Meanwhile, a couple of related recent American events you might not have heard of. In Maine, newly elected Republican governor Paul LePage has ordered the removal of a mural in the state Department of Labour depicting the state’s labour history, along with the renaming of conference rooms named after César Chávez and other labour organizers. The governor’s spokesman proclaimed that these symbols are “not in keeping with the department’s pro-business goals.” At the symbolic level too, the government has explicitly picked a side in a class struggle.

The same battles come up in the federal government, where House Republicans have prepared a measure to deny food stamps – the main US provision to ensure people do not starve – to striking workers. If you fight for better labour conditions, the logic appears to go, you deserve to die hungry. Some irony that all this is taking place around the 100th anniversary of the industrial disaster that helped create labour laws and labour movement in the US. (Keep in mind, too, that unions are already extraordinarily weak in the US; less than 10% of private-sector employees belong to a union, and even in the public sector the number is less than 40%.)

It has been hard for me to go through the past couple of weeks without hearing the voice of Karl Marx saying “I told you so”: class struggles are real, and the government takes the side of the property owners. It’s true that these active gratuitous assaults on labour movement are all perpetrated by Republicans, but they are just further assaults on unions that were already weakened with Democratic complicity. (Republicans have recently taken on the sadly amusing habit of calling Obama a “socialist.” Would that it were so.) I haven’t been a Marxist for a long time, but this year’s events go a long way toward making me one – not just in terms of the problem of alienation, where I’ve already discussed my agreement with Marx, but also with respect to his more central issue of class conflict.

But what I also said about Marx before still applies: he was wrong about the future. There was and will be no new preferable order. The Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson quoted an anonymous “someone” as having said “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”; as it turns out, Jameson himself had said something like this in an earlier work. I think it’s hard to dispute this quote. There is a varied number of disasters, some narrowly averted, that could mean the end of humanity: global nuclear war, emerging pandemic, change to the natural environment that comes too quickly for us to stop. But humanity going on after capitalism? It’s not entirely unthinkable, but at this point it’s very difficult to envision what that would look like, when the only really serious attempt at an alternative not only failed, but destroyed millions of lives and families along the way.

Just as before, I think there’s a close parallel between Marxism and Christianity – though rather than Jesus and the early Christians, I’m thinking here of probably the most profound and influential Christian thinker, Augustine. What Marx and Augustine share, to use Greek medical terms, is a combination of penetrating diagnosis and wrong prognosis. Augustine is quite right to point out his central “chastened intellectualist” theme of human weakness: when we make attempts at self-improvement, the persistence of our bad habits shows us just how hard it is to be better, even how much we rationalize the bad habits to ourselves. When we place our individual weakness beside the terrible crimes committed by other human beings – some of the worst having been committed in Marx’s own name – it is easy to see the power of Augustine’s mistrust of human virtue, like Marx’s insights into class conflict and alienation.

Yet Augustine’s way forward is no better than Marx’s. In his eyes, our troubles will be resolved by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ if we open ourselves up to his grace, allowing ourselves a perfectly virtuous and happy life after death. But I’ve noted before that I don’t see any reason to believe in such a thing; and even if I did, I would have significant objections to worshipping the God he describes, who damns human beings to eternal torment.

Augustine and Marx, then, both insightfully diagnose a problem but leave us without a good solution. I used to think Buddhism offered us a good way out of this dilemma, through a critique of hope: accept that the world is not as it should be, and just deal with reducing your suffering. But then Buddhists have their own kind of hope, which I also find wrong-headed: the idea that suffering can be entirely eliminated, that we can reach a state of nirvana. In Buddhism too, we face a powerful and perceptive diagnosis in the Second Noble Truth, with a misinformed prognosis in the Third.

What the poor prognoses of Marx, Augustine and the Pali suttas all share, indeed, is hope, optimism: an optimism entirely uncalled for given their pessimistic diagnoses. There isn’t going to be a new social order, and we’re going to remain surrounded by a suffering that ends in death. Nor, as the Stoics and Epicureans that Augustine criticized might think, will we be able to make ourselves good enough to transcend our evil or our suffering. No, things don’t look good for humans, and there’s no straightforward solution in sight. All we can do is keep stumbling through the evils of life – we can pursue the difficult, but worthy and surmountable, task of finding enough joy, truth and interest in life to make it well worth living.

