But I don’t want all these criticisms to make it sound like I think Wilber’s thought is silly, fruitless or otherwise wrong-headed. Quite the opposite. I engage with Wilber’s ideas this much precisely because his project is so important and valuable. Granted, his writings don’t stand up well to either analytic or continental assessment: his arguments are sometimes maddeningly imprecise, and his readings of other thinkers tend strongly to the superficial. But what Wilber lacks in precision and depth, he makes up for in breadth.

For the thing about both the analytic and continental standards of assessment is that they are both generated in the context of contemporary academia – and that is a context that gives out all its rewards to those who think small. When good work is considered to be that which gets the details exactly right, it’s much easier to generate endless articles saying new things, because there are so many new details to talk about. The nonacademic book publishing industry has its own problematic incentives, but they are not the same ones. They don’t push authors to precise nitpicky detail in the same way; and that’s a valuable counterbalance to academia. I do think academia’s details matter a lot. But they matter because they are part of a larger whole. We will not really be able to make sense of the world and our lives if we can’t understand what that whole is, how everything fits together. And that’s where Wilber comes in.

Wilber’s project is an audacious one: to integrate all the different realms of human knowledge, including the “great wisdom traditions” like Buddhism and Christianity. He tries hard to bring together “religion” and science, and he understands that philosophy has a key role in that process.

It would be one thing to make a mere catalogue of these different kinds of knowledge, a road map to the most important books. That much has been done before. Wilber, by contrast, actually tries to consider the truth of the ideas he studies. And not just in terms of declaring them true or declaring them false, but trying to find the truth in all of them. He proclaims, rightly I think, that “no human mind can produce 100% error.” And more than that: when an idea comes to last across multiple generations, that suggests there is particular truth to it – it’s not tied to the madness of one particular clique or the whimsy of one era, but is reinvented with every new birth who take it up and find it valuable for explaining the world and our place in it. Somehow, the ideas need to go together.

This approach too has been taken before to some extent. G.W.F. Hegel tried harder than most. While I think Hegel was more methodologically sophisticated than Wilber, there is a lot missing from Hegel’s synthesis. Science, especially, has changed a lot, making Hegel’s philosophy of nature difficult to accept; so too, Hegel’s thought has no room for the shining achievement of the 20th century, namely feminism and the liberation of women. And while Hegel at least attempted to include Asian philosophies in his synthesis, in a way that few had before, they were stuck at the earliest and lowest level of his philosophy, making Hegel “strong with respect to time and weak with respect to space”. All of these vast gaps in Hegel’s thought – science, feminism, Asian philosophy – Wilber has tried hard to give a central place in his thought. His attempted synthesis is the widest one I know of – much more so than that of, say, Mou Zongsan, who says little if anything about Judaism or Advaita Vedānta, let alone feminism and science. Wilber gives us some vision of what a unified synthesis now could look like.

I don’t accept most of the contours of the synthesis Wilber comes up with, but some of the concepts that make it up have been very valuable to my reflection, especially ascent and descent and the pre-trans fallacy. And beyond the particular concepts, the nature of the project itself is particularly valuable in the era of detail-obsessed academia. Philologists and analytic philosophers usually can’t see the forest for the trees. Wilber’s sweeping generalizations give him the opposite problem: he has a hard time getting the whole forest because he doesn’t understand the trees that make it up. But when the structures of textual production today lead so overwhelmingly to a focus on nitpicky details with no larger context, Wilber’s problem is a good one for a thinker to have.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The problem I quickly realized is that romantic marriage is a recent invention, a construct of our own time. It was obvious to me from the beginning that I’d get little help from Indian Buddhism, where sex and marriage are emphasized as fetters that bind us in suffering. I knew that to choose marriage was to side against Śāntideva. Sure, Śāntideva praises the monk Jyotis for breaking his monastic vows and marrying a woman who fell in love with him – but Jyotis, like a good bodhisattva, did this entirely out of compassion. “I’m marrying you out of sympathy” is not exactly the note on which I want to start married life.

