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.

It’s easy, though, to misinterpret the idea of virtue as a mean. Virtue is not merely the middle ground. It is not a combination or a compromise between two vices. Virtue requires that the middle ground one occupy be specifically a good middle ground. It needs, essentially, to preserve what is best in each vice – to be a synthesis rather than a compromise.

On the virtue of justice, for example, a lack of justice may be expressed in a greedy sense of entitlement, claiming things that are not one’s own. As I expressed before, against the criticisms of Grotius, there may also be an excess with respect to justice, of not feeling entitled to things that really are one’s own (an unhealthy submissiveness that is often taught to women). But it is possible to combine these two in an unhealthy way, and I think this is the pattern among narcissistic personalities. Contemporary psychoanalyst Andrew Morrison claims that “shame and narcissism inform each other”: a narcissist can veer between experiencing himself as matching a false and overinflated ideal, and as contemptibly vile for falling short of that ideal; between believing himself entitled to everything and believing herself deserving nothing. Submissiveness and sense of overentitlement, the excess and the lack, can coexist in the same person, both getting in the way of justice. This is a middle ground between simple submissiveness and simple overentitlement, but it is vicious, not virtuous.

I noted the point briefly in the final chapter of my dissertation. I had presented an earlier part of the dissertation at the AAR conference, examining the questions at issue between Śāntideva and Martha Nussbaum on external goods: Śāntideva telling us that having possessions or close relationships will produce dangerous attachments, and Nussbaum saying that they are essential to a flourishing life.

As a respondent to my presentation, Mark Berkson had suggested a middle ground between their two views: one could live with the outward form of Nussbaumian flourishing — living in the world with property, human relationships, political participation — while inwardly renouncing all attachment to them, as is advocated in the Bhagavad Gītā. But I responded: this is indeed a middle ground, a compromise, but it is not a synthesis. Without further justification, at least, the Gītā approach does not answer the concerns of either Śāntideva or Nussbaum. As I said in the dissertation:

Nussbaum sees not merely one’s outward relationships, but one’s inner engagement and attachment, as central to the good life. Something fundamentally human is lost if one goes through those relationships like a play-actor, as surely as if one renounced them entirely for the monastic life. So too, Śāntideva’s ethical revaluation warns us of the dangers posed by external objects themselves, at least if we are not sufficiently advanced. If we did try to go through the trappings of a worldly life in this way, it would affect our minds, bringing us back into the attachment and anger we tried to escape.

One could argue, then, that the life promoted by the Gītā satisfies neither concern: one does not experience the joys of a Nussbaumian life passionately tied to attachments, but also doesn’t get Śāntidevan serenity because the attachments creep back in when one doesn’t want them to. It is the worst of both worlds, and not the best. I’m not arguing here that the Gītā’s proposed life actually is this bad (although I do find that view plausible), merely noting why a compromise is not good enough without being synthesis: one must make sure that the mean is virtuous and not vicious.

Whether one is putting together different worldviews or trying to navigate between the vices that prevent one from being a better person, one must constantly be aware that merely putting two things together or inhabiting two worlds is not enough. If one does not make sure to get the best of both worlds, one may easily end up with the worst. I am reminded of the (possibly apocryphal) exchange between an aged George Bernard Shaw and a beautiful young dancer. The dancer told him they should have children together: “Imagine a child with my body and your brain!” “Yes,” Shaw demurred, “but what if it had my body and your brain?”

It’s a great question, and one I’ve asked myself a number of times. Being anti-political is a position I’ve flirted with a lot, especially over the course of writing my dissertation, and my personal views are closely entangled with the ideas I address there. In many respects I see the dissertation’s main contribution to Śāntideva scholarship as pointing out the strongly anti-political nature of Śāntideva’s thought, and the underlying reasons for his anti-politics. Śāntideva is, I think, often thought of as a great friend to the Engaged Buddhist program of Buddhist political activism, since he is probably best known as the favourite thinker of that noted activist Tenzin Gyatso, the present (fourteenth) Dalai Lama; I claimed in the dissertation that such a placing of Śāntideva is mistaken.