The idea that I always associate with Hadot is encapsulated in the translated English title of one of his major works: philosophy as a way of life. Hadot, a scholar of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, treats this philosophy as a way of life, a set of “spiritual practices,” and in so doing he helps remind us of the distance between ancient and modern philosophy. And I don’t just mean that he gives us yet another reason to critique contemporary philosophy departments, which (whether analytic or continental) typically seem far from any ancient ideal of the love of wisdom. I mean also that he reminds us why philosophy has so little place in contemporary Western culture.

I’ve noticed that a fairly large number of my posts have to do with “religion and science,” and the supposed relation between them. This wasn’t my original intent, since I don’t care much for the idea of “religion” in the first place, as most of those posts attest; and the most animated question in “religion and science” debates – the relation between evolution and Hebrew Bible accounts of creation – is of relatively little interest to me, since I’ve never bought any of those accounts to begin with. But I’ve been realizing something about most people today, even well educated people who might be expected to know some philosophy, and not only in the Western world. When moderns look for the things that Greek and Roman philosophy was supposed to provide – answers to big questions about the purpose of our lives, our proper view of the world and our place in it, ways of dealing with death – they don’t turn to philosophy. They turn to “religion” – Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, various “Hindu” traditions – and they turn to natural science, above all to psychology. It is in the realms of religion and science, that is to say, that philosophy is found today, especially any sense of philosophy as a way of life. Scientists often claim their work to be value-free, but especially for those who are not part of a “religious” community, much of the guidance we receive in life comes from scientific evidence and the people charged to apply it to our daily lives. The title we use for those people – “doctor” – originally referred to learned Christian religious. It is doctors who warn us that our behaviours are self-destructive, that we need to change our views and habits and ways of life, and that we fail to do so at our own peril – and this advice often involves codes of behaviour toward food that rival Leviticus in their complexity.

But philosophy – that is what we don’t have. Hadot reminds us that the ancients did. It’s not just that their academic work was not so carved up into disciplines, so that the inquiries now called “science” would have been known as “philosophy” (though of course it was that). The Stoic practice of prosoche, attention to one’s soul, bears a startling resemblance to Buddhist mindfulness – conducted in the name of philosophy. When the Greek explorer Megasthenes explained ancient Indian society to his fellow Greeks , the name he gave to the brahmins and to the samana wandering monks – the Buddhists, Jains and their ilk – was “philosophers.” He recognized what the Greeks called philosophy in what they were doing. It is in the Christian (and Islamic?) Middle Ages, Hadot notes, that philosophy loses this status, becoming “the handmaid of theology.” It is not a huge step from there to the analytic philosophy of today, which (I think it would be hard to deny) sees itself largely as “the handmaid of science,” answering only those questions left over from the empirical inquiries of natural science.

Now the terms “religion” and “science” seem unlikely to go away any time soon. We are probably stuck with them. Perhaps more importantly, the realms of knowledge and practice that the terms cover – from Kierkegaard to prayer, from Einstein to psychotherapy – are of inestimable value to human life. As much as I might wish for a world where these terms went away (at least the “religion” term), I would find it devastating if the phenomena were to disappear. So for better and for worse, “religion” and “science” are here to stay. So while I have always identified the present venue as a blog about philosophy, it necessarily also becomes a blog about religion and science.

What then happens to “philosophy”? Can it ever again become the way of life that Hadot tells us of? Not in the terms of the ancient world. If one were to start a monastic garden of philosophers the way that Epicurus did – even if one were explicitly to call it Epicurean – most people would invariably call it a religion (or worse, a cult). At the same time, I think philosophy takes on a crucial role in the world of “religion” and “science,” as a middle ground between the two. New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, full of bile toward “religion,” nevertheless affirm the value of (at least analytic) philosophy; and philosophy, even today’s academic philosophy, has tools to examine even conservative forms of “religion” critically on their own terms, terms that science does not have. Even to the fundamentalist who denies philosophy as heretical, one may still ask the fundamental questions: why is scripture inerrant? Why must faith take precedence over knowledge? The answers to these questions can be interrogated by philosophy, but not by experimental science. One might even say that the problem with Stephen Jay Gould’s NOMA is that, in separating the realms of science and religion, it ignores the third realm that unites them, namely philosophy.

