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.

It is also not surprising that ancient ethics, with one marginal exception, never develops anything like the related consequentialist idea of a maximizing model of rationality. If my ethical aim is to produce a good, or the best, state of affairs, then it is only rational to produce as much as possible of it. But ancient ethics does not aim at the production of good states of affairs, and so is not tempted to think that rationality should take the form of maximizing them. Rather, what I aim at is my living in a certain way, my making the best use of goods, and acting in some ways rather than others. None of these things can sensibly be maximized by the agent. Why would I want to maximize my acting courageously, for example? I aim at acting courageously when it is required. I have no need, normally, to produce as many dangerous situations as possible, in order to act bravely in them.

Why is this passage particularly striking in New York? Because as I discussed before, New York life is all about maximizing. You go to New York because you want the best of everything – for indeed, in New York you get the best of everything, at least if you can afford it. I like to talk about the great Thai food at a couple of restaurants back home in Boston, being as good as it is in Thailand, but these were blown away by a truly stunning Northeastern Thai restaurant that recently opened up in the East Village neighbourhood – the sauce on their laap was pure perfection. The Boston places are very good, but they can’t keep up. Nor is the Boston subway nearly as fast or as extensive; nor does a brand-new store selling cheap, quality, high-tech Japanese clothing open up all around the city. Nor are there browseable bookstores four storeys tall – one of which was the place where I purchased Annas’s book. And these are just examples I experienced on a four-day trip, with relatively limited funds – no attempt to, say, see Jon Stewart live.

But as I noted before, all this is just the problem. You go to New York because you want to have the best of everything – and that means you will always be wanting more. I remember, on one of my first trips to New York years ago, speaking to the New Yorker closest to me, who was already making an income likely higher than anything I’ll ever make – but spoke of his frustration that this was less than his MBA classmates. You don’t go to the place that has the best of everything if you’re the kind of person who is likely to be satisfied with the life you have. In the terms of Herbert Simon and Barry Schwartz, New Yorkers are maximizers rather than satisficers. And this, in turn, is probably why the people in this wonderland are the unhappiest in the United States.

Which brings me back to Julia Annas’s quote. Like Simon and Schwartz, she uses the language of “maximizing” – in her case, to describe what it is that “ancient philosophy” does not advocate. You can maximize your variety of food choices, but you can’t maximize courage. John Rawls popularized the highly unfortunate term perfectionism to describe virtue-focused ethical theories; it is an awful term, since virtue theories are in this respect the opposite of perfectionism in the usual sense of that word. Perfectionists, as we normally understand the term, are the consummate maximizers, never satisfied because they strive to make everything perfect, including themselves. But Annas is pointing out that the ancient Greeks and Romans from Aristotle onwards are very different from this: their philosophy cannot be put in terms of maximizing, not even the maximizing of virtue. Rather, try to live a flourishing life – a life with which you can be satisfied.

I think it’s important to stress and illustrate Annas’s point because it helps illustrate an alternative to consequentialism, the widespread view according to which the best actions can be defined in terms of bringing about the best total consequences. Consequentialism is the philosophy of maximizing, the worldview that built New York. (Philosophical utilitarianism, the most common variant of consequentialism, is a direct ancestor of modern economics.) The “ancient” view offers us something quite different, in a way that Rawls’s “perfectionism” concept obscures.

It’s important to have this alternative because consequentialism is so filled with problems. I think Schwartz and Simon point us to a paradox at the heart of consequentialism – at least of hedonistic forms of consequentialism, which is most of them. I’ve attempted to note this before: trying to maximize our own happiness is like trying to get to sleep; thinking about it gets in the way. But the same is true about maximizing others’ happiness. Happiness is there in the moment. At some point, you have to be happy with what you have now, and even with what others have now. Eventually, you are going to die; and if you keep trying to maximize, you are going to die unsatisfied. This was the point behind my rejection of utilitarianism: there’s a fundamental problem behind a life devoted to making others happy as possible, when doing so makes you unhappy yourself. If everybody lived the way you did, they would all fail at their goal.

It is true, as commenter Ethan C-F pointed out before, that we can realize a good for others that will come about after we’re gone, even if it too will eventually perish in the cosmos. But it seems to me that if we’re going to strive to benefit others, we need to see a good in the striving itself, in the doing of good works for others, and not in their consequences – successful or not. It is that attitude that allows us to be happy satisficers rather than miserable maximizers. I think that this point is what underlies the enduring popularity of the Bhagavad Gītā, the reason the pacifist Gandhi drew his inspiration from a text that advocates war: if you tie your happiness to the consequences of your actions, you will not be happy, and neither will anyone else who does so. I suspect that Jack Layton had figured out this lesson, which is why he was as inspiring as he was.

