It seems to me that the term “sensitivity,” as popularly used, implies at least two different concepts. They are related; in both cases, if one is asked “what is one sensitive to?”, the answer would likely be: emotion. But they are not the same; for one is generally good, the other generally bad.

Sensitivity in the good sense, it seems to me, involves being aware of emotion, being able to sense it. One can witness that slight tremble in a lower lip and know that it means unhappiness, see that those slightly narrowed eyes indicate disapproval, recognize that that particular turn of phrase indicates annoyance. This sort of sensitivity strikes me as a valuable skill. It allows one to be attentive to others, know the needs that they often fear expressing. One can be similarly sensitive to one’s own emotions – be attuned to them, aware of them as they arise. I think that something like this sort of sensitivity to oneself is expressed in the Buddhist virtue of mindfulness (smṛti), awareness of the currents of one’s thoughts and feelings. Such awareness can mean the difference between repressing and reducing anger, or other negative emotions – between leaving anger untouched in a way that leads to passive aggression, and dealing with it actively and openly in a way that actively minimizes it.

But the term “sensitivity” also typically implies something else. A “sensitive guy” is often easily affected by another’s emotion, takes it personally. This is, I would admit, a flaw of mine; I don’t react particularly well to others’ disapproval. And “sensitivity” in this second sense can be exacerbated by sensitivity in the first sense – for it’s much easier to react negatively to disapproval when you’re acutely aware that that disapproval is happening. This is why I find it very easy to get annoyed by subtle changes in tone of voice when they come from my wife or a close friend – when those same changes from a stranger would not affect me. It’s a source for the kinds of arguments within married couples that seem so bewildering to those outside the relationship (“Don’t give me that look! You always do this!”)

A traditionally masculine man is likely sensitive in neither of these ways. The second makes him easier to get along with because less easily offended; the first is a source of frustration to those who try to send him subtle signals. A nice person, on the other hand, is likely sensitive in both ways – considerate of emotion but solicitous of approval.

A significant part of classical Buddhism’s appeal to me is that it seems to get this distinction. Mindfulness toward emotion, at least one’s own, is a key Buddhist virtue; but saukumārya, “softness” or “fragility,” is disdained. Śāntideva insists that being soft in the face of suffering only allows that suffering to increase.

The larger passage in which Śāntideva’s claim appairs, within the Bodhicaryāvatāra chapter on patient endurance, is rhetorically striking: “A wise one should not disturb purity of mind even in suffering, for [the wise one is in] combat with the mental afflictions, and pain is easily obtained in war.” One might not expect military metaphors from an advocate of non-harming. But for Śāntideva our mental afflictions (kleśas) are so destructive that we must stamp them out, fight a battle against them in a way we would never do against a sentient being.

The metaphor takes me back to my earlier discussion of niceness (the SNAG looks almost identical to the nice guy). André Comte-Sponville addresses the importance of gentleness as a virtue, beginning his discussion thus: “Gentleness is a feminine virtue. That is why it is particularly pleasing in men.” And he urges us to “think of trains packed with soldiers” as an example of the ugly, and traditionally masculine, world that follows from a lack of gentleness. Now Śāntideva does not wish us to be gentle toward the mental afflictions, rather to root them out and fight them, be tough against them. We must not act like sensitive guys toward our craving and ignorance and even anger. But to fight them we must nevertheless be sensitive to their existence.

There is a fine line between gentleness and niceness; the latter too easily becomes a vice. Similarly, there is a fine line between the two concepts of sensitivity: In subtly discerning others’ emotions, one runs a risk of being too easily affected by those subtleties. It is in being affected by them that we most easily notice them. But to notice others’ subtle emotional shifts while remaining undisturbed by them – this is an ideal worth striving for.

“The… news?” We looked at each other.

“Oh my God, you haven’t heard! Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center. It’s collapsed.”

“Two planes!” I said. “Then it must have been deliberate.”

“Yeah, they think it’s Osama bin Laden.”

“Huh,” I said. “Wow.” I paused for a few seconds, saying “Wow” and “Huh” a few more times. Then I shrugged my shoulders and said “Well, let’s get back to moving.”

This was not, I would soon learn, the way most Americans reacted to the same news.