The dissertation explains this point in great detail (mostly in its fourth, fifth and seventh chapters), but I haven’t yet said much about it on the blog, and I probably should. Briefly: Śāntideva says very little about political action, but what he does say (in the Śikṣā Samuccaya) indicates that he rejects it. He gives a list of genres of information that are not worth knowing or learning about, and includes law and political science (daṇḍanīti) on this list. When he gives advice to kings, it is that they give their kingdoms away.

Why is this? I argue that it’s because Śāntideva rejects or devalues most of what Martha Nussbaum (following Aristotle) would call “external goods”: things not under our control which we would normally want, including relationships, social status and (above all) material goods. For him these things are neutral at best, and most often actively harmful (as I discussed here.) Śāntideva does say that one should give these things to others – one of the reasons why Engaged Buddhists like Stephen Jenkins see him as arguing for political action on behalf of the poor. But Śāntideva’s reasoning for giving things to others, I argue, is not that they benefit from possessing the gift – indeed, they may be harmed. But such harm is worth it when they receive a gift from a bodhisattva, because it produces esteem (śraddhā) toward the bodhisattva – it makes the recipient more likely to listen to the bodhisattva’s dharma teaching. A crucial feature of this gift encounter, however, is that the gift come directly from a bodhisattva. Donations from a government or NGO will not do the trick. And this, I argue, is why Śāntideva does not care about governments; action to help others in politics has no genuinely beneficial effect.

I came to these ideas slowly. When I first presented on Śāntideva at a graduate student workshop, I was excited to talk about what Śāntideva could teach us in a contemporary context; a respondent claimed that if he urged political quietism, we could not be able to accept such a worldview in the present age. (I mentioned this response in this early post.) I was a little cowed by this response at first, and it took me a while to figure out an appropriate reply: but then I realized that that political quietism was, in many respects, itself one of the most important things that Śāntideva has to teach us. Whether we agree or disagree with it, his anti-politics is a profound and impeccably Buddhist idea, one that challenges us in a way we must think about and respond to.

For me, it was intoxicating to discover such an idea at a time when I needed to get away from politics, when caring about politics brought nothing but pain. I felt validated in my search for a better, happier life outside politics. The seventh chapter of the dissertation juxtaposed Śāntideva’s ideas against Nussbaum’s more politically charged philosophy, effectively defending Śāntideva against Nussbaum’s objections.

What the dissertation did not do was take up my own substantive, constructive position on the question at hand – for such constructive positions are largely frowned upon, if not scowled upon, in academic religious studies. But such a lack of attention to constructive views allowed me to get off the hook too easily, to defend Śāntideva’s anti-politics without thinking too hard about whether I really believed it.

For in the end I don’t reject external goods; on that basic question I do stand closer to Nussbaum than to Śāntideva. Again, if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have got married; the logical practical conclusion from Śāntideva’s thought is the monasticism which he himself practised. Some external goods are genuinely good. They can indeed be negative, as in the case of the hedonic treadmill; and in some cases their absence can strengthen us, as Śāntideva also claims and as I noted in an earlier post. But I do not think that this negativity is the norm – especially at the lower end of the social ladder, where governments are most likely to direct their help. External goods are often genuine goods, especially when they are what we often call “basic needs.”

In short, Śāntideva’s position on external goods – and therefore on political action – cannot be mine. So where do I stand? Well, I haven’t settled that yet. This is part of the reason I’ve lately been trying to explore the concept of altruism: the value of politics depends a lot on who we are ultimately trying to benefit. Should we aim for an enlightened self-interest, for the good of those close to us or whom we identify with, or universally for the good of all? Śāntideva takes the latter, universal position, in no uncertain terms. But I suspect he may be only able to do this because he devalues external goods, because the good of all is identified as their spiritual liberation. To value external goods and still seek the good of all is basically to be a utilitarian, a terribly frustrating and perhaps ultimately counterproductive way of life.

