Fascinating conversation between Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, and Will Hutton, Principal of Hertford College, Oxford, in Sunday’s Observer – so I thought I’d join in.

“Dear Richard, …Liberalism is a doctrine of live and let live, and there has to be a very high threshold of harm before that liberal principle can be qualified. …the Church of England…is a great liberal redoubt – an institution that embodies proportionality, tolerance of dissent and respect for others along with considerable moral authority… Best, Will.”

Dear Will, I’m an advocate of EF Schumacher’s view that ‘we always need both freedom and order‘, as I write about here. We need safeguards in place to protect us from both these extremes. But we have largely been at the extreme of living and letting live for three decades now – particularly economically. I think we have a once in an era chance to move towards a new society based on more Enlightened (notice the capital E) principles. To do this, we need to reassess our precious dogmas – liberalism, anglicanism, scientific rationalism and materialism amongst them – as the two of you are doing. Most importantly, though, we need ethical principles that are subjectively and collectively verifiable and which don’t need God as guarantor. I think a sincere engagement with Buddhism can provide these – and not just to those who wish to identify themselves as religious or want to call themselves Buddhists. With metta, Manjusiha.

“Dear Will, …What is illiberal is not persuasion but imposition of one’s views. And the government, in its determination to “do God”, imposes religion on us. Bishops in the House of Lords is just one of many examples… All good wishes, Richard.”

Dear Richard, I couldn’t agree more. However, religion and ‘doing God’ are not synonymous, and we need to find a new way of engaging in the debate that recognises this. I find it most illuminating to translate ‘religion’ as ‘world-view’, as I explored here. We all have a world-view that guides our actions, even if we’re not very conscious of this and do not have an easy label for it. Using ‘world-view’ also has the benefit of turning the heat down – it prevents an immediate polarisation between the religious and the irreligious, such as yourself. Buddhism doesn’t fit into either of these boxes – the debate doesn’t need to either. Metta, Manjusiha.

“Dear Richard, …Secularism unsupported by atheism is nonsensical. The reason why a secularist objects so strongly about the extension of religion into the public sphere – and even its private practice – is because its adherents are delusional, and, using your own words, imposing a delusional set of values and practices on others… Best, Will.”

Dear Will, The quasi-religious doctrines of the market and the science lab are delusional in the same sense. This is not to say that they are not of use – these two doctrines are probably the most practically useful doctrines ever discovered by humanity. As so often, though, the problems arise when a useful tool is used for the wrong job e.g. thinking that materialism can provide a basis for ethical action, or that rationalism can shed much light on religion (as traditionally defined). Metta, Manjusiha.

“Dear Will, ‘Secularism unsupported by atheism is nonsensical.’ Really? You mean the US first amendment is nonsense? The Indian constitution? Their idealist founders enshrined secularism in those constitutions because they wanted all religions to be free: no religion should dominate; no religion should impose… All good wishes, Richard.”

Dear Richard, One religion (as world-view) or another always dominates, whether this is labelled ‘religion’ or not. Look around you: our society is telling us that what we need most is a new, inclusive religion to provide us with a reliable ethical guide. Please plunder the Dharma. And it doesn’t really matter what labels you use for it – secular, religious, scientific, rational – so long as its true, and moves us in the right direction. I think you already recognise this point in The God Delusion, which you say is ‘not concerned at all’ with Buddhism, which can be treated as ‘an ethical system’ or ‘philosophy of life’.

“Dear Richard, …Of course we can agree that nobody wants a theocracy, and the founders of both the American and Indian constitutions were right to protect their countries from that risk given the historic and cultural contexts in which they founded their states. But there was little risk of church and state eliding in Britain 200 years ago despite our very imperfect unwritten constitution; there is zero risk today. To raise its spectre is specious… Best, Will.”

Dear Will, Our Queen and our Prime Minister are both emphasising that ‘we are a Christian country’ and advocating a return to Christian values to underpin our ethics, as I write about here and here. Yet, as Richard’s survey shows, Christian belief is waning in the UK, and even those Christians who identify themselves as such ‘have low levels of religious knowledge, belief and practice’, as Richard suggests. Where are our principles and practices to come from if, as Sangharakshita suggests in his book on the Buddha’s noble eight-fold path, traditional ethics now ‘consists in not doing what we want to do, and doing what we do not want to do, because, for reasons we do not understand – we have been told to by someone in whose existence we no longer believe’? To say that we are now ethically rudderless is to overstate it, perhaps, but not by much. Metta, Manjusiha.