The Gītā’s worldview, to be sure, is quite different from Aristotle’s – all about adherence to an externally defined duty rather than the cultivation of flourishing. But they share the rejection of consequentialist maximizing; they are willing to let virtue be its own reward.

“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.

It’s a shame that the world lost such a great singer so early. And yet, the same louche excess that killed Winehouse was part of the appeal of her songs. Nobody wants to hear a soulful voice sing “I ate all my vegetables and flossed daily,” even if this idea is put in more poetic cadences.

Since her death I’ve been thinking about the 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil – who was not much older than Winehouse when she died herself. Weil’s most famous work Gravity and Grace is regularly quoted for this line: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.” Winehouse’s self-destruction was an evil in the wider sense of that word; one suspects it may have been gloomy and monotonous for her, as romantic and varied as it was for us. Though the evils she faced were real enough for her and those close to her, this nonfiction story may as well have been imaginary for most of us, the ones who knew her only as a voice and a moving image.

Weil’s quote offers an implicit criticism of Martha Nussbaum’s thesis, in “Transcending humanity,” which attacks the attempt to transcend everyday human life in part on the grounds that the transcendent life is less interesting. In Homer’s Odyssey, we readers want Odysseus to refuse the nymph Calypso’s offer of permanent bliss with her outside the human world, because the story wouldn’t be interesting if he took it:

What story would be left, if he made the other choice? Plato saw the answer clearly: no story at all, but only praises of the goodness of good gods and heroes. Unfortunately for Plato, readers brought up on Homer would be likely to find that prospect about as appealing as twenty-four books of description of Calypso’s unchanging island. Readers, too, want to be where the action is. (Love’s Knowledge 367)

What Nussbaum skirts around, though, is the distinction between the Odyssey’s story and those we might make for ourselves – between the lives we wish to hear about and the ones we wish to live. I think the Mahābhārata may be the greatest story ever told; but I would never wish the tragic fates of its heroes on myself or any of my loved ones. Those lives are filled with romantic and varied imaginary evils. To trudge through those evils every day would indeed be gloomy and barren.

The point in turn casts some doubt on the actively engaged human ideal that Nussbaum endorses – an ideal standing in contrast to the peaceful monastic life sought by Platonists like Augustine (as well as the immortality sought by so many Daoists). Nobody writes stories about a monk immersed in contemplative retreat. Unless that monk’s meditative journey is interrupted, he has to leave that retreat for a pilgrimage (the Journey to the West) or face inner demons (the Buddha under the bo tree) – that is, unless the monk faces imaginary evils. (Ironically enough, Simone Weil’s own life turned out to be fascinating, in part because she pushed the monastic ideal too far – seeking self-denial, she died young of a disease caused in part by starvation.) But this lack of interest does nothing to invalidate the monastic life. It doesn’t make for a good story, but maybe that’s a good thing.

By saying all this I’m expressing the counterpoint to the things I said earlier this year in commenting on Penelope Trunk: while there is something to be said for a life that’s interesting and not merely happy, there’s something else to be said for happiness too. For fictional characters, interest is much more important than happiness; for real people, that’s not so clear. Looking back recently at my own reasons for rejecting monasticism, I notice that it’s not about choosing interest over happiness, so much as choosing a different kind of happiness: active joy versus blissful contentment.

Amy Winehouse’s life was not long, and it does not sound to me like it was happy. But it was definitely interesting. The world is richer for its having taken place. I hope that’s what she wanted.

The example intrigues me because I’m the exact opposite. I’m in love with spicy international foods of all kinds, one of the most delightful and satisfying pleasures in my life (and one of the biggest reasons why I love being in New York). And music brings me a deep satisfaction – my worst days have often been brightened, even amid the traffic snarls of the Southeast Expressway, by hearing a beloved song. Children’s literature, on the other hand, does little for me – and so, I have to admit, do novels more generally. I have enjoyed a good number of novels in my day, but I don’t go out of my way for them.

The point is one I’ve had to think about whenever I read Martha Nussbaum’s work on philosophical form (in what probably remains her best known work, the first chapter of Love’s Knowledge.) Nussbaum’s argument, broadly speaking, is that literary form and style make implicit claims about what is important, in ways that can undercut themselves if we’re not careful. So Spinoza’s abstract, dispassionate universalistic rationalism, for example, is very well expressed in the geometric theorems of his Ethics. But the kind of philosophy that Nussbaum herself advocates – prioritizing particular human individuals, valuing strong emotions – is best expressed in literary forms that tell the stories of particular individuals and evoke emotions, and above all in novels. This claim made it more difficult for me to get deep into Nussbaum’s thought.

