Tango Philosophy

The Skin I Live In: Almodóvar meets Seneca

2012-01-13T16:06:00.000-08:00

Elena Anaya and a blurry Antonio Banderas in The Skin I Live In

This week, with my friend Selena, Iwent to see the latest film by Spanish director, Pedro Almodóvar, The Skin I Live In. On my way by ferryto the cinema, I read a short essay on the Stoic philosopher, politician andplaywright Seneca, who served the emperor Nero as tutor and advisor, and wasordered by him to commit suicide in 65 CE. As chance would have it, this turnedout to be the perfect prelude to viewing Almodóvar’s film.

Most critics have not known quite what tomake of The Skin I Live In, admittingthat they enjoyed it, but at the same time complaining that it seems cold, andlacks the compassion that usually characterizes Almodóvar’s work. It seems tome that this confusion clears if The SkinI Live In is read as a drama in the spirit of Stoic tragedy. It is notdesigned to elicit compassion, but rather to generate what the Stoics called apatheia. In doing so, it is a salutoryalternative to mainstream cinema that stickily endorses revenge rather thanletting us see it, clearly and even joyfully, for what it is.

The apatheiacultivated by the Stoic is an attitude of happy indifference toward externalevents, designed to free one from passions, particularly anger and grief, thatmight otherwise arise in the face of undesirable changes in fortune. Senecatells us that the person who achieves this emotional control is rare; the Stoicsage is like a phoenix, appearing perhaps once every five hundred years. Hegives us no portraits of such exemplary figures in his tragedies, but swings tothe opposite extreme, depicting the extremes of human passion, cruelty andsuffering, to the point where some readers, including Erasmus and Diderot, have(mistakenly) speculated that playwright and the philosopher must have been twodifferent men.

A contemporary rewriting of Seneca’s drama, Thyestes is showing as part of theSydney Festival – the story involves bitter sibling rivalry for power, sexualinfidelity, murder, and, the pièce de résistance, cannibalism, with Thyestes luredby his brother, Atreus, to unwittingly consume the cooked flesh of his ownchildren. This might be read as a heavy-handed moral warning about the dangersof giving in to the lust for power (or haute cuisine), but Seneca’s dramaticstyle is far from such earnest didacticism.

There are didacticStoic voices in his plays: nurses and advisors counsel Stoic dispassion – buttheir message is typically distorted and thrown back in their faces by thepassionate and the powerful. And the spectator can only feel grateful for this,since his gory tales of greed, deception and violent revenge are undeniablyenjoyable. As we see outrages, betrayals and acts of violence piling uponanother with the kind of flamboyant excess that was later imitated by theplaywrights of the Elizabethan era in England, the mood in the audiencetypically becomes increasingly cheerful and serene.

Perhaps Seneca is training us in Stoicindifference, not by providing us with impossibly tranquil models to imitate,but by parading extreme fluctuations of human emotion at such a rate that wecannot sustain a passionate response ourselves, but let go of any personaldistress and settle into an engaged, but calm and light-hearted mood. This, itseems to me, is close to the apatheia theStoics sought, which is misunderstood if it is seen as involving colddetachment from worldly life.

by Louise Bourgeois

Almodóvar’s film achieves a similar effect.It tells a fantastical tale about a plastic surgeon who uses transgenesis tocreate living skin, and experiments with it, illegally, on an extremelybeautiful and flexible young woman who is living as a prisoner in his house.The story proceeds, and turns back on itself, via narrative twists involvingrape, madness and murder, and secretive, violent family relations. As in the Thyestes, a major motive for thecharacters’ actions is the desire for revenge, which is depicted withoutmoralistic judgment or justification. This being Almodóvar, there are alsofabulous clothes, beautiful people, quirky jokes, gender puzzles and manyappreciative references to the work of other artists, particularly that of theFrench-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois.

In suggesting that Almodóvar’s film, likeSeneca’s play, is likely to produce a response of apatheia, it should be clear that I’m not suggesting that it willput you in an ‘apathetic’ state – the connotations of the English word are quitedifferent. It would be more apt to wonder whether the pleasure to be had from watching family members destroy oneanother isn’t uncomfortably close to the disreputable emotion of schadenfreude– malicious joy taken in the suffering of others.

A disturbing amount of contemporary filmand literature seems to depend for its impact on stirring up nasty emotions,particularly that of morally justified vengefulness: we are encouraged to takepleasure in the suffering of certain characters because they “deserve” it, andto share in the vindictive joy of the ultimately triumphant hero, or oftenheroine, as she takes her revenge – I’d put Verhoeven’s film Black Book in this category, to take just one example. But such moralisticvindictiveness is not schadenfreude, and it is at the other end of theemotional spectrum from apatheia.

Schadenfreude is not moralistic. On thecontrary, it is an amoral, even a guilty, or at least naughty pleasure. We knowthat morally, we’re not supposed to react to the suffering of others withdelight; schadenfreude is never self-righteous, it is a joy that bubbles up, oftenin spite of efforts to appear more appropriately sober and sympatheticallyconcerned. It can have a malicious, even sadistic edge, but it can also bequite innocent, the kind of spontaneous joy that makes us laugh at slapstick –or take pleasure in watching events driven by the worst elements of humannature unfold with relentless, unstoppable logic, on stage or on screen.

In part, such pleasure may come fromfeeling that we are safe on the shore, watching a shipwreck in the distance – mosttroubles of our own are mere soap-bubbles in comparison to the suffering ofThyestes. But if the Stoic playwright succeeds, then our enjoyment will extendto include our own suffering, regarded as part of a grand spectacle that can bewatched with interest and calm delight.

After seeing The Skin I Live In, I left the cinema in high spirits. My book ofSeneca’s essays remained unopened on the ferry ride that took me back acrossthe harbour. Instead of reading, I sat outside and let the wind blow my hairabout while I admired the delicate, luminous shades of lilac and purple producedin the evening sky by gleams of late, golden light between the clouds, andtheir undulating reflections in water stirred into wide ripples by the movementof the ferry. I felt a buoyant and expansive pleasure in the beauty of nature, anenjoyment that strangely enough – and Stoically enough - seemed connected tohaving just watched a stylish film about the hyperbolic suffering wreaked bythe human desire for power and revenge.

Louise Bourgeois 1911-2010

The Magic Mountain

2012-01-04T21:15:00.000-08:00

Something odd is happening to me. I havestarted reading Thomas Mann’s great work, The Magic Mountain, or to give it its original title, Der Zauberberg. I’m told that the adjective “zauber” has slightly differentconnotations to the English “magic.” There are no cute, Disney-influencedovertones to the German word. Rather, it implies sorcery, possibly of a menacingkind.

Early after beginning the novel, I wasovercome by sleepiness, and ended up dozing away most of an afternoon, wakingflushed and groggy, feeling rather unwell. I forced myself out of the house fora short walk, did some meditation at a nearby Buddhist monastery, and took alonger walk through the bush to get home, enchanted by the magical sight of afluffy baby lyrebird on the way. Feeling better after this excursion, Ipresumed I had just been exhausted after Christmas and New Years revels, and thatthe heat of the summer day had finished me off.

But the next day, when I took out thenovel, something similar happened. I didn’t sleep so long this time, but wokewith a strange pain in my left shoulder. This time, I thought some morestrenuous exercise might be in order, so I went to the local swim centre anddid my usual twenty laps in the outdoor pool. Towards the end of my swim, Istarted to feel congested. There was a sharp, prickling sensation in my chest.The sky clouded over and started to spit at me. I had to interrupt a lap tocough.

Having looked up the word “sputum” in thedictionary earlier in the day (it is of some importance in the novel) I wondered,while continuing to swim, if I was bringing up sputum, or merely phlegm. WouldI soon need to carry around a flat bottle with me for the purpose of collectingsamples for later examination by medical experts? It was a whimsical, if alsodisgusting thought – I was imagining myself as one of the consumptive patientsliving in the sanatorium described in Mann’s novel, set in the German Alps, agood deal higher than the Australian Blue Mountains where I live.

The routine of (largely horizontal) life inthe fictional International Sanatorium Berghof is constructed around mealtimes,of which there are five daily: early breakfast, second breakfast, dinner, afternoontea, and supper. The food is sumptuous and beautifully prepared. At the tablewhere the main character of the novel, Hans Castorp is seated, the dishes areserved by a dining attendant who also happens to be a dwarf.

Thomas Mann

I write this having first consumed my own“second breakfast” for the day, which consisted of an omelette with fresh sageand goats curd, à la Bill Granger, and a roast dandelion soy latte, with honey.I prepared and served this meal myself, which suggests that I am playing boththe role of hero, or anti-hero (Castorp is defined by his mediocrity,supplemented with a penchant for philosophical musings – about time, mostly),and that of the dwarf who serves him. This confusion, or amalgamation of roles,can be put down to the fact that I am living in the early twenty-first century,under conditions of advanced capitalism and liberal democracy, whereas Mann’scharacters belong to the period before the First World War.

In his novel, the appearance of a dwarfwaitress is cause for a slight shock, and heightened politeness on Castorp’spart, quickly fading into simple acceptance of her presence as part of thepeculiar status quo in the Berghof. This detail in the novel reminds me ofstories I heard a few years ago about how a law firm in Sydney hired dwarves toserve the drinks at its staff Christmas party. I wonder if the organisers were awarethat in light of Mann’s famous novel, this suggested that the partners of thefirm were not only morally decadent, but likely to be ravaged by internal disease,beneath their flush, rosy-cheeked exteriors. Kim Kardashian might also like to take note.

At this point, I feel a certain obligationto come up with some incisive philosophical observations, supported by cogenthistorical examples, about the changing symbolism of illness, perhaps drawingon Susan Sontag’s contrast between the spiritualization of consumptives, whowere seen to draw closer to God as their illness progressed, and the morerecent attitude toward cancer patients, who are likely to feel blamed for their own illness, in line with what I would not hesitate to call thehyperbolic concept of personal responsibility that dominates contemporary Westernculture. I might add to this analysis some consideration of AIDS and its interpretation via discourses of sin, messianiccatastrophe and redemption (as illustrated in playwright Tony Kushner's Angels in America), and sparesome thought for those forms of illness which remain unfigured in any majorcultural tropes, negative or positive, and consequently fail to attractsignificant research funding leading to better treatment…

But I find thatlassitude is overtaking me, and realise that I have only a short time to wrapmyself in a blanket (the weather here in the mountains having once again turnedunseasonably cold) and take a quick kip on the couch before it will be time tomeet my friend Nigel for lunch.

intelligent, angry elephant

2011-12-30T20:54:00.000-08:00

An extended version of my blog post on anger from last week has just appeared in elephant, an online journal devoted to yoga, sustainability, politics and spirituality. Take a look.

elephant journal: Yoga, Sustainability, Politics, Spirituality

New Year's Wishes

2011-12-30T02:58:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday, I went for a walk to find awishing well. I’d heard about this place, and seen signs pointing to it in theMorton National Park, near Bundanoon. It seemed like a good place to visit inthe few days remaining before the new year, an auspicious spot to contemplatethe year to come. Resolutions seem all too likely to result in bad consciencelater on — I prefer the idea of new year’s wishes (keeping in mind the old fairytale warning, be careful what you wish for…)

On the way, I came across an echidna,snuffling in the bush. She put her sturdy front claws up on an old log andblinked in my direction, sniffing the air, before waddling away on her ancientlooking legs, black and yellow spines smooth against her body. I took this as agood sign.

The account I’d heard of the wishing wellled me to imagine it nestled in a glen. I expected that at some point I wouldleave the fire trail style track I was following through eucalypt forest nearthe edge of a cliff, and descend via a narrower track into rainforest, beforereaching a shadowy and mysterious place, suitable for magical transactions.

There’s a spot that fits this description called the Fairy Bower falls, which Ivisited last time I was in this park. I remembered being enchanted by a glisteningcurtain of water adorning the rock face, and tantalised by the sound of a largebird beating its powerful wings ahead of me as I climbed back out of thevalley. At one point on that earlier walk, I noticed tufts of very soft greyhair on the track, and turned a steep corner to discover fresh entrails laidout in the middle of the path. There was nothing more of the animal that hadbeen taken, probably a possum or glider. I gazed up the enormous trunks of thenearby gums, but never did see the bird of prey.

When I came to a neat sign reading “WishingWell,” I was still on high ground, however, and there was no sign of a trackleading downwards or anywhere, for that matter. Next to the sign was a spot fora car, and beyond that a rocky area stretching away. Slightly confused, Iwalked up onto a kind of rock platform and was surprised to see what appearedto be a large metal cage perched at one end of it. On closer inspection, Irealized that I had found the “well,” a natural formation in the rock. It was remarkablyround and quite small – less than a metre wide and deep, filled with rainwaterand lichen. In the mud at the bottom, visitors had tossed a few coins. What hadappeared to be a cage was actually a large, clumsy but solid fence, constructedaround this small depression in the rock. Presumably it was designed toguarantee the safety of young children, who might be left unattended at the“well” by extremely careless parents.

Needless to say, the fence dispelled anysense of mystery or wonder that might have been evoked by the curiouslysymmetric hole in the rock. Instead, the unattractive, oversized barrieremanated a vaguely menacing sense of the reach of institutionalized paternalismall the way into this relatively remote spot in the wild. At the same time,this effort to guarantee the safety of tiny tourists seemed touchingly naïveand inadequate. A few steps from the fence, a child bent on self-harm could easilythrow himself off the rock ledge into a small valley where with a bit of luckhe could be bitten by a snake, or perhaps be taken by a bird of prey, hisentrails to be discovered later by startled bushwalkers…

I sat down on the sun-warmed rock a shortdistance from the “wishing well” and pondered the strangely myopic and earnestattitude of the National Park rangers who, I supposed, had erected thisungainly looking safety structure.

Then it dawned on me: of course, theprimary purpose of the fence was not to protect unsupervised toddlers fromdrowning, but to protect the relevant authorities from the possibility of beingsued. That’s why there are similar barriers at every official lookout in thepark, partially obscuring the view, right next to vast, unfenced stretches ofcliff where there is nothing to interrupt the line of sight or of accidental flight.

These barriers don’t relate in any verypractical or commonsensical way to the visible, material world, the landscapeor the people hiking across it, looking at views and making wishes. But thismakes perfect sense once you realise that they are there chiefly to protect anabstract legal identity. The objectionably solid fence in front of me unveileditself as an oddly metaphysical entity, a creation of law, whose true purposeand meaning could only become fully apparent in the actual or merely anxiouslyanticipated context of a courtroom.

This was at once depressing and intriguing.Ever since Australia was colonized by the British, the powerful and sometimes violently fictional constructs of Western law have been getting in the way of any moregraceful, sensitive, or simply sensible way of relating to the naturalenvironment and its inhabitants, here. But the presence of this fence alsodemonstrated the potential of wishes. If an idea, shared by enough people, cancause a bloody big metal fence to appear on a rock in the middle of thewilderness, where it clearly doesn’t belong, then what other, more beautiful andapt creations (or disappearances) might result from well-formed wishes, thekind that an echnidna might lend a little of her spiny magic to support?

May all your new year’s wishes for 2012 betrue, and come true.

The intelligence of anger

2011-12-22T16:01:00.001-08:00

Mid-way through a peaceful ramble throughthe bush at Wentworth Falls a few weeks ago, my friends Maddy, Tess and I cameto a standstill when our conversation got on to the topic of how much anger isexpressed, in sometimes astonishingly vitriolic forms, when unpopular views arevoiced in the media. Writers of opinion pieces regularly devote columns toexpressing their shock and dismay at receiving floods of abusive andthreatening messages after touching, sometimes quite innocently, on a topicthat unleashes unrestrained fury in a large number of their readers. It’s adisturbing phenomenon –we found we weren’t capable of walking and talking aboutit at the same time. Maddy’s little son Zeke looked on quizzically from hisvantage point in a pack on Maddy’s back while we gesticulated. At one point,attempting to move along the track while still conversing, I fell off thewooden walkway into the reeds on one side. What’s going on, here?

An obvious point is that it is difficult todo tango philosophy, bushwalk backwards, and maintain your dignity and physicalsafety all at the same time. I don’t suggest you try it at home. Anotherobvious point, which is more to thepoint, is that the possibility of instantaneous, electronic communication withstrangers (as well as friends) means that anger can be expressed with fewerinhibitions than ever before. You can let yourself go when writing an email orcontributing to an online discussion, and send the message while passion isstill running high, in a way that you wouldn’t normally do in face to facecommunication, or if you had to wait until the next day to post a letter, andcertainly not if you had to get the message past an editor in order for it toreach its audience. The restraints that operate to keep anger in check in othercommunicative situations aren’t readily available online.

Another, slightly less obvious point isthat many people seem to contain a reservoir of anger, that has been filleddrip by drip, day by day, until it’s ready to overflow, so that the nextirritant that triggers it, however minor or impersonal it may be, can break therestraining wall and unleash a wave that comes crashing towards the person whoprovoked that final drop.