To me, a terrorist attack, like a hurricane or a famine, was a sad event that needed to be dealt with appropriately; it just wasn’t earth-shaking. In the previous decade alone, there had already been a successful international terrorist attack against the US in the African embassy bombings. There had already been an international terrorist attack on American soil when bin Laden had previously tried to bomb the World Trade Center. And there had already been a successful terrorist attack on American soil in Oklahoma City. Why then was it such a big surprise when there was a successful international terrorist attack on American soil? These things happen. Of course they are terrible tragedies, and we should try our best to stop them, but I didn’t see why such an event would be an earth-shattering surprise.

But the seemingly unanimous reaction across the US media, and even people we spoke to, was: this is the day that everything changed. And everything did indeed change – but because of people’s reactions to the event, more than the event itself. The media spoke of nothing else. The economy plunged into recession from the disruption of confidence. Suddenly 90% of the American population declared its approval for the malicious and ignorant George W. Bush. And brown-skinned foreigners were no longer welcome. According to FBI data, there was a 1600-percent spike in hate crimes against people perceived to be Muslim – whether or not they were. Balbir Singh Sodhi was murdered for being a Sikh and therefore looking like a Muslim. These things I saw on the news were confirmed in a smaller way by my personal experience. That week I called a taxi on the phone, waited a few minutes, and saw a cab from the company I called drive up to me on the street. As soon as the driver saw my brown-skinned body waiting for him, he kept going past me quickly, pulled into a parking lot, turned around and sped off the other way. It was one of the very few incidents in my lucky and privileged life where I have unambiguously felt myself to be a victim of racism.

This was the world of 9/12 – the darkest, lowest ebb to which American political culture has sunk in my living memory. What stung considerably worse was the way many Americans in the media would repeatedly describe it all as their country’s finest hour, the time to be held out for emulation. That claim still gets made now – and while one might expect that kind of behaviour from Glenn Beck, today one can hear no less than Barack Obama recalling a supposed spirit of generosity, compassion and unity at the time. If there was indeed an outpouring of generosity and compassion in 2001, I didn’t experience it. A spirit of unity was there indeed – in that nearly the whole country lining up to endorse the man who brought us the Iraq war, government-sanctioned torture, free environmental destruction and frivolous tax breaks for millionaires. It was this context that gave rise to the ’00s, the decade of powerlessness, when the country I lived in repeatedly expressed its confidence in the man I most hated.

But for that very reason, the ’00s were also a time for deep reflection for me – the time in which I became anti-political, when I realized the way politics so easily leads to a hatred that scars one’s heart, with the help of Śāntideva and a Goenka retreat. And while I am afraid that some of the mental scars I felt living in that time will not heal, I hope that some of them have.

English-speaking North Americans typically have a hard time understanding the ethnic conflicts that fill so many places in the rest of the world. It’s difficult for us to see why Serbs and Croats, say, would start slaughtering each other after long years of relative peace – sometimes even killing each other over events that happened hundreds of years ago. But it seems to me that in those days following September 2001, many Americans began acting in a very similar way. For all around in those days, even in liberal Cambridge, one could spot bumper stickers and T-shirts and posters speaking that most chilling of slogans: “9/11/01 – NEVER FORGET.”

It is a good thing to look at a tragic or horrific event and say “never again,” work to prevent similar events from happening in the future. But “never forget?” That is surely what Hutus told each other about Tutsis, the credo of the Irish Protestants and Catholics who continued fighting the Troubles. Remember the terrible things that they have done to us. Hold that horrible memory in your heart, so that you can preserve your hatred. Even if the war ends in the outside world, you must keep fighting it in your heart. Remember, and hate.

And yet. Ten years later, it is remarkable just how little of “9/11″ remains in American public consciousness, considering how ten years ago people seemed to speak of nothing else. The agenda of the “Tea Party” seems about as bad to me now as Bush’s did then, but that agenda has nothing whatever to do with terrorism; and the other side is fighting back. Even the media discussion of this major anniversary has so far been relatively restrained. The main visible legacy of the attacks is the ever-more-elaborate security ordeal one now faces to board an airplane; and while one might well debate how necessary or useful that procedure is, it at least has the stated purpose of preventing future attacks, not of preserving the memory of the past one.

