Tag Archives: Morality

Practical Zen: An Approach to Secular Ethics

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[This is a talk more or less as I gave it at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture on October 23, 2016. It is based on a chapter in Rethinking Religion: Finding a Place for Religion in a Modern, Tolerant, Progressive, Peaceful and Science-affirming World.]

Hello. I’m so pleased to be here today. Many years ago I lived in New Jersey. And in those days I often attended lectures hosted by the Ethical Culture Society in Teaneck. So I come here with an appreciation of what you’re about.

I have been a formal student of Zen Buddhism for nearly 30 years. Zen is my spiritual path. However, let me assure you I’m not here to sell you on Buddhism, but simply to offer a perspective adapted from Buddhism for your consideration. I’m calling it “practical Zen” because I intend to avoid the enigmatic one-hand-clapping stuff and keep this talk grounded in our common experience.

Let’s begin with a quote from a Chinese text that is not Zen, but Daoist. This is paraphrased somewhat from the Dao Dejing, verse 18 in most translations. This passage describes a series of fallback positions.

When the Dao is lost, we fall back on virtue.
When virtue is lost, we fall back on humanity.
When humanity is lost, we fall back on morality.
When morality is lost, we fall back on religion.

If I could provide an executive summary of this talk, it would be that to move toward a more ethical culture we need to climb back up this ladder, at least to virtue. And if you want to go for broke and aim for the Dao, great.

So let’s talk about how we might do this.

There’s a basic Buddhist teaching that says what we might call psychological impulses, including our emotions and thoughts, are the forerunner of all actions. One aspect of that is that the way we conceptualize the world around us conditions how we relate to the world. So the first step in considering a moral course is to look very closely at how we conceptualize morality.

I looked “morality” up in an English dictionary and found “principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.” Another definition says morality is “beliefs about what is right behavior and what is wrong behavior.”

But the fact is, we don’t agree about what’s right and wrong or good and bad behavior. Especially as our communities and nations become more diverse, we more and more often are butting heads with people who have entirely different beliefs about what right and wrong, good and evil even mean.

Where do these beliefs come from? I never heard of people putting them to a vote. Some of us are stuck in the idea that morality is about following absolute rules that are eternal and unchanging because God said so, even if those rules are making everyone miserable. And to an increasing degree, that rigidity is tearing us apart.

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Is there another way to define morality? The Sanskrit word found in early Buddhist scriptures that is translated into English as morality or ethics is sila. Sila has a connotation of harmony; it’s acting in a way that allows people to live in harmonious families and communities. Sila involves cultivating an atmosphere of trust, respect, and security. Rules can be useful to help with that cultivation, but by themselves they are not the be-all and end-all of morality.

Buddhism does have moral rules, of course. Monks and nuns have hundreds of rules. Laypeople have five. We call them Precepts. The Precepts for laypeople are very basic ― don’t take life; don’t take what is not given, don’t misuse sexuality, don’t deceive others, avoid intoxicants. Those are the five Precepts every school agrees on; Zen throws in a few more. The Precepts are something like training wheels. We practice the Precepts in order to cultivate morality, humanity, virtue, compassion, kindness, and all that stuff, which is where true morality originates.

There’s an American Zen master who is also a Unitarian Universalist minister named James Ford. James Ford wrote about the Precepts recently,

“Frankly, there are times we just need the rules. Much of our lives we’re wandering around in the thickets. Haven’t a clue. We’re lost. And the precepts can become a life line thrown out to us. Sometimes we just have to grab that line. Sometimes we just have to follow the rules. …

… But if we live only in the realm of rules we are strangled by dead letters. And not only are our own lives constrained, we become caricatures of our true potentiality.”

Some rules really are necessary. Rules about theft and homicide, for example. Without some rules, we humans would never have left the caves. We’d still be huddled around our little fires, guarding our flint arrowheads from those people in that other cave. Civilization wouldn’t be possible.

But we’re still left with a lot of rules that seem to serve no useful purpose. We’re fighting over who can use which public restrooms, for example, because of some people’s rigid ideas about morality. We’re fighting about reproductive rights, about who can get married, and who has to bake wedding cakes.

What’s the point? What does denying people the right to follow their hearts, or in the case of the restroom issue, their bladders, have to do with cultivating an atmosphere of trust, respect and security? In this case, rigid rule-following is having the opposite effect.

Another way to understand the religiosity-morality connection is explained in a book I bet some of you have read, which is The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt. Haidt provides a rigorously tested argument that we feel before we judge. The moment we are confronted with a moral question, something in our subconscious or intuitive mind churns up feelings about the question that determine our position. Our rational mind then constructs a narrative that explains to us what we think and why we think it. This happens so quickly we usually aren’t aware that’s what we’re doing.

Haidt’s explanation of how we respond to moral questions is very similar to what many Buddhist philosophers have taught for centuries, so it’s good to see science catching up.

Anyway, according to Haidt’s hypothesis, as much as we all want to think we are rational and logical and think the way we do for serious reasons, the fact is that we all allow rudimentary emotions to dictate what we think, at least about some things.

When you understand that much of “morality” is about rudimentary emotions and biases, you might also understand why conservative and dogmatic religions of all persuasion tend to get hung up on sex and on keeping women under control. This tells me that the men in charge of things are channeling their own anxieties about sex and women and projecting them into their scriptures. In doing so, they sometimes wander quite a distance from what their scriptures actually say, revealing how pathologically deep those anxieties are. And because they have the authority of institutional religion behind them, these men are given great moral authority in our culture. But in truth, often what we’re seeing from religious authorities is plain old bigotry. And religion is just being used as an excuse for it.

I feel strongly that one of the many steps we need to take to restore some sanity to this fractured nation is to de-authorize religious authorities from dictating morality to all of us. As a diverse society, we require a secular basis for our common ethics.

While we’re on the subject of thought and actions, I want to talk about good and evil. The way we conceptualize good and evil has real-world consequences.

For example, on September 14, 2001, President George W. Bush said this at a prayer service at the National Cathedral:

“Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”

Rid the world of evil? That really should have set off a lot more alarm bells than it did.

