“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.

Americans have typically greeted bin Laden’s death with jubilation and celebration, often waving American flags and chanting “U.S.A.” But some minority voices, such as Linton Weeks at NPR radio and Pamela Gerloff of the Huffington Post, have raised questions about this celebration. Is it really a good idea to celebrate a human death, even the death of one’s enemy?

This all makes a good occasion to revisit an earlier short post of mine, one of my favourites. The thing that affected me most at my one Goenka meditation retreat was not the meditation practice in general, but the closing practice of karmic redirection, because it specifically involved wishing George W. Bush well – and, more generally, wishing one’s enemies well. What applies to Bush here applies to bin Laden – the two men are of course enemies of each other, but I also consider them both enemies of mine.

A couple months ago, Thill questioned the value of Goenka’s practice – not over its efficacy, but over the values that underlie it. Thill asks: “Is wishing the enemy well actually a case of masochism since the enemy is a person who wants to harm us?… What if the enemy is a sadist whose happiness consists in seeing you suffer? Then, wishing this enemy happiness is tantamount to wishing one’s own suffering!”

As Jim Wilton rightly noted in his replies, wishing enemies well does not entail wishing them success in their aims, or wishing that their desires be fulfilled. This is as true of one’s friends as of one’s enemies. If my friend is addicted to crack cocaine, wishing him well does not mean that I wish he find more crack to smoke. Indeed I wish him the exact opposite. What he needs most is a change in the structure of his desires; he will probably be better off with the desires unfulfilled, as that would bring about the relevant change. And the same applies to people with evil or hateful aims: wishing them a good and happy life carries with it the wish that they improve and become better people. Thill’s comments here have assumed a simplistic understanding of happiness that equates it with the satisfaction of desire, when often what is needed for a long-term and stable happiness is the exact opposite.

In reply to Jim, Thill makes an important point: “note the element of self-interest in all this. In wishing all that for your enemy, you are also wishing a change in your enemy’s attitude towards you. It is all tantamount to wishing that he or she is in a condition in which he or she ceases to be your enemy!” That’s true. But even if one characterizes it as self-interested, one should notice what such wishing for one’s enemy’s virtue doesn’t imply: namely revenge. One wishes that, in spite of the bad things the enemy has done, he might still become better and happier, in the process ceasing to be an enemy. One does not take the enemy’s violent and painful death as an occasion for celebration.

Now let me clarify: this is not a call for pacifism. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, I sat in on a class at Harvard where the professor’s response to the attacks was “I think we should set up an exchange program, so that people in our countries can better understand each other.” (Students applauded.) I was stunned at the naïveté expressed there. We are not talking about people who express frustrating differences at the ballot box (like, say, Québec separatists – most of the time). We are talking about people who want to kill you, and have just killed several of your fellow countrymen simply because they were your fellow countrymen; they would do it to you if given the chance – like on an exchange program.

Gandhi, to whom Thill refers in this context, was considerably more sophisticated than said professor. Gandhi understood that his pacifism would cause great suffering, even many deaths, to his own side; but that it was worth it to achieve his goals in a morally upstanding way. It’s worth celebrating the success of Gandhi’s nonviolent methods against colonialism – and those of Martin Luther King, who derived many of his methods from Gandhi. But Gandhi and King were facing enemies who believed in justice over power, in the rule of law, in the value of human life. The goals of the British Empire and of the American South were to preserve an unjust and discriminatory social order which they believed to be benign. The goals of the Nazis, by contrast, were extermination. If an Indian stood fearlessly in front of a British soldier’s gun, the soldier would rightly fear the public repercussions of shooting. If a Jew stood fearlessly in front of a Nazi gun, she would merely save the Nazi the work of rounding her up. Bin Laden, in this respect, was far more akin to the Nazis – his attacks weren’t even to make demands, the destruction itself was the goal. (It is worth noting that Bush, however, would have been significantly more akin to the British Empire.) I agree with Thill on this much: one often must fight against one’s enemies, and sometimes this does require violence.

This violence is, however, regrettable. In war, killing another human being can be – and often is – the best course of action. But it is a tragic right action, and one should be aware of this fact. Thill claimed in another context: “Even if you want to kill a dog or a horse in order to put it out of misery and you do it skillfully, it would still be a gross distortion to describe this act as one which gives pleasure to the agent.” That is, one feels compassion, a painful emotion occasioned by another’s suffering. I discussed compassion myself in response to Thill’s post, noting that because we are not perfect or ideal people, we need remind ourselves that others’ pain is a bad thing (even if a hypothetical perfect person might need feel no regrets). The killing of an enemy, it seems to me, fits under exactly this class of action: necessary but regrettable, a proper occasion for compassion. Finding and punishing bin Laden was an important goal, and it is good that the US government under Obama succeeded in accomplishing this goal. And yet even so, it is not an occasion for celebration, but for sadness that it had to come to this.