Americans, in short, have started to forget. And it’s a wonderful thing. There’s a certain pragmatism that is characteristically American: let’s get on with business, let’s just get things done. That spirit seemed to be suspended in 2001, when everything ground to a halt – in stark contrast to the London bombings, where Brits carried on with business as usual. But it’s back. 9/12, at long last, is over.

Mostly, anyway. I know the memory of that era still lives on in my spirit – I’m still easily angered when I think about what the United States became in the early ’00s. The irony of writing a commemorative post to praise forgetting is not lost on me. But I hope that this post serves as something of a spiritual exercise, a sort of reminding, for me and for others who may have reacted to the ’00s USA in something like the way I did. I find it admirable that Americans have mostly left behind attempts to keep alive their memories of 9/11′s horrors. I want to try to do the same with my own memory of 9/12.

Jack Layton was the leader of the left-wing New Democratic Party, the only political party whose candidates I have ever voted for. He died of cancer on 22 August, at the relatively young age of 61 – at the peak of his career. Until Layton took over the NDP, the party had never received more than 44 of the roughly 300 seats in the Canadian Parliament. Earlier this year, under his leadership, the party earned over 100, most of those in Québec – where the party had never held more than a single seat before. It received more than twice as many seats as the third-place Liberals, a party which had governed Canada so often that it viewed itself as the “natural governing party.” And a great deal of this rapid rise derived from Layton’s personal popularity. His funeral has now been receiving coverage in Canada comparable to that of Princess Diana’s – at a time when it is held as a commonplace that people hate politicians and are fed up with them. His life and death moved a great many. My American wife, who a year ago didn’t know who Jack Layton was, was moved to tears watching the coverage of his memorials.

Now why am I going on about Jack Layton on a philosophy blog? Because Layton, as far as I can see, lived a tremendously good life. It’s not just that he managed to accomplish a great deal – both for the NDP across Canada and for the city of Toronto in his earlier days as a city councillor. Many politicians do that; that’s why one enters politics, if one has any decency. Rather, it’s that Layton accomplished all this while retaining both his integrity and his happiness – not the pleasure of triumphing over one’s enemies, but the joy of being engaged in a meaningful, intrinsically motivating activity. Even when Layton first took over the NDP and it still seemed a spent force, several commenters dubbed him “Smilin’ Jack,” for the facial expression that he wore even in the cut and thrust of a televised debate.

And Layton has made me think more about the flip side of the anti-political views I have often discussed here. The past decade, for me, was filled with anger, bile, hatred at the terrible things happening in the country around me. Buddhism of various kinds was deeply valuable for me because it saved me from politics. First, my youthful reading in Pali Buddhism provided a satisfying alternative to the misery of a life based in political utilitarianism. Then my dissertation work on Śāntideva helped remind me how one could justify a life consciously disregarding politics. And probably most importantly, the karmic redirection at my Goenka meditation retreat vividly pointed out the anger and hatred choking my soul during the Bush days.

In all these realms, what I found most valuable about Buddhism was that it provided an alternative to the hatred, bitterness, resentment and anger that to me had always characterized political engagement. And how could they not have, I thought, for a left-winger whose entire life was spent during the global ascent of the political right? Thus I’ve long harboured a deep suspicion toward the Engaged Buddhist movement, which combines Buddhism with political activism. It’s not that Engaged Buddhism is such a departure from historical Buddhist tradition (though in many ways I think it is); I’ve defended such departures and continue to do so. Rather, it’s that Engaged Buddhists can turn us away from one of the most valuable lessons that Buddhism has to offer, and the one it offered me.

Layton provided a different way. In his final days, when it seemed less likely that he would make it, he wrote a public letter that closed with these memorable words:

My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.

Here, the rejection of anger is itself the starting point for political activism. So too a rejection of fear – the fear I grew up with, the fear of Reagan’s military buildups, of Mulroney‘s budget cuts and trade agreements, of Bush’s incompetence and reckless spending and military adventurism. These words, these thoughts, these emotions are quite different from those of most of the activists I have known, perhaps above all my young self.