Here’s another quote: In a New York Times column published February 11, 2004, David Brooks wrote, “Some liberals have trouble grasping evil, and always think that if we could take care of the handguns or the weapons of mass destruction, our problems would be ameliorated. But I know the problem lies in the souls of our enemies.”

Now, what might we infer about “evil” from these quotations? The first suggests that “evil” is something tangible, with some sort of finite mass and material substance, and if we just work hard enough we can whittle ‘er down and be done with it.

The second suggests that evil is a quality or attribute that some people possess, and others don’t. And once evil has infected “the souls of our enemies” there is nothing to be done but to eliminate them.

Of course, it’s likely “our enemies” feel exactly the same way about us.

People are seduced into evil because they don’t recognize evil as evil. They mistake it for justice, or righteousness, or even God’s Will. And the seduction begins with the thought that “I’m a good person,” and “his hatred of me is evil, but my hatred of him is justified.” As soon as we identify ourselves as “good” and the Other, whoever they are, as “evil,” we’ve well on the way to giving ourselves a cosmic permission slip to do whatever we want to be rid of them. You see the problem.

I say this seductive impulse is at the root of most of the mass atrocities humankind has inflicted on itself through the ages. That’s why the way we conceptualize good and evil has real-world consequences.

Please understand that I’m not saying people or nations shouldn’t defend themselves from those who intend to do them harm. What gets us into trouble is thinking that we’re entitled to Holy Retribution, or that we are somehow qualified to pass judgments and inflict brutality on entire populations, because we’re the good guys.

I used to run into the words good and evil in Buddhist sutras, and these words often nagged at me as being out of place. So I had something of a breakthrough when I found out that the Sanskrit or Pali words being translated as good and evil actually mean “skillful” and “unskillful.”

I’ll give you a mindfulness exercise. Very Zen. Sometime, either now or while you’re sitting in a quiet place, think the word “evil.” Don’t contemplate what it means, just hold the word in your consciousness. And as you do that, pay close attention to the subtle emotional cues within your body that are triggered by the word “evil.”

Now, think the word “unskillful.” If you are tuned in to yourself, you might notice a different reaction. It’s very subtle, but it’s real.

At the very least, maybe we’d be less likely to bomb people for being unskillful.

Zen teachers say it’s important to appreciate that “evil” really has no substance and no independent existence. It is no-thing. It does not infect people. Evil “exists” only in intentions, actions and consequences.

If we understand that neither we nor our enemies are intrinsically good or evil, does that change how we see traumatic events? Speaking as an eyewitness, as I’m sure some of you are, the collapse of the World Trade Center towers easily was the most terrible thing I ever saw, but I honestly don’t see why hanging the label “evil” on it makes any difference. It was what it was. But my perspective enrages some people who clearly think it is vitally important to label the event as “evil,” and if we don’t we’re somehow being soft or letting the terrorists win.

There’s some kind of magical thinking lurking around in there, somewhere.

I don’t agree entirely with the postmodernist view that good and evil are purely relative or matters of subjective judgment. Skillful or unskillful are not just relative. Causing harm to another is unskillful. Wasting natural resources or adding to global climate change are unskillful, even if they aren’t covered by the Ten Commandments. That’s the problem with moral rules left over from the Bronze Age; we’ve got different problems now.

And then there’s “moral clarity.” In the U.S. many religious conservatives place great value in “moral clarity,” which I define as a state of mind achieved by staking a fixed position on a presumed moral high ground and then ignoring the details of human life that fog the view.

For example, I have read many essays arguing for criminalizing abortion that go on and on about the humanity of the fetus without mentioning the pregnant woman at all. If she is mentioned, she is considered to be a kind of niggling technicality. Or worse, she is portrayed as weak-minded or otherwise unqualified to make her own moral decisions.

The “moral clarity” crowd must never admit that the woman is a valuable and intelligent human being who may be in a terribly difficult situation, because empathy and compassion for her would block their “clarity.”

In short, moral absolutism requires ignoring genuine human life experience. This makes its rigid application anti-human and oppressive.

I want to cite the late Robert Aitken Roshi, who was one of the most revered patriarchs of American Zen. In his book The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics, he said, “The absolute position, when isolated, omits human details completely. Doctrines, including Buddhism, are meant to be used. Beware of them taking life of their own, for then they use us.”

Does moral absolutism even work? There is data showing us that rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock pregnancy are higher in conservative “Bible Belt” U.S. states than in more liberal ones, and this pattern seems to replicate itself worldwide.

Reasonable people may disagree about whether abortion is immoral, but note that rates of abortion in overwhelmingly Catholic Latin America, where abortion is nearly everywhere illegal and harshly punished, are higher than in the United States and a lot higher than in mostly liberal and allegedly decadent western Europe.

And what does his tell us? It appears that when absolutist morality is enforced, either by public shaming or by law, actual human behavior — heterosexual behavior included — is driven into the closet, leaving actual humans with no practical guidance in their actual circumstances.

I say the absolutist approach to morality gets everything backward. It creates too wide a gap between public righteousness and what people are really doing in their private lives, so that the moral rules are not really guiding anyone. And when we cede the presumed moral high ground to the absolutists, too often we squelch open and honest discussion of our real-world circumstances and behaviors.

Again, “The absolute position, when isolated, omits human details completely. Doctrines are meant to be used. Beware of them taking life of their own, for then they use us.”

Secular moralists sometimes propose a utilitarian or consequentialist approach to morality. Very broadly, utilitarianism is the view that the morally right action is the action that produces the most good. There are many variations of utilitarianism, however, mostly because people disagree on what constitutes “good.” Further, this approach often fails to provide an incentive for “being good.”

Author and neuroscientist Sam Harris has proposed that science can provide a basis for morality. Harris is a smart guy and he says many things worthy of consideration. But he’s written that science can “tell us what’s objectively true about morality” and “give us answers about right and wrong.” I think that’s right up there with thinking we can rid the world of evil.

I have a more radical proposal here. Some things people need to work out for themselves.

Human life is infinitely complicated and messy, and circumstances have a way of confounding application of one-size-fits-all solutions. Some things people need to work out for themselves. And that’s okay.

