One of the more interesting elements of teaching at Stonehill was explaining Protestantism to a student body composed largely of ethnic Catholics. I remember giving a lecture on the history of Protestantism and having a student ask, “But what do Protestants believe?” It was a great question, for in my focus on history I’d neglected to say much about, say, the relative emphasis on the Bible or on Mary. The fault was mine for naïvely assuming it would be something students already knew. And so in later versions of the course, I gave students a much more detailed account of the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, and in turn these differences became much clearer to me myself.

I particularly came to realize how evangelical Protestantism – the growing Protestant wing of which fundamentalist Protestantism is basically a subset – is basically a more extreme form of Protestantism itself, “more extreme” in the sense of being much more characteristically Protestant and less Catholic. And what I found central in evangelicalism specifically but to some extent in Protestantism generally is something analogous, and perhaps even homologous, to modernism.

This central thing might be called single-mindedness: the tendency to focus on “what’s really important,” at the expense of the ancillary details. That’s the attitude behind all the ugly modernist architecture: the most important thing is to give people a comfortable, hygienic, convenient place to live. You can do without all those frivolous aesthetic details; focus on the big stuff, and people will learn to like it, as they should.

This same tendency seems to me to underlie evangelical Protestantism. The really important thing is the saving power of Jesus Christ; the rest, one might say, is gravy. And so evangelicals typically congregate in highly modern buildings, most notoriously the “megachurches” like Lakewood Church in Houston, a former sports arena, and often play rock music in their services. You don’t need the beauty and mystery of a centuries-old cathedral and its incense and pipe organ; you need Jesus.

The older, non-evangelical streams of Protestantism, such as Anglicanism and Lutheranism – usually referred to in the US as “mainline” – do not take this extreme approach. They still meet in the old churches, pray in an older style. And yet I think their founders, too, had something of the modernist tendency to privilege the big picture over the details. For Luther as I understand him, Christian tradition had become needlessly packed with irrelevant accretions. History still mattered to him – but the history that mattered was the history recounted in the Bible, not anything that had happened since then. All those sacraments and rituals were of a piece with selling indulgences. One may note that Luther derives a great deal of his thought from Augustine, and Augustine shares some of this same single-mindedness of focus. Augustine in his work expresses a worried ambivalence about liturgical music – he’s all for it if the lyrics bring people into Christian tradition, but he’s worried that it will be counterproductive if people start enjoying the music for its own sake. (And while many of Augustine’s views did become part of official Catholic tradition, they were typically tempered by the more worldly Aristotelian views of Thomas Aquinas.)

This kind of single-mindedness is not confined to Christianity or secularism, either. This single-mindedness is also the most prominent feature of the Salafi or Wahhabi strain of contemporary Islam. At first glance, Salafi tradition is as opposed to modernism as can be, for it claims that Islamic tradition was perfected in its first few centuries and every following innovation is worthless or worse. But the Salafis share with the modernists a single-minded disdain for the details of established tradition. And aesthetically the two come to look very similar. In recent years the Saudi Arabian state, which officially endorses Salafi Islam, has deliberately destroyed most of the historic sites of old Mecca and Medina, partially to make room for more infrastructure for pilgrims, but just as much because of Salafi ideology. People offered veneration and prayer at many of those sites, such as the grave of Muhammad’s mother. But to a Salafi, such activity is idolatrous, associating partners with God and compromising his unity. Better not to have them around. (Evangelicals, I might note, often take a similar attitude to many Catholic traditions, especially the reverence for Mary.)

Further musings on philosophical single-mindedness next week.