It took me a while to figure out the reason for this, but I came to see it quite clearly: for most left-wingers, the good is fundamentally political. The place to focus our efforts, in changing the way that things and people are, is on the inequalities, oppressions and pollutions of the state and the corporations and wealth it regulates. Conservatives, at least social conservatives, often do not think this way. Our big problems are with ourselves. It matters that people become better, more virtuous; even when they do obsess about politics, it is as an attempt to make people better in some sense. An interesting example is Rod Dreher, one of the conservative bloggers I linked to in the earlier post: while his blog was originally called “Crunchy Con” (as in “conservative”), it later just took on his name, and now is called Macroculture – the emphasis has been steadily less on politics and more on culture, and the blog has gotten steadily more interesting (though less popular) as it went. This is an attitude I tend to be largely in agreement with. My deepest debt to Buddhism is that it saved me from politics, made me focus on problems with myself and not with the world.

The question I’ve then come to ask myself is: why haven’t I become conservative myself? I don’t mean a movement Republican, for that question is easily answered: George W. Bush, and his ideological successor Sarah Palin, represent an abhorrent combination of procedural, symbolic and substantive wrongs, many of which would count as wrong from any ideological standpoint. ̇When his writings were primarily political, Dreher was a fierce critic of Bush on conservative grounds – the enormous expansion of government and the deficit, the wars of choice, the incompetence in the face of Hurricane Katrina.

But why not become a more skeptical right-winger like Dreher? This is where the question gets more philosophically interesting. I’ve sometimes found it perplexing that in the contemporary right wing, social and cultural conservatism is often joined with economic libertarianism, extreme liberalism in the classical sense (and the inverse is true on the left). The justification for this connection is often articulated by right-wing bloggers like Dreher and William Vallicella: government social intervention on behalf of the disadvantaged, the centrepiece of a left-wing political problem, makes people worse. It discourages people from working hard and being thrifty, makes them lazy, less virtuous. Under a left-wing social-democratic government, the good people who work hard and save to get rich are punished, while the lazy are rewarded. Right-wingers typically maintain some modified version of the Protestant ethic chronicled by Max Weber, according to which wealth is, if not a sign of God’s favour, at least a deserved reward for a virtuous life spent working hard and saving.

And where I depart most from such a viewpoint is not in the idea that the government should avoid the promotion of virtue, nor in the belief that social programs may discourage work or thrift. Rather, it is in the idea that hard work and thrift are themselves virtues. It is this conceit – typically American but hardly unique to the US – that I disdain.

Hard work and thrift are often associated with real virtues, such as temperance and patient endurance. To put in long hours earning money, one must have the ability to put aside the desires of the moment and endure present hardship for future benefit; this ability is an excellent character trait. But it is not a virtue in itself; indeed, especially in the US, it often becomes a characteristic vice. As I argued last week, this is the real problem with “convenience”: spending money to save time is a futile and unworthy pursuit if all we do with that time is make more money.

Marx was wise to emphasize alienation – our work lives are lives lived for someone else, they take us away from the things that are most important, in the name of money. Most of us need to work, but if that becomes our priority in life, we have bad priorities. The iconic Silicon Valley entrepreneur who works 90-hour weeks in order to make millions – this seems like a right-winger’s model of a good human being. In my view, however, such a person is seriously deficient. I’m hardly the first to make this point – Bertrand Russell put it far more eloquently – but it is all too absent from contemporary political conversation, especially those of self-professed conservatives. The thrift and saving that makes many millionaires, too, can easily degenerate into miserliness, and a capitalist economy often rewards the latter even more than the former. The self-made rich, even if they have come by their money entirely honestly, are not necessarily any better than the rest of us, and may well be worse.

Beyond all this, of course, there is the basic point that hard work and thrift are often not related to economic success; one can easily compare Paris Hilton to Mexican immigrant families who struggle tirelessly and still can’t make ends meet, or any number of similar examples. This is of course an important point in deciding where on the political spectrum one will fall; but it interests me less here than the wider point about virtue. Even if wealth were awarded entirely in accordance with effort and labour, it seems to me that it would still be worth offering some government support to the needy, and doing so would not necessarily affect the people’s character for the worse.

But I think the conflict may be very difficult to resolve, for reasons that are philosophically interesting – they get to the heart of important questions in political theory. What follows are my layman’s reflections on the issue, not the views of an expert on Thai politics, and I may have some details wrong; but the issues seem big enough to merit posting on here regardless.

What is fundamentally at stake in Thailand, it seems to me, is the question of populism vs. technocracy – a debate that animates almost every modern democratic system in some respect, though it’s often unacknowledged as such, lost between the more common oppositions of “left” and “right” (or even “libertarian” and “communitarian”).

