Over the last year or so, I have been increasingly immersing myself in Chinese philosophy, as well as doing my best to learn Chinese, and this has all been enormously enriching. I have the sense that there are possibilities of thinking in all of this that could be enormously fruitful, although at the moment I confess that my knowledge is still rudimentary at best. Anyway, I am currently in the middle of François Jullien’s fascinating Detour and Access, which explores the role of the indirect in Chinese thought – whether in philosophy, in literature or in military strategy. It is a book, that is to say, about the way in which the indirect, the oblique and the sidelong may prove efficacious when the direct and the frontal may fail. The implications that Jullien draws out of this are extensive, not least for the idea of what we are up to when we say we are up to philosophy: for if direction heads towards truth, then indirection doesn’t do so in the same way; it looks not so much for a kind of unchanging and final certainty, but for a kind of responsiveness that is always in motion. And so it is not surprising that the models for what philosophy is in the West and in China are – broadly speaking – correspondingly different: the frontal approach of argument and counter-argument familiar from the Western tradition (a form of argument about which I have grave concerns, and of which I am very slightly afraid) simply doesn’t exist in China in the same way. Instead there is something rather more subtle, rather more sidelong, and something that looks rather less like philosophy, when philosophy is considered in terms of its Western models.

As I have said, this is all very formative at the moment, but it occurs to me that there is something in this fluid, subtle, oblique approach to things. Of course, it is not the only way of going about things (Jullien points out that “Alongside the subtlety of detour, there is the jubliation of being explicit”, and reminds us that there is a benefit to direction as there is a benefit to indirection), but it is one that, in the West, we can tend to forget or to diminsh. And certainly my own sense of what is going on when I am trying to make sense of the world – whether through just getting on with my life, or through writing, or through meditating, or what have you – is that, very often, I’m not really directly orientating myself towards a particular goal (whilst I can see the value of near goals, I don’t really believe in big, metaphysical goals), but instead I’m more or less trying to sidle up to things. Or else I’m more or less trying to let things sidle up to me. When it comes to meditation, it has taken me years to realise the value of obliqueness, the way in which, if you sit for long enough, things eventually come and sit down next to you (unless it’s the cat, who just comes along and prods you continually with his paws and meows for breakfast). Sitting quietly doing nothing spring comes and the grass grows by itself. And, if you are lucky and you persist for long enough, even the cat eventually goes to sleep and leaves you in peace.

Anyway, this is just a brief update to let you know I haven’t gone away. When some of those various thoughts decide to alight, I’ll post again.

Even if I could have risen to the occasion, I am also aware that debates such as this can frequently be painful to witness. The email invitation was couched in distinctly military metaphors: the two debating parties or “opponents” would have “positions” that they would seek to “defend”, and the best argument would “win” the debate. This kind of warfare always seems to me to be a rather uncongenial approach to discussion (I have written before on this blog about the fear I have of the unpleasant things that lurk under our chairs as we talk to each other). And so, after a bit of thought, and a very pleasant exchange of emails, I turned the offer down. But this all got me thinking a bit about the heat that is currently generated by arguing over the existence (or not) of God. What, I wonder, are such debates actually for? What purpose do they serve?

One of the problems that I have – and perhaps this is a problem that many of the ungodly have – is that when people talk about God, I find it genuinely very hard indeed to make any sense of what it is that they are talking about. They talk with a clear passion about something that is clearly very important to them; but I just don’t see what they are getting at. My mind is – to use the term proposed by the philosopher Michael McGhee – not particularly dei-form. “It seems to me,” McGhee writes, “that ‘believers’ do not so much ‘believe that there is a God’ as think God. Their minds are God-shaped or ‘dei-form’ in the sense that their thinking is determined by theistic categories” (in Transformations of Mind, p.123).

If we take the idea seriously that what is at issue is not belief so much as the God-shapedness of certain minds, then there may anyway be very limited value in debating propositions about god in an attempt to persuade others one way or the other. For each of us, I suspect, our own peculiar individual world-view is a messy, sprawling, socially and historically conditioned, contextually fashioned and refashioned, and – when it comes down to it – rather untidy (but shapely, in its way) thing. Ideas that are themselves as historically weighted and as slippery as the idea “god” are capable of doing all kinds of jobs within this big old sprawl that is our world-view. So it is really not a matter of us having a sheaf of axioms that we hold to and can debate (even if we are philosophers), but something much more complex. It is not surprising that few people are really persuaded by debates of this kind. There are probably relatively few who have listened with quiet attentiveness to Richard Dawkins (for example) and said, “Oh, good point, Richard, I’ll take off my dog-collar now”, or who have stumbled upon a sermon by Rowan Williams (once again, for example) and said “Hmmm… You’ve got something there, Rowan. My unbelieving days are behind me. I’m off to be baptised.” Of course these things might happen, very occasionally; but when looked at in the light of the heatedness of some of these debates, they happen with surprising infrequency.

Saint Anselm, an individual who (unlike me) was greatly exercised by the question of God’s existence, was also sensible enough to recognise that debates of this kind do not really serve to convert us one way or the other, at least in the main. “Credo ut intelligam”, he said: I believe that I may understand; the implicit suggestion here being that reason does not establish (or fail to establish) once and for all the question of God’s existence. Arguments about God are not a way of proving or disproving the question of his existence so much as a way of demonstrating that if one believes in God, then that belief is can be rationally defended, that it is in harmony with reason. And this is a whole other thing.

If certain forms of belief may be (who knows?) in harmony with reason, so may certain forms of unbelief. But what I think is more important than reason as an end in itself, is the question of what constitutes a life well-lived. This may involve an element of reasoning, of course (a life of committed unreason does not seem to be plausible as a candidate for a life well-lived); but reason alone is not a sufficient condition for such a life. And so, if this is the case as I believe it is, what I would like to see is less heat around the question of God’s existence. Those arguing against may, anyway, be always swimming against the tide: there seems to be increasing evidence that, given the kinds of minds that we have been bequeathed by our evolutionary heritage, we will always have a propensity towards belief in curious fictions like gods, imps, spirits, angels, ghosts, elves, trolls and the like. And so, whether or not the world is begodded, betrolled, beimped or bespirited, we may not be able to entirely outrun these curious beasts. So whilst I am not a believer in any of these entities, I would like to make what I think is the relatively modest (and empirical) suggestion that belief in any number of them is entirely consistent with the possibility of a life well-lived. But conversely, I also would also like to make the similarly modest (and similarly empirical) suggestion that non-belief in any or all of these entities is also entirely consistent with various other forms of life that one could legitimately claim to be well-lived.

This brings me, then, to the thing I most fear about these kinds of debates about god and godlessness: the implicit assertion that all too frequently emerges, on both sides, that there is only one form of life that is a life well-lived. This smacks, to me, not only of a lack of imaginative breadth, but also of a kind of dogmatism when it comes to thinking through what form of life might be best for us. The good life of which the philosophers and sages speak is not (I hope) a single thing.