I discussed this claim once before but want to return to it. The claim is, I think, overstated for rhetorical effect. Even in Śāntideva’s eyes, merely desiring others’ happiness will not make you happy – especially if you are misguided about the causes of their happiness, so that you try only to provide them with external goods rather than addressing the inner mental causes of their suffering. And yet from my experience, I would still say the claim is more true than not. There’s something self-defeating about searching after one’s own happiness itself. If one keeps one’s eye on this goal above all, one becomes too acutely aware of failures at it, too focused on one’s lack of happiness – “I’m trying so hard to be happy and yet I’m not; something must be wrong with me” – and the goal is inhibited. (In his book Power Sleep, psychologist James Maas noted a similar problem with respect to sleep: subjects offered $20 if they fell asleep quickly would take longer to fall asleep than subjects who were not offered the money.)

This “paradox of hedonism” (as Peter Railton calls it) is what comes to my mind when I hear Jesus’s paradox expressed in the books of Matthew and Luke: “Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.” The alternative proffered to seeking one’s own life and happiness is different – following Jesus rather than seeking others’ happiness – but there is a commonality in the importance of looking to something bigger than oneself.

All this is another of the points that lead me to a foundational ethical point that I’ve been coming to more and more (and somewhat grudgingly): there must be more to the proper end of life than pleasure, and more even than happiness itself. One could argue (as Neil Sinhababu and other utilitarians indeed do) that a focus on others’ happiness is enough, but it strikes me that such an approach is still vulnerable to the paradox. Too much focus on others’ happiness can lead one to a despair just like that found when one focuses on one’s own happiness: one sees the billion miserable people out there, and seeing the fact only increases their number to a billion and one. (This problem was at the heart of my own conversion away from utilitarianism.)

As I noted before, Railton tries to save utilitarianism (or consequentialism more generally) by distinguishing between truth and justification: it could still be true that the only proper purpose of life is to be happy or to make others happy, but that for that very reason one is not justified in believing it is so. But I have a hard time accepting such a view. I’m reminded of Freud’s comment on a very similar viewpoint advocating useful fictions, Hans Vaihinger’s philosophy of the “as if”: Freud said that its demand “is one only a philosopher could put forward.” While ordinary unphilosophical people do indeed believe false things all the time, they usually do so merely because they haven’t thought about them; once they actually understand that something is false, that is sufficient reason for them to stop believing it. And we philosophers face a similar problem in the opposite direction: Railton’s or Vaihinger’s views seem to require that we not think too hard about our own philosophy lest we stop (or start!) believing it, which would appear to be the antithesis of what a philosopher does. Whether we’re philosophical or not, the call to deliberately believe false things seems to ring hollow. And therefore, for the reasons above, it seems to me that we can’t reasonably accept happiness as the sole aim of life.

Lately I’ve slowly been making my way through Philosophy and Freedom, a collection of essays by and about the neglected Canadian Hegelian philosopher James Doull (rhymes with towel). Doull, like Socrates or George Herbert Mead, never published a book during his lifetime; his reputation derives almost entirely from being spread by his students and their students, mostly through the classics department at Dalhousie University and the great-books program at its affiliated University of King’s College. (I myself know Doull’s work only because a lifelong friend of mine is one of Doull’s “grand-pupils,” a devoted student of Doull’s students at Dalhousie and King’s.)

Doull’s work is difficult, both in the density of its prose and in the wide range of the texts it expects familiarity with – the chapter on ancient Greece covers not only philosophy but the full range of history, tragedy and comedy, viewing their scope all together through a Hegelian philosophical lens. Moreover, because Doull’s concerns are so wide-ranging, a study of his work does not immediately repay the reader with direct application to particular philosophical questions and problems. If ever there was a big-picture thinker it is this man, at least when it comes to Western philosophical traditions.