This all is at the theoretical level. But it matters at the level of practice as well. One can always try to live one’s life entirely within the guidance specified by a particular tradition of inquiry, including the tradition of natural science. But once one tries to be both at once – to be both “religious” and “scientific,” or even to inhabit more than one “religion” – then one needs philosophy to settle their differences. One can no longer take philosophy by itself as a way of life. But philosophy may yet turn out to be an inescapable part of the best way of life today.

(Scroll down to read the rest of the post.)

Strange and incomprehensible rituals, aren’t they? At least, that’s how they seem at first. But if you haven’t figured it out yet: what does “Nacirema” spell backwards?

The obsessive and sadomasochistic bodily rituals that Miner describes with such scope are our own, not only among the Americans but among most Western cultures, and increasingly in the rest of the world as well: bathrooms, toothbrushes, nurses, dentists. But described in the language of the outsider, these things all come to look strange. (They also come to look like “religion,” another reason I don’t care much for the concept.)

There are many messages that one can take away from Miner’s exercise. In my view, one of the most important is that other cultures are not as different from ours as we often think they are.

I think that my post on performance theory was too strongly phrased; it sounds as if I’m saying we should always understand other cultures’ myths in terms of their content and not their effects, and understand rituals in terms of their meaning rather than effect. But I don’t believe this. I’ve been thinking about the point since writing my recent Christmas posts. In both of these posts (and the comments below) I was effectively arguing that certain rituals and myths are best viewed through something like a performative lens: the rituals are best understood as preserving family tradition, the myths as stories that delight children despite their being false statements. It’s just that these particular rituals and myths, of course, are ours: the rituals of Christmas and the myth of Santa Claus.

So indeed, the fundamental point of ritual and myth can very often be in what they do, not merely in what they mean. But that’s as true of our own cultures as it is of others’. Sometimes they make claims regardless of their truth, because of those claims’ effects; and sometimes they perform traditional actions regardless of their meaning or cognitive content. But so do we. Like us, they make statements about the physical world and its causal processes; the fact that those statements seem bizarre to us does not mean that people were only saying them for their effects.

(Sorry for the long gap in the post. I just didn’t want to give the game away, for those encountering Miner for the first time.)

This sort of pattern provides great fodder for the social constructionists in the Western humanities. When one is immersed in the humanities today it’s easy to assume that the default position is a cultural relativism that assumes the absence of cultural universals. But cross the quad to the psychology building, and one can discover a startlingly naïve cultural universalism that confines everything outside Western white experience to a brief appendix.

There are many lessons to be taken from Watters’s article, and I can’t begin to address them all here. The one that stands out for me is Robin Horton’s point that non-Western cultures have a great deal to teach us about psychology and sociology, and not only in the long-literate “great traditions” of South and East Asia. Especially, their supernatural explanations of (what we usually call) mental illness can be far more humane than our medical models. Anthropologist Juli McGruder noted in her studies of Zanzibar: behaviours that the DSM would easily classify as schizophrenia, are classified in Zanzibar as examples of spirit possession, and treated accordingly; and while Zanzibari rituals don’t return the individual to a “normal” state, they nevertheless allow the individual to remain within a caring social environment, and allow a kind of “calmness and acquiescence” (patient endurance, I might call it) in the face of the unusual behaviour.

It’s not hard, then, to see that there’s something very wrong with psychological diagnosis in the West – which becomes psychological diagnosis everywhere, as it gets exported. On the other hand, it’s also worth asking what’s right with it. While the Zanzibaris might have a more effective way of dealing with the behaviours in question, those behaviours do still seem to have something in common with schizophrenia. The case of anorexia is still more intriguing. The behaviour of starving oneself to death is common to thin-obsessed Manhattanites, Hong Kongers complaining of stomach bloat, and the philosopher Simone Weil, who starved herself as an ascetic attempt to transcend the world. Could there not be something these differently interpreted behaviours have in common? If Manhattanites have something to learn from Zanzibaris, surely the reverse can be true as well.