“Dear Richard, …Jürgen Habermas says that human nature needs both secularism and rationality on one hand, and faith and belief on the other; that to imagine pure secularism is utopian… Best, Will.”

Dear Will, I think Habermas could be on to something here! This reminds me of the five spiritual faculties – in particular, the creative tension between wisdom (prajna) and faith (sraddha) exemplified so well by your conversation with Richard. Thank you. Metta from Manjusiha.

“Dear Will, I am struck by the fact that, despite your emphasis on liberalism, you are exemplifying the distorted and illiberal way atheism and secularism are portrayed by their opponents. (And please stop conflating the two: atheism is the lack of belief in gods, secularism is the view that governments should be neutral on the subject of belief in gods.) All good wishes, Richard.”

Dear Richard, Thank you, as always, for your clarity. As a Buddhist I do not believe in gods but do believe in a reality beyond rationality, materialism and self-clinging. And every government has its gods and idols – we have been worshipping the market and materialism for far too long in my view. Your conversation will, I hope, help to dislodge these ‘false idols’ from their perch, along with those of a Christianity that for most people is now largely part of our cultural heritage rather than a real, vibrant and meaningful guide to life. Metta from Manjusiha.

Eric Pickles, the wonderfully named UK Minister for Communities and Local Government, is hoping that Part 1 of the Localism Act will commence today. He believes this will “restore the right of councils to say prayers at official meetings“, according to the Christian Institute.

This follows a court victory last week by the National Secular Society: “Mr Justice Ouseley ruled in a landmark judgement that Bideford council in Devon had no statutory powers to hold prayers during council meetings.” (Guardian)

This decision has sparked an extraordinary week of debate about the role of faith in UK society. The Queen, speaking on Wednesday, “found herself echoing Baroness Warsi, chair of the Conservative party… Each was defending the significance of faith in British society and, in particular, the cultural importance of Christianity, against what both regard as the threat of militant atheism.” (Guardian)

Baroness Warsi, who is the first female Muslim cabinet minister, ‘hit out at “secular fundamentalists”‘ on a visit to the Vatican, and said that ‘Europe needs to be “more confident in its Christianity“.’ The Queen, meanwhile, in one of the first official engagements of her Diamond Jubilee year, said “we should remind ourselves of the significant position of the Church of England in our nation’s life. The concept of our established church is occasionally misunderstood and, I believe, commonly under-appreciated.”

A number of secularist thinkers have, unsurprisingly, responded. Philosopher Julian Baggiani, for instance, said “It all goes back to how we understand the core secularist principle of neutrality in the public square. Neutrality means just that: neither standing for or against religion or any other comprehensive world-view.”

Personally, I don’t believe there is any such thing as neutrality in the private or public realm – at least not this side of Enlightenment. Market fundamentalism, for instance – a seemingly ‘neutral’, rational view – is akin to the religious dogmas of old and has had a huge impact on our lives these past decades. The waning faith that this ‘religion’ can guide us towards what is meaningful is, I think, contributing significantly to the rising heat in relation to faith and the state. Nor do I feel that the ‘democratic will‘ of a local area should be the arbiter of what are, in fact, universal human principles about ethical life and ultimate meaning. In my view, until we find a space to collectively and peacefully identify these principles, and enshrine them in a written constitution – as Bhimrao Ambedkar, the great Buddhist social reformer did in India – then this week’s rancour can only continue.

Something interesting sprang up in the railway land around Shoreditch High Street station shortly before Christmas. It had been heralded on billboards for months, to the extent that I thought it might never arrive. But arrive it did – a number of tastefully painted, walk-in shipping containers in black and white, stacked two-high: Boxpark, ‘the world’s first pop-up mall’.

It’s not bad, actually, as shopping malls go. The owners strip and refit the containers to create low cost, low risk, ‘box shops’ and cafes. They feature household and local clothing brands and also provide space for campaigners, such as Amnesty International.