And yet studying Doull closely has ultimately paid off for me in thinking about the big question I’ve addressed above. I realize that this question of ethical motivation has, in its way, been central to Western philosophical tradition, not merely in the works of individual thinkers but through its history. Not all of what follows is said directly in Doull’s work, but it is inspired by it, and I think it is faithful to his spirit based on conversations with Doullian friends.

I’ve seen the point now particularly with reference to the book of Ecclesiastes, which Doull refers to and which I recently taught in my intro religion class at Stonehill. Ecclesiastes paints a picture of the world that differs greatly from more familiar books of the Hebrew Bible. The very message of the book of Exodus, for example, seems to be that God acts in history, that his presence in our lives is real and palpable, working his miracle everywhere one turns, bringing about cosmic justice for his chosen people if not others. Ecclesiastes, by contrast, gives us a remote and distant God, in a world where the wicked triumph and the unjust perish. There isn’t even an afterlife for the expectation of justice; all the dead go to sheol, “the grave” where they know nothing. It’s a moving text, and one which seems to fit the experience of our post-Darwinian age where God’s very existence seems questionable at best.

And yet. In the midst of this God-bereft world, where there is no justice and no reward for virtue, Ecclesiastes repeatedly tells us: “fear God and keep his commandments.” It seems, in its way, to be the paradigm of ethical externalism. One wants to ask: why? No reward awaits us for keeping God’s commandments, in this world or the next. And the approach to knowledge, if relatively untheorized, is similarly externalist: the truth is out there in God, whether we know it or not.

A couple centuries before this, Doull notes, the Sophists had innovated by presenting the opposite, internalist, position. Man is the measure of all things; everything, ethical and epistemological, is up to us. But this view runs into the problems I have addressed in recent posts about truth and contradiction. If we have no standards beyond our existing motivations, we have no grounds on which to change others’ behaviour, or our own.

For Doull, it is Aristotle who first resolves this problem, above all in the theory of eudaimonia – a human flourishing constituted by both virtue and happiness. But Doull agrees with the points Alasdair MacIntyre regularly makes about Aristotle – that this flourishing was embedded in the political context of the Greek polis, a community formed around shared ethical standards and practices. When the polis degenerated into a large and impersonal empire, virtue could no longer count on reward; so virtue and happiness became separated in the Stoics and Epicureans, who would define happiness entirely in terms of virtue (the Stoics) or vice versa (the Epicureans). But for both of them, as for Aristotle, internalism and externalism (in the sense of my previous post) remain united: our own motivations and the absolute ethical principle end up taking us to the same place. They could make this move because, unlike Aristotle, they dismissed the importance of external goods: our internal states were all that mattered. Sure, virtue doesn’t get you a public reward, but it gets you the internal state of undisturbed peace.

But the Stoics and Epicureans are in tension not only with each other – is virtue or happiness really the more important one? – but with the world itself. Our virtue is often lacking in spite of our best efforts of will, not enough to make us really happy; and some virtues (like friendship) seem constituted by external conditions that make them possible. This is part of the criticism that Martha Nussbaum has recently made of these Hellenistic thinkers, on quasi-Aristotelian grounds; but historically, the figure who made the point stick, on quite different grounds, was (Saint) Augustine – with help from the Jewish worldview that gave rise to Ecclesiastes.

Augustine accepts what seems like the commonsense view that virtue and happiness are not analytically equivalent. He notes that in this world, so full of suffering and misfortune, virtue is not rewarded with happiness; but further, neither real virtue nor real happiness can be adequately reached in this world, where humans are frail enough that they fall far short of the virtue and happiness they seek. Augustine’s solution is to put it all off into the next world, a world for which we can hope after death.

