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.

I speak, of course, of Steve Jobs, the co-founder and former CEO of Apple Computer. Jobs’s figure loomed large over my life a decade ago. My first wife had convinced me to switch to a Mac in 2000, and I embraced everything Mac and Apple with all the zeal of the newly converted. She and I regularly went together to the Apple retail store in Cambridge for Jobs’s keynotes, just to watch him announce new products with his famous showmanship. I have been far less enthused about Apple recently, especially the arbitrary restrictions the company places on iPhone apps – the exact kind of controlling monopolistic behaviour that Apple was once best known for fighting against. I still happily use Macs and iPods, though. And more importantly for today, I learned important lessons from following Apple and Jobs so devotedly in the 2000s – above all about leadership.

I’ve never been much of a leader. I’d much rather let people do their own thing, and stay out of their way. But there are plenty of circumstances when such an attitude is not appropriate. Sometimes, we need to make decisions for other people, and it’s not easy to figure out how to do that well. “Leadership” does not figure prominently in premodern lists of virtues (like Aristotle’s), but I wonder if that’s because of different social circumstances. The idea of leadership as a virtue seems to me to come to the fore in organizations that are supposed (in theory) to be meritocratic, and where the input of subordinates is supposed (again in theory) to be valuable. This is the regular situation of a modern business, but seems to me to have been less common in earlier days. Confucius’s “rectification of names” tells us that “a king kings” (that is, a king should act in the manner proper to a king and “a father fathers”; it doesn’t tell us that “a leader leads,” and I wonder if this wasn’t because most hierarchies were specific enough that the more general idea of leadership was unnecessary.

I’m not enough of a social historian to say any of that with confidence. The point is: however that history may be, today we – at least we in the white-collar middle classes – are frequently thrown into situations where we are expected to lead people who are in other respects considered our equals. And this is a situation that requires decisiveness, requires that those decisions be made even when there are others who actively disagree. And Steve Jobs was the best model of this kind of leadership that I knew.

I remember how back in 2001, not long after I’d first obtained my beautiful Ruby iMac, Apple announced one of its famously secretive press conferences for a mysterious new product. Online Apple forums lit up with underwhelmed disappointment after the conference, saying “you mean it’s just an MP3 player?” But that disappointing MP3 player, of course, turned out to be the iPod – a product that wound up being more successful for Apple than any of the computers it had previously sold, and one which probably eventually wound up in the hands of nearly all the people who had previously posted their disappointment. Similarly, the new computer designs that Apple released under Jobs were often notable for what they lacked. It was unthinkable in 1998 for a computer to be sold without a floppy disk drive – but that’s exactly what the iMac was, and it was the computer that saved Apple. If Jobs had listened too attentively to those around him, he could not have made the bold decisions that he did.

In this respect, leadership is in many respects the inverse of humility, a virtue I’ve spoken of quite frequently on this blog. One must listen to others enough to be aware when one might be wrong – but one must nevertheless still make the decision even though it might be wrong.

Indeed, while Jobs’s decisiveness made him a good leader, it may well be the occasional dose of humility that helped make him a great leader. Just before the iPod, Jobs had gushed about a computer called the G4 Cube, saying in interviews “Isn’t it beautiful?” The G4 Cube, as it turned out, was a very expensive computer that was only as powerful as a laptop but had none of the portability. Few people wanted one; I can’t recall meeting anybody who owned one. It was a flop. But soon enough, Jobs admitted “we goofed.” The humility to admit a mistake is essential to a good leader – one must have the courage to make mistakes, but then be willing to accept their consequences. Jobs did, and he didn’t look back – he continued to make the bizarre but prescient decisions that would build his company from a struggling niche player to the most valuable company on earth.

Now as part of an integrated human life, leadership extends beyond just your own organization; it’s one thing to be a good leader for your company’s bottom line, and another to be a leader who benefits humanity as a whole. On this score, Jobs’s later monopolistic tendencies leave me unable to give him the unequivocal praise I would have liked to give; excluding competitors arbitrarily from the iPhone’s store has probably been great leadership for the bottom line, but it diminishes the broader human good in a way that Jobs’s earlier innovations never did. But then power corrupts, and Jobs is no exception to that. I doubt I could have been as effusive about Jack Layton had he actually become prime minister for a significant length of time. For many years, at least, Jobs gave us a model of what it’s like to be a great leader. That model is worth celebrating – and emulating.