As with all such neat distinctions, whilst there is some truth in this, at the same time it is probably true that most of us, most of the time, do both of these things. There is a kind of satisfaction, or a kind of pleasure, in solving questions and laying them to rest. But there is also a kind of satisfaction, or a kind of pleasure, in following questions until they provoke further questions, and following these so that they, in turn, provoke still further questions, in a kind of infinite regress. And both of these kinds of approaches to questioning seem to me to have their place.

But of late, I have been thinking a bit about this second kind of questioning, about the kinds of questions that open up new questions that (to steal a nice line from G.K. Chesteron) “make settled things strange”. For it seems to me that one approach to thinking about what is going on in mediation is in terms of this kind of questioning that makes settled things strange. When I sit down on my cushions, paying attention to the on-going happening of things, often I ask myself questions such as these: “What is this thing that is sitting here?” Or, “Where do thoughts come from?” Or, perhaps, “I am hearing a bird outside the window. Where is the hearing taking place?” Or, “Who is doing the hearing?”

Questions such as these, if you keep asking them (and if you also remain attentive), have a curious effect. They are questions that probe away at the fine-grain of experience, and that do not lend themselves to clear an unambiguous answers. Of course, you can forumulate answers to these kinds of questions. Who is doing the hearing? Well, OK, it’s me, Will. I have a biography, a sense of myself, a life… But these answers give rise to fresh questions: “Are you the same as this biography? What is this sense of yourself? What is this life that you have? Who is it that is doing the having?” And if you do this for long enough, whilst keeping on paying attention, looking to experience itself for some kind of a respose to these questions, instead of looking to abstract formulations, something strange happens. The specific questions die away, but the almost bodily sense of questioning continues. And there you are, sitting on your meditation cushions, a big fat question mark plonked down somewhere in the midst of the world.

And it is at moments like these, that it is possible to touch a different sense of life. It is no doubt true that there are many problems to be solved over the course our lives. And so much of the time we are concerned with the kind of pragmatic questions that seek answers. But taken as a whole, life itself is more than a bunch of problems to be solved. It is not, that is to say, a crossword-puzzle that can reach some kind of final resolution. Thank goodness that this is so, because a crossword-puzzle loses all its appeal once it is solved. Instead, at times like these, it is possible to see life as a whole – to borrow the words of Heidegger – as a question that we can never go through, a question that instead, “requires that we settle down and live within it.” And it seems to me that this sense of life as a question that we cannot go through is one that opens up a sense of beauty and wonder when it comes to our existence and the existence of the world, an awareness of the inexhaustible preciousness of things, and of a richness that cannot be exhausted.

For those who are interested, the Heidegger passage in question (!) comes from What is Called Thinking Trans. J. Glenn Gray, Harper Colophon (1968), p. 137

Image: Wikimedia Commons

So leaving philosophy on one side, I have over the last few years been practising having no free will. That it to say, I have been giving up on the thought that some little homunculus in my head is responsible for directing me, and instead I have been having the thought (or the thought has been having me…) “What if my actions arise not out of some kind of personal freedom, but merely out of various interacting conditions at play in the world as a whole?” What this means, in practice, is allowing the constant internal conversation around acting and the justification of acting to subside. Because much of the time, what our minds seem to be doing is something like this: “Hmm…. those luminous green cupcakes look rather splendid. Should I have cake? It’s sure to be tasty. But it’s also not cheap. And fattening, probably. And I had a large breafkast. Then there’s that paperwork I should be filling in today, so I should get moving and head to work. Perhaps I should come back this afternoon. But what if the cakes have sold out by then? Oh, I don’t know what to do! How to decide? Maybe I should toss a coin…” and so on and so forth. The whole business is, frankly, rather exhausting. And what happens? Well, a decision eventually pops up, and I find that either a) I have sat myself down for the pleasantly luminous cupcake that I do not really need, or b) I have gone to do my paperwork like the well-behaved fellow that I really ought to be, or c) something else has happened. But I have no idea, if I am being honest, how it is that this decision has popped up, nor what it has to do with this curious notion of the “will”.

As I’ve thought about this, I’ve become less and less sure what useful role this kind of internal monologue serves. And the more time goes on, the more I am beginning to think that it’s main function is perhaps to justify those things that I really ought not do. That is to say, when I catch this little mental subroutine doing its thing, and when I just stop myself and say, “OK, forget all this to-ing and fro-ing, and all this ‘I-must-make-a-decision-ing’. Let’s just see what I do next …”, then – perhaps rather curiously – what I do next is often the thing I really ought to do.

The fear is that – if we give up on the idea of this internal decision-maker – somehow we will be giving up on ethics. As I have suggested before, this may just be an internalisation of the idea that without God there is no ethics, with the little decision-making homunculus becoming a kind of internal god directing the whole show. But as time goes on, I have a greater trust in the wisdom of decisions that arise in this “Let’s just see what I do next…” way, than I do in the kinds of decisions that arise in this “Let’s just work out what I ought to do next…” way. This little, insistent subroutine often seems to be decidedly deficient in wisdom, whereas, when I surrender things to my organism as a whole, whilst I’m not exactly coursing in streams of wisdom of unparalleled depth, it seems that there are more resources available to inform whatever choosing I am involved in at that moment, that I am more open to the world as a whole, and that the decisions that arise as if by their own accord are correspondingly rather better informed, rather more elegant and skilful, and just a little bit wiser.

Still, it was nice to have a small part to play in the growing field of research in the place where brain science meets Buddhist practices of meditation. I was reminded of my brief experience of life as a laboratory subject whilst reading B. Alan Wallace’s latest book, Mind in the Balance. Wallace – a former Buddhist monk and translator to the Dalai Lama, and founder of the Santa Barbara Institute of Consciousness Studies – is interested in the places where contemplative traditions and the sciences meet. This is certainly a fascinating area, and yet before even opening his new book on the subject, alarm bells were ringing. The blurb proclaims that the book explores the relationship between the sciences and both Buddhist and Christian contemplative traditions, and reveals, “the theoretical similarities underlying these disparate disciplines and their unified approach to making sense of the objective world”. Theoretical similarities? Unified approach? These are bold claims. So what, exactly, is going on here?

Wallace’s book is divided into two parts. The first – Meditation: Where it Started and How it Got Here – gives a decidedly selective view of the history of contemplative traditions, moving from ancient Greece to the desert fathers of Christianity to the India of the Buddha’s day, whilst at the same time launching an assault on what Wallace takes to be the harms of scientific materialism. The second part of the book – Meditation in Theory and Practice – then alternates between chapters on “practice” where Wallace sketches out a particular form of meditation, and “theory”, in which he reflects upon this practice.