I propose that given the infinity of variables, no two human beings ever faced completely identical moral dilemmas.  When faced with questions about ending a pregnancy, or a marriage, or when to discontinue life support, or whether to intervene in a friend’s problems or let things sort themselves out — we need to be able to apply some subjectivity to matters that will change our lives and the lives of those around us, because we’re the only ones familiar with most of the variables.

We’re the only ones who have our medical history, or our parents, or our financial or physical resources, or our marriage, or our job, or our special needs child. Etc., etc. I think that in some circumstances we need the freedom to be subjective, to consider complex moral questions not just in the abstract but in the light of our particular life and situation.

The challenge to us as a society is to distinguish between those behaviors that cannot be allowed ― such as homicide ― because allowing them would damage civilization; and those problems that people need to work out for themselves, even if we don’t all personally approve of all the solutions. And then we have to persuade the absolutists to back off.

We can, as a society, draw parameters around moral questions — medical guidelines determining when life support is futile, for example. And I agree that science can help with much of that. And then we’ll continue to do what we’ve always done, which is argue among ourselves about where the parameters should be drawn. Maybe arguing with each other is the price we pay for freedom.

If all this sounds terribly ambiguous — yeah, mostly, it is. That’s because you and the world and human life generally are very complicated, and where there is complication, there is ambiguity.

I realize people often are uncomfortable with ambiguity. They want clear rules and sharply defined boundaries. They want all phenomena to be properly sorted into their socially acceptable conceptual boxes. That’s why some people prize moral absolutism. That’s a mostly workable strategy for getting through life, but it’s not real. It’s an artificial order superimposed on the messiness of reality.  And sometimes failing to accept reality causes more trouble than it solves.

One of the great humanistic philosophers of the 20th century, Erich Fromm, wrote that people often escape into authoritarian mass movements because they fear freedom. A lot of that fear of freedom is a fear of ambiguity, a lack of clear, bright lines that make your choices for you.

I think we see a lot of that fear in America today. And notice that some of the same people who talk about how they want to protect their freedom seem hell bent on destroying everybody’s freedom to do that. It’s like they’re protecting their freedom to be not free. But those clear, bright lines are not likely to come back, so this is a situation we’re going to have to deal with for a while.

Just about any psychologist will tell you that you can’t force other people to change. We can only look to ourselves. How do we find our own moral compass in the messiness of life?

And to answer this question I want to wade a little more deeply into Zen.

Here’s a question for you. “Can you identify yourself without reference to a relationship?”  This is a question I first heard in a sociology class. I’ve never heard anyone provide an answer; I don’t think it’s answerable. It’s something of a koan, because if you work with it you end up exploring the paradoxical nature of the self, which is a very Zen thing to do.

Many schools of Buddhism, including Zen, have a doctrine called the two truths. The two truths describe what seems to be a paradox. On one hand, we are all precious and unique individuals, worthy of respect and compassion.

But at the same time, we take our very uniqueness, our identities, from our relationships. From our roles in our families, from our professions, from the interests we share with others, from the arts and intellectual pursuits we enjoy, with our circle of associations. We are who we are because everyone else is who they are. We are not the entirely self-contained, stand-alone people units we think we are.

This interdependence extends to our biological existence as well. We depend on other life forms to sustain our lives and to maintain the conditions on this planet that make life possible. All beings are interdependent. All beings inter-exist. This comes directly from the teaching of the Buddha.

A metaphor used to help resolve this paradox is attributed to a Chinese master named Dushun who was born in the 6th century. This is called “Indra’s Net.”  Imagine a vast net that stretches infinitely in all directions. In each “eye” of the net is a single brilliant, perfect jewel. Each jewel also reflects every other jewel, infinite in number, and each of the reflected images of the jewels bears the image of all the other jewels — infinity to infinity. Whatever affects one jewel affects all of them.

This means every jewel matters. Every person matters. You matter. And everything you do affects everyone else. This is the most essential thing to understand. Everything you feel and think, everything you do or say affects yourself and everyone else. Most effects may be extremely subtle, but they’re still effects. And sometimes even subtle effects can have big real-world consequences.

And at its most basic, an ethical life is a life that produces beneficial effects.

Now, it may seem inconsistent to say that we need to be allowed some subjectivity in our moral choices, while at the same time everything we do impacts everyone else. So let’s take this to another level.

Twenty-five centuries ago, the Buddha emphasized purifying oneself of what he called afflictions or defilements. The chief afflictions are greed, hate and ignorance. This ignorance is ignorance of the inter-existence of all beings, because most of our problems come from thinking of ourselves as separated from everything else. We think that whatever is within our skin is “me” and what’s outside our skin is “everything else.” It’s this misperception that is the chief source of our fear, our greed, our anger, our hatred.

You can follow moral rules to the letter, but if you are harboring greed, hate, and ignorance, you are not living a beneficial life. You are not living an ethical life. You are not cultivating an atmosphere of trust, respect, and security.

The Buddha taught many practices, including meditation and mindfulness, to reduce our afflictions.

There’s nothing magical or supernatural going on here; it’s all about becoming more intimate with yourself. You become more aware of what jerks you around and pulls you out of harmony. You learn to let those things go. If you don’t have some sort of meditation or mindfulness practice already, I encourage you to look into one.

Finally he encouraged us to develop four particular virtues above all others. The first is metta, goodwill, or loving kindness to all beings. The second is compassion, which is the active desire to reduce the suffering of others. The third is called “mudita,” which means “sympathetic joy.” This is joy in the good fortune of others. It’s the opposite of envy.

And, finally, equanimity. With equanimity, we are not being constantly pulled back and forth between things we want and things we want to avoid; we accept what life brings us. We learn to remain in balance in the middle of chaos. We learn to be comfortable with ambiguity. And we learn to not be pulled into one-sided views. The Buddha gave many, many sermons about all of these virtues.

Now, developing these virtues isn’t something you can do in three easy steps, and none of us is ever perfect, and that’s okay. Just making the effort, even if you fall short, makes the whole universe a better place. And while Buddhism provides a lot of tools for cultivating these virtues, it doesn’t have a patent on them.

Every day we have opportunities to actualize goodwill and compassion, and to share the joy of others. Every day, there are opportunities to develop equanimity. I propose that these virtues harmonize well with the commitment of Ethical Culture to “always act so as to elicit the best in others, and thereby yourself.”