“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.

McMahan’s chapters are topical rather than chronological, so that he can examine the various features of the transition to Buddhist modernism. Naturally, he rounds up the most common topics: the asserted compatibility between Buddhism and science, and the idea of meditation as the most central Buddhist practice. He takes a genuinely balanced perspective on these topics that’s a welcome antidote to others. But he also touches on a few less widely noticed topics: interdependence, nature, and ordinary life. During the interview, I began to think about how closely these topics are connected with each other – and how they share a history in Buddhism that goes back long before the rise of Yavanayāna.

McMahan, more than most observers of Yavanayāna, rightly notes the extent to which Buddhist modernists affirm the very phenomena that the early Buddhists were most suspicious of. I’ve noted before how Yavanayāna Buddhists often treat “interdependence” as something to be celebrated and rejoiced in – the very opposite of the Buddha of the Pali suttas, for whom it was something to be escaped. But McMahan extends the point to two other phenomena I’d thought less about: nature and everyday life. The old texts see the forest as a fearful place, full of dangerous animals, far from contemporary ideas of celebrating nature and our harmony with it.

And in what seems to me the most original and insightful of McMahan’s contributions, he points to the way that Yavanayāna Buddhists tend to treat “mindfulness” as an appreciation of the beauties and even sacrality of everyday life in the world of mundane work and family. Drawing on Charles Taylor‘s work, McMahan notes that modernity in the West has characteristically involved just this kind of orientation. Using the term found in Ken Wilber and Martha Nussbaum, I have characterized it as Descent. Indeed for McMahan, the affirmation of everyday life is found most characteristically in modern novels, especially those of James Joyce, which highlight the subtle and particular details of everyday experience and consciousness; and it is Joyce whom Nussbaum takes, in Upheavals of Thought, as the ultimate paradigm of the descent she advocates.

It strikes me that the affirmations of interdependence and nature are themselves forms of Descent – embracing the connections of the material world with all its flaws and imperfections, avoiding attempts to transcend it. The advocates of affirming nature and interdependence tend to see themselves as opposing scientistic and technological views of the world that attack nature; but I think they’re also in their way opposed to the early Buddhist texts’ quest for an other-worldly (lokottara) nibbāna/nirvana. Buddhist modernism, then, seems to be characterized by a move from Ascent to Descent orientation – as, it would seem, is modernity in general. (I might argue that in many respects Buddhist modernism is also a move from an integrity orientation to an intimacy orientation – and in this respect it is against the grain of modernity in general. But that could be a post of its own.)

But there’s more to the story of Buddhist Ascent and Descent than this. McMahan is rightly ready in his book to note that none of the features of Buddhist modernism have been entirely novel; they all had some precedents in premodern tradition. But those precedents were found far more often in Mahāyāna than in Theravāda – and above all in East Asian Mahāyāna. Yavanayāna has a stronger Descent orientation than does Ch’an or Tiantai; but those in turn have a stronger Descent orientation than the older Indian Mahāyāna, which in turn is more of a Descent than the oldest Buddhism recorded in Pali (or Gandhari or other ancient Indian languages).

So perhaps the most interesting thing about this story is that it is in some sense linear. Depending on one’s own orientation, one could view it either as progress or as decline; but it is a continuous progress or decline, moving toward one point and away from the other. The Buddhism of the Pali suttas is not all that far removed from its contemporary rival Jainism, about as thoroughgoing an Ascent tradition as one could name – a tradition whose monks practised self-mortification in order to achieve a superhuman state of transcendental solitude. Perhaps one could even identify early Jainism as the very first step, before early Buddhism, in an Ascent-Descent movement whose latest stage is Yavanayāna.

With the rise of Mahāyāna, Indian Buddhism takes a Descending step, especially under the influence of Nāgārjuna. Nāgārjuna claims that saṃsāra and nirvana are not different from one another; nirvana is merely this world viewed properly. This statement sounds like an affirmation of everyday life, a descent, and it will be used that way later; but it only goes so far. For Indian Mahāyānists like Śāntideva, the important thing is that we normally view this world improperly, and that wrong view mires us in the terrible suffering that constitutes everyday life. Transcending that everyday world is still paramount, and one is best suited to do it as a monk, leaving work and family behind. Nature, too, remains suspect – the Indian Pure Land sūtras describe a world of beautiful buildings and carefully manicured gardens, and view it as a marked improvement on the chaotic and dangerous nature that normally surrounds us.

