The question, or some form of it, came up a number of times in recent discussions of “common sense”: if common sense isn’t reliable, I was asked, what is? I’m going to try to avoid the word “reliable” as I think its different uses became confusing in the previous debate; I have little stake in its use as a term. But the basic question of determining truth from falsehood is a crucial one and worth asking.

That’s not to say, however, that it admits easy answers, for I don’t think we should expect easy answers on the most basic philosophical questions. If the answers were easy, it would be a stunning and bizarre fact that so many intelligent people have spent so long trying to answer them and explain them without coming to a resolution (as indeed has, so far, been the case in the recent debates, though these have lasted only weeks and not centuries). This is one reason why I don’t identify knowledge of the truth as deriving from a single source like “common sense” – though my posts and comments should make clear I have many more specific problems with that concept, especially as defined by Thill and other commenters on this blog.

How should we identify truth instead? The question of how we should discern truth is closely linked to the question of how, in practice, we do discern it. I like to say that we start where we are: we assess new information learned by reasoning out its coherence with the information we have already accepted. The new information comes in through sense perception one way or another, though the perception might be of someone else’s testimony: I observe you tell me something.

So I think the Vedānta schools are probably right when they describe the means of knowledge (pramāṇas) as perception, inference and authority – that is, the testimony of sources we trust. But that’s not to say any of these sources are always right. Rather, they’re right often enough to be worthy of our belief unless there is some reason to mistrust them in a particular case: for example, I would normally believe my eyes telling me that there is a large yellow stick floating in front of me, but I can’t touch the stick and I have heard that this perception is a symptom of eye diseases, so I don’t.

When a particular belief is in question, though, it’s not enough to refute it merely by saying we learned its contrary through any of these means of knowledge; for they can be, and often are, wrong. Moreover, this is not a matter of one means taking precedence over another. Yes, my senses tell me that the sun revolves around the earth; but because I trust the authority of trained astronomers, I know that this is not the case. Or alternately: a scientist friend (in this case our esteemed commenter Ben) tells me there’s a new article in a refereed psychology journal telling us that caffeine doesn’t actually increase alertness; but I don’t accept this claim because it is so completely contrary to my felt and observed experience of caffeine’s effects on myself. The conclusions must have been misreported, or something wrong with the methodology, or the sample unrepresentative, or the definitions of “alertness” something very different from what I understand by it.

But how do I, or should I, make the decision in those cases where means of knowledge conflict with each other or with themselves? I don’t think a hard-and-fast rule can be provided. Providing an easy and definitive answer to the question “How can I tell true from false?” is like providing an easy and definitive answer to the question “How can I become a better fiddle player?” Discernment of true and false is a virtue, a skill learned with time and practice; there is a wealth of tips and advice one can offer about how to do it better, but one can’t provide a formula for it that will settle disputes in advance. (Or rather, one can; it’s just that one will be wrong.) In saying this, I’m expressing agreement with a contemporary school of analytic philosophy known as virtue epistemology.

Thill disputes such claims:

If you have easy answers to determine what is unreliable, indeed, if you can go to the absurd length of deeming common sense (on which you rely for your very survival) unreliable, you can surely specify what you consider reliable and what you depend on to function in the world…. your claim that it is not easy to ascertain what is reliable implies that it is not easy to ascertain what is unreliable. This is at odds with your easy dismissal of the appeal to common sense on the grounds that it is unreliable.

But I’ve made no such easy dismissal. The easy answer Thill asked for, as far as I can tell, is a statement of “that which is X is reliable and that which is not-X is not,” an exaltation of one single source of knowledge in the way that Thill exalts common sense, which is what I’ve refused to provide here and elsewhere. My refutation of “common sense” as a reliable source of knowledge didn’t rely on a single-sentence knockdown; more importantly, it didn’t say simply “all X is true and all Y is not,” but tried to show us the complexity of the world and of knowledge. I have never said that the items of knowledge included in “common sense” are always wrong; indeed, I suspect most of them are right. The point was that we do not have any special reason to believe a claim based on the fact that it is said to belong to “common sense” (in the sense of knowledge learned without training).

If my alternative view can be described in a sentence, it is probably this: we need to engage in the complex process of knowing as best we can. And if that sounds vague, that’s because it is, intentionally. You should be suspicious of anyone who claims to give you a single easy tip that sums up the whole of how to play the fiddle, do successful biology experiments, or pick up romantic partners. You should be similarly suspicious of anyone who claims to easily sum up how to tell truth from falsehood in the general case.