For several years I was the student of a Zen teacher named Jion Susan Postal, who died in 2014. She founded the Zen Center in New Rochelle. Susan taught us to be grateful for these opportunities. She said,

“For all beneficent karma ever manifested through me, I am grateful. May our gratitude be expressed in our body, speech and mind, with infinite kindness to the past, infinite service to the present, and infinite responsibility to the future.”

And to all of you, metta.

The Boxes We Live In

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One of my favorite sayings, which was from my first Zen teacher, is “We all live in a box, and the walls of the box consist of who we think we are and what we think life should be.”

There are some heavy-duty spiritual implications in the quote that I’m mostly going to skip here. The important point is that the box is, in a way, a contrivance; a fantasy; a delusion. Ultimately, there is no box. Yet we live in it anyway, and stepping outside of it is unthinkable for most of us.

Civilization itself is a kind of meta-box, or net connecting all the boxes, created by our collective projections and conditionings. Civilization can be understood as an intricate net of assumptions and agreements that allow us to live together and deal with each other in complex ways. This net has been crafted from ancient times, and each generation has added a little more to it. We are conditioned from birth to accept civilization as it exists in our time, and it’s so “normal” to us we often are oblivious to what a complex and astonishing thing it has become. It’s like air to us; we take it for granted.

Remember also that we humans are social creatures, wired to form associations with other humans to survive. And I mean “wired” in a physiological sense. Infants and small children deprived of social contact have been found to have abnormal brain development. Adults isolated from other humans will develop all kinds of psychological problems. We literally need each other to be who we are.

But let’s get back to civilization. Modern civilization is elaborately integrated. The web grows tighter and tighter. Our “normal” life, maintaining the box we live in, depends increasingly on very complex interconnections with the other boxes even for basic things like food and shelter, never mind Internet connection.

As recently as 150 years ago it wasn’t uncommon for someone to build a cabin in the woods on unclaimed property and live off the land. It may have been a nasty, brutish, and short life by our standards, but it was within culturally accepted norms of the time. There may be a handful of people today who could still do that, but for the enormous majority it’s not an option. Even if they had the survival skills, which most don’t, there’s not enough wilderness left to accommodate all the disaffected people of the world. And, frankly, the box most of us live in wouldn’t allow for it, anyway.

These days, in developed nations anyway, life in the box requires connection to the power grid and clean running water brought to us from distant reservoirs. We depend on commerce to make food and clothing available. We depend on an intricate, and often capricious, legal and financial system to create shelters we can live in. We are required to find some means of adding value to the commercial and financial systems to that we can receive credits (money) to exchange for what we need and want. And we are drawn like ants to honey to new communication technologies, so that we can interconnect with each other to our heart’s content.

This is the box we live in. This is who we think we are and what we think life should be. Our dependencies on each other are not negated by money — I paid for this! Nobody gave it to me! Indeed, the paper we carry in our wallet or the numbers in our bank accounts have value only because they are integral parts of our system of inter- dependencies. Otherwise, they would be valueless. And if we were challenged to cobble our own shoes, build our own shelters, or grow our own food, most of us would make a botch of it.

This also is why Ayn Randism and the “John Galt” pledge are so ridiculous. We cannot live for ourselves alone; it is not possible, whether we like it or not. We either live for each other, or we are cut off from civilization, and we die. People who think they really are living for themselves alone are oblivious to reality. (They also tend to be assholes, but that’s another rant.)

(And, seriously, if living for yourself alone is so all-fired important to you, why bother to reach out to other people and ask them to sign a John Galt Pledge on the Web? What this tells us is that Randism is a kind of romantic fantasy, and if that’s the box you live in you want other people to buy into the fantasy and reinforce it. That’s very human, and also utterly absurd.)

So let’s look at what’s been going on with civilization in our lifetimes. Even as the net grows tighter, ancient ethnic, racial and cultural boundaries are growing blurry. We’re literally finding new ways to form tribal associations, and the old ways rapidly are losing their function and significance.

Nations still play important functions in civilization, and I don’t see the phenomenon of the nation-state dissolving anytime soon. But it may be indicative of something that nations don’t seem to declare war on each other any more. Armed conflicts are waged by extra-national movements these days. I think this indicates a significant shift in the role of the nation in human civilization, although exactly where this is taking us is hard to say.

The changes occurring to civilization, many of which are being driven by rapid technological advances, are challenging the integrity of many boxes. If the box you live in depends on clearly drawn racial divisions, for example, the blurring of racial boundaries is very distressing. And people experience challenges to the integrity of the boxes they live in as existential threats. So, while some of us embrace modernity, others of us are recoiling in horror.

And this takes us to fundamentalism. The scholar Karen Armstrong defines fundamentalism as a “militant religiosity” that is a “reaction against and a rejection of modern Western society.” I would turn that around a bit and say that religious fundamentalism is a kind of social pathology that expresses itself as religion. Although the pathology comes in a religious package, the pathology, not the religion, is the driving force. I say that because, time and time again, we see that any teachings of the religion being used as the container are ignored if they conflict with the pathology.

By the same token, I say that current “movement conservatism” is a social pathology expressing itself as political ideology. Conservatism has taken on many of the attributes scholars associate with fundamentalism, such as the view that they are engaged in a cosmic struggle between absolute good and absolute evil. They also “affirm their identity by selecting doctrines and practices from the past,” one of the markers of fundamentalism in this review of one of Armstrong’s books. They’re adopting rigid doctrines about taxes and monetary policy, often without even a glimmer of understanding how taxes and the monetary system work. They accept the doctrines of the tribe because those are the doctrines of the tribe. Oh, and freedom.

It’s getting uglier and uglier because many people are living in boxes that are utterly out of sync with the way civilization really works these days. Eventually this will fade, but not in our lifetimes. Until then, we’re going to have to put up with lots of people who are raving and fearful and irrationally thrashing about in all directions because the box they live in is threatened by modernity. So be it.