I’m going to begin this week not with God, but with Buddhism. Because I think one of the most deep and important elements of Buddhist tradition is precisely its atheism. That atheism is, indeed, a great part of what brought me to Buddhism in the first place. The teaching on suffering was what really got me hooked on Buddhism, but it wasn’t what had got me interested in the first place; indeed, it had initially repelled me. Even despite my repulsion, I’d done a lot of reading on Buddhism during my time in Thailand; that was what made it possible for me to see how Buddhism applied directly to my life, when the time came for me to make that grand discovery. And why? Well, part of it, as I’ve said in telling the story here, was that the temples were so gorgeous and I was drawn into the worldview behind them. But there was also something that had drawn me to Buddhism well before I ever saw a Thai temple, and that was its atheism. In a journal that I wrote while travelling around India at age 19, I had noted that “in my Indian travels it was Buddhism, more than Hinduism or Islam, which seemed the most profound and interesting of the Indian religions — probably because it’s not technically a religion at all. You can be an agnostic or even an atheist and still be a Buddhist, because God or Gods don’t figure.”

I still think this is something remarkable about Buddhism, at least in its Theravāda variant. Unlike Epicureanism, a similarly atheistic tradition which died out within a century or two, Buddhist tradition survived for thousands of years while denying that there were gods out there. And I don’t think it’s just me for whom this is an appealing point: in an atheistic age where we are more aware than ever of the hideous sufferings that befall our fellow human beings, and where Darwin managed to dispense with God as the explanation for life’s diversity, Buddhism provides the kind of wise and enduring tradition that the various theisms provide, without having that God at the core. It is significant in this respect that an outspoken atheist like Sam Harris has spoken highly of “Buddhist wisdom,” even as he wishes to divorce it from “religion.”

But just as Buddhism has some of the advantages of atheism, it can also face its disadvantages – and especially, the one I first spoke of three weeks ago. I discussed the ways that the atheistic thinkers of early twentieth-century analytic philosophy, like Ayer and Moore, struggle to make sense of ideas of value and goodness, often giving highly implausible responses. But I am increasingly thinking that Buddhists face the same difficulty.

Damien Keown, widely regarded as one of the most prominent experts on Buddhist ethics, has increasingly begun putting forth the view that there is no such thing: that Buddhism is “morality without ethics,” in that Buddhists do little to justify the claims they make about what we should and shouldn’t do. I have disputed this claim in my dissertation; in Śāntideva I have found many arguments why certain actions are good and others are bad. I think such arguments are found in other Buddhist thinkers as well. But I also think there is a certain way in which Keown is on to something. The most persuasive of Śāntideva’s ethical arguments appeal to values Śāntideva expects us to already have. They have a means-end approach: since we all wish to end suffering, we should therefore take whatever action is being recommended (avoid anger, avoid lust, and so on.)

But why should we wish to end suffering? What makes suffering bad? Śāntideva responds to this question directly, in a way that no other Buddhist (that I am aware of) does. But I do not find his very brief answer satisfactory. It occurs in Bodhicaryāvatāra verse VIII.103, within his famous equalization of self and other, in which he argues that since the self is unreal, one should prevent everyone’s suffering and not only one’s own. Having said this, he entertains an objection (pūrvapakṣa) to the effect of “Why is suffering to be prevented?” (kasmān nivāryaṃ cet) and responds with sarveṣām avivādataḥ: literally “Because of the non-dispute of everyone.” Or in Crosby and Skilton’s simpler and crisper translation: “No one disputes that!”

But this won’t do. It is not just that his imagined objector does indeed seem to be disputing that suffering should be prevented. What Śāntideva is doing here is very similar to Mill’s argument in Utilitarianism that the only reason one can give for finding happiness or pleasure (or anything else) desirable is “that people do actually desire it.” G.E. Moore thought this the classic example of a “naturalistic fallacy,” of illegitimately deriving a “should” from an “is,” in that “desirable” means what should be desired rather than what is; it does not mean “able to be desired” in the way that “visible” means “able to be seen.” But as Alasdair MacIntyre points out in A Short History of Ethics, there is a way to read Mill which does not rest on linguistic equivocation, and I think the same applies to Śāntideva (changing “pleasure” to “the absence of suffering”):

He treats the thesis that all men desire pleasure as a factual assertion which guarantees the success of an ad hominem appeal to anyone who denies his conclusion. If anyone denies that pleasure is desirable, then we can ask him, But don’t you desire it? and we know in advance that he must answer yes, and consequently must admit that pleasure is desirable.