It rapidly becomes clear that there is a vigorous dualism at work in Wallace’s work. On the one hand, there is the world of contemplation, of ethics, of spiritual truths, of meaning; and on the other hand there is the deterministic material world of genetics, instinct and emotion. And, the argument goes, whilst the sciences are very good at understanding the latter world, they are not at all advanced when it comes to the understanding of the former world. It is here that Wallace sees the need for light from contemplative traditions (in particular the contemplative tradition with which he is most familiar, that of Tibetan Buddhism) to balance out the picture. We need, in other words, a kind of “inner science” to balance the outer science with which we are familiar. Without such an inner science, our understanding not only of ourselves, but also of the universe as a whole, will be stunted; and, not only this, we risk closing ourselves off to the very spiritual realities that we are so much in need of. The stakes, it seems, could not be higher. At the very end of the book, Wallace writes that “We are now poised for the greatest renaissance the world has seen, for the first time integrating the ancient and modern insights of the East and West. The time is ripe for humanity to take the next step in our spiritual evolution so that we can successfully rise to the challenges of today’s world and flourish in the world to come” (199).

There are innumerable problems with all of this. The first problem is that of the very partial approach that Wallace has taken to contemplative traditions. He weaves together strands of ancient Pythagoreanism, Tibetan Buddhism, selected Christian writers, and certain aspects of Hinduism, to construct a a set of “truths” revealed by the “great wisdom traditions of human civilization, including religion, philosophy, and science.” In the story that Wallace is telling, as far as I can discern it, the following things are true: that all the great contemplatives, more or less, experience the same kind of thing; that consciousness is a “deep space” in need of exploration; that consciousness is somehow fundamental to the nature of the universe – if anything, more fundamental than the “mere” material world; that consciousness is essentially unbounded by birth and death, and therefore there is such a thing as rebirth; and that our collective human welfare and happiness are dependent upon these realisations. However, this account does not pay any attention to differing accounts of contemplation and of experience that undermine the story that Wallace is telling. I am not sure, for example, that the idea of contemplation as a form of exploration of some inner “deep space” is one that makes a great deal of sense when seen in the light of the Chan and Zen traditions. This is a serious problem, because if the argument rests, as it seems to, on the commonality of the findings of contemplative practitioners, then this commonality needs to be well established for Wallace’s argument to be taken seriously. Not only this, but also whilst there may be an awful lot of interest to be said about the place where science, philosophy and practices of contemplation meet, the characterisation of science, philosophy and religion as convergent wisdom traditions seems to be one that at the outset seriously skews inquiry we are engaged in. As the argument unfolds, it becomes clear that this is a view that requires not only a partial view of history and a restrictive perspective upon the traditions in question, but also a sprinkling of magic courtesy of quantum physics, if it is to work at all.

The claims that Wallace makes about the efficacy of meditation in terms of brain plasticity, mental well-being and so forth, are today relatively well-attested – although, somewhat parenthetically, it may be that there is insufficient research into the potential harms of meditation. Nevertheless, whilst it is one thing to say that meditators are in general calmer, that their frontal cortices are more frisky, that they have less violent startle-reflexes, or that they are kinder to animals and small children, it is another thing entirely to say that the accounts they give about the ultimate nature of the universe – filtered through a long and complex religious tradition – should be taken at face value – even if we found that those accounts converged substantially, which I’m not at all sure that they do. And the metaphysical views of which Wallace is trying to persuade us are so extravagant that I cannot help feeling that he needs to work rather harder.

Let us take the example of the “Rainbow Body”, discussed towards the end of the book. This is said to be the culmination of the Tibetan Dzogchen practice, in which one’s body “allegedly dissolves into shimmering, multicoloured light at death.” This is an impressive party-trick if you can pull it off, but even more impressively, it can be done without dying at all, in which case, “All the atoms of the body vanish into the absolute space of phenomena, but one still retains the appearance of a physical body, which can be seen and touched by others.” Pretty neat, but the obvious response is this: show us the evidence. When it comes to the latter version – in which I am still alive – then this seems incapable of being tested. If I told you that all the atoms of my body had indeed vanished into the absolute space of phenomena (whatever that is), whilst to all appearances looking just like me – a bloke sitting somewhere in the East Midlands of England, typing whilst the cat snoozes on a beanbag – then I cannot see any way that this could be tested. For all I know, that cat could have pulled off the same trick. And if I can still be seen and touched, in what sense can it be said that my atoms have vanished. What is the light bouncing off? What are you touching? As all of this is, as far as I can see, incapable of being tested, we can leave it to one side. The other claim – that the body, at death, could actually dissolve into a rainbow, is something for which we could find some degree of concrete evidence, but unfortunately Wallace does not provide anything like this. He tells us that there are lots of cases of eyewitness reports, but there are eyewitness reports of everything from Elvis living down the road, to alien abductions, to milk-drinking statues of Ganesh, to angels in the shopping mall. It is simply not good enough to say that the reason that we do not accept such stories is “the ideological hegemony of materialism.” We don’t accept them, generally speaking, because they are implausible, and because insufficient evidence has been advanced. As a Buddhist friend was fond of muttering, when she heard people telling stories about auspicious events such as this, “Auspicious? Suspicious, more like!”

I may, of course, be wrong. But I can’t help thinking that, when it comes to exploring the possibilities for rich dialogue between contemplative traditions and the sciences, Wallace is barking up the wrong tree. For me, I suspect that the really productive dialogue will not come from some kind of a revolution in the sciences, an overthrowing of materialism, and a discovery that the Tibetan stories were right all along, but instead it will come about from a revolution in the way that we see ourselves in the light of the sciences. For it seems to me that, when we come to exploring the knotty questions of consciousness, we are hamstrung already by a kind of mysticism: the mysticism of our idea of an enduring self, the mysticism of our belief in free will, and the curious philosophical mysticism that posits ineffable qualia. And if we are going to proceed at all in these discussions, I suspect that we will do so not by adding mysticism to mysticism, and by the spinning of new fictions, fantasies and dreams about a separate and self-subsistent spiritual realm, but rather by the realisation that those things that we take to be realities are themselves fictions, fantasies and dreams.

The glitch looks as if it has now been ironed out. Whilst sorting this out, I’ve also made the comments box rather larger – a small job that was long overdue, so that if you are feeling in expansive mood in your comments, your style will not be cramped. Do get in touch if you have any problems, but things should now be running more or less smoothly.

Now, all of that may be so, but what I wondered about was the throwaway line at the end of the article, where the author Kate Douglas suggested that “some might argue that if random acts of kindness give us a mental buzz, then this is not pure altruism after all.”