One of the things that strikes me, over and over again, about the reactionaries calling themselves conservatives these days is the degree to which they are utterly oblivious to the interconnections. You’ve got a Republican presidential ticket made up of two guys born into wealth and privilege who see themselves as self-made men, and don’t understand why everyone can’t be as successful as they are. You’ve got the baggers in Medicare-paid power scooters rallying against socialized medicine.

And then there’s the “you didn’t build that” flap. You can’t explain to the baggers that the President was talking about essential infrastructure. They deny that business needs infrastructure. Build a nail salon and they will come, I suppose. I actually ran into someone on a Web forum who refused to believe that business needs stuff like roads and utilities. They built Las Vegas in the desert, didn’t they?

This morning’s rant was touched off by a comment on this page. JETHRO212 wrote,

The ironic thing is, if you listen to the entire Obama “You didn’t build dat” thing, it gets way worse, if you listen to the whole thing he goes way off into it wouldn’t even be possible to have a business without Government.

But … it really isn’t possible to have a business, as we understand business, without government. Currency? Government. Without government, we’d resort to a barter system; we really would be taking chickens to the doctor. Contracts? Without a legal system, contracts are worthless. Legal system? Government. Someone robs your store, you call the police. Police? Government. Without government, the only people in business are mobs and pirates. Civilization itself was built on the premise that somebody is in charge and makes the rules. In recorded history there has never been a human society that didn’t have some kind of government, even if just a tribal chief who got the honor by beating up all the other chief candidates.

I have a fantasy that all the Ayn Rand enthusiasts who want to “go Galt” be given a big tract of land somewhere and allowed to take whatever power generators, tools, and means to produce food they can carry, and then they can be on their own. And as long as they stay on the “res,” and didn’t interact with the rest of society, they wouldn’t have to pay taxes. They also forfeit all government benefits, of course. But they could build whatever they wanted and be self-made men (and, trust me, most of ‘em would be men) all day long.

I’d give it two years, tops.

[Originally published on The Mahablog, September 19, 2012. To read more about the boxes we live in, see Rethinking Religion: Finding a Place for Religion in a Modern, Tolerant, Progressive, Peaceful and Science-affirming World.]

What We Don’t See

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Of all the conceits common to humankind possibly the most insidious is that any of us are entirely rational. And often the most irrational people are those who brag about how rational they are.

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Even if a person’s basic reasoning skills are sound, the outcome of his reasoning nearly always will be imperfect. That’s because nearly all of us “live” within limited conceptual frameworks that filter and sort information in artificial ways. The way we conceptually interface with reality is based partly on our own experience and partly on how we are culturally conditioned to understand things. And most of us are blind to this, because if we and everyone we know is artificially filtering and sorting information in pretty much the same way, we assume our understanding of reality is the only possible one.

(I wrote quite a lot about this in my book, by the way, explaining the way our limited conceptual frameworks have impacted religion and have largely rendered it ridiculous, but it doesn’t have to be that way.)

Breaking out of the conceptual box we live in usually takes some extraordinary experience — and often a shocking one — to see that we’re living in an artificial world and that the “real” one outside the limits of our awareness is largely alien to us. And most of us amble through life without ever having that experience.

Even though few of us ever perceive that we’re living inside a conceptual box, if we run into people whose conceptual boxes are very different from ours we think those people just don’t understand the real world (meaning our “real world”). I could define maturity, even wisdom, as the ability to appreciate and respect that other people’s “worlds” are just as valid as ours even if they are wildly different. I wrote a few years ago,

My view is that everything we think comes from a complex of psychological discriminations and impulses, little of which have anything to do with “logic.” The way we understand ourselves and the world begins to be shaped from the moment we’re born and continues to be shaped by the culture we grow up and live in. In other words, all of our understandings are biased. This is pervasive and inescapable. Often the difference between “logical” and “empathic” people is that an “empathic” person has at least a dim appreciation of his own biases, whereas a “logical” person is utterly oblivious to them. …

… Our conscious, cognitive understandings of things are based on internalized models of what we’ve been conditioned to believe is “normal.” We may be able to articulate our ideas and perceptions in a coolly logical way, but the process by which we arrive at our ideas and perception is “complex, unconscious and emotional.” This is always true, whether we want to admit it or not. …

… Generally being “fair” is not losing one’s biases, but perceiving one’s biases as biases. If you recognize your biases as biases, you are in a position to overrule them as the facts dictate. But if you are so unconscious of yourself that you don’t recognize your biases as biases, then your “thinking” generally amounts to casting around for support for your biases. Then you put the biases and the cobbled-together “support” together and call it “reason.”

And this takes me to what we don’t see. I’ve written before about the “default norm” syndrome, also called the invisible baseline fallacy, which in our culture means white maledom is the default norm, and perspectives and experiences that deviate from those common to white men are not respected as legitimate. If you are a woman or racial minority in this country you have bumped into this iron wall of assumption many times, but the iron wall is invisible to a lot of white men. Not all, thank goodness.

This is basically the same thing that people are calling “male privilege” or “white privilege,” although I don’t like those terms. The degree to which one’s assumptions, biases and experiences are “privileged” depends on a complex of factors that include health or physical condition, class, and wealth. A white male lower-income paraplegic is considerably less “privileged” than the Koch brothers, for example. As wealth inequality becomes more extreme a whole lot of white people are being left behind to a degree I believe is unprecedented in American history, and I assure you most of these people don’t feel all that “privileged.”

Money is privilege. People who have always been financially comfortable have no idea how much lack of money can be an obstacle to basic functionality in our society. The poor are taxed in myriad ways, from paying higher bank account fees on their meager balances — causing the very poor to not use banks at all, but then one must use check cashing services that also take a bite. Without a car you take public transportation, which eats a lot more time out of your day. And if you don’t have money for a bus you simply don’t go anywhere out of walking distance, which puts a huge limit on your job opportunities. Those left out of Medicaid expansion still have limited access to health care, and chronic, debilitating conditions often go untreated. Poor parents often are caught in the day care trap — they aren’t paid enough to afford reliable day care, but without that it’s hard to hold a job at all. So one is perpetually making seat-of-the-pants arrangements with people to watch the children, and then worrying if the kids are safe. Etc. etc. Many conveniences people with money take for granted are not available to the poor, and the inconveniences pile up and make day-to-day life an exhausting exercise in barely coping.