Classical Buddhism is an ascetic tradition through and through, as uncomfortable as such asceticism might make us today. But then much the same can be said about classical Christianity, at least as expressed in Paul’s New Testament writings. “Better to marry than to burn”: marriage is a third-best option, not as good as converting to celibacy as Paul did, let alone lifelong celibacy. It is good only because it prevents the worse option, of being led around by sexual lust. For this reason I tend to chafe a bit when I hear the standard wedding reading of 1 Corinthians: “Love is patient, love is kind,” and so on. Paul is not even talking about familial love, let alone romantic love; that’s the last thing on his mind. He’s talking about agape, compassion, close to Buddhist karuṇā. The King James Bible makes the point well when it renders the passage with “charity” rather than “love.”

But what about the non-ascetic traditions? Clearly some premoderns gave an unqualified endorsement to married life, even if the classical Buddhists and Christians did not. Indeed they did – but marriage so viewed was a very different thing. I touched on the point in my previous post about weddings, but it’s worth coming back to. Traditionally, marriage was not about the couple, it was about the community and its continuity, arranged by parents for the sake of producing and raising new children. And it was often the wife’s job to raise the children and the husband’s to provide materially – or sometimes the job of the extended family, if both were working. This is the married relationship that Confucius praises; but it is not our marriage. We fell in love without our families’ involvement, and we do not intend to have children. All of my family members are hundreds of miles away; hers do not live with us. To top it off, for the moment, she is our breadwinner while I am unemployed and taking care of the household. When classical Jewish or Confucian texts endorse marriage, it is for reasons far removed from ours. While I’ve said that weddings always imply a certain amount of traditionalism, to most traditional audiences our marriage looks a lot more like libertinism.

So the best premodern texts for a modern marriage are likely those which are not about marriage. The last time I got married, we read Pausanias’s speech from Plato’s Symposium, arguing that the best kind of love is pursued for the cultivation of virtue. A great and noble sentiment, and here we are talking about a love closer to modern romantic love – sexually charged eros, not compassionate agape. A good reading, but worth remembering that the eros that’s at issue here is the love Plato knew, between an older man and a younger boy. The dialogue never even entertains the idea that a married couple would feel eros for each other.

So likewise the Song of Songs, that Hebrew text that has made so many wonder “why is this in the Bible?” Not being constrained in our interpretations by tradition, we don’t need to take the strained reading of the text as an allegory for God’s love for the church. We can read it literally for what it is, the erotic passion of two heterosexual lovers, in a text that is nevertheless ancient and passed down by tradition. The text never says these lovers are married; in their time, they probably wouldn’t have been. But their love is much more like ours than is Paul’s agape, Śāntideva’s karuṇā, or the community- and family-oriented Confucian marriage. And so we are having a selection from this text sung at our wedding.

The other premodern reading we’ll have at the wedding is the short closing lines of the Rig Veda (X.191.4): “May your aim be one and single / May your hands be joined in one / The mind at rest in unison / At peace with all, so may you be.” It is also not about marriage in its original context, but about unity among Agni worshippers; and the translation is quite loose. In these respects I suppose it’s really no better than the Corinthians. But my father has regularly sent it as a wedding blessing to most of the couples we know who have married in my lifetime. So it’s become part of our own family tradition, in a way, as well as being an appropriate wish expressed in beautiful English. And all of that matters.

This will be my last post for a couple weeks – because of the wedding, of course! The next week and a half will be frenetic with wedding planning, and after that we are having a week’s honeymoon in New Orleans. (We had intended to go further afield, but immigration issues intervened; we expect to take a longer honeymoon this winter.) Blogging will take a back seat during this period. If I am seized by the urge to write about something topical, it’s possible that there may be a post in the interim; but I expect the blog’s writing to resume on the first of August.

Naturally, comments will remain open during this period; I’m happy that some lively discussions have got going here recently and I would be delighted if they continue. Before I pause, I would like to say a word of thanks to all my commenters and regular readers. You have made writing this blog a tremendously rewarding experience for me, and I look forward to resuming it in August.