Simply imagine what would happen if we indeed said that modern physics support mysticism. What happens, for example, if we say that today’s physics is in perfect agreement with Buddha’s enlightenment? What happens when tomorrow’s physics supplants or replaces today’s physics (which it most definitely will)? Does poor Buddha then lose his enlightenment? You see the problem. If you hook your God to today’s physics, then when that physics slips, that God slips with it. (from Grace and Grit, p. 20)

Gould’s claim would be a great way of resolving the conflicts between science and religion – if it were true. The problem is that it isn’t. A rigid separation between fact and value cannot be rationally sustained, and rare is the “religious” person who tries to do so. Gould approvingly cites encyclicals from Pius XII and John Paul II allowing Catholics to believe in evolution; but they don’t do so on the grounds of a fact-value distinction. The popes say we may believe in the evolution of the body as long as we also believe those bodies have souls; but the existence of souls, if true, would be a fact. It is a fact imbued with moral meaning – but so are the existence of grinding poverty, the development of a fetus, and the heritability of homosexual orientation.

Other “religions” are similarly concerned with questions of fact. Much of Buddhism is composed of psychological hypotheses about the nature and origins of human suffering. If we can disprove empirically that suffering is caused by craving, then we have effectively disproved Buddhism. Wilber is right to see that if we tie our “religious” claims to scientific ones, then they become far more tentative, far less a source of certainty; but that’s just in the nature of knowledge itself. People have disagreed on matters “religious” since time immemorial. (The soul that’s so essential for the Popes is explicitly and directly denied by the Buddha of the Pali suttas.) Science does offer ways of resolving some of those disputes, for those inclined to listen. To refuse to tie your beliefs to experimental evidence, for fear that they might be disproven, is to refuse to allow your beliefs to be true.

It’s not just that “religion” deals in matters of fact. It’s also that science deals in matters of value. I’ve previously discussed the way in which health is itself a value, and medical science is inescapably normative in prescribing the healthy functioning of human beings. The point applies even to biomedical science with no explicit psychological component, but it goes double for psychology and neurology, which cannot help but deal with questions of happiness, virtue and vice.

The NOMA idea only has a chance of making sense if we separate questions of value out into an a priori realm completely detached from the physical world – as Kant tried to do, for example. But it’s an inordinately difficult task to try and derive a full set of answers to questions of value without reference to the physical world, and I don’t think that even Kant managed to succeed at it. Even when asking questions of ethics and meaning, we need evidence from the physical world. And that means that, indeed, science may disprove matters like the Buddha’s enlightenment – not causing him to lose it, but demonstrating that he never had it in the first place. The point is all the more reason to embrace some degree of uncertainty; new connections in the physical world are likely to be discovered, in ways that change things we thought we knew for sure. I’ve previously noted the difficulty with attempts at certain knowledge. Since writing that post, I’ve become a little more confident in saying we can never truly have certain knowledge – but, of course, I have not become certain.

Suppose one man likes strawberries and another does not; in what respect is the latter superior? There is no abstract and impersonal proof either that strawberries are good or that they are not good. To the man who likes them they are good, to the man who dislikes them they are not. But the man who likes them has a pleasure which the other does not have; to that extent his life is more enjoyable and he is better adapted to the world in which both must live. What is true in this trivial instance is equally true in more important matters. The man who enjoys watching football is to that extent superior to the man who does not. The man who enjoys reading is still more superior to the man who does not, since opportunities for reading are more frequent than opportunities for watching football. (Russell did not live to see ESPN.) The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he loses one thing he can fall back upon another. Life is too short to be interested in everything, but it is good to be interested in as many things as are necessary to fill our days. (Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, pp. 125-6)

Zest in this sense, I think, is and should be a controversial virtue. There are many lists of virtues in which it does not appear. For Aristotle and the medieval tradition that follows him, the virtue with respect to pleasure and pain is temperance (sophrosyne), which is quite a different thing – more about moderation and controlling desires, “nothing in excess.” Comte-Sponville adds gratitude, which is related to zest (and probably just as pleasurable) but also not the same thing.