The ‘pop-up paradigm‘ has exploded over the last couple of years fuelled, in part, by the amount of vacant retail space on our high streets – due to the recession and the rise in internet shopping and out of town centres. A report by the Local Data Company on shop vacancy rates published this week showed that, ‘although the number of empty shops had “stabilised” at a national level in the last six months of 2011 the outlook was bleak: “The odds are stacked against a positive take-up of shops and as such the new reality of 48,000 empty shops is here to stay unless an alternative use or purpose can be found.”’ (Guardian)

Last May, the Government appointed Mary Portas, “one of the UKs leading retail experts and host of TV’s Queen of Shops“, to look into the future of the High Street. The Portas Review, published in December, “made 28 recommendations including “town teams” to lead community regeneration projects and the relaxation of planning laws to allow defunct stores to be turned into gyms, creches and bingo halls.” (Guardian) The Government responded last week, by launching a competition “to choose 12 towns to become ‘Portas Pilots’, with the winners benefiting from a share of £1 million to help turn around their “unloved and unused” high streets.”

Are more gyms, creches and bingo halls really what we want, though? These have their place, of course, but will they really help fuel the regeneration that so many of our town centres – and our society more generally – really need? Are chichi shipping containers really the answer to what ails us? (And isn’t there an irony in using these utilitarian symbols of world trade in this way?) What do last year’s riots, with all the associated, opportunistic looting, tell us about ourselves? How are we, as Buddhists, to respond to ‘ghost towns’, austerity and unrest?

One response is to occupy the shops – and I mean legally. If the planning laws are to be relaxed to allow community spaces to spring up in town centres, shouldn’t we, as Buddhists and meditators get involved? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a pop-up meditation hall on every high street, a visible, accessible antidote to the more harmful effects of consumerism? What could be more appropriate: a joyous, transient embodiment of the four noble truths – a momentary shrine to the meaningful – right at the heart of our consumerist, materialistic society? When do we start? Pop-up, people!
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Image courtesy of ‘nyoin’: www.nyo-in.com.

Today’s Telegraph is reporting that ‘secular sage’ Alain de Botton “has come up with an ambitious scheme that he calls Temples for Atheists. These will be secular spaces for contemplation, starting with one in London but then spreading across the country”. This is part of de Botton’s wider project of encouraging secular society to “steal religion’s most fruitful ideas” (Guardian), as set out in his latest book, Religion for Atheists, published last week.

I fully expected to dislike Religion for Atheists. It’s the title, you see: Buddhism is, after all, an atheistic religion, and I am quite contentedly living a meaningful spiritual life without any need for, or belief in, God.

And my feathers remained resolutely ruffled by the first sentence of the book: “The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true – in terms of being handed down from heaven to the sound of trumpets and supernaturally governed by prophets and celestial beings.’ There seem to be enough questionable views in this sentence alone to warrant another book in response! Is it so unreasonable to ground our spiritual life on truth, for instance? What is truth anyway? Are the truths of reason and science really so reliable? Is God-given truth the only game in town when it comes to spiritual life? What about the direct meeting with what is reality that can occur in meditation? The list goes on…

By the end of the Religion for Atheists, though, I felt more sympathetic. In fact, I felt quite warmly disposed to de Botton’s attempt to “reclaim atheism from strident anti-religion figures such as Richard Dawkins” (Telegraph). What is needed, though, from a Buddhist viewpoint, is a much stronger expression of the middle way – of the truth that lies between the extremes of scientific, rational, materialism on the one side and fundamentalist theisms of all flavours on the other.

So I’m left feeling that Alain de Botton moves in the right direction but doesn’t go nearly far enough. He seems to be promoting – in the book and in his School of Life – mere psychological wholeness as life’s purpose and goal. Whilst this is, of course, laudable and desirable, and an achievement in itself, it is, from a Buddhist viewpoint, just the beginning, the first stage of the path. On the basis of establishing the happy, healthy humanness that de Botton advocates, and the ‘skilful intentions’ that can be strengthened by meditation practices such as the metta bhavana, we can start to look at what life – and existence itself – is really about. And on the basis of that, we can start to loosen our attachment to a narrow sense of ourselves and the world, and find real freedom. And we do this all without recourse to anything ‘handed down from heaven to the sound of trumpets’, without the intervention of ‘prophets and celestial beings’. Now isn’t that something worth building glorious, atheist-religious monuments to? Share

Postscript: Here is a link to a talk I gave recently about truth, as part of a series on Buddhism and Western Philosophy at the London Buddhist Centre. I include it here in response to some of the comments below.