The Red Shirts, whose protests were the occasion for the most recent round of protest, are fundamentally populist. To them what matters is that the people be represented, that their choices be respected, that the system be genuinely democratic. (No doubt some of them are just in it for the money – Thaksin is using his riches to fund much of the support for him – but it seems highly implausible to me The Yellow Shirts, who set off the previous round, are technocrats – their concern is that government govern well. The two sides have come to an impasse over one man: Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister elected in a landslide and then ousted in a military coup.

As I understand it, it’s hard to dispute that Thaksin’s government was corrupt to the core, enriching Thaksin’s own pockets at the country’s expense, in a way that could have brought the country to ruin. Reaction of the Bangkok businesspeople went beyond anger to panic: if Thaksin kept up, would Thailand start looking like Laos, as impoverished as it was 50 years ago? And yet Thaksin was elected, never lost an election, and would very likely win another one if it was actually held. Nobody, as far as I know, suspects that Thaksin’s corruption went as far as systematic vote-rigging. He is the people’s choice. Why? He put in many reforms that benefitted the poor north and northeast of the country; those might not have been economically sustainable in the long term (as the yellow shirts fear), but in the short term they worked wonders, and the Thais love him for them.

The Yellow Shirt movement against Thaksin seems to me, at its heart, utilitarian: the idea is to bring about the best overall consequences for the greatest number in the long run. If to accomplish this you need a military coup to topple a democratically elected leader, more power to you. (There is a very strong historical connection between philosophical utilitarianism and economics, the technocratic discipline par excellence.) The Red Shirts, on the other hand, are fighting for popular sovereignty: for the right of the people to collectively decide their own fate, even if it turns out it’s a bad one.

The Yellow Shirts embody the ideal of technocracy, the Red Shirts of populism. And this is a battle that plays out elsewhere as well, cutting across left-right lines. Hugo Chávez and Pat Buchanan are both populists, Manmohan Singh and Angela Merkel both technocrats. Technocrats set what appears to be the “centre,” and yet the populists on either “fringe” can sometimes find more to agree on with each other than with those centrists.

In the United States, Sarah Palin and Ralph Nader share the same populist appeal as the Red Shirts: the idea of speaking up for a silenced people. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, was a consummate technocrat, leaving no grand plans or inspiring visions, staking his legitimacy only on the great prosperity for which his later years are remembered. George W. Bush succeeded because he talked like a populist and acted like a technocrat. The grassroots Christian conservative populist movement, without whom Bush could never have been elected, got very little of what it wanted from him; but the big businesses who depended on him for their profitable functioning got everything.

In Canada the Bloc Québécois embodies a populist spirit, speaking out for French Québécois who feel alienated from the larger system, against the consummately technocratic Liberals. The old Reform Party tried to be populist, but as it moved toward power it got absorbed into the much more technocratic Conservatives.

Genuine populists, then, rarely get very close to power; as they do, they become more technocratic. To the populist, that transition is a matter of selling out; the populists in power get bought off by big business, big government and big labour, they need to strike too many deals on the way up. To the technocrat, on the other hand, it’s a matter of seeing the reasons why the world is as it is: radical at 20, pragmatic at 40. I used to have very strong populist sensibilities. These took a hit after I moved to the US where direct democracy and referenda – key tools in ensuring the people’s wishes are followed – are politically prominent. Since I moved to Massachusetts ten years ago, the state has seen ballot measures both to establish universal health care and to repeal the income tax. It would have been easy for voters to establish both – but that would have required draconian sales taxes, drastic cuts to everything but health care (education, transportation, law enforcement) and probably a giant deficit to boot, none of which voters would have voted for. Policy is much more effective when it’s made as a package; but ordinary voters think piecemeal about particular initiatives, not about the package. That’s a basic argument for technocracy. And yet, when that argument is followed, government is genuinely taken out of the hands of the people; it becomes significantly less democratic. I have seen no way to resolve the problem yet. So I suspect that the conflict between Red Shirts and Yellow Shirts will persist – and not only in Thailand.

I spent almost the entire decade living in the United States, except for two three-month stints in Toronto in 2001 and India in 2005. It was not the ideal decade in which to do this, for the US of this decade was the US of George W. Bush: a man who opposed almost everything I had ever stood for, whether substantively (torture, wars of choice, gutting environmental regulations), procedurally (incompetent patronage appointments for natural disasters, governing unilaterally without respect for other branches of government) or symbolically (insisting on suits and ties in the White House). I had grown up despising Ronald Reagan, but Reagan now looked like a saint compared to W – Reagan at least was competent. And in the face of all this, Americans returned him to office in 2004.

For my many American friends – the vast majority of them left-wingers like me – this decade was a time of powerlessness and rage. But they at least could vote, could contribute to political campaigns, could do something about it. For me, the powerlessness was doubled, and so, therefore, was the rage.