This, it seems, is a common claim. We are, alas, terribly suspicious when it comes to acts of apparent altruism – not just suspicious of each other, but also suspicious of ourselves. “Was that a good act?” we find ourselves asking. “Really? But I’m feeling better now I have done it. So perhaps I’m just self-interested after all…” This kind of suspicion can run rampant, so that we can come to the conclusion that there really is nothing in altruism at all, that all is self-interest. And if this is the case, why bother going through the pantomime of altruism at all? Why no go all-out for self-interest?

It seems to me, however, that such a conclusion is not warranted. It is born out of the idea that, for altruism to mean anything, it must be somehow “pure”, that there must be one single motive, and no others. Not only that, but the view is often that there must only be benefit to the object of our altruistic attentions, and any benefit that we thereby accrue somehow diminishes the act (a kind of crude “if it don’t hurt, it ain’t moral” view). But the idea that altruism – or any other virtue – must be pure to be counted a virtue at all is something of a non-starter if we are interested in thinking about how we act in the world. If we reverse the picture, this becomes more apparent. Imagine that I am the recipient of an altruistic act. I fall off my bike, and a stranger stops and helps me back to my feet. From my point of view, this seems very like an act of altruism, and it hardly matters that – for example – they are pleased to stop so that they can be late for that boring meeting to which that they were hurrying. Although they may have accrued a little benefit in terms of shaving five minutes off the dreaded meeting, this does not, as the recipient of the kind act, diminish the act for me. Not only this, but I would really much rather that the person helping me actually derived some residual benefit by helping me. At the very least, I would rather that, in our brief encounter, we exchanged a few friendly words and they went away with a smile on their face, feeling a bit better about life, than I would that they helped me out of grim duty and gained not a single drop of pleasure or of any other benefit from so doing. The kinds of altruism worth having, in other words, are not the kinds that are ‘pure’ according to these exacting standards by virtue of which only one party benefits; and if we look for pure altruism, then we end up failing to see any altruism at all. This does us a disservice. The world that we inhabit is not a world of pure abstractions, but is irredeemably mixed, and any account of ethics worth its salt needs to start from this point, rather than from the position of some abstract idea of purity.

But here’s another thought. If all of the above is true, and if there is no such thing as a purely altruistic act, then it may be that there is no such thing as a purely selfish act, because this idea of pure selfishness makes as little sense – and is based upon the same premises – as the idea of pure altruism. This, however, may be rather harder to swallow. Nevertheless, if we do give up on the idea of pure altruism, and if we also give up the idea of pure selfishness, then perhaps we might be able to see things in a rather more subtle fashion, to see the virtues and the vices not as absolutes that stand outside the ebb and flow of our lives, but as tendencies and currents with this ebb and flow. And with this subtlety may come a rather more generous attitude by virtue of which we might be able to appreciate what altruism there is in the world, and thereby give this goodness a little more space to breathe and flourish.

Image: Thanks to himalayanart.org

When it comes to ethics, it seems that we are all at sea. Since the beginning, the philosophers have always dreamed of finally reaching solid ground, but their proofs and demonstrations and laws have failed to bring us into harbour. Incapable of defining virtue, we manage to tell tales about it; not quite sure what justice is, we still spin yarns about the just and the unjust. Casting the reader adrift onto the sea of stories, attentive to the changes in the winds and the tides, through both philosophy and storytelling, this book explores ethics not as a means of finding our way back home to a safe harbour, but instead as a way of acclimatising ourselves to life on the seas of uncertainty.

I’ll keep you all updated about the launch, and closer to the time I might even post an extract to tempt you to part with your hard-earned cash.

Anyway, one of the major themes of the book is that of storytelling or narrative. Personally, I prefer the terms “storytelling” and “story” to “narration” and “narrative”, because nobody sits down and says to somebody else, “Go on, tell me a narrative…” When one is talking about something as intimate as storytelling, then it seems to me that using what feels like a much more technical vocabulary of “narrative” and so on can distance us from what is the most interesting.

Anyway, I am interested in storytelling for several reasons. Firstly, as a fiction writer, I spend my days wrestling with stories, thinking about stories, and writing stories. Secondly, as a meditator, I spend a fair amount of time going in the opposite direction, unpicking stories, looking to see what lies behind the habitual stories the mind weaves. And thirdly, as a writer of philosophy attempting to think about ethics, one of the things that strikes me again and again in that if, on the one hand, our thinking about ethics seems to need stories, on the other hand, the kinds of stories that we tell are often the problem as much as they are the solution. As the Dhammapada has it, “‘He insulted me, hit me, beat me, robbed me’ – for those who brood on this, hostility isn’t stilled.”

A few weeks back, I was watching that well-known blockbuster, Derrida, the Movie – not, I admit, everybody’s idea of a fun night in. Nevertheless despite the whiff of excessive reverence that surrounded the film, Derrida himself was really quite engaging as went goes about his business, making breakfast, pottering around, talking philosophy, and picking apart the fabric of the film as fast as the film-makers could weave it together. Anyway, at one point in the movie, Derrida said that “the story of one’s life – details, anecdotes, daily events – can only be inadequately told. The question for me is always the question of narration. I’d love to tell stories, but I don’t know how to tell them… so I’ve given up telling stories.”

It seems to me that Derrida has hit the nail on the head here. Our lives are, when it comes down to it, not particularly story-like. In one sense, they have beginnings, middles and ends; but they do not have the nice, tidy narrative arc that we expect of a story. We are always slap-bang in the middle of things, and the chains of conditions in which we participate stretch into the past and the future, far beyond the narrow compass of our birth and death. We are storytellers (even Derrida, as he goes about telling stories about how he has given up telling stories); but our lives are not stories. Daniel Dennett (not one of Derrida’s natural bed-fellows, perhaps) puts it like this: “our stories are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them; they spin us. The human consciousness, the narrative selfhood, is the product, not their source.”

If this is true, then the art, I think, is not to go beyond all stories. They are an important part of how we relate to the world, after all. The art, it seems to me, is to be able to maintain a sense of provisionality to the stories that we are telling about our lives, to tell tales whilst knowing that they are not the only tales possible, to hold to the stories lightly, to allow them to change as conditions change, even to allow contradictions between the various tales that we are telling because – if our lives our not story-like, even though they invite stories – then we may need a certain contradictoriness in the stories that we weave, so that our storytelling can take account of the entire range of our experience. And in this weaving and unweaving, it may be that we can find ways of binding ourselves together on the one hand, and of opening up breathing spaces for the telling of new stories and for the realisation of new possibilities on the other.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Now, this is something that interests me, given that I’ve been writing this blog for something around the past four and a bit years. After all, at times the question “Why am I doing this?” does indeed occur to me. So I hoped that the show might have something interesting to say. However, whilst the discussion was interesting enough, I could not help feeling frustrated by the narrowness of focus. The main questions under discussion seemed to be these: What is the relationship between blogging and the traditional or mainstream news media? Can the clamour of a thousand individual voices build a better picture of reality than a handful of trained, rigorous and dispassionate investigative journalists? And, is the world of the blog parasitic on the mainstream media, or is it independent of the mainstream media?

