeed, is exactly what happened. In the case of the Green Party of Canada, what happened was a famous environmentalist by the name of Elizabeth May decided to join the party and run for the leadership. At that point, the Green Party pretty much became the "Elizabeth May Party" and ceased to be much of anything else but a vehicle for promoting her particular view of environmentalism. And getting her elected into Parliament (which it eventually did.)

Please note, I am not suggesting that Ms. May is any sort of a Machiavellian. She is just an extremely hard-working woman who has devoted her life to pursuing a long list of important causes. But she had never been a member of the Green Party before she decided to run and had absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of the party's internal issues or history. Moreover, she brought in a huge number of members who's only interest was in seeing her elected---because she is famous----and who's understanding of the complex issues behind the Green crisis are extremely limited. The result is that the Green Party no longer has anything like a fundamental critique of either mainstream society or our political system. It really is just another political party now.

To bring this back to the Wall Street protesters.

Looking at the protests, I could not help but think that they were all going down a similar blind alley that the Green Party traveled when I thought that it might be able to accomplish something. Their statements about creating a "new form of democracy" through some sort of consensus structure is doomed to fail for the same reasons it did in the Green Party. (And it also failed before in the women's movement for the same reasons, see the great essay The Tyranny of Structurelessness.)

But I was listening to a professor on the CBC talking about the Wall Street protests this morning and she made a very important point that I had missed. She said that it didn't matter if anything practical comes from these protests. What is important about protests is a change of consciousness. And the protests against Wall Street for one reason or another have made it possible for people in the media and government to talk about redistributing wealth and increasing taxes again. In the same way, the civil rights movement, women's liberation, gay rights, etc, movements didn't "accomplish" anything except change how people thought about some issues. And when enough people had changed their opinions, then governments were able to take concrete legislative steps to actually change society in accordance with these new ideas. And once society had changed enough, it eventually became increasingly hard for people to "get away" with the sort of casual sexism, racism, homophobia, etc, that were simply "the way things are" when I was young.

In the same way, the Green Party was able to raise issues about things like the need to end economic growth and live in a sustainable manner even though it eventually morphed into not much more than "Liberals in a hurry".

Those protesters out on the streets who think that they are creating a whole new world and a new way of doing things are right. But not in the way that they think that they are. The radical experiments in formal consensus and citizen assemblies are simply too poorly thought-out to be able to work. And the movement that they are creating is simply too weak and fragile to avoid almost instant co-optation. But the ideas that they are throwing out into the world will spread like dandelion seeds and take root in some of the most unlikely places.

I might also add that their analysis of the crisis we are facing as a society is flawed because it doesn't goes much deeper than identifying the greed of the bankers and other big business people. Instead, I would argue that the economy has hit the limits to growth that the Club of Rome recognized so long ago. Both climate change and Peak Oil are absolute limits that are ending the idea of economic growth that our entire society and culture is built around. If you asked the people protesting on Wall Street who is "at fault" most of them would suggest that it is "the one percent" that they identify. But the real problem, IMHO, is that our entire society is based on endless growth and we are hitting its limit. The "one percent"r's are simply the specific individuals who find themselves in that slot and the political system that they have corrupted is just the inevitable result of the whole idea of progress. And if you asked most of the protesters, (and certainly the people who think that they are doing something good), you'd learn pretty quickly that the only problem with the "system" is that it failed to deliver the goods they wanted, not that the whole idea that it can do so indefinitely is impossible on a finite planet.

There is one point I would take from the decades that I put into struggling in the Green movement that I would like to share with my readers, though. I pointed out a while back in one of the ~~Vow of Sustainability~~ Environmental Vow chapters that freedom is not really about having "choice" between one option or another. Instead, I suggested that a more sophisticated definition comes from Cicero : "Freedom is participation in power". In other words, the freedom that a citizen has in a free and democratic society doesn't come from voting, but instead from participation in the actual process of government----through things like joining the Green Party or protesting on Wall Street.

I would add to Cicero's insight one of my own. The only way we can "participate" in power is if we understand that we cannot accomplish anything of worth while through brute force but only insofar as we are moving in harmony with the times. To be a free citizen in a democratic society it is necessary to participate in society instead of being a passive by-stander. But to be a ~~spiritually~~ self-consciously free citizen, it is necessary to have some sort of personal distance from the great events of our times and understand how much we are all like leaves floating down the stream of the Dao.

So as a Daoist I can support the protests on Wall Street and suggest that they will probably do some good. But I also have to understand that much as I would like these people to understand the deeper issues involved, I realize that they are not ready to understand that no matter what government does we simply cannot go back to the "good old days" and must, instead, learn to accommodate ourselves to a new way of doing things. They will learn, but not through some sort of rational process but rather because they simply will have no other option.

That's the way the Dao is------.

Environmental Vow 16: Buddhism

2011-10-05T21:42:00.000-06:00

Bringing in a Third Option

I hope that I have been persuasive with at least a few of my readers to the point where they believe as I do, that something like faith and duty are necessary for mobilizing humanity to save the planet. Moreover, I also hope that they have been able to follow my explanation why traditional formulations are no longer acceptable to most citizens. I also hope that people have followed my description of why Maslow's suggested ethic of “self actualization” has failed to fill the void. Finally, I'd like to think that my little digression dealing with the complexities of freedom articulated clearly why I think it is important to reject naive assumptions about the relationship between the individual and the collective.

In effect, what I am suggesting is that in order to mobilize society in a way that will allow us to really deal with the problems that the human race will face during the coming time of environmental catastrophe we will have to develop some new way of mobilizing society. This unifying force will have to mimic the best parts of faith and duty, without falling prey to the limitations that are all too obvious to modern people. It will also have to avoid the problems that I have identified with the ideals of “self-actualization” and “follow your bliss” and instead has more in common with Cicero's ideal of “participation in power”.

In the next part of this essay I'm going to examine some new trends in our society that I think show some promise about how we might be able to work our way out of the present mess.

Buddhism

The big push to develop the new ethic of Self-Actualization or “Follow your bliss” came from a rejection of both patriotic duty and religious faith as the key motivational force in a person's life. It was pretty obvious to a society that had gone through things like the reformation, the enlightenment and the World Wars that there needed to be something else to motivate intelligent people beyond religious faith and patriotism. That is why thinkers like Maslow tried so hard to come up with some sort of replacement. Unfortunately, in practice his suggestion quickly degenerated into not much more than “do your own thing”. This is pretty thin gruel to live on in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity. It is totally insufficient to support people going through a period of crisis like the present ecological collapse.

Large minorities have decided to maintain their allegiance to traditional faith, which has led to the increased militancy of Protestant Fundamentalism and a sort of creeping Roman Catholic Fascism that places all power in the Pope. Coexisting with and mostly overlapping with them are extreme patriots who exhibit a similar sort of belief in the value of the military and Executive authority to the exclusion of both the Legislature and Constitutional safeguards. Beyond these reactionary tendencies, I would suggest that there are other, more promising currents at work.

One example is the emergence of North American Buddhism. Even though it is difficult to find hard numbers, it appears that the number of Buddhists is growing very quickly in North America1. While much of this growth comes from Asian immigration, a significant fraction (estimated at about 20-25%2) are Western converts of European descent. While the absolute numbers of actual converts are quite small, the important point to remember is that Buddhism is not just another flavour of the Middle-Eastern religion once held by most North Americans, it is significantly different in what it understands a religion to be. The fact that it is becoming a significant minority player on the North American religious scene is extremely relevant----not because of its numbers, but rather because of what it says about how the general public increasingly views religion itself.

The Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all defined by the relationship between the believer and God. This relationship is defined by a codified belief system that comes from divine revelation, tradition and ecclesiastic institutions that provide definitive “orthodox” interpretations of that revelation and tradition. It is very important that the “believer” believe in what orthodoxy teaches or else bad things will happen---excommunication, execution for heresy or apostasy, and, eternal damnation. In effect, it all comes down to loyalty to a cause. If someone breaks ranks and starts thinking for herself, an angry hierarchy---both ecclesiastic and divine---will punish her for disloyalty.

Buddhism is very different. It sees the world in terms of impersonal forces and scientific laws. For this system there is no point in believing a creed on faith except in the provisional sense of taking advice from someone more experienced and experimenting to see if it works as described. Moreover, a belief without understanding is seen as worthless because it means that it cannot be applied to a given situation with the sort of “skillful means”3 that is necessary to jump the gap between theory and practice. There is no “angry God” who punishes you after death---just your own unresolved internal conflicts that manifest themselves as hallucinations on the deathbed4 or the impersonal law of karma that will create consequences that continue after the individual has expired.5

What is important is the specific effort one puts into gaining real insight into what it means to be a human being. This is achieved through a myriad of different practices that are tailored to different types of people who have lived in many different societies. As such, a perennial question that is asked about Buddhism is whether it is a religion at all, or “just” a philosophy of life or school of applied psychology. It is because of this emphasis on the process of self-investigation instead of a revealed belief system that even a thorough-going, self-proclaimed atheist such as Sam Harris is able to suggest that there is much of value in the Buddhist tradition.6

This is not to say that Buddhism is exclusively or even fundamentally a science of the mind. In many ways it is similar to the Abrahamic religions in that it also has a belief-system that has developed a complex enculturation process aimed at fostering a specific sort of mindset. It has sects. They have rituals. Its monasteries and nunneries have rules of behaviour similar to the rules that govern Christian monasteries. But it does have that one significant distinction in its core beliefs are---at least theoretically---based on the personal experience of individual monks and nuns, as opposed to submission to the will of an unknowable God, and, the Ecclesiastic hierarchy that speaks in his name.

In a variety of ways this basic Buddhist message has at times been twisted and made into something that more resembles the Abrahamic religions. For example, Zen Buddhism has made a fetish of lineage that has given far too much power to some Zen Masters, which they have gone on to abuse.7 Similarly at least one master of the “crazy wisdom” tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, the late Chogyam Rimpoche, has been accused of abusing the extreme authority given to him by his followers. In addition, the Institutions that govern Zen Buddhism were co-opted by the Imperial Japanese Empire in support of brutal oppression of other nations.8 Similar problems also exist in just about every other branch of Buddhism.9 In each of these cases the well-known injunction of the Buddha that all his followers should be “lamps unto oneself” was ignored in favour of the ideal of the “Master” who's understanding was so greater than an ordinary human being that they were told to ignore the promptings of their own reason or conscience.

But having acknowledged all of these particular problems, there is still at the core of Buddhist religious tradition a central vision that suggests that people should ultimately not submit to any authority except themselves when it comes to spiritual matters. One recent version of this statement that seems to be widely copied on the Internet states it thus:

Believe nothing on the faith of traditions,
even though they have been held in honor
for many generations and in diverse places.
Do not believe a thing because many people speak of it.
Do not believe on the faith of the sages of the past.
Do not believe what you yourself have imagined,
persuading yourself that a God inspires you.
Believe nothing on the sole authority of your masters and priests.
After examination, believe what you yourself have tested
and found to be reasonable, and conform your conduct thereto.10

Moreover, I would suggest that it is exactly this ideal of intellectual freedom that is most appealing to Western converts.

Is it possible that a Buddhist-based religious revival could occur in the West during our coming “dark ages” of ecological collapse? Could Buddhist monasteries play as important a role in saving nature much as Benedictine ones did in saving Western Europe?

Unfortunately, I think that that is an overly optimist read of the situation. Western Buddhism's emphasis on the importance of introspection as a means of gaining enlightenment has resulted in a significant tendency that allows naive followers to ignore all other elements of the human experience. I have, for example, a wall-hanging that I purchased from an order of Tibetan monks that says

Mind is the forerunner of all states.
If with a mind that is calm and clean,
With him does bliss follow,
Mind is supreme, all are creations of mind.
One speaks or does a thing,
Like the never deserting Shadow.11
-Dhamapada

Obviously, if “Mind is supreme”, then the environment is a secondary issue that a good Buddhist shouldn't invest much energy into preserving. Unfortunately, I think that this rather flippant understanding pretty much accurately sums-up the worldview of many, if not most Western Buddhists.

The Tibetan monks that I purchased this hanging from understood the fallacy of this point of view. That is why when they gave their demonstration of harmonic chanting they also insisted on showing a debate between two monks on Buddhist theory. (Unfortunately, since it was delivered in Tibetan instead of English, this point was lost on just about everyone in the audience.) The point they were trying emphasize is that meditation---while key to Buddhism---is only one element of a far bigger system.

Almost the only element of Buddhism that most Western Buddhists see are meditation classes. And in substance, these almost invariably work from a therapeutic instead of a religious model. Psychotherapists serve a significantly different role than do religious teachers. Religions are supposed to tell us things about the universe---what is “right”, what is “wrong” and how society should work. Therapists, on the other hand, are only legitimately concerned about the individual they are treating. Ultimate issues are set aside so they can focus exclusively on how to help an individual person become more functional in her day-to-day life. That is why psychiatrists, for example, assume the posture of being “non-judgemental” in their interactions with the client. Meditation taught outside the structure of the Eightfold Path is non-judgemental, but within its bounds, it is very much the opposite.

The Eightfold Path is an attempt to find the absolute essentials that a person must have in order to live a “good” life---in both senses of the word. When we say that someone led a “good” life it can mean that it was relatively pleasant and the person who lived suffered less than most. We can also say that a person was a “good” woman, even though she suffered from terrible deprivation---because she was a moral, honourable and engaged person. Because Buddhism teaches that a great deal of our sense of well-being is derived from our mental state instead of the physical situation we inhabit (e.g. “Mind is the forerunner of all states---”), it believes that it is impossible to separate these two definitions of “good”. In effect, the fact that the two senses of the word are linked reflects a fundamental truth, not a mere happenstance of language. For Buddhists, enlightenment is not just a mental state that can be scotch-taped onto just about anyone. Instead, it is the result of having a certain way of looking at the world and behaving in a certain way.

The Eightfold Path of Buddhism is an attempt to link together both sides of “good” in an easily remembered prescription for how to live the best possible life, both in terms of personal satisfaction and in terms of morality. The are: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and, right concentration. Note that the Western popular understanding of Buddhism---derived from all those meditation classes---usually only includes the last two, “right mindfulness” and “right concentration”. Almost no emphasis is placed upon any sort of theoretical understanding of humanity and its place in the universe, or, “right view” and “right intention”. (This was the element of the Eightfold Path that those Tibetan lamas were trying to emphasize in their scholarly debate that I mentioned above.) Nor is there any emphasis usually placed upon how a human being should interact with his society at large, or, “right speech”, “right action”, and, “right livelihood”. If there is any attention paid to “right effort”, it probably revolves around how much effort a person should put into their meditation practice.

The key issue that explains why Western citizens are usually only exposed to and embrace the last two parts of the Buddhist Way centres around the issue of renunciation. Buddhism in Asia has primarily been a religion of monks and nuns. In the West, it is primarily a religion for lay people. Monks and nuns are people who have made a very conscious choice (at least the ones who entered the convent voluntarily) to live a certain way and give up a wide range of opportunities and activities that are taken for granted by most of the general public. The idea is that as a way of training the mind (as well as being able to form a stable community) monks and nuns voluntarily agree upon living a very specific way. This special way of living has been codified in different ways by different Buddhist sects and traditions---just like orders of Christian monks and nuns have adopted their “rules” that govern their life. And if you look at the rules that exist, you can see that they are in some cases very specific.