There is, of course, plenty to be learned in each of these practices; that’s one of the reasons they’re not easy. There are various tips and tricks that can aid in each: play emphasized notes with a down stroke of the bow; control as many variables as you can; groom your hair carefully; trust the conclusions of scientists with expertise in their fields. All of these tips are generally wise, but still admit exceptions: there are two emphasized notes of the same pitch in a row; controlling an additional variable would cost so much that you’d need to hire fewer staff and make careless mistakes; you’re courting someone who likes the dishevelled look; the scientist misspoke because she’s having a bad day. And in each field there is also advice offered that is well meaning but inappropriate, advice we should not take: play as fast as you can; fudge your data a bit and nobody will notice; pretend to be wealthier than you are; treat a claim as true because one can learn it without specialized training. The acceptance or refutation of one of these tips may be a relatively simple matter by itself; but that doesn’t make the whole practice an easy one.

Is this a definitive account of how we can discern truth? No, it’s just a start. But that’s the point.

Deneen’s speech is a “defence of culture.” Following one Romano Guardini, Deneen understands culture in a specific sense that ties it essentially to nature, history and society. Culture thus defined is a tradition of interacting with nature and other humans, suspicious of change, deferring to the past and ready to pass it on to future generations. When defined this way, Deneen says, the enemy of culture is liberalism, the contemporary politics of individual choice and freedom at a great remove from nature, history and society. (In this sense, most of the libertarian American Tea Partiers are consummate liberals; liberalism is generally the ideology of both the modern left and the modern right.) Liberalism, Deneen says, endorses an “anti-culture,” or at least monoculture, in which the priority of individual over collective goods is everywhere enshrined. The particular kind of collective goods Deneen has in mind, I think, have above all to do with raising a family – for example, the ability to raise one’s children in an environment that is not thoroughly sexualized by scantily-clad magazine covers, Lady Gaga, Internet pornography and Bratz dolls. (The example is mine, but it’s true to Deneen’s position as I understand it.) Perhaps the most telling line in the piece, and the one that inspired me to write this entry, is this quote from Bertrand de Jouvenel: the political philosophers of liberalism are “childless men who have forgotten their childhood.”

I find Deneen’s definition of culture strange, but I won’t dwell on that point. I’m more interested in the essay because of the way it cogently expresses the critique of liberalism, as made by a literal conservatism rooted in nature and family. And I think there’s something missing from this analysis, something put in acute focus by a knowledge of South Asian traditions.

For liberalism, I submit, is not the only tradition that opposes “culture” in Deneen’s sense, wishes to free human beings against the bonds of nature and family. Rather, Indian “renouncer” traditions have been engaged in this project for hundreds of years. The Buddhist First Noble Truth, that all the conditioned things around us in the world are suffering, is relatively well known. But plenty of his non-Buddhist contemporaries said something very much like it. Classical Jain tradition, as expressed in the Tattvārtha Sūtra, aims to free the human subject from the material world and its bonds, into a liberated state called kaivalya (aloneness) – as do the Yoga Sūtras, often considered “Hindu.” One might hesitate to refer to early Buddhism as individualist, since it so readily deconstructs the self, but the same cannot be said about these other traditions – which, in some form in another, also survive to this day in India and its diaspora.

And these different Indian traditions find their social expression in monkhood – a deliberate rejection of family. Their thinkers and theorists are childless men by choice; it is not that they have forgotten their childhood, so much as they wish to transcend it. The fact of our past childhood should not be denied, but it should also not weigh down on our transcendent futures.

Now such traditions are of course far removed from the modern liberalism Deneen criticizes. Monks, more or less by definition, don’t have sex. To Jains and Buddhists and yogins, sex and related worldly pleasures are among the worst of the fetters that bind us to the world of suffering – to society and history and nature. Deneen’s conservative traditionalism has important commonalities with the Indian renouncers, most obviously a suspicion of open, or permissive, sexuality. And yet the renouncers share a great deal with liberal modernity that they do not share with the family-oriented culture embraced by Deneen. I tried to get at this point when I identified asceticism, libertinism and traditionalism as three distinct ways of life, but since then I’ve come back to thinking that the point is best expressed in Thomas Kasulis’s distinction between intimacy and integrity worldviews: modern liberalism’s integrity orientation is shared by the classical Indian renouncers.

More germane to Deneen’s points about culture, these renouncers also share modernity’s universalism. For the Jains or early Buddhists there would be no problem if everyone around the world adopted a common Jain or Buddhist culture, aimed at the renunciation of suffering. While Christians and Muslims would often believe a similar thing, their universalism is still self-consciously and essentially tied to particular historical events in a way that Buddhism, like modern liberalism, is not. Thus to the extent that Buddhists care about the “authenticity” of Buddhist teachings, it is only because the historical Buddha happened to be the only awakened one in our era.

Yet nevertheless Buddhists do look back to the Buddha’s teachings. The past great thinker is still treated as worthy of reverence. And this much, Buddhists do share with Deneen’s traditionalists, against modernity. For Deneen, if we look to the future as a place to be liberated from the past – as our increasingly science- and technology-focused education systems effectively do – we will lose something of the greatest human importance, our best guides to living well.