As for Engaged Buddhists: perhaps not surprisingly, the style of their activism varies greatly. The monastic serenity of Thich Nhat Hanh, while far removed from Jack Layton’s familial bonhomie, shares Layton’s generosity of spirit, insisting (as Goenka did) on compassion even towards one’s enemies, and attempting to live such a gentle worldview. On the other hand, I have seen many Engaged Buddhists express their politics with exactly the kind of contempt and anger that made me turn away from politics in the first place. It would be rude to name the names of those I have known personally, but as a public figure I will name Gary Snyder, whose 1969 Smokey the Bear Sutra is as antithetical as can be to anything genuinely Buddhist. The problem is not Snyder’s attempt to move Buddhists to environmental concern, nor his (creative and funny) use of the figure of Smokey the Bear. Rather, it is the poem’s shameful celebration of violence, war and hate:

Smokey the Bear will Illuminate those who would help him; but for those who would hinder or slander him… HE WILL PUT THEM OUT….. And if anyone is threatened by advertising, air pollution, television, or the police, they should chant SMOKEY THE BEAR’S WAR SPELL:

DROWN THEIR BUTTS

CRUSH THEIR BUTTS

DROWN THEIR BUTTS

CRUSH THEIR BUTTS

And SMOKEY THE BEAR will surely appear to put the enemy out with his vajra-shovel.

One could say here that Nhat Hanh is more committed to Buddhism than to engagement, and vice versa about Snyder; but the important thing is that Nhat Hanh, unlike Snyder, does make the combination possible, putting together political activism with a genuinely Buddhist compassion, gentleness and patient endurance. (I note that Layton remained a committed member of the liberal United Church of Canada, and regularly wrote about his commitments; how much of Layton’s generous temperament came from his faith, I can’t say.)

I continue to defend the politically disengaged life. I don’t think activism is a constitutive part of human well-being, and I remain suspicious of those who say that it is. But Jack Layton’s life was a beautiful reminder that political participation and good human lives are not mutually exclusive. Far from it. Layton’s life was a very good one, not merely in spite of his political engagement, but in many respects because of it.

Americans have typically greeted bin Laden’s death with jubilation and celebration, often waving American flags and chanting “U.S.A.” But some minority voices, such as Linton Weeks at NPR radio and Pamela Gerloff of the Huffington Post, have raised questions about this celebration. Is it really a good idea to celebrate a human death, even the death of one’s enemy?

This all makes a good occasion to revisit an earlier short post of mine, one of my favourites. The thing that affected me most at my one Goenka meditation retreat was not the meditation practice in general, but the closing practice of karmic redirection, because it specifically involved wishing George W. Bush well – and, more generally, wishing one’s enemies well. What applies to Bush here applies to bin Laden – the two men are of course enemies of each other, but I also consider them both enemies of mine.

A couple months ago, Thill questioned the value of Goenka’s practice – not over its efficacy, but over the values that underlie it. Thill asks: “Is wishing the enemy well actually a case of masochism since the enemy is a person who wants to harm us?… What if the enemy is a sadist whose happiness consists in seeing you suffer? Then, wishing this enemy happiness is tantamount to wishing one’s own suffering!”

As Jim Wilton rightly noted in his replies, wishing enemies well does not entail wishing them success in their aims, or wishing that their desires be fulfilled. This is as true of one’s friends as of one’s enemies. If my friend is addicted to crack cocaine, wishing him well does not mean that I wish he find more crack to smoke. Indeed I wish him the exact opposite. What he needs most is a change in the structure of his desires; he will probably be better off with the desires unfulfilled, as that would bring about the relevant change. And the same applies to people with evil or hateful aims: wishing them a good and happy life carries with it the wish that they improve and become better people. Thill’s comments here have assumed a simplistic understanding of happiness that equates it with the satisfaction of desire, when often what is needed for a long-term and stable happiness is the exact opposite.

In reply to Jim, Thill makes an important point: “note the element of self-interest in all this. In wishing all that for your enemy, you are also wishing a change in your enemy’s attitude towards you. It is all tantamount to wishing that he or she is in a condition in which he or she ceases to be your enemy!” That’s true. But even if one characterizes it as self-interested, one should notice what such wishing for one’s enemy’s virtue doesn’t imply: namely revenge. One wishes that, in spite of the bad things the enemy has done, he might still become better and happier, in the process ceasing to be an enemy. One does not take the enemy’s violent and painful death as an occasion for celebration.