It would be nice to think that the academy was some sort of exception to this rule; but it’s anything but. People go into academic work because they love to think and read and write and teach. But in a research-oriented job where one is paid to think and read and write, one must do it according to established disciplinary boundaries that do not necessarily make sense for one’s work: in my field one writes either for “philosophers” who value only precision and logical rigour, and care little or not at all for the great ideas of the past; or for “religionists” who care only about an accurate representation of the past and not about what that past has to teach us. If one tries to cross the boundaries, one is hurt far more than helped. And even if one is comfortable with those boundaries, one cannot simply take the time to learn, understand, absorb; one must write and be published, even if one would rather take the time to read and learn more before doing so. As for that vaunted “academic freedom”: for the majority of people employed in academic positions, there is no such thing. I started this blog only once it seemed likely I would not have an academic career in the long term; for I try here to speak my mind openly, explore my passions and intellectual curiosity, in a way that all the world can see. As long as I sought an academic career, I was deathly afraid that search committee members would discover that my views were not what they wanted to hear, and promptly exercise their wide-ranging arbitrary powers to deny me a livelihood.

And then there’s teaching: often in subjects that have little to do with one’s own passion, and equally often to students who do not care. That’s not even to mention the oft-required bureaucratic committee work, work that most academics relish far less than either research or teaching. Between these three alienated commitments, an aspiring philosophy or religion professor often has less time to think about philosophy than one who is outside the academy. And to do all this, in the vast majority of cases, one must effectively abandon friends and family, move to a place to which one has no ties and may well despise – and all of this is what one does if one is lucky, if one does not join the majority of PhD graduates who teach courses for less than a living wage.

To enter the academy, to try and write or play music for a living, to sell homemade crafts – these are often failed and futile attempt to avoid alienation, one which only leads one deeper into oppression and false consciousness. As an adjunct professor, one is exploited far more ruthlessly than any unionized factory worker – and the work that one does is scarcely any more one’s own than is the product of a modern factory. Marx would not be surprised to see that colleges and universities – even now that they’re run by the Sixties generation of former radicals – are alienated capitalist shop floors like any other. We want to think that the university is a place for the free exchange of ideas, outside of alienated market labour; it is anything but. It is one more site of capitalist exploitation.

The more I experience the capitalist workplace, the more I see that Marx’s diagnosis was right. Where Marx was wrong was in his prognosis of a better system. Bart Ehrman portrays Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet – one who thought that the Day of Judgement was coming in his own lifetime. Marx thought the same: the last would be first and the first would be last, a new order would come in where justice would prevail and humans’ true ends would be fulfilled.

Jesus and Marx were wrong. There was no new order. Once they were gone, their hopes were dashed. In the 150 years since Marx wrote they have not been fulfilled; nor have they been fulfilled in the 2000 years since Jesus’s lifetime. It’s been long enough in both cases to think that if the prophecies have not yet been fulfilled, they may well never be. And to me, this is where Buddhism comes in, another reason why I find the Buddha’s thought profounder than Marx’s. What Christianity and Marxism share above all is a sense of hope – a hope that history has so far falsified. Buddhism, on the other hand, offers us a critique of hope. The world is never going to get better. What we can do is work on our own suffering, and that of those around us, in the midst of our alienation and oppression. As the bumper sticker used to say, I feel so much better ever since I’ve given up hope.

Or, if you can’t handle that kind of pessimism, at least consider this. Marx was always cagey about his vision of a future society, what a non-alienated world would look like – it was supposed to arise out of the reflection of alienated or exploited groups. And yet he did offer glimpses, especially in the early work that focuses most on alienation. In the German Ideology, Marx speaks of a better world where one could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind,” as opposed to the specialized, mechanized world of alienated capitalist labour. My father, explaining this passage, once mentioned a time he had been flying first class and discussed Marx with a wealthy heiress sitting beside him on a plane. He had mentioned this passage to her, and she replied: “I can do that right now!” The difference was just that Marx hoped to see everyone, not just the aristocracy, have such an opportunity for self-definition.