And on this score, if little else, I agree with Deneen. I have learned far more about living well from the Buddha and Lucretius and Aristotle than I have from contemporary philosophy or even psychology. At the same time, I do have one foot firmly planted in the universalist and individualist world of modern liberalism, to the point of not intending to have children. I suppose this all makes for a key reason Buddhism continues to hold such appeal for me: it allows us to return to the past for guidance, and yet in an individualistic way that does not bind us too closely to nature and society. (Stoicism and Epicureanism do the same things, in a way, but they have lost Buddhism’s continuity to the present day.)

No doubt Deneen and his colleagues would criticize such a view as shallow, an attempt to have one’s historical cake and eat it too. There’s a lot to such a view, and developing a critique of it would take far more than this one post. But I will start by saying that attempts at synthesis do not have to be shallow. Traditions change, develop and grow as they encounter each other – and such encounters are happening today to an unprecedented degree.

The problem I quickly realized is that romantic marriage is a recent invention, a construct of our own time. It was obvious to me from the beginning that I’d get little help from Indian Buddhism, where sex and marriage are emphasized as fetters that bind us in suffering. I knew that to choose marriage was to side against Śāntideva. Sure, Śāntideva praises the monk Jyotis for breaking his monastic vows and marrying a woman who fell in love with him – but Jyotis, like a good bodhisattva, did this entirely out of compassion. “I’m marrying you out of sympathy” is not exactly the note on which I want to start married life.

Classical Buddhism is an ascetic tradition through and through, as uncomfortable as such asceticism might make us today. But then much the same can be said about classical Christianity, at least as expressed in Paul’s New Testament writings. “Better to marry than to burn”: marriage is a third-best option, not as good as converting to celibacy as Paul did, let alone lifelong celibacy. It is good only because it prevents the worse option, of being led around by sexual lust. For this reason I tend to chafe a bit when I hear the standard wedding reading of 1 Corinthians: “Love is patient, love is kind,” and so on. Paul is not even talking about familial love, let alone romantic love; that’s the last thing on his mind. He’s talking about agape, compassion, close to Buddhist karuṇā. The King James Bible makes the point well when it renders the passage with “charity” rather than “love.”

But what about the non-ascetic traditions? Clearly some premoderns gave an unqualified endorsement to married life, even if the classical Buddhists and Christians did not. Indeed they did – but marriage so viewed was a very different thing. I touched on the point in my previous post about weddings, but it’s worth coming back to. Traditionally, marriage was not about the couple, it was about the community and its continuity, arranged by parents for the sake of producing and raising new children. And it was often the wife’s job to raise the children and the husband’s to provide materially – or sometimes the job of the extended family, if both were working. This is the married relationship that Confucius praises; but it is not our marriage. We fell in love without our families’ involvement, and we do not intend to have children. All of my family members are hundreds of miles away; hers do not live with us. To top it off, for the moment, she is our breadwinner while I am unemployed and taking care of the household. When classical Jewish or Confucian texts endorse marriage, it is for reasons far removed from ours. While I’ve said that weddings always imply a certain amount of traditionalism, to most traditional audiences our marriage looks a lot more like libertinism.

So the best premodern texts for a modern marriage are likely those which are not about marriage. The last time I got married, we read Pausanias’s speech from Plato’s Symposium, arguing that the best kind of love is pursued for the cultivation of virtue. A great and noble sentiment, and here we are talking about a love closer to modern romantic love – sexually charged eros, not compassionate agape. A good reading, but worth remembering that the eros that’s at issue here is the love Plato knew, between an older man and a younger boy. The dialogue never even entertains the idea that a married couple would feel eros for each other.

So likewise the Song of Songs, that Hebrew text that has made so many wonder “why is this in the Bible?” Not being constrained in our interpretations by tradition, we don’t need to take the strained reading of the text as an allegory for God’s love for the church. We can read it literally for what it is, the erotic passion of two heterosexual lovers, in a text that is nevertheless ancient and passed down by tradition. The text never says these lovers are married; in their time, they probably wouldn’t have been. But their love is much more like ours than is Paul’s agape, Śāntideva’s karuṇā, or the community- and family-oriented Confucian marriage. And so we are having a selection from this text sung at our wedding.

The other premodern reading we’ll have at the wedding is the short closing lines of the Rig Veda (X.191.4): “May your aim be one and single / May your hands be joined in one / The mind at rest in unison / At peace with all, so may you be.” It is also not about marriage in its original context, but about unity among Agni worshippers; and the translation is quite loose. In these respects I suppose it’s really no better than the Corinthians. But my father has regularly sent it as a wedding blessing to most of the couples we know who have married in my lifetime. So it’s become part of our own family tradition, in a way, as well as being an appropriate wish expressed in beautiful English. And all of that matters.