Jungle Yoga

I observed this phenomenon in my ownresponse to a teacher on a ten-day meditation retreat at the beginning of thisyear. The retreat was held in Thailand, in an extraordinarily beautifullocation. We stayed in floating bungalows on a lake surrounded by ancientrainforest, said to have greater biodiversity than the Amazon. The water was aperfect temperature for lazy swimming; there were kayaks readily available; therewas even a masseuse on hand in case you developed some tension in your musclesfrom the hard work of daily yoga classes and meditation. And the quality of meditationinstruction was very high – there were two teachers, an American man and an Australianwoman, who had both trained extensively in Burma. On top of their skillful andengaging group instruction, they made themselves available for daily personalinterviews with each member of our small group.

You might think that it would be practicallyimpossible to get angry, or to sustain any anger that might somehow arise, insuch a blissful and well-supported situation. But of course, you would bewrong.

After my first personal interview with themale teacher, I found myself crying tears of fury and frustration into thedelicious green pawpaw salad I was eating for lunch. The retreat was held insilence, so no one asked me what was wrong, but the woman who was sittingclosest to me later said that when she saw me crying she thought to herself,“Wow, that woman is really in touch with her feelings.” My own view was that Iwas way too much in touch with them. Who wants to spend ten days in an earthlyparadise getting up close and personal with anger?

But this was a situation in which there wasno easy outlet for aggressive emotion. I couldn’t send an abusive email, oreven have a bitch to a third party about the way the teacher had spoken to me.I had no choice but to get still more deeply “in touch” with my anger. It wasan interesting investigation. One thing I realized pretty quickly was that myreaction was out of all proportion to the apparent cause. It didn’t seemplausible that I was really this angry, purely over the condescending,dismissive attitude a man whom I didn’t even know had taken toward me. Whyshould I even care about what he thought of me, especially on first,superficial impression?

I recently told this story at a dinner, anda woman at the table jumped in at this point to tell me I was right to beangry, that intelligent women are constantly treated this way by men inpositions of authority, especially in spiritual circles, and that too often weaccept this demeaning behavior, or blame ourselves, feeling that we have somehowfailed in the exchange, rather than recognizing that anger is an appropriateresponse: women shouldn’t have to put up with this kind of thing, and theyshouldn’t support it by accepting it. Too often, you see a man playing thedubious role of guru in front of twenty women in leotards who treat him like aminor, or even major deity. Obviously the women involved get something out ofthe exchange, too, but respect for women’s intelligence, and for intelligent women,is a likely, early casualty.

She had a good point; I recognized thescenario she was describing (which can manifest with or without leotards, oreven any kind of spiritually signifying fashion statement). At the same time, Iknew it wouldn’t have been helpful or just for me to unleash my anger over thiskind of thing on the teacher I met in Thailand. He was only the last in aseries. Alone he wouldn’t have provoked more than mild frustration andsurprise.

It turned out that “getting in touch” withmy anger meant realizing this – seeing the structural causes, and the longchain of events that had contributed to the store of anger that I carried withme to Thailand. At this level, anger becomes understanding, even wisdom, anenergy that can drive action rather than reaction. It takes restraint to resistreacting to anger while it’s raw, but it seems to me that if you manage to dothis and stay “in touch” with the feeling rather than suppressing it, you canget to a point of understanding where it’s possible to let the anger move youin invigorating, positive ways that don’t do violence to anyone.

A few days after the dinner, I did a yogaclass taught by the woman who’d intervened so passionately when I was talking aboutmy experience in Thailand. I watched and followed as she demonstrated breathingexercises and yoga postures surrounded by a group of about twenty women wearingleotards, plus a couple of men in similar outfits. She herself was dressed in loosewhite dance top and shorts, of very thin, soft material, worn over black tightsand a tight black top, and although she was sitting on the floor like the restof us, she seemed somehow elevated. She had the rapt attention of the wholegroup, whether she was simply drawing her hand slowly toward her chest,exhaling, or executing an impossibly perfect upward dog (that last bit is not aabrupt departure into automatic writing, it makes quite ordinary sense in thelanguage of yoga). Perhaps it would be an exaggeration to say that we weregazing at her as if in the presence of a goddess, but there was certainly anair of devotion in the room…

In this season, traditionally known forfestivity and family tension, I won’t go so far as to wish you a crankyChristmas, an angry Hannukah, or a simply furious solstice (summer or winter)but may you recognise the divine in yourself and others, and give your angertime to reveal its deep and supple intelligence.

Now-time

2011-12-17T16:12:00.000-08:00

My weekly blog-post is a bit late this week, due to having too good a time at the annual conference of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy conference on "The Times of Our Lives," held at La Trobe University in Melbourne.

One of many highlights was a key-note paper by Elizabeth Grosz, on "Deleuze, Ruyer and becoming-brain: the music of life's temporality." In question time, she expanded on the notion of consciousness as "self-enjoyment" by saying that when you have an idea, "and it doesn't happen very often," suddenly everything changes, you see and feel everything differently.

In this spirit, here's taste of the paper I presented. Prepare yourself for a brief tour of...

Walter Benjamin's famous Construction Site of History!

At the entrance, you are invited to play chess with anautomaton, a puppet in Turkish attire seated before a chess board placed on alarge table. Ingeniously hidden inside the table is a hunchbacked dwarf, amaster at chess, who manipulates the puppet so that it wins every game. Thiswas a real device which amazed audiences in the Nineteenth century. In Benjamin's version, the puppet represents historical materialism, while the dwarf istheology, which today, as he says, “is small and ugly and has to keep outof sight.”

I Progress and catastrophe

During the game, you are permitted to observe the secretheliotropism of past events as they turn like flowers toward a sun rising inthe sky of history. The almost inconspicuous change in their orientation isbrought about by sheer bogan confidence, courage, humour, cunning andfortitude, energies that constantly call into question every victory, past andpresent, of the rulers. We can turn the past in our favour, secretly, gently,almost imperceptibly, if we know how to play with the qualities that are the living spoils of the class struggle.

Paul Klee's Angelus Novus

This sunny vision gives way to a more troubling one,however. The sky clouds over and we see an angel “who seems about to move awayfrom something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wingsare spread.” This is the angel of history. “His face is turned toward the past.Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe,which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angelwould like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. Buta storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is sostrong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives himirresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile ofdebris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.”

(As Gershom Scholem, a great scholar of Jewish mysticism,and one of Benjamin’s closest friends, puts it, “Jewish Messianism is in itsorigins and by its nature – this cannot be sufficiently emphasized – a theoryof catastrophe.”)

I will leave you to imagine the images of wreckage and ofthe dead that the angel of history is staring at. Literally, of course, he islooking at us.

II Heroism and Utopia

You may wish to turn away from this vision of catastrophe.Let us leave the storm of progress behind, and focus on the heroic utopianpossibilities offered by Now-time (Jetztzeit).

In this very instant, you areencouraged to attempt a fashionable or even revolutionary tiger’s leap into thepast.

(The utopian, redemptive element in the Messianic visioninvolves the “wild indulgence of fantasy” but also “fascinating vitality towhich no historical reality can do justice” – Scholem.)

Robespierre demonstrates this move as he performed it duringthe French Revolution, “citing Rome exactly the way fashion cites a bygone modeof dress.” Recall that Robespierre was known as“the incorruptible” for his high and inflexible standards of personal morality.He famously defended revolutionary terror, and eventually fell victim to it.

Like all stylish and heroic activities, leaping into thepast comes with a standard warning: beware of sirens, in particular a whorecalled “Once upon a time,” who pedals the eternal image of the past inhistoricism’s bordello. Here, Benjamin tells us, only the historicalmaterialist remains in control of his powers – “man enough to blast open thecontinuum of history.”

III Contemplation

As tension mounts, the historical materialist (or is it thedwarf of theology who secretly animates him?) performs the astonishing feat ofarresting thought, provoking the crystallization of a historical object in theform of a monad. This is a sign, ladies and gentlemen… “the sign of a messianicarrest of happening, or (to put it differently) a revolutionary chance in thefight for the oppressed past.”

What does it mean to seize this chance? Witness thehistorical materialist blast an era from the homogenous time of history, a lifefrom the era, a work from the lifework! “As a result of this method,” saysBenjamin, “the lifework is both preserved and sublated in the work, the era inthe lifework, and the entire course of history in the era. The nourishing fruit of what is historically understoodcontains time in its interior as aprecious but tasteless seed.”

In Benjamin’s method of immanent critique, the time of theworld is finally encapsulated and redeemed in each historical object and thework of critical understanding through which it becomes crystallized.

This completes the show. But to take home with you, thesouvenir-pack with everything:

“Now-time, which, as a model of messianic time,comprises the entire history of mankind in a tremendous abbreviation, coincidesexactly with the figure which the history of mankind describes in theuniverse.”

(Except where otherwise indicated, all quotes are from Walter Benjamin's essay "On the Concept of History," also known as his "Theses on the Philosophy of History.")

We are the 100%

2011-12-05T19:21:00.001-08:00

He-man with flying troll

I recently got involved in a discussion onfacebook about the percentage of income tax paid in the US by the richest 1%. Thiswas the very first exchange I have participated in on the topic of the Americantax system, and I have to admit that my contribution was somewhat childish, notto say troll-like (in my opening parry, I accused one of my friends of“capitalist he-man posturing”). Feeling remorseful about this, I have decidedto attempt to redeem myself here, with some musings which may still appear naïveto some, but have at least benefited from a little more time to mature.

Apparently the wealthiest 1% in the US pay about 40% of all annual income tax collected in that country. This figure hasincreased since tax rates for the richest Americans were reduced under Bush; thismeans that although very rich Americans now pay a smaller proportion of their incomeas tax, their share of total income has increased so much that have ended uppaying a larger proportion of the national tax bill – the reduction in theirtax rates may have helped to achieve this result. So while the figure of 40%might initially seem to suggest that the richest Americans contribute animpressively large share of tax, on reflection, it is a stark indication of howextremely unequal the distribution of wealth in that country has become.

It could be seen as a very shortexplanation of the situation that has provoked, and sustained, the Occupy movement.But it can also be seen as a succinct summary of a mindset that the Occupymovement has created.

Without the existence and persistence ofthe Occupy movement figures like this would not currently be circulating on theinternet. The rhetoric of Occupy has somewhat arbitrarily divided the USpopulation into two camps: the wealthiest 1% and the other 99%. This isdesigned to give the movement credibility – it is not speaking on behalf of asmall, marginalized group, but is voicing the concerns of an overwhelmingmajority, the 99%.

An unfortunate side-effect of this strategyis to make those cordoned off as the 1% seem embattled and accused, heldexclusively responsible for problems created by the society as a whole. This hasmotivated some to come up with statistics or slogans to defend this group, aimingto point out that the super rich do contribute to society (in many cases thisis precisely how they’ve gotten so rich), and don’t typically spend large swathesof their time sitting around scheming about how to rip its fabric apart.

As the brief discussion of US income taxshows, this tactic backfires when it involves a denial of the problem. The inequalitiesare extreme. So are some of the rips and tears in American society - and theanger and sense of insecurity they incite.

(A quick digression: last week Tom and Isaw the Cohen Bros film, Burn beforeReading. It’s a great example of intelligent American humour – humourunderpinned and abruptly interrupted by rage. But Americans have no monopoly oninequality, insecurity, or ax-wielding maniacs. Consider what’s happening rightnow at the University of Sydney.)

OWS Ladies' Choir

But to get back to the main topic: aremarkable thing about the Occupy movement is that although it is a protestmovement, it is not dominated by anger. Rather, it can be seen as an antidoteto the anger that often seems to be tightly coiled just under the surface of contemporarysocial life. It is resolutely non-violent, and committed to inclusive, creative,frequently humorous and truly democratic forms of communication. Just one example:a musician friend of mine who lives in NY, Greta Gertler, has contributed byforming a choir that regularly sings four part harmonies in Zuccotti Park inBrooklyn. It's called the OWS (Occupy Wall Street) Ladies’ Choir. In spite of the name, Iunderstand that female gender is not a prerequisite for membership. Protestmay have been high-pitched before, but never has it been so mellifluous (here is one of the songs they sing).

So is there a way of challenging thedivisive element in the 99% versus 1% slogan that doesn’t deny the problems, orlead to even more divisive discussions? Thanks to Bhante Sujato, I recentlycame across a counter-slogan, devised by Zen peacemaker Ari Setsudo Pliskin, that fits this billperfectly. Instead of “We are the 99%” he advocates: “We are the 100%.”

Imagine if the rich and poor in America and elsewhere came together to defend democracy, and let lucid arguments rather than money determine the outcome of political struggles, for the benefit of society (and the planet) as a whole. You may say I'm a dreamer... But the concerns of the Occupy movement affectus all.

A gracious gadfly on the rump of the state

Continental philosophers and other animals

2011-11-29T18:45:00.001-08:00

Next month, I will be going to Melbourne toattend the annual conference of the Australasian Association for Continental Philosophers (I know, it sounds like something out of a David Lodge novel, butit’s real). Continental philosophers are not people who think deeply about thesignificance of living in a nation that’s also an entire continent. Nor, youmay be relieved to learn, are they sponsored by Continental Airlines (althoughthe concept of the “bar in the sky” developed by that company is somehow in keepingwith the spirit of many continental philosophy discussions).

Rather, the term “continental philosophy”refers to philosophy from or inspired by thinkers from the continent of Europe,which mainly means France, Germany and Italy. Even more importantly, itdesignates philosophy that is NOT part of the (predominantly) Anglo-Americantradition of analytic thought. Somewhat confusingly, analytic philosophy issaid to originate with the work of a German philosopher, Gottlob Frege. It isscientific in spirit, whereas continental philosophy is anchored in the methodsof textual interpretation and inquiry of the great religious, literary andhistorical traditions that inform European culture. The split between the twois a recent phenomenon, dating only from the Twentieth century, when the schoolof analytic philosophy emerged.

Although (or perhaps because) their schoolis a mere baby of the Western tradition, analytic philosophers tend to show afundamentalist, reformatory zeal, asserting that their approach to philosophyis the one true way. As David Attenborough might have observed, had he venturedinto the jungle of contemporary academia, analytic philosophers will fightfiercely to protect and expand their communal and material interests. Sociable,loyal, even charming among their own kind,they become territorial and dangerous in dealings withphilosophers from other schools, insisting that continental philosophy (which,mind you, covers pretty much the whole tradition of Western philosophy beforethe arrival of analytic philosophy) is not worthy of the title “philosophy” andought to be stamped out wherever possible. And indeed, it has proved close to possiblein many philosophy departments in Australia, the United States of America, andthe United Kingdom. Analytic philosophy is clearly in the ascendency in thesecountries.

It should be admitted that most of thephilosophers grouped under the rubric of “continental philosophy” are secretly equallydismissive of the value of analytic philosophy, considering that should itmagically disappear without trace, this would be no loss to the world. However,they are much less organized or unified in their opposition to their naturalenemy, tending to be preoccupied with depressing problems of their own, such ashow to continue a tradition of thought which is implicated in the terribleevents of European history in the last century, particularly the Holocaust.Busy deconstructing, critiquing, and declaring “states of exception” involvingthe suspension of the authority of their own intellectual heritage,continental philosophers have been in a weak position to withstand the energeticand strategic advances of the analytic philosophers. While retaining a foothold in philosophy departments, they have tended to scatter into otherdisciplines, such as literature, fine arts, cultural studies, and the socialsciences.

Hence the need for an Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy (ASCP), to bring the diaspora together. There is noequivalent society for analytic philosophy. The analytic philosophers simplydominate the Australasian Association of Philosophy.

This year, the ASCP conference has beengiven the theme, “The Times of our Lives.” I am preparing a paper on WalterBenjamin’s concept of Now-time. This is a suggestive understanding ofhistorical time, not as an empty, homogenous expanse in which events occursequentially, but rather as an intense experience of the present as a momentthat is full to overflowing with the past, to the point of catastrophe or possiblyredemptive revolution. To get a better sense of Benjamin’s work as a whole (hisoeuvre, to be continental about it),I have been reading Howard Caygill, whose summary of Benjamin’s project goessome way to explaining why continental philosophy is not in a stronger positionin contemporary academia:

Walter Benjamin

“To a large extent Benjamin’s thought maybe understood as an attempt to extend the limits of experience treated withinphilosophy to the point where the identity of philosophy itself is jeopardized.In place of a philosophical mastery of experience, whether that of art, ofreligion, of language or of the city, Benjamin allows experience to test thelimits of philosophy. The work of philosophical criticism according to the‘method called nihilism’ allows experience to invade, evade and even ruin itsphilosophical host.”