And then it is assumed the poor can’t get ahead because they are lazy. And it is just about impossible to explain the problem to someone who has been cocooned from it. It’s not part of his, or her, experience; therefore, it isn’t “real.”

As a woman I am sometimes surprised at how much even liberal men are oblivious to the extreme misogyny that still lingers in our culture. I wrote earlier this year,

Even those of us who have never experienced physical assault have experienced sexual intimidation, belittling and humiliation, aimed at us only because of our gender. And most of the time we put up with it, because what else can we do? Confronting some sexist bozo could turn an unpleasant situation into something genuinely dangerous. So how has the political Right responded to #YesAllWomen? Mostly with more belittling. Charles Cooke at NRO, for example, dismisses the social media phenomenon as “groupthink.” We women can’t possibly know our own experiences, apparently, and simply imagine misogyny because we’ve read about it.

Especially to conservatives, problems that middle- and upper-income white men rarely if ever encounter are not “real” issues worthy of being addressed by society or government, but are exceptions that the individuals affected must take care of on their own. The fact that these issues may impact all of us, directly or indirectly, and that the cause may be widespread cultural and institutional bias that upper-income whites feed on a daily basis, is invisible to them. And you can’t explain it to them. No amount of real-world data or well-constructed logic makes dent in the iron wall. If it doesn’t conform to the conceptual box they live in, it can’t be true.

This is why it is good to have diversity of experience represented in decision-making bodies such as governments, for example. White men like to tell themselves they can make decisions that affect everybody else just fine because they will apply reason. But their reason is based on biased perspectives that fail to take many things into account. Publius provides a good example here — many rape laws used to require a woman to show she had resisted an assault to prove she had not consented. But this is a male-centric view. A woman understands that if she is being assaulted by a violent man much stronger than she is, her only hope of surviving may be in not resisting. (I remember a bitter joke from many years ago that the only woman almost certain to win a rape case is a dead nun.)

And don’t get me started on reproductive issues. Just a few days ago I was told I was too emotional because I passionately disagreed that abortion must be criminalized. Naturally it was a man, who will never be pregnant, who said this. Yes it’s easier to be emotionally detached from a issue when it’s not personal, and when the real-world experiences and consequences of that issue are merely hypothetical. It’s easier to be emotionally detached when you’re behind the iron wall.

Michael Brown is being buried today. If his killing, and what we’ve learned about Ferguson, hasn’t given us a clear picture of the evils and pervasiveness of institutional racism I don’t know what else will. Yet just last week I encountered a forum populated largely by white men who couldn’t understand why people are always going on about race. Why is race such a big deal? Isn’t it all about making white men feel guilty?

But I certainly don’t give a rodent’s posterior whether anybody feels guilty. Guilt doesn’t so much as butter toast. Our country is becoming increasingly dysfunctional, in part because our institutions, especially government, increasingly reflect the views of only the most sheltered and privileged among us. And it is increasingly unresponsive to everyone else. And, weirdly, a big chunk of the population being left behind still clings to the cognitive biases that support policies that are hurting them. Their collective conceptual frameworks are not adjusting; they still can’t see past the iron wall.

See also: Andrew O’Hehir, “White Privilege: An Insidious Virus That’s Eating America from Within.”

[First posted on The Mahablog, August 25, 2014]

Deluded About Enlightenment

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This is a follow up to the post before last, about the death of Joshu Sasaki. The New York Times published an article about it, and apparently not all of the Roshi’s former students acknowledge that what he did was wrong.

“The idea that he was a predator is mistaken,” said Harold D. Roth, a professor of religious studies at Brown University and a former student of Mr. Sasaki’s. “Everything he did was in the devoted service of awakening enlightenment in his students.”

Oh, please. He was hitting on women students in freakin’ sanzen.

They said he would tell them that sexual contact with a Zen master, or roshi, like him, would help them attain new levels of “non-attachment,” one of Zen’s central objectives. If they resisted, they said, he used intimidation and threats of expulsion.

The Roshi was particularly devoted to the service of enlightening women, apparently, since by all accounts male students didn’t get the same opportunity to attain new levels of non-attachment.

An independent panel of Buddhist leaders concluded in 2013 that the allegations were essentially indisputable. The panel report said that students had complained to Mr. Sasaki’s staff about his behavior since the early 1970s, and that those “who chose to speak out were silenced, exiled, ridiculed or otherwise punished.”

Some of the senior students who make excuses for the Roshi note that no rape charge was ever filed. That’s not unusual, however. Women probably figured it was futile to file charges, considering the Roshi’s seniors students obviously were going to shield him from accountability.

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I would say to Professor Roth that nobody is absolutely bad or absolutely good. Nobody is absolutely anything. I don’t doubt a lot of people who studied with the Roshi and learned Zen practice from him feel the experience was worthwhile. But just as it is delusion to assume a person who has done something wrong is evil, it’s also a delusion to assume a person whose life has otherwise been beneficial is good. This proposes a permanent essence of Sasaki Roshi upon which attributes may be hung — good, bad, enlightened, deluded.

That’s not how it works.

Zennies must affirm that there is no excuse for sexual predation, and that the Roshi’s acts were harmful and wrong. This is not about punishing him, but about giving affirmation to the women he abused while also saying loudly and clearly that this is not what Zen does.

Flaws and Zen Teachers

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The death of Joshu Sasaki Roshi at the age of 107 was noted in several major U.S. newspapers, but I haven’t heard much about it in the U.S. Zen community, possibly because many would like to forget him entirely.

James Ford, a Soto Zen lineage holder, did post on his blog Monkey Mind about the Roshi, and wrote,

By all accounts a great teacher.

By all accounts a sexual predator.

A great sadness for the Dharma come west.

There is no question flawed people can still be great teachers. Were it not so, there would be no great teachers. But there are flaws, and then there are other flaws. Christine Mai-Duc wrote in the Los Angeles Times,

Decades later, allegations from dozens of former students that he had sexually abused them surfaced. The allegations included molestation and rape, and some had been reported to the Rinzai-ji board, which never took effective action, according to an investigation by an independent council of Buddhist leaders.