These are all perhaps questions worth asking, but they are not the kinds of questions that preoccupy me when I write this blog. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, no doubt, it is because thinkBuddha.org is about as un-newsy as it is possible for a blog to be. From time to time, if there is something interesting happening in the world, or in the world of Buddhism or philosophy, I post something news-related. But I’m not usually to be found grappling with the latest issues from the morning news. Secondly – and this is not unconnected – I don’t think that seeing blogging only in the light of the mainstream media is really a useful way of understanding what role blogs play in the way that we deal collectively with knowledge, or what passes for knowledge.

Ultimately the question here is one of authority, a word that was not mentioned in the discussion on The Philosopher’s Zone, but that seemed to be implicit throughout all the discussions. The questions lurking in the background seemed to be these: Who has the authority to speak? And, why should we listen to those whose authority is in question? These, I think, are more interesting questions, because it seems to me that blogging invites a kind of writing that is without authority, whereas the mainstream news media invites a kind of writing that at least pretends to a kind of authority. Put differently, blogging is, I think, an essentially amateur form of writing. By this I do not mean that it is inept or unskilled. There are many inept and unskilled journalists and the world, and there are many good bloggers; conversely there are many good journalists and many inept and unskilled bloggers. Instead, what I mean by “amateur” is that we often approach blogs without the assumption of expertise. Instead, we approach them knowing that the person who is writing is fallible and human, that their perspective is partial and almost certainly skewed. At least, I hope that is how you, dear Reader, approach this particular blog: as fallible, human and skewed. And, whilst I sometimes can be tempted to climb up upon my high horse and wave around my little wooden sword (it’s nice and breezy up there, the view is quite pretty, and there’s a certain pleasure to be had…), nevertheless one of the things I like about writing here is that I can write without any assumption of authority, that I can write to try out ideas that may be stupid or foolish or just plain wrong, and that I can trust that a large number of my readers will read what I have written with a degree of scepticism, saying, “Sounds a bit suspicious… But, then, who the heck is he? It’s hardly as if this stuff is peer-reviewed…”

This certainly gives me a sense of freedom as a writer, a freedom that simply does not exist in the writing of academic papers and tomes. But it is not just about this sense of freedom. Because – to return to the question of whether we are ‘epistemically better off’ thanks to blogs – I suspect that this kind of writing without authority is epistemically extremely valuable, because what it does is it demands of the reader a certain critical intelligence that can be obscured by the pantomime of authority, and in doing so, it opens up a space for the kinds of naive questions that are often unasked between the narrow lines of close, well-referenced arguments. It is not so much a matter of possessing knowledge as it is of exploring in dialogue with others the processes of knowing, or of coming-to-know. And if this is not social epistemology in action, then I don’t know what is.

But, as I said, I’m no authority on any of this. And so, if I were you, I’d take all of the above with a healthy dose of salt…

This morning, catching up with various bits and pieces, I came across a comment piece on the Guardian website which made me reflect a little more on this sense of delight. In the piece, Naseem Khan responds to a piece that Zen teacher Norman Fischer wrote in the New York Times. Fisher’s essay, For the Time Being, was about a retreat that he led on Puget Sound. Here is a brief passage from Fischer’s article:

I am a Zen Buddhist priest, so a meditation retreat isn’t exotic to me: it’s what I do. But this one was particularly delightful. Sixty-five of us in silence together for a week, as great blue herons winged slowly overhead, swallows darted low to the ground before us as we walked quietly on the open grassy space between the meditation hall and the dining room. Rabbits nibbled on tall grasses in the thicket by the lake. The sky that far north is glorious this time of year, full of big bright clouds that can be spectacular at sunset – which doesn’t happen until around 10 p.m., the sky ablaze over the tops of the many islands thereabouts.

This is, I think, a lovely passage. Of all the words that fill the New York Times, not many are, I suspect, as filled with such straightforward wonder and delight as these. ‘Wouldn’t it be a lovely headline,’ sings Rufus Wainwright, ‘“Life is Beautiful”, in the New York Times?’ Khan, however, does not entirely agree, and her piece calls into question the value of this kind of retreat. ‘If William Blake could find heaven in a grain of sand,’ she asks, ‘shouldn’t we look for it in a thrown-away tube ticket and a MacDonalds hamburger. is it really necessary to retreat to settings of unimaginable tranquility in order to attain tranquility?’ In asking this question, Khan is not, it should be said, entirely unaware of the way that retreats work. As Fischer points out in his piece, and as she also notes, if retreats seems like ‘getting away from it all’, the thing that one does not get away from is one’s own mind. That, for better or worse, comes along for the ride. And so if, on day one, you are thinking ‘Oh, look, there’s a beautiful heron!’ it is very likely that by day five you might find yourself thinking, ‘If that damn heron croaks loudly in my meditation again, I will personally wring it’s long and beautifully slender neck.’

However, providing that you manage to deal with your irrational heron-hatred, the real problems, Khan suggests, begin when you get home. It is then that you realise that the cat has been sick on the carpet, your great aunt is up to her old tricks, your house has been vandalised whilst you’ve been away, and your email inbox is groaning, and you suddenly seem to lose every last shred of the apparent wisdom and compassion, every last twinkle of the gratifyingly spiritual glow, that you seemed to possess whilst on retreat.

As a corrective to this, Khan talks of other models of practice – for example, Bernie Glassman’s street retreats – which may act as a “counter to blue herons and fine sunsets.” Yet, for me, whatever the value of these other forms of practice, I am not at all sure that blue herons and sunsets need to be countered. To be sure, if one is fortunate to find oneself on such a retreat, it is always worth being aware that these are very particular conditions, that they will come to an end, that when you get back home you will almost certainly have to deal once again with your vomiting cat, with your backlog of emails, and with your troublesome great aunt, as you did beforehand. But at the same time, there are definite benefits to such experiences of delight. It is good to be reminded of the beauty of things, it is good to cultivate wonder and awe at the extraordinary fact of our being here, thinking and feeling beings, in a world filled with sunsets and croaking herons and mad great aunts and vomiting cats and so forth. In itself, there is nothing self-indulgent in delight. It is attachment to the things that delight us that is self-indulgent. And to have periods in our lives in which we can open ourselves more than usual to this kind of delight can be profoundly useful. Of course there are things to be getting on with. There are ethical demands and responsibilities upon us. But without delight, I suspect that our ability to respond to these demands and responsibilities is limited. And this is why, I think, it is important to be able to open up spaces of delight within our lives – those impromptu cycle rides, those retreats, the time spent with friends.