This is the kind of thing that makesanalytic philosophers see the work of continental thinkers as akin to aparasitic disease. But to “allow experience to test the limits ofphilosophy” need not amount to a suicidal flirtation with destructive forces.In less melancholic mode, it might involve allowing experience to invite, leadand even enliven its philosophical partner. But that would mean moving on fromthe oppositional category of continental thought, and adopting the ‘methodcalled tango philosophy.’

Strange sympathies: Fritz Lang and reptilian aliens

2011-11-23T21:27:00.001-08:00

This week my movie mate, Tom, came overwith a dvd of Fritz Lang’s 1931 film “M.” This classic black and white crimethriller tells the story of a German community’s response to a series of childmurders. The police and the criminal network of the city both mobilize to trackdown the culprit, using almost indistinguishable techniques: highly bureaucraticorganization directed exclusively by men, their discussions wreathed intendrils, building to clouds, of cigarette and cigar smoke.

Cutting through the haze, the head of theunderworld comes up with the idea of delegating the task of surveillance to the“beggars’ union.” One step ahead of the police, the beggars find their man, andthe criminal network swings into action. A chalky “M” slapped on the back of thesuspect’s coat brands him, he is captured, and brought to a kangaroo court inan abandoned factory. And here the moral argument of the film becomes clear.

The murderer defends himself by claimingthat his actions are involuntary – he is continually persecuted by demons andby the ghosts of the mothers of the children he has killed. He finds reliefonly when he “does it,” but remembers nothing of his actions, only learning ofthem through the newspapers later. As he speaks of his compulsion, several ofthe criminals in his audience are shown nodding, evidently identifying with theunconscious, unwilled nature of his experience.

The crime boss responds by declaring thatthe man has condemned himself by his own words: he is clearly a danger tosociety and must be done away with. But in keeping with the way the criminalnetwork mirrors every other aspect of respectable society, the accused has beenappointed a defence counsel who is permitted to plead on his behalf. The lawyerspeaks courageously of the rights of the accused, demanding that he be handedover to the police and tried according to the rule of law; he is sick and oughtto be sent to an asylum, not executed.

The mob are not convinced; a woman raisesher voice on behalf of the mothers who have lost their children, arguing thatthey should be the ones to determine the murderer’s fate. This incites thecrowd and they move to attack the man, but just at this moment, the policearrive. The members of the criminal mob all raise their hands – suddenly thetables have turned and they are the ones exposed to potential arrest forattempted murder. We see a hand laid very gently on the accused’s shoulder, aboutto lead him away to another scene of judgment.

The final speech of the film is given to abereaved mother we met in the opening sequences of the film, who declares thatwe all share in responsibility for such murders – we must take better care ofour children.

After we finished watching, Tom said he hadfelt himself identifying, for a moment, with the mob who wanted to lynch themurderer. He looked at me, “But you didn’t, did you? You were the lawyer.” Hewas half right. I did identify with the lawyer, not so much as a defender of dueprocess, or the institution of the law, but as the protector of the accused againstthe passions of the mob. I have a strange sympathy for criminals – or morespecifically for the isolated individual accused (even fairly) of crime.

My maternal instincts lead me not to sharethe mob’s anger, but to fear for the fate of their lonely target. At a gut level, Ifeel that every criminal is in danger of being scapegoated, punished personallyfor a crime with collective dimensions, caught in a social web spun of passionand sticky prejudice, which sweep the rights of the unpopular away, rather thanthe even strands of measured judgment which would keep them intact. Where mobpassions take charge, the punishment of individuals risks becoming like thepersecution of Christ, with the difference that punishing an ordinary humanbeing for the sins of a whole society (its failures to “look after itschildren”) brings no redemption. To use a more ancient metaphor, the concern isthat without the safeguards provided by law (and love), crime and punishment operateon the ouroboric model of the serpent which endlessly devours its own tail, asingle force, constantly feeding upon and regenerating itself, with no opportunityfor justice or mercy to break the cycle.

Given its historical context, an obviousreading of Lang’s magnificently ambiguous film would be to take the marked manaccused of child murder who is ignorant of his crimes, only learning of them inthe popular press, as a figure of the Jew, while the portrayal of a society inwhich the underworld and the institutions of law and order are disturbinglydifficult to distinguish would be a prescient portrait of Nazi Germany. Butthere are contemporary parallels that also spring to mind.

Lately, I have repeatedly come acrossreferences to the strange conspiracy theory of David Icke, who teaches that thehuman race, and the US administration in particular, has been infiltrated byshape-shifting reptilian aliens. It is a more extravagant, imaginative versionof the idea that any powerful (or simply unpopular) person who shows signs ofthe ruthlessness that is encouraged by the system is a psychopath, a being thatis constitutionally, and irreparably, different to the rest of the humanspecies. It is worth noting that these theories make the same rhetorical movesthat the Nazis used to brand the Jews as inhuman, and deserving of elimination.But the interesting aspect of the alien reptile theory is that it also evokesthe sense of an ouroboric element alive in society, writhing beneath thesurface of liberal institutions like the rule of law. Lang’s film points to theidea that the real reptile, its jaws closing on its own thrashing tail, is asocial (or these days, social media) body – a mob moved by paranoid fear and generalized anger,which generates and feeds upon the dangerous attitudes it claims to expose andeliminate.

Was Prince Siddhartha gay? A (very) free app of the Buddha’s life story

2011-11-14T20:47:00.001-08:00

Last week I went to the Apple Store inGeorge St with the friend I mentioned in my last post (the one who thinks thatBuddhism makes you want to kill yourself). She gave me the low-down on thecheapest way to get yourself an iPhone, and showed me some of the coolfeatures of the iPad. We discussed the ethics of remaining loyal to Apple, orgoing over to a competitor who has “reverse-engineered” (ie ripped-off) theiPhone, but made its operating system open-source, so there can be freeexchange of new applications.

In amongst all this, I mentioned my last blog-postabout suicide and rebirth. My friend immediately reiterated her view that theteachings of the Buddha encourage a wholesale rejection of the life of theworld. I mentioned the story of Prince Siddhartha abandoning his life in thepalace and she leapt on the example, insisting that as a young prince,Siddhartha had everything the world could offer, and he rejected it. Iquestioned whether a prince’s life is really so ideal; has Prince Charles’ lifebeen that easy? What about all the expectations laid upon someone in thisposition? My friend dismissed these doubts: Prince Siddhartha wasn’t PrinceCharles; he was a prince in ancient India, endowed with every luxury, everypleasure that life can offer a young man. But he saw all this as suffering, andthe religion he started encourages us to see it the same way. No i-phone for atrue disciple of the Buddha.

I had to admit that I had become suspiciousof my own desire to believe that Siddhartha might have left the palace, not outof a sense that all worldly pleasure is suffering, but simply out of anexpansive desire to live more fully. When he rode away on his white horse, hiswife had just given birth to a son. Surely the decision to abandon them, withouteven letting himself see his new-born child, must have been made in a state ofanguish. The idea that he was just calmly choosing an open-source life over amore protected one based on family loyalty doesn’t seem plausible. So why didhe leave his wife and son? This is an aspect of the Buddha’s life that hastroubled many people.

In the middle of the Apple Store, I putforward a half-serious hypothesis: maybe Prince Siddhartha was gay. He feltthat his life was a sham, that he was playing a role he couldn’t sustain, andthe birth of a son made this painfully apparent. How could he be a father, amodel for his child, when he was living a lie? He couldn’t enjoy the luxurieslaid daily at his feet, or the even greater pleasures of fatherhood, because hefelt he didn’t deserve them. Tormented by his own lack of integrity, he turnedaway from the people he most loved and went into voluntary exile. This was onlythe first step in his punishing treatment of himself. He then took up the mostextreme possible ascetic practices, expressing his self-hatred in visceral form.

He went on like this until he had almostkilled himself. His life would have ended in suicide if not for a simple act ofkindness from a woman called Sujata. Finding him on the verge of starvation,she offered him some milk-rice, and he ate it. This was the second majorturning-point in Siddhartha’s life-story, one that is too often overlooked,especially in Theravadan Buddhist circles: the turn back toward life, andself-acceptance. At last he began to take care of himself, and appreciate thegood things that were offered to him. He saw that life is not just sufferingand causes of suffering: there is also the ending of suffering, and the way tothe ending of suffering. The noble truth is not two-fold, but four-fold. Thisis the insight that prevented Siddhartha from killing himself, allowed him to findthe middle way that leads to enlightenment, and enabled him to found aspiritual community that would come to include his wife and son.

Of course, it’s possible to tell the storythis way without supposing that Prince Siddhartha was gay – there could havebeen some other trigger for the crisis that led him to abandon his young familyand walk away from the life of plenty he was born to. But to my mind, thereis a certain restrained gay sensibility in the teachings of the Buddha. Maybeit’s just that his perspective comes from outside mainstream, heterosexualsociety, and that a lot of the teachings are concerned with men who spend most oftheir lives in the company of other men, and develop their deepest friendshipsin this context. There’s also a certain archly humourous take on the foibles ofhuman nature, and the occasional outburst when the Buddha excoriates some poor monkwho’s asked the wrong question by telling him and everyone listening what anidiot he is. When reading the suttas, there are times when I feel I couldalmost be reading Patrick White - which is a compliment to the great Australiannovelist as well as a testament to how entertaining, as well as enlightening,the suttas can be.

Patrick White - looking startled at being compared to the Buddha

Suicide and Rebirth

2011-11-08T20:46:00.000-08:00

Ven. Robina Courtin

I recently had a troubling conversation about rebirth and suicide. I mentioned to a friend of mine that I’d seenAustralian Tibetan Buddhist nun Robina Courtin on Judith Lucy’s tv showSpiritual Journey. The comedian told the nun that she was attracted by Buddhismand convinced by a lot of what it has to say, but just couldn’t get her headaround rebirth. Venerable Courtin took this in her stride. “Darling, that’s fine. Justtake what works for you right now, practice with that, and then see where itleads you.” This seemed like pretty good advice to me.

Judith Lucy

My friend, on the other hand,thought it was problematic. She said that if you accept the Buddha’s teachings,but reject rebirth, then there’d be no reason not to commit suicide. Why?Because the Buddha teaches that all worldly experience is suffering. If youtake this seriously, you’ll gradually recognize that all your experiences, eventhe ones you used to value as pleasurable and desirable, are unsatisfactory.Anyone can tell that being in intense pain from an incurable disease is suffering.It takes a Buddhist to recognize that having to decide which of two delectabledishes to eat while surrounded by charming company in a beautiful restaurant isalso suffering. Suicide would seem like a good way to get out of this pervasiveweb of dukkha (suffering,unsatisfactoriness) if only it weren’t for the prospect of being reborn into aneven worse situation.

This argument upset me. I was depressed bythis vision of Buddhism as a religion that convinces people that life issuffering, to the point where even if their lives are full of abundance andopportunity, they’d prefer to be dead, if only they could be sure they wouldn’tget reborn. My own interpretation of Prince Siddharta’s rejection of life inthe palace was that he left because he wanted more of life, not less. I like tothink he wanted to experience the full gamut of what life had to offer,suffering and joy, and the deep peace and bliss that lies beyond thesedichotomies. Far from wanting to kill himself over an exquisitely painfulchoice between two desserts, he was ready to give up such luxuries inorder to live more fully.

But then I started to wonder, what does the Buddha haveto say about suicide? I discovered a sutta in which a monk called Channakills himself, and the Buddha endorses his action as blameless (MN 144). Channa is gravely ill and is not getting well, eventhough he has suitable food and medicine and a proper attendant. His painfulfeelings resemble those described in other suttas as willfully cultivated byascetics: “just as if a skilled butcher or his apprentice were to carve up anox’s belly with a sharp butcher’s knife, so too, violent winds are carving upmy belly…” He has lost his desire to live. Venerable monks (Sariputta and MahaCunda) offer him assistance, tell him they want him to live and give him wise teachings,but none of the practical, emotional and spiritual support he receives relieveshis pain, or changes his decision to “use the knife.”

The commentary on this sutta focuses on theidea that Channa must be an arahant, a fully enlightened being, meaning that he will not be reborn – thisis why suicide is blameless in his case: the doctrine of rebirth no longer applies to him. This argument follows the same logic employed by my friend: rebirthmakes suicide stupid (and blameworthy), absence of rebirth makes it smart(and blameless). But in the sutta itself, Channa’s status as arahant is onlyindicated, somewhat obliquely, at the end of the text. First we hear about thedire state of his health and the fact that none of the many types of support heis given can relieve his pain. It is also shown that Channa is notclinging to his self-identity in any way: he sees clearly in regard to allsensations and thoughts, “This is not mine, this I am not, this is not myself.” Only after his death do we additionally learn that he was not one who “laysdown this body and takes up a new body.”

There is no hint here that just any old (or new) kind ofdukkha could have motivated Channa’s suicide, or that the extreme pain heexperienced can be compared to the suffering occasioned by a frustrated desire to eat every dish on offer, or a nervous inability to appreciate the oneyou’ve chosen. The sutta makes it very clear that Channa’s pain was notself-inflicted, and nor could it be relieved despite the abundant attention andcare of his fellow monks, and his own loving devotion to the Buddha and the wayof practice. His decision to “use the knife” was not motivated by self-centreddistress or despair; it was an act of kindness and last resort - less arejection of life than a measured, peaceful acceptance of death as a counterpart to life. It seems to me that this was why his act was blameless, something that makes sense whether or not you believe in rebirth, or arahantship.

Crazy Stupid Love

2011-10-31T18:53:00.000-07:00

In my relaxed, post-monastic-retreat state, I’ve been more open to random experience than usual. For example, I recently decided to go to the movies and see whatever was on when I arrived at the cinema. Although I was in Newtown (ie well within my usual comfort zone), it turned out not to be the arthouse film I might have chosen, but a Hollywood movie, Crazy Stupid Love.

The plot follows a couple whose marriage is breaking down: at the beginning, the wife tells her husband she wants a divorce and has slept with another man. He responds by letting himself fall out of their moving car, a gesture that symbolically foreshadows his next step which is to go out and fall into bed with lots of other women. In the end, he renews his commitment to his marriage, and the couple decide to try to restore their relationship. There are subplots about other people, including their children, going through similar struggles to find and sustain romantic love within a culture which is more supportive of sexual conquest.

Glancing at the reviews on the internet, most people seem to have responded to this film as a sweetly romantic romcom. The few critics who took a different view have complained about it being full of falsehood and fantasy (but what do you want from a romcom?), or more subtly have pointed out that the film’s messages about the importance of lasting love and family values are somewhat compromised by the fact that “three-quarters of the cast are acting like sex pests.” Anthony Morris, the critic who made this observation, nevertheless held to the majority view that the film is basically a piece of feel-good entertainment and objected to Julianne Moore’s performance in one of the lead roles as striking a false note by being “just a little too convincing as a woman who’s lost her way in life.”

My friend Tom saw the film in Bondi Junction. He told me that the audience there didn’t pay too much attention to Moore’s interpretation of her role. They cheered and clapped at the end, behaving as if they were part of the crowd of proud parents at the school speech day that comes at the end of the film and provides a pretext for speeches made by the father and son characters about their commitment to lurve.

The fact that Moore, playing the wife and mother of the family, looks stressed and slightly hysterical in the final “reunion” shot with her husband clearly didn’t register. Her thirteen year old son seems similarly stunned at the end of the film. The object of his repeatedly declared and rejected affections, a considerably older babysitter, has just given him some nude photos of herself, shots she had earlier intended to use in order to seduce his father. As she walks away, the boy’s father remarks, “He looks happy,” blithely ignoring the actual expression of bewilderment on his son’s face.

In Newtown on a weekday afternoon, there weren’t many other people in the cinema. Naturally, we maintained a cool silence when the credits began to roll. I don’t know what the others were thinking, but to me, the interest of this film was in what I took to be its deliberate contradictions. It appeared to defend the conservative dream of life-long love and family commitment, but it also played on an equally strong fantasy about the pursuit of sexual conquest without limits. And in its more realistic and disturbing details, it suggested that in a culture which promotes both these fantasies at once and refuses to see the incompatibility between them, the result is a distressing level of confusion and anxiety. Individuals who sense that neither of these ideals matches their experience, or even their desires, face a disconcerting lack of more nuanced models for intimate relationship. In the world of American romcom, it seems there’s no middle way.

Walkin' like a wombat

2011-10-25T17:00:00.000-07:00

It’s now nearly two weeks since the ‘rains retreat’ finished and I left Santi Forest Monastery. As my little nephew Ollie would say, “I did it!” I have survived three months in a Buddhist monastery. More than survived. Although there were a few moments when I asked myself what the hell I was doing there, now that it’s over, I find myself answering people’s questions about how it went with heartfelt exclamations of “Great!”