This isn’t just a matter of forgetting to include zest on the list, at least in Aristotle’s case. Zest is a potentially problematic virtue. For most Buddhists, indeed, zest looks positively vicious. Zest is exactly the problem; zest is taking pleasure in the impermanent things of the world, which reveal themselves ultimately to be nothing but suffering. We may take some pleasure in our efforts to get out of worldly things – or even in giving others worldly pleasures, in Mahāyāna tradition – but ultimately, zest is something we need to fight against if we are to have a truly good and worthy life.

This Buddhist view is perhaps the biggest reason I don’t identify as a Buddhist. My belief in the value of zest is a more general version of my belief in marriage: the pleasures of this world are, in many respects, good. At the same time, there is a great deal to the Buddhist critique. Buddhist patient endurance (k??nti) is, I think, as important a virtue as zest: there always will be bad things happening to us, and we must be ready to deal with them with equanimity and small-s stoicism. Buddhist practice does a very good job of cultivating this virtue.

In the end, I guess I’m agreeing with Aristotle that there’s a virtuous mean here, but a different one than he describes. Moderation, temperance, is its own kind of virtue, given that health is a good. But it is a virtue with respect to health, not to pleasure and pain. With respect to pleasure and pain, true virtue lies in a combination of patient endurance and zest. A lack of patient endurance is one vicious extreme, the extreme one might see in a child bitterly wailing over a dropped ice cream cone; a lack of zest is the other, the extreme one might see in a monk as in a cynic or a jaded hipster aesthete.

On this point I think MacIntyre is half right – or perhaps three-quarters right. He is quite right to note the low status that the modern West accords philosophers; but he overemphasizes the role of lawyers, because his concept of the good is (to my mind) overly political. Lawyers do play the role of medieval clergy as the rulers’ intellectual assistants in determining what a good state will be in practice. When it comes to the good life itself, however, the intellectual heavy lifting is done by a very different group: namely doctors, and medical researchers. It is medicine, not law (and certainly not philosophy), that plays the greatest role in telling moderns how they should live.

Law merely sets the boundaries, limits beyond which our lives may not go. Medicine tells us far more: what we should do within those boundaries. The point is most obvious in the case of psychology, which has always aimed to tell us what we must do to avoid a miserable and wretched life; now, in the days of positive psychology and happiness studies, it goes further and aims to tell us what a good life is. But it’s not only psychology. The other branches of medicine also tell us what kind of work to do (don’t do something too stressful), instruct us how to spend our spare time (exercise, don’t go out in the sun too long), and provide us with an arcane and ever-fluctuating set of prescriptions on how to eat that make kosher laws and dharma??stra look simple. (At least Leviticus is not supposed to keep changing.) The idea of health has, in practice, become one of the most important concepts in the normative ethics of Western life, the ways we think about how we should live. Sometimes we even think about happiness for its health benefits rather than as an end in itself.

Academic philosophy, however – and “continentals” don’t seem much better than analytics here – has done little to bring the concept of health into dialogue with the rest of our ethical worldview. (Nietzsche, for whom “healthy” was always an important term of ethical praise, is a major exception, though empirical research may have disproven much of what he thought was healthy. But then Nietzsche tends to make himself an exception in many ways.) “Bioethics” or “medical ethics” deals with something very different – ethical decisions made by medical practitioners in extreme situations, not the ethical implications of medicine for everyday life. Bioethicists think about how ethics guides medicine, not about how medicine guides ethics.

For their part, medical researchers, like most scientists, typically claim to be value-free – they’re just telling us about cause and effect, about what phenomena cause us to be healthy or unhealthy. But the normative weight of the concept of “health” is the reason we use it so much – we wouldn’t pay doctors and medical researchers so much to tell us how to be healthy if we didn’t think that, other things being equal, health is a very good thing. And the kind of cause-and-effect relations that the medical sciences establish are not so different from what some philosophers have tried to establish. From the start the Buddha’s teachings, as recorded in the Pali suttas, dealt with psychological causation: suffering is caused by craving. The project of establishing psychological causation becomes even clearer in the Abhidhamma.

We haven’t done nearly enough, it seems to me, to think philosophically about the claims of medicine. What role should health play in our conceptions of the good life? When should we do what is healthy, and when should we ignore our doctors’ advice and seek out competing goods?