The world contains both the possibility of delight and the possibility of suffering. If we are interested in cultivating the art of seeing things clearly, then we need to be open to both. If it were possible to allow the awareness of suffering to enter into our experience of delight, without this awareness thereby diminishing the delight that we experienced, and if it were possible to allow the awareness of the possibility of delight to enter into our experience of suffering, without this awareness obscuring the urgency of the suffering with which we are confronted – then, I think, we’d really be getting somewhere.

I continued stirring the onions on the hob (nicely spiced with ground coriander and a sprinkling of cumin – it was a curry night at the thinkBuddha HQ), and reflected on how I, too, was ignorant in that particular respect. As I tried to recollect what scraps of knowledge I possessed concerning the aforesaid battle, I realised that it was a fairly sorry picture that started to emerge. I had a vague intuition that Horatio Nelson was involved, that he had one arm and one eye, but that, unlike Long John Silver, he had two legs – meaning that he could run perfectly well, but that depth perception and juggling would have been difficult for him. Nelson, I also recollected (at least as far as I could recall) did not have a parrot on his shoulder. And he had a friend called Hardy who kissed him. Chastely, I imagined. Beyond that, I was beginning to struggle. Yet the voices wafting from the radio were suggesting that this was an important – nay, a vital – part of my British heritage (whatever that might be), and that my not knowing such a thing was a state-of-affairs bordering on the scandalous.

I turned off the radio, and went back to my onions (a dash of turmeric , some chopped fresh green chilli, then in went the chopped tomatoes…), and as I stirred the pan, I found myself reflecting on the attitude that we have to knowledge. The date of the battle, for what it is worth, was October 21st, 1805. Perhaps I knew this piece of information once and forgot it. Or perhaps I simply omitted to learn it in the first place. Certainly, by next week, I will have forgotten it again, for the simple reason that I am, alas, not greatly interested in the battle of Trafalgar. And whilst for some – naval officers, nineteenth century historians, Tory MPs and the like – knowledge of the exact date of the battle of Trafalgar may seem to be a key part of one’s moral existence, an anchor point within this world of flux, for me it is just another date of just another battle, of which there have been rather too many to count throughout history.

But what troubled me about the interview on the radio was the shrill tone of condemnation. All too frequently, in debates such as this, the absence of a certain piece of knowledge is taken as a sign of shocking ignorance: from Tory MPs protesting that schoolchildren cannot recite the date of the battle of Trafalgar, to clergymen bemoaning the fact that only a tiny percentage of the population can remember by heart the ten commandments, to scientists lamenting that the general public are largely ignorant of the third law of thermodynamics. And I am guilty of making the same claims myself. “Really?” I hear myself saying, “You don’t even know that…?”

The trouble with all of these complaints is that – as I think Zhuangzi once pointed out – the possible objects of knowledge are unlimited, but the things that we can know are, in the end, limited. And the question of the kinds of knowledge that matter – the question of what kinds of things are worth knowing – is not one that is easy to answer. In part, of course, it is contextual. Sure, I am ignorant when it comes to the battle of Trafalgar. But that is because, in the vast sea of possible objects of knowledge, I haven’t exactly been fishing in the same waters as those military historians and Tory MPs and the like. We are, all of us, utterly ignorant when it comes to most of what is out there. But at the same time we, all of us, know all kinds of amazing stuff. What we lazily term other people’s ‘ignorance’, more often than not may simply be the fact that other people judge different things worth knowing, because they exist in different contexts from our own. There are things that I care about and know a bit about (off the top of my head, here are a few: how to cook a pretty fine curry; how to play the classical guitar passably well; the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas; Buddhism; the novels of Italo Calvino; the theory of evolution), and other things about which I am largely ignorant. But it would be an impoverished – not to say a pretty weird – world if I insisted that everybody should hold the same things as personally worth knowing that I hold as personally worth knowing.

And herein lies the problem. Given the innumerability of the objects of knowledge, establishing if there are things that are worth knowing for everyone, and establishing what these things are is a difficult process (but see some thoughts here from a post that I wrote around four years ago). Nevertheless, just for the time being, I want to leave this question to the educationalists and policy makers, and to ask another question, a question that I think is often overlooked: the question of what exactly we do with the things that we deem worth knowing.

Here, I think, things become more interesting, because this question forces us to deal with the ethics of our relationship with those things that we know, or that we claim to know. Because it seems to me to be more important, in the long run, that we should treat each other well, than that we should know any particular facts about battles, commandments or laws of nature. And it seems to me to be more important that we use what knowledge we have in the service of treating each other well, than that we should know things simply so that we can use them to pour scorn, to manipulate, or to condemn.

To shift the focus from asking about the kinds of knowledge that matter to asking about how we deal with the ethics of our relationship to the things we know, is to let all kinds of questions back into the debate that are otherwise pushed to the sidelines. And as we start to explore these ethical questions about how it is that we go about knowing, I can’t help thinking that it might be possible to open up a space for something that – in all of our concern with knowledge and with what is termed (terrifyingly) the ‘knowledge economy’ – we have forgotten how to think about: the possibility not just of knowlege, but of wisdom.

As I was sitting this morning, it struck me that meditation is about as far from being an abstract pursuit as is possible. There is a popular idea of meditators as having their head in their clouds, and of meditation as an unworldly pursuit. But it seems to me that there is nothing more worldly than meditation. Not only this, but it also seems to me that a lot of what is sometimes called (although I dislike the term) “worldly” activity is, on the contrary, somewhat abstract and unworldly.

What do I mean by this? What I mean, I think, is this: that much of the time in our everyday lives, we are preoccupied with abstractions and with “what ifs?”. We perpetually run simulations of the world through our minds, testing out possible futures and reminagining the past. We weave endless stories, and then tangle ourselves up in the stories that we weave. Of course, this kind of abstraction is a part of the stuff of being human. Our capacity for this kind of abstraction is one of the things that helps us find our way around the world. But at the same time, there is more to life than this web of abstraction. And one thing that meditation can do is it can allow the senses to reattune themselves to the world, and it can allow us to settle back into the living, breathing, and absolutely concrete physicality of our being.

Sitting in meditation this morning, it was as if the clamorous and agitated flocks of birds that are my restless thoughts eventually grew tired of fluttering around, and they at last home to roost and settle. And it was as if, in turn, my body slowly settled back into the world, putting down roots as I sat there on the floor, so that I was no longer a thing set apart from the world, but once again was immersed in things. And as this happened, I felt a richer sense of life – one that has been somewhat in abeyance for the last couple of weeks – beginning to return.

It’s good to be back.