Now let me clarify: this is not a call for pacifism. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, I sat in on a class at Harvard where the professor’s response to the attacks was “I think we should set up an exchange program, so that people in our countries can better understand each other.” (Students applauded.) I was stunned at the naïveté expressed there. We are not talking about people who express frustrating differences at the ballot box (like, say, Québec separatists – most of the time). We are talking about people who want to kill you, and have just killed several of your fellow countrymen simply because they were your fellow countrymen; they would do it to you if given the chance – like on an exchange program.

Gandhi, to whom Thill refers in this context, was considerably more sophisticated than said professor. Gandhi understood that his pacifism would cause great suffering, even many deaths, to his own side; but that it was worth it to achieve his goals in a morally upstanding way. It’s worth celebrating the success of Gandhi’s nonviolent methods against colonialism – and those of Martin Luther King, who derived many of his methods from Gandhi. But Gandhi and King were facing enemies who believed in justice over power, in the rule of law, in the value of human life. The goals of the British Empire and of the American South were to preserve an unjust and discriminatory social order which they believed to be benign. The goals of the Nazis, by contrast, were extermination. If an Indian stood fearlessly in front of a British soldier’s gun, the soldier would rightly fear the public repercussions of shooting. If a Jew stood fearlessly in front of a Nazi gun, she would merely save the Nazi the work of rounding her up. Bin Laden, in this respect, was far more akin to the Nazis – his attacks weren’t even to make demands, the destruction itself was the goal. (It is worth noting that Bush, however, would have been significantly more akin to the British Empire.) I agree with Thill on this much: one often must fight against one’s enemies, and sometimes this does require violence.

This violence is, however, regrettable. In war, killing another human being can be – and often is – the best course of action. But it is a tragic right action, and one should be aware of this fact. Thill claimed in another context: “Even if you want to kill a dog or a horse in order to put it out of misery and you do it skillfully, it would still be a gross distortion to describe this act as one which gives pleasure to the agent.” That is, one feels compassion, a painful emotion occasioned by another’s suffering. I discussed compassion myself in response to Thill’s post, noting that because we are not perfect or ideal people, we need remind ourselves that others’ pain is a bad thing (even if a hypothetical perfect person might need feel no regrets). The killing of an enemy, it seems to me, fits under exactly this class of action: necessary but regrettable, a proper occasion for compassion. Finding and punishing bin Laden was an important goal, and it is good that the US government under Obama succeeded in accomplishing this goal. And yet even so, it is not an occasion for celebration, but for sadness that it had to come to this.

I don’t know enough about Judaism to say how pervasive Soloveichik’s approach is in the tradition, or enough about the Tanakh to know how much it pervades there. But I find his view intriguing for a number of reasons, even if it is little more than Soloveichik’s own idiosyncrasy. First among these is the afterlife; for when I read Soloveichik’s article on this subject, I found it made me consider myself significantly more Buddhist.

Soloveichik believes a Christian is committed to saying that Hitler or Pol Pot, if they sincerely repented their evil deeds moments before death, they would then end up in heaven. Richard John Neuhaus, creator of First Things, suggested that perhaps “Hitler in heaven will be forever a little dog to whom we will benignly condescend. But he will be grateful for being there, and for not having received what he deserved,” just as “we will all be grateful for being there and for not having received what we deserve.” Such a view is unacceptable in Soloveichik’s Judaism. He instead presents a view from Maimonides, according to which “souls are never eternally punished in hell: the presence of the truly wicked is so intolerable to the Almighty that they never even experience an afterlife. Rather, they are, in the words of the Bible, ‘cut off’: after death, they just… disappear.” [ellipses are Soloveichik's]

The point got me thinking: what would I like to think about the afterlife of the wicked? What would seem to be a fair view, if I were designing the cosmos? And I thought: neither the Christian instant forgiveness, nor the (presumed) Jewish elimination, seemed right to me – and eternal damnation for those who don’t repent seemed even worse. Rather, I thought, I would want to see something more like the Buddhist view: they would get punishment for a long time, but eventually get a clean slate. I realized that said something about my own ethical views on the treatment of evildoers in this world: forgiveness is a worthwhile goal, but it has to be to some extent earned; a moment of repentance isn’t good enough.