This will be my last post for a couple weeks – because of the wedding, of course! The next week and a half will be frenetic with wedding planning, and after that we are having a week’s honeymoon in New Orleans. (We had intended to go further afield, but immigration issues intervened; we expect to take a longer honeymoon this winter.) Blogging will take a back seat during this period. If I am seized by the urge to write about something topical, it’s possible that there may be a post in the interim; but I expect the blog’s writing to resume on the first of August.

Naturally, comments will remain open during this period; I’m happy that some lively discussions have got going here recently and I would be delighted if they continue. Before I pause, I would like to say a word of thanks to all my commenters and regular readers. You have made writing this blog a tremendously rewarding experience for me, and I look forward to resuming it in August.

I didn’t say anything – I wasn’t part of that conversation – but something about that offhand remark has bothered me ever since. “Offensive“? Is that the best word you have for a criticism, I thought? In the politically correct Nineties, had moral criticism been erased and replaced with mere “offensiveness”? Then something must have gone terribly wrong. For to my mind, offensiveness had always been something good. We political radicals – as I and the other students identified – were supposed to be offensive against the values of the conservative mainstream… weren’t we? Even now, when I’m far less political, I still love deliberately offensive humour – the bad taste of Sarah Silverman’s stand-up comedy or of South Park. To be inoffensive, by contrast, seems a lot like being nice, in the wrong way. If all that was wrong with On the Road was that it was “really offensive,” it seemed to me, then nothing is wrong with it.

What does it mean, indeed, to be “offensive”? The word has achieved a particular currency in the era of identity politics – a cultural product is “offensive” to particular groups of people. But what is that? What makes it “offensive”? Is offensiveness purely a creation of a postmodern era of heightened sensitivity? Typically, I think, something is called “offensive” because it is presumed to be insulting; more specifically, because someone feels insulted. I suspect there isn’t much of an objective dimension to offensiveness; something is only offensive if someone is offended.

And here Śāntideva’s magnificent words in chapter six of the Bodhicary?vat?ra come back to me. Śāntideva is an advocate of measured and pleasant speech; he is unlikely to insult anyone unless, perhaps, it is specifically necessary for their own spiritual development. (Thus he does direct some insults at himself.) He does not wish us to be offensive, then. But he is less worried, overall, about our insulting others than about our feeling insulted ourselves – concerned less about our offending than about our being offended. When others slander us, say bad things about us, knock down others’ praise of us – we are in grave danger not from these insults, but from our reactions to them. The latter are the real problem, one he addresses in a beautiful passage that may be my favourite in all his works, one I’ve been personally inspired by many times. I will let the (translated) passage speak for itself:

Just as a child cries out in pain when his sandcastle is destroyed — that’s how my mind appears when I lose praise and admiration. The word of praise doesn’t matter if it’s not thought; the cause of my pleasure is that someone else is pleased with me. But what do I get from someone else’s pleasure toward me? That pleasure and happiness is only theirs. Not even a small part of it is mine. If I get pleasure from their pleasure, I should get pleasure from everyone’s. Why don’t I feel as good when people are pleased by others’ actions? So the delight that I am praised is just the gesture of a child, because it is absurd. Praise, fame and admiration give me a false sense of security, and destroy my intensity. They produce jealousy toward good people, and make me angry. Therefore, those who attack my praise and so on are just protecting me against a fall into destruction. (BCA VI.93-9, my translation)

The claim that there is no truth is false. It contains a contradiction that cannot be resolved unless one takes it to mean something very different from what it appears to mean. Nor is this one of that narrow group of paradoxes which could be taken as true on the grounds of Graham Priest’s dialetheism. Priest tries to argue that most of the problems with contradiction stem not from accepting some contradictions, but from accepting all; but if one accepts “there is no truth,” one comes much closer to allowing all contradictions in. Indeed postmodernists often approvingly quote the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend in telling us that “anything goes.”

It is not true that there is no truth. What is crucial about this and other postmodern claims, however, is that its truth value is not the point. Like Stanley Fish, postmodernists shift our attention away from contradiction and truth entirely, claiming they’re not the important thing. (Caputo at one point approves one of his opponent’s moves because “it drops the stuff about contradiction and actually addresses the issues.”) Drawing on J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, postmodernists will argue that the reason to make such a claim against truth is its performative dimension. The point, that is, is not what the sentence says, but what it does.

It is on this last point, however, that the evidence against postmodernism seems strongest. What, exactly, has postmodernism accomplished? I have previously mentioned cognitive dissonance and spiritual transformation as reason to be concerned about contradictions. But these are typically not at the forefront of postmodern concern. Rather, most postmodern writers express some sort of concern for marginalized political groups – women, gays, transgendered people, the poorer or working classes, people in nonwhite racial groups, people from colonized societies. But what has postmodernism actually done to improve their situation?