Theravada Buddhism, which is one of the older schools of Buddhism, has a very large number of rules and regulations governing the behaviour of monks and nuns. A collection of rules, the Bhikkhu Pāṭimokkha, has been translated by Buddhist scholar of the name Thanissaro Bhikkhu and published on the Internet.12 Here are a few bits and pieces so readers can get a flavour of the rules and regulations. From the chapter titled “Pārājika: Rules entailing expulsion from the Sangha (Defeat)” comes:

Should any bhikkhu intentionally deprive a human being of life, or search for an assassin for him, or praise the advantages of death, or incite him to die (saying,): "My good man, what use is this evil, miserable life to you? Death would be better for you than life," or with such an idea in mind, such a purpose in mind, should in various ways praise the advantages of death or incite him to die, he also is defeated and no longer in affiliation.

From the section titled “Saṅghādisesa: Rules entailing an initial and subsequent meeting of the Sangha” comes this:

Should any bhikkhu — corrupt, aversive, disgruntled — charge a bhikkhu with an unfounded case entailing defeat, (thinking), "Perhaps I may bring about his fall from this celibate life," then regardless of whether or not he is cross-examined on a later occasion, if the issue is unfounded and the bhikkhu confesses his aversion, it entails initial and subsequent meetings of the Community.

Obviously putting a hit on someone is not monkish behaviour, but it is also against most societies' legal codes anyway. Suggesting suicide as an option or bearing false witness are not usually dealt with by civil courts, but it is also easy to see that these would be very serious crimes in a spiritual community. I don't think anyone would find these rules onerous to follow.

But these codes tend to have many, many rules that govern many different elements of monastic life. They exist because it is really difficult to get people to live together in these sorts of communities without having them blow up due internal friction. These are a very few of these more “practical” rules.

Should any bhikkhu accept robe-cloth from the hand of a bhikkhunī [a Buddhist nun] unrelated to him — except in exchange — it is to be forfeited and confessed.

Malicious tale-bearing among bhikkhus is to be confessed.

The damaging of a living plant is to be confessed.

Should any bhikkhu knowingly lie down in a dwelling belonging to the Community so as to intrude on a bhikkhu who arrived there first, (thinking), "Whoever finds it confining will go away" — doing it for just that reason and no other — it is to be confessed.

Monks shouldn't have “special friend” nuns that do favours for them. Monks shouldn't be “tattle-tales” and “gossips”. Monks shouldn't trample the flowers at the monastery. Monks shouldn't intrude on the private space of other monks. These are simple rules aimed at keeping the peace.

As anyone who reads through these long lists of rules---and all the Buddhist sects have their own---can see, being a monk or nun was, and still is, very much not an issue of “follow your bliss”. Instead, it is a pretty heavy undertaking that involved a radical restructuring of a person's priorities and physical surroundings so he can integrate himself into a community that survives on very limited resources. It is very much the same sort of radical renunciation that a Benedictine monk took when he decided to give up his life as an aristocrat and became a brother who would drain swamps, cut hay and get up in the middle of the night to sing divine services. Of course, in both Buddhist and Benedictine cases the change was a lot less dramatic for those who jumped into monastic life from being a poor peasant. But it was, and still is for modern Buddhist monastics, a very far cry from the life of the middle-class North American who takes a few meditation classes, begins a regular meditation practice, and begins to call himself a “Buddhist”.

I've raised this point as an outsider to the Western Buddhist world and had several very engaged people reinforce this assessment. For example, one person responded to a blog posting with the following comment:

For thirty years I taught Buddhism in various capacities; as a monastic, as the Abbot of a Temple, as a Prison Chaplain, in courses as Junior Colleges. The one aspect of Buddhism which I found impossible for the students to absorb was renunciation. Any time renunciation was brought up (and you can’t really talk about Buddhism without discussing renunciation since renunciation is central to its world view) people would argue that renunciation is not necessary, or no longer necessary, or that it is misguided; that one can have everything one wants on a material level as well as spiritual attainment. In discussions I have had with other Buddhist teachers my experience has been affirmed, they also found it literally impossible to communicate the place renunciation holds in Buddhism. (One wit put it that Buddhism in the West is ‘the upper middle class way’.)13

So while traditional Buddhist abbies might very well serve the same function as the Benedictines did during the Dark Ages, Western Buddhism doesn't have at its core the same commitment to lifestyle change that Eastern Buddhism had through the Eightfold Path and different monastic codes of conduct. Instead, I think it can be said that it has been “infected” by Maslow's self-actualization ideal to the point where people simply aren't willing to accept the renunciation prescription that is encapsulated in the Eightfold Path and various monastic codes.

Having said that, it still is profoundly worthwhile to see that so many Westerners still want to find a religious option for their life that also includes the notion of “be a lamp unto yourself”. Moreover, it is important to realize that even if people do not immediately twig onto the Eightfold Path, the very act of deciding to follow a regular meditation practice is itself a much greater commitment than that usually required by the Abrahimic religions. For those people who do stick to a meditation regime, there is a significant chance that they will want to pursue a deeper understanding of Buddhism, which will in turn lead them towards a more authentic experience. But the end of a road is not the beginning, and many a traveler never makes it all the way.

Types of Compassion

2011-09-26T11:28:00.000-06:00

I had a bit of a discussion with my significant other a couple days back that got my juices flowing. We started talking about how it appears that the governments of the world really won't do anything at all about greenhouse gas emissions until it is much too late to prevent significant change. I suggested that the thing that gives me hope is the option of geoengineering. That is, that it should be possible to manipulate the climate in order to deal with some of the worst aspects of climate change, which would give humanity time to work at our greenhouse gas emissions.

Mention this subject to most people and they get very nervous about monkeying around with the climate. I do too, and all things being equal, I'd be opposed to even thinking about it. But things are not equal, they are seriously out of whack. And even if we have serious qualms about what would happen with geoengineering, we might end up having to do it if we want to avoid climate catastrophe from runaway climate feedback. If we get into a feedback loop like that, we could end up with a population crash that would result in billions of people starving to death as their agricultural systems collapse.

What surprised me about this discussion was the blythe way my significant other contemplated the nasty, horrid deaths of these people. It isn't because she lacks compassion, indeed, she freaks if her cat catches a bird and makes a huge personal investment of her scarce resources to help friends when in need. In this sense, she is a far more compassionate person than I am. Yet I become extremely fretful over the prospect of billions starving in a way that she doesn't. Could it be that Stalin was right when he said "One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic"?

Being the wise person she is, my fiancee didn't get all emotional about this, but instead talked the point through with me. She said that if a village of people were starving right in front of her she would get involved in trying to help them. (Of this I have no doubt.) But contemplating numbers in a theoretical scenario was too abstract for her. In contrast, when I am confronted by an actual person who is in dire straights, I often become fearful about that person dragging me down, in a way that she does not.

Ultimately, who is the more compassionate person?

Another element that she pointed out was that no one on the earth is able to avoid a death sentence and one way or another, the population has to shrink. We all die. My response was that it is better for people to die of old age than for them to die of hunger. I'd rather that the population shrank through birth control than through a mass die off. She could respond, "yes it would----but what are the chances of that happening?" Not great, of course.

This leaves us with another issue. If the population doesn't crash because of climate change, and it simply will not decline any other way, won't geoengineering simply postpone the inevitable and ensure that a population crash will come for some other reason?

She makes a very good point.

At this stage, all I can do is try to analyse my emotions and try to understand why I get so cranked up about climate change. I understand that emotions are the drivers of behaviour. I have been very involved in a wide variety of environmental projects simply because I get so emotional about all this stuff. But this emotional response ceases to productive when things have reached this stage. The rational response is to understand that the Dao is not going to deal with climate change the way I would have wanted it to. Instead, it looks like we are on the edge of a crazy mega-experiment that will directly affect the lives of everyone on the earth.

My emotions, therefore, come down to a sort of existential dread, and not much else. In a sense, my fear of the nasty, painful death of billions is ultimately connected to my fear of personal death. If I can accept either one with equanimity, I can accept the other. I understand this point intellectually, but not "in my bones", as the Zen people say. When I can do this, then I will have achieved true equanimity.

I suppose many people who call themselves "Daoists" would say "well duh". Certainly many folks I've met seem to not be able to understand why it is that i fret about this so much. But I've always had a certain suspicion that this sort of thing is worthless unless it comes from real soul-searching and perhaps even suffering. My feeling is that glib affirmations rarely stand significant stress tests. So until someone really understands the horror of existence, they don't have the right to suggest that it is nothing but an illusion. My better half has suffered a fair amount in her life, which is why I tend to believe her when she makes statements about this sort of thing. Perhaps others I've met have too, and I was too callow to understand that.

Either way, I've spent a lot of time ruminating on the issue of compassion, what it means for the future of the earth, and whether my equanimity will ever be able to completely stand in the face of mega-suffering.

Environmental Vow: Part 15

2011-09-19T12:06:00.003-06:00

Some People's Curious Unwillingness to Admit That Sacrifice Even Exists

There is yet another issue at play that needs to be discussed: the relationship between “freedom”, “choice” and “sacrifice”. I think one of the best ways to understand the relationship is to consider the significant fraction of the public that has been so seduced by the ideal of “do your own thing”, that they seem to believe that the concept of personal sacrifice is conceptually impossible. Primarily, this boils down to the notion that no one ever does anything that they do not want to do simply because if they didn't want to do it, they wouldn't. This response often comes out in conversations similar to the following one that I once had with a friend after I mentioned to her that I had decided to never fly again.

“Why would you decide to never fly in an airplane?”
“Jet aircraft release a lot of climate changing C02 into the atmosphere, so I've decided that this is a sacrifice I can make for the good of future generations and Mother Nature.”
“No, it's not a sacrifice. You simply choose to not fly. You're afraid of flying, aren't you? Don't worry, it's safer than driving a car.”

What I believe is happening in these sorts of situations is that people are confusing several different things for a variety of reasons and on the basis of that confusion jumping to unwarranted conclusions.

It is true that people often do announce that they are making a sacrifice for the greater good when in fact what they really are doing is seeking social recognition and status for their actions. The corporation that “donates” money to a university but expects public recognition, a tax write-off and demands to set research priorities is an example of this sort of “giving” that really turns out to really be a purchase. This sort of “sacrifice” is really a very self-conscious act of hypocrisy. A more subtle, unconscious type of hypocrisy can also cloud sacrifice---as when a grasping parent demands constant attention by children for the “gift” of birth and nurturing until the age of majority. An even more subtle case involves the sense of self-worth that can come from “doing the right thing” when everyone else isn't. This sort of behaviour is common in religious organizations and usually labelled “self-righteousness”. Finally, as in the example above, the “sacrifice” could be an excuse to cover up some other, not necessarily self-serving, reason for following a course of action---such as when my friend assumed that my decision to stop flying was just an attempt to hide my fear.

In the case of environmental activism, it certainly could be the case that some people in leadership positions are enamoured by the attention they receive from the media and citizenry. This cannot be a universal phenomenon, however, simply because for every person in a leadership position there needs to be many more who are supporters. If only a small number of people involved in a situation can bask in the glory, it cannot be the case that everyone is in it for the prestige.

And the issue isn't just one of activism. People routinely “do without” in order to support some sort of higher ideal. For example, a woman who has a child doesn't “want” to go through childbirth, have her sleep constantly interrupted or clean dirty diapers, yet she does these things willingly because they are necessary if she is to be a mother. They are undesired yet necessary means to a desired end. In much the same way, soldiers do not want to advance into battle and all monks have problems with at least some elements of monastic routine---yet they accept that these undesired things are necessary to pursue the desired ones. In a similar vein, some people do choose to live without an automobile, not fly on airplanes, eat relatively inconvenient and expensive locally-grown, organic food, etc, because they think that the act is in defence of Mother Nature.

Yet, like my friend, many people are loathe to admit this. I suspect that they often do so for two reasons. First of all, if they admit that they didn't actually like doing the unpleasant means that they already do, they might feel that they are betraying the desired end. In the case of a mother, she might feel that she is betraying her child if she admits that it isn't much fun washing dirty diapers. Secondly, if a person admits that people do often do unpleasant things in order to pursue some other desired end, an implicit moral imperative comes into play. When Henry David Thoreau went to jail rather than pay taxes in support of what he considered an unjust war (against Mexico) a visitor asked him why he was behind bars. Thoreau's response was to turn the tables on the questioner and ask him “Why aren't you in here with me?”

This raises another important point. When I brought up Cicero's definition of “freedom” as participation in power, I suggested that the relevant issue is engagement in the process. I went on to suggest that the emotional connection with the community that comes from engaging with it has a lot to do with the experience of living a “free” life. I would also suggest that there is an other element of engagement that needs to be considered: personal responsibility.

A lot of people understand “freedom” in terms that take out any sense of personal responsibility. That is, “freedom” for them is just another aspect of consumerism---like when you wander down the isle of a grocery store and have to choose between Coke and Pepsi. This sort of consumer “choice” is totally value-free because there is little (if any) difference between the two options. Both are carbonated sugar-water beverages flavoured with cola nut extract, produced by multinational corporations and packaged in disposable aluminium cans. There are consequences to both a person's health and to the environment (both negative) if a person decides to purchase either one of these products, but there is none at all over which particular brand. If you look at people's lives, you find that even though North Americans have an enormous ranges of choices in their lives, the practical impact of those choices is limited---mother nature and your liver don't care whether you purchase Count Chocola, GMC and a split level as opposed to Lucky Charms, Chrystler and a ranch style.

This type of choice wouldn't be a problem but it has become so ubiquitous in our consumer society that many people confuse this “choosing” with the sort of important morally-based decisions that we have to make as both individuals and a society. This leads to a conflation of the idea of consumer choice with democratic referendum. Consider the sort of routine arguments that come about from public planning. If the city suggests that suburban sprawl damages the economic and environmental viability of the community, and therefore zoning should be changed to force higher-density development, at least some members of the community will start arguing that developers “only build what people want” and if “people wanted higher density, they'd build it”. This argument totally misses the point that the benefits from living in a low-density suburb go to the individuals that bought the home whereas the costs (such as increased infrastructure expenses) are paid for by the entire community.

In situations like the planning of cities, freedom as “participation in power” involves getting the entire community involved in the process through elected representatives and hired staff who are expected to think about the good of the entire community. In contrast, freedom as “consumer choice” narrows the terms of reference to “what's in it for me?” Amongst other things, freedom as “consumer choice” is freedom devoid of any personal responsibility for the consequences of your individual decision. “Participation in Power”, in contrast, suggests some sort of engagement with the wider community (i.e. the other people “participating”) that places a burden on the individual to think of the consequences of his decisions on these other people (and, by extension, the community of nature.)

Almost all environmental decisions suffer from this confusion of consumer choice and free choice because almost all environmental problems are the result of choices in the way people live their lives. If we continue to labour under the assumption that being able to live “freely” ultimately means not having to think about how the impact of those choices will affect other people, it is hard to see how anything at all can ever be done to avoid ultimate and total catastrophe. In effect, if the world is going to deal with the environmental crisis and remain a democracy, people are going to have to make personal individual sacrifices in how they live their lives. As Mohandas Gandhi would have said, people are going to have to learn how to “Live simply that others may simply live.”