About ten days ago, we moved down from Leeds to Leicester. The last time we moved was a year ago, and so we’re pretty darned slick these days when it comes to packing boxes and the like, but there was still an awfully large quantity of books to lug half way across the country. Having made the move, the following morning I went straight down to London for a few days’ research in the School of Oriental and African Studies library. The research was for a future novel that is still very formative – I’m expecting this one to take a good two or three years before I even see a draft – and it was a pleasure to be up to my ears once again in dusty books by obscure scholars. A strange kind of pleasure, no doubt, but a pleasure nonetheless. Anyway, whilst down in London, I started to feel decidedly unwell, and by the time I arrived back in Leicester to a house full of unpacked boxes in the middle of last week, I was not good for much except coughing, sneezing, sweating, sleeping and sitting in a chair staring into space. All of which I did in copious amounts for the next five days before coming to my senses again and blearily raising my head yesterday and staggering out to see if the world outside still existed.

Today I have headed back into the office to catch up on a backlog of emails – the internet connection in the new house is not yet up and running – and to try to see where I am up to with things. I’ve got a couple of things I want to blog about here over the coming days, but it may take another day or so to get back onto my feet…

Jaimal Yogis, the author of Saltwater Buddha is, however, made of sterner stuff. The child of New-Age parents and brought up on a diet of Buddhism, Hinduism and Eastern literature, Yogis ran away from home whilst still at high school, pocketing several hundred dollars from his mother’s credit card (money that he later returned), and caught a plane to Hawaii, where he eked out a meagre existence as he learned how to surf. After a phone-call home, he found himself taking refuge from loneliness in the practice of meditation, and from then onwards, the two practices of surfing and Zen (practices that he speculates may be around the same age, with Bodhidharma turning up in South China at around the time that the Polynesians arrived in Hawaii, the spiritual home of surfing) began to intertwine, both of them, in different ways, holding out the promise of a kind of freedom.

Saltwater Buddha is a seductive book: part memoir, part reflection, Yogis writes in a light and breezy style as he traces his restless journey from monastery to monastery, and from surf-spot to surf-spot, all the while wrestling with the tricky business of how to make his way through the world. Written in short, beautifully-crafted sections, with good doses of self-deprecating insight, Yogis pulls off the difficult trick of writing seriously about his search, but without preciousness or self-indulgence. And for all the lightness of touch, there is – whether he is talking about meditation or about surfing – the unmistakable mark of hard-won experience here. By the time he is writing of his experience of watching the sun rise from his surf-board far out from the shores of Kalani, I am almost won over:

We would float out there as the moon sank behind the palms – alone except maybe for tiger sharks submerged under the silvery waves – until a huge orange sun rose right out of the sea. Dolphins swam by, coming just inches from our boards.
There was really nothing better in the world.

Almost, that is; but not quite. It is probably something to do with those tiger sharks, but for all of the considerable charm and insight of Saltwater Buddha, I think I’ll stick to stomping along the shore, and I’ll leave the surf to others. Nevertheless, as I walked along the coastline last week down in Devon, and watched the people out there in their wetsuits riding the waves, I could not help but feel a surge of exhiliration as I watched those saltwater Buddhas going about their everyday business, out there where the waters rolled in from the Atlantic.

One thing that I have been interested in for a long time is the kind of tone that philosophical discussion takes. If philosophy is a kind of practice, then questions of tone, and questions of how we actually engage with each other, questions of the kind of rhetoric that we employ, questions of how we treat each other when engaged in discussion, all matter profoundly. Michel Serres, one of my philosophical heroes, writes of a Greek vase that depicts two people, sitting opposite each other and engaged in lively debate. But when you look more closely, you see that underneath their chairs lurk two hideous little monsters just waiting to pounce. How, Serres asks, can we manage to engage in debate, without letting those monsters crawl out from under the chairs to sow discord? And so much discussion and debate – both inside and outside of the academic world – seems to give these mischievous demons free rein. But for the past few days, those particular monsters do not seem to have been much in evidence, and I have been remembering again that there is a kind of delight to be had in philosophical discussion in the company of friends.

One thing that this brings to mind is a little footnote in that I came across in John Cage’s book Silence. I love footnotes in the same way that I love those curious little pictures in the margins of medieval manuscripts: they are little sideshows where things can happen that are often more interesting than the main text itself. Anyway, the footnote concerns the early translator of Zen to the West, D.T. Suzuki:

An Indian lady invited me to dinner and said Dr. Suzuki would be there. He was. Before dinner I mentioned Gertrude Stein. Suzuki had never heard of her. I described aspects of her work, which he said sounded very interesting. Stimulated, I mentioned James Joyce, whose name was also new to him. At dinner he was unable to eat the curries that were offered, so a few uncooked vegetables and fruits were brought, which he enjoyed. After dinner the talk turned to metaphysical problems, and there were many questions, for the hostess was a follower of a certain Indian yogi and her guests were more or less equally divided between allegiance to Indian thought and to Japanese thought. About eleven o’clock we were out on the street walking along, and an American lady said, “How is it, Dr. Suzuki? We spend the evening asking you questions and nothing is decided.” Dr. Suzuki smiled and said, “That’s why I love philosophy; no one wins.”

John Cage, Silence. p.40

The idea that, when it comes to philosophy, no one wins, is one that requires a little more scrutiny. I do think that there are better and worse philosophical arguments – philosophy is not just a matter of me saying “well, I think A,” and somebody else saying, “well, I think B (or not-A)”, and then leaving it at that. Philosophy, that is to say, is not a free-for-all. And yet, at the same time, what I think characterises genuine philosophical discussion – or what characterises the kind of philosophical discussion that I think is worth having – is a kind of shared inquiry, a kind of mutual exploration of the world and of our place in the world in which we are no longer concerned with winning or losing, but in which we are guided instead by that wonder which Aristotle said was the beginning (and maybe – who knows? – the end) of philosophy.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

I had to admit that he had a point. Of all of the people I knew and counted amongst my friends, of all the people I had ever met, this particular friend seemed to have the most impressive knack of causing trouble. And yet, of all the people I knew, he was also one of the kindest and the most generous, one of the people whose company I enjoyed the most, and one of the people who cared most passionately about others and about the world.

When it comes to our virtues and our shortcomings, it does not seem to me as if we are dealing with the kinds of things that can be counted up, so that we can be given a final mark on how we we are doing in our lives. There are two reasons for this, I think. Firstly, it is because our acts of thoughtlessness do not cancel out our acts of kindness, nor do our acts of kindness cancel out our acts of thoughtlessness. It was true that this particular friend was trouble, but it was also true that he was immensely kind and generous. Neither of these facts excluded the other. But there is another reason as well, and that is that those things that we notice most of all are frequently all those things that go wrong: the words that we speak out of turn, the unkind thoughts, the clumsy acts that we later regret. What we don’t notice are the everyday kindnesses, the moments of ease, the small acts of generosity. These things are not invisible to us because we are gloomy or ungrateful, but because they have kind of natural ease to them. What we notice are the bumps and the ruts and the knocks, the things that break with the flow of our lives. We don’t notice when people manage to get by with each other in a crowded street, stepping out of each other’s way, or letting each other be; we notice the rare times when people snarl or snap or come into conflict with each other. The virtues, that is to say, appear quietly, and without fanfare – so quietly, in fact, that it takes a degree of attention to notice them at all.