This week, on Burns Night, Scotland’s First Minister and leader of the Scottish National Party, Alex Salmond, set out the process through which Scotland could end its 305-year union with England. This, somewhat unaccountably, got me reflecting on my experience of separation and divorce.

After rehearsing the same argument again and again, my ex- and I finally realised we were never going to find a solution. We kept returning to a bedrock of difference that never seemed to weaken or crack. We split, instead. The potential sticking point was ‘my’ flat in Kilburn – when we married, she had sold hers to move there. Now she wanted to stay. How could I have found myself in this situation? What was I to do?

The breakthrough came for me on an intensive meditation retreat for men. It was in Umbria in Italy, where I had also been on honeymoon. Not only did the retreat provide a turning point in my marriage – or my separation, rather – it was a turning point, more broadly, for my life. It enabled me to see through, momentarily, my sense of myself and my attachments. And it enabled me to let go, more fully, of my pre-existing identity as a husband and homeowner; I seemed to let go of any self-identification whatsoever, in fact, and glimpse, for the first time, who, or what, I could become.

Now I’m not saying that this vision of my potential lasted very long. It was fleeting, in fact, though no less powerful or life-changing for that. And I’m certainly not saying it was anything special – I think many of us have these ‘peak moments’, and not only on Buddhist retreats (although retreat conditions are particularly conducive, I think). Nor am I saying that I can always rise to the personal challenges that life throws up following this experience: I’m currently in the middle of a (hopefully minor) disagreement with someone in the residential Buddhist community that I moved into from my marital home following the retreat.

But what I do know, now, is how when things fall apart, we are given a precious opportunity: we can try to cling on to what we have and who we think we are, even as these slip away, or we can use disintegration as a means of seeing ourselves more clearly – of seeing through to what connects us more deeply and fully to whom or what we are separating from.

What an opportunity Alex Salmond is providing us, then, as a nation! The SNP is now held up, by many, as “the last effective defender of a UK postwar settlement which has been systematically undermined in England over the past 30 years… Free prescriptions, free university education, free long-term care for the elderly…” (Guardian). Could Scotland be a model – and independence a catalyst – for bringing about a better, more connected society in England, after decades of individualism and fragmentation?

My hope is that our brothers and sisters (or perhaps I should now say friendly neighbours?) in Scotland have, and vote for, the ‘devo max‘ option in 2014. I hope that this peaceful revolution helps us in England to bring all of the many positive aspects of our self-identity back into focus which, judging by this report, also published this week, is already starting to happen. And I hope that we will start to see what it is, in our Englishness, that truly unites us in the face of challenges ahead: those sustainable, communal values that, in a disintegrating world, provide the only reliable guide. Share

Last weekend I led a day at the London Buddhist Centre, with Maitreyabandhu, on Tristan and Isolde, Wagner’s revolutionary masterpiece. In preparing for the day, I re-read Bryan Magee’s wonderful ‘Wagner and Philosophy‘, and came across this, on Hegel:

“Reality is not a state of affairs but a process: it is something going on. This is true of every part of reality, and of every facet of our personal lives and experience. Even a material object is a process.”

Anyone with even a minor acquaintance with Buddhism will be familiar with this view. Magee goes on to summarise Hegel’s dialectical worldview in which “any positive state of affairs… [will] call into being contrary and incompatible states of affairs… which destablize it and cause it to change into something new.”

Anglo-Saxon politics can be described very well in this way: as a series of unstable swings between the Democrats and the Republicans, between, in short, a party that (ostensibly, at least) promotes freedom and the individual, and one that supposedly supports more centralised planning and collective action, as I explored here.

So I find it fascinating that, late last year, the UK Government launched a National Music Plan for the first time. What provoked the laissez faire Coalition to engage in such centralised planning?

El Sistema (“the system”) of Venezuela was, no doubt, an inspiration. This publicly financed voluntary sector music education program, originally called Social Action for Music, “has 31 symphony orchestras. But its greatest achievement are the 250,000 children who attend its music schools around the country, 90 percent of them from poor socio-economic backgrounds.’ (Wikipedia) The extraordinary Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, which appeared at the UK’s Proms again last year, is one of the products of El Sistema – what better advertisement for the program?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEs8yqhavtI

The leftist administration of Hugo Chávez has been the most generous patron of El Sistema, ‘footing almost its entire annual operating budget as well as additional capital projects.’ (Wikipedia) Will the UK Government invest so wholeheartedly? Not if this week’s Huffington Post is anything to go by: Labour MP David Blunkett has indicated that funding for musical education is actually decreasing, with cuts of 12.5% in the past year.