I haven’t yet been able to follow Doull’s story past this point. Which is something of a shame, for there’s an obvious problem with the resolution in Augustine’s time: we have no more evidence to believe in an afterlife of reward than we have to believe the virtuous are rewarded in this life. Wishful thinking is not an adequate basis on which to build a life. Neither is Pascal’s Wager, the argument that we should believe in God and follow his law just in case there is an afterlife; for it could just as easily be that the afterlife rewards vice. (MacIntyre in God, Philosophy, Universities goes so far as to say he doesn’t think Pascal himself believed the wager was a good argument.)

What appeals to me in all of this is a spirit that, in at least one respect, seems the opposite of analytic philosophy as normally practised. One could call Doull’s work synthetic philosophy: rather than cutting ideas up into ever smaller pieces, he puts them together. It’s an approach that I suspect leads ultimately to conclusions that are both truer and more satisfying. This isn’t to bash analytic philosophy or say there’s no place for it; but I do welcome a view that takes this larger scope.

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.

1. It involves a lot of lying and deception practiced on credulous people.
2. It tends to foster greed in children and contributes to their false impression that one’s happiness is determined by one’s material possessions.
3. In telling children that the quantity and quality of one’s gifts are a function of one’s behavior, when actually they are a function of one’s socio-economic standing and parental temperament, it induces moral complacency in well-off children and false feelings of moral inferiority in less well-off children.

Now, I am no parent, and (as I’ve noted before) have no plans to be one; so my reflections here are not grounded in personal experience, and I urge parents and potential parents to take them with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, childrearing is a central part of life for most people, and our approach to it tells us a lot about what we value, so I don’t expect this to be the last time I dip my toes into these particular muddy waters.

The first of these objections appears the most radical. It would seem to suggest that telling stories is a form of lying or deception. Such a view is hardly without philosophical precedent; we can recall Plato banishing the poets from the ideal city. But in Plato’s work this is clearly understood to be a radical approach, of a piece with his other radical ideas about childrearing (especially, that children should be raised in common rather than by famillies). Do we really want to raise children without stories, without fictions – at least, without fictions that are clearly marked as such? One can tell children stories they will understand, long before they understand the difference between myth and reality. Is this a lie? Perhaps, but one shudders before the implications of an account of truth so unflinching and demanding that it requires all children’s stories be clearly marked as false and fictional. The worldview at issue sounds rather like Dickens’s unsympathetic Mr. Gradgrind; the burden of proof would seem to be on whoever would count such a cold way of life admirable.

White’s second objection is close to my heart, since I’m enthusiastic about Buddhist critiques of wealth. The objection would seem to apply not merely to the Santa myth, but to Christmas gift-giving in general: we will make our children better and happier people if we don’t train them to value material goods. While I’m sympathetic to the position, the advice seems to overestimate the influence that single decisions can have on a child’s emotional development. If a parent withholds Christmas gifts and gives a child only the bare necessities, will that teach the child Buddhist/Epicurean moderation, or will it teach the reverse? My empirically uninformed money is on the latter: a child raised in relative poverty will crave possessions far more, because she will not have had the opportunity to learn the fleeting nature of wealth’s pleasures (let alone the hedonic treadmill they might put you on). I suspect this is a reason the historical Buddha was (said to be) a prince: we do better to find out for ourselves that wealth is inessential (or worse) for our happiness and well-being.

The third objection is very Rawlsian, in a way particularly close to the heart of the young Rawls but in keeping with Rawls’s mature work as well: we deserve nothing, our station in life is determined primarily by external factors. Now while the point seems largely true to me on a macro level, it seems like it does not need to be true at a micro level. Within the household, parents are quite capable of setting up an environment in which children are rewarded with material goods for acting well. (It would seem important, however, that the parents follow through with such rewards and the denial of the rewards, holding them back when children have been genuinely “naughty”; if they’re not prepared to do so, it may not be appropriate to spread the Santa myth.) I think here of Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of goods internal and external to practices, an account which is also central to his more general account of virtue (at least in After Virtue). It is no coincidence that he introduces the distinction with a discussion of childrearing: specifically, how to teach an intelligent child to play chess when he or she does not want to play. At first, one offers the child some candy if she wins, and then her motivation is always to win, so that the child will cheat if she can.