There’s an amazing level of generosity that makes a place like Santi possible. It’s very touching to freely receive so much support for practice. I'll start with the basics. Santi is set on a beautiful, climactically dramatic piece of bushland adjoining the Morton National Park, which was donated by a woman called Elizabeth Gorsky, who has since become a nun at Dhammasara Nuns Monastery in Perth. Accommodation is mostly in individual huts or 'kutis' - in my case, an Aussie yurt-with-verandah, surrounded by wattle plants in full-bloom when I first arrived. And although you can't eat after midday, the food is bountiful, delicious and often prepared and donated by visiting Sri Lankan, Vietnamese or Thai supporters (I developed the ability to consume quite astonishing amounts of food during the morning hours :).

On top of this, during the 'rains', we were nurtured by a steady and stimulating stream of teachings from the Abbot, Bhante Sujato, including weekly dhamma talks, sutta classes and personal interviews. And most importantly, by the friendships that develop from living together and sharing the various struggles that communal practice throws up. “Do not say that admirable friendship is half of the holy life, Ananda; it is the whole of the holy life.”

There are benefits that flow from just being in an environment like this. I’ve come out feeling much clearer and more relaxed about a lot of things. Without even consciously addressing it, a lot of emotional baggage I’d been carrying seemed to grow wings and fly away. Sequestering myself away for this time has also sharpened my appreciation of the people and places I’ve come back to. And I’ve brought back with me a stronger sense of the value of retreating – and an understanding of how to do it even in the midst of social life.

Other retreats I’ve done have all been highly structured – the challenge of learning how to retreat never even came up. The rains retreat was different, although it began in a familiar manner. First there was a (mostly) silent ten-day meditation retreat led by the Abbot of the monastery. For me this was immediately followed by two weeks of personal retreat when I was left entirely to my own devices in the seclusion of my yurt. My meals brought to a pre-arranged drop-off point, so that I didn’t have any social contact with other people during this time.

These experiences were interesting and challenging in certain ways, but they didn’t raise any particular questions in my mind about what it is to retreat or how to go about it. The container of silence meant that being on retreat was a given – a gift that I accepted with gratitude, like a thick blanket that I could wrap around myself during the cold winter of Bundanoon. I settled down inside this protective covering, overcame the nervousness I’d arrived with, and had some good meditation sessions, particularly in a lovely little cave I discovered in the national park adjoining the monastery. I also went for long walks in the bush and had some entrancing encounters with echidnas and other wild creatures.

When my personal retreat came to an end, being the social animal I am, I felt quite eager to rejoin the little world of the monastery and engage more fully with the community. This brought me into a fairly unstructured social space – apart from the teachings and meals, there were no timetabled group activities, which meant a lot of people had a lot of time on their hands. After a few weeks of quite intense and continuous social interaction, I felt exhausted and overwhelmed: I needed a retreat from the retreat! So I went to Sydney for a few days (a bit weird to “retreat” to a major metropolis, but it worked).

When I came back, it was with a different attitude. I realized that without cutting off from the life of the community, I needed to pick up that blanket of silence again and wrap myself in it more regularly. I needed to learn how to make retreating into a gentle daily habit, rather than an abrupt, total, and occasional withdrawal from everyday life. This didn’t just mean maintaining a daily meditation practice. It also meant becoming more sensitive to when it felt right to retreat from the group and go my own way, “at ease like wombat in the bush,” to adapt a phrase of the Buddha’s.

I’d definitely recommend the practice of walkin’ like a wombat, both in the metaphorical and literal senses - there are lots of wonderful things to be discovered once you get off the main trails and follow some of those little tunnel-like paths that lead off in the bush… And I must admit that I did know something about this practice before doing the rains retreat – it’s what got me to Santi in the first place.

Confession No.2: I'm hard to pick as a control freak

2011-07-12T21:35:00.000-07:00

When I told two of the people who know me best about my last blog post, they independently said exactly the same thing, “But you’re not a control freak.”

All right, I was exaggerating for comic effect. And admittedly, I was misrepresenting my own most characteristic tactics. When I feel the need for control, I’m more likely to withdraw than to try to make other people do what I want – not a move that normally invites the label “control freak” (though maybe it should).

I’m happy to take responsibility for myself, but wielding influence over other people is something that makes me nervous. In the past, I have tended to think of this in all or nothing terms – either I exert no significant influence on others, and attract no responsibility for their decisions, or I get involved and attract a scary level of responsibility if anything goes wrong. It’s taken me quite a while to see that responsibility can truly be shared and experienced as something that connects me to others in a positive or forgiving way, rather than as something which always tends to isolate the individual – either exalting the ego or crushing it.

While the story behind my relationship to responsibility no doubt has aspects peculiar to me, I think this way of interpreting responsibility is not uncommon. It relates to the dominance of the concept of “the person” in modern Western ways of understanding all kinds of responsibility. As I've pointed out before, even in situations that are clearly collective, like wars or climate change, in the West we think predominantly in terms of personal rather than collective responsibility.

The dominance of the concept of personal responsibility goes some way to explaining why otherwise sociable, reasonable people often react to calls for responsibility by behaving like “control freaks,” whether of the visible or invisible, withdrawing kind. And maybe the reverse is true, too: because we are living in a time during which the rate of change is unprecedented, and at the same time technological progress has increased our expectations of being able to control our environment, it’s easy to feel that things are getting out of control. One way of dealing with this is to impose the concept of personal responsibility to create a comforting illusion of control and moral order. But this sense of security comes at a high price, since in the process individuals are likely to be scapegoated or to flee responsibility for fear of being singled out and blamed when things go wrong. (John Locke was the first philosopher to define personal identity. He described “person” as a forensic term...)

It’s a vicious circle: overuse of the concept of personal responsibility feeds anxiety about individual control, and anxiety about individual control leads to overuse (or abuse) of the concept of personal responsibility.

How to think and feel differently?

Recently I came across a quote from Yeats' poem 'The Second Coming':

“Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold…

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”

These memorable lines suggest that in situations of crisis, when things are falling apart, and individuals feel they must do what they can to maintain some sense of control, the wise tend to abandon ship, while the foolish desperately attempt to take charge.

In more settled times, convictions can be held without fanaticism, and intensity of commitment or social involvement need not be driven by blind passion, but by enlightened vision. But even when society – or one’s own life - is in upheaval, surely there are alternatives to self-protective withdrawal, or violent attempts to take control. I’d like to think it is possible to weather the storms of change and live with insecurity by keeping our convictions flexible enough not to break, and cultivating a dispassionate intensity. By this, I mean an ability to stay awake to the intensity of the times, to the people around us and to our own experience, without letting it sweep us into the turmoil of destructive passions.

Open-minded conviction, dispassionate intensity. I’m hoping that these paradoxes will help me navigate the challenges of spending three months in a Buddhist monastery, an environment which will strip me of many of the props that usually give me a sense of mastery over my life. This is another correction to the flippancy of my last post. It’s not because I’m out of control that I’ve decided to go to the monastery, but rather because I feel ready to relinquish some personal control and see what happens.

One of the props to go will be this weekly blog, but I expect I’ll be back in mid to late October to let you know a little of what has happened to me by then.

In the meantime, my mother has a painting exhibition on in August, so if you’re in Sydney, please go along and feel free to post your responses to her art works as comments on this blog (go on, she’d love it).

Click on this image for a clearer view

Confession of a control freak

2011-07-05T20:32:00.000-07:00

I remember once causing a boyfriend of mine a moment of astonishment by describing myself as a bit of a control freak. “You’re aware of that?” he said.

This was years ago. My awareness of my tendency to try to control things, including situations that are not even slightly my responsibility to control, or amenable to control by anyone, has not, strange to say, reduced the tendency - or not noticeably. Maybe this is because I haven’t fully allowed myself to notice how much anguish I cause myself, or how much annoyance I cause to other people, by trying to take charge in situations that patently do not call for my direction. When I notice it, I even find this tendency of mine quite amusing (clearly reform is still some way off).

Recently I caught myself maneuvering to become a leading light and determining authority in relation to a group project that a friend is involved in, a project that he has not invited me to join or even influence in any substantial way. The observation gave me a good laugh. I could see that my behavior was verging on the ridiculous, largely futile, and counter-productive in terms of establishing a harmonious relationship with the person in question, which is something I would very much like to do.

And yet this impulse to impose my will is not something that I can honestly say I wish to renounce. Maybe that’s why I like Nietzsche so much. He proposed that all of life can be analysed in terms of will to power. For him, will to power is not something you can renounce. At most you can mask it.

The thing that really made me laugh when I admitted to myself what I had been up to, was how pious and earnest a mask I had used to achieve my limited success (if a project so perverse can be said to involve success). I had spoken of loving-kindness, compassion, understanding, commitment to peace. So eloquent did I wax that I temporarily blinded myself to the little jabs I was making, through the use of these very words, at my target’s authority. He, however, soon showed signs of feeling these pin-pricks and stopped responding to my advancing plans to rework the project. At this point, I contented myself with discussing my fantastical schemes with a few third parties. The creativity involved in this last bit was enjoyable, and may yet lead to something productive, but on reflection, the whole episode provides clear evidence of a fairly urgent need to take myself in hand. It is fairly obvious that my desire to control things that are not mine to control is linked to the fact that I am out of control.

I am a control freak and I am out of control. It’s not a good combination. So serious has this situation become that I have lately been feeling a desire for incarceration. I’m not joking. I yearn for severe constraints, austere conditions and a regular timetable. So, since my will to power has not yet taken criminal form, I have booked myself into a Buddhist monastery for a three month retreat, starting in about ten days time.

What will happen in there? I’m hoping that in this restricted environment, I will be presented with such limited opportunities to control other people that my frustrated need for control will turn inwards. I’ll bring all my will to power to bear on the task of directing myself. Pretty soon, instead of other people getting annoyed with me, I expect I’ll be the one telling myself to kindly piss off. And then maybe I’ll get so sick of my control freak antics that I'll stop finding them amusing, and actually change.

Of course the other possibility is that in three months time, my spiritual progress will be no further advanced, but I will have made a bid to oust the Abbot from power and (I know this is ambitious) install myself as the first lay Abbess of a Buddhist monastery.

"I more than the others": accepting responsibility

2011-06-28T19:24:00.000-07:00

Last week a friend called to tell me that he had recovered memories of something very harmful that happened to him when he was eleven years old. He wanted me to know about this because he felt it explained some of his behavior toward me and other people in the intervening years. He wanted to apologize for this behavior, and excuse himself for it.

My immediate response to his apology was to burst into tears and say that I was sorry, too, that I hadn’t been able to understand him better. When I said how sorry I was, I felt that I wasn’t only apologising for my own failure to be more sensitive to his needs and vulnerabilities. I was also expressing regret for everyone’s failures or inabilities in this respect. I thought of a speech from Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov which is repeatedly quoted by the philosopher Lévinas in his meditations on responsibility: “Each of us is guilty, before everyone for everyone, and I more than the others.” These words of a holy fool made perfectly rational sense to me in that moment (although like Lévinas, I would substitute the concept of responsibility for that of guilt).

In my recent opinion piece on climate change, I said that it is a mistake to confuse personal and collective responsibility. Was I making that mistake in feeling sorry about all the failures of care that have affected my friend, and wanting to apologise for them all, as if I were somehow at the root of them, “I, more than the others”?

If I had been burdening myself with a sense of guilt for all that he has suffered, then yes, I think I would have been confusing the two forms of responsibility in a way that was inappropriately punitive toward myself. If I felt that this all-encompassing sense of responsibility meant that it was up to me alone to make up for all the harm done to him, to “save him” from the course his life has taken, then again, I think I would have been making a mistake, denying to him and to other people their own responsibilities and misconceiving my own – and also failing to see all the good things in his life, the gleaming silver linings of the clouds he has experienced.

I realise that I did fall into both of these errors to some extent during the days that followed my friend’s call, as I struggled to assimilate what he had told me and tried to work out how to respond to it. My body pretty quickly let me know that it didn’t appreciate either of these views. I’ll spare you the details of its “argument” – let’s just say they were pretty compelling.

The Buddha spoke about “near enemies” of different forms of love, impulses that superficially resemble love, but actually block it. The near enemy of compassion is pity, the near enemy of loving-kindness is attachment. On my analysis so far, the near enemies of responsibility for collective harms are twofold: unbounded guilt, and a desire for control.

But if we avoid the dual excesses of inappropriate guilt and a compulsion to remake the world exactly the way we think it should be, then the impulse to express regret, not just for harm that I personally have caused, but for all the harm done to a person whose suffering is brought to my attention, without concern for whether it is my fault or not, is a good and powerful thing. It provides a connection between personal and collective responsibility that allows collective responsibility to be meaningfully expressed to an individual who has been harmed.

For the one who takes up this responsibility, it is a liberating experience to put aside defensive questions about where the boundaries of personal responsibility lie, and respond to a call for collective responsibility by saying, “I’m sorry.” I imagine that Kevin Rudd experienced this when, as Prime Minister, but also as one among many Australians, he apologized to the Aboriginal Stolen Generations.

The acceptance and expression of this kind of responsibility does not mean that you are suddenly in charge of solving every problem faced by the suffering, but it does make it more likely that you will find some practical, cooperative way to help. I say this because I think that if you personally accept collective responsibility, one benefit is that you are freed from the problems of misplaced guilt and the savior complex which both indicate difficulty in sharing responsibility with others.

Actively sharing in collective responsibility does not mean that the individual merges without trace into the masses. On the contrary, Dostoevsky’s character Alyosha says that “I more than the others,” am responsible. He does not say, "I instead of the others," or "I on behalf of the others." In this form of responsibility, personal identity is not allowed to replace, or to hide behind, the collective. Rather, I am asked to accept more than the others of a responsibility we share.

Why more? Not because I am worse or better than others, but because in the moment when the acknowledgment of collective responsibility is called for, I am no longer an anonymous individual in the crowd. The ethical spotlight rests on my face: I am the one who has become aware of harm and is called upon to show compassion for the suffering it has caused. The Aboriginal community called upon the Prime Minister. My friend called me. For those whose hearing is attuned to nature, it seems to me that the environment is now calling to each one of us.

Sleeping beauties

2011-06-22T19:46:00.000-07:00

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve come across a series of disturbing filmic images of women who are (metaphorically or literally) sleeping through their lives.

The first was in an Australian film called Sleeping Beauty, written and directed by Julia Leigh, who was a year ahead of me at Sydney Uni. The second was in an American film called The Future, made by a woman who is also close to my own age: Miranda July, an American performance artist who is the star of her own film (and life, I would guess). The third was a film of the Paris Ballet performing Coppélia, a ballet based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story ‘The Sand-Man.’

The three films were completely different in mood. Leigh’s film depicts a dramatic, desolate world full of disturbing experimental encounters, scientific and sexual. In pursuit of money, and perhaps an experience that can break through her emotional frozenness, the main character takes on more and more transgressive forms of work, eventually allowing herself to be drugged so that men can spend the night with her beautiful, unconscious, naked body. This is a form of prostitution with heavy literary associations – Yasunari Kawabata and Gabriel García Márquez both wrote famous stories on this theme. The film also clearly alludes to the work of Haneke and other male European film-makers. One way of reading Leigh's film is that it evokes the disassociation and repressed trauma of a young woman who is almost completely immersed in a male cultural perspective for which women are passive, mute, disturbing bodily presences (there is an audible female literary voice in the film, that of Ingeborg Bachmann, but even she speaks, or rather is spoken, through a male character). She cannot break free from this heavy inheritance; it is as though she is enthralled to it, even though she is also clearly oppressed by it.

Paw Paw the cat

July’s film, by contrast, portrays a humorous, slightly fantastical, but very recognizable world of self-absorbed people stuffing things up. In this film a cat, who has her own squeaky soliloquies to the audience, ends up euthanized because the couple who have decided to adopt her are so busy having a crisis about the meaning of their lives that they forget to pick her up. It occurred to me that you could see this cat as a figure of divinity, the Second Coming in female, feline form. This time around, God is not persecuted or hated. Rather, she suffers and dies because people simply forget about her. There is clearly a message about our relationship to the environment gently embedded in this story of animal neglect.

What really struck me though, seeing this film the day after Leigh’s film (they were both shown at the Sydney Film Festival) was that The Future also depicts a woman who is in thrall to a culture in which women are seen primarily as attractive bodies, with no capacity or concern for moral agency. In this film the picture of femininity is drawn from popular rather than high culture, and the lines are not so sharp, the trauma is ordinary and visible rather than unexplained and hidden, but the problem seems essentially the same.

In The Future, the main female character is a dance teacher for kids, who competitively aspires to create a series of sexy dance clips that she hopes will go viral on the internet. Finding herself jerkily and self-consciously incapable of this and lacking any other clear direction, she pursues an affair with a random stranger who offers her the opportunity to let herself be absorbed into his life and avoid working out what to do with her own. As a result she breaks her boyfriend’s heart, and her pet-to-be meets a clinical and premature death. The message for anyone who can identify with her: wake up! and live your sexuality - and your life - in a more conscious and authentic way.