The point helped me learn to pay more attention to the supernatural dimensions of the traditions I study. I have generally Yavanayāna sympathies myself – I don’t generally believe in the supernatural and tend to think most traditions would be better off without it. But it’s worth paying attention to any thinker’s view of the supernatural – whether the afterlife, God, or karma – because it will wind up telling you a lot about that thinker’s view of everything else.

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 extent to which he can recover, seems to me, depends on his faith. He’s said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So, my message to Tiger would be, ‘Tiger, turn your faith, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.”

Shortly afterwards, in an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor, Hume attempted to defend his comments with the claim that his point was about Christianity rather than about Buddhism:

Hume is, of course, wrong about Buddhism. While Buddhists typically don’t speak in terms of forgiveness and redemption, the rest of the claim is a complete non sequitur, as well as being false: Buddhism has helped countless people recover from committing past wrongs and become better. If Hume is anything other than a complete ignoramus, he does nothing to illustrate such a status in the first clip; the second demonstrates little more than an attempt to weasel out of criticism. (Others inform me that this combination of poor argument and non-argument may be typical of TV news in general and Fox News in particular, but I don’t watch TV news enough to know, and don’t care about it enough to find out. I’m interested in the particular case here.)

That said, I disagree with the way several Buddhist bloggers have reacted to Hume’s words. The Bitterroot Badger (a pseudonym, presumably) offers a good and reasoned criticism of Hume in his (her?) blog post itself; the problem comes into play with the letter to Fox News in the post’s second update. If you think sending a letter to correct misinformation on Fox News will have any positive effect, well, I have my doubts, but more power to you. But the Badger goes far further than merely correcting Hume’s poorly informed claim:

But the most troubling point, so beyond the pale, is for a purported journalist to use an American mass-media format to call for the conversion of someone from one religion to another. So, in the interest of fairness and balance, I’m writing to insist on an on-air apology from Mr. Hume to all the Buddhists he so casually disrespected on your program.

In what way, I must ask, are Hume’s words “beyond the pale”? Surely a call for conversion is the least troubling point of his speech, much less so than his ignorance. Televangelists use American mass media to call for conversion all the time. Is it “disrespectful” to Buddhists when Christians criticize Buddhist tradition? Well, most Christians consider it a duty to attempt to convert others, to spread what they take to be the good news of Jesus’s exclusive saving power. No doubt the Badger would criticize this aspect of Christianity – but if criticism equals disrespect, then the Badger is being similarly disrespectful to these Christians.

Perhaps the Badger is objecting merely because of Hume’s status as a “purported journalist,” in that Hume’s action deprives him of journalistic neutrality or objectivity. I don’t know much about Hume, but Wikipedia classifies him as a “commentator” and “political analyst” as well as a journalist; the O’Reilly bio line bills him as a “political analyst” as well. And the commentator’s or analyst’s role is not to be neutral, it’s to take a side.

The Badger’s criticisms are mild compared to those of Kyle at Progressive Buddhism (with whom I have previously sparred). In a post quoted on MSNBC, Kyle urges letters to Fox that “respectfully ask for the on air apology to all Buddhists or Mr.Hume’s dismissal from Fox News all together,” adding “we have come to far in this country and this world to stand idly by while an ignorant political mouthpiece spews hatred and intolerance.”

We have here one man expressing his sincerely held (if ignorant) beliefs that one tradition is more effective and another person should convert to it, without even the merest suggestion of compulsion by the state or an employer. We also have another man requesting that someone else be fired for expressing those very sincerely held beliefs. Which one of these is being intolerant?