Prisons of the Mind

2011-09-12T09:24:00.001-06:00

Where I work we've recently gone through a negotiating process in order to sign a new collective agreement between the University and my union. I found it a depressing exercise in observing people who've become trapped in collective delusion.

I first got the feeling about this when I walked into a union meeting and saw this video from our union being projected on the screen above us.

Don't get me wrong. I like this video and support it's creation and dissemination (that's part of the reason why I'm embedding it in this post.) But I simply do not believe that it is apropos for where I work. My workplace is more than a little paternalistic in the good sense. As near as I can tell, the management really does look out for its employees. Indeed, my supervisor used to be head of a union and is very pro-labour.

It's true that the university is looking to ask the union for concessions on our pensions, but the fact of the matter is that with the decline in interest rates and stock values, the present system will crash and burn if we don't put more money into it and cut back a bit on the benefits. That's why every other union that I know of in Ontario has made concessions with regard to pension plans.

What bothered me about the local union leadership was the way it argued that the management were evil greed-heads out to screw the little guy instead of being in the difficult position of trying to protect an institution that is starved for money and suffering from economic forces outside of its control. In effect, it "pumped up the volume" amongst the membership in order to put more pressure on Administration. And since ever action creates a re-action, the administration decided to ask all the membership to turn in their keys on the day that both sides were legally able to stop work (either through a strike or a lock out.) I've worked on campus for 23 years and I've never been asked to hand in my passkey. There were a LOT of very long faces leaving the university after work that night.

Low and behold, however, a tentative contract was signed that night and I leave to vote on it today. It will pass, of course, as I think both sides were plenty scared by all the brinksmanship that was employed by both.

My response is to think "how ridiculously stupid!", it was just like two male gorillas meeting in a forest to pound their fists against their chests and try to scare the other into backing down. Surely there has to be a better way of dealing with a disagreement.

When I was talking to my co-workers, however, it became clear to me why things had escalated to this point. A lot of people simply do not understand how much the world has changed and how this is going to impact the way they live their lives.

The entire basis of our economic system is ultimately based on a fallacious assumption that the economy can grow by geometric progression indefinitely. That is what we call the "miracle of compound interest". In effect, when someone says that the economy has grown by 3% per year (roughly what the Canadian economy has been growing by for a long time), it means that on average there has been a 3% increase in the number of cars being driven on the roads, houses being lived in, smart phones being called on, etc. It is this constant growth in the amount of things being produced, bought, paid for and thrown away that ensures that on average a dollar invested in something will produce 3 cents in return per year.

It is this on average increase in the economy that allows an institution to toss a huge amount of money into a wide variety of investments and believe that this will accumulate value over the long haul.

There is a huge problem with exponential growth, however, in that the Earth and everything on it that we depend upon for our livelihood is fixed in size. That means that there are going to be limits to how much our economy can grow. The best way to understand this is to go to one of several websites that have compound interest calculators and punch in a few numbers. For example, I wrote earlier that the Canadian economy has been growing at the rate of 3% per annum for a very long time (now, of course, it isn't.) Canada, as a dominion, was created in 1867 or 144 years ago. If we continue to have 3% average economic growth for the next 144 years, that means the economy will be over 70 times its current size!

It is fundamentally absurd to think that our economy can grow to 70 times its current size given our ecological limitations, yet that is what our entire economic and political system demands in order to preserve the status quo in terms of pension benefits and government spending!!!!!

There's another element to this thing that makes it much worse.

The classic demonstration of this issue has been around for a very, very, very long time:

One of the key things to understand from this demonstration is that 3/4's of the rice will be on the last two squares of the board. What this means is that not only is exponential growth unsustainable, it tends to "sneak up" on people and hit them without warning. (If any of this is new to you, take a look at these series of YouTube videos, which are aptly named "The Most Important Video You Will Ever See". )

I'm not someone is able to see the future, but for a long time I have thought about these issues and expected that they would have a significant impact on my life----if I live to any sort of age. My belief is that the current economic crisis we face is not some sort of momentary "blip", but rather the working through of the mathematical contradictions that our entire civilization is built upon. Peak oil, for example, is not primarily a problem of running out of oil, per ce, but rather that of demand (created by global exponential economic growth) outstripping oil production, dependent as it is on a limited earth. In the same way, climate change is also a creation of the collision between an exponentially-growing economy and a limited ecosystem.

Both peak oil and climate change will act as brakes on economic growth. This will either happen because society will institute mechanisms for weaning us off fossil fuels or because scarcity will drive up the cost, which will pull money out of consumer's pockets so it can be used to chase fuels that are more and more expensive to produce. (The first oil wells in Canada were in Southern Ontario and were simply hand-dug wells that people could lower buckets into. Now we have to mine the oil out of tar sands in the extreme North and heavily process it in order to make crude oil.) If we don't prevent climate change (actually that horse has already left the barn) then we are going to pull more money out of consumer's pockets to pay for storm damage-----like the Texas wildfires and the New England hurricane.) Both mechanisms are going slow down economic growth and ultimately shut it down.

And that ending of economic growth is going to wreak havoc on things like pension plans and government spending. And because most folks in the labour movement and government simply don't know about this sort of thing, we are going to have a lot of labour unrest as people fight to prop up something that simply cannot be propped up much longer.

The sad thing about all of this is that all this energy would be much better spent trying to manage change towards something better. But people have such an emotional investment in the status quo, and are so fearful of change in general, that they would rather shut their eyes to the big picture. This came home to me in an exchange with a co-worker. He's a smart guy, and as I explained the above argument, you could see that he was processing but scared of the implications. Ultimately, he said "That's OK for you, you're a idealistic person. But me, I think for myself first." What I had a hard time explaining to him is that it isn't a question of choosing one point of view versus another, it was a question of understanding the world around you and adapting to circumstances instead of trying to fight them (and ending up in big trouble as a result.)

Where this fits into Daoism is the idea that Daoists try to understand the Dao and build their lives around it instead of the notions that dominate our culture. Indeed, one of the things that my significant other said about me when we first became connected was "You are the biggest 'big picture' person I have ever met". It was exactly this point that she zeroed in on. (I learn a lot from her.)

So if I would make any sort of suggestion to anyone who reads this blog, try to understand the giant forces that are work in our lives. You cannot fight against them with any hope of success. But you can adapt and flow with them. That will not guarantee success (that is in the hands of fate), but it will certainly increase the odds.

My History of Meditation

2011-08-28T18:29:00.002-06:00

A couple posts back I did a review of a book by Livia Kohn that was about a specific meditational practice that she translates as "sitting in oblivion" and which I have tended to call "sitting and forgetting". An anonymous person asked if I would write something specific about what I have been taught about meditation, so I thought I'd spend a post discussing this subject.

The first thing to understand is that a person isn't a "blank slate" that comes to a meditation teacher to have the "wonderous technique" inscribed on their being. Instead, they come with a very large amount of personal experience. In my case, I grew up on a farm and spent an enormous amount of time working at very tedious jobs. One of them involved hoeing an absolutely enormous vegetable garden. (We raised almost all of our own food.) I found that the only way I could stand the boredom was by making a game of the work. This involved willing myself to become a "hoeing machine". That is I would totally focus on the work of hoeing to the exclusion of all other thoughts. This involved trying to become totally and completely aware of the bodily sensation of working the hoe.

Another appallingly boring job involved driving tractor---often until late at night. I got around this by similarly becoming a "driving machine". I also used to talk to myself----I would have long monologues on a variety of subjects.

These two aspects of my personal history taught me to deal with boredom by developing an "interior life". I once had a housekeeping foreman tell me that he never hired stupid people to be janitors because he found that the boredom would drive them to distraction. He said that smart people never get bored---because they always have something "in their heads" to keep them occupied.

My first formal meditation experience came about in somewhat unusual circumstances. I was at university, living in residence, and a hall-advisor had come to me to ask about another person in residence that I'd been seen with. This guy had gotten drunk the night before and said that he had a rifle and was thinking about going up on one of the buildings on campus to start shooting people at random. The police had been informed, who had contacted the advisor, who asked me.

This "freaked me out", so I sat down with this fellow in the student pub to find out about him. He told me a pretty sad story: his parents had run away on him at a young age and his sister had supported him by working in a body rub parlour (i.e. as a prostitute.) His first job had been as a "repo man" taking away things like television sets from people who had purchased them on time and couldn't make the payments.

He left the table after sharing this with me and I ended up sitting by myself feeling pretty bumbed.

At that moment a fellow sat down next to me, ordered two beers for me and introduced himself. He was one of those "hale fellow, well met, types" and we started talking about this, that and the other thing. It came out that he was a Buddhist and his brother was a monk in one of the Tibetan flavoured sects. I commented that religion was a lot of hocum and all I believed in was "science".

He responded by saying that it wasn't scientific to reject something without experimentation. I asked how someone could "experiment" with religion and he said that "meditation" was experimentation in religion. He made a good case, so I asked how someone meditated. He said that one way was to sit still and repeat some phrase over and over again. He said that what you said didn't matter, just that you repeated it.

I got home that night and thought I'd sit down, make up a mantra and repeat it over and over. So I did just that. Almost instantly I felt a very strong force from the base of my spine punching up and out the top of my head. I was having an "out of body experience".

This got me quite interested in the whole meditation thing. As a result, I spent a lot of time doing things like sitting and quieting my mind, hatha yoga, repeating mantras, meditating in the forest, etc, etc. I used to bump into the guy I'd met in the bar once in a while and he'd offer suggestions---once he said I should walk around and just focus on all the parallel lines that I could identify in the building.

I used to read all the books I could on the subject of meditation and try out all the techniques described. For example, I read all the books by Carlos Castenada (who I later found out was a complete fraud) and did things like meditate in dried-up ponds in order to find the "water spirit". I also once took a massive dose of magic mushrooms after staying awake and fasting for 48 hours (to magnify the effects, which it certainly did.)

Eventually, I decided to learn a martial art, which led me to joining a taijiquan club, which in turn led me to joining an organization led by a Daoishi. In turn, I joined a temple he founded and was initiated into his lineage. He had a brother initiate from Hong Kong who would visit Canada once in a while. He would hold meditation workshops (and initiated me into the lineage.) At these workshops all he would do is have people sit in a specific posture. He would walk around and correct our posture. Whenever we thought we couldn't handle the pain anymore, we'd get up. Everything else was a case of "figure it out for yourself".

Since then I continued to study meditation. I've been to various Buddhist retreats and classes. I also went for weekly spiritual direction for years with a variety of Roman Catholic types. I've also gone through a lot of different phases. For years I had an altar that I did "sitting and forgetting" at. For other years, I did walking meditation while reciting a Buddhist rosary. Now, I focus primarily on taijiquan, reading and writing things like this blog.

In summary, my experience tells me that while there are a great many things that you can do while meditating, most of the more dramatic effects are "blind alleys". The only really worthwhile thing that a person can seek is wisdom and greater control over the different aspects of his mind. I also believe that, contrary to what many folks have told me and what I've read in most books, almost all forms of meditation are very similar. They all boil down to learning how to control the "monkey chatter" in a person's mind. There are a wide variety of methods to do this, but ultimately they come down to learning to "think about thinking". And once you've started to do this, you can see that there are various processes at work that can be changed through disciplined effort.

I hope that some of the above is of value to others. Questions are always accepted.

The Transition of "Conventional Wisdom"

2011-08-01T11:33:00.006-06:00

As someone who still finds himself attracted to the world of politics (like a fly to a venus fly trap, alas), I've been watching various different elements of the political ecosystem. This ranges from the loony American debt ceiling debate, through the municipal politics of Toronto, through the tragedy in Norway to the farce in Greece. Looking at all of these different elements together, I've come to the conclusion that they all have one thing in common: we've reached a "tipping point" in the evolution of "conventional wisdom".

People involved in radical politics understand that in a liberal democracy the terms of debate are severely limited. For example, none of the major parties will ever suggest that we need to radically change the way our government works. They all believe in roughly the same thing----a capitalist state with some welfare state provision for the poor. No one is talking about nationalizing the mines or locking up dissidents in concentration camps. (No matter what the rhetoric may suggest.) It's pretty much been this way since the end of the Second World War up until now. All debate in elections and Parliament has boiled down to seeking the percentage of emphasis----so many dollars for guns, so many for butter, so many for business, so much for the poor; and; the best means----low taxes, government incentives, strategic investment, free trade versus tariffs, etc.

This sort of stability is essential to the long-term viability of democracy. If people in parliament really did have radically different visions of what the state should do, at best this would result in procedural logjams as each fought tooth and nail for their vision. At worst, this could degenerate into civil war.

Well, I think if we look at the USA, I think that the case can be made that this government is suffering from procedural a logjam because the conventional wisdom has broken down and the Republican and Democratic vision is so far apart that it is almost impossible for them to agree on anything.

In parliamentary and municipal governments a different result comes from the same cause. Premiers and mayors work in a political system where they are not bound by the "checks and balances" that Barack Obama does. This means that they can actually make the changes that they seek without being stymied by the opposition. But come the next election they are sometimes replaced by administrations that then move to undo their work. In either case, administration of the state ceases to be effective because there is no unified vision at work.

As I see it, this dysfunction is not a long-term phenomenon but rather a specific period of dynamic chaos that exists between two islands of stability.

As I mentioned above, there has been a sort of "conventional wisdom" or "common sense" that has existed since WWII. A few parts of this consensus have been based on the idea that energy is cheap, nature can be taken for granted, there should be a sort of hierarchy in society, and, that the only viable morality flows out of the Bible.

Prior to the age of fossil fuels the cost of energy was a constant drag on economic growth. It takes a huge amount of wood to make charcoal to make iron. This puts a real limit on the amount of iron that a society can use. The same can be said about a great many other elements of our society. When the price of fossil fuels goes up, it means that money that used to flow to other things----such as wages, taxes, etc----is now used to purchase that energy. Since the price of oil by the barrel is currently around $100/barrel this means that any energy intensive activity in our society (or, damn near everything) has had to cough up an astounding $85 extra dollars for energy, per barrel, over what it did in 1988, when oil cost only $15/barrel.

All of a sudden, the cost of energy is now a part of the equation. Yet people who still adhere to the old consensus simply cannot figure this point out. That's why they constantly complain that there is a "conspiracy" by oil companies to gouge the public. It's also why they fight tooth and nail against creating a more energy-efficient society, simply because they cannot conceive that the cost of energy as being an intrinsic part of "just the way things are". These are the people who's answer to Peak Oil is the empty phrase "drill baby drill" or who make ridiculous claims about the promise of shale oil. Having lived most of their lives with energy being trivial in cost, they simply cannot accept that something so basic has changed dramatically.

A related issue is that of global climate change. People who have lived their whole life believing that nature is an "externality" that can be ignored simply cannot believe that serious amounts of money has to be spent on preserving the ecosystem. As a result, they have fled into denial, believing that some shyster economist that they read on the internet knows more than the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists.

Probably of equal import is the way women, gays, and, people of colour have become significantly more equal. This change is so pervasive that a lot of folks don't understand what a cataclysmic change this has been in the way people relate to each other. But for people who took it for granted that white men had exclusive access to various elements of society this change must seem like a tooth-grindingly awful change for the worse. Certainly it must make many feel like they have been totally short-changed by a system that changed the rules just when they got to the age where they could reach for the brass ring.

This change is more than just that of women in executive office, of course. It also means that the nature of work has changed dramatically. For example, the idea of "service" has become an integral part of many workplaces, which makes the sort of gruff, "macho" ideal that many blue collar grew up with an actual impediment to employment.