But it was also a time that I spent learning about Buddhism, having first become interested in it a few years before. Especially there was Śāntideva, on whom I decided to write my dissertation – and above all his views on anger and patient endurance, which I really began to think about after teaching them in a seminar. In a decade of rage and powerlessness, this was a lifeline.

I spoke a while ago of how S.N. Goenka’s karmic redirection (at a retreat in late 2005) had a tremendous healing effect for me: meditate on wishing your enemies well, and for me that meant George W. Bush. But that was only the second step for me; the process had begun a little earlier, in a way that was equally transformative.

At the end of 2004, when Bush was elected (any “re-” is at least arguable), my rage was at its height. Daily I devoured the news on left-wing political blogs like Daily Kos and Atrios’s Eschaton, full of people who shared my anger. Then as 2005 began I flew to India on a Shastri fellowship to study Buddhist Sanskrit. I was away from the Internet for the first week or two, and print news focused on Indian issues, not American ones. When I got my Internet back a week or so later, the first thing I did was open up Atrios – and shut it back down immediately, before I’d reading the first sentence.

In that moment I had just come to realize Śāntideva’s wisdom – I had come to see how anger was poisoning my soul. For in that week without exposure to American politics, the anger had subsided, and a peace had come with it – but in reading a half-dozen words of Atrios’s, the flame rekindled in an instant. I didn’t want that anymore. I wanted to be happy and peaceful; and I could be that way by leaving politics behind.

So far the most controversial feature of my scholarly work, as it developed in the latter half of the decade, has been my skepticism toward politically Engaged Buddhism, and a defence of political quietism like Śāntideva’s. I suspect that this view has cost me academic jobs: I remember well one interview where the interviewers had loved my earlier Marxist work, but the temperature in the room dropped rapidly when I gave my job talk on Śāntideva’s anti-politics. But it would have been hard for me to do otherwise in the face of the decade’s events: Buddhism had saved me from politics. It showed me that a better life was possible without angry political engagement.

Now, finally, at the end of the decade, the political landscape is dramatically different. For the first time in my lifetime, Canada’s government is further right than the US’s, most recently embarrassing itself with a disgraceful obstructionism at the Copenhagen conference. I no longer feel a terrible anger at the government of the country I live in. And yet there remain plenty of opportunities for such anger: first at Canada’s government, and second that even the new US government has done so little. Barack Obama promised us hope: but nothing has been done about climate change, the US remains mired in an Afghanistan war that looks seemingly pointless, and we have yet to see whether he can deliver even on his signature issue of health care.

And yet, one can remain happy. I’ve previously described Buddhism as a critique of hope. A good life has less to do with external situations – of you, of your country, of the world – and more to do with a peace within. With the abandonment of hope in politics can come the abandonment of anger, and a new tranquility. So Obama’s government feels less like a letdown to me than it does to many of my fellows on the left. Is he making the world better, giving us reason to hope? Perhaps not. But he’s at least stopping it from getting significantly worse. After the past decade, that’s reason enough to celebrate.

I gained a newfound respect for the practice, though, when I attended a vipassanā meditation retreat in S.N. Goenka’s tradition, in 2005. Many people I know swear by Goenka’s overall technique; it frankly didn’t do a lot for me. What made a huge difference, though, was at the very end of the retreat, when Goenka urged us to a practice very much like traditional pariṇāmanā. Wish everyone well, he said on his videotape. Think of people you know and wish them the best.

Fine, that’s the easy part. But then he said: wish your enemies well. Think of your enemies, and devote wishes to their being happy. So I thought: who is my greatest enemy? As a lifelong leftie, in 2005, it didn’t take me long to identify George W. Bush. And so, as part of the practice, I tried sincerely to wish that man well.

The experience was more than unsettling. I cried in the process. But it helped me grow a lot. I had spent a long time feeling such poisonous hatred for that man, which did terrible things to me and my own well-being – in a way that Śāntideva warns us about. It’s a terribly unnerving, but highly rewarding, thing to wish your enemies well. Since your enemies are only human it makes philosophical sense to do so, really, if your main aim is consequentialist – that is, to produce the best results for yourself or for humanity. The trick is that it requires you to give up retribution as a goal, and even for a consequentialist, that’s not easy.

UPDATE (29 June 2009): According to my blog stats, this post is getting almost as many hits today alone as it got in the previous three weeks it was online! I’m also seeing that people have been referred here from their Livejournal friends pages, but I can’t find any reference to the post on those pages. So I’m guessing someone referred to it from a friends-locked LJ post…? One way or another, I’m delighted to have you all here, I hope you’ve enjoyed the post, and I’d be happy to hear your comments below (and would also be happy to have you stick around and check out my other posts). I’m also a little curious about who linked to me and what they said!