And yet here’s the thing. Thanks primarily to the work of twentieth-century labour unions – often allied with Marxists, especially in places where their gains were strongest, outside the United States – many of us now have some of our lives to ourselves, where we can define ourselves in this way, independent of our alienated careers. If we can manage to find the 40-hour work week that our grandparents fought so hard for, we can certainly hunt in the morning, fish in the evening, and be a critical critic in the evening – on the weekend. Even the rest of the week, we might have several nights on which we can do at least one of these things. Alas, these days the work week seems to be getting longer; any fights in this regard are to maintain the status quo, not to make things better or bring them any closer to a non-alienated utopia.

Still, the benefits are there if we accept them – and, I suppose, if we don’t have children. Marx didn’t seem to think much about that part: even if we all had the resources to hunt in the morning and criticize in the evening, who would raise the kids? Friedrich Engels took up that question some, but Marx himself didn’t. Still, to have children is a choice which many people undertake, and undertake for their own reasons, not as part of a bargain with an employer; whether or not children actually make them happy, people have them because they believe they do. If we don’t take that choice, and we fight to keep the rights our grandparents fought for (as so many people today do not), then we may well be able to do the things we love in life without getting paid for them, do work that is a genuine labour of love. The work I did in academia was not my own. It was alienated labour. But this blog, I am happy to say, is not. I am lucky to have the chance to do some work that is all mine.

Somehow, Bob and I had also overlooked the fact that even if all you wanted was an ice cream truck, a bartender, and a deejay, you still needed a place to put them. And if you decided it might be nice to have some photographs of the day — photographs that did not scalp anyone, or feature detailed close-ups of your uncle’s thumb — it was best to hire a photographer. And then, as my mother diplomatically pointed out, if relatives were going to travel across the country to witness your marriage, it was probably polite to feed them more than a Fudgsicle and a glass of champagne. And surely, you couldn’t expect older folks to balance a plate on their hand all night: they had to sit somewhere. And since you were going to have tables anyway, would it really kill you to put out a few flowers to brighten things up?

Eventually Gilman even accepts the pouffy white wedding dress of her essay’s title: “My mind might have been that of a twenty-first-century feminist, but my body was that of a nineteenth-century Victorian, and the dress seemed to have been custom-made for my proportions.” And so it begins: as much as one desires to buck tradition, one nevertheless winds up finding reason to embrace many of the traditions one intended to reject. Hegel, I think, would approve: for him, it is important to question the authority of the past, but primarily in order to discover the rationality that underlies existing tradition, the reason things are the way they are. That seems to me exactly what young couples go through these days: however much you might want to reject the tent rentals, the fancy catering, the flower arrangements, the expensive photographer, you find that there are good reasons people go through all of these. You can (and probably should) throw out some wedding traditions, but you throw them all out at your peril.

Beyond Hegel, the process also makes me think of Confucius. I’ll refer back to comments I made when posting about Christmas:

The Confucians love to talk about how traditional ritual is one of the things that civilizes us, makes us part of the community – it’s the act of participating in the ritual itself that does this, not a historical or theological meaning that the ritual has. And… [ellipsis in original] I think Confucians like their traditional rituals for exactly the same reasons many North Americans hate Christmas (or Thanksgiving, or Passover for that matter): the whole idea is to share activity with family, including family who are very different from us, family who have poor character, family we don’t like. In our individualistic small-household culture, the holidays are among the few large-family rituals we have, which is why many people understandably would rather not bother with them.

Confucius’s prime example of such a civilizing ritual was traditional funeral rites. And indeed, in the mobile and scattered West, the two occasions we are most likely to see our whole extended family are funerals and – weddings. More so even than Christmas or Thanksgiving, weddings are a time when the family comes together, and when family preferences matter, even if the wedding is supposed to be all about two individuals.

In a certain way I would think of weddings as even more supremely Confucian than funerals. For while one can take a funeral to be about only one person, a wedding is always about at least two. Few events have more to do with the intimacy orientation so characteristic of Confucianism (again using Thomas Kasulis‘s highly productive distinction). By deciding to get married, to a certain extent one rejects the integrity orientation – both the premodern integrity orientation of the unmarried monk, and the modern integrity orientation of the autonomous libertine who cares only for himself or herself. On my previous account of three ways of life, at a wedding one commits to some degree of traditionalism, against both asceticism and libertism.