I think Śāntideva’s argument is most persuasively read as just this sort of “ad hominem appeal.” But this is still insufficient. For one thing, many would indeed argue against ending suffering – most notably Nietzsche, who believed that suffering can ennoble us and make us better people. Or even Penelope Trunk, who, after considerable reflection, decided she would rather suffer because happiness is boring. One could, I suppose, bite the bullet and say “fine, then, those people don’t need Buddhism and their life will be perfectly good without it,” but this is not a response that would be acceptable to the vast majority of Buddhist tradition to date – certainly not to Śāntideva himself.

Moreover, Śāntideva’s very argument rests on denying one of our most deeply felt beliefs – the existence of a self. If even our basic selfhood – the one sole thing that Descartes thought completely indubitable – is available for dispute, then surely the prevention of suffering is as well. One might well reply to the ad hominem: “Well, yes, I believe my suffering should be prevented. But I also believe that there’s a self, and that that’s the whole reason it makes sense to prevent any suffering at all. If you really knock down the self, you knock down the prevention of suffering – and maybe the existence of suffering – with it.” (This point is roughly similar to Paul Williams’s objection.)

In short, Śāntideva – possibly the most sophisticated ethical theorist in Buddhist tradition – fails, like the twentieth-century analytic philosophers, to provide a satisfactory account of why we should value the things we do value. And I suspect that this is not a coincidence: that Buddhists, like empiricists, have a hard time justifying their value system because they do not assign value a place underlying the metaphysics of reality. The obvious objection to the claim is karma; but karma is held to be a potentially observable causal law of the universe, comparable in theory to the laws discovered by scientists. Karma does not make things valuable, and so it does not suffice as an explanation of the nature of value.

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.

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.

Teaching students who did not want to be there was not always a joy. The wonderful advantage of teaching Stonehill’s required courses, though, was that there was almost no restriction on content. My love of big cross-cultural questions does not play well with the specialization taught in grad school and encouraged in academic publishing, where one must learn one thing and nothing else. But I could design these courses the way I wanted. The religion department had decided it wanted one common reference point that upper-year students could turn back to, and it had decided on the book of Exodus. But as long as you taught Exodus, the rest of the course was all up to you.

And so one semester I decided I wanted to learn more about Western monotheisms, and entitled my intro religion course “God in the West.” All that Buddhism and “Hinduism” I’d studied in grad school – never mind that. Because that was stuff I already knew pretty well. One of the things I hoped to impart to my students was a love of learning; and so I decided I would teach them a subject I wanted to learn about myself.

And learn I did. The course gave me a chance to really think with the monotheisms, especially Christianity – and in so doing I moved considerably closer to atheism. For I’d wanted to challenge my students’ complacent, mellow, liberal moralistic-therapeutic deism by showing it criticized from both sides: both the severe conservatism of an Augustine, calling for more Christian piety, and the problem of suffering, which effectively calls for less.

Until I taught that course, I had never really paid much attention to the problem of suffering. I thought it didn’t really matter, since I didn’t believe in an omnipotent omnibenevolent God in the first place; I hadn’t been raised with such a belief and never saw a reason to adopt it. But in teaching Christianity I attempted to think with it, in its terms, and I saw just how serious a problem this is. Until that point I had seen myself as vaguely theist; I believed in a capital-T Truth like the Platonic Good, a universal which seemed a lot like God. But as I saw my students grapple with theodicy, it hit home for me that this “philosopher’s God” really has little to do with what most people understand God to be. For them, God is there actively moving the universe along; things are the way they are because God wants them to be. But given the vast and terrible suffering in the universe – including all the suffering that has nothing to do with human free will – it seems like a cruel joke to describe such a God as omnibenevolent, universally good. An omnibenevolent and omnipotent God was really nowhere even close to anything I believed in.

I tried to teach a few theologians who would defend God, but their justifications seemed enormously unsatisfying. The best I could find was Richard Swinburne‘s case for a “half-finished universe,” extending the free-will defence so that it is our job to perfect the world and end suffering. Putting aside the question of whether this is even possible (as with similar questions one could ask of Buddhists), it still hardly seems an adequate resolution. How can this be fair to all the people whose lives are cruelly, brutally sacrificed in pursuit of this perfection? They don’t get to see the perfect world to come. Swinburne seems to advocate an oddly Maoist God, who can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs; this celestial utopian scarcely seems better than the earthly utopians like Mao and Stalin, whom we rightly judge today as murderers.