Finally, many people grew up on the idea that morality comes from submission to a set of moral rules that were codified in the Bible and explained by their local church. The idea that people would be able to come up with alternative sets of moral rules (e.g. that it is immoral to discriminate against gays), and actually suggest that this new morality is actually better than the old, has also caused a great deal of anger.

What I'm suggesting is that the Conservatives are right, there is a "culture war" at work in our society. Moreover, I would also suggest that they are also right in feeling that they are losing that war. It might not seem that way, because their militancy has allowed them to organize and exert influence beyond the actual numbers would support. But this is just a rear-guard action. No matter how much they howl "drill, baby drill", the price of oil has nowhere to go but up. And women, gays and people of colour are not going to go back to the kitchen, closet or Jim Crow.

It comes down to the numbers. The people who support the old status quo are older, and they are not reproducing. The people who are supporting the new consensus are growing rapidly. To cite one specific example, the battle to stop gay marriage is well on its way to being over. This is simply because the polling numbers show that a growing majority of Americans simply don't believe that the government should ban it. As I see it, the problem for conservatives is that once something like this becomes legal and people see that it doesn't lead to the horrible results that they suggest (the decline of Western civilization) people simply forget what the fuss was all about. (A similar phenomenon happened with abortion. A recent poll in Ontario suggests that only 8% of the population believe that it should be outlawed. That horse has left the barn too.)

The wild instability we are seeing in our political systems is coming about because in any transition from one conventional wisdom set to another there inevitably comes a point where both points of view are roughly balanced. At that point, a shift of support one way or the other can result in a huge victory for one at the expense of the other. Fortunately for the people who support the new consensus, however, this is just a temporary situation. Eventually, the new consensus achieves large enough support that the old once simply becomes incapable of every winning any more elections. It then dwindles down to being an angry, increasingly radical rump.

These rumps can cause problems for their society. The shooter in Norway and other terrorists like Bin Laden are fueled by resentment that their vision of society is so out of date that they cannot win at the ballot box, so they seek to win with the rifle. But they simply cannot win. Their actions do nothing more than convince the other side that they are even more right that they were before. This is why the Norwegian's promise to become "even more tolerant" will probably be successful. People resent being terrorized and it usually hardens people's resolve more than anything else.

I'm trying to suggest that "progressives" should avoid despair when they look at the way Conservatives seem to be able to wreak havoc on the world around us. I think that in ten years or so they will be fundamentally a spent force. That doesn't mean that the future is going to be all rose water and white gloves. There are objective problems that people are going to have to work hard to deal with, such as climate change and peak oil. But the current time of political paralysis is, IMHO, going to pass by fairly quickly. At that point we will have a new consensus and society will mobilize in order to deal with these crises---just as our grand parents did to deal with WWII.

What does all of this have to do with the Dao? A lot of people suggest that Daoism is not much more than walking in the woods with a smile on your face. But I would suggest that it is also about learning how to see the underlying, subtle laws that lie underneath the surface. I would also suggest that it is about developing a sense of equanimity that allows a person to focus on the big picture in order to stop hyperventilating about the problems that face her here and now.

Zuowang: "Sitting and Forgetting"

2011-07-17T19:26:00.014-06:00

A while back I offered to write some reviews of books on Daoism for the publisher of an academic press. The publisher is a woman by the name of Livia Kohn, who is a fairly important person in the academic study of the Daoist religion as well as a practicing Daoist herself. The publishing house she runs is Three Pines Press, which is committed to publishing books about Daoism. They also publish a yearly journal about Daoism, the Journal of Daoist Studies. (I had an opinion piece published in their "Forum on Comtemporary Practice" in the last issue.)

The first book that I've decided to review is by Ms. Kohn herself, and it is titled Sitting in Oblivion: The Heart of Daoist Meditation.

It's a very good introduction to a key Daoist spiritual practice which I tend to call "sitting and forgetting", but which she translates as "Sitting in Oblivion" and which is often referred to as Zuowang.

What makes this book so useful is the fact that Kohn is a Westerner, a scholar and a practitioner. What this means is that she can write definitively about the practice using her own words and by making references to the modern Western cultural milieu. This makes the book far, far, far more intelligible than if she were a Chinese practitioner who had a hard time explaining herself to a Western audience. And as a practitioner, she understands exactly what is and is not important in the experience of "sitting and forgetting", which is something that an academic without any grounding in the practice could not possibly do.

In addition, Kohn adds translations of eight short Daoist texts on "sitting and forgetting" at the end of the book. These are texts that non-Chinese readers (and probably most non-Daoist Chinese readers too) will never come across.

As such, this book is probably the best academic introduction to "sitting and forgetting" that people are probably ever going to come across. If you want to learn what a book can teach you about "sitting and forgetting", this is probably the best source that I have come across.

I've been holding off on writing this review for months. Partially, this is because I have been really busy doing other things. But another part comes from a sort of inarticulate reticence. After long deliberation, I think I've figured out the different elements of this funk.

First of all, I really liked the first part of the book. Kohn is a good writer and she seems to really understand the subject. It was when I got to the end and tried to wade through the translations that I got bogged down. I've never been a fan of the metaphorical language of most religious Daoist texts. I like clear, precise essays. I know that I cannot expect this sort of thing from ancient sources, but that doesn't mean that I have to like what they do offer.

Secondly, I'm a little concerned about a lot of these sorts of texts because I wonder if reading them might be counter-productive. The school where I was taught "sitting and forgetting" did absolutely nothing at all to explain what it was that we were being exposed to. We were told to "just sit" and figure it out for ourselves. This might seem bizarre to modern Westerners who expect to have some sort of theoretical explanation for everything that they do, but I can't help but think that the "figure it out for yourself" bit is pretty important to the whole exercise.

Of course, memory plays tricks and the meditation sessions I attended were a long, long time ago. It might be that the Daoshi who taught us felt that the translation available wasn't up to the task of explaining what was going on. But be that as it may, I still think that my experience has taught me that there is precious little that a teacher can give to the student beyond his or her own personal example. Ultimately, everyone has to "figure it out for herself"----both on the pillows and throughout just about every other part of their life.

I came to this conclusion as I felt myself going through different stages in the process of "sitting and forgetting". I went through a stage where I kept falling asleep---it ended. I went through another stage where I was in incredible pain---it ended. I went through a stage of crazy boredom----it went away. I also went through a stage where I was hallucinating and having what seemed to be genuine psychic experiences----they too went away. The insight that I gained from these experiences was that these were not "impediments" to "sitting and forgetting", they were absolutely key to the process itself. A trite way of saying this would be to be that they "build character" in the individual.

If a teacher explained all of these points and held the hand of the student all through these different stages, he would gain a whole lot less benefit from the experience.

As for the weird experiences that people talk about with regard to meditation, I've had more than a few. I've had experiences of seen visions, a couple times felt that I was experiencing some sort of divine "oneness" with the world. I've also felt weird energies flowing through parts of my body. When I mention these experiences to others, a lot of people think that they signify something pretty darn important. But when I had them happen to me, I had the overwhelming feeling that they were pretty much trivial. They didn't result in any sort of world-altering experiences and they didn't make me a better man.

To cite one example, I once totally automatically walked out to meet a friend that I had every reason to believe was working in a factory that day. As I stepped out of my office and went across campus to meeting him, I purposely walked directly to a curb and at the exact moment I stepped onto it, he drove up in his car, stopped and I got in. "What, you might ask, was the cosmic result of this divinely ordained meeting?" We drove to a strip joint and had a few beers. All the genuinely psychic experiences of my intense meditation practice were all similarly absurd and mundane.

When I think of it, though, of what real significance are most religious experiences? St. Francis, for example, was supposed to have manifested stigmata. Exactly how did that butter anyone's parsnips?

Over the years I've come to the conclusion that there are significantly different types of meditation practice and some of them are of very limited value and others potentially acutely dangerous. Recently I've had this ambivalence reinforced by reading a blog that I subscribe to called "Down the Crooked Path". Whomever creates this blog puts a lot of effort into finding examples of religious leaders (mostly Buddhist and Yogic) who are abusing the trust placed in them. As well, she also has the odd post that shows examples of people who have suffered psychiatric problems as a result of pursuing specific types of practice.

These examples lead me to consider two very important things about meditation.

First of all, beyond the practical insignificance of any "miracles" that come from meditating, it appears that people can be very adept at some types of meditation and still be sex-crazed, materialistic, power-mad boobs. What this tells me is that these forms of meditation do not seem to be the "path to wisdom" that they are portrayed as being. Why do them if they don't work?

Secondly, it would also seem that some of these forms of meditation are also potentially harmful. If they don't really seem to work (i.e. make people who are really good at them into wise human beings), and, they could really hurt you, again, why do them?

Having said the above, I would suggest that there are different types of meditation. To that end, I think that "Holding onto the One", as suggested in the Nei-Yeh, is a pretty healthy form of meditation. It is not aimed at entering into trance states, or any sort of state at all, but instead is a form of mindfulness practice. It also seems to be very useful to have some sort of very minimal----but very regular---practice that incorporates some sort of physical movement. Taijiquan fits the bill perfectly, but there are also forms of walking meditation that I've done for years and are much easier to learn. The point is, that a lot of people in our world find themselves with "scattered" minds. A short, regular, "Holding onto the One", taijiquan and walking meditation practice do a really good job of helping people become a little more focused. But the emphasis should be on regular practice, not long duration. If you do stuff like this too much, there is the risk of sliding into trance meditation, which doesn't seem to me to be terribly helpful.

Of course, as in all cases, I'm ready to be corrected by someone who can show me the error of my ways. The only real reason why I post most of these things is because I've been doing this stuff for so long and I don't see many people out there that seem to know that much more than I do. Maybe someone will get some value from my babbling.

Different Religions, Different Visions

2011-06-22T10:28:00.011-06:00

I recently had an involved conversation with my significant other about the differences between Christianity and Daoism. This stimulated a lot of thought and I thought I'd share one particular idea that struck me.

In chapter 19, story number 8 of the Zhuangzi you come across the story of Kongzi meeting an old man who has gained the ability to swim safely in a torrent that "fell from a height of thirty fathoms" and where no "alligator, fish or turtle could swim". When Kongzi speaks to this man, he says:

No, I have no special way. I began with what was innate, grew up with my nature, and completed my destiny. I enter the very centre of the whirlpools and emerge as a companion of the torrent. I follow along with the way of the water and do not impose myself on it. That's how I do my treading. (Victor H. Mair trans.)

By way of a contrast, consider Chapter 14, lines 24 to 33 of Matthew from the Gospels. In that story, the disciples are in a boat on the sea in a storm. Jesus has been left on shore, but he walks on the water out to meet them. They are as surprised as Kongzi at what they see. Indeed, they are afraid that they are seeing a ghost, so Jesus calls out to the "Take heart, it's me! Don't be afraid." Peter replies that if it's really Jesus he should order him to come out of the boat and join him. Jesus agrees and asks him to come out.

And Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But with the strong wind in his face, he became afraid. And when he started to sink, he cried out, "Master, save me."

Right away Jesus extended his hand and took hold of him and says to him, "You don't have enough trust! Why did you hesitate?" (Scholars Version, Five Gospels)

These are somewhat similar stories, but they differ because the two religious that they are trying to explain are based on very different ideals.

In the case of Kongzi and the swimmer, the issue at hand is to take what seems stupendously miraculous and explain it in a "matter of fact" way. It is amazing that this man can swim in the cataract. But he can do it because he understands the way water and currents operate, so he doesn't expend any energy trying to fight them. He also understands that even in a vicious undertow, there is always a return current that will take him to the surface. The "miracle" is that he has developed the consciousness that has allowed him to master his fear and completely understand how the water works.

Matthew's story is very different. There is no mastery involved, just a question of faith in the ability of one man, Jesus, to suspend the laws of nature. Moreover, there is no subtlety to the story vis-a-vis the psychology of faith. Jesus seems to have no sympathy at all for Peter's inability to sustain his faith in Jesus' ability to simply violate the laws of nature. When Peter starts to sink into the water, he says "You don't have enough trust! Why did you hesitate?" Well duh, Jesus. Every single event in Peter's life is telling him that its bloody impossible to walk on water. He's the only guy who even got out of the boat. It was his idea to get out and join you in the first place. What the heck do you expect?

What's important to Kongzi's swimmer is learning how things work, both the water and his own abilities. This is totally irrelevant to Jesus. It doesn't matter whether or not Peter has any understanding of the world around him or how his thinking works---all that matters is whether or not he has faith in Jesus.

How different!

I suppose that at one time it was possible for someone to build their life around total and utter submission to faith in the existence of both God and Jesus. And if one did so they would find their lives calmer and easier to live. But I don't think that that is possible anymore without creating a crazy feeling of cognitive dissonance . If you are a fundamentalist, you must accept "on faith" that evolution is a crock. But what must someone who thinks this feel when they walk through a museum and see galleries of dinosaur skeletons? Similarly, if you are a Catholic and must accept Papal "infallibility", how must reading about sexual abuse scandals make you feel? Indeed, how can one believe in God and life after death when just about every experience we have tells us that neither one exists?

I think that, like myself, increasing numbers of modern people find it pretty much impossible to make that "leap of faith" anymore. No matter how much we might want to just jam our reasoning minds into some sort of theological prison, they find some way of escaping. And just was we are reaching out hands out to Jesus, the water we are standing on turns back to liquid and we begin to sink beneath the waves.

I suspect, however, that a lot of people are not happy with simply rejecting God and Jesus out of hand. They want some sort of religious framework to build their lives around. I know that I do. That's why I am a Daoist. The story of Kongzi and the swimmer is just as rich with meaning as the one of Jesus walking on the water, but it is totally compatible with the modern world. Moreover, I think that societies need religions to create the sort of unity needed to deal with the big problems that face them from time to time---like our present environmental crisis. Again, I think that something like Daoism is desperately needed in order to help us work together and learn how to live in harmony with Nature.

Daoist Morality

2011-05-29T20:34:00.004-06:00

I recently got around to watching the movie "The Reader". For those of you who might not have heard of it, this movie is about a young man who has an affair with an older woman who turns out to have been a guard at a Nazi concentration camp. He only finds this out years later after both have gone their separate ways and he attends her trial while attending law school.

It is a very good movie and I found myself absolutely captivated by Kate Winslet's performance as Hanna Schmitz, the Nazi guard. Indeed, I was so struck by the film that I went on to read a translation of the novel it is based upon.

The story is basically a mechanism for the author to deal with a key problem for Germans of his generation: how to deal with an older generation that was tarnished by co-operation with the Holocaust. This is not a hypothetical situation. Almost everyone of a certain generation in Germany has had the opportunity to wonder what his parents did during the Holocaust.

In the book, the narrator never does come to peace with Hanna. He has a connection to her that he cannot sever, but on the other hand, he refuses to allow himself to manifest any sort of human connection with her. As a result, he spends his life denying her the friendship that he feels he should offer her and feeling like he has betrayed her. In both the movie and the book Hanna commits suicide shortly before she is released from prison after the narrator rebuffs her attempt to connect during a visit. The book ends with him still unable to sort out his feelings, in contrast, the movie ends at her grave where he has finally made his decision and honours her by telling his daughter about his relationship.