The Badger’s post quotes a text that’s dear to my heart, the sixth chapter of Śāntideva’s Bodhicary?vat?ra. But I wish the two Buddhist bloggers had taken to heart the verse of that chapter that deals most directly with issues like this:

“But my anger about the abusing or destruction of images, st?pas or the true dharma is not justified, for the Buddhas are not distressed.” (BCA VI.64)

I spent almost the entire decade living in the United States, except for two three-month stints in Toronto in 2001 and India in 2005. It was not the ideal decade in which to do this, for the US of this decade was the US of George W. Bush: a man who opposed almost everything I had ever stood for, whether substantively (torture, wars of choice, gutting environmental regulations), procedurally (incompetent patronage appointments for natural disasters, governing unilaterally without respect for other branches of government) or symbolically (insisting on suits and ties in the White House). I had grown up despising Ronald Reagan, but Reagan now looked like a saint compared to W – Reagan at least was competent. And in the face of all this, Americans returned him to office in 2004.

For my many American friends – the vast majority of them left-wingers like me – this decade was a time of powerlessness and rage. But they at least could vote, could contribute to political campaigns, could do something about it. For me, the powerlessness was doubled, and so, therefore, was the rage.

But it was also a time that I spent learning about Buddhism, having first become interested in it a few years before. Especially there was Śāntideva, on whom I decided to write my dissertation – and above all his views on anger and patient endurance, which I really began to think about after teaching them in a seminar. In a decade of rage and powerlessness, this was a lifeline.

I spoke a while ago of how S.N. Goenka’s karmic redirection (at a retreat in late 2005) had a tremendous healing effect for me: meditate on wishing your enemies well, and for me that meant George W. Bush. But that was only the second step for me; the process had begun a little earlier, in a way that was equally transformative.

At the end of 2004, when Bush was elected (any “re-” is at least arguable), my rage was at its height. Daily I devoured the news on left-wing political blogs like Daily Kos and Atrios’s Eschaton, full of people who shared my anger. Then as 2005 began I flew to India on a Shastri fellowship to study Buddhist Sanskrit. I was away from the Internet for the first week or two, and print news focused on Indian issues, not American ones. When I got my Internet back a week or so later, the first thing I did was open up Atrios – and shut it back down immediately, before I’d reading the first sentence.

In that moment I had just come to realize Śāntideva’s wisdom – I had come to see how anger was poisoning my soul. For in that week without exposure to American politics, the anger had subsided, and a peace had come with it – but in reading a half-dozen words of Atrios’s, the flame rekindled in an instant. I didn’t want that anymore. I wanted to be happy and peaceful; and I could be that way by leaving politics behind.

So far the most controversial feature of my scholarly work, as it developed in the latter half of the decade, has been my skepticism toward politically Engaged Buddhism, and a defence of political quietism like Śāntideva’s. I suspect that this view has cost me academic jobs: I remember well one interview where the interviewers had loved my earlier Marxist work, but the temperature in the room dropped rapidly when I gave my job talk on Śāntideva’s anti-politics. But it would have been hard for me to do otherwise in the face of the decade’s events: Buddhism had saved me from politics. It showed me that a better life was possible without angry political engagement.

Now, finally, at the end of the decade, the political landscape is dramatically different. For the first time in my lifetime, Canada’s government is further right than the US’s, most recently embarrassing itself with a disgraceful obstructionism at the Copenhagen conference. I no longer feel a terrible anger at the government of the country I live in. And yet there remain plenty of opportunities for such anger: first at Canada’s government, and second that even the new US government has done so little. Barack Obama promised us hope: but nothing has been done about climate change, the US remains mired in an Afghanistan war that looks seemingly pointless, and we have yet to see whether he can deliver even on his signature issue of health care.

And yet, one can remain happy. I’ve previously described Buddhism as a critique of hope. A good life has less to do with external situations – of you, of your country, of the world – and more to do with a peace within. With the abandonment of hope in politics can come the abandonment of anger, and a new tranquility. So Obama’s government feels less like a letdown to me than it does to many of my fellows on the left. Is he making the world better, giving us reason to hope? Perhaps not. But he’s at least stopping it from getting significantly worse. After the past decade, that’s reason enough to celebrate.

I would still tend to agree with Śāntideva against that criticism; I don’t see the righteousness of any cause as justifying anger. But there’s another common modern criticism of Śāntideva’s position that I think has more force. Namely: is it even possible to get rid of anger, as Śāntideva recommends we do? Don’t you just wind up repressing it, so that it comes back as a passive aggression that’s ultimately more destructive than the original anger?