Despite this, I still feel positive about ‘our sistema’. After all, music – like the Dharma – can help us completely transcend all oppositional dialectics and rancour. Both music and the Dharma can help us see beyond our narrow self-clinging and contact a sphere of reliable value, meaning and positive transformation. Anything that supports this process – particularly in our young people – is to be encouraged. As José Antonio Abreu, the founder of El Sistema, said, on receiving the TED Prize in 2009, ‘only art and religion can give proper answers to humanity, to mankind’s deepest aspirations, and to the historic demands of our times.‘ Let’s hope our leaders fully embrace the transcendental and moral values that music and the spiritual life can embody. Only then can we become the ideal society that an orchestra, in full flow, represents. Share

The time between Christmas and New Year is, I think, wonderful for reflection. After spending Christmas with my family, my girlfriend away on retreat, I decamped to a draughty cottage on the north Norfolk coast – one of my favourite places on earth – and have been meditating, reading, writing and reflecting, as well as watching TV and still eating just a bit too much. It’s been a solitary retreat and holiday in one, and I feel grateful for the time and space.

There’s been time for retrospectives, alongside the introspection. I saw part of the ITV’s news review of the year, as well as their review of the Royal year. I also watched The King’s Speech, whilst with my family, and the Queen’s Christmas Day speech, a tradition, still, in our household. I went to midnight mass with my mum on Christmas Eve, during which we were invited to pray for the Duke of Edinburgh, 90 this year, who spent Christmas Day in hospital rather than at the Sandringham estate, a few miles down the road from my mum’s village.

What I am left with, after this right Royal binge, is a sense of shock at how in each others’ pockets the state, church and monarchy still seem to be in the UK. No doubt my surprise is still partly in response to David Cameron’s pronouncement that we shouldn’t be afraid to say that the UK is a Christian country. But on the back of his speech, the overt Christian message of the Queen’s speech – particularly at the end – was an added shock.

The King’s Speech was a helpful reminder to me of the historical relationship between the Church and the British monarchy. Perhaps the Queen was responding to the turmoil around her by reasserting her role as Defender of the Faith and appealing to Christianity as the glue that could yet hold our society together. But is this likely to be effective, given that half the people in the UK no longer belong to any religion, compared to one in three in 1983, with the decline being ‘largely accounted for by falling affiliation with the Church of England/Anglicanism‘?

At least Prince Charles is trying to reflect the country as it is now, perhaps, rather than the country of his mother’s ascension sixty years ago. He caused controversy in the Anglican church a few years ago when he said that he wanted to go by the title ‘Defender of the Faiths‘, to more closely reflect the UK’s cultural and religious diversity. He has since changed his proposed title, on advice, to Defender of Faith.

But is it meaningful, given the diversity of religious belief in the UK, for our titular head to defend us all in this way? As Damian Thompson wrote on the Telegraph blog, the definitions of faith, and religion more generally, are extremely problematic. Also, not all ‘articles of faith’ should be defended – as evidenced by the many acts of atrocities committed in the name of religion – particularly, but not exclusively, the theistic religions. What would our monarch defend, then, in terms of faith?

What I’m left with is a sense of how meaningless it is to have a defender of the faith or a defender of faith in 21st century Britain. Much better to identify where true spiritual values overlap with our shared national identity and use these as our guiding principles, thereby avoiding the vagueness of ‘faith’ and the divisiveness of ‘the faith’. Isn’t it time, in other words, to campaign, once again, for a written constitution in the UK? Share

‘David Cameron has declared that “Britain is a Christian country and we should not be afraid to say so”, in a speech to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. Cameron told Church of England clergy gathered in Oxford that a return to Christian values could counter the country’s “moral collapse”.’ (Guardian)

Terry Sanderson, the President of the National Secular Society, responded, saying ‘the British Social Attitudes Survey published last week showed that 65% of young people in Britain don’t have a religion.’ The survey also indicated that, ‘as many as half the public say they do not belong to any particular religion, compared with a third only a generation or so ago in the 1980s. More specifically, the proportion who identify with the Church of England has halved from 40 to 20 per cent.’