There are even some who lament that, in a sense, today’s marriages are not traditional enough. Patrick Deneen points out on Front Porch Republic not only that most marriages in history were based on family contracts rather than individual consent; but also that even when individual consent became indispensable to marriage in the West,

it was still understood by all parties that marriage was most fully a union by and for the greater community. Blessings of parents and the publication of “the banns” was a necessary precondition for a wedding. This was especially because the married couple – by committing to marriage – was not merely joining to each other in an official capacity, but was in fact becoming a constitutive unit of the community and the conduit for the continuation of culture. Marriage was thus essential to the life and future of culture, and could not be permitted to take place between two individuals who happened to love each other but who were culturally unrelated. Rather, and necessarily, marriage was the union not simply between individuals, but between two people who would convey the lived traditions of a culture – most obviously (for instance), a man and woman of the same religious faith (this is one of the main points of Fiddler on the Roof, where Tevye can brook the choices of his two older daughters – even marriage to a communist – because they are both Jews. It is only when his youngest daughter proposes to marry a Christian that he withholds consent). Marriage was most essentially a commitment to a community, not the sum of personal choices of individuals. [emphases in original]

Deneen writes as a conservative opposed to gay marriage, but he sees gay marriage as the inevitable outcome of an individualistic concept of marriage – the kind of concept that we or Gilman tried to follow, where we would decide to move away from established traditions. Deneen reminds me what a modern individualist I am; I’m grateful that I don’t live in Deneen’s world, which would in many ways be Confucius’s. I’m much happier to be in Hegel’s world. We still could throw out all convention, we still could elope, and it’s important that we be able to reserve that right; but because we want to give our families and friends a good time, we start to see the reasons behind a number of the conventions we thought we’d leave aside.

Such a point has implications well beyond weddings. I think it’s what gives rise to the old saw “liberal at 20, conservative at 40″ – though I’d prefer “radical at 20, pragmatic at 40,” as self-styled conservatives, especially of the libertarian stripe, can be far more radical in the changes they wish to see than many are left-wingers. As teenagers, we learn – to our shock – what is wrong with the world around us, and set out to do everything differently from what came before. Only as we try (and typically fail) to do this over the years do we learn why things are the way they are in the first place.

The problem: this view is almost the opposite of what the classical Indian Buddhists – including the Buddha of the Pali suttas – actually taught. To be sure, the autonomous, independent selves that we would like to believe in are an illusion. We must indeed recognize the dependent co-arising (paticca samupp?da or pratitya samutp?da) of all things, acknowledge that everything arises out of a circle of mutually dependent causes.

Here’s the thing: this circle of causes is bad. The first of the twelve links in the chain of causation is ignorance; and out of this chain comes suffering. All of the things conditioned by causation, the First Noble Truth says, are suffering, dukkha. The hope offered by the Buddha, in the Third Noble Truth, is to offer us a way out of this suffering interdependent world of sa?s?ra – to get us to nirvana, something unconditioned, in some sense even independent. You usually won’t hear this part in Yavanayāna affirmations of interdependence. Early Buddhism offers us a worldview strikingly similar to the Jainism that preceded it and the Yoga Sūtras that followed it; and these are probably the strongest integrity traditions there are, more “Cartesian” than Descartes himself. We progressively reduce our dependence on the world around us until we transcend even dependence on life itself, entering the ideal state, the Jaina and Yoga version of nirv?na, which is called kaivalya: aloneness.

Neither does this integrity orientation change where one might most expect it to change: the rise of other-oriented Mahāyāna, where one remains in the world to free others. In Indian Mahāyāna thinkers like Śāntideva, this freedom is itself understood as independence. Śāntideva teaches the importance of the kaly?na mitra, the good spiritual friend – but this friendship is understood in a necessarily unbalanced and hierarchical way. When I was a TA for Diana Eck, she gave me some wise advice about the proper boundaries for a teacher: “You can be your students’ friend, but they can’t be your friend.” And this is exactly the way the kaly?na mitra works. The kaly?na mitra is a guru, someone more liberated than you are; you can trust, rely on depend on this guru, but the guru can’t depend on you. Ultimately, the goal is to become a kaly?na mitra for others, to allow them to depend on you – but they can depend on you because you are advanced enough not to depend on anyone else.