But, so we may hope, there will come a time when the child will find in those goods specific to chess, in the achievement of a certain highly particular kind of analytical skill, strategic imagination and competitive intensity, a new set of reasons, reasons now not just for winning on a particular occasion, but for trying to excel in whatever way the game of chess demands. Now if the child cheats, he or she will be defeating not me, but himself or herself. (After Virtue, p. 188)

Chess, for MacIntyre, is one example of a social practice, and virtues are those qualities that allow us to achieve goods internal to practices – such as the good of enjoying the challenge of chess, for its own sake. One teaches children to be virtuous first through external motivation, such as candy, in the hope and expectation that soon they will discover motivation internal to the practice. It strikes me as entirely reasonable to see Santa as analogous to the chess-player’s candy: he is the external motivator for virtue, who we expect will give way to internal motivation as the child matures.

In short, I don’t think White’s objections to Santa are compelling individually or collectively. Nonetheless, it’s a thought-provoking short piece, exactly the sort of challenge to social convention that philosophical reflection should provoke us to from time to time.

Turns out it wasn’t always so. The title of Rawls’s thesis would have appeared a little drab at the time, but it’s striking to those who have read Rawls’s later philosophy. While the thesis deals heavily with questions of community and interpersonal relations, it says very little about Rawls’s later concern for the organization of the state. And soon after he wrote it, Rawls would go off to fight in World War II, and the horrors he saw would turn him agnostic. But what’s far more striking in the thesis is the continuity between the old (devout, pious) Rawls and the new (secular, political) Rawls. For my part, I have previously thought of Rawls as a philosophical foe – associating him with the utilitarianism that I rejected – and the thesis confirms to me that, in the most important respects, Rawls was thinking in all the wrong directions.

Fundamental to the thesis is a rejection of Greek philosophical thought from Plato and Aristotle onwards. In a line of Christian thinkers going back at least to Tertullian, Rawls rejects the influence the Greeks have had on Christianity from Augustine onward. Why? Because Greek thought is what Rawls eccentrically calls “naturalistic”: it asks what the good life is for humans, what humans do desire and what they should desire. But for Rawls all desire is part of the problem. We cannot see God as truly ultimate if our relation to him is one of desire – as it is in Augustine’s longing for God, let alone in the erotic longings of medieval women mystics like Teresa of Ávila. Augustine sees the heavenly life as the best life – and that’s the problem. We shouldn’t be thinking about the best life for ourselves, or even for others. We should be thinking about God as a person who is not an object of our desire at all. Ironically, Rawls’ later exclusion of religion (as “comprehensive conceptions of the good”) has its precedent in his own Christian views. Things would have been very different had Rawls been a Buddhist, in a tradition where so much is founded on our desire to end suffering.

Rawls does not argue for Christianity itself, taking it merely as a given starting point – and thereby anticipating his later attempt to debate politics without allowing religious debate to enter into it. Rawls never seemed to want to talk about religious foundations, early or late in life, even though the middle of his life had given him reason to change the roots of his own convictions from Christian to agnostic.

But the connection that strikes me most between the young Rawls and the mature Rawls is the opposition to ideas of merit or desert. Along with the Greeks’ striving for the desired good (eudaimonia), the later Rawls rejects Aristotle’s idea that social goods should go to the most deserving. In the early Rawls, this idea takes on a theological underpinning. He passionately rejects the Catholic doctrine of merit, which states that good works receive supernatural award. (This is why you will sometimes see the Buddhist terms pu?ya and p?pa, “good karma” and “bad karma” respectively, translated as “merit” and “demerit.”) Rawls rejects merit with a passionate fire rarely found in his later, more analytical writing:

The human person, once perceiving that the Revelation of the Word is a condemnation of the self, casts away all thoughts of his own merit. He sees that the givenness of God is everywhere prevenient, and that he possesses nothing that has not been given. He knows that what he has received has been given by some “other,” and that ultimately all good things are gifts of God. Therefore in the face of this givenness of God, in the face of His perfect and righteous mercy, he knows that he has no merit. Never again can he hope to boast of his good deeds, of his skill, of his prowess, for he knows that they are gifts.