Does it really matter, then, what the Prime Minister says about religion and the church given that so many people find it irrelevant? Perhaps, when David Cameron says that he is a ‘committed but vaguely practising Church of England Christian’ he is simply stating how many of us feel – that whatever commitment we have left to religious principles needn’t have much effect on our lives and politics. And shouldn’t religion be kept separate from politics anyway?

To address the last question first, obviously I wouldn’t be writing about Buddhism and current affairs if I thought that religion and politics were separate concerns. But it depends what one means by ‘religion’. Buddhism is often described as a ‘philosophy’, ‘world-view’ or ‘way of life’, rather than as a religion. What happens, then, if we apply the ways in which Buddhism is usually categorised to what the Prime Minister and the British Social Attitudes Survey said? Does it make any sense, for example, to say that ‘as many as half the public say they do not have any world-view or way of life’ or that ’65% of young people have no philosophy’? And how do we feel when our PM tells us which world-view and way of life our nation has as a whole?

The fact is that our religion, when defined is this way, is utterly central to who and what we are. We cannot live without it. We are our world-view, even if we are not fully aware of what it is. Yet we do not – and cannot – believe in the religious dogmas of old, and no appeal to the centrality Christianity had in our past will change that. These views have been replaced, for so many of us, by the ‘common sense’ of science and the market – the new dogmas of our days – which, in turn, leave us cold and grasping after things that, ultimately, cannot fulfil us.

Nietzsche foresaw all this, of course. His prognosis is, perhaps, only now starting to fully dawn on us: “The greatest recent event – that ‘God is dead’, that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable – is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe… some sun seems to have set and some ancient and profound trust has been turned into doubt…”

David Cameron is clearly right to say that Christianity is central to the UK’s cultural heritage. Personally, I’m looking forward to attending midnight mass with my mum in the beautiful 12th century church in the Norfolk village where she lives. It is part of my background and upbringing, and I am fond of the tradition. But it is the sweet nostalgia for something dead and gone – or dying and going – rather than the vibrant living tradition that can address our deepest needs – as individuals and as a society. Share

One of my favourite episodes in my favourite novel involves an encounter with a flock of sheep. Don Quixote, a middle aged madman who has gone forth as a knight errant with his credulous neighbour, Sancho Panza, comes across a thick cloud of dust. He takes this cloud to conceal “a vast army, composed of innumerable and diverse peoples, which is marching towards us.” Sancho responds by saying “if that’s the case, there must be two, because over in the opposite direction there’s another cloud of dust just like it.” Turning to look, Don Quixote is ‘overjoyed, thinking, no doubt, that these were two armies coming to attack and fight each other in the middle of a broad plain.’

What the dust clouds actually conceal are two flocks of sheep moving towards each other. He rides into the clouds, galloping at the sheep with his lance ‘as fearlessly and courageously as if he really were attacking his mortal enemies.’

Quixotic responses never seem far away from the UK’s political dealings in Europe. In the build-up to last weekend’s summit, during which David Cameron’s used ‘the ultimate weapon in European summitry‘ – the veto – to block a new EU-wide treaty, ‘one Tory MP said that a failure to secure “cast-iron” guarantees would see Mr Cameron return home like Neville Chamberlain after the Munich Agreement.’ (Telegraph)

As the Guardian’s editorial indicated earlier this week, ‘it doesn’t take much to get the British press to refight the second world war,’ even after seventy years. ‘So, when David Cameron walked away from the table in Brussels last week, he triggered a predictable torrent of wartime rhetoric and headlines.’ The editorial goes on to say that David Miliband, when confronted with such rhetoric by John Humphrys on the Today programme described it, rightly, as ‘delusional’.

Although Downing Street described the Neville Chamberlain remark as ‘ridiculous’, it seems that, so often, so many of us prefer the reassuring presence of a familiar enemy to the terror of uncertainty or lack of control. Is our creation of an enemy in this situation really any different to the delusions of a deranged vagrant playing out past imperial glories that are no longer real – if they ever were?

I confess that I have always had a problematic relationship to identity. I come from a mixed afro-European background and have always been suspicious of group-think and the scapegoating that goes with it. Rather, I should say that identity was a particular problem for me until I started practising wholeheartedly as a Buddhist. What changed? One way of talking about it is using the central Dharmic principle of ‘sunyata‘. This is often translated as ‘voidness’, the principle that nothing – from our mental to our nation states – has any inherent existence.