The book is probably a more honest statement of how many Germans feel, but the movie has a more hopeful ending.

A key scene in the movie and book both takes place after Hanna's death where the narrator takes on a task left to him in her suicide note. Hanna wants her entire life savings given to one of the few surviving victims of her particular camp. The woman adamantly refuses to accept any of the money, as she feels that this might look like some sort of atonement. The idea is that there is no room for forgiveness in the heart of the victims.

This is very similar to a core theme in Simon Wiesenthal 's book The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness. It too is about an SS killer, but in this case it is a dying man who is asking forgiveness from a specific Jewish inmate. (This is a true incident that happened to Wiesenthal.) The story is told in a short book and various people from different religious traditions are asked to comment on whether or not they would be willing to forgive if they were confronted by this situation.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this and have come to the conclusion that when people refuse to forgive even the most vile behaviour they are operating on a flawed conception of what it means to be a human being. That is, the conventional view of human beings is to see them as having souls, free will and the constant opportunity to choose between two very obvious and different sets of actions, one right and the other wrong. I come from a different perspective. I see people as being dominated by peer pressure, strong emotional tendencies stemming from our past experiences, and social ideas that form the language and structure of our thought processes.

People think that it is "obvious" that it is evil to torture and kill other human beings. But if we look at recent history, I can see people who in support of what they believed are the noblest ideals were willing to kill thousands in terrorist attacks and for others in support of other (but, I would argue very similar) ideals were willing to authorize torture and trample on the civil liberties enshrined in their government's constitution. Murdering millions is not the same as water-boarding a few suspected terrorists and wire-tapping lawyers. But Eastern Europe in the 1940's was not the same world we inhabit now.

Eugenics was not considered the raving of lunatics, but rather the latest in science. My mother, who trained as a nurse at this time, used to tell me once in a while about how the "dull, subnormals" were going to eventually destroy the human race because they were out-breeding the more intelligent. Obviously, this is something that she picked up during the few weeks she spent learning about social issues. The idea of protecting the race from "dilution" was so much a part of the air, that even the political elite of Canada were willing to send "defective" children to schools where they were sterilized, without consent. The province of Alberta had a regulation that gave a board of appointed "experts" the right to force sterilization on people they deemed defective and therefore, a threat to the gene pool.

This is just part of the context that people like Hanna Schmidt would have inhabited. Add to that a background that discouraged curiosity, encouraged conformity, an abusive background that may have triggered inappropriate violent emotions, etc. and we have the making of a violent prison guard. I would argue that if many of us were to have had exactly the same background, context and set of circumstances we might end up doing much the same thing.

Indeed, I happen to believe that there actually is a Holocaust happening right now before us. That is, our behaviour to the environment will eventually be viewed with much the same horror that we feel towards the Nazis. I suspect that ordinary Germans were about as oblivious to the plight of the Jews as many people of today are about the prospects of global climate change. Many people refused to believe the stories they heard and what they saw just as many people today refuse to believe the warnings of scientists.

Ultimately, I think the thing to remember is that there are no rules sent down from on-high by God----for God doesn't exist. Nor is there any sort of immortal soul that tells us what the "right" or "wrong" thing might be in any given situation. Instead, all we have are the circumstances of individual life and culture that influence our consciousness. They flow like a river through time. We call that river the "Dao" and all we can do is be like a leaf that floats with the current.

Environmental Vow: Part 14

2011-05-24T07:13:00.001-06:00

An Alternative Model of Freedom

I've raised the idea of restorative justice not to solve the problems of our criminal justice system, but instead as a bit of a “thought experiment” to illustrate the different ways in which the concept of “freedom” can be understood. My suggestion is that the ideal encapsulated in the ethic of “self-actualization” and “follow your bliss” (at least as popularly conceived) is based on a flawed definition of freedom, one that is specifically centred on the individual. As I've suggested, as people naively express this ideal in their personal lives, it boils down to “do your own thing”. And, as I've pointed out, the ethic of “doing your own thing” has no real answer to the question “Why not become a crack whore? Couch potato? Greedhead? Sex Maniac? etc.” Adherence to this ideal has not only discredited so-called “progressives” in the eyes of the Right, it means that they have no moral grounds for suggesting that there is an imperative (moral, religious or patriotic) for people mobilize in order to deal with our climate catastrophe.

At this point, I'd like to introduce a more sophisticated definition of “freedom”, one that can go a long way, I believe, in answering the problems that have arisen from the “do your own thing” worldview. Marcus Tullius Cicero, the ancient Roman, once wrote that “Freedom is participation in power.” This definition will probably sound startling to some readers, so it might be helpful to mention that I first heard this quote mentioned by the consumer advocate and community organizer Ralph Nader. What he was saying was that “freedom”, in the political sense, does not flow from the absense of the Gestapo or the Inquisition, but instead from how engaged the citizenry is in the daily life of their society. It is possible to consider an enlightened dictatorship with complete freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, etc. But insofar as the people who live in that state do not have feel that they have any control over who is making the big decisions in their life, they still live in a dictatorship and they are not “free”. As a result of this reasoning, Nader was saying that if you want to be politically free you have to be actively engaged in the political process.

I believe that this new definition also works when we go beyond the realm of politics. “Power” is more than just government. Engineers and scientists, for example, gain power by learning more about the physical world that surrounds us. Even ordinary people who know how to fix a leaking toilet or change the operating system on their computer insofar as they can do so participate in the power of modern technology. It is certainly the case that when people are confronted by something that they don't know how to repair or even operate they feel especially powerless and unfree.

I would further suggest that the fundamental issue is not the specific knowledge that a person gains from learning about the machinery that surrounds them. Just because I can change the operating system on my computer doesn't mean that I know how it works or could even write a very simple program. The “mastery” I feel is ultimately pretty shallow and inconsequential. But the process of learning how to download open source software and install Linux on my laptop has resulted in my becoming personally “engaged” with the technology in a way that cannot happen by going into a store and buying a new computer pre-loaded with a MS Windows package.

In much the same way, the “freedom” that Cicero and Nader are talking about comes not from having all that much real control over the political process (even citizen groups have to have leaders and followers, after all.) Instead, the relevant issue is how much the person has invested their own personal well-being into the group project. This means that when we think about the phrase “freedom comes from participation in power”, the emphasis should be upon participation, not power.

At this point we can see where the value of restorative justice comes into play. It sees the key issue in criminal activity as being that of an individuals's alienation from society instead of their personal “evil”. The solution, therefore, is to reintegrate the offender into the community instead of merely punishing him. The Lakota elders reintegrated the murderer by making him responsible for supporting the wife and children of the man he killed. The modern example I gave teaches the offender that there really are individual human beings who are harmed by property crimes like burglary, which thereby deflates the comforting illusion that their offenses are only against impersonal, inhuman insurance companies. Insofar as this initiative is successful, it means that if the would-be criminal contemplates committing similar crimes in the future, the crime will have to be understood specifically as an act that is done to specific human beings who will suffer as a result. This makes the crime “real” in a way that it wasn't before, which is to say that the criminal has been brought back into the community of man.

Once we start seeing freedom in this way, we can see how religious people like the Benedictines and soldiers like General Wolf could see themselves as being “free”. Insofar as they felt that they were emotionally “participating” or “engaging” in enterprises much bigger than themselves---the monastery or regiment---they felt “free” in the same sense as understood by Cicero and Nader. Obviously the individual soldier driven into the army by poverty or oblate given to the Benedictines while still a young child, did not initially “participate” very much in the “power” that compelled them. But even so, many of these people no doubt did end up identifying with the community that they found themselves in, accepted its ideals, and ended up finding satisfaction in the life. Proof of this fact exists around us insofar as many people still find enormous personal satisfaction from living in religious communities. Similarly, a great many veterans of the Armed Forces are tenatiously loyal to their branch of the service even many years after being discharged.

The important point to understand in using Cicero's definition is to change the emphasis from that of being free from constraint to that of engagement in something bigger than one's self. The “free” man is not one that is free from coercion---a necessary, but not sufficient state of affairs---but rather one that is engaged with something that fulfills him. The philosopher Jean Paul Sartre pointed out much the same thing when he suggested that there is a difference between what he called “freedom from” and “freedom for”. Many people seek freedom from constraints of one form or another (work, rules, etc), whereas the truly free man seeks freedom to follow some sort of higher idea (art, justice, etc.) This is where the difference lies between the crack whore and a great man like Martin Luther King Jr. comes into play. The former never set out to become enslaved to cocaine, it was just the result of a series of bad choices and/or consistently bad luck. The latter, on the other hand, devoted himself to the ideal of civil rights and did what was necessary to pursue it. Both came to a bad end, but the former is a sad tragedy whereas the latter was heroic martyrdom.

Politics: the "Land of Dust"

2011-05-12T07:19:00.013-06:00

Canada recently had an election and as someone who has devoted enormous amounts of my precious time to politics, the experience brought me mixed emotions. I was angry, because I think that politics is ultimately a game that exposes much that is wrong about people. I was also very attracted to it, though, because I tend to believe that the democratic ideal is something very noble and valuable. I have no truck or sympathy with cynics who refuse to engage in the process of choosing our government, even though I am fully aware of how far the practice diverges from the ideal.

I've learned a lot of things from my involvement in politics, and increasingly I've wondered how I could pass on this information to others. I'm pretty sure that I would have benefited greatly if someone had tried to explain a few of these things to me early on. Indeed, I was desperate for some information when I started out, yet I never really did meet anyone who understood and could articulate some key points that I only learned from long, hard experience. Think of what follows as my first attempt at a "Politics 101".

Politics is Personal

I was always amazed at how petty most people can be. That is, it is a very rare person indeed who can differentiate between their personal feeling about a person and the program that they are supporting. I found in politics that a person can be totally in favour of a specific project, it can even be useful for their future career, but if they dislike the person who is promoting it, they will usually move Heaven and Earth to sabotage it. This always flabbergasted me, as I am so committed to saving the planet that I don't usually care who I'm working with as long as they are helping me work towards the same goal. Most people aren't like that, though. If you piss them off about something, they will usually hold onto that slight like a dog with a bone and if it is necessary in order to punish you, will destroy the organization they support and all the ideals that they hold dear to do so.

As a result, when you get involved in politics always consider the person you are dealing with. If you possibly can, try to be their friend. If they are a total dick (and don't kid yourself, many people are), then ask yourself very seriously "how much damage can this person cause me years later if I cross him and he ends up hating me for all of eternity?" If he can cause you problems (and almost everyone can), then try to figure out some way of hopefully avoiding him, or at worst neutralizing him in a way that he never thinks to blame you.

People Will Play Dirty Tricks

I was often surprised at how incredibly underhanded a lot of people who mouth the most beautiful sounding ideals can be. I've always believed that being "forthright" was a virtue, so I tend to tell people to their face what I think about them instead of trying to manipulate them from behind. The way I believe democracy should operate is that people should articulate different points of view in a very honest, open manner and allow the membership to decide which course to follow through a free vote. What I found instead was that many people in the party would use process rules in order to drastically limit the ability of the membership to make decisions.

Often this involved keeping the membership from being able to vote on the issue at hand. One classic method was to set up the agenda at meetings so the item that the organizing committee didn't want to see passed was put at the absolute end of the agenda. That way people opposed to it could waste time through various methods in order to "wait the clock out" with the result that it never got discussed. Since meetings where these sorts of agendas only occur once a year, this usually meant that no matter how popular a resolution might be, it could be postponed almost forever.

In general elections there are any number of dirty tricks that can be used to massage a vote. In the last Canadian federal election, for example, fake "robo calls" (originating in the USA where they could hide from prosecution) informing voters that the place where they vote had been changed. These targeted polls that traditionally voted one particular way.

Politics Is a Team Sport

Because people managing the organization of any sort of political institution will take advantage of their authority to manipulate the process---no matter what the constitution may say---it is imperative to avoid trying to play the role of "lone wolf". Playing by the rules is no guarantee whatsoever that you will be given a fair say if the referees are all members of the other team. Instead, you have to be willing to form a team of your own and make sure that you get control of some of the referees yourself. If you don't do this, no matter how popular you may be with voters you will always lose due to the other side cheating.

"Nice" People Aren't Fair People

It's important to remember that most people are more concerned about people being "polite" than they are about people being "fair" or "honest". What this boils down to in politics is that no one gains any support from the populace for pointing out when the other side is cheating. The reason for this is that they do not have the interest to try and figure out the truth of what you are saying. Instead, what they hear is someone "squabbling about politics", which at best will turn them off the entire process or at worst decide to not support you because you are "paranoid" or a "whiner". This allows the people who control the referees pretty much a free reign when it comes to manipulating or even totally ignoring the process set out in the constitutional structure. Ultimately, voters are like parents who's response to complaints by children that one of them is cheating is to throw over the board----which always gives cheaters at worst a draw.

(This rule was shown in the last Canadian election where the Liberals tried to show how badly the Conservatives had subverted our Parliamentary rules---they were destroyed as a party. It also may be why John Kerry in the USA never really tried to fight against the voter fraud that appears to have given George Bush his second term of office.)

People Want to be Lied To

Very few people have the inclination to "stretch their minds" or challenge their basic assumptions about how the world operates. What this means is that any politician who can spin his message around what passes for "conventional wisdom" has a tremendous advantage over anyone who is trying to express something that is either unpleasant to consider or hard to understand. This isn't hard to understand. If a person is confronted by two equally plausible options, they will tend to be attracted to the one that doesn't require him to make any uncomfortable changes in life or to work very hard to understand.

The problem is, however, that whenever a society genuinely does face a significant problem, the political system will usually refuse to deal with it until some sort of catastrophe makes it impossible to avoid admitting that there is a real problem. America was isolationist in spirit until the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour. And even though Jimmy Carter could easily see "the handwriting on the wall" with regard to dependence on foreign oil, Ronald Regan was able to cast him as a "gloomy Jimmy" who didn't understand that America could still do anything it wanted without regard for the future. This basic tendency probably means that our political culture will not do anything significant about climate change until some catastrophe (perhaps dramatic increase in sea levels) makes both the fact of change and the scope of the problems it will create impossible to ignore. (Hopefully geo-engineering will allow us to retreat from this situation.)

Politics is Universal, But Democracy is Best

People often think of politics as being something peculiar to democratic states. This is a profound misunderstanding of how societies operate. A dictatorship or absolute monarchy may not have regular elections or formal political parties, but it does have constituencies that need to be supported. Even the most ruthless dictator has to have the support of his praetorian guard or else they will kill and replace him with someone who is more able or willing to serve their interests. In authoritarian or totalitarian states, politics always comes down to the creation of cabals who then maneuver to be able to seize control of the government through assassination, coup d'etat or other violent means.

Democracy has two great advantages over other forms of government.

First, it allows for a non-violent method of changing the regime. Votes can be rigged and manipulated, the system of organizing representation can (and usually are) grotesquely unfair, and voters can be systematically misled and confused by propaganda campaigns----but no one ends up with their head on a stick at the end of the process. In and of itself, this is a big improvement on just about every other system humanity has created.