Where all of this does change, as far as I can tell, is in East Asia – where the intimacy worldview was philosophically entrenched long before Buddhism arrived o the scene. I’m no expert on East Asian Buddhism, but as I understand it, schools like Huayan do indeed stress the world’s interdependence and see it as a good thing. This point, however, seems to have much more to do with East Asia than with Buddhism. It’s part of the reason I see Buddhism as the exception that proves the rule in Asian philosophy, the constant between South Asia and East Asia that does more to show their differences than their commonalities. Buddhism is an integrity philosophy like Jainism and Yoga when it’s in India alongside those philosophical systems; it’s an intimacy philosophy like Confucianism when it’s beside Confucianism in East Asia. Macy, however, tends to act as if the Theravāda Buddhism she has learned from is Confucian in this way, when it really isn’t, and she’s not alone in thinking that way.

Now why stress this point? I do think that acknowledging our dependence is a good thing in many ways, especially if we’re not going to try and go it alone in a monastic lifestyle. Yet at the same time, there’s something important to the idea of controlling our emotions and reducing our attachments. Feminists of the boomer generation, like Macy, fought against the stiff-upper-lip ideal of men who repressed their emotions, and there’s surely something to their critique; at the same time, there’s something to that ideal as well. It’s valuable to get our emotions under control so they don’t control us; that doesn’t mean we need to repress them. Similarly, as much as we do need to acknowledge our dependence on others, we also need to cultivate some amount of healthy independence, to be comfortable in our own skins independent of what others think of us, to be the “rock” that others can lean on. In my view, classical Buddhism as it was, and Macy’s distortion of it, both tend to be one-sided.

Niceness, in my books, is not necessarily a virtue like kindness or gentleness, though it’s also not necessarily a flaw like timidity. Like extraversion, it is a personality trait with its benefits and flaws; the latter tend to receive less attention. I’m not just referring to the view that “nice guys finish last”; one might argue that that’s part of the point of niceness, to be self-sacrificing or altruistic so that others may do better. But even if one would argue that that’s a good thing, there are ways that niceness can hurt others as well as the nice themselves.

Consider the distinction between niceness and gentleness – or more concretely, between the nice guy and the gentleman. While in other respects I was unimpressed with Harvey Mansfield’s talk on manliness, I thought he gave an excellent reply there to a question about the ideal of the gentleman: a gentleman is a proper masculine ideal in that he is gentle because he chooses to be, not because he has to be. The nice guy, on the other hand, is nice by temperament, in a way that makes it difficult for him to avoid.

More generally, to pin these concepts down a bit more, it seems to me that to be nice is to avoid offence to others when possible, whereas to be gentle is to avoid harm. But surely sometimes offence is good – it helps us do good and avoid harm. Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal used offence to bring about valuable political change, as (in a different way) did Norman Lear’s All In The Family years later. So too, Ch’an masters are expected to insult and offend their students as a way of bringing about personal change for the better, in a way that a nice person couldn’t do. Dr. Phil‘s approach to therapy seems to be based on the same principle – it’s by being “mean,” the opposite of nice, that he makes people realize they’re screwing their lives up. Only be giving offence can he “tell it like it is.”

Niceness at its best becomes gentleness. André Comte-Sponville refers to la douceur, which could mean gentleness or niceness, as that which is lacking in a train full of soldiers – a group of people who, in other circumstances at least, could surely use a measure of niceness. Where Canadians would do well with a lower dose of niceness, Texans could use more of it.

It’s telling, though, that Comte-Sponville’s douceur literally means “softness”; Śāntideva uses saukum?rya, a Sanskrit word with a similar meaning, to describe the vice present in someone with no patient endurance, no tolerance for pain. The English “nice” doesn’t have quite that negative sense, but it does, I think, involve at least a little bit of fear. The nice guy doesn’t want to give offence, because he wants to avoid confrontation – even when confrontation would be a good thing. Niceness then too easily turns into passive aggression – because one isn’t ready for offence and open confrontation, one causes harm without admitting it.