In some respects my students’ answer seemed better than Swinburne’s: it could all be made worthwhile and redeemed by the ultimate promise of an afterlife in heaven. Within the system that seems more consistent to me; but one still would need to find evidence for the existence of this heavenly afterlife, and I’ve never heard of any.

In short, having attempted to take the Christian God seriously for the length of a course, I came out much more predisposed against him. I would be reluctant to say, though, that teaching the course made me an atheist. For the word “atheist” is usually claimed today by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, sneering know-nothings who thrive on contempt and disdain for anything alien to their worldview. It’s an attitude I already disliked, and if anything I came out of the very same course disliking it more.

For while I ended up thinking less of God, I also ended up thinking more of that much-maligned text attributed to him, the Hebrew Bible. Though I do think it’s ultimately philosophically inconsistent, I came to admire the book of Ecclesiastes not only for its poetic beauty, but also its attempt to reflect on the harsh world we live in, in which the righteous so often suffer and the wicked thrive. Ecclesiastes is an admirable early attempt to face this world with open eyes.

Perhaps more importantly, I also had my students read A.J. Jacobs’s highly enjoyable The Year of Living Biblically, which is exactly what it sounds like. Jacobs, a secular New York Jew, decided he’d one-up all the fundamentalists by trying his best to follow all the Bible’s commandments to the best of his ability. The original idea was to remind people how ridiculous the Bible commandments really are. And yet Jacobs found his life improving by following several of the commands – and not just the popular ones like loving your neighbour. Obeying the injunction to wear only white, he found himself becoming more cheerful, having a sunny disposition; refusing to use swear words, he found himself watching his emotions and avoiding trivial anger. These turned out not to be ridiculous after all – even when he didn’t have to do so for his book, Jacobs continued wearing white and saying prayers of thanksgiving.

Biblical commands, like the injunctions in dharmaśāstra, are not ethics; they are not philosophy. There is little reasoning or argument given there; one is merely ordered to do this and not do that. And yet Jacobs’s experience helps remind us that someone wrote those texts, and put those commands in there for a reason. Many of those reasons may have lost their force today; but some of them haven’t. Following those commands worked for a lot of people for a long time; it would take a truly heroic leap of cynicism to believe millions of people followed them for thousands of years entirely out of stupidity or gullibility. We cannot and should not swallow the ideas and practices of history’s traditions in their entirety; but we ignore or casually dismiss them at our peril.

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.

One of the more curious features of American political conversation is Americans’ attitude toward their Constitution. In American politics, the Constitution is a scripture, a sacred text; and I do not mean this at all metaphorically or analogically. The Constitution literally is a scripture, for it has the most important hallmark that a scripture has: while the meaning of the text is endlessly debated, the text itself is universally regarded with great reverence and respect. Both of the warring sides of American politics accuse the other side of disrespecting the Constitution (the language used is typically stronger than “disrespecting,” often involving bodily functions of some variety). Some might argue that the Constitution is not a scripture because it is not “religious,” but this is already to beg the question; I have yet to find an adequate reason to distinguish between the “religious” and the “non-religious,” or reasonable way of classifying the two.

This attitude toward the Constitution has perplexed me since before I arrived in the country. Here questions of free speech – debated throughout the modern world – are referred to as “First Amendment questions,” as if free speech would somehow not be a meaningful or important concept if this constitutional amendment had not been passed. The text of the Constitution is often quoted as definitive – the idea that one might disagree with a document written by slaveholding white men sometimes does not seem to enter consideration. And strangest of all, American institutions sometimes legally require their members to “support and uphold” the Constitution. During grad school, while thinking toward a future in academia, I noticed that many American universities – in a holdover from the McCarthy era – require their professors to swear American loyalty oaths. But these oaths are declarations of support not for the American people, but for the Constitution – the usual language is that one promises to “support and uphold the Constitution of the United States.” (A similar promise is required when one becomes a citizen.) That language concerned me. I don’t believe that everyone should have a right to own guns, or that every state should have the same number of senators, as the Constitution provides. To me, the Constitution seems like a flawed document – as I think it does to many Americans who agree with me on these and similar issues. So could I really claim, on good conscience, to support it? My worries were not assuaged when I posted my concerns on an online forum for PhD students and a common response – from graduate students, perhaps the most left-wing segment of the entire American population – amounted to “If you don’t support the Constitution, then leave.”