Among the most widely cited exemplars of real political change on behalf of the disenfranchised are the nonviolent activists Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi. Both of these men believed in an absolute truth. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail takes its authority from “the moral law or the Law of God”; Gandhi continually cited a Truth he identified with God as the heart of his ideals. Neither were relativists of any stripe. And it seems to me that, given their accomplishments, it could scarcely have been otherwise.

It is not merely that their faith in something bigger than themselves gave them strength as they were jailed and persecuted (though I have no doubt it did this). It is also that a strategy of nonviolent resistance relies heavily on persuasion, on appeals to justice, on making others see the case for your side. Such appeals depend on recognizing the normative force of non-contradiction. If, like Fish, you think contradiction is no big deal, then it’s far easier to ignore the appeal of a King or a Gandhi. In one sphere of your political life you preach the value and benefit of the British mission to civilize the colonies; in another, you order your soldiers to shoot colonial subjects who disobey arbitrary measures. Sure your actions contradict each other, but you don’t need to think about that. If contradiction matters, by contrast, then we must pay attention to those who note how we fail to live up to our own ideals.

Without a respect for contradiction, one can certainly achieve violent social change. One can overthrow a government by force and not be bothered by anything anyone else has to say about it. But violent social change has a harder time being a force for good. Lenin and Mao were idealists like King and Gandhi; but their names are remembered far more ambiguously, for good reason.

On this point consider the sophist Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic. While Thrasymachus agrees that the conclusions of Socrates’s arguments make sense, he never really agrees to accept them. When Socrates presents Thrasymachus with his final conclusion – that “injustice is never more profitable than justice” – Thrasymachus does not acknowledge its truth or display a conversion, as so many of Socrates’s interlocutors do. Instead he merely seems to shrug and take an “agree to disagree” approach: “Let that be your banquet, Socrates, at the feast day today.” This argument to justice might be your opinion, Socrates, but no matter how rational it is, it will never be mine. Such a view is where the likes of Caputo lead us: I don’t care what reason says, I just keep my views.

The problem with such a conclusion, however, is expressed in the views that Thrasymachus himself is expressing. It’s not coincidence that Thrasymachus tells us justice is the interest of the stronger. For indeed, if we do not feel the normative force of non-contradiction, if we do not allow ourselves to be convinced by reason and truth, then politics must necessarily be Thrasymachean. Without an attempt to convince people rationally of the value of their positions, as Gandhi and King did, then the strong rule. But the oppressed and marginalized, those whose causes postmodernists claim to take up, are weak effectively by definition.

The rule of the strong, then, is what we might expect to see accompany postmodern thought. And is it in fact what we do see? Well, the rise of postmodernism as a theory, in the ’80s through the ’00s, coincides with the rise of right-wing politics worldwide. Social programs for the poor and dispossessed were cut everywhere; patriarchal and oppressive cultural tradition made a comeback everywhere from George W. Bush to Lee Kuan Yew; while the right wing pushed its agenda aggressively, left-leaning governments made little of the major initiatives to support marginalized groups that characterized the post-WWII era. Is all of this merely a coincidence? Causation is always hard to establish, and it would be difficult ever to say for sure. I can’t help but note again, though, that one of the first of the new wave of right-wingers, the Ayatollah Khomeini, was endorsed by Michel Foucault. That great friend of gay rights wound up endorsing a state in which homosexuality is punishable by death.

A recently popular slogan among political activists, one that Gandhi and King could easily endorse, is “speak truth to power.” Yet the whole point of Foucault’s work seems to be to tell us that there is no truth but only power – in other words, to speak power to truth. Foucault and Derrida’s views most often seem to be taken up on the grounds of challenging oppressive structures; but they are, as far as I can see, no friends to the marginalized or oppressed. Whether judged by its effects or by its truth value, postmodernism comes up lacking or worse.

Last Friday’s episode, Belonging, implicitly makes a further point about the good life. (Spoiler warning, if you haven’t seen this episode.) Sierra, played by Dichen Lachman, was once pursued by an obsessive rich businessman, who planned elaborate setups to seduce her. When it became clear that he could never win her, he drugged her with psychotics so that she could be committed to the Dollhouse. (The Dollhouse’s policy is that sane people can only become dolls if they give their consent.) Then he frequently “hires” her to be imprinted with a personality that will love him and have sex with him.

When the Dollhouse staff find out how she arrived there, they try to forbid the businessman from using her again – but he has connections to their superiors. He makes a threat to fire them, or possibly worse, if they don’t accede to his demand: that she be imprinted as his lover, to live with him forever.