Secondly, democracies are organized around formalized institutions: Parliament, Congress, political parties, Riding Associations, etc. In contrast, non-democracies are built around "big men" that everyone looks to for leadership. This makes non-democracies very vulnerable violent turnovers in times of crisis. All that the rebels really need to do in Libya, for example, is knock out Gaddafi and the country is theirs because the government he has built around him will collapse immediately. In contrast, were someone to assassinate the Canadian Prime Minister the deputy leader would immediately take control, and were he assassinated too, the house leader would replace him, even if there was a mass slaughter of the cabinet, MPs would quickly hold a snap vote and appoint someone else. Similarly in all democracies there is a clearly defined chain of command, all of which members have significant legitimacy within their own right.

Machiavelli believed that it was very dangerous for princes to declare war on democracies (both forms of government existed amongst the Italian states of his time), as the former would almost inevitably collapse on the death or significant failure of the ruler whereas the latter could survive tremendous setbacks by bringing forth new leaders in times of crisis.

Why it is called "The Land of Dust"

It is easy to see why a Daoist would be repelled by the chicanery endemic in any form of politics. It is impossible to manifest Ziran when you find yourself having to avoid saying or doing anything that will put you at a disadvantage vis-a-vis someone else who is ruthlessly trying to push you out of the way. Indeed, the system has worn me down to the point where I've pretty much given up on politics. But as the saying goes, even if you give up on politics, it will not give up on you. In other words, just because you chose not to participate don't expect the decisions made by the process to not affect you in your daily life. As a result, I still try to follow politics, I vote and even donate money to parties when I can afford it.

But I have realized that politics is invariably for mainstream people, and I am a totally marginal person. I believe that I am right a great deal of the time, but my viewpoint makes me about as alien to the average voter as if I was from the planet Mars. Sometimes people ask me why I call myself a "hermit" even though I live in the city. It is this sense of alienation from "normal" society that gives me this label. So, like many Daoists before me, I have removed myself from the Land of Dust.

"The Tragedy of the Commons"

2011-04-28T10:53:00.024-06:00

I work for a university, which is a large charitable corporation that does a lot of work for the government as well as private industry. I mention its structure because a lot of people think that it is a government institution, which will bear on their emotional response towards what follows. I mention this before the following meditation because I want the reader to be prepared to park their ideological assumptions at the door and read what I write instead of following the narrative that many folks follow when they think about government.

One of the things that an academic institution has to do is purge books that no one wants to read. If they didn't do that, they would have to constantly expand the size of the building to find room for the new books that it is constantly buying. This causes problems for the institution because many people have a huge emotional investment in the idea that books should never be discarded. That is to say, the library has to hide the fact that we are throwing out books because if we don't some folks---often elderly people who are potentially large donors to the institution---will complain bitterly.

In the past this need to hide has caused big hassles for the institution. Many years ago, for example, the university had to build a complex, covered slide to hide books that were being discarded from an older building because people had complained about seeing books being thrown out a window into a dumpster. The books were still being thrown out, but now they were hidden from sight by a plywood chute. Another time someone complained about seeing books marked with the library stamp in a landfill. As a result, we started boxing surplus books, packing them on skids and shipped them to the National Book repository hundreds of miles away---where they were landfilled. This went on for years and cost the institution a lot of money, even though the collections budget had been cut repeatedly to save money.

We no longer ship books to the Repository because they can be "recycled". But we recently had a new purge and I noticed that once again the books are being packaged in boxes, placed on skids and shipped out of the building----even thought we have a dedicated recycling bin right in receiving. Why not just dump them there as they come down?

It turns out that the municipal recycling system will not accept books unless they have their covers torn off. (This is probably because the covers cause problems for the machinery in one part of the recycling process or another.) This would be a huge task for the institution as they are purging thousands of books right now. We do have a company that is willing to accept the books as is, but if it placed a dumpster on campus they are concerned that the books would be contaminated with other garbage. This is a reasonable fear, as people routinely come onto campus with loads of garbage and throw trash into the dumpsters without any regard to whether or not they are putting their refuse in the right one.

As a result, in order to "do the right thing", the university has to use a lot of corrugated cardboard boxes (many of which are reused, but a lot have been purchased new specifically to box these books meant for "recycling".) They are being loaded onto trucks and shipped across town to go into a dumpster that is safely away from the members of the public who would contaminate it.

At this point I hope anyone with any sense has realized that all the extra handling, the diesel fuel used in transit plus the cardboard boxes probably mean that any value that the environment might have seen from reusing the paper pulp is more than wiped out. Please note, as well, that I have been putting the word "recycle" in "scare quotes" for a reason. The company that is receiving the books is not pulping the books to make paper, it is instead shredding them for animal bedding. I hope that after its use it gets composted and spread on fields, but for all I know it gets incinerated or landfilled.

I mention this one example of what really happens when we try to recycle in order to show just how illogical our society has become.

I mention all of this primarily to draw people's attention to the way people's assumptions swirl around them and drive institutional behaviour. For example, I had to start this little anecdote by warning people that I do not work for the government. I did this because my experience has been that once some people assume that the government is involved, they just "write it off" as being inherently inefficient. Well, no, I don't work for the government. Moreover, I have worked for very large private sector corporations and it has been my personal experience that large corporations are just as inefficient as the public sector. Inefficiency, as near as I can tell, is a result of an institution being huge and hierarchical, not whether it is owned by taxpayers or shareholders.

Once this caveat is out of the way, I will draw reader's attention to the strong emotions that are drawn out about books. People do not like to throw them out. This causes no end of problems for people in charities who end up with enormous piles of unsalable books being delivered at their doorstep. And, as I pointed out, it causes significant problems with academic libraries that have to routinely purge books that have absolutely zero value for the public. After all, outside of a very small academic readership, who wants back issues of "The Journal of Bloody Diarrhea"?

I would ask readers to parse down the emotions that are at play and think about their commitment to recycling. How much of an improvement is it to "recycle" the paper in the books when the process of doing so involves the purchase of new books and driving the books to an isolated dumpster where they won't be contaminated---so they can be shredded and used as bedding material instead of being made into new books? Could it be argued that the emotional commitment that people have towards recycling is often about as illogical as the emotional commitment that many people have towards the preservation of books?

I got started meditating on the way our cherished assumptions and emotional feelings influence our behaviour---both individual and collective---by thinking about a seminal essay titled "The Tragedy of the Commons", by Garrett Hardin. I have seen this essay referred to by right wingers who say that it argues that all natural resources should be privatized in order to prevent their over-utilization and destruction. In actual fact, however, it argues that the tragedy isn't one of public ownership, but rather that of under-regulation.

A "tragedy", as classically understood, was not just a bad thing that happens to someone, but rather a very bad thing that comes about because of the inherent nature (or, in Daoist terms "Ziran") of a person sows the seeds of their destruction. In Shakespeare, for example, the tragedy of Hamlet is his vacillating character which means that he ends up destroying both himself and the royal court instead of simply revenging his father's assassination.

The specific "tragedy of the commons" refers to the way that collective ownership can lead to the destruction of a natural resource. The example used in the essay is that of a medieval pasture where peasants were allowed to graze their cattle. The idea is that because everyone owns the pasture, but only the peasant owns an individual cow, the cost to the individual due to overgrazing is greatly diluted whereas the utility of having another cow is significant. That is the cost of over grazing is "X" divided by the number of peasants in the entire community, whereas the profit of owning another cow, "Y" belongs only to one person. (In economics, this is known as "externalizing your costs".) This means that there is a strong self-interest for peasants to have as many cows as they can and over-graze and destroy the pasture in a way that they never would if they also owned the pasture individually.

Hardin used this example to argue that the environment is a "commons" that is held by all individuals and is being progressively "over-grazed" and destroyed. Because no one owns the oceans, they are being over-fished, the air is being polluted, etc. His answer, however, is not to privatize the entire environment, but rather to develop a strict regulatory regime that protects these "commons" from being damaged.

This is an intermediary stage in his argument, however, as his ultimate concern is population. Once we see the oceans, etc, as a "commons" that needs to be protected the next logical step is to see the entire earth and its future as a commons. And the greatest threat to that is arguably over population, if only because all insults to the earth caused by humanity are multiplied by the number of people who are insulting it. That is, if five people pollute a river they can get away with a great deal individually without causing severe damage. But five million have to all be extremely scrupulous in order to protect the stream.

If we accept that population increase has a tremendous impact on the "commons", and we believe that the only real way to protect it is through regulation, then it follows that we need to have some pretty significant regulation over the ability of human being to reproduce.

On the face of it, this should be pretty obvious to all and sundry. But the fact of the matter is that it is a conclusion that is very controversial. Not because the logic or evidence is faulty, but rather because people have such a strong emotional commitment to the idea that there is something good about large families that they are blinded to obvious fact that the earth is grotesquely over-populated.

If you listen to old women you will often notice the extreme pride they take in the size of their families. For example, I recently heard two women in a restaurant bragging about how many children and grand-children they each had. One had ten and the other had fourteen. On the occasion of my grandmother's death I remember the enormous satisfaction my mother had----she had five children herself and she had four surviving brothers and sisters herself, most of whom had had at least two children too. This emotional commitment to "family" is the sort of thing that is driving our population explosion.

I've been trying to point out that key behaviours of both individuals and institutions are being driven by emotions because I want to point out a significant debate that took place in ancient China and which I think should also be taking place right now. Amongst the other schools, there was one known as the "school of Fa " or "legalism" which battled with Confucianism. (For some reason, which is debated, Daoism was embraced and not persecuted by the Fa when they tried to erase all the other schools.)

For the purposes of this blog post, I would argue that legalism is the dominant philosophy of our society in that the initial response to any and all problems seems to be to pass a law about it. Confucianism (or, the school of "Ru"), in contrast, argues that this is wrong-headed because it ignores human nature and the fact that the world is too complex to be able to craft laws that can deal effectively with all possible situations. Confucianism believes that the way to govern society is to find and train good people and then give them the authority to "do the right thing".

As a matter of historical fact, the Fa school was successful in building up one of the warring states, Qin, into a military powerhouse that was able to conquer all the other states. As such, it set the direction of Chinese society for thousands of years to come. At the same time, the Confucians were also proven correct in that the totalitarian Fa state fell apart into rebellion and confusion because the leaders of the state had no moral glue holding them together after the death of the First Emperor and because the citizenry were so oppressed that they had no reason to support the state. As a result, Confucianism has survived as a seminal influence on Chinese political theory up until the present Communist state and perhaps past, as it now even seems to be being resuscitated as part of modern nationalist identity.

I introduced the distinction between Fa and Ru because these issues still dog us today. No matter what laws govern the institution of the University where I work, the administration still has to consider the emotions and concerns of the people it has to deal with. This leads to the absurdities of having to ship books long distances instead of just tossing them into a bin off the loading dock. Similarly, as someone who has spent far too many years in politics, I can assure you that people's emotions have huge bearing on the laws that get passed. (Even the legalists of the Qin dynasty realized that they have to think about this when they eventually went too far and ended up with peasant revolts on their hands.)

How this bears on the commons has a huge impact on Hardin's thesis. The medieval commons survived for over a thousand years because it was regulated by a combination of rule by the local lord and by the customs that held peasant society together. This blew apart when society changed and the old verities of society no longer held sway. It is easy for him to suggest that governments should regulate population, but I know from practical experience in politics that there is no swifter way to destroy a career than to simply point out that we are over-populated, let alone try to craft regulations to deal with it. A totalitarian state like Maoist China may be able to cut its population through its "one child law", but that sort of thing is simply beyond the authority of just about any other type of government.

I don't know what response I bring from thinking about these issues. For a long time I believed that it might be possible to actually change society by creating new mythologies or even a new religion that would be able to change the emotional framework of people, which could then create room for new laws and regulations governing things like population growth. I'm less sanguine about this sort of thing nowadays. Instead, I tend towards a more pessimistic opinion that people have very little control over the Dao and instead it simply follows its own path. Perhaps this is wisdom dawning, perhaps it is just exhaustion and old age.

One of the paradoxes of life is that we begin to see the complexity of things just at the point where we lose the energy necessary to try to be an active agent in the world.

What is Enlightenment?

2011-04-06T12:14:00.007-06:00

I've been thinking a lot about enlightenment lately. Primarily, I've found that I've been spending more and more of my time living in the moment instead of fretting about the future or the past. This isn't to say that I don't spend time doing both, but just that I've found that a useful antidote to both is to focus on the "here and now".

The result has been a significant improvement in the quality of my life. While time seems to go by faster and faster, paradoxically, the individual moment I inhabit seems to have expanded dramatically. People often remark on how time seemed to go on forever when they were young, but now it seems to go by more and more quickly. I always ascribed this fact to the idea that an hour of a young child's life is a greater fraction of their lived experience than that of an old person. But now I think a large part of that experience might be the fact that children are forced by their circumstances to be little more than potentiality----they always have to wait until some adult deems it is the "right time" for whatever they want to do.

In this clip we see that Homer is actively engaged in all the different aspects of getting to the amusement park, whereas the children are merely passive passengers who can do nothing more than wait. I think that this has a lot to do with the experience of time. If you are a passive person without any engagement in your life, time expands whereas if you are actively engaged, it shrinks.

This is an insight that has really made a big change in my life. When I remember it, it allows me to avoid the ennui and dread that use to fill many hours of my previous life. Ennui, like Bart and Lisa, who were forced to passively sit in the back seat and wait for life to arrive. And dread, like during my episodes of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder when I was consumed with terror over what might happen and guilt over what already has. By focusing on the individual moment in time that I am inhabiting now, I am able to avoid both aspects of Hell.

What this experience has got me thinking about recently is what "enlightenment" could be. All religions seem to have some sort of mental state that at least some of their followers are seeking. Buddhism is probably most famous for its pursuit of Nirvana. Daoism has its equivalent in Ziran. I belive that Sufism has the concept of "An" (although I cannot find a supporting link.) And Christianity and Judaism has Shalom.

Please note, that I am not suggesting that all of these experiences are exactly the same. It might be that they are, but in any event, the cultures that they arise from are different enough that even if they are all the same, the languages used to express them are sufficiently different that they each will have different nuances. Moreover, it might be that the experiences themselves are culturally mediated in such away that there are differences between them. The key point to understand is that Buddhists who are enlightened, Daoists who do manifest Ziran, Sufis who experience An and Christians and Jews who do live in Shalom would all get along with each other far better than with their co-religionists who do not understand or emphasize these concepts in their particular faith tradition. For example, a Sufi who manifests An will get along better with a Jew who lives in Shalom than with a member of the Taliban or al-Qaida. (Which is probably why the Taliban recently attacked a Sufi shrine with a bomb, killing many worshipers.)

The experience that I have been having lately is nothing earth-shattering. It is really very mundane, actually. But it is something that I treasure and it does make life a lot easier. It is also somewhat hard to explain. People go through life on the assumption that all words and experiences can be explained. This is an important and useful assumption. Most of the time things can be explained. And most of the time when someone cannot explain something and expects us to accept it "on faith", it is usually because they believe something that is unjustifiable. As my Daoist teacher once said, "if you can't explain yourself, you usually don't know what you are talking about".

But sometimes people cannot understand something simply because they haven't had the experience. Someone who has been blind from birth simply cannot know what colour is all about. In the same way, I don't think that enlightenment or Ziran or Shalom can be understood by anyone who hasn't really tried to live their life in a certain way. Please note, that the difference in being able to understand the experience of enlightenment or Ziran doesn't come from some sort of wild, extra-ordinary experience, but rather from a lot of time spent thinking about what it means to be alive. It's more like moving ten tons of gravel, one shovel at a time than about shoving your fingers into a light socket and getting an instantaneous jolt. (This isn't to say that there aren't life changing moments, but my experience is that they are very rare and usually come about because of previous mundane effort.)