Where is all this coming from? Why are Americans so ardently devoted to a document that, in many cases, they themselves disagree with in large part? Doull helped clear this up for me, through a few brief comments on Plato’s Politicus (Statesman). For Doull, and I think for Plato, a political community’s constitution is “its ideal ordering to the good.” A constitution is, in a sense, the Platonic idea of a political community and its state; a state’s constitution, by definition, is its essence, what makes that state what it is.

If we view constitutions in this Platonic or Doullian light, the strangeness of American political discourse gets displaced. It no longer seems strange that Americans would be passionately devoted to their constitution – for to be devoted to the American constitution is merely to be devoted to America. That attachment to a constitution is no more and no less than the nationalism that is found throughout the modern world. (Which, while curious in its own way, is nevertheless easily understood at a gut level for those who have grown up in that world.) To declare loyalty to the constitution of any country is just to declare loyalty to that country; it only makes sense that one seeking citizenship in a country would declare loyalty to its constitution. (Whether universities should require loyalty oaths of their employees is a very different, and tangential, issue.)

Instead, on a Doullian account, the real strangeness of the American system is that the Americans identify “the Constitution” with that written document, adopted in 1787 and infrequently modified. Properly considered, a constitution includes all of the most fundamental things that make a country what it is, throughout its history; there is much more to the constitution of the United States than the written document of “the Constitution.” I suspect it is no coincidence here that Doull, like me, is from Canada, where the idea of the Constitution is much more nebulous, referring to a much wider set of documents along with unwritten codes, traditions and history.

I have been wondering lately whether the American approach to the constitution derives from the role of conservative Protestants in the nation’s founding. For the idea of a constitution as a single and fixed written scripture would come naturally to those whose entire worldview is itself all about a different single and fixed written scripture. The role of the British Queen in Canadian politics bewilders my wife as much as the American Constitution bewilders me – how could the result of a significant political crisis be decided by a person whose job description is Queen’s representative? It seems to me that where the American constitution is Protestant, the Canadian constitution is Catholic: rather than a single written scripture which everybody respects even as they disagree over its content, Canada’s institutions are based on history, custom and tradition, all of which vest ultimate nominal authority in a single individual who commands a certain amount of respect, even as most members of the institution ignore that individual in all their everyday doings. Here I am turning to metaphor, to analogy rather than homology, for even though there are more Catholics than Protestants in Canada, almost half of them are anti-monarchist French Québécois. Still, the Christian sects seem helpful as a way of making sense of the two North American states, what they fundamentally are and how they work – which is to say, their constitutions.

The attempt to identify such universal categories, I think, is central to the work of analytic philosophy. It drives the characteristically analytic attempt to classify Buddhist ethics according to the categories of 20th-century ethics: is Buddhist ethics consequentialism or virtue ethics? For that matter, is Śāntideva a determinist or a compatibilist? The problem with such attempts, in my book, is that they take it for granted that the questions of 20th-century ethics (consequentialism, deontology or virtue?) are the most important ones to ask. Such an approach, it seems to me, strongly limits one’s ability to learn anything of substance from other traditions. Foreign traditions (and this includes the Greeks and the medieval Christians as much as the Confucians or Vedāntins) can teach us different questions to ask, not merely different answers to those questions. That’s why it’s important to me that when we do think in more universal categories, we try to involve categories (like ascent-descent) that are derived from the study of multiple traditions.