I’ve tried to engage with Nussbaum’s philosophy at some length, as in my dissertation. While reading up on her ideas I tried to read a novel she takes as exemplary, one she quotes and analyzes at length: Henry James’s The Golden Bowl. I clearly did not experience this novel the way Nussbaum did; the first phrase that came to my mind to describe the experience of reading it was “Chinese water torture.” James’s plodding Germanic sentences, combined with the novel’s slow pacing and relative lack of major events, made it an ordeal. A minor ordeal, to be sure – nothing like breaking a bone or losing a job – but not even remotely a pleasurable experience. Even philosophically, I got more out of Nussbaum’s commentary on James than I did out of James himself.

I’ve been thinking about related points in the past couple of weeks, during which I have been obsessed by the recent Canadian election and the resulting transformations in the country’s political landscape. I have several times expressed my suspicion of politics and how political concern can mess up a human life. And yet I love following politics – not even the ideas so much as the “horse race.” Since my teens I have been a “political junkie,” fascinated by seat counts and electoral systems. Am I then unhealthy?

The point here isn’t to go on about my personal likes and dislikes. Rather, it’s to raise a related question about the “Be Gretchen” idea itself. Suppose Nussbaum is right that one learns best about true philosophy from novels, but Rubin is also right that one is happiest when staying true to one’s own desires, loves, preferences. What then should someone do in my position of not particularly liking novels? Or, suppose Plato is right that the greatest of the arts is music – where does that leave Gretchen Rubin, when she doesn’t particularly care for it?

As with most philosophical questions, there probably isn’t a single, easily stated answer to be found here. This too strikes me as a matter of finding the virtuous mean between two vices – akin to the “meta-virtue” I previously discussed with respect to pessimism. To stay entirely in one’s comfort zone and never let one’s choice of pleasures be guided by those whose judgement one respects – this is a vice. It’s a sure way to remain mired in the situation described by Lorraine Besser-Jones in which virtue does not become pleasurable and pleasure does not become virtuous. At the same time, to ignore one’s own preferences and passions in the hopes of reaching an unrealistic ideal of what one should like – this too is a vice, one that sacrifices one’s happiness and likely one’s virtue as well. How does one negotiate the middle ground?

That question may need to be answered on a case-by-case basis. In each case, if one believes one should like something one doesn’t currently like, one might examine the reasons for liking that thing and see if there is an appropriate substitute. For example, Nussbaum recommends reading novels because they tell the stories of particular people, in such a way that the details of those people’s lives matter to us, and matter emotionally. But it is not only novels where one gets this exploration of character; one can find it in any medium that tells people’s stories at length and in depth. I have learned a lot about the subtleties of human personality in media as diverse as the Fox TV show King of the Hill and the teen webcomic Penny and Aggie – both of which derive their humour from richly drawn characters, people who feel real.

As for politics, I recently noted a solution that has worked for me: view it as a spectator sport, as a Sox fan does the World Series. Enjoy the excitement, but don’t get too wrapped up in the outcome. And yet that too has its pitfalls. In Canada, despite the ascendance of the Conservatives I oppose, I was elated to see the rise of the socialist NDP as the opposition, at the expense of the centrist Liberals and the separatist Bloc Québécois. In recent weeks on Facebook I was trash-talking the latter two, just as a fan of the Sox might against the Yankees – even after the election was over. An old friend implied that this might be hurtful to hear for those who now have to live under a Conservative majority government. When your health care is on the line, politics remains more than a spectator sport. Here as elsewhere, there are no easy answers.

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.

The understandable reactions to the essay’s pessimism nevertheless surprised me. For as I wrote it, I felt light, happy, life-affirming. Why? Well, the first part is easy. Rejecting Marx’s form of hope, political hope, is something I found essential to living a happy life. Right now I’m quite excited about tomorrow’s Canadian election – where the socialist NDP, which I’ve long supported, seems poised for an unprecedented breakthrough. But it is as a spectator sport, the excitement of a Boston fan seeing the Red Sox on the cusp of winning the World Series, where one shrugs and gets on with life if one’s favoured team turns out to lose as it has so many times in the past. If my happiness were tied to a real hope that politics in Canada or the US were going to get significantly better – as it was in my teens – I would be setting myself up for crushing disappointment. No, I continue to endorse at least some form of the anti-politics that I learned from Buddhism: we cannot let our well-being be tied too closely to the external goods of politics, things we cannot control. It is best to free ourselves from political hopes and focus on our own virtues, which we can control. I feel so much better ever since I’ve given up hope.