East Asian Buddhism, as I understand it, takes a step past Indian Mahāyāna toward Descent and immanence. For pre-Buddhist East Asian thought was already far less anthropocentric than Indian thought, more oriented to what we in the West would call nature; and Buddhism in East Asia absorbed such an orientation to the physical world. McMahan notes that classical Ch’an/Zen literature is full of stories of monks liberated at the sight of mundane natural images, like a frog jumping into a pond; this is not an idea one would find in India. Relatedly, the Huayan tradition begins to talk about interdependence in something like the positive light it takes on in Yavanayāna. For the Huayan thinker Fazang, we do not need to transcend the world, not even through knowledge of its illusory nature as in Nāgārjuna or Śāntideva: interdependence or dependent origination is the “marvelous manifestation of the cosmic Buddha,” so properly seeing the world means only “seeing it as the wonder as it is.” And East Asia also introduces the idea of sudden liberation: taking Nāgārjuna a step further, liberation is now something we can achieve not only in this life but in this moment, right here and now. (It increasingly seems to me that the Chinese and Japanese changed Buddhism at least as much as the modern West ever did.)

Despite all of this, East Asian Buddhism still retains an emphasis on monkhood. Buddhists soften their criticisms of family life when they defend the tradition in China, to win acceptance in a society whose ways of ethical thinking are heavily Confucian; but they continue to emphasize the detached, ritualized life of the monk. Ch’an and Zen affirm the everyday world, but McMahan notes that it is the monk‘s everyday world. He notes that the Zen master Dōgen had said “There is no gap between practice and enlightenment or zazen and daily life.” But, says McMahan, “In contrast to contemporary interpretations of Zen spontaneity however, this meant an intensive formalization of every activity, from meditation to using the bathroom.” (234-5) The “practice” spoken of was not merely being mindful of events in the everyday household life, but in the ritualized life of a monk. “True spontaneity, on this model, was not doing whatever one wanted; it could only come about when the extremely formal gestures and acts that made up the monastic life became ‘natural’ and effortless. Then they could be understood as expressions of buddha-nature.” (235)

Here Yavanayāna takes one more Descending step. Even though some of its most influential figures (like Anagarika Dharmapala and Thich Nhat Hanh) were and are monks, Yavanayāna Buddhists tend to downplay the importance of monasticism. Indeed, S.N. Goenka‘s organizations effectively prohibit it. One is allowed to live at a Goenka vipassanā meditation centre (and help run its activities) for a period of a few months; but one may not do it for the long term. Even if one wishes to, one cannot leave worldly society for a Goenka Buddhist society, in the way that the most devout would have been expected to follow in traditional Buddhist societies. That path of Ascent is forbidden. From the original disparagement of everyday life, Buddhists – even Theravādins like Goenka – have now moved to requiring it.

EDIT: Due to a technical glitch, the podcast was not yet available when this post first appeared. It is now available: http://newbooksinbuddhiststudies.com/2011/09/02/david-mcmahan-the-making-of-buddhist-modernism-oxford-up-2008/

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thill disputes such claims:

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

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

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

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

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

I’d like to thank all the blog’s readers for its success to date. And I’d like to extend a special thank-you to the commenters, who have made this site a lively forum for discussion of key philosophical issues. It is deeply gratifying to see how many people come back to hear and discuss my reflections on topics that can often be abstract, esoteric or difficult.

Last year at this time, I added a list of “favourite posts” from the first year. With two years’ worth of posts, I’ve changed and expanded that list. In the sidebar you’ll see three categories. The first is “popular posts” that others have appreciated or enjoyed a lot. The second is “basic concepts,” posts that elaborate ideas I return to regularly in my philosophy; they’re a good starting point to understand the ideas here in more detail. Finally, there’s “personal favourites,” which is just that: the posts I’m particularly fond of myself.

Thank you all again, whether you reply or not. Without you, Love of All Wisdom would be no more than a set of personal journals stashed away in a corner. Here’s to many more years!

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.