July’s film seems more optimistic than Leigh’s about the possibility of this kind of awakening, but there is no redemption at the end of her story, either. What seems to be missing for both film-makers is any sense that there exists any widely-established cultural support for a view of women as active and responsible – as fully awake, especially in sexual relations. They both portray young women struggling with this soporific situation, which is a start, but it feels like there’s still a battle for consciousness to be fought.

As for the ballet, remembering having been enchanted by a live performance of Coppélia when I was a child, I took my 9 year old niece, Caitlin to see this filmed version of it. She commented authoritatively as soon as it began, “Very good dancing.” And it was. But it also gradually sent both of us to the verge of sleep. As Caitlin said on the way home, it seemed an achievement to get through it without nodding off.

Partly this may be the nature of ballet on film. Partly it may have been the result of us both having stayed up late the night before – I had been out dancing tango and Caitlin had had a sleep-over with a couple of her girlfriends. But mainly, I think it was due to the fact that in this production, the director, Patrice Bart, made a psychological interpretation of the story which was too subtle to be appreciated by anyone who didn’t have the original clearly in mind already (Caitlin and I both belonging to this category on the day of viewing).

As I found out later, the Hoffman tale is about a young man whose love for his intelligent, calm, beautiful and loving fiancée is interrupted by his deluded passion for an animated mechanical doll, an enchantment which develops during a period while he is living away from his fiancée. The doll is created and brought to life by a couple of men, one of them a very ugly, mysterious and threatening character. It is by looking through a glass created by him that the young man falls into the ultimately fatal trap of confusing this false, mechanical version of femininity with the woman who loves him.

In Bart's interpretation of the ballet based on this story, a single dancer performs both parts: the fiancé and the doll. Not only does this blur the distinction between them, it also suggests that it is the young woman herself who is giving life to the figure of the doll, rather than this being solely the work of men. As a result, the potential for confusion between woman and mechanical doll, fantasy and reality, dream and waking states, is exponentially increased.

When I saw it with Caitlin, this complex interpretation combined with perfectly executed but somewhat repetitive dance moves just made me sleepy. Now, though, it occurs to me that rather than simply presenting a dilemma concerning male perceptions of women, this version of the ballet opens up the same contemporary problem addressed by Leigh and July. Not only her lover, but also the young woman herself is in danger of being lulled into an artificial sleep by the power of images portraying women as passive sexual commodities. As she struggles to conform to their mechanical patterns, she compromises her agency, as well as her moral intelligence. And when this happens, perhaps beauty itself, as something inseparable from self-consciousness, is surrendered - unless and until she wakes up.

A little thing

2011-06-13T19:51:00.000-07:00

“And then he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with my mind’s eye and I thought: ‘What can this be?’ And the answer came: ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled that it could last, for I thought that it might suddenly have crumbled to nothing, it was so small. And the answer came into my mind: ‘It lasts and ever shall, because God loves it.’ And so all things have being through the love of God.”

These words were written by a woman known as Julian of Norwich.

She lived in the 14^th century, and is the first woman we know of to have written in English. Her biography is uncertain, although it is thought she may have been a wife and mother who lost her family, possibly in one of three bouts of the ‘black death’ that reduced the population of Norwich by about one third during her lifetime. At the age of thirty she became very sick herself, and during this illness received sixteen ‘showings’ from God, which she recorded in a small book.

Subsequently she became an anchoress, meaning that she lived in a small room adjoining the church from which she took her name. She spent the rest of her life in this room. It had a window into the church, and another on to the outside world. She had a couple of servants who brought her food, and a cat who kept the rats from coming in to nibble at her ears. She spent her time in prayer and in advising the parishioners who came to her with their troubles, something she is said to have done with great wisdom and compassion.

She also wrote a longer commentary on the first small text describing the ‘showings.’ In this commentary she grappled with the problem of how to reconcile the message of unlimited divine love she had received in her visions, with a world in which she was acutely aware of human suffering and conflict – the fourteenth century saw the 100 years war between England and France, harsh suppression of the Peasants Revolt against taxation during years of famine, and an intensity of religious rivalry and doctrinal controversy that would make the Holocaust references and ad hominem attacks of the recent debates over climate change look like polite conversation.

It was this later effort to make sense of her revelations of divine love, and their meaning in the human world, that made Julian one of the greatest of all theologians (in the judgment of Thomas Merton, among others). She began with her experience of divine love as all-encompassing, blissful, and unlimited, with no room for anger or judgment, or for craving or confusion. Then she grappled with the multiple questions that flow from the seeming incompatibility or inaccessibility of this kind of love in a human social world in which anger, craving and confusion so often seem to be the elemental components of experience and expression.

Her vision of creation as a ball the size of a hazelnut, sitting in the palm of her hand, is perhaps the most famous of the images she has left us. It has particular resonance at a time when space exploration has given us images of the earth as a tiny ball and awareness of global warming has led us to see the future of this small planet as resting in our hands. Julian's message is that it is divine love that ultimately sustains the world, but also that this love needs to pass through us - we need to stop blocking it with greed and anger and ignorance.

If only we manage to do that, then to my mind Julian’s teachings suggest that the awesome analytic and creative power of science and the human capacity for social and political cooperation will be able to operate unhindered, and as she put it:

“All shall be well,

and all shall be well,

and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Earthrise viewed from Apollo 8, December 1968

(With thanks to John and Joy O’Connor for introducing me to the thought of Julian during a wonderful day at their house recently.)

Is climate change science inconclusive?

2011-06-10T19:44:00.000-07:00

In my Sydney Morning Herald opinion piece on climate change I wrote:

“I doubt that many people question the truth of climate change because they truly find the science inconclusive.”

Quite a few people wrote to me to dispute this claim, saying that the science is not settled, there is still room for doubt that climate change is a problem that we need or can do anything about.

In response to these people, I take back my claim – there are obviously a significant number of people who do find the science inconclusive, and who have real doubts about the trustworthiness of the mainstream scientific community and their declarations regarding climate change.

As I said to my friend in the record shop, who is a scientist, I’m not a “believer.” I don’t espouse quasi-religious faith in climate change science, or in scientists (sorry, Neal). I’m open to the idea that reasonable questions and challenges can be addressed to the scientists who maintain that climate change is real and caused in significant part by human activity.

But I’m also happy to leave this discussion to the scientists, and to show what I consider to be rational and friendly (rather than blind or mystical) faith in their expertise. Right now, the Climate Change Commission and a large majority of scientists agree on the reality of climate change, and that’s good enough for me. It has to be, because I know I don’t have the scientific training to look into the science directly. To attempt to assess all the evidence for myself would be a mistake that would be likely to lead me into confusion and false conclusions – I’m humble enough to recognise my limits in this regard.

Contemporary science is a highly complex and interdependent form of knowledge. It is not something that each individual can assess independently, making his or her mind up based on direct experience and individual use of reason. This is another reason why climate change science should not be treated as if it were a religion.

In the case of religious or moral knowledge, it is legitimate and important for each individual to make up their own mind, based on their own interpretation of teachings, use of reasoning powers and reflection on direct experience. While the support of good friends is essential for anyone’s personal ripening and not everyone is at the same level development, you have to seek spiritual enlightenment or grace for yourself, you can’t delegate that task. Similarly you have to make moral decisions for yourself, otherwise they’re not fully moral.

Everyone is capable of making moral judgments about climate change, even if only a few of us are qualified to make scientific judgments about it. More that this, we are all obliged to address the moral challenge posed by climate change, and I think the volume of debate about it shows that many people feel this keenly. This issue raises important questions about how we relate to one another, and how we operate as a moral and political community (or interacting series of communities). It also raises the question of how we relate to the authority of science.

I think it is this last question, about the authority of science, that underlies the splitting of speakers on climate change into opposing camps of believers and skeptics. To my mind, this suggests that for both sides, science is taken to be a new form of religion, to be defended or challenged in the same way that a religious faith might be. This is where I see people on both sides of the debate making a crucial error. Modern science is not religion (or it's an "inverse cripple" form of religion, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche).

No matter how strong the science on climate change is or becomes, it will never give us the answers to moral questions about how to communicate about it, how to respond to it personally, or how to shape collective identities with the power to do something effective about it at local, national and global levels. On these sorts of questions, I agree that the science is inconclusive.

Climate change pagans

2011-06-09T16:17:00.000-07:00

This week's blogpost has made it into the mainstream media! You can read it here.

Are you a psychopath?

2011-05-31T21:42:00.000-07:00

Why do so many people in Western society today reject religion, particularly the Christianity that a lot of us grew up with? I suspect that one reason is a perceived incompatibility between the core religious value of humility, and a liberal democratic culture in which self-confidence and ambition are seen as positive and necessary traits that support both personal and societal success. At the same time, we know that the ethic of self-advancement can turn nasty. When combined with rampant materialism and the breakdown of social bonds, it can give rise to impulsively self-serving behaviour that is ultimately destructive both for the individual and society. Feeding on fear of this possibility, the figure of the psychopath has come to stalk our collective imaginary.

On the weekend, I crashed a house-warming in Leura and got into an engaging conversation with a very glamorous (especially for Leura) crime writer. To set the scene a little more, the host had cooked goat and rabbit for the event, and there was a log fire keeping us warm as the rain fell gently but continuously outside. Although I am more or less vegetarian, I also subscribe to the monastic discipline of accepting any food that is offered to me, so in a humble and at the same time self-interested gesture of appreciation of the poetically rustic hospitality on offer, I ate (among other things) a baked onion stuffed with rabbit and various herbs, which was delicious, and made me feel as if I was in a country house in the north of France.

While I was digesting, the beautiful crime novelist informed me that 1% of the population worldwide are psychopaths - no variation for culture or gender, this is a wholly democratic concept. This means that you’ve definitely met a few, in fact, you may well be living with one, or even be one. I think there are only about 50 people reading this blog so far, so we could, in theory, be a psychopath-free online community, though I have to admit, it seems unlikely.

Obviously this claim is based on a very broad definition of the psychopath – you don’t need to have done anything life-threatening with a chainsaw, axe, gun or other weapon to qualify. You just need to show a lack of moral conscience, in particular a lack of remorse, “shallow affect” (ie you don’t care much about other people), and a willingness to lie to get what you want. Unintelligent psychopaths often end up in jail (or the doghouse), while intelligent ones end up in positions of power. Basically, anyone who pursues their own interests by doing something that other people consider immoral, and doesn’t seem sincerely sorry when they get found out, can be labeled a psychopath. On this definition, as has probably occurred to you already, most of your ex-lovers, a good number of your colleagues and possibly a few of your close family members are probably psychopaths. A lot of children are undoubtedly psychopaths.

You can see by now that the concept of the psychopath can operate a bit like an emotional chainsaw. It’s a mental weapon you can turn on anyone who has betrayed your trust. It allows you to protect yourself by cutting them off, placing them beyond the possibility of understanding or communication. At the same time, it betrays a lingering fascination with this person, who is not just disappointing, but (at least in your eyes) pathologically heartless. Something ought to be done to control them, for the protection of other actual or potential victims; you can’t just walk away (or close the book, and go to sleep).

Liberal use of the concept of the psychopath beyond the world of crime fiction where it belongs seems a perfect example of what Nietzsche called ressentiment in action. It involves a mode of evaluation that focuses on the other as Evil, and defines the self, in pale contrast, as good. Nietzsche associated this way of approaching the world with institutionalized Christianity. (Has crime fiction replaced Christianity in the emotional and moral life of our culture? Or is crime fiction actually a late, decadent, secular form of Christianity?) Behind practices of so-called humility, ranging from self-effacement to self-flagellation, Nietzsche detected the vengeful spirit of resentment, a desire to attack the more powerful, or the differently constituted, and establish one’s own goodness not actively, but reactively. I am good and normal and deserving of compassion and acceptance because I am not like them. I am not a psychopath.

Lately I have been editing a few papers for the upcoming Sakyadhita conference of Buddhist women (would a psychopath do that?). In the course of this work, I read a thought-provoking paper by a Korean delegate, Eun-so Cho, who provides another angle on the problem of self-effacing or self-denying practices. Her topic is “Women’s Leadership and the Buddhist Concept of Non-self.” In her paper, she addresses the problem of women interpreting Buddhist values like humility and the doctrine of non-self in ways that undermine their self-confidence and conviction in the value of their own activities and achievements. She sees a painful clash between traditional Buddhist forms of self-effacement and contemporary Western-inspired efforts to improve women’s social participation and promote gender equality in her own country. This clash is played out not only in external resistance to women’s advancement, but even more potently within the minds of successful women themselves, who are prone to question their own motivations and worry that their behavior is selfish and their satisfaction in their own achievements amounts to pride, putting them in conflict with their own spiritual ideals.

From a Nietzschean perspective, this is an example of “bad conscience,” a form of consciousness that turns its aggressive tendencies upon itself. The woman worries that she herself may be a psychopath, or on the way to becoming one. Her identity as a “good” religious person attacks what it sees as the Evil, ambitious self that is seduced by the lure of worldly power and success. The paradox is that the aggression of the “good” self is likely to be motivated by hopes and fears that are even more heavily conditioned by social pressures than her worldly ambitions.

How do we move beyond the pathological anxiety of bad conscience, and develop a healthy, moderate, realistic attitude toward our achievements and failures, as well as toward those of others? How do we resist the temptation to indulge in ressentiment whether directed at others or at ourselves? Eun-so Cho’s answer is to point to the Buddhist doctrine of non-self as it is interpreted and lived by women in the early Buddhist texts. Far from leading to self-flagellation, the idea that there is no fixed self, either good or bad, liberated the women of the Therigatha from self-doubt and gave them the confidence and determination to pursue spiritual freedom. Where there is no fixed self, there is no target for ressentiment, or at least none that stays still for long enough to get hit. No self, no psychopath. Hmm, I think I might be onto an idea for an unconventional crime novel…

Of Gods and Men

2011-05-24T18:32:00.000-07:00

I saw a film called Of Gods and Men, directed by Xavier Beavois, at the French Film Festival last month. (For those in Sydney, it’s also opening at Palace Verona tomorrow.) It tells the story of a group of French monks in Algeria who were killed in 1996, after refusing to give in to demands by militant Islamicist groups and pressure from the government to leave the country. The film beautifully portrays life within and around the monastery as well as the emotional struggles of the monks in deciding whether to stay or leave. Some feel strongly that they ought to stay in Algeria, that this is their life and it would be wrong to give in to the threat of violence. Other monks aren’t so idealistic, or so brave, or so sure that they have a duty or a right to stay in Algeria that’s worth defending at the risk of death. On the other hand, they are aware that the Islamic people living in the village that has grown up around the monastery want them to remain.

When the abbot asks a group of the local people if they feel they need the protection of the army against the violence of the political radicals, one man says, “Let’s not talk about the army, it’s a catastrophe. The army won’t come. The protection is you.” A monk then compares the monks to birds on a branch, an image that evokes both a sense of them as sitting targets, and the possibility that they may fly at any moment. To this, a woman firmly replies, “We are the birds. You are the branch. Without you, we won’t know where to rest.”

Over dinner a week or two ago, I got into a lively argument with a friend of mine, Nick, about this film. He felt it was irresponsible and unhelpful to make a film like this at a time when there is already so much fear of terrorism, and lack of understanding of the conditions that underlie Islamicism. He thinks that what we need are films that make Islamicism comprehensible, that acknowledge and expose the injustices that have provoked the anger and the desperate measures of Islamicist politics. For him, this film demonized the Islamicists in Algeria, idealized the monks as the representatives of Western culture, and failed to consider the history that led up to their confrontation or to present the perspective of the Islamicists.

It is true that ‘Of Gods and Men’ does not attempt to explain the history of colonization in Algeria. As a French film, it is made for an audience that is assumed to have prior knowledge of this history. It is also a film that does not seek to understand political violence by delving into its causes or exploring the perspective of the violent. In the world of the film the threat of violence is a given, a fact that the protagonists of the film cannot control. Their problem is how to respond to it. The options of flight or compromise are considered, but not taken up. Horrified as they are by the violence, the monks also refrain from condemnation or judgment.

When an armed group storms into the monastery and its leader demands medical treatment for his men, the abbot stands his ground and says that they will receive the same treatment as the villagers – no more. He quotes a passage from the Koran about the love shown by Christians toward the people they live among, and the leader supplies the last phrase (about “waxing not proud”). When the abbot adds that it is Christmas Eve, the leader apologises and shakes his hand before leaving peacefully.

Later, the abbot is called upon by an army general to identify the corpse of this man. Before showing him the body, the general warns that it has been dragged through the town behind an army truck so his victims could rejoice over his death. The abbot asks why he did not prevent this. Astonished, the general asks if he wants to know what the favorite torture technique of this man was in dealing with his innocent victims, and declares that people like him do not merit compassion. By contrast, when the dead man’s head is uncovered and the abbot recognizes the Islamicist leader, it is clear from his gesture and expression that the abbot is filled with compassion for a fellow human being whose life has ended so pitifully – judgment of the crimes this man committed is irrelevant for him in this moment.