The council’s report suggested he may have abused hundreds. “We see how, knowingly and unknowingly, the community was drawn into an open secret,” the council wrote. “We have reports that those who chose to speak out were silenced, exiled, ridiculed, or otherwise punished.”

A council of senior Zen teachers ordained under Roshi later responded with an apology, acknowledging that it failed to address the teacher’s alleged sexual misconduct.

The community was drawn into an open secret … those who chose to speak out were silenced, exiled, ridiculed, or otherwise punished. To me, this is the most critical issue. There is no group of people immune to herd mentality, including scientists, self-described skeptics — and Zen students. And I feel compelled to point out that “great teachers” don’t haul their students into co-dependency and complicity.

His senior students, quoted in the news stories, still speak of him with gushing reverence.  Apparently he had great presence, even charisma. But in Zen, genuinely great teachers are praised for their ordinariness. Genuinely great teachers don’t encourage emotional dependency.

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (1904-1971), who founded the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC) in the late 1960s, once compared working with one’s own delusions to climbing a stepladder. Then he added,

Sometimes I may be a delusion. You may overestimate me: “He is a good teacher!” That is already a kind of delusion. I am your friend. I am just practicing with you as your friend who has many stepladders.”

Shunryu Suzuki was a great teacher. I’ve never heard even a hint of a scandalous thing about him. However, as he was dying he rushed transmission of his senior student Richard Baker, who apparently was not ready, and Baker became embroiled in scandals that nearly destroyed SFZC. But SFZC survived, partly through the guidance of Shunryu Suzuki’s son Hoitsu Suzuki. My second Zen teacher, Jion Susan Postal (1940-2014)  received transmission from a teacher in Suzuki Roshi’s lineage through Hoitsu Suzuki. Susan was a great teacher.

(If you are unfamiliar with the Zen lineage tradition, see the explanation beneath the asterisks below.)

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American Zen has done a lot of soul-searching, so to speak, in recent years. A relative handful of Japanese and Korean teachers came to the U.S. in the 1950s through 1970s to teach Zen, and out of that small group several were accused of sexual impropriety eventually. The first generation of American-born teachers, almost all men, also included some teachers who arguably allowed their sexual choices to compromise their roles as teachers, which doesn’t mean they were all predators. Japanese Buddhism is not celibate, and I know of at least a couple of teachers who engaged in publicly acknowledged, serially monogamous relationships with students who were old enough to know what they were getting into. Whether this was detrimental to either the students or the community is a matter of opinion, I suppose.

However, I sense a consensus is growing that teachers shouldn’t be messing with their own students, period. Also, more and more American lineage holders are women, so western Zen is not nearly as much of a boy’s club as it was in the 1970s. More importantly, as western Zen matures students are less likely to think of Zen masters as people with magic powers. They provide essential guidance in the process that is Zen, but ultimately they are just people with flaws and stepladders.

*   *   *

Joshu Sasaki Roshi established a network of Zen centers called Rinzai-ji but left no dharma heirs, in spite of being a teacher for more than 60 years, which throws the future of those centers into doubt.

The news stories and articles about the Roshi persistently confuse terms like “priest” and “teacher,” so let me explain. Rinzai and Soto Zen (the two primary schools in Japan) operate a bit differently, but generally priest ordination roughly is equivalent to novice nun or monk ordination, and “dharma transmission” is equivalent to full ordination. Usually the term “Zen teacher” is limited to the transmitted and is not used to describe priests without transmission, even if the priest is filling the function of a teacher. However, I don’t know if that’s a hard-and-fast rule everywhere.

Someone who has received transmission is also called a “lineage holder,” “dharma heir” or even “Zen master,” although within American Zen it’s unusual to hear the title “Zen master.” The lineage tradition is the primary container that has maintained the integrity of Zen lo these 15 centuries, since Bodhidharma sat in the cave at Shaolin. Zen defines itself as the “face to face transmission of the dharma outside the sutras,” and “dharma” in this case is understood to be the Buddha’s own enlightenment, kept alive by students and teachers working together, person-to-person, mind-to-mind, through the generations. It’s not a matter of learning stuff from books, in other words. Obviously the system doesn’t guarantee anything, but it’s the only system Zen has. Without it, no Zen.

There are many functions only a lineage holder is supposed to be able to do, such as give formal private spiritual interviews (called dokusan or sanzen) and confer ordinations at any level. Zen centers that have no affiliation with a transmitted teacher have limited functionality and, I would argue, are not really “Zen centers.” The Rinzai-ji centers will have to recruit teachers from outside Rinzai-ji to remain “Zen.” But if they can do that, they should be able to survive.

Why Law Shouldn’t Be Based on Morality

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There’s a common argument that law ought to be based on morality, but I disagree. While there is a huge amount of overlap, law and morality operate on slightly different planes. I wrote about this in Rethinking Religion, but I feel like elaborating on it a bit more.

I think law should not be based on opinions of what is right or wrong, but on the objective needs of civil society, local and national. Morality is more about interpersonal relations and how each of us as individuals relate to other living beings and the planet generally. But not everything we might think is immoral needs to be illegal.

Put another way, if there is an evidence-based argument that regulation of X would make an empirically measurable improvement in a community or nation — data that show regulation of X will reduce pollution or crime or enhance property values or something — then by all means, regulate X. But if the only reason for regulating X is that some people think it’s just morally wrong, then I say leave it alone. And I would say that even if I agree that X is morally wrong.

For example, most of us might agree that marital infidelity is morally wrong. But many of us might also agree that enforcing faithfulness is not the government’s business.  However much unfaithfulness might damage a marriage, this is something the people in the marriage need to work out for themselves.  Marital faithfulness cops would be uncomfortably intrusive into our personal lives, I would think.

It also tends to be the case that where infidelity is illegal, somehow only women are prosecuted and punished. Bleep that.

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There are some behaviors that we might agree are morally wrong but which can’t be stopped by banning it. I’m thinking now of abortion.  I’ve been arguing for years that even if there were a broad consensus to create policy to stop or reduce abortion, criminalizing it doesn’t work.