The show clearly expects viewers to react with horror at this prospect, and we do – it looks like a fate worse than death. It even causes one of the show’s most amoral characters to show pangs of conscience and prevent this from happening. But here’s the thing: if pleasure is the only intrinsic good, as Neil Sinhababu has claimed recently and others (including Jeremy Bentham and to some extent Epicurus) have claimed in the past, then surely the businessman’s intended fate for Sierra is a fine and good one. She won’t remember the bad things he’s done to her or her former hatred of him; she’ll be blissfully in love with him, happily spending the rest of her life in pleasurable days. Before her capture she would have found this the most loathsome fate imaginable; but that doesn’t matter now, because she won’t anymore. (The thought experiment here is comparable to Robert Nozick’s experience machine, though darker and more disturbing, and therefore more provocative.)

There are a couple of ways for ethical hedonists to weasel around the problem: to say, for example, that knowing what a sleazeball this man is, he’ll probably treat her badly and therefore she won’t experience much pleasure. But it may well be that she’s programmed to love that mistreatment, to crave it. Or they might say that the man needs to be punished as a deterrent to prevent people acting so cruelly in the future – but on a hedonistic theory, why should we deter people from creating more pleasure?

The most honest and thought-provoking reply I can envision (and I suspect this is the approach Neil might take?) is to “bite the bullet,” to accept the unpalatable consequence of a hedonistic theory and say that indeed, in a scenario like this one, it is good for Sierra’s life to become filled with pleasure at loving and serving the man she once hated. Our repugnance at Sierra’s fate comes merely from unreliable “emotional perception,” an unreliable perception comparable to our belief that the earth is flat; whereas our knowledge that pleasure is the only real good comes from the “phenomenal introspection” that is a more reliable guide.

For such a bullet-biting to work, of course, the argument for pleasure as the only good must itself work – and must be ironclad in order to persuade us to give up such a strongly felt reaction against it. Examples like Dollhouse give us prima facie reasons, at least, to be highly skeptical of such arguments. And in the end, as I noted, I don’t think they do work. So the staff are right to save Sierra.

Now, I’ve tried to be explicit that this is a philosophy blog, not a personal blog – while a great deal here is autobiographical, the purpose of even those entries is to point to bigger questions, questions that I hope my life story can help illuminate in some way. So I’m going to talk today a little bit about my reasons for deciding to marry. The particular reasons, of course, are all about my sweetheart herself, a beautiful, smart, funny, playful, charming, sexy, adventurous, responsible, virtuous woman. But there are more general reasons that tie to the blog’s bigger concerns.

Above all, my action this weekend is not one that Śāntideva, or the Buddha of the Pali suttas, would view as a part of the highest, best, most fully virtuous life. They speak at length of the disadvantages of the household life, the life spent among family with a paid job in the everyday world. The life of a monk is a higher and better one to pursue. Eros keeps us mired in the suffering of everyday life, enslaved to the desires and craving that only cause us yet more suffering. The monk, by contrast, devotes himself or herself fully to the development of virtue, much more able to rise above craving and suffering.

Of course Indian Buddhists made room for householders – they’re the ones who kept the monks fed and clothed. But the classical Indian renouncer traditions, Jainism and Buddhism above all, make it very clear that the householder’s path is a lesser one, a path for those who are not as well developed. It may well be best for certain people – probably most people – to choose a householder’s life, but that’s because those people are weak, their bad karma too strong. There are echoes here of Paul in the New Testament saying “better to marry than to burn” (meaning “burn with lust,” not “burn in hell”). On the logic of classical Indian Buddhism, if marriage is the best path for me, it’s because I’m weak and unvirtuous, not good enough.

Now I’ve lived long enough to see a lot of my weaknesses. It’s not the characterization of myself as weak and unvirtuous that I object to; I can see a lot of that in myself, which is one reason I see such appeal in chastened intellectualism. Nevertheless, I do ultimately disagree that the monk’s life is the best life a human being can aspire to. Don’t get me wrong, I have an enormous degree of respect for monks. Overall, I suspect most lifetime monks are better off and more virtuous than the rest of us – they spend so much time cultivating themselves that they can be far less wrapped up in self-destructive behaviour than most. And yet, I do think that ultimately, the best, most fully human life is one that partakes of the pleasures of love and friendship, probably even of sensual pleasures like food and sex – while still being aware of the dangers of excessive attachment to them. Ultimately, on the question of external goods, I do end up closer to Martha Nussbaum’s worldly view than to Śāntideva’s. I have defended Śāntideva against Nussbaum many times, in my dissertation and elsewhere, and will continue to do so, because I think his side of the story doesn’t get nearly enough of a hearing; it’s worth listening to and there is a lot to learn from it. But in the end, I do not stand with him.