I don't think that enlightenment or Ziran or Shalom is anything all that special or weird, but it does make it an "undiscovered continent" to people who haven't really tried to understand their life. And in the presence of a vacuum, people start to insert all sorts of speculation about what they could be like. And because fame and power are not things that come from manifesting enlightenment or Ziran, the guys who know the least often end up teaching the courses and writing the text books. And if you can't understand exactly what someone is talking about until you do the exercise yourself, you are going to be at a real disadvantage when it comes to shopping around for a "do it yourself" manual. And when you do make some headway, you may find yourself smacking yourself on the head and thinking "That's what its all about? Wow, if I'd known then what I know now, I wouldn't have wasted so much time chasing blind allies."

Think of this post as a suggestion of a road map. I might be fooling myself, but I don't think I am. It's up to you to figure out if I can be trusted or not, though. Obviously very few people do, which is why I don't have hundreds or thousands of subscribers. And therein lies the rub. To read the map of where you want to go, you pretty much almost have to be there already.

One last thing. I came across this Youtube for a "Daoist Rap" and I simply couldn't let it pass without sharing----.

What is Morality?

2011-03-22T20:42:00.011-06:00

I read an article by Michael Valpy in today's "Globe and Mail" that got me thinking about what people mean when they say the word "morality". Specifically, the article makes the assertion that "conservatives are more likely to embrace a world view that seeks certainty and abhors ambiguity, and hold the belief that morality is more important than knowledge". This statement really grabbed me by the lapels and shook me up. Why is there a contradiction between "morality" and "ambiguity"? Even more to the point, why is there a contradiction between "morality" and "knowledge"?

When I think about "morality", it seems to me that there are several underlying issues that are intrinsically involved in being a moral person. One of which is being "truthful". And by this, I don't mean in the sense of being honour-bound to never tell a lie---such as in the old, moronic "situational ethic" argument about whether it would be right to lie to the Gestapo about whether or not you know where the Jewish family is hidden. What I mean instead, is that a "moral" person should be willing to follow the "truth" where it leads---no matter how much difficulty that might cause the individual in question.

An example in point comes from a documentary movie I once saw about the abolition of slavery. Early on in that struggle a person brought a suit to an English court about whether or not it was legal to have slaves in England. (A fellow from the colonies had brought along a personal slave servant, and he decided to "jump ship" in England.) I recall the judge made reference to a legal maxim of "Fiat justitia ruat caelum" ("Let justice be done though the heaven's fall".) The idea was that even though there would be a great deal of anger from slave owners about their loss of "property", the law said that there should be no slavery in England. (As I recall, the reasoning was based on a medieval case against slavery where the judge had written that "the air England is too sweet to allow a slave to breath it".)

How would it have been "moral" for the judge to not follow the case law and agree that the person arguing against slavery was right? It would have been a lot easier to simply agree with the other side and not alienate the wealthy and powerful. But would it have been moral?

If we agree that intellectual honesty is part of the foundation underpinning morality, then surely "knowledge" is not only not existing in opposition to morality, it would seem to be an essential element of its composition. Moreover, if knowledge is important, then it seems that ambiguity should also be an intrinsic element of morality. It is a truism that "the more we know, the less we think we know". But if this is the case, then surely ambiguity follows on the tail of knowledge. And if morality consists of following the truth wherever it leads us, then the moral path must also lead us into the valley of ambiguity more than once in a while.

This is a very practical issue because it strikes me that the conservative people I meet are people who are anything but moral in their behaviour and outlook. Indeed, I would argue that they are often the most immoral people I have ever met. I say that because they seem to almost invariably refuse to believe that "truth" has any sort of intrinsic merit. Instead, their morality is based on submission to some sort of authority----governmental, scriptural, ecclesiastic, etc. The "Bible tells me so", "my country right or wrong", etc is good enough for them. Lay out a reasoned argument that shows that they shouldn't be following their particular chosen authority, and they invariably derail the discussion in one way or another.

I had an experience of this a few years back when I was involved in an email discussion with a Jesuit priest. He said he honestly couldn't understand why people would be opposed to children being given a Catholic education. I wrote back that with all due respect the image that many people have of the Catholic church is pedophilia, homophobia, misogyny and intellectual dishonesty. For these people, giving children a Catholic education is a form of child abuse. The priest didn't respond, he simply cut off the conversation. We have met since then, but he never, ever makes any reference to the conversation---it's as if it never took place.

I would suggest that this is not only a cowardly thing to do, it is also profoundly immoral.

Another incident teased out a further complexity for me.

Years ago the mayor of my city got caught cold copying a large amounts of an official speech. Lots of my friends were very angry about this, but her supporters seemed to honestly not understand what all the fuss was about. It strikes me that the reason why people with a university education made such a fuss was because it is probably the absolute worse crime (short of fudging research) which an educated person can commit. Lots of students fool around sexually, take drugs, etc, but what will get you booted from school no ifs or buts, is plagiarism. I can remember in grad school that the professors were absolutely ruthless about this and would expel undergrads without any mercy for copying. And, if you think about it, this makes sense. All scholarship is based on a degree of trust. No authority could possibly fact check every single piece of research that gets done. Universities simply have to be able to trust their scholars and scientists.

This raises one last point. Is morality authoritative or consensual?

Conservatives would argue that all morality comes from some sort of authority: the Bible, the constitution, the Pope, etc. But scientific truth seems to be based on the development of a consensus. A person puts forward a theory and performs an experiment, then writes it up in a paper. The paper then goes in front of a jury of experts in the field who decide whether or not it is worth publishing. Then it gets published and enters the discussion that constantly goes on between members of the field. People try to recreate the experiment, design others to disprove it. Eventually, a majority of people in the field decide to either discard it as a failed model, or accept it and then try to build further on it.

In retrospect this different attitude explains the way my friend the Jesuit responded to my honest attempt to engage him about the public view of Catholic education. I tried to engage him in the consensus-building dialectic of intellectual discussion. Instead, all he saw was an attack on the authority that he had built his life around.

I've had friends say that this is the problem with religion, that it is authority based instead of being experientially or consensus-based. I agree, it seems to me right now that this is the key problem with regard to existing dominant religions. But I don't think that they need to be. I recall reading somewhere that the Buddha said that the religion he was founding was bound to die out and be replaced as it got old, became corrupted and ceased to serve society. I also have read a quote that said that he felt no one should follow his teachings on authority---instead, he counselled people to be a "lamp onto themselves". I like to think that Daoism is similarly based on personal experience and consensus between free individuals instead of slavishly following some authoritative text or teacher. (I know that Buddhism and other non-authoritarian religions often fall far short of this idea and that there are non-authoritarian streams in Western spirituality, but I am only making generalizations to illustrate different tendencies.)

Excuses and Apologies

2011-03-22T16:00:00.002-06:00

I haven't been making many posts lately. Primarily, this is for two reasons.

About a year ago, one of you readers reached out and contacted me. A fellow Daoist, she started reading my blog and found a kindred spirit that she never knew existed. We struck up a conversation, which led to a visit, which led to a proposal. Now we are engaged----even though we live in different countries. As you might imagine, this relationship eats up a little of my time.

Secondly, I've hired a company to gut and rebuild the kitchen of my home. This too is taking up a lot of my time. It has also made writing a very difficult activity, as I usually write on my kitchen table. Also, it is very hard to write when a group of strange men are making loud noises and creating clouds of dust all around you.

Hopefully I will be able to get back into my "groove" soon. Writing is a spiritual practice for me and I deeply feel its loss.

Life and Death, Autonomy and the Dao

2011-02-15T22:07:00.012-06:00

I recently went to hear a lecture by Gwynne Dyer about climate change. Basically, his message came down to the idea that it is technically and economically feasible for the human race to take the measures necessary to prevent runaway global warming, but it is beyond our political institutions. As a result, we will not be able to prevent CO2 levels from reaching the point where we start getting feedback effects that will result in more warming, which will trigger more feedback effects, which will trigger more warming, and so on.

The end point as Dyer sees it, would be a total human population in the millions clustered around the Arctic Ocean. Everyone else will be dead either by famine or war or disease within one or two hundred years.

Dyer doesn't think that this is inevitable, however, because he thinks that there are "on the shelf" geo-engineering solutions that will allow the human race the "breathing room" necessary to develop solutions to the greenhouse problem. These include things like spraying the stratosphere with sulfur dioxide, creating fleets of wind-powered robot ships that spray water into the air, building giant space mirrors to shade earth, etc. The idea is that these techno-fixes would reflect enough sunlight that they would keep the planet from heating up to a dangerous level.

What I'm interested about with regard to all of this is my personal reaction to Gwynne's dire predictions. I have devoted enormous amounts of time and energy in the battle to prevent global climate change. Primarily, this was based on a real terror of what could happen. As it happens around me, I've had to think deeply about the nature of that fear.

Oddly enough, I've come to the conclusion that it is fundamentally misplaced.

It seems horrible to consider the vast majority of the human race dying off in some sort of environmental cataclysm. But the fact of the matter is that every single person who has been born has died in one way or another. And most of the ways that people do die are pretty bad. Ultimately, what real difference is there between starving to death in just another run-of-the-mill famine or the "mother of all famines" caused by climate change? Or dying in an ordinary war caused by sheer stupidity instead of one caused by societies that are on the verge of collapse due to environmental catastrophe? Again, what is the difference between dying of cholera because your society hasn't really figured out how to give working people clean water versus getting something bad because your society has collapsed? Either way, in all of these cases, you end up dead. And I suspect that if you look at mortuary statistics the overwhelming majority of people in any age have died due to hunger, violence or disease.

So what would be all that new in Dyer's scenario?

Not much, really. There is the death of nature, but I don't think that I'd be being really honest if I said that that was the source of my extreme emotions. Instead, I think that a larger fraction of my concern is my own fear of personal extinction. Indeed, in a real sense the entire world "ends" when every one of expires---at least for the individual in question. Perhaps contemplating the death of nature (or, to me more precise, its radical change) forces me to direct my gaze in ways that I prefer not.

Another element of this issue came home to me today when I was at church. My local Unitarian congregation has an energetic group of members who have talked the church into installing solar voltaic energy panels on the roof. One member's also hot to create a more ecologically-focused congregation. I sat in on a question-and-answer session after the service to hear what people had in mind. I was appalled because it was the same old middle-class feeble attempt to deal with an absolutely existential problem with tiny "baby-step" solutions. I didn't hear any evidence that these people had even begun to wrap their heads around either the severity of the problem or the type of substantive change that would be necessary to prevent catastrophe. (I suspect that Dyer would say that this is what underlies the inability of our political system to actually come to terms with climate change.)

This highlights another key element underlying my frantic emotions about climate change.

I've always had some sort of faith in the human race. That is, I'd always felt that people's basic sense of "fair play" and "common sense" could be counted on in the long run. I suppose the best way to sum this up is to quote Abraham Lincoln "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time." But looking around the room I came to the conclusion that while Lincoln might have been right within a very limited set of social circumstances, but with regard to existential issues, the overwhelming majority of people live their entire lives swimming in a sea of delusion.

One particular delusion that I have laboured under has been the idea that individual human beings can have much impact on the direction of human history. Dyer mentioned this fact at the end of his talk, when he said that it only makes sense that if an intelligent species of animal creates a technological society it is inevitably going to have to come to terms with the limits that its environment imposes on it. That is the situation that the human race faces. Our economy and society moves forward through the operation of impersonal cultural laws. And it will either be able to develop new ways of preserving the environment through these individual, inhuman laws or it will not. The efforts of all the environmentalists are only, at best, one tiny part of the way those laws operate.

In effect, I have to not only accept the fact that I---and all I hold dear to me---is mortal and doomed to die; but also that for that brief life I live, I am not much more than a chip of wood floating on the ocean current that is the Dao. The chip has no responsibility about where it goes, all it can do is just float. In the same way, individual human beings---even educated Daoists like me---have zero influence over whether we are going to suffer runaway climate change or no. This is a very hard lesson to learn intellectually.

I wonder if I will ever be able to know this truth in my bones?

Realization---Moment by Moment

2011-01-05T11:18:00.014-06:00

I've been reading a lot lately about "crazy wisdom" teachers. Primarily, I read The Buddha from Brooklyn by Martha Sherrill, Holy Madness by Georg Feuerstein and Stripping the Gurus by Geoffrey D. Falk. I'm interested in this subject, at least in part, because I've often wondered if the fellow who introduced me to Daoism, Moy Lin Shin, was some sort of "crazy wise" teacher. If he was, perhaps his behaviour wasn't simply weird and dysfunctional, but instead a tremendous opportunity to learn that I passed up when I left his organization.

For those readers who haven't heard of "crazy wisdom" before, the idea is that some religious teachers choose to teach their students by stressing them to the breaking point in the hope that this will force them reassess their basic assumptions about what it is to be a human being. The stress can take many forms, but primarily, it consists of expecting far, far too much from the student, either in the form of simple effort or in the form of breaking very important social taboos. Religious literature abounds with this sort of thing---Zen masters who beat their students, Lamas that force students to do heroic tasks of labour, Taiji Chuan masters who work their students so hard that they attempt suicide, and so on. In a more modern context, it involves gurus deliberately ignoring the boundaries that usually exist between a religious teacher and a student---such as forcing them to engage in abusive or embarrassing sex acts.

How could this possibly be justified?

The best illustration that I've ever seen comes from the delightfully complex movie "I Heart Huckabees". (If you have or haven't seen the movie, I'd recommend this essay on it.) The scene involves two men sitting at a picnic table bouncing a beach ball off each other's face. The idea is that the minor pain that results distracts them away from whatever thoughts are filling their minds and gives them a chance to experience "pure consciousness". (I suspect that this experience might have at one time been behind the Zen "keisaku" stick.) The two men are so enamored with the experience that they ignore their teacher's warning that this taste of empty consciousness can only be nothing more than just a fleeting event that invariably becomes overwhelmed by the complexities of life.

In order to force them to listen to her, she illustrates her point by caressing the crotch of one of the men with her foot, which immediately focuses his mind on her. As they walk off into the bushes to have wild, crazy sex, the other man is overwhelmed with jealousy. This, of course, completely makes the teacher's point that no matter how hard people try to take refuge in the "suchness" of life, they will invariably become distracted by the world around them. As such, their teacher is breaking social convention in order to teach them an important truth---i.e. in a "crazy-wise" way.

The problem with this style of teaching, unfortunately, is that the knife cuts both ways. Just as the two guys in the movie were quickly distracted from their beach-ball illumination, so can even the most enlightened master who gains a similar awareness from years of meditation. It isn't just the student who gets distracted when he gets "boinked" by the teacher, but the teacher too! The sad truth is that people with some significant insight can find their store of wisdom exhausted by the grind of attempting to help other people. I happen to believe that this is the reason why people who appear to have genuine insight at one point in their life can end up becoming abusive tyrants later on. Moreover, I think that this problem can become magnified within organizations as people who once had genuine insight but then lose it go on to make decisions about the abilities of other people, who then get promoted to positions of authority that they may either never have been capable of filling adequately, or, once did but since lost their ability to do so.

Underlying this issue is the fallacious assumption that "enlightenment" is an "all or nothing" or "once you've got it, it can't be taken away" sort of thing. If you believe that this is the case, then once someone "gets it", then they can never ever be wrong again---"backsliding" is simply impossible.