Part of the point of thinking across traditions in this way, to me, is that metaphilosophy shouldn’t only be about universals, but about particulars – specifically, historical particulars. I have no problem in saying that philosophy aims at universal truth; but it does so only through the eyes of individual philosophers, who are all finite, particular and historically limited human beings, shaped greatly by their historical context. And for any given philosophy – including one’s own – that context is an essential reason why it is the way it is.

For me, what makes any kind of history exciting is the window it opens on the present, the ability to see why things are the way they are because one can see when they became the way they are. For this reason, Canadian history became a lot more interesting to me in the past year after I learned about the Seven Years’ War, which created the English-dominated bilingual society that is contemporary Canada. (Schools in Québec and Massachusetts both teach this as a fundamental event in the creation of their worlds, which it was; schools in Ontario do not teach it, though it was just as important. Our history classes began with 1867, when Canada had long already had more or less the shape it has now; and so it’s no wonder I learned to regard Canadian history as really, really boring.) I generally didn’t care about history at all until, sometime during my undergraduate degree, I would start to see past philosophers appear in the present – and not just present philosophers. I would hear other students argue moral issues – outside of philosophy classes – and I would think “they’re getting this from Kant, whether they realize it or not.” Perhaps more fundamentally, I looked at the epistemological empiricism I myself held at the time, and realized that it came from David Hume. My own philosophy, even though it aspired to a universal truth, was still rooted in a particular time and place.

Philosophy is always instantiated in the views of particular philosophers – and I had come to see just how much those views, including my own, were historically conditioned. This point, I think, is central to Martin Heidegger‘s philosophical activity: he wanted to get us over what he saw as the mistakes of the Western philosophical tradition, but he knew that we would keep repeating those mistakes unless we knew that tradition very well. Thus he kept turning back to the first Western philosophers, the pre-Socratics.

Now it is crucial here not to make a mere circumstantial ad hominem fallacy: to say that a given philosophical view is wrong because it can be explained by its historical context. Such a view leads past relativism to nihilism, since one could make such explanations of any philosophy, and therefore “refute” all of them. That’s not what Heidegger is up to, of course; he is trying to get at a real truth of some sort, he’s just convinced that most of the Western tradition has missed it, and that he has missed it as well insofar as he is still under the influence of that tradition.

I think that this attention to the history of philosophy is generally shared in some such respect by those on the “continental” side of the contemporary divide. It certainly seems true of postmodernists like Jacques Derrida who, following Heidegger, seek to overthrow the Western philosophical tradition. But it is also true of those who value that tradition and seek to sustain and advance it – among whom the key figure is G.W.F. Hegel.

I have kept returning to Hegel throughout my philosophical career, not merely for this blog, because of his powerful attempt to blend these two approaches to metaphilosophy: to link the search for universal truths and the understanding of historical particularity, put them all together. Hegel’s own discussion of the history of philosophy is manifestly inadequate, for he treats South and East Asian philosophies as being without any inner development, merely the starting point for Western tradition. One can refute him on that score with a relatively cursory knowledge of those traditions. Yet for those who see the power and truth behind both kinds of metaphilosophy – recognizing that one needs to look for universal truth, but also recognizing that historical particularity is a part of every philosophy at a very deep level – Hegel’s project remains an essential starting point.

LARPing for me is genuinely a hobby. It’s not an avocation, a “neither career nor hobby” passion like I intend this blog to be; it’s just for fun. Still, lately I’ve been noticing its philosophical implications, largely because of a splendid game I play called Seven Virtues. The obvious inspiration (or at least analogy) for Seven Virtues is the Harry Potter series, as it’s set in a school, training heroes to fight beings of evil and destruction. But in this fantasy world, what makes the heroes powerful and able to fight their evil foes is their devotion to virtue, to becoming better people. Their goodness has direct effects on the supernatural physical world, and there are plausible reasons within the game’s cosmology why it does so (and one of the characters’ tasks is to find out how). To Plato or Augustine it seemed obvious that truth and goodness were the same thing; in a modern world that explains life by evolution and not divine design it is much harder to step into their worldview, but it’s much easier to do so in such a fantasy world. The game’s premise is bait for philosophers, especially those like me who could be classified as virtue ethicists. And it’s made me think a bit more about the philosophical implications of LARPing more generally.