As the references to nice guys and gentlemen might suggest, gender matters here too. Women are traditionally expected to be douce, to avoid confrontation, in ways that lead to meekness and submissiveness. (The nice guy, unlike the gentleman, is often thought of as effeminate.) My commenter Ayse sensibly took issue before with my previous reversal of Mansfield’s traditional gender roles, where I suggested that women need more patient endurance and men need emotional expression. Here, though, I see another reversal of traditional gender roles that seems in keeping with the spirit of her comment: women typically need to be less nice.

This change in usage can’t be a coincidence. I think of a twentysomething friend of mine whose father is a modernist architect, a devotee of the International Style. He builds the kind of buildings that only architects can love, eminently functional buildings that appear to most people (including his daughter) as merely ugly: what Jane Jacobs famously called a Great Blight of Dullness. When I visit their house, I see at a picture of him on the wall from the 1970s: a dashing, handsome young man, decked out resplendently in the fashions of the age. Once upon a time, it was the trend to be modern.

Moreover, it was the trend for good reason. In the 1970s, “old-fashioned” meant a world where a woman’s place was in the home, where “sodomy” was illegal, where races were segregated – a world that not so long ago had produced the Nazis. When I see the picture of my friend’s father I think of Pierre Trudeau, the dashing, flamboyant Canadian prime minister who legalized homosexuality and contraception and promoted the now-dominant view of Canada as officially bilingual and multicultural – having grown up under the conservative Catholic fascism of Québec’s Maurice Duplessis. Trudeau was one face of Québec’s “Quiet Revolution,” the drastic move within one generation from a church-dominated authoritarian society to a libertine egalitarianism. We owe a debt to the modernists of the ’60s and ’70s and their rejection of the old-fashioned world.

But the 1970s were also the era of Jane Jacobs’s urban criticism, and most notably of Pruitt-Igoe, the 1950s modern St. Louis housing project praised by architectural critics as a grand breakthrough – and demolished as unlivable less than 20 years later, in 1972. While Pruitt-Igoe became the symbol of failed architectural modernism, all over the world there was an increasing reaction against modernism’s blandness, sterility and simple ugliness. By the end of the ’70s, the trend was to historic preservation. The modest but pleasing buildings of the early twentieth century no longer seemed old-fashioned. Though the word wasn’t yet used this way, they seemed old-school.

Architecture is the realm where it’s easiest to pinpoint what went wrong with modernism, and why it ended. But the move from “old-fashioned” to “old-school,” from rejecting the old to embracing it, entered far more realms of human endeavour. Above all, we hear little these days of the “secularization thesis,” taken for granted in the early ’70s, which assumed that people were embracing scientific rationalism and moving away from “religion,” whatever that is. A first straw in the wind was the Iranian revolution of 1979, seen as an atavistic aberration by the prevailing intellectuals of the time, but embraced by a young French philosopher named Michel Foucault. Foucault’s philosophy centred around a critique of modernity, which led him to endorse the Ayatollah Khomeini as a reaction against the modern world – for a while at least. You can almost hear him looking at Khomeini and saying “Man, that dude is old school!” Foucault, of course, went on to become one of the best-known philosophers of his generation; and the Iranian revolution is still with us, and inspired many others to embrace what they saw as an older variety of Islam.

I’m not a great admirer of Foucault’s philosophy, but I think I understand the impulse that led him to endorse the Iranian revolution. In Foucault and Khomeini there’s a cautionary tale: to turn the clock back before Trudeau, before the International Style, would be disastrous. And yet I think that my generation feels more acutely the things that are missing from the modernist world: not merely in art and architecture, but in ideas and values. My own intellectual story is a break from the eminently modern philosophy of utilitarianism, turning to much older Buddhist views. Even on gender, where the accomplishments of the modern day are least ambiguous, there’s still something to be said for the values of traditional masculinity. No longer old-fashioned, the old now looks old-school.