The more he examines his life, the more he looks into himself with complete honesty, the more clearly he perceives that what he has is a gift. Suppose he was an upright man in the eyes of society, then he will now say to himself: “So you were an educated man, yes, but who paid for your education; so you were a good man and upright, yes, but who taught you your good maners and so provided you with good fortune that you did not need to steal; so you were a man of a loving disposition and not like the hard-hearted, yes, but who raised you in a good family, who showed you care and affection when you were young so that you would grow up to appreciate kindness — must you not admit that what you have, you have received? Then be thankful and cease your boasting.” Thus there is no man so upright that the Word of God beside his goodness will not condemn. There is no goodness that beside God’s goodness does not become a “filthy rag.” (239-40)

Rawls here deals with a point I discuss in my dissertation: the partial dependence of virtue on external goods. Martha Nussbaum criticizes the Stoics for distinguishing between virtue, internal to ourselves, and external goods that we cannot control, saying that only the first matters; I argue that this is a point Śāntideva would concede, that our virtues have causes outside ourselves. (He could hardly say otherwise, given his rejection of free will.) The question is, what do we do with this point? Rawls, in his earlier and later phases, effectively takes it as a reason to leave virtue aside entirely, in favour of divine grace or social institutions. In my view, against Rawls, virtue is a crucial component of the human good – and the human good, for ourselves and for others, is what it is most important for us to focus our attentions on.

Nevertheless, there’s a valuable cautionary point in this passage of the early Rawls, one I agree with. Our virtue is not ours alone, in that there are causal conditions that make it possible. It is something we should be thankful for. Other virtues make a pyrrhic victory if they take us to arrogance and away from humility; they are lacking without the gratitude for the things that makes them possible. Here the early Rawls can do us a service by making us more virtuous – despite himself.

There are a number of passages in the suttas that support this interpretation, on which wealth itself is neutral to our well-being (although I suspect that these passages are not always being read in their proper context). But it’s worth pointing out that there’s another view in South Asian Buddhism that takes a significantly more negative view of wealth and its accumulation, one that appears strongly in Śāntideva.

Śāntideva tells us that acquisition (l?bha), along with honour (satk?ra), is to be avoided because it generates desire (r?ga) (?ik??samuccaya, p. 105). Notice the point here: it’s not just that desire and craving for possessions are bad (a Buddhist commonplace), but that the possessions themselves lead one to have that desire. He repeats the theme elsewhere, saying that “one should have fear of acquisition,” and “great gain is among the obstacles to the Mahāyāna”; he has a long passage condemning the dangers of the things kept in one’s home (and the values of what is given away). This is all part of the reason he regularly praises the possessionless life of a monk, and urges us to it. (For references, see the third and fourth chapters of my dissertation.)

Is Śāntideva right? Well, I’m skeptical of his overall negative evaluation of worldly goods, which is why I’m getting married. But at the same time I think there’s a strong psychological truth to what he says. Michael Eysenck has popularized the idea of the hedonic treadmill: we keep pursuing the goods we think will make us happy, only to stay in place or worse. Once we get more wealth, we expect more wealth. So our happiness doesn’t go up when we gain wealth – but it does go down when we lose wealth! The point confronts me every day this year, when I’m teaching on a reduced-teaching fellowship position instead of last year’s full-time visiting assistant professor position. I’m making about the same amount now as I did when I was in grad school, and I didn’t feel particularly poor then. But after two years of living on a professor’s salary, I feel poor all the time now. My past wealth produced a desire for itself. In that respect at least, wealth is not neutral.

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

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

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

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

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

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