I did a little bit of theatre in high school, but LARPing is by far the closest I’ve come to method acting. For that reason, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about David Haberman’s Acting as a Way of Salvation, a study of the sixteenth-century Indian thinker Rūpa Gosvāmi. Rūpa Gosvāmi urges his followers to become closer to the god Krishna through dramatic play – acting out the life of Krishna in their own lives, sometimes taking a vow never to leave the area of Vraj (where Krishna was supposedly born). To help make sense of Rūpa Gosvāmi and his followers, Haberman’s book turns to the works of Russian philosopher-director Constantin Stanislavski, the father of method acting. For Stanislavski, the true actor fuses his identity with that of his characters, cheering “Live your part!”: “It may not last long but while it does last you will be incapable of distinguishing between yourself and the person you are portraying.” And according to Haberman, this is exactly what Rūpa and his followers aim to achieve: by acting like the characters in Krishna’s life, they hope in some sense to become the characters in Krishna’s life.

Now most LARPers, myself included, are not great actors or method actors; we don’t get the kind of change in identity that Stanislavski advocates. But that is in some sense the ideal that LARPs increasingly aim for, especially the “Accelerant” games I play in. As I understand it, the first LARPs simulated fighting with rock-paper-scissors (if you win at rock-paper-scissors you win the fight); whereas in the Accelerant games, people build foam weapons to simulate actually hitting each other. In older games, a staff member would explain to players the things that their characters saw, like a gamemaster in Dungeons & Dragons; in Accelerant games, staff produce low-budget costumes and special effects to simulate actually seeing it. (Games almost always take place at private camps in secluded rural areas so that curious strangers do not happen to wander in.) And because the game typically lasts a whole weekend, one effectively eats and sleeps in character. During that weekend one tries to become the character one plays, to fully live the part.

The question I wonder about is: is this a good and virtuous thing for our real-life selves, to live a part? For Rūpa Gosvāmi the answer would have been easy: by acting out Krishna’s life one is entering into his divine perfection, so of course it makes one better to do so. But LARPers, like Stanislavski’s method actors, are acting for entertainment and pleasure, whether their own or that of an audience. Perhaps more importantly, unlike the Gosvāmi devotees, the character that one plays is usually not an ideal, but a flawed human (or humanlike) being with imperfections and vices that one does not have oneself – perhaps even a true villain. Might the process of merging one’s identity with such a person not make oneself worse? Such a troubling problem is brought to mind by the Muharram passion plays, in which Shi’a Muslims reenact the lives of the martyrs Hasan and Husayn, as Rūpa’s devotees reenact Krishna’s. In a class session on the subject, Ali Asani noted that at Muharram the actors playing the bad guys, the ones who killed Hasan and Husayn, are paid very highly because they are in danger of being mobbed to death by others caught up in the emotions of the drama. One can see reasons why Plato might have banished the playwrights from his ideal state – they took people’s focus away from the things that are truly good.

In Seven Virtues, my character does act in ways that I might think wrong. He has a strict quasi-Kantian moral code that I do not share, and indeed find troubling. And yet by living inside his head I can see what is admirable about his worldview, remind myself why it appeals to many people: the unflinching honesty and moral courage that it allows. I can appreciate someone very different from myself, in a way more personal and immediate than watching such a person as a character onscreen or in a novel. The same might even be true of getting inside the head of a genuine villain, as troubling as it might be. Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film Der Untergang (The Downfall) attracted controversy because it portrayed Adolf Hitler as genuinely human, in a way that could arouse some modest sympathy with him. (The film’s impact may have been lessened somewhat by the strange and often hilarious parody videos made of its final scene, but that’s not something the director could have imagined.) But it seems to me that this too is a good thing. Everyone has some potentially admirable qualities, even Hitler or Pol Pot; without such qualities, the wicked world leaders could not have attained the following they did. And it seems to me that an understanding of those admirable qualities, while potentially quite dangerous, is nevertheless a good thing.