This is the kind of objection we would likely associate with Freud, though one sees versions of it in Nietzsche’s attacks on morality – moral blame and criticism, for Nietzsche, is its own form of passive aggression, a less healthy outlet for anger than angry words or blows. Does their objection defeat Śāntideva?

I think it’s possible to put the two together. Śāntideva is not criticizing only the outward manifestations of anger, after all. Anger expressed in the passive-aggressive’s sighs and eyerolls is still anger, just like anger expressed in screams and fists. Anger that has been repressed hasn’t really been eradicated in the way that Śāntideva advocates.

The question remains: is it possible to genuinely eradicate anger, as opposed to merely repressing it? I suspect that the answer may be no – in the context of the hubbub of everyday life. (Śāntideva tells us to be monks, and the monk’s single-minded focus on virtue may make it a more serious possibility.) Nevertheless, I think it’s still possible to reduce anger in a way that does not repress it. Sometimes anger really does go away without resurfacing – through talking it through, through understanding its causes, through meditative introspection (all practices that Śāntideva recommends). The trick is in distinguishing the two; and that may be something you can only learn through practice.

(I don’t think Śāntideva actually says any of this, mind you, and I wish he said more; but I do think this position is compatible with what he does say.)

Even though my stomach fluids and so on make great distress, I have no anger toward them. Why do I have anger toward sentient beings? Even their anger has a cause…. Certainly, all the different crimes and vices arise out of causes; we can’t find an independent one…. Therefore, when one sees an enemy or a friend doing unjust acts, one should think “it has causes,” and remain happy. (Bodhicary?vat?ra verses VI.22-33)

Goodman takes these passages at face value, reading Śāntideva as a determinist. Siderits instead calls Śāntideva a “paleo-compatibilist,” arguing that Śāntideva still makes room for “moral responsibility.” Siderits tries to derive this claim from a peculiar reading of BCA VI.32, one that adds a great deal of interpretation to the Sanskrit (and doesn’t appear to be supported by the Tibetan commentarial tradition either). But this isn’t the place to get into the details of interpreting the Sanskrit; I’m starting to write an article where I take that point on in more detail.

Here, instead, I want to call more attention to the implications of what I (with Goodman) take to be Śāntideva’s “hard determinism.” Unlike Siderits, I think that in many respects the whole idea of this passage is to reject the idea of moral responsibility and of blame, as part of his larger project of rejecting anger. What intrigues me here is that in some sense, Śāntideva may in some sense be rejecting morality per se.

Shyam Ranganathan‘s book argues for an “anger inclination thesis” of moral claims: that “moral statements are things that there is a tendency to get angry about, if the evaluative force of the statement is violated.” (pp. 53-4) Similarly, comparative studies of moral anthropology like those of Jonathan Haidt tend to find a close correlation between moral claims and the desire to punish. On such a view, given Śāntideva’s sweeping opposition to anger and his willingness to absolve blame and responsibility, it would seem that he is in a serious sense opposed to morality.

I think we can indeed see Śāntideva as opposing morality – on one very serious condition, which is that we make a sharp separation between morality and ethics, as Bernard Williams has done (and Haidt and Ranganathan do not do). Williams wants to take seriously Nietzsche’s withering critique of “morality,” while still (like Nietzsche) making claims about what is good and bad, claims that can reasonably be called ethical. And what strikes me here is the similarity between Śāntideva’s and Nietzsche’s critiques: “Wherever responsibilities are sought, it is usually the instinct of wanting to judge and punish which is at work.” (Twilight of the Idols, “The four great errors,” section 7) On ethical grounds – grounds of gentleness, of patience, of mercy, of resisting anger – one fights against morality, because of its tendency to anger and punishment.

Damien Keown (using very different definitions, of course) once proposed that Buddhism offers “morality without ethics.” In Śāntideva’s work I see the opposite: ethics without morality. And it strikes me as a very powerful ideal.

I’ll be out of town for about two weeks after today, with very spotty Internet access. Posting will be infrequent during that time, if I can manage it at all. I’ll try to find some time to reply to comments, though it might come slowly.