These scenes from the film make it hard for me to see it as a work that demonises Islamicists, or encourages anti-terrorist sentiment, even though it portrays the suffering and fear provoked by Islamicist violence. For me, it is a film that presents an inspiring and challenging model of how to respond to such violence. The monks do not participate in the violence, even in the form of condemnatory judgments or by letting it persuade them to abandon a place and a way of life they value. Instead, under great pressure, they sustain their commitment to a way of peace and love, and show a compassionate understanding of those who threaten them that is not based on complex judgments about historical responsibilities, but on a simpler, more profound sense of shared humanity. There is a strong sense that this commitment is both extremely difficult and freely made and renewed each day. Nothing obliges the monks to behave the way they do, not the violent agents of political history, not the authority of the Church or Western culture, not even the demands of morality.

I am conscious in writing the last sentence of echoing Sartre’s rhetoric in Being and Nothingness - except that he would have italicized “Nothing.” To my mind, Of Gods and Men provides a moving example of what it might be to live according to an existentialist ethic of absolute personal freedom and responsibility. But it also challenges Sartre’s version of this ethic by suggesting an intimate connection between such responsibility and a commitment to non-violence that is underpinned by the discipline of religious practice. Sartre was anti-religious and defended the use of violence for political purposes. Maybe he would have agreed with Nick…

Minor miracles

2011-05-23T20:06:00.000-07:00

I’ve been living spontaneously lately, letting one day lead into the next in a way that you can only do when you are “unburdened with duties,” as the Metta sutta says. After writing the post last week about persimmons and friendship, I felt moved to return to the source of the persimmon, and go and do a bit of painting with Venerable Tejadhammo at his new centre in Wingello. I rang Bella and Janey, some friends of mine who live in that neck of the woods, and giving them one day’s notice, asked if I could come and stay the night. No problem. By the following evening I was sitting on the lounge in their mud-brick house, listening to their daughter Lucy tinkle the ivories of my old piano and admiring their son Edward’s Buddha collection. So far his collection consists of two small Buddha statues, one green, one black, both laughing (a bit like his parents).

Guido Reni's archangel Michael

Despite being made of mud bricks, the house where these Buddhas reside is not your average hippy-built dwelling. It was constructed by a former SS officer who ended up marrying a Jewish woman he met while working in a Socialist Union library. This man has seen the archangel Michael three times during his life. The first time he told him he would survive his internment in a camp for prisoners of war. The second time he told him to build on this plot of land. The third time, he said that my friends would come to buy the house from him. And so they did.

Finding myself somewhat unexpectedly in Wingello, it occurred to me that I was more than halfway to Canberra, so I sent a Facebook message to Lisa, an old friend who lives there now and whom I haven’t seen in over a decade. It seemed like a fairly long shot.

I then spent the night sleeping in a huge bed with some of the smoothest sheets I have ever encountered, in a little stone cottage which was warmed by a wood fire in a little pot-bellied stove. I felt like a medieval princess, or a seed encased in the smooth flesh of a persimmon. I was quite reluctant to abandon either of these fantasies in the morning, which resulted in such a late start to the day that the children had already left for school by the time I emerged.

Bhante Tejadhammo was also wondering what had become of me. But I did arrive at Vejasalla eventually, and spent an extremely enjoyable day chatting to him while getting creamy splotches of paint on my holey old tracky dacks, which are possibly holy now, too, having been employed in the painting of a meditation and shrine room (a good deal of the paint made it onto the walls). My princess persona was definitively shed when Bhante asked me if I was all right as I maneuvered my paint roller onto a particularly tricky bit of wall. He said the grunts I was emitting made me sound like a boxer.

After the job was done, I drove off in the direction of Bundanoon. Unexpectedly quickly I found myself at the turnoff to Santi Forest Monastery, and made a brake-screeching, dust-stirring decision to drop in (Darryl would have approved). I wasn’t consciously looking for a fight, although I have found that Santi is often good for a bit of intellectual boxing. But when I arrived this time, all was calm and quiet. I checked my emails on my laptop while waiting for some action. Lo and behold: a message from Lisa, saying, come to Canberra!

I hopped back in the car and hotfooted it into the Australian Capital Territory. When I got into the city, I discovered that the road where Lisa lives was blocked off at the end I was coming from. This led to a rambling, circuitous journey around the streets of Canberra, which miraculously ended in front of her door. When she opened it, we started talking, and apart from a few hours for sleeping and (in her case) tandem bike-riding with a blind companion, we basically didn’t stop gasbagging for the next couple of days. We did have more than a decade to catch up on.

On Sunday afternoon I drove home to Katoomba via Oberon, passing through some magnificent country on the way. Mentally joining the dots between different parts of our conversation, I realised that Lisa and I have both responded to turning forty (Lisa a couple of years ahead of me) by making some pretty radical changes: leaving jobs, houses, relationships. I guess we both felt a sense of urgency – death is closer now, we have started to believe in our own mortality, something that for me at least always seemed rather theoretical when I was younger. And knowing that this life won’t last forever, we both preferred to leap into the scary but expansive freedom of the new, rather than trudge along in situations that felt stale or stuck. The very first time I met Lisa, she got the impression I didn’t like her, which was weird because I thought she was wonderful – and I still do. A line from one of Leonard Cohen’s songs comes to mind (as I remember it, a bit different from the original I’ve since discovered):

“I saw a woman leaning in her kitchen door. She said to me, hey, why not ask for more?”

How to ripen a persimmon

2011-05-16T22:45:00.000-07:00

In March, while I was staying at Santi Forest Monastery in Bundanoon, I went for a drive with one of the nuns there, Ayya Analaya. We went to Wingello, where Venerable Tejadhammo and the Association of Engaged Buddhists have recently bought a property in order to set up a retreat centre for people suffering serious illness. No one was there when we visited, so we strolled around the grounds. Ayya Analaya identified the different plants and trees, full of delight at the variety and potential she saw in the garden. Near the main house is a large persimmon tree, which was laden with fruit. Some of the persimmons had dropped to the ground, and Ayya found an undamaged one and gave it to me. She told me it was still unripe but would ripen in time.

I took the persimmon home and put it in front of my little Buddha statue where it became slightly more orange, but otherwise didn’t change much. After a while, I moved it into a fruit bowl in the kitchen, where it joined a few small apples. As the weeks went by it became much brighter orange, until I thought it might have been ripe. It was still hard, though, and my mother informed me that persimmons should be quite squishy to touch before they’re ready to eat.

Then last week I returned home after a weekend in Sydney to find the persimmon looking very wrinkly. It was so soft that I was afraid it had rotted. I almost threw it away, but as I’ve never tasted persimmon before, I though I’d at least cut it open and check. Most of the flesh was the consistency of stewed apples. I scooped it out with a spoon and ate it. It was sweet and delicious, which just a hint of tartness where the seeds were enveloped in slightly firmer, very smooth flesh.

Jack Kornfield says that “Great spiritual traditions are used as means to ripen us, to bring us face to face with our life, and to help us see in a new way by developing a stillness of mind and a strength of heart.”

At first, the example of the persimmon made me think that perhaps all that was required for ripening (vegetable or spiritual) was to stay still and wait patiently. Of course, it’s much easier for a persimmon to do this than a human being, but from another angle, it seems encouraging to think that you don’t have to do anything special – ripening will take place of its own accord.

However, I’ve since realized that there was more to the ripening of the persimmon than just the passage of time.

On the weekend, I heard a talk by Venerable Tejadhammo at the Buddhist Expo in Marrickville. He told the story of the Meghiya Sutta (Udana IV.I), about a young monk who is assisting the Buddha when he discovers a charming mango grove. It seems to him to be the perfect place to practice meditation. Three times he asks the Buddha’s permission to go to this grove. In his usual style, the Buddha refuses twice, asking Meghiya to wait until another monk comes. On the third request, the Buddha yields to Meghiya’s obstinacy and tells him, “Do what you think it is now time to do…” Anyone who has read a few of the suttas will realise this is a gentle way of saying, “All right, since you can’t take advice, go and learn from your own mistakes.”

Meghiya goes off to the mango grove, sits down like a piece of fallen fruit to meditate, and finds his mind obsessed with unskilful thoughts: sensual thoughts (involving mangos, probably), thoughts of ill will, and thoughts of doing harm (mangos as missiles..?). It doesn’t sound like a great meditation session, but Meghiya does at least have enough awareness to recognise how unruly, or unripe, his mind is. This comes as a shock. Humbled, he returns to the Buddha, ready to listen this time.

The first piece of advice the Buddha gives to Meghiya is this:

“There is the case where a monk has admirable friends, admirable companions, admirable comrades. In one whose awareness-release is still immature, this is the first quality that brings it to maturity.”

After Venerable Tejadhammo’s talk was over, I had a chat with him, and told him about the persimmon I’d gleaned from his property in Wingello. He said he'd been told that to ripen a persimmon, you should put it in a paper bag with an apple. Apparently the apple absorbs gases released by the persimmon, which helps in the ripening process. So maybe that’s why my persimmon was so delicious – it had spent plenty of time sitting around in a fruit bowl with three admirable apples.

Cool compassion

2011-05-13T18:25:00.000-07:00

We hear a lot about ‘compassion fatigue’ these days, as if being compassionate wears us out. But is it really compassion that’s exhausting us? Like other aspects of love –loving-kindness, sympathetic joy, equanimity – I suspect that true compassion is not tiring, but rather energizing. The actions we undertake out of compassion may require effort, but especially compassionate people seem to have more than average amounts of energy to expend. It seems as though real compassion generates energy rather than depleting it.

In Buddhism, compassion is sometimes said to be a ‘cool’ emotion. It has a soothing, calming quality, rather than a passionate, excited one. This makes sense to me. When you are responding passionately to the suffering of others, chances are you are swept up in your own related, but unacknowledged suffering. It’s not until your own emotional storm has passed (or you reach a calm point at the eye of that ongoing storm) that you really become available to respond to the suffering of someone else.

Cool or not cool?

Recently I spent a few hours with a friend I haven’t seen much of in a long time. He poured out the story of unhappiness that has been his marriage for the last few years. As he was telling me about it, I initially responded with calm analysis of the dynamic he was describing. I was trying to help him see the situation differently, in a way that might be kinder both to himself and to his wife. Although this might have seemed like a compassionate response, I think now that the ‘coolness’ of this approach wasn’t that of compassion. Rather, I was ‘performing’ compassion, doing what I thought compassion required, but quite likely irritating my friend with advice he wasn’t asking for. My desire to analyse his situation was more to do with keeping myself at a safe distance from his suffering (and my own), rather than getting close enough to help do something about it. That was pretty cold and self-protective of me, but it wasn’t very cool.

Then our conversation warmed up. My friend described an incident in which his wife had let him down, and it seemed to me that he did so in terms that were exaggerated and aggressive towards her. I responded by defending her behavior: “It’s not that bad.” He looked incredulous. Obviously from his perspective, what she had done (or not done) had been extremely hurtful, so I was flatly invalidating his feelings. At this point, I think it’s fair to say, I had dropped the role of the supposedly compassionate friend and had shifted to a more passionate, and honest, identification with my friend’s wife.

After my friend left, this small part of our conversation kept coming back into my mind. Later I tried to do some loving-kindness meditation for him, but realized that I wanted to send my love to his wife instead. When I allowed myself to concentrate on her, I burst into tears. I’m pretty sure that this was not because I was exhausted by compassion, but rather because I was recalling or reliving my own distress in a situation that was similar to the way I imagined hers to be. It made me feel much happier and lighter to let myself feel this and have a good cry. Afterwards, I felt spontaneously more connected to the people around me.

The following morning while I was making breakfast, I suddenly had an idea about why my friend might have been so upset by his wife’s behavior. It was a thought that made me feel sympathetic toward both him and his wife. My guess may or may not have been accurate, but it showed that I had shifted from reacting to my friend’s feelings and judgments to wondering about what had caused them. I had a sense of my mind expanding, no longer tense or turbulent with my own distress, but rather relaxed, energized and open. This, I think, is the kind of ‘coolness’ that is associated with true compassion. If this right, I don’t think anyone could ever get tired of it, or tired because of it.

The knobstick of fearlessness

2011-05-03T21:42:00.000-07:00

Last week I went to a meditation group called Cloud Refuge, led by Joyce Kornblatt in Blackheath. The theme of the session was kindness, and to give each person space to talk about their understanding and experience of kindness and what stops us from being kind, Joyce produced a little wooden stick with a ball on one end – in searching for an image of it on google, the closest I've come is a Zulu knobstick.

This was handed around the circle, each person waiting until they had possession of the stick to speak. The idea was that while a person was holding this smooth, agreeable object, no one else would speak, but instead would concentrate on listening, giving the speaker the space to express themself, for as long as they chose.

As Joyce observed at the end of the meeting, this is in itself a powerful act of kindness – the act of listening without interruption or judgment. She suggested that it is a form of kindness that people are “hungry” for, something that is not so easily come by in contemporary life, with its busy-ness and short concentration spans. She also commented that in ordinary conversation, we often perform for one another, rather than really listening, or speaking authentically, and that this can be very stressful and tiring.

While I appreciated the points Joyce was making, I had some doubts about the idea that the knobstick worked to discourage the habit of using speech to perform for others. The first time I came to Cloud Refuge, I came away thinking that it provided an interesting opportunity for practicing improvisational performance. To me, holding the stick felt like holding a little microphone, facing an audience whose silent and attentive attitude was very much like that of an engaged lecture or theatre audience, albeit a very small, non-threatening one. The challenge was not to “prepare” while others were speaking, but to really listen to them, so that when it came to my turn, my “performance” would truly be improvised, and might also resonate with what they had been saying.

The ability to speak spontaneously like this, but still to produce a talk that is structured and rich – a bit like a jazz solo - is a capacity cultivated by monks in the Thai tradition. For several years, I’ve been impressed by Bhante Sujato’s performances in this genre, and aspired to replace or at least supplement my own more “classical,” written lecture style with something more spontaneous and energizing, both for me and my audience. Given that I had seized upon Joyce’s stick as the perfect device to help me practice this, it came as a bit of a shock to hear her declare that it was intended to remove the impulse to perform!

Thinking about this later, it occurred to me that social performance can be imagined as stretching along a spectrum between two poles. At one end is performance which is anxiously designed to meet social expectations or pressures. In this kind of performance, we try to hide or change ourselves to suit what we believe will please our audience – we say what we think they want to hear, and often we review and worry about our performance later. This is typically very tiring, and tends to keep us stuck in old patterns – I imagine this is what Joyce was thinking of when she suggested that a lot of conversation is a stressful form of performance.

At the other pole is performance that is spontaneous, and draws upon the resources available in the moment to create something new, or give old knowledge fresh expression. Here we share what we are and know with others, and may be transformed in the process, but without worrying about the result. We can feel immediately when it’s working, we don’t need to go over it obsessively later. There is a generosity in this kind of creativity – it is for others, as well as for ourselves, so it is still performance, but here the divide between self and others tends to drop away; it doesn’t matter in the way it does at the other end of the spectrum. Maybe this is why this kind of performance is not tiring or stressful, but is typically energizing, and can even be exhilarating, for everyone involved. Like the best kind of intimate conversation, it is a practice of fearlessness.

The knobstick of fearlessness… I think Joyce would be pretty happy with that.

"Wait for me"

2011-04-26T19:14:00.000-07:00

For a woman, the main thing you must learn in order to dance tango is how to follow the lead of your partner. This, as I’ve commented before on this blog, is harder than it sounds. Following is a discipline: you need to be attentive, making your energy available for whatever is indicated by your partner’s movements. You can’t afford to get distracted, or give in to the temptation to anticipate, assuming that you know what your partner is going to do, and going ahead with a figure before he has started it. “Wait for me,” is a phrase often spoken, with some urgency and insistence, by men to women on the tango dance-floor – meaning, “wait for my lead.”

This doesn’t mean, “become completely passive and allow me to dominate you” (although some people seem to think it does, and are no fun to dance with, as a result). This kind of waiting is active and energized (and energizing). It also allows two-way communication – if you are in tune, which most importantly means in time, with your partner’s lead, this creates a rapport and sense of trust within which the follower can bring her own style or interpretation into the dance. The leader establishes the framework of steps, but within this, the follower, who doesn’t need to think about what figure to embark upon next, is freer to feel and express the subtleties of the music, and a good leader will pick up on this, “listening” and responding to his partner as well as leading her.

I’ve observed a similar dynamic when chanting Buddhist suttas. Chanting often makes me think of dancing, since in this situation too, I am usually a follower, and must wait for the monk's lead, within which it is possible to improvise harmonies – sometimes they just seem to arise of their own accord. The sense of communication between leader and follower, and the pleasure when this is sustained and vibrant, for me is very much the same as that of dancing tango. This might seem a provocative comparison, since obviously Buddhist monks don’t dance – certainly not tango! But actually, it’s more a reflection of how I experience tango – as something that at its best is very close to meditation.