I first heard of monks and renouncers when I was quite young, visiting India with family, and I heard the explanation that people would follow this hard path to free themselves from sorrow. I expressed then what was probably my first real philosophical thought: “But if you free yourself from sorrow, you also free yourself from joy!” And this, to me, is a real problem. The classical Buddhist texts would say that even joy is itself sorrow – even sukha is dukkha – because joy comes to an end, because we inevitably lose the things we love, at death if not before. The inevitability of loss is indeed real, and terrible. But it is not clear to me that this loss must be so terrible. Does the pain of grief really outweigh the joys of togetherness? There is something to that idea – happiness researchers like Daniel Gilbert tell us we do lose more happiness from losses than we get from gains – but I don’t think it tells the whole story. Research in the same field also suggests that marriage (unlike childrearing) does do a lot to make you happy. And on death itself – so often emphasized in criticisms of material goods – the loss is itself not necessarily painful. Some of the wisest counsel on death comes from the Roman Epicurean Lucretius: true, when we die, we lose everything. But so what? We won’t be around to mourn the loss!

EDIT (1 November): My fiancée has asked me that her last name not be mentioned on this site, as she’s entering a critical phase of her career, and I post some fairly controversial opinions on the blog.

Savage’s arguments are startlingly poor. Abuse of power, a clear justification for opposing parent-child incest or incest between underage siblings, is hardly an issue between adult brothers and sisters. He says “older or more domineering siblings can hold enormous power over their brothers and sisters” – but so can older or more domineering spouses. And when he adds that the incest taboo “is not an attempt to deny a group of people any and all access to love and intimacy, but an attempt to direct sexual feelings toward healthier, more appropriate targets” – well, that’s exactly what anti-gay people say about their own position. Savage tries to add that people attracted to siblings can be attracted to others in a way that gays can’t; but while that might mean the homosexuality taboo’s effects are more unjust than the incest taboo’s, it still doesn’t give us any reason to believe the taboo against incest is healthy or valid in a way that the taboo against homosexuality is not. (Savage at least doesn’t try to bring up the really lame argument that incest leads to birth defects – on those grounds, we would need to prohibit people from having vaginal sex if they have heritable genetic disorders themselves!)

Now why does all this stuff about incest matter, philosophically? Because the incest taboo tends to be among our strongest preexisting moral beliefs (“moral intuitions”) – so much so that people like Savage will go to bizarre lengths to defend it in the face of all logic. Jonathan Haidt has done some great work exploring this phenomenon, noting how people will keep trying to come up with sillier and sillier reasons for opposing incest even when the obvious holes are pointed out.

Haidt shows us that there is one way to oppose consensual adult brother-sister incest consistently – and that’s to be the kind of conservative who also opposes homosexuality. Leon Kass, for example, likes to speak of the “wisdom of repugnance,” arguing that our disgust reactions are a good guide to ethical truth and we should be ready to follow them. But the same argument, of course, applies to homosexuality. This is what he calls a “conservative” view – one that admits all of our moral “intuitions,” including those based on disgust, rather than trying to reduce our moral views to harm, benefit and fairness.

By contrast, most defences of homosexuality require, as far as I can tell, that disgust reactions be ruled out of court as guides to ethical truth. I’m happy to say that; Martha Nussbaum has made similar points. But once you go to that point, you’re going to have a very hard time opposing incest. I don’t have a problem with this; I accept (as Haidt does) that there’s nothing wrong with consensual adult brother-sister incest. But it remains a problem for those who do want to hold on to “intuitions.”

Again no Sunday entry this week, as I’ll be out of town and away from the Internet.

Now the people who post anti-Laine messages online can’t personally be blamed for this violence, any more than Al Gore can be blamed for ecoterrorism; but the violence certainly illustrates the kind of passions the issue has aroused. I myself ran afoul of the scholars’ critics a number of times during my graduate career; the fact that I defended Western scholars while having an Indian name appeared to rankle them a lot, to the point that Malhotra called me a “sepoy-in-training” (and that was far from the worst insult I received).

The sad irony in all this for me is that I actually sympathize strongly with what I take to be the heart of the critics’ project: to get a better hearing for Indian traditions in the scholarly community. Readers of this blog, or my dissertation, will have seen that this is a major aim of my own scholarly work – to highlight the contributions of Asian, and especially Indian Buddhist, thought to our own understanding of the world.

A key problem is that these critics’ understanding of academic work is so limited that they do this cause more harm than good. A comment I’ve heard very often: “how would you feel if scholars started saying this stuff about Christianity?” To which Jeff Kripal’s response was effectively: um, you mean like these? (See footnote 18 at the reference.) He listed a dozen good introductions to psychoanalytic sexual studies of Jesus and Biblical texts off the top of his head, and mentioned accurately that such studies number in the hundreds – far outnumbering the relatively puny number of such studies made of anything that can be called Hindu.