How so? There is all kinds of hard, real-world data showing that abortion law has no impact on abortion rates. Some of the highest abortion rates on the planet are in places where abortion is illegal. Some of the lowest abortion rates are in places where it is legal. I understand that when a country changes its abortion laws, whether to legalize or criminalize, any subsequent change in the rate of abortions is temporary. Eventually the rate settles back to what it had been before the law changed.

People who succeed in criminalizing abortion may congratulate themselves for standing up for morality, but they aren’t saving babies. And where abortion is criminal, it’s also much more dangerous for women. Around the world, the enormous majority of deaths of women from botched abortions occur where abortion is illegal.

I was reminded of this when I found an old blog post written by a former anti-abortion conservative Christian who is now a pro-reproduction rights atheist. “How I Lost Faith in the ‘Pro-Life’ Movement” lays out all the arguments I’ve been making for years, clearly and logically.  The author, Libby Anne, also was shocked to learn that the one thing proven by copious data to reduce abortion rates is use of birth control.

Do read the whole thing. Libby Anne concluded that the tactics of the abortion criminalization movement are utterly illogical if their goal was to reduce abortions and save babies. However, it makes perfect sense if their goal is to punish women for their sexuality. See also “What If Banks, Not Abortion Clinics, Needed Buffer Zones?,” which is a short excerpt from Rethinking Religion.

I’m not happy with the pro-reproductive rights side, either. I have felt for years they should be broadcasting the fact that criminalizing abortion doesn’t stop it as loudly and as broadly as possible, and I am ignored. Arguments purely based on a concept of rights are not persuasive to people who are uncomfortable with women having rights, especially sexual rights. I wrote about morality last week,

Notice that most of our hot-button and never-ending public squabbles about what’s moral and what isn’t touches on the same two issues — sex and death. That’s because these are two issues most of us are really emotional — and often conflicted — about. Lying, stealing and cheating, by contrast, are not nearly so controversial.

But regarding sex, it’s really women and sex that set off everybody’s crazy alarms. There are all kinds of ancient taboos about women and purity and whatnot ground into us that are still jerking us around, whether we admit to it or not. Male sexuality doesn’t trigger anywhere near the same degree of angst.

A few years ago I wrote an article for About.com on Buddhism and Abortion. I still get comments on it sometimes, mostly from people who don’t seem to have read it carefully. Yes, most schools of Buddhism consider “a life” to begin with conception, and terminating a pregnancy is a violation of the First Precept.

However, Buddhism takes a more situationist than absolutist  approach to moral questions. Instead of rigidly applying one-size-fits-all rules, individuals are encouraged to weigh the possible consequences of their actions, taking in all the people affected. We are encouraged to reflect on our own intentions and motivations. And then we consider all that in light of the Buddha’s teaching. That said, I can think of a great many circumstances in which abortion may be a morally justifiable decision.

And, in any event, we have real-world evidence that the many nations with legal abortion are not suffering catastrophes because of it. Even if we agree abortion is immoral, there is no civil purpose to be served by making it broadly illegal.

Not only does criminalizing abortion push women into risking their lives to terminate pregnancies, I understand there are places in Latin America where women avoid getting medical care after a naturally occurring miscarriage because they fear being prosecuted for getting an abortion. Abortion may be immoral, but criminalizing it also leads to a kind of immorality, seems to me.

The Basis of Morality

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One chapter in Rethinking Religion is devoted to rethinking morality. Many religious people insist — absurdly, to my mind — that there can be no morality without religion. Secularists have taken up this challenge and have devised various non-religious moral theories. Prominent atheist Sam Harris, for example, has written a number of articles and books with his own proposals for how we might live by a moral code without having to believe in a judgmental God.

Religious and secularist moralists tend to make the same basic mistake, however, which is to assume that “morality” mostly involves living according to some kind of universally accepted code. It doesn’t. It never did.

Much current research in psychology and sociology points to another source entirely for where our moral notions come from. And that would be our biases and emotions. Our orientation toward all moral issues depends on how we feel about those issues, and then we use our “rational” minds to craft a narrative to explain why our views are “good.” We all do this, whether we admit it or not.

This is why many of our public fights over “moral” issues remain at impasse. People who are disgusted by homosexuality, for example, will find no end of reasons why suppressing it isn’t some kind of moral “good,” while people who accept homosexuality think it’s the suppression that’s immoral.

Notice that most of our hot-button and never-ending public squabbles about what’s moral and what isn’t touches on the same two issues — sex and death. That’s because these are two issues most of us are really emotional — and often conflicted — about. Lying, stealing and cheating, by contrast, are not nearly so controversial.

Although Christians opposed to abortion and birth control insist their perspective is religious, the truth is that Bible-based arguments against abortion and birth control are laughably flimsy, and the pertinent scriptures could be interpreted many ways. Yet to go by the energy the Christian Right puts into fighting these things, you’d think Jesus never talked about anything else. In fact, he never addressed abortion or birth control at all, nor did the Apostles, even though abortions and haphazard attempts at birth control were going on at the time, and they must have known about this.

In truth, our opinions about these issues actually are coming from a murky place in our ids where our feelings about sex, sexual purity, women, motherhood etc., are perpetually stewing and jerking us about. We choose sides depending on what those feelings are, and then we grab the first available ideology that harmonizes with our opinions, whether “religion” or liberalism or whatever.

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And if the facts of a situation don’t fit our narratives, we change the facts. The pro-life zealots who camped around Terry Schiavo’s hospital a few years ago convinced themselves that Ms. Schiavo was not in a persistent vegetative state at all, but was awake and communicating, for example. The truth is, “moral clarity” nearly always depends on ignoring the messy, and often painful, details of human life that obstruct the view.

But those irrelevant details are what our lives actually are. To ignore them is to ignore humanity. That’s why moral absolutism, taken to logical extremes, becomes inhumane. To deny our subjectivity is to deny us.

I’m not arguing against all codes of morals, mind you. Humans need agreed-upon codes of behavior in order to live in communities together. But those are not the basis of morality.

The basis, like it or not, is just us. The basis is our ability to be compassionate; to be empathetic; to value others as much as we value ourselves. Often morality depends on our ability to put aside our own desires and defer to the needs of others. If we can do that, we will be moral people, and if we can’t we won’t. And if we can’t, all the rules in the world won’t matter.