In more conventional forms of meditation, the dance is between the breath (or other leader of meditation) and awareness, or the mind. The breath sets the rhythm, the timing of the dance, and the mind must resist the temptation to take over and start trying to change the pace, or breaking out into other dances altogether. Habitually, the mind (well, my mind, at least) wants to lead – it’s not easy for it to relax and focus enough to follow, let alone get to the point where it might be capable of contributing appropriate adornments or harmonies.

In Argentina, a man who wants to learn to tango traditionally begins with the woman’s part – he must learn to follow before he can learn how to lead. This seems to me a good principle for leadership more generally, and in particular, for the leadership of that would-be inner dictator, the mind. Is a mind that cannot settle long enough to follow the breath likely to come up with any ideas worth following in turn?

The idea of a rat: meditation retreat in Katoomba

2011-04-19T23:55:00.000-07:00

I’ve just done a week-long meditation retreat at the Buddhist Vihara in Katoomba, a very beautiful small monastery nestled in bush, overlooking the Jamison valley. The retreat was led by Venerable Kovida, the Sri Lankan abbot of the monastery and at present the only monk living there, assisted by a lay woman, Louise. It struck me as quite different to other retreats I’ve done, mainly because it took place in a monastery rather than a retreat centre or other secular setting, and because the rhythm of monastic life provided the structure of the retreat.

The program of meditation was quite continuous, but fairly gentle compared with many retreats. The day started with a 45 minute sit at 6am, followed by breakfast, then chanting and meditation from 8-9am, a service which takes place every morning at the monastery, whether there’s a retreat on or not. After that the retreatants continued mediting until 10.45, alternating between sitting and walking, usually in periods of half an hour each. Then there was a half hour work period, followed by lunch which was offered by Sri Lankan families who came each day for this purpose, showing heart-warming generosity and devotion. They served each of us in the same way they served Venerable Kovida. As required by monastic discipline, lunch was finished by 12pm (which given the abundance of food offered to us meant that for a short period of time we had to behave like rapid and continuous eating machines, an interesting capacity to master). After an hour to rest and digest, the program continued at 1pm either with meditation or, on every second day, an hour of group discussion when we could ask questions or report on our practice. Sitting and walking meditation then continued until 4.45pm, followed by a break when we could eat or drink something if needed. From 6-7pm there was the evening chanting and meditation service, which concluded the daily program.

There were no dhamma talks, except for one by American nun Pema Chodron that we listened to during one of the group discussion hours – and this only happened because I’d brought the cd to return to someone, and Louise asked if we could listen to it. There were also no private interviews. The retreat was conducted in ‘noble silence’ meaning no talking or communicating except during the discussion hours, or if required for some practical purpose.

I have to admit I broke noble silence once, on the third night. I’d woken up early (at 3.20am) and decided I should go back to sleep. I did a little relaxation exercise and was just drifting off, half dreaming, when I felt a sharp sensation in my left ear, just above the lobe. I was wearing a beanie so that my ears and face were the only part of me exposed to the cold night air. I instinctively shook my head, and wondered meditatively what the cause of this sensation might be. Half a second later, a thought popped into my head, instantly followed by a feeling of fear and in a high voice I said, “what was that?” There was no one else in the room to answer me, but my mute hypothesis was soon confirmed by the sound of little feet scurrying around under the bed – the delay had been caused by the fact that I was on the top bunk, and it took the rodent (probably a small rat) a few seconds to reach the floor. At that stage I felt I was really getting a proper taste of monastic life. Not only had I been nibbled by a rat during the early hours of the morning (a friend later suggested that it was testing to see if I was alive), but I had managed quite clearly to observe the chain of reactions: contact with night-time visitor, feeling of sharpness, instinctive physical reaction of movement, calm mental investigation, conceptual thought, PANIC leading to outburst of fairly nonsensical and useless speech. It was interesting to see how my fear didn’t arise from contact with the rat itself, but rather from the thought ‘rat?’ I do have – or have had – quite a strongly entrenched fear of rodents. But now that I’ve had one nibble my ear, funnily enough, I don’t feel so afraid of them, maybe because I now realise that I’m actually only afraid of the idea of rats – although admittedly this has yet to be tested by any further close encounters.

Anyway, back to the more general aspects of the retreat. The fact that the program was so simple, and included very little teaching or talking, meant that I had a good chance to observe what my mind does when pretty much left to itself. It wasn’t all pleasant – I spent a lot of time ‘getting in touch,’ as they say, with obsessive and confused habitual states of my mind. It was quite a humbling experience. At the time, I started to have doubts about what I was doing, whether I was actually driving myself mad rather than doing anything that could possibly lead towards enlightenment. But having survived and come out the other side, I feel that I gained more insight into my own emotional processes than I have on any other retreat. I’ve certainly experienced strong emotion on retreats before, but typically, I’ve also encountered plenty of things to help distract me – or rather, plenty of words to keep me occupied and entertained. While I usually find dhamma talks stimulating, and private interviews can be anything from comforting and helpful to (more rarely) infuriating, they can all operate, for someone like myself, who enjoys playing around with concepts and words, as opportunities to avoid anything too uncomfortable in the intimacy of my own experience, and to reassure myself that my mind is basically clear, sharp and on top of things (a bit like the rat J).

Having been on a lot of meditation retreats, I realise that my ego has worked out how to use them almost as a form of entertainment, a kind of educational holiday. It took a real rat and the support of a whole monastic environment to shake me out of this mode.

The Dalai Lama dances with Nietzsche

2011-02-09T16:22:00.000-08:00

Last year I saw a film that got me thinking about the role of universal principles in ethics and how they fit (or not) with the need to respond to concrete communicative situations. The same kind of contrast or conundrum that I developed in my earlier post on integrity came up here as well. Here's what I wrote...

I saw something on the weekend that I can't seem to get out of my head. It was at a fundraiser put on by a Tibetan Buddhist group in Katoomba. They showed a documentary about a group of Americans, supposedly all leaders in their fields (although as they seemed to be self-selected, there was some room for doubt about their actual status), who went to Dharamasala to come up with solutions to the world's problems and present them to the Dalai Lama. He was shown laughing merrily as he greeted them, as if already tickled by the crazy ambition of the project.

After a few days of brain-storming and bickering, they met with the Dalai Lama and proposed one of their ideas, to seek an economic boycott of China in order to pressure the Chinese government to withdraw from Tibet and return it to the Tibetan people. The Dalai Lama responded by saying that this was a very complicated question, but that it was necessary to consider that such sanctions would hurt ordinary Chinese, many of whom are already living in dire poverty, so ethically, it would be wrong to pursue this idea. He then softened this judgment a little by saying that he believed the intention behind the idea was good, but as a monk he couldn't endorse the idea itself.

One of the organisers then asked if they could take that response as a "tentative yes." The Dalai Lama hesitated, and asked an interpreter something in Tibetan - perhaps checking on the meaning of "tentative," or just verifying that he had heard correctly, and this man was really interpreting him as saying, well, you know as a monk I'm obliged to say this isn't a good idea, but nudge, nudge, wink, wink, that doesn't mean that I wouldn't mind if you lay people took a different view...

Having taken this in, he ran with it, chuckled and said, "Well, you know, as a monk I can't say yes to this, but let's put it to the vote. Who thinks it's a good idea?" At this, most of the people in the group raised their hands. The Dalai Lama was enjoying himself, laughing and gesturing with his hands as if to say, yes, why not, vote for it! He seemed to be playing with these Americans and at the same time possibly poking fun at the Western practice of deciding ethical questions by resorting to opinion polls. No one present showed any sign of seeing the joke, though.

It was interesting to see how the Dalai Lama handled the situation, so playfully, taking it all very lightly, improvising in response to his audience, and doing it with such good humour that they felt he was right there with them, appreciating their energy and enthusiasm. And he was - he wasn't laughing at them, so much as just taking delight in the little culture clash that seemed to have just taken place, having fun taking it a bit further. (Later on he did make it clear to them, however, that he didn’t want them to pursue economic sanctions against the Chinese.)

While I was impressed and intrigued by the Dalai Lama’s way of handling the situation, I was left feeling perturbed that this group of seemingly well-educated, supposedly intelligent adults did not respond to his first, almost sharp judgment that the plan they had proposed was unethical, or his reasoned explanation of why he made that judgment. To most of them, unethical seemed to mean no more than "bad for my image" - or perhaps, to be a bit less cynical about their views, "what the kind of person I am is expected to do." As a monk, the Dalai Lama couldn't endorse pushing Chinese people further into poverty to further the cause of Tibet, but that didn't mean that someone who wasn't a monk couldn't do so without any problems. They seemed to have no sense that ethical judgment connotes a universal standard. God really is dead for these people. And rational argument about ethics seems to have gone to the grave with him.

Here's Nietzsche on the death of God:

In the main, however, one may say that the event itself is far too great, too remote, too much beyond most people’s power of apprehension, for one to suppose that so much as the report of it could have reached them; not to speak of many who already knew what had taken place, and what must all collapse now that this belief had been undermined, because so much was built upon it, so much rested on it, and had become one with it: for example, our entire European morality. (Gay Science 343)

It did appear that for this group of Americans, the old European morality based in Christian values has collapsed and with it any sense of a binding ethics that can't be decided by popular vote. It's easy to feel superior to such a group, and laugh at (or feel horrified by) their unshakeable attachment to their well-intentioned plan, but perhaps they are more representative of our own culture than we would like to think. Do we know any more where ethical values come from, or in what they are based, if it isn't just in expectations attached to roles, and the instrumental benefits of meeting such expectations, on the whole, at least when you're being watched (which is most of the time in the surveillance culture of modern life)?

At the same time, perhaps there is more in the Dalai Lama's response than just a display of good humour. He didn't insist on the ethical reasons he'd just given for rejecting the plan - didn't thump his fist on any equivalent of a pulpit and demand respect for the universal ethical truth. He seemed willing to acknowledge that yes, as a monk (and a teacher), he is playing a role, you can usefully look at it that way. He also seemed spontaneously to realise that in giving an argument based on Buddhist values of equanimity and compassion for all humans (not to mention other sentient beings) as fundamentally interconnected, he was - as the response showed - relying on cultural assumptions that simply didn't have any valency for his audience.

They didn't get it - and reiterating reasoning that was already perfectly clear probably wouldn't have helped them to get it. It would have been more likely to set off an argument, destroying the friendly atmosphere that was allowing a good connection to be established. Instead he switched immediately to a process that was culturally familiar to his audience, and gave him a quick insight into where they were at in terms of their ability to understand what he’d just said to them. This was the knowledge that counted in this concrete ethical situation, and it wasn't universal or based on abstract reasoning. Instead, it was based on a remarkable ability to hold the truth lightly, and let go of any fixed assumptions about how to approach the challenge of communicating it.

Word of the day: traduce

2011-02-08T19:41:00.001-08:00

The verb, to traduce, covers an interesting spectrum of meanings, ranging from straightforward confidence in the capacity to pass something on, to a recognition that change is likely occur along the way, to a potent sense of suspicion or anxiety about what is passed on and why. According to the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, its equivalents include to convey, transport, transfer, transmit, generate, propagate, translate, alter, modify, misrepresent, malign, slander, blame, accuse.

A traducian is a person who maintains that the soul of a child, like the body, is propagated by or inherited from the parents. Also (rare), a person who maintains that original sin is transmitted from parent to child.

In logic, traduction refers to the transference or transmission from one order of reasoning to another.

A traductor is a device on the side of a railway carriage that picks up and deposits mailbags while the train is moving.

This family of words strike me as especially interesting, as I’ve just finished reading Christina Stead’s great novel of family life, The Man Who Loved Children. The Man of the title, Sam Pollit, operates a bit like a traductor, picking up and depositing children, like mailbags, while the train of his creative and self-absorbed monologue remains in perpetual motion, protecting him from more than fleeting contact with the surrounding emotional landscape, which is dominated by the relentless antagonism of his embittered and periodically hysterical wife, Henny. For the kids, there’s joy to be had in the world their father creates around himself – it’s fun to be picked up by a human traductor, and there’s something vaguely miraculous, in a strictly naturalistic, scientific way, about the process. But there’s also danger – getting ‘deposited’ from the fast-moving train of endless words and activity that is ‘Sam-the-Bold’ can be a jolting and bruising experience.

For the reader of the novel, the casual cruelty that seems to flows seamlessly from the diversions of Sam’s jokes and invented language remains shocking, even after multiple repetitions of the pattern. One moment, he’s entertaining the kids, and us, with amusing word-plays, or at worst, lulling us into a gentle, drowsing stupor with his endless factual knowledge or his naïve humanistic idealism, and the next he’s viciously running one of his children down, goading the boys into hurting one another, demanding that the girls perform grinding domestic duties, or proposing eugenics programs that even Hitler might have baulked at. We come to realise that the charmed atmosphere Sam generates around himself is not a safe or reliable space; it is more about shoring up his ego than providing for his children’s emotional needs. Over the course of the novel, it more slowly becomes apparent that he is also incapable of taking responsibility for his family’s material needs: about financial matters, as about everything else, he is “vague and sentimental.”

Biographical information suggests that the character of Sam is closely based on the father of Christina Stead. One reviewer comments that the portrait, although critical, is drawn without hatred. I’m not so sure of that – there seems to be both hatred and love woven into the many details, like tiny brushstrokes, that build up the picture we are given of this man. Stead has traduced her father, with all the ambiguous range of that word: she has passed him on to us by generating and abundantly propogating the literary character of Sam Pollit. This character is a transmission, a translation of the living man who is, no doubt creatively misrepresented, openly slandered, and yet also reasonably blamed for harms and plausibly accused of domestic crimes committed against the children he loved. This range is what makes the work such a satisfying and intriguing example of literary traduction, to coin an expression, by which I mean the transference or transmission from the order of lived experience to that of literature.

In The Man Who Loved Children, Stead, the daughter, becomes the propagator of the soul of her father. This might well be a kind of revenge upon the father for his persistent assertion of a secular version of traducian orthodoxy: Sam sees himself as the creator, and assiduous gardener, of his children’s souls. While neglecting the conditions of his children’s material and emotional well-being, he shows intrusive interest in examining and attempting to shape their moral development. His eldest child, Louie, feels this intrusion keenly, and a strong thread (I initially wrote ‘threat’) in the narrative concerns her struggle to free herself from his influence. Since Louie appears to be a literary traduction of the young Christina Stead, the novel can also be read as an effort by the mature Stead to examine the extent to which her own soul has in reality been ‘propagated’ by her parents, particularly her father, and how far its structures have been shaped by her exposure to and involvement in the conflictual relationship between her father and the woman whom she called mother (her birth mother, like Louie’s, died while she was very young).

The step-mother of the novel is Henny, the shade to Sam’s dazzling light. In some ways she resembles her husband: she also has charm, and a capacity to create a magical world for the children, as well as an acid tongue which she does not hesitate to use upon them. But she is consistent in her litany of complaints, which gives her insults an expected, familiar quality and softens their effect. They seem an eloquent expression of her own misery, which is visibly wearing her down, more than an attempt to hurt anyone else. For Louie, who is regularly reviled as the step-daughter Henny cannot stand, these attacks seem to flow like water off an ugly duckling’s back; they do not prevent her from feeling a deep affinity with this woman and sympathy for her position. There is an almost extravagant honesty about Henny, in spite of her secrecy and deceptions; she rarely lies to herself, or to her husband – she simply avoids speaking to him, most of the time. If anything, she is too keenly aware of the misery of the world in general and her marriage in particular, which Sam refuses to feel. It is as if she has taken on the burden of this unhappiness alone, as she also increasingly takes on the burden of providing material support for the family, as best she can. She is the rock that holds the family together, but she is a fragile support, ready to shatter under a weight too heavy for her.

And then there is Louie, whose soul does indeed seem to partake of the qualities of her parents. Like Henny, she is keenly sensitive to the “daily misery” of their lives, but like Sam, she has a drive for self-preservation and a capacity for invention and imagination that allows her to transcend her immediate surroundings. Louie does not simply retreat into a self-absorbed fantasy world, however. Rather she finds resources in literature to help her interpret the violence of her emotional life and transmute it into poems and plays and stories, written sometimes in English and sometimes in a language of her own making.

Freud (with Sophocles) has offered us the Oedipal complex as a mythico-psychological guide to the love-hate relations between mother, father and son. In The Man Who Loved Children, Stead gives us an account of the triangular relationship between a father, mother and daughter which suggests that the passions involved in this version are equally powerful, transgressive and destructive in their potential. But her conclusion to the familial drama is quite different. At the end of the novel, Stead’s female Oedipus, rather than blinding herself in guilt, turns her gaze away from the family and toward the world, with a sense of awakening and adventure:

They would look everywhere and conclude that [Louie] had gone for a walk. “So I have,” she thought, smiling secretly, “I have gone for a walk around the world.”