Well, IMHO, things just aren't that simple. In fact, I think that every moment of everyone's life we are in the same situation that confronted Neo when he first met Morpheus in "The Matrix". That is, we have a significant test of our courage and integrity. Do we take the "blue pill" and wake up safe and secure in the bed of comfortable illusions that sustain us in our present existence? Or do we take the "red pill" that may expose us to an uncomfortable truth that may shatter those illusions even though it might give us significant new insight? Those pills aren't just offered as a test for introduction to the spiritual life---they come along all the time. The failures we find in spiritual authority figures come up to their having decided to choose the blue pill.

So what does this mean for the serious student of the Dao (or Christ within, Buddha mind, etc)? Well, I'm not about to give up on the entire enterprise of spiritual practice. I think that there still is value. (I hope that by making this decision, I'm not just grabbing at a blue pill myself.) But it does get me thinking about a couple practical issues. First of all, I think that people should change the emphasis on enlightenment, realization, etc, away from the individual to the experience. Men (and women) cannot become "enlightened" or "realized". Instead, they can experience moments of realization. Obviously, some more than others. But the emphasis in teaching needs to be the contents of the vessel, not the vessel itself.

Secondly, I think that we should accept that if no one is "enlightened", then no one, ultimately can take on the mantle of "Mastery". This means that people have to accept that while there are people out there with insights who can offer us suggestions in our search for wisdom, we are always going to end up sitting in that chair having to decide on the red or blue pills all by ourselves. And if we decide to live in institutions, we are going to have to give up on any illusion about there being someone to tell us what to do. Instead, we are going to have to accept that any sort of authentic collective religious life is ultimately going to have to involve the "give and take" of people trying to figure out the right thing to do through the messy activity of consensus building and democracy.

Some people might complain that I've robbed the spiritual path of any goal. What is the point of it if no one ever becomes enlightened? Agreed, this is a big change. Without the ideal of the enlightened Master, the goal ceases to be personal and instead becomes collective. We go through our life attempting to gain insight through our glimpses of realization and try to hand them on to future generations---by personal interaction with others, through writings (like this blog), works of art, and, the institutions we create as collections of people. If some people think that this is not enough, I would suggest that it is all that sustains people who devote their lives to art, science, public service, etc.

Why should religion be any different?

The Beginings of a Theory of Qi

2010-12-11T18:26:00.036-06:00

I've never been very comfortable with the idea of "qi", nor with the "qi-gong". Primarily, this is because the concept is associated with a lot of vague, "New Age speak". For example, take a look at this definition that I just found at this site just by doing a Google search.

Central to Taoist world-view and practice is qi (chi). Qi is life-force -- that which animates the forms of the world. It is the vibratory nature of phenomena -- the flow and tremoring that is happening continuously at molecular, atomic and sub-atomic levels. In Japan it is called “ki,” and in India, “prana” or “shakti.” The ancient Egyptians referred to it as “ka,” and the ancient Greeks as “pneuma.” For Native Americans it is the “Great Spirit” and for Christians, the “Holy Spirit.” In Africa it’s known as “ashe” and in Hawaii as “ha” or “mana.”

I hope I don't hurt many reader's feelings, but this definition is so bad that, to quote Wolfgang Pali, "it isn't even wrong".

The reason why it is so bad is that if you look at the words this definition uses, they don't really mean much of anything. For example, what exactly is "life force"? "Force" is a term from physics that can be defined as "mass times acceleration". In this context, I can't really figure out what it could mean. As I see it, the fundamental problem in this definition is that it is attempting to see life as a concrete entity in itself (i.e. a "life force" that "animates" matter.) Modern thinking is that life is not a substance but rather an activity. It is what is known as a "homeostatic process", or, a complex process or series of processes with feedback loops that preserve the process over a given period of time. A simple example of a homestasis is the flame on a candle---the heat of the flame melts wax, which allows the liquid to flow up the wick, where it vaporizes and catches fire, which in turn heats more wax to feed the flame.

In other words, what we call "life" isn't a "thing" so much as an "activity" that comes about through a very complex series of processes. Talking about it as a "thing" called "qi" is what philosophers call a "category mistake", or the mistake of describing something as being something that it simply is not and then attributing to qualities from that category that it doesn't manifest. The philosopher Gilbert Ryle gives the following example of a category mistake: "The Prime Minister is in London, and the Foreign Secretary is in Paris, and the Home Secretary is in Bristol, but where is the Government?" The mistake lies in thinking that the "government" is something alongside its individual members.

So the way people talk about "qi" puts me off, because the language of almost everyone I hear talking about it is so flawed that it suggests to me that they haven't thought too much about it and clearly don't know what they are talking about.

Even worse, people who talk about "qi" often talk about the "evidence" that they have for its existence from the demonstrations of "Qi Masters". When I see these demonstrations, what I see looks like nothing much more than simple stage magic. Lest people call me a "narrow-minded skeptic", take a look at this video that explains a similar sort of thing from the Indian Yogic tradition (think "prana", not "qi".) I'm posting on a Daoist blog because it is that rare thing from television---short, and to the point.

I also managed to find a clip from a similar sort of program in China---with a translation---that exposes a similar sort of "qi fraud". Unfortunately, Chinese television seems to suffer from the same "issues" as North American---a need to create false tension and pad a simple story in order to sell soap. As a result, this clip drags on considerably, but it is worth seeing if you have the time.

So if I'm so critical of how people talk about "qi" and the way charlatans milk people's credibility, do I just dismiss "qi" out of hand? No, because I think that there is a real phenomena going on here. I have experienced the flow of "qi" and I think that it is a really important part of human health.

Most people have experienced "qi" when they do taijiquan. In my case, I've felt my hands warm up, strange pulsing in the roots of my teeth and the crown of my head, etc. Please note, however, that feeling something is not the same thing as knowing what it is or even being able to define it.

If you pursue Daoist meditation, you will also eventually come across what's called the "microcosmic orbit". I believe that this was once an esoteric teaching, but a fellow by the name of Mantak Chia has been selling books and giving workshops on it for quite a while. (I've heard anecdotes to the effect that Western "seekers" have gone to Daoist temples and Masters offered them "hidden, esoteric knowledge" that turned out to simply be what the Westerner learned at a quickie workshop in his home town.)

Briefly stated, the "microcosmic orbit" consists of sitting comfortably, concentrating on your breaths, doing Daoist "reverse breathing", and guiding your qi up your spine to the top of the head and down the front of the body to the Dantian.

There are a lot of claims about this process, but one that seems to work for me comes from the realm of psycho-therapy. It seems to work with my Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. My therapist, who is a Yoga instructor as well as holding a Master's degree in some school of therapy, says that the feelings we have in our body are directly related to our psychological well-being.

This makes perfect sense to me, as the reason why I decided to go to therapy in the first place was because of the wild physical feelings I was having as a result of the PTSD. The worst of these were the flash backs, which involved heart palpatations plus being drenched with sweat. When we are in therapy, she has shown me the way my bodily sensations are related to my mental state. (At one time I laughed at her because it became clear to me that she was physically manipulating me "like a puppet" by asking me to bring up specific memories, which in turn triggered emotional states, which in turn triggered specific bodily feelings. She was able to monitor my mental state by watching my posture. She said that what she was doing was a form of "desensitization therapy" for me, so my memories would no longer be so hard on me.)

You do not have to have a dramatic psychological problem like PTSD to be familiar with the way our mind interact with our bodies. For example, just about everyone has experienced the dramatic physiological effects that love has on our body. For example, several times I've had the experience of being in love with a woman only to find out that not only was she not similarly attracted to me, but that she was in love with someone else. The comedy cartoon "The Simpsons" does an admirable job of illustrating this feeling in one of its episodes where Bart falls for an older girl.

So what exactly is happening when we experience these sorts of feelings? There are two possibilities that come to my mind.

First, I've heard that modern scientific research seems to suggest that the brain and body interact in subtle and complex ways to make decisions and manage consciousness. We have tended to think that we just think with the brain and digest food with the liver, for example. But it may very well be that the liver releases complex hormones that have a dramatic impact on the decisions we make and what we believe. Certainly, our gonads seem to have some impact on our sex life, which in turn is directly related to many of our conscious decisions.

Secondly, it may be that while we are feeling something in our body what is really happening is something like "phantom limb syndrome". That is, since every experience we have is mediated by the brain, there is no reason to believe that any bodily feeling we have could not be a "trick" that the brain is playing on us---just as it tells many people with amputated legs that the leg is still there.

I suspect, actually, that both of these things are happening when we experience "qi".

My therapist goes on to make a further leap, one that makes sense to me. That is, she believes that the experience of bodily awareness that is common to all esoteric meditation traditions---including Daoism---is a process whereby we can consciously change and repair the physiology of our brains (or, perhaps our brains and that element of our bodies that we have up until now assumed was part of the brain.) The circulation of "qi" in the body when we are doing taijiquan or the "microcosmic orbit", therefore, is a process whereby we are repairing damage to our brains. In my case, that is the trauma from a horrific childhood.

No wild cosmic powers. No lightning bolts out of the hands. But a damned important thing none-the-less!

I was once told by a Zen priest that harsh experiences are the "entry ticket" to the contemplative life. (I believe he got into Zen as a result of being a soldier in the Korean war.) People forget about how brutal and harsh life can be, and often was for even the elite in ancient China. I suspect that Neidan and other types of meditation practice based upon qi came about as a way of dealing with the problems that many Daoists had to have had. I suspect that it can also bring about new ways of looking at the world and unlock hidden potential too. But I haven't had much experience with that yet, so I will leave that subject to others or perhaps a future post.

Oral and Written Traditions

2010-11-13T11:46:00.015-06:00

I've been thinking a bit about the difference between oral and written traditions lately. I've started reading Ellen Chen's wonderful translation with commentary of the Laozi, and she argues that, contrary to the more common opinion among modern scholars, that it is the creation of one person and that it was originally written down. This has shaken my previous belief that the Laozi is a collection of sayings from an oral tradition that was written down over time. Not having the ability to read ancient Chinese, I pretty much have to accept the authority of the scholars who do, which leaves me pretty much in the dark about what to think about the origins of the DDJ. If nothing else, it is an important lesson to learn that what we know we see "through a glass, darkly", to quote St. Paul.

Having said that, it doesn't undermine a pet theory of mine about the way oral and written traditions influence society. People have a modern belief that oral traditions involve bards and story-tellers memorizing their epics the way actors memorize the lines of a play. But in actual fact, I've read that ancient epics likes the Iliad, Odyssey, etc, were more improvisational than that. Bard and story tellers would know the basic outlines of the story---having heard it many times themselves when they were the apprentice running around with a bowl collecting money from listeners---and improvise their language as they recited. After years of practice, they were able to create rhythmn schemes in the same way that accomplished jazz musicians can follow chord progressions and key changes while noodling around with a theme or rhythmn.

What's interesting about this sort of "improvisational literature" is that it is fluid. That is to say that when a bard said something that really resonated well with the people listening, there was a tendency to include it or something like it in all future performances. Similarly, if someting didn't go over well, it tended to get discarded. And these changes tended to get passed onto the apprentices too, who would then make similar sorts of changes before their works were passed on to the next generation of bards. What was happening was a form of natural selection. Over generations and generations, I suspect that this process would be able to change just about anything into a great work of literature.

As an aside, this makes me wonder if maybe we should rethink the whole idea of "genius". Perhaps "Homer" wrote down a very, very old oral tradition that had been refined by generations of very good bards. Perhaps the bards took an "OK", but not great, poem by a fellow named "Homer" and refined it slowly into something amazing. Either way, it looks like there may not have been an enormously gifted blind poet who deserves most of the prase.

Even works that were written down instead of orally transmitted can go through this sort of process. In some cultures, at some times, all books were written by hand. If the books were copied by literate slaves, then probably the most one would get would be simply mistakes. But if people reading and enjoying texts were making copies for themselves or friends, then there had to be a tendency to change, add and remove bits as a form of "friendly editing". There is evidence of this in books from this stage of social evolution. For example, take a look at this discussion of the different elements that scholars have found in the book of Job in the Old Testament. That is, if we find copies of books that were created before the "standard edition" was created, we often find some significant differences between different versions. So some change can happen even at this stage, although I suspect hand-written books rarely evolve as much as oral traditions.

I think that this phenomenon is tremendously important to religions. That is because religious scriptures are tremendously important to the way the traditions develop. And I believe that in order for these traditions to stay relevant and true to the original spirit of the faith, they need to constantly adapt and evolve to the social and physical conditions that people find themselves in. As long as the unifying story and teachings of the faith are oral in nature, they can adapt to the needs of the people. But once they get written down, and especially when they get mechanically reproduced, the religion ceases to adapt to the needs of its followers and instead, the followers are forced to adapt to the words of the scripture.

This is a very bad thing. In fact, I recall hearing a teaching story about a Zen master who had inherited a mass of scriptures when he took over a Temple. He had the monks pile up these scriptures and burn them. When asked about why it was he was doing this, his answer was that he had to burn them in order to preserve them. I would suggest that this action and answer makes sense if you understand the way oral teachings can adapt to changing circumstances whereas written ones cannot. Let me repeat this in order to emphasize the point, to save the spirit of a teaching, you sometimes have to destroy its outward manifestation which is confining and perverting it.

I wonder if perhaps the reason why the Black form of American Christianity sometimes seems so much more dynamic and progressive is because historically it has been a church composed of many illiterate people. (Think about it, who is the exemplar of Black Christianity: Martin Luther King Jr.? Who is of comparable stature in white Christianity? Jerry Falwell? Billy Graham?) At first, the slaves were forbidden to learn how to read or write. After emancipation, the rules of Jim Crow made if very hard for most blacks to get any sort of education. What this meant was that people were able to adapt and improvise their understanding and form of Christianity without having to bend and twist themselves to fit the confines of 2,000 years of church history.

I've thought a lot about this issue because of a sometimes angry debate in the scholarly community about the value of certain "versions" of the DDJ that have been written by people who have no understanding of ancient Chinese---and often no Chinese language at all. I probably find myself in the worst situation of all in that I have sympathy for both positions. On the one hand, I agree that it sounds preposterous that someone would write a version of the DDJ without knowing the original language. But on the other hand, I think that we are now entering into a new age where religious texts need to be freed up and become fluid again---like they were in oral traditions. It is a great thing that so many different takes on the DDJ have been published. Many, if not most of them are probably dreadful and will not survive the process of natural selection. But some of them will perhaps bring some new point of view, and new, more relevant spirit to the living tradition of Daoism.

I wish something similar could happen with all religious texts. Moreover, I wish people felt the courage to write new texts based upon their understanding of the divine. And I wish that people could enter into a form of collaboration---just like those ancient bards did with their audiences.

The funny thing is that modern technology actually makes this not only possible, but trivially easy. To that end, I've set up a wiki that is designed to facilitate the creation of collaborative religious scriptures. You can access it here. Feel free to upload new stuff, create new threads, change stuff I and other people have posted. And by all means invite other people to the site and put links to it for others. Change the artwork---go nuts! If someone wants to support the thing and move over to a better site or pay Wetpaint for a different type of wiki, contact me.

The site is a gift from me, the Cloudwalking Owl, to the entire human race. Use it and make something wonderful.