But there’s a problem here. This move from the external to the internal, from what we can’t control to what we can, is characteristic of the Hellenistic Greek philosophers, the Stoics and Epicureans. But Augustine’s perceptive critique is directed squarely at these Hellenistics: we cannot actually be as good as we think we can. The Stoics move us from hope about politics to hope about virtue. But in Augustine’s diagnosis, that hope too is bound to disappoint. Our bad habits persist; we enlist reason in the name of self-improvement, but too often it turns into rationalization. More than that, even virtue can be a matter more of luck than of effort. This is the main theme of John Rawls’s early Christian writings, which I have been finding more interesting and thought-provoking than the later political theory that made Rawls famous. Our patient endurance or our honesty themselves arise as a result of the biological and social circumstances that made them possible. The clearest example may be the case of Phineas Gage, whose former virtues of self-discipline and respectfulness nearly disappeared after he suffered brain damage. (Such a line of reasoning does suggest a denial of free will which sits uncomfortably with Rawls’s and Augustine’s other Christian convictions, but never mind: I am not concerned with whether the claim is Christian but with whether it is true.) We cannot put our hopes in our virtue, but only in God.

Now this kind of hope seems to propose a greater problem, require a greater pessimism, than does Marx’s. If politics is a problem with no solution, then fine, withdraw from politics and focus on ourselves. But what if our own virtue is a problem with no solution? If we can’t really be all that good, as Augustine says, but his God does not exist and would not deserve worship even if he did? How can such a conclusion lead us to anything but darkness and misery?

Looking back on it, I think that Buddhists provide a helpful answer, and that – as Jim Wilton argued – I may have counted the Buddhist critique of hope out too quickly. And the reason has to do with an important debate within Buddhist tradition, one that I don’t think I’ve explored enough yet: the debate between sudden and gradual liberation.

In traditional Indian Buddhism, my graduate area of study, liberation from suffering is a long, slow, painstaking, gradual process. It doesn’t just take years; it takes millennia, as you work to improve yourself across multiple rebirths to become a perfected person, an arhat or bodhisattva. But in East Asia, and above all in the Ch’an/Zen tradition – to which Jim’s comments about kōans refer – liberation comes suddenly, is experienced in a single moment. I had long been skeptical of the sudden-awakening school. It sounds too much like the worst hippie clichés of Yavanayāna Buddhism, where you don’t actually have to do anything, you can just be yourself as you are and you’ll be perfectly enlightened. It seemed to get you out of all the hard work of making yourself a better person.

And yet in contexts like the present one, I come to see the wisdom in the sudden-liberation approach. For one thing, it makes it a lot easier to take the unscientific concept of rebirth out of the picture. But more importantly, it reflects a psychological truth about the achievement of happiness: that as long as one’s attention is focused primarily on happiness, one will not have it. The same is true of several virtues: if one strives to be an exemplar of perfect humility, one will not be very humble. The sleep study noted by James Maas, demonstrating that it’s harder to fall asleep when you’re trying to do so, seems to me like it can be analogically extended to a lot of noble human goals. At some point along the path, you have to stop trying and just be.

All this, I think, is why Jim effectively defended my earlier characterization of Buddhism as a critique of hope, and rejected my later presentation of the Third Noble Truth as a form of hope, the hope of nirvana. At some point along the path, a good Buddhist stops hoping; as long as there’s hope, there’s attachment and not liberation.

And I think that Jim – with the East Asian Buddhist traditions – thereby puts his finger on the reason I felt so happy after that pessimistic post, better than I had myself. The last sentence of the post struck me as upbeat then and still does: “All we can do is keep stumbling through the evils of life – we can pursue the difficult, but worthy and surmountable, task of finding enough joy, truth and interest in life to make it well worth living.” What I was trying to get at is a transition from the future to the present – an ability to enjoy life and be good just as things are, even in the face of one’s own insurmountable imperfections.

To say that is to risk the very pitfall that made me so suspicious of sudden liberation in the first place: thinking that one is already great just as one is and doesn’t need any improving, leaving one’s weaknesses and problems to fester. But then it seems to me that finding this balance is its own kind of virtue – and like any other virtue, it is a mean between two vices. I don’t know what to call it, but it seems like a sort of meta-virtue: the ability to maintain the effort at cultivating one’s own virtue, while still remaining immersed in the moment of the virtues one already has.