I sometimes imagine the centuries lined up on some chronological Judgement Day, and the 20th century being shown its great catalogue of horrors and atrocities. A cosmic judge asks that century “What do you have to say for yourself? How can you possibly justify your existence in the face of this destruction?”

In spite of everything, before this cosmic temporal court, I believe the 20th century could make up for it all with three small words: we liberated women. The liberation of women is the singular achievement of the past hundred years.

Before 1900, half of the human race, no matter its wealth or social standing, was guaranteed a life of subservience and disregard. Certainly women could still be happy in those earlier circumstances; happiness depends far more on one’s own mental dispositions than it does on one’s social standing or other external factors. But they received little if any opportunity to make a contribution to the world beyond their own families. A list of the pre-20th century philosophers who rival their greatest male counterparts, for example, could probably fit on the fingers of one hand, if one was being generous.

What the 20th century proved was that, contrary to the views of such great minds as Aristotle, Hume, Kant, the dharma??stra authors and arguably even the Buddha, women are every bit as capable as men when given a realistic opportunity; their lack of achievement had nothing to do with the poverty of their ideas and everything to do with the inability to get their ideas developed and preserved. Martha Nussbaum, Ayn Rand, Judith Butler, Iris Murdoch immediately leap to mind as among the past century’s most capable thinkers; even if one disdains their contributions, as analytic philosophers are prone to do, one can easily point to women among the most distinguished analytical ethicists: Philippa Foot, Christine Korsgaard, Judith Jarvis Thomson.

The technological achievements of the 20th century are a double-edged sword; the colonial empires’ liberation will be a footnote in the history told thousands of years from now, when most of those new nations no longer exist. But women’s liberation – incomplete though it may be – is here to stay. In the Western world, even organizations working against feminist causes accept women’s equality in ways they never would have hundreds of years before. Only in the Islamic world are serious arguments heard against women’s basic equality before the law in a general sense, and those arguments are marginal in much of that world, which has produced a large number of female heads of state. This is no longer a clock that can be turned back. And even in the face of so many shameful atrocities, that’s an accomplishment that should make any century proud.

A long time ago, I was talking to my friend Nic Thorne, a classicist, about Buddhism and virtue. I was explaining the characteristically Buddhist virtue of k??nti or patient endurance – taking unpleasant events with peace and equanimity. He said: “stoicism.”

The word just floored me. At that point I’d never studied the Stoics, and never imagined that there could be a connection between Buddhism and stoicism – whether with a small or big S. I associated the term “stoicism” with icons of old-fashioned masculinity, which seemed at the time almost comical: the British stiff upper lip, John Wayne. Men who refused to display emotion. I assumed such a posture was repression, leading to passive aggression – or perhaps to self-destruction. (Slash‘s autobiography is an interesting case study of a man who, unwilling to talk about or express his worries, instead turns to heroin for a release.)

But through my appreciation for Buddhism, I came to a new appreciation of that traditional masculinity as well. There’s something to the idea that one should control one’s emotions – though, again, this is very different from repressing them. It’s good to be the kind of person who doesn’t get angry – even though it’s terrible to be the kind of person who gets angry inside and represses it outside.

I do think, though, that the association of small-s stoicism with masculinity is misguided. Harvey Mansfield tried to defend it in his book on manliness, and in a talk he gave on the subject at Harvard; but I couldn’t discern a single reason in his talk why this manliness should be a virtue limited to biological males. I asked him why it wouldn’t be a virtue for women too, and he said “well, that’s the gender-neutral society I’m attacking,” but nothing in his reply seemed at all persuasive in claiming there was anything wrong with such a society. I appreciated his attempt to revive the virtues associated with masculinity, but his attempt to maintain a gender link did those virtues no favours.

If anything, it seems to me that the opposite of Mansfield’s position is true. Men should be the ones trying to express their repressed emotions, since they’re so conditioned to repress them – that’s how we avoid ending up in Slash’s position. It’s women, conditioned to be emotional, who most need a healthy dose of Buddhist patient endurance.