Buddhist writer and academic Robert Thurman is instructive here: his translation, in the extraordinary Vimalakirti Nirdesa, of sunyata as ‘emptiness with respect to personal and phenomenal selves, or with respect to identity…’ is so relevant here. We identify ourselves as fixed and separate selves, but this is an illusion. And our national identity is no different – it is simply a state of mind, a deeply held and cherished collective story that can help us in some situations, but which can also get us into a whole lot of trouble.

And it is a particularly dangerous story when things are shaky, as they so clearly are at present. We get a glimpse that things are not quite as firm, stable and secure as we’d like them to be – we see, in short, the existential reality of our situation. It is so easy, through fear, to retreat into familiar narratives whilst simultaneusly advancing on our supposed enemies as a means of trying to regain control. This only exacerbates the problem. To use the language of trade economics, the risk is of “retraction, rising protectionism and isolation”, which, as IMF chief Christine Lagarde indicates, is exactly what happened in the 1930s, with all that followed.

What to do in the face of such uncertainty? Celebrate and act from those views and values that will truly help us – rely, in short, as fully as we can on the Dharma. In Britain’s case this means rejoicing in, and acting from, openness, fairness and tolerance. It means relying on our incredible resiliance, resourcefulness, courage and community-spiritedness in the face of change. As Will Hutton points out, “the last time Britain endured such an extended period of depression and falling living standards – the 1870s and 1880s – saw the mushrooming of the co-operative movement and the emergence of the Labour party as the more moderate expressions of anger that wanted to challenge the very basis of capitalism.” To support and export these and other human, rather than national, values – instead of acting like sheep, or seeing our enemies in clouds of dust – would be to show true leadership, both personal and political, at a time when it is most needed.

I’m using the word “growth” provocatively and somewhat ironically, here. For so long the need for economic growth has gone largely unchallenged in the political mainstream. But more and more studies from around the world are showing that “once the basics of life are provided, rising overall incomes do not achieve one jot of extra contentment,” according to an editorial in today’s Guardian. Is there an opportunity within this economic depression for a real spurt in collective contentment and spiritual growth?

“Before the crisis…the argument that general wellbeing should trump GDP was growing strongly from rich evidential soil – to the point where it caught David Cameron’s eye.” (Guardian) The Government started measuring wellbeing alongside other indicators, and the first results, which were published yesterday, show that “three-quarters of us…rate our level of well-being at seven out of ten or higher” (Metro). Meanwhile, economic figures based on the Chancellor’s statement this week suggested that ‘middle Britain’s’ living standards are set to decline for a full 13 years – something that is unprecedented. Is there any correlation between these two news items? Does this week’s combination of economic and wellbeing reports indicate that we are entering a phase of what E F Schumacher called ‘Buddhist economics’, with the nation’s aim being to “obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption”?

I confess that I am not someone who finds happiness or wellbeing very interesting or inspiring. My girlfriend booked tickets, a couple of months ago, for us to go to the wonderful Conway Hall to see Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard give a talk about happiness. This was hosted by the Action for Happiness campaign, which is also mentioned in many of today’s reports on happiness. Just the thought of going to this talk made me somewhat depressed and irritable! As I listened, though, I found myself in a better and better mood – as though I had stepped into a palpable atmosphere of meaning and significance. It was essentially a Dharma talk – and a good one – and I found it hugely satisfying and enjoyable. I also found it helpful that, instead of referring to happiness throughout, Matthieu Ricard referred instead to fulfilment or meaning in life, something I chime with much more fully, and something that I think my Dharma life has given me.

Don’t get me wrong – I know that our economic travails are causing real suffering. I only have to think of my brother and his girlfriend, who has been trying to get a job for a long time, trying to bring up my eighteen month old nephew on a limited budget – one story amongst millions. However, I do think the unprecedented economic situation we find ourselves in brings with it a real opportunity for a new kind of society to emerge – one with much more sustainable values at its heart. If we are to grasp the opportunity we will need to collectively challenge some of the values upon which our society is currently based – particularly the ingrained assumption that someone who consumes more is better off than someone who consumes less. And we will need to be much more radical in living and communicating a Zen life of beauty and simplicity, as well as engaging with society around us to enable others to do the same.