No doubt it can be useful to notice the things that go wrong, the acts of clumsiness, the words we should really not have said. But at the same time, it can also be useful to notice that this is not the whole story, to recognise that our life is not an examination, that we are not going to be given a final mark, and that even if it were, we might already be doing rather better than we realise.

Photo: Stock Exchange  

The idea of cosmopolitanism is, in fact, one that has always attracted me. As a writer, I find many of the books that I love come not from the traditions of English literature, but from beyond. And I might even be tempted to see my engagement with Buddhism over the years in this cosmopolitan light, as a kind of broadening of the possibilities of thinking and acting. As a philosophical notion, cosmopolitanism dates back to the time of the ancient cynics. When Diogenes was asked where he came from, he did not say that he was a citizen of Sinope, but he said instead “I am a citizen of the cosmos”, so scandalising the Athenians by refusing to identify first and foremost with the polis, with the city-state. I am not sure if Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book Cosmopolitanism is going to scandalise anybody in quite the same way; but at the same time, it is a persuasive exploration of how we may be able to live together with each other, how we may be able to practice ethics, “in a world of strangers.” Appiah, a philosopher at Princeton, explores the implications of cosmopolitanism with the kind of fluency and charm that is all too uncommon in philosophy books (for those who have not read the book, he can be heard over on the Philosophy Bites podcast site).

One of the crucial claims that Appiah makes is that cosmopolitanism involves the recognition of both difference and universalism, and thus treads a kind of middle path between relativism on the one hand, and moral absolutism on the other. Making the case for universalism, we could say that we all have a shared biology, and that this shared biology sets many of the parameters for the kinds of beings that we are and the kings of things that we do. The folks who live over there (wherever “over there” happens to be) may seem to be pretty funny, but when you look more closely, they are pretty funny only within the bounds of this shared biology. They too, like us, get up to the same kinds of things: they are born, they raise their children, they fall in love, they talk about how best to do philosophy or how best to cook vegetables, they grow old, they die. Nevertheless, although there is much that is shared, the differences between us are not negligible. We live – depending on where we are, how we are brought up, and what influences have borne upon us – according to different modes of life. These two are not in contradiction: one of the human universals is that we creatures capable of living according to different modes of life. It may be that one frog (for example) goes about its life in much the same way as another frog. But human beings are not like this. The universal fact of human suppleness is something that leads to the fact of difference. It is not quite true, as Sartre claims, that our existence precedes our essence; but at the same time it is not quite false either. And so, it is also the case that that the people over there (from our perspective) are, in fact, pretty funny; although the corollary of this is that we (from their perspective) are pretty funny as well.

One of the crucial points that Appiah makes arises from the tension between universalism on the one hand and difference on the other. We can sometimes think that moral conversation is about securing agreement, and that only on the basis of agreement can we find ways of living together. If we could just exercise our reason with sufficient vigour, the argument goes, then we could see through all the different moral issues that afflict us, we could talk things through, and we could find a way of living harmoniously side-by-side. The bad news, however, is that this goal is one that is rarely reached, and that the differences that divide us are such that there is perhaps little chance of reaching this kind of moral agreement. But, on the other hand, the good news is that we do not need moral agreement to live with each other. Often, we get by, even when agreement is lacking.

That is to say, conversation about matters of right and wrong and so forth is not so much a way of getting to a final judgement; but instead it is – at its best – a means of helping us to find ways of putting up with each other. I might also add the reverse, and caution that conversations about matters of right and wrong are often dangerous precisely because – at their worst – they can lead us to believe that we cannot or must not put up with each other, leading as much to division as to harmony, as much to discord as to amity. In a world where differences will never be fully resolved, the dream of ultimate moral agreement is one that can cause untold damage. When we forget Diogenes’s challenge for us to remember that we are not just citizens of Sinope, or of wherever it is that we come from, or when we give in to the temptation to stake our identify upon one particular region out of the vast sea of conditions – the ten thousand things – out of which we have been born, it is then the problems start. And this is something that Appiah hints at, although he is not explicit on the point: we are, all of us, already citizens of the cosmos. I do not mean this in a vague and mystical sense. What I mean is that we are born out of an enormous range of conditions, that we are all of us multiple, and that to stake one’s identity, once and for all, upon a single flag, creed, nation or ideology is to close one’s eyes to the vastness and the complexity of this sea of conditions.

Yesterday, as I was walking down the street and seeing so many thousands of people all rubbing shoulders with each other, I was astonished that I didn’t see a single snarl. Thousands of people, putting up with each other. Perhaps it doesn’t seem a very elevated goal. Perhaps it seems ordinary. But such ordinariness is well worth preserving.

Biophilia, love of the world: this is not something spiritual or abstract or even particularly elevated. Instead, it is that sense that we can have, living beings that we are, of being alive, that immersion in the world of the senses where birds sing and light slants, and the path beneath the feet unfolds, the everyday, ordinariness of it all. And on that evening it was, for a few moments, so unutterably beautiful that the clamour of the various dramas in which I had been immersed for the day subsided. So I stood for a while admiring the blackbird, then I thanked it (it seemed the only polite thing to do) and made my way home.

It is remarkable how such a simple thing – an evening walk, a bird in a tree yelling its head off – can manage to cut through so much mental entanglement, can revive you when you are tired, can bring an almost immediate sense of well-being. And it occurred to me that evening that one of the things about the world is that it is largely indifferent to the human stories that we weave. We may be, as I have said before on this blog, storytellers by nature; but nature itself is not story-like. And because the stories that we weave can so often be limiting, can so often trap us, or can so often simply go over the same old ground, again and again, this attention to the world can loosen the bonds a little, can give us over to a kind of thinking that can help us find new paths and tracks through the world.

For me, there is a kind of Lucretian peace that can be found in attention paid to the world; and it is for this reason that frequently I find in scientific understanding a kind of stillness. On the other hand, I often find that religious dreams and ideas simply generate further clamour that adds to an already clamorous world. It is the tendency of projecting what are parochial human dramas onto the universe as a whole that depresses me most about a good deal of religious thought. This tendency seems to me to be both a discourtesy paid towards the universe, and also a denial of the true astonishment of living.

In these moments of astonishment at being alive, there on the road home, in these moments when the human dramas that we are caught up in find themselves in abeyance, there is a kind of bodily, living sense of being immersed in the world that breaks with all the dramas that we carry around in our heads. What I find most fearful about religion is this: that in its hunger to make everything conform to human stories, it might eliminate all those oases in which we can have respite from a kind of clamour that is entirely of our own making.