The critics are right about one thing: Christianity gets a much more sympathetic hearing, overall, in Western academies than does Hinduism. But why is this? Is it, as they sometimes bizarrely claim, because scholars wouldn’t dare say negative things about Christianity in the way that they do about Hinduism? Absolutely not, as even the slightest bit of research on Christian studies would confirm. Scholars of religion make attacks on Christianity that are often stronger than anything said about Hinduism. (Kripal was actually quite sympathetic to Ramakrishna, and doesn’t see sexuality as diminishing mysticism.)

Rather, Hinduism gets a worse rap than Christianity overall because scholars are too timid, often for reasons of career self-preservation, to say all the positive things about Hinduism that they do about Christianity. There are countless well regarded academic programs, articles and other institutions that specialize in Christian theology – but it is an act of courage to acknowledge that one specializes in Buddhist or Hindu theology. (Even my own milder self-portrait – that I specialize in “constructive” Buddhist studies rather than “theology,” learning from the tradition critically and thinking with it as an outsider – has cost me at least one academic job. And that was just the job where the search committee told me this fact directly; I strongly suspect there were other cases where my positive view of Buddhism got me taken off the list as well, they just didn’t happen to tell me about it.)

There are encouraging signs here. I’m happy to see the formation of organizations like DANAM, the Dharma Association of North America, aimed explicitly at learning from Indian thought. (I’m also happy to have presented at a DANAM meeting in 2004.) DANAM is an initiative that may yet help Indian thought gain some academic respectability. The verbal (and physical) attacks thrown at Kripal and Laine, by contrast, serve only to embarrass it.

Cabezón probes the point that the present Dalai Lama, while defending the “full human rights” of gay people, nevertheless treats male homosexual sex (and oral and anal sex more generally) as a form of sexual misconduct. Understandably, the Dalai Lama’s claim startles and worries many Western Buddhist practitioners (surely not least Cabezón himself, whom I believe is himself an out gay man). Cabezón rightly, I think, tells readers that it’s not enough to dismiss such teachings as “un-Buddhist”; they have been found in Buddhist tradition for a long time. The Dalai Lama himself derives them from Tsong kha pa, one of the most respected thinkers in Tibetan tradition; Cabezón notes that one can find them in other Tibetan thinkers like Gam po pa. Cabezón argues – correctly, to my mind – that if one is to “take refuge in the Dhamma,” acknowledge oneself as a part of the tradition, then one must attempt to deal with the whole tradition, warts and all, not merely picking and choosing what one likes oneself. It’s entirely fair to try and modify the tradition (an action that Cabezón himself is trying to do, and that I have previously defended here as well), but one should do it with open eyes. Cabezón argues in particular (again rightly, in my view) that one needs to pay attention to the context in which such words were written – specifically, to ask why their writers wrote them.

Ascertaining a writer’s reason, of course, is typically far from an easy task; and it’s at this point that I think Cabezón goes awry. In asking why monastic writers forbade certain lay sexual practices, he claims that as monks, they would “read lay sexual ethics through the lens of monastic discipline, reading monastic norms (like where penises can and cannot be inserted) into lay behavioral codes…. The result was to make lay sexuality increasingly more restrictive and monastic-like.” (p. 68)

But this, I think, is an inadequate explanation, if we look at what’s actually in those monastic codes. It’s not just that the vinaya codes forbade heterosexual sex along with these other forms. Rather, Janet Gyatso has noted in her chapter on sex – rightly, I think – that at least in the early Pali vinaya, heterosexual vaginal sex is the paradigm of monastic sexual misconduct, “woman as fertile mate (with her particular kind of sexual organ) is the paradigmatic and most proscribed kind of partner…” (p. 281) For a male monk, on this line of reasoning, sex with a woman is a significantly worse crime than sex with a man. The reason, likely, is that heterosexual vaginal sex can produce children, which endanger the monk’s lifestyle and the monastic institution. The more other sexual acts resemble that one, the worse they are, because the more they symbolize the act which constitutes a rejection of the monkhood. (There’s more to Gyatso’s argument than this, but this is the part that’s most relevant to this discussion.)

If all this is so, then if Tsong kha pa or his Indian predecessors were imitating monastic codes as Cabezón claims, then they should have treated heterosexual sex as worse than homosexual sex. But they didn’t. As Cabezón notes, they allow heterosexual men five orgasms a night. Why is this?

I don’t know the answer to that question. I blog about it because I’m philosophically intrigued as to what the reasons could be. The most common philosophical objections to gay sex tend to be phrased in terms of natural law, à la Aquinas: nature (usually representing God) has designed us for heterosexuality, so we should not go against that plan. But I can’t imagine a Buddhist saying that – at least, not a South Asian Buddhist. Nature’s laws are what mire us in suffering; they’re what we’re trying to get away from. Natural law can’t be what’s going on here. So what is it?