It is an appealing conclusion. However rich or poor the psychic inheritance we receive from our parents, and however happy or difficult our childhoods, there is a whole world beyond the family, awaiting our attention, and if we open our eyes we see that we can traverse - and even traduce - it for ourselves.

But there is another way to understand the sense of liberation and opening that is so strong in the experience of Louie at the end of The Man Who Loved Children. In writing this book, Christina Stead looks unflinchingly into the unhappiness of her early family life, and by the end of the novel there is a sense that this has brought her enough peace and understanding to let the title of the novel be truly ambiguous. Although Stead leads her readers to hold Sam Pollit responsible for multiple failings as a parent (what kind of fatherly love is this, so selfish, so deluded, so intrusive, so neglectful?), at the same time, the book is suffused with a lively, grateful, even wildly proliferating sense that this man does, with all the considerable energy of his flawed, suffering human heart, love his children, and the rebellious Louie, or at least the writer she would grow into, finally understands this and is able to let go of her anger against him.

Truthfulness, by Beatriz Copello

2011-02-05T14:18:00.000-08:00

Speak the truth

let your voice

utter honest words

words of courage

words of valour,

open your mouth

to embrace sincerity,

kindness and compassion

because by doing this

you will be true to yourself.

I came across this poem by Australian poet Beatriz Copello, printed in One Heart-One Mind, The Newsletter of the Association of Engaged Buddhists. Like a precious stone, it shows all the facets of integrity that I began exploring in the last post, in shining simplicity. Thanks, Beatriz.

Integrity

2011-02-01T19:32:00.000-08:00

This is the first tango philosophy post in quite a while... years, in fact. I've been inspired to revive the blog by a couple of factors. First, I've recently decided to stop teaching (ordinary) philosophy in a university setting, and to devote more of my time to writing. I've got a feeling that a lot of that writing will end up being in the spirit of tango philosophy (as defined in the very first post to this blog, back in 2007).

Second, and more immediately, I was provoked to think about integrity by a discussion that recently took place on Sujato's blog. The comment I wrote turned into an essay, too long to post as a comment. So here it is, the tango philosophy approach to integrity (in which moral philosophy dances with Buddhist practice and personal experience)...

What is it, to show integrity? One understanding would be that it is to stand up for what you believe, regardless of whether other people like it or not, and regardless of the price you must pay for refusing to compromise or pretend or remain silent. The price may be the loss of relationships, and the alienation of people who have previously supported you. This is surely painful, but if you value integrity, you might consider that it is worse to betray your own convictions.

I used to identify strongly with this vision of integrity. I remember, many years ago when I was studying law, I did a course on the Holocaust. The teacher passionately believed that former Nazis should be hunted down and punished, preferably killed, by legal or if necessary, illegal means. He seemed to have the courage of his convictions – he’d been involved in street fights with neo-Nazis in his own country. I spoke up against the vengefulness that I saw in this approach, and in favour of an analysis of the Holocaust, and appropriate responses to it, in terms of collective responsibility. I think the teacher respected the fact that I was willing to articulate my position, although he didn’t agree with it. What disturbed me most was not his views, but the fact that no one else in the class spoke up against them, even though several people privately told me that they agreed with me and admired me for speaking out. I remember one day leaving the law school building in tears, in despair over what I saw as the lack of integrity of my classmates, and their failure to support me publicly even when they agreed with my objections. And these were people who intended to take up the responsibility of maintaining our justice system! It was an odd situation – the person I identified with most easily was the one whose views I found abhorrent, because at least he had the courage to say what he really thought. He had some integrity!

But is standing up for what you believe all there is to integrity? What if what you believe is that people belonging to a certain category deserve to be killed? Do we want to say that a person can display integrity in proclaiming a message of hatred? The honesty and openness with which such a person expresses his views and feelings might contain seeds of integrity, but I think there must be more to integrity than this.

There’s a phrase in the Metta Sutta that has given rise to some dispute. The phrase describes the way of enlightenment, and is sometimes translated as “not holding to false views,” sometimes as “not holding to fixed views” (these are not the only options). This difference in translation reflects a difference in practice. Some say that to follow the Buddha means that we must free ourselves from false views and hold to true ones. This suggests that a person of integrity is one who sees the truth and is willing to speak it and to live by it. Standing up for false views is not integrity, it’s stubbornness, arrogance, or simply foolishness.

Others say that to follow the Buddha means that we must loosen our attachments to all views, recognizing that our grasp on the truth is only ever partial. To hold tightly to any fixed view prevents us from listening to and learning from other perspectives. This opens up a different vision of integrity, one that has at least as much to do with listening as with speaking our truth. A person of great integrity would be one who can “integrate” a great number of different perspectives, who can see the grains of truth (and separate them from the chaff) on all sides of an argument. In the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, such a person would know how to keep the door of their heart open to all, to the snake as well as to the frog who is eaten by the snake… or to the provocative lecturer as well as to the quiet student who disagrees with him but never says what she thinks. Standing up for views, even true ones, is not integrity if it leads us to reject those who think or behave differently to us.

While I might have shown integrity in articulating my views in that class on the Holocaust, it wasn’t integrity that made me burst into tears on the steps of the law school. At that point I was angry because I was convinced that I was in the right, and everyone else was in the wrong – I believed that I was the only student in that class who cared about the truth, while everyone else was only selfishly interested in getting a good grade. And that thought made me feel simultaneously superior to the others, and very lonely and sorry for myself. I now think that a mature sense of integrity would have allowed me both to state my objections to the lecturer’s views, and to have remained equanimous, or at least curious rather than furious, when I discovered that no one else was prepared to speak up on my side of the argument.

Interestingly, in this situation I was not overly fixed on the view that I would still hold to be true – that vengeance and punishment of individuals is not the best way to respond to collective crimes. This idea I was prepared to put into the space of public debate. I was willing to listen to counter-arguments, consider exceptions and to revise my view in response to them. (You can see some of the results, years later, here.) The view I was really fixated on – that the only honourable way to respond to the lecturer’s statements was to speak up against them – was not one that I clearly articulated, even to myself (it’s hard to articulate clearly when you’re sobbing). Now that I have identified it, I can immediately see that it isn’t true: another valid and perhaps even more effective response in this context was to refuse to be drawn by the more extreme aspects of the lecturer’s argument, simply to let them fall away into silence.

This leads me to speculate that perhaps the difference in translation I mentioned earlier can be reconciled. Maybe it’s only false views that get fixed and bound up with our emotions, so that we become enraged or fearful when they are triggered or threatened. In this case, false views and fixed views would be one and the same. Views that point toward the truth, on the other hand, never really get “fixed” in this damaging way. They are of the nature to be held lightly, open to new developments. This is why we can take pleasure in throwing them out into open debate, and let them get tossed around in argument without concern: we have confidence that they will not only survive, but be improved in the process, their rough edges smoothed away or transformed into new points of interest.

Recently, I found myself in a rather different situation in which I felt my sense of integrity was again being tested. I was at a dinner for my brother-in-law’s 40^th birthday, held at a fancy restaurant. He and my sister were picking up the tab for all of us, a gesture that is typical of their generosity. One of his friends started posing moral conundrums of the “you’re in a train that’s about to hit five innocent track-workers, and you can divert it onto a different track where a child is playing, meaning that the child will be killed but the workers will be saved. What do you do?” type. (These are the questionable legacy of utilitarian philosophers to dinner party conversation.)

He asked me to suppose that immediately after a disaster, I found my sister (who at that moment was sitting directly opposite me) on the verge of death, and five other people who were also injured but whose chances of survival were much better than my sister’s. There was a chance that if I devoted all my attention to my sister and abandoned the five strangers to their deaths, she would survive. On the other hand, if I attended to the strangers and abandoned my sister, she would certainly die, but all five of them would probably survive. What would I do?

Somewhat startled, I played for time by asking how likely it was that my sister would live if I gave my attention to her. My brother evilly upped the stakes by suggesting that even with my help her chances of survival were extremely slight – but there was still the slim possibility that she might live… I remained silent, while my sister looked at me intently with an unusual expression, hovering between confidence and accusation. Someone else spoke and the conversation went off on a tangent I don’t recall – but the reprieve was temporary. The dinner-party philosopher wasn’t going to let me off. By the time he had reiterated the question, I was ready: “I’d save my sister. Logically, I ought to save the other five, but…” My sister finished the sentence for me, “the connection is stronger.” Clearly, in her mind there was no doubt: I had made the morally correct choice.

To be honest, I wasn’t so sure. I had not come up with any watertight moral argument – or indeed any argument at all - to justify favouring my sister’s life over the other five. However it had occurred to me that if I answered differently my sister would feel hurt, even horrified, at the thought that I could contemplate abandoning her in her moment of greatest need. I will probably never find myself in the hypothetical situation, and if I do, it won’t be as I imagined it. To my mind the real moral conundrum I faced was how best to answer this question in front of my sister. And from this perspective, I also felt no doubt that I answered it correctly. So strong was this feeling that as I spoke I also felt sure that what I was saying was true. Not as a statement about what I would do in a counter-factual situation, but in a more direct, self-evident sense. In that very moment I was choosing to save my sister – I was putting her feelings and my relationship with her ahead of any interest I or the five or so other people participating in the conversation at our end of the table had in pursuing the philosophical discussion.

Did I show integrity, or a lack of integrity in answering this way?

I began this piece by suggesting that the price to be paid for integrity may well be the “loss of relationships, and the alienation of people who have previously supported you.” In this situation I gave an answer I couldn’t justify in terms of beliefs, in order to take care of a relationship with someone who is important to me. My response wasn’t intellectually impressive. It didn’t fit with my image of myself as someone who values and is good at philosophical argument. In this sense, my sense of identity was challenged. And yet I wouldn’t say I felt a loss of integrity. It seemed to me that I had responded intuitively to the demands of the present moment; my answer was “integrated” with my sister’s needs in a way that an abstract discussion of principles would not have been. This was in harmony with the value I place not only on my relationship with her, but more generally on practices of kindness, awareness and sensitivity.

I still think it is important to stand up for what you believe, and I greatly admire those who manage to weaken the power of false or fixed views by opposing them with cogent arguments and fearless gestures. But now it seems to me that such effective examples of integrity depend not only upon courage and conviction, but also the flexible wisdom of an attentive mind and the steadfast kindness of an open heart.

Kierkegaard and dance

2007-12-22T23:37:00.000-08:00

Not exactly a tango metaphor, but I thought it might help to collect some philosophical quotations referring to dance:

"[The knight of faith] constantly makes the movement of infinity, but he does it with such precision and proficiency that he constantly gets finitude out of it and at no second does one suspect anything else. It is supposed to be the most difficult task for a dancer to leap into a particular posture in such a way that there is no second when he grasps at the position but assumes it in the leap itself. Perhaps no dancer can do it - but that knight does. The majority of people live absorbed in worldly sorrow and joy; they are wallflowers who do not join in the dance. The knights of infinity are dancers and have elevation. ... But every time they drop down they cannot assume the posture at once; they hesitate an instant, and this hesitation shows that they are really strangers in the world. ... One does not need to see them in the air but only at the instant they touch and have made contact with the ground to recognize them. But to be able to land in such a way that it looks as if one were simultaneously standing and walking, to transform the leap of life into a gait, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian - that only the knight of faith can do - and that is the only miracle." (Fear & Trembling, trans. C. Stephen Evans, Sylvia Walsh, 2006, 34)

Some Cognitive Science of Dance

2007-11-20T16:17:00.001-08:00

Firstly, let me say how excited I am that I finally have something to post on this blog. I've been looking forward to this for weeks!

I've just discovered that John Sutton wrote a paper on possible intersections between cognitive science (particularly dynamical systems theory) and the phenomenology of dance in 2005. It's available from John's site.

John's interested in the overlap or possible exchanges between properly cognitive modes (like planning, making commitments, deliberating etc) and bodily know-how. He writes that

Philosophical or political ideas, wishes, hints and half-remembered dreams, idiosyncratic individual memories, cognitively-loaded emotional states and moods, perceptually-driven assessments of complex cultural situations, and other cognitive processes which are (to varying degrees) more articulable and accessible than is movement itself, can all influence the creation, performance, and enjoyment of dance.

Naturally, this interference cuts both ways, and I don't think I'm stretching his view too far to suggest that it may be through the body that cognition acquires it's interpersonal dimension. After all, where he says:

cognition is interpersonally as well as technologically distributed: we work together with each other in many ways to form temporarily integrated larger systems with cognitive characteristics and abilities which are often quite different from the mere sum of individual capacities,

wouldn't we just say that the tango is a two-headed beast?

Learning to walk

2007-10-31T23:12:00.000-07:00

Tango dancers will know that possibly the most important element in tango, and something that comes even before the "basic eight," is the tango walk. Men in particular spend years perfecting their tango walk.

There's a whole sub-genre of writing about tango in which people wax philosophical on this topic. An example from Loo Yeo (the full text is tagged in my delicious favourites):

As an ideal dancer you would need to be aware of your line, and be able to place your feet on it unerringly. Since your movements will be unsighted, you will need to develop your sense of proprioception, such that your limbs go exactly where you intend for them to. I call this "perfect register" where intent and movement are perfectly aligned.

So that's (one of the many things that can be said about) the tango walk. But what is the tangophilosophy walk?

Sam has got me thinking about this with his comment on my previous post. He wrote:

Compare peripeteia: turning around (from the Greek) & Peripatetic: Aristotelian (from his habit of walking around thinking).

Peripeteia also means a sudden change of events or reversal of circumstances, especially in a literary work, and peripatetic can mean an itinerant, one who travels around.

This reminds me of a few things:

A talk I once heard by Drucilla Modjeska (Australian author whose writing has a nice sense of the philosophical although she would never call herself a philosopher) in which she discussed the effect of walking upon thinking. I recall she mentioned Nietzsche as a philosopher who found it essential to walk in order to think, and in particular to produce philosophical thoughts.

An organisation called peri that was set up by Cameron Tonkin (now Cameron Tonkinwise), who was responsible for persuading me not to drop philosophy after first year at uni. As I recall, peri was an experimental performance/happening network and the name was chosen to evoke the ideas above, but also a sense of being "on the edge" - as in perimeter, peripheral.

Well, I think I can safely say that tangophilosophy is also philosophy done in the spirit of "peri-". It involves thinking while moving (following an impulse that comes from somewhere other than thought) and is a form of philosophy that is peripheral to that which gets done in institutions and academies.

Forward ochos

2007-10-15T18:25:00.000-07:00

Play Video

After you've mastered the basic eight, which is the standard way of starting to learn to tango, you usually move on to learn how to do forward ochos. Ocho is Spanish for eight. The idea is that the move traces the shape of the figure eight on the floor. The eight in "basic eight" refers to eight beats of music. First you get the temporal dimension, then the spatial.

Above you can see a woman doing a series of forward ochos, dancing in open "embrace" with a wall. Obviously it's more desirable to dance in either open or close embrace with a living partner, who will lead you to make this move.

If you cannot do a forward ocho in close embrace it is because your
posture is not correct. You are blocking the woman from moving forward with your body.
- Deby Novitz

What does this have to do with tango philosophy? If tango philosophy is philosophy that follows before it aims to lead, then it will need a partner (or series of partners - tango is a social dance) that doesn't behave like a wall, that doesn't block philosophical thought from moving forward. And philosophy itself might have to loosen up a bit, allow the straight line of pure logic to trace some curves that can curl gracefully in on each other.

The basic eight

2007-10-08T17:27:00.000-07:00

Nietzsche said he would believe only in a god who knew how to dance.

Tango philosophy is for people who think philosophers should know how to dance. Or at least be willing to learn...

What might this mean?

To think in a way that can follow as well as lead.
To improvise within the structures of a living tradition.
To listen and respond to the music of the time and place in which the dance is unfolding.

Philosophy often aims to lead: to tell us what is true, or right, or good. But how effective is it in communicating with its various partners - with the forces of imagination, action, passion? Can a philosopher, like a good tango leader, bring about beautiful and exhilarating, or tenderly moving effects in a manner that seems effortless, but involves great skill and sensitivity to the conditions of the moment?

In Argentina, a man who is serious about learning to dance the tango will begin by learning how to follow - how to dance the woman's part. It might seem as though this is beginning with the easier role. But following is not as simple as it seems, especially for those who are used to leading, or acting independently - as many women discover when they begin to dance tango.

What would it mean for philosophy to give up its independence and learn to follow?
Who would be the leader(s) in a dance in which philosophy would take the part of the woman?

These are open questions, and this blog is an open space of wooden floorboards on which to try out some answers. Tango is a social dance - and tango philosophy a nascent art-form of the social web.

bbb