Meanwhile, a couple of related recent American events you might not have heard of. In Maine, newly elected Republican governor Paul LePage has ordered the removal of a mural in the state Department of Labour depicting the state’s labour history, along with the renaming of conference rooms named after César Chávez and other labour organizers. The governor’s spokesman proclaimed that these symbols are “not in keeping with the department’s pro-business goals.” At the symbolic level too, the government has explicitly picked a side in a class struggle.

The same battles come up in the federal government, where House Republicans have prepared a measure to deny food stamps – the main US provision to ensure people do not starve – to striking workers. If you fight for better labour conditions, the logic appears to go, you deserve to die hungry. Some irony that all this is taking place around the 100th anniversary of the industrial disaster that helped create labour laws and labour movement in the US. (Keep in mind, too, that unions are already extraordinarily weak in the US; less than 10% of private-sector employees belong to a union, and even in the public sector the number is less than 40%.)

It has been hard for me to go through the past couple of weeks without hearing the voice of Karl Marx saying “I told you so”: class struggles are real, and the government takes the side of the property owners. It’s true that these active gratuitous assaults on labour movement are all perpetrated by Republicans, but they are just further assaults on unions that were already weakened with Democratic complicity. (Republicans have recently taken on the sadly amusing habit of calling Obama a “socialist.” Would that it were so.) I haven’t been a Marxist for a long time, but this year’s events go a long way toward making me one – not just in terms of the problem of alienation, where I’ve already discussed my agreement with Marx, but also with respect to his more central issue of class conflict.

But what I also said about Marx before still applies: he was wrong about the future. There was and will be no new preferable order. The Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson quoted an anonymous “someone” as having said “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”; as it turns out, Jameson himself had said something like this in an earlier work. I think it’s hard to dispute this quote. There is a varied number of disasters, some narrowly averted, that could mean the end of humanity: global nuclear war, emerging pandemic, change to the natural environment that comes too quickly for us to stop. But humanity going on after capitalism? It’s not entirely unthinkable, but at this point it’s very difficult to envision what that would look like, when the only really serious attempt at an alternative not only failed, but destroyed millions of lives and families along the way.

Just as before, I think there’s a close parallel between Marxism and Christianity – though rather than Jesus and the early Christians, I’m thinking here of probably the most profound and influential Christian thinker, Augustine. What Marx and Augustine share, to use Greek medical terms, is a combination of penetrating diagnosis and wrong prognosis. Augustine is quite right to point out his central “chastened intellectualist” theme of human weakness: when we make attempts at self-improvement, the persistence of our bad habits shows us just how hard it is to be better, even how much we rationalize the bad habits to ourselves. When we place our individual weakness beside the terrible crimes committed by other human beings – some of the worst having been committed in Marx’s own name – it is easy to see the power of Augustine’s mistrust of human virtue, like Marx’s insights into class conflict and alienation.

Yet Augustine’s way forward is no better than Marx’s. In his eyes, our troubles will be resolved by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ if we open ourselves up to his grace, allowing ourselves a perfectly virtuous and happy life after death. But I’ve noted before that I don’t see any reason to believe in such a thing; and even if I did, I would have significant objections to worshipping the God he describes, who damns human beings to eternal torment.

Augustine and Marx, then, both insightfully diagnose a problem but leave us without a good solution. I used to think Buddhism offered us a good way out of this dilemma, through a critique of hope: accept that the world is not as it should be, and just deal with reducing your suffering. But then Buddhists have their own kind of hope, which I also find wrong-headed: the idea that suffering can be entirely eliminated, that we can reach a state of nirvana. In Buddhism too, we face a powerful and perceptive diagnosis in the Second Noble Truth, with a misinformed prognosis in the Third.

What the poor prognoses of Marx, Augustine and the Pali suttas all share, indeed, is hope, optimism: an optimism entirely uncalled for given their pessimistic diagnoses. There isn’t going to be a new social order, and we’re going to remain surrounded by a suffering that ends in death. Nor, as the Stoics and Epicureans that Augustine criticized might think, will we be able to make ourselves good enough to transcend our evil or our suffering. No, things don’t look good for humans, and there’s no straightforward solution in sight. All we can do is keep stumbling through the evils of life – we can pursue the difficult, but worthy and surmountable, task of finding enough joy, truth and interest in life to make it